A website does nothing for your business or organization by itself. Its use depends on traffic, and traffic depends on marketing. A website without a marketing plan is as useful as a tollfree telephone number that nobody knows about. One of the biggest and most widespread fallacies of the 1995-2000 Internet boom in the United States was the idea that a website would or could create business on its own. This outrageous idea was populated by messages such as the television commercial, watched by millions in the late 1990s, showing two women who invented an improvement on sunglasses while on the beach, and in a subsequent scene they were still happily on the beach but at that point living off of their website.
In truth it just doesn't happen like that. Here are some basic truths to offset common myths:
- Websites without traffic offer no business or organizational purpose: Sad but true, the myth is just pure myth. If you build a beautiful website and nobody comes, no matter how useful or artistic the website, it is useless. Think of a website as a new version of the tollfree telephone number; just like a tollfree number is useless if nobody dials it, so too a website is useless if nobody visits it.
- Websites don't get traffic by themselves: If you build it, and do nothing else, they will come. That's also a myth. Websites don't generate traffic anymore just because they are good, or useful.
- Traffic takes Marketing: It takes marketing to generate traffic on a website. Successful websites generate traffic by new applications of old-fashioned marketing, including advertising, public relations, and word of mouth. They also generate traffic through new Internet marketing, highlighted by careful management of searcher strategies.
- The Internet goldrush is over: Times have changed for the Internet, investors are no longer going to invest in traffic alone. These days plans have to be complete, from marketing to revenues and expenses, with business sense.
