The challenge of providing good advice to owners of new and growing businesses is that there are so many businesses out there. Recommendations I make to one place may not be applicable to the next.
In this article, we’re going to look at how 5 businesses are succeeding in building traffic to their site and we’ll start you on the road to developing your own ideas. But if you just take the ideas suggested here and implement them on your site, you’ve frankly failed. That’s not the point of this article.
Instead, use these businesses as inspiration and as a springboard for your own ideas. It’s only when you get creative and different that you’ll put your competition into your rearview mirror and take the lead.
www.Progressive.com sells insurance. Maybe you’ve seen the commercials or visited their website. They have a “ticker” that shows the prices that people are being quoted for car insurance from several different insurance companies. Progressive is sometimes the cheapest and sometimes it isn’t. It’s a great way to show that they’re giving good, honest customer service and demonstrates an unbiased approach to business. So what can you do for your business? Do you have a highly competitive industry that is difficult to break into? Maybe you can level the playing field by showing you with the other players. Progressive’s “point of difference” is that they show you the prices; it isn’t that they’re always the cheapest! Can you find something in your industry that allows you to let others compare you with your competition?
www.MetHomeWarranty.com sells home warranties. They have an RSS feed posted to their site that has information on the real estate industry. This helps them provide a valuable service to visitors by giving them great information on a complimentary (related but non-competing) topic. The people browsing this site would likely be looking for real estate information at the same time. Too often, here’s what happens instead: Website owners accept links that take visitors out of their website. Instead, Met Home Warranty posts the information right on their site, and it’s relevant information to the people who are visiting the site. Can you think of complimentary content and links (that open in another window) for your site? You can add real value to your niche by giving them information in one place that they’d like have had to click elsewhere before.
www.Half.com is owned by eBay. Before being sold to eBay, the people who started the business wanted to market the site in a unique way. They convinced a town in Oregon to change their name to Half.com Oregon and created buzz that generated attention, and business. Later, the same marketer advertised in fortune cookies. Can you come up with an equally zany idea that no one has done before? The advertising may cost money but the uniqueness of it will help generate more traffic than pure dollars ever could.
www.Woot.com is an e-tail site. But don’t yawn yet until you’ve seen it. They sell one thing each day. That’s it. It changes every day but they only ever sell one thing. The prices are not spectacular, but the writing is hilarious and the key difference (a one-product store!) is brilliant. We’re not suggesting that you go out and create a one-product store, but you can learn a lot from how the people at Woot. They don’t take themselves too seriously and they have cleverly highlighted their point of difference. Do you have a point of difference that will let you stand out from the crowd?
www.milliondollarhomepage.com spawned its own industry. A college student bundled and sold small pixel advertising on his website and became an Internet million in a few months. Advertisers paid to be part of this historical website and for a while it was getting 500,000 hits a day. Now everyone from .au to .wz seems to be getting on the million dollar home page bandwagon. Instead of starting your own (I don’t know that there are any of these domains left, anyway!) why not create a small business website that makes history in a different way. What can you do that, like the creator of this site, breaks the mould and makes history?
