Articles

Index

Delivering Value to Your Visitors

  by Gerald O'Connell

After using the Internet for a couple of years and publishing my own content, I became obsessed by a number of central themes:

1) The faster it grows the less easily navigable the Internet becomes: although the technology constantly improves download times, we seem to be taking longer to find the kind of things we really want to find.

2) Complex corporate alliances are making the 'slant' of so-called major portal sites ever greater: this means that it becomes harder and harder to find a satisfactory universal 'starting point' for surfing.

3) Few attempts at traffic-building through linking strategies take full account of the need to deliver quality to visitors: your site will be visited far more often if people perceive value in the links that it offers!

Drawing these threads together I decided to create a prototype solution: a website that would develop as a fast-loading, high-value, straightforward answer to the surfing start-point problem, and also gain traffic because people would want to link to it on the grounds that it delivers value and utility to all of their visitors. You can judge how successful I have been by looking at the URL below. I would be grateful for all comments on the site (remembering that it is targeted at a North American audience).

This is the crunch: all this activity has convinced me that the most successful websites in the future will be those that turn themselves into niche portals for the kind of content that their target audience is interested in. This approach means that anybody who wants to think hard and really work at it can generate traffic of disproportionate quantity to their central content. It means doing a lot of analysis on the subject matter of your own web-presence, and then coming to terms with what the best of the competition are doing.

The next step is to get all that 'competition' working for you by designing the best available and most comprehensive way of linking to it! After that, if you succeed at the content and organisation of information level, you can 'leapfrog' your competitors' individual traffic levels by acting as the metasite that surfers visit first. See how this fits back to my concern at the outset about the quality of the links you carry, and how this delivers value to your visitors?

I am convinced that the next phase of Internet promotional development will revolve around this niche portal issue. It is a brave strategy, but those that carry it through successfully will go to the front of the pack...

Gerald O'Connell
http://www.wonderport.com