A Little Promotion Goes a Long Way
I’m always surprised at the power of grassroots marketing and I forget how important it is! Take one of my favorite sites http://www.firmscode.com. Firmscode is a free online tool for looking up the four digit alpha-numeric code assigned by US Customs to warehouses that are approved to handle freight before it is legally entered into the country.
Firmscode probably doesn’t have much interest for most people, but it is an extremely valuable resource for the trade community (Custom warehouses, importers, exporters, freight-forwarders, etc.). Because it is a one-of-a-kind online resource, it dominates the search engines for the term “Firms code” and gets a lot of repeat visitors from people in the industry everyday. I know they’re repeat visitors because they don’t have a referrer URL (meaning they typed the URL into their browser bar or they have it bookmarked), and I know they’re in the industry because I will on occasion use this IP Lookup tool to see where their IP addresses are registered. Most of the time the larger freight forwarders are listed on the registration information.
Despite being such a great resource, traffic and visitors to the site are growing at a snails pace. It proves the adage that you can have the best online content in the world, and if no one knows about it, you’ll never get anywhere.
With this in mind, yesterday I sent out an alert email to 7,000 members of the Informed Trade International opt-in mailing list. The response has been fantastic! Not only was there a groundswell of new users (which I’m sure will turn into repeat visitors), but the traffic has doubled and I even received a $100 donation from someone who needed this exact tool, but couldn’t find it anywhere else.
I’m pretty pleased with these results. Just goes to show that it’s important to split time evenly between quality content and marketing if you want a successful website.