Ideally, your goal is a single goal you can drive towards, but it is alright to have a few end goals – as long as they are not mutually exclusive where achieving one goal makes it impossible to achieve another. At this point I have been speaking at a very high level – all theory and no substance.

Some specific goals from promoting your web site are:

• Increase product or service sales (money motivation)
• Generate largest number of visitors possible (no focus on cultivating visitor loyalty to return)
• Generate loyalty among visitors (focus on cultivating return visitors)
• Target specific types of visitors (your website content is very focused and only appeals to a small audience)
• Generate ad revenue (multiple goals from above apply if this is your main end goal)
• Others I haven’t thought of (leave a comment if you think of other goals and I’ll respond or write a follow-up post)

Why do I need to know my end goals?

Your end goals determine what tactical steps you need to take to effectively promote your web site. You will use different techniques if your goal is to sell a product that if it is to promote your hobby web site detailing the history of the Smith family [see this post]. For example, if you are promoting an ecommerce web site, you will want to leverage Google’s Product Search and list all of your products there to increase visibility of you products to the public. On the other hand, if you’re not selling products, you don’t need to use Google’s Product Search as a techqnique for marketing your web site.

This may seem obvious - to begin with the end goal in mind, but you’d be surprised how many people just meander their way through trying to get the word out about their web site without defining their goals and developing a concrete plan with specific action items. So your first assignment: figure out exactly what it is your success criteria is for promoting your web site.

In the case of the Smith family web site, it is better to talk about “promoting” the site versus “marketing” it because the term “marketing” is a loaded term – usually involving money-hungry business whores willing to do anything to make a quick buck. You might be reading this with just such plans in mind. Excellent! Keep reading this blog and you will become filthy rich (just remember me when you make your first million).

On the other hand, the concept of marketing still applies when making money isn’t your primary concern. What if you just want to publish some really interesting information on the web? Just because you have a web site doesn’t mean anyone will ever find it. That’s why I have started this blog – to show you techniques to make others aware your web site (or product, or service, or business or whatever) exists. Awareness of your web site’s existence is the battle. Even for those people who just want other like-minded people to find their New Kids On The Block fan web site, with no ideas of profits dancing in their head, they still need to expose the rest of the big world to the fact that their web site even exists. And that’s not easy given the amount of data published on the web every second. Which brings us back to the reason for this site’s existence.

Back to the title of this post: marketing versus promoting. I don’t care whether you say you market your web site or promote your web site. I’m going to switch between both terms constantly. I don’t care if you use the techniques I cover to make money or just make people aware.

This blog will cover online marketing in all its forms. It will cover current trends in online marketing and specific recommendations for how to get the message about your product or service out to your prospective customers online. It will cover subjects like search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve excellent natural search results, using blogs as a communication mechanism, syndicating your blogs, email marketing, online advertising (both being the advertiser and making money off of offering ads in case that’s your business model), best practices for managing paid search ads, and much more. There will be coverage on using social networks to broadcast your message out into the marketplace (ever wonder why large companies have MySpace or Facebook accounts dedicated to a specific product?). There will be coverage of newer communication channels like Twitter. In short, it’s going to a be a spattering of topics on how to get your information into the hands of your potential customers using online media.

I hope to have a good mix of specific recommendations and tutorials as well as high level coverage of topics. In-depth tutorials and reviews of online marketing methods will give you a really deep knowledge of actual techniques to market your message. Higher level coverage will give you the breadth to understand how all of these various techniques blend together.

Feedback Appreciated

Through it all, please offer your feedback as comments to posts. If there are specific topics you’d like me to cover, feel free to email them to feedback [at] hellobigworld [dot] com (obviously format that as a real email address)

Need Help?

As a shameless plug, while you read posts on this blog and feel I have expertise you would like to leverage in your business to make a positive impact, I am available as an independent freelance consultant in the areas of online marketing and web application development. I have consulted for companies of all sizes from Fortune 500 to single owner businesses. Some of my most successful clients have been the smallest businesses, so don’t think just because you’re a small business that it’s terribly cost prohibitive to have your own dedicated consultant focusing on your online marketing initiatives. If interested, email consulting [at] hellobigworld [dot] com with a description of the opportunity and I will reply with information and rates.