Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 21:04:52 -0500 From: Sudha Jamthe Subject: March 22 Web-Net Meeting: Content Based Web Marketing Meeting Topic: Content Based Web Marketing Date: March 22, 1999 7:00 PM Location: MIT Sloan School E51 Room 345 (usual room) Check our web-site http://www.web-net.org for directions Speaker: Richard Seltzer, Author of "Altavista Revolution" and "Online Shopping" Details: On the Web, text content can be of value to you in a variety of ways -- selling discrete chunks, selling by subscription, and also turning it into a marketing asset. In some cases, the marketing value of posting content for free can far exceed what you might hope to get through online sales of the same content. This is especially true of content related to Internet business and technology, which seems to have a useful half-life of less than year. Search engines, like AltaVista, index every single word on every page they find -- including the order of the words. Hence the more text you have on the Web -- in simple, search-engine-friendly form -- the more likely your pages will be found. Those who find your pages and like what they see are likely bookmark them and tell others about them and/or create links to your pages. Hence the marketing value of such content increases over time, as it becomes more ingrained in the search and link structure of the Web, even as its information value decreases over time. >From these observations, we can derive the basic principles of content-based marketing: 1) Make as much text available on the Web as possible. 2) Design the pages to make them easy for search engines to find, and with the most important information in the HTML title and the first couple lines of text. 3) Do not discard Web pages because their information is no longer current. Rather add links from old pages to new pages with related current information. 4) If your business model depends on using design features which block search engines (e.g., dynamic pages, frames, java applets) or if corporate branding rules prevent you from creating text-heavy, search-engine friendly pages and/or prevent you from retaining old content, create a non-branded Web site, using inexpensive ISP-hosted Web space, and use that site to launch you content-based marketing efforts. 5) From every content-marketing page, point visitors to current and related information at your site, and to the starting point at your main Web site that will provide them with the most useful experience. Basically, content-based marketing takes advantage of the full text of every document you are will to make public. This is an application of my "fly-paper" principle for drawing traffic to a Web site (see www.samizdat.com/socintro.html and soc1.html). In contrast, "search engine optimization" focuses narrowly on raising you higher in the results lists for searches for specific "key words." --------- Web-Net is a free business networking user group. Meetings are free and open to all. Check http://www.web-net.org for more details about other Web-Net events.