Domain Owl

I don’t know who said it, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. While every web developer in existence today spends their time trolling the forums and talking up their sites, in my opinion the best way to gather new visitors to your website is to rely on tried and true thirty year old marketing methods. Because the tech and site might be new, but the way people interact and communicate is not. And those basic spurs to relating your website name and domain are what site traffic is made of.

Imagine you talk to a neighbor this morning briefly about your new website. This guy has fifteen things on his mind and nods comprehendingly to everything you say. But ten seconds after his Prius disappears out of view, he’ll have forgotten you conversation in the impending rush to take care of the items on his own agenda. But if he reached for a pencil, a Post-It, or a packet of instant coffee with your sites name on it, you’ve become the center of his universe.

In this day and age of ultra-mobile devices, everybody still wants to write things down. They scrabble through their purse, car, briefcase, sofa, anything to find that elusive writing device to jot something down. And later on, in a moment of boredom or metaphysical malaise or general pondering, the text of the url of your domain will reappear in front of their eyes. Those 3 a.m. breaks from World of Warcraft or raids on the refrigerator might give someone a new chance to check out your site.

Maybe it’s a TiVo episode number. Maybe it’s the name of that cool song third from last in the playlist. Maybe it’s the license plate of that guy who just cut him off in traffic. Or perhaps a critical phone number or two. But the universal need for a writing device remains the same. And the beauty of website advertising pencils is that they get passed on and re-used by entirely new sets of eyeballs who also wonder what that suite is about. This can start a conversation about the uses of such a site and build an expectation about what such a site can deliver.

Bumper stickers are the cheapest advertising in the world. This is the perfect solution for clients who cry foul at the cost of any manufactured promotional items. They are also the type of marketing domainers ignore.

Most domain name owners will stop short at actually printing materials or distributing items with their brand on them, even though every website worth its salt cries out to be seen and heard of. But the use of one pad of paper as a quick-and-dirty message pad in a large company for phone messages and reminders can generate a dozen or more unique page views. And these cost about the price of a flavored latte.

For the following example, assume the existence of freehubcaps.com. Hypothetically, if the domain owner of freehubcaps.com makes a template of a sticker or font size logo for the site,distant marketing contacts can print out their own stickers. The cost of marketing just went down to pennies a day.

That’s when writing the ads for Craigslist to advertise get very easy. When the marketing contact for a given website meets their target goal for their area (say 100), they receive a Paypal payment or Starbucks card charge or mailed gift card in the mail. A website owner with a similar site contacts 100 people who drive on crowded freeways in crawling rush hour traffic daily. It is likely that a bumper sticker featuring the website name would get a lot of eyeballs.

People are bored to distraction during work commutes, any website that looks like fun can be instantly dialed up via smart phone netbook or tablet. At the very least, twenty bumper stickers promoting a website in a given metro market could show targeted traffic. Just handing out business cards on a crowded subway train in a major metropolitan market can earn some great geo-based clicks easily trackable back to the promotion.

These types of promotion will always work in conjunction with the subject matter of the website and the attractiveness of the domain name. Having the site optimized and ready is a absolute prerequisite to any domain name (website) promotions campaign. this makes the distribution of business cards to niche users easy.

A sports site might have a group of business cards distributed at a sports bar. Gaming site cards can be handed out where ever gamers are found (libraries, schools, coffee shops). Shopping websites might be handed out in parking lots or left on car windshields. These are old school tricks for new era traffic farming. And so on. Finding clicks from that niche market just got easy, and doable.