Which MILLION would you rather have?

Posted by Laura Bergells

January 7, 2007

Which million web visitors would you rather have this month?

One million visitors finding your site from 1 MILLION different small (let’s say: blog) websites?
OR:
One million visitors finding your site from ONE HUGE website (say: Google, MSNBC, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)

As you might suspect, this is a trick question. The answer:

If a million people are visiting your site this month: you have something buzzworthy on your hands.

What this means in web-land:

Millions of bloggers are writing about you and linking to you (hence a quarter million bloglink visits.)
The mainstream media is writing/talking/raving about you (hence another quarter million more visits.)
After a few months, your Google Page Rank and search position went up (yielding a half million more visits.)

The key to the one million? Having something amazing on your hands.

Remember the 4Ps of Marketing? Think about Product and Packaging for a sec…

Without something amazing (product) and an amazing story (packaging) the bloggers won’t rave. When bloggers don’t rave, the mainstream media doesn’t hear the buzz. And without links coming in from dozens of niched blog sites and a few big, important media sites: Google won’t see you.

(Does it always happen in that order? Bloggers - Big Media - Search Engines? Not necessarily!)

But be aware: social media is changing the promotion landscape. You used to write a press release and pitch journalists on your story, product, or service. You used to schmooz editors. Now, blogging is an increasingly important part of your promo strategy. Now, you are pitching bloggers as well as journalists.

Now, you covet great word of mouth more than a seat on Oprah’s couch. (Hey, people have been known to jump on that thing. Get off of it!)

Your one million visitors won’t all come from one place at one time: nor would you want them to. If you put all your eggs in the Google basket and Google dumps you….where does that leave you? And if you suddenly got all your visitors in ONE DAY — how would that affect your bandwidth and ability to plan and deliver?

What does your inbound link pie chart look like? The more segments, the better. Micro-niching is very good.

The longer the tail, the better.