Optimizing Site Structure

Highlight Your Best Content

Until September of 2007 my homepage was the most recent posts from my blog. While that helps to promote new posts on the blog, it is off-putting to people new to my field. If you create a popular blog, make sure that your homepage is appealing to people new to your field. Guide them through the learning process, show them where to start, and highlight your best content. If your site grows into a business re-invest to create tools, add forums, and other interactive features that keep people coming back to your site.

Fix Page Titles

Many blog content management systems place the site name ahead of the post name in the page title of individual blog posts. It is best if your page titles start with the most relevant information first. There are numerous Wordpress plugins that make it easy to change the structure of your page titles. A couple popular ones are all in one SEO pack and SEO Title Tag.

Use Push Marketing After Launching Your Site

Being Remarkable

If you are new to internet marketing, read Seth Godin's Purple Cow to understand how to create remarkable ideas. Links are nothing but a citation. If you are remarkable the links will come, but not without a little push marketing first!

Sharing Social Proof

• Comments: If your site gets many comments people will be more likely to participate in the discussion. You can bold your "leave a comment" line or feature recent comments in your sidebar to encourage more comments. Replying to comments makes people more likely to leave additional comments. Some bloggers partner up, commenting on each other's stories to help make their blogs look more active.
  
• Subscriber stats: If you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers you may want to publicly display those stats.
  
• Borrow Authority: Ask authoritative people in your industry for feedback or input on a project prior to launching it. If they feel ownership in the idea they not only lend credibility to it, but they may also help you market it for free.
  
• Publicize Your Publicity: If you or your blog were featured in the mainstream media displaying a "as seen in" section on your site helps build your authority.

Add Interactivity

People read blogs because they would rather read them than read a whole book at a time. Including pictures and video in your blog posts, and breaking up big chunks using bulleted lists makes it easier to consume (and share) your site.

Show Your Bias

Having a consistent original bias and voice makes it easy for others who share your biases and worldview to trust you and spread your message. Most (perhaps all?) popular political blogs are heavily biased.

Sidebar: 10 ways to raise a purple cow

Making and marketing something remarkable means asking new questions -- and trying new practices. Here are 10 suggestions.

1. Differentiate your customers. Find the group that's most profitable. Find the group that's most likely to influence other customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group. Ignore the rest. Cater to the customers you would choose if you could choose your customers.


2. If you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it be? Why not launch a product to compete with your own that does nothing but appeal to that market?


3. Create two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people around.


4. Do you have the email addresses of the 20% of your customer base that loves what you do? If not, start getting them. If you do, what could you make for them that would be superspecial?


5. Remarkable isn't always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the "unsafe" thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to see what's working and what's not.


6. Explore the limits. What if you're the cheapest, the fastest, the slowest, the hottest, the coldest, the easiest, the most efficient, the loudest, the most hated, the copycat, the outsider, the hardest, the oldest, the newest, or just the most! If there's a limit, you should (must) test it.


7. Think small. One vestige of the TV-industrial complex is a need to think mass. If it doesn't appeal to everyone, the thinking goes, it's not worth it. No longer. Think of the smallest conceivable market and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there.


8. Find things that are "just not done" in your industry, and then go ahead and do them. For example, JetBlue Airways almost instituted a dress code -- for its passengers! The company is still playing with the idea of giving a free airline ticket to the best-dressed person on the plane. A plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates. A book publisher could put a book on sale for a certain period of time. Stew Leonard's took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the customers pick their own. Sales doubled.


9. Ask, "Why not?" Almost everything you don't do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don't do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, "Why not?"


10. What would happen if you simply told the truth inside your company and to your customers?

In Praise of the Purple Cow

Remarkably honest ideas (and remarkably useful case studies) about making and marketing remarkable products.

Soybeans, Wal-Mart, and Ideaviruses

The first 100 years of our country's history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farms. The second 100 years were about the race to build efficient factories. Welcome to the third century: This one's about ideas.

An idea that just sits there is worthless. But an idea that moves, grows, and infects everyone it touches ... that's an ideavirus.

Exactly how does an ideavirus manifest itself? Where does it live? What does it look like? It starts with an idea manifesto, a powerful, logical "essay" that assembles a bunch of existing ideas and transforms them into a new, larger idea that's unified and compelling. Sometimes a manifesto is a written essay. Just as often it's an image, a song, a cool product, or a slick process. The medium doesn't matter; the message does. As long as you can use your manifesto to change the way that people think, talk, and act, you create value.

So, is an ideavirus a form of marketing? Absolutely! But today, what else is there? You don't win with better shipping, or better manufacturing, or better accounts payable. You win with better marketing, because marketing is about spreading ideas -- and ideas are now the very basis of competition.

The future belongs to the people who unleash ideaviruses.