By Alli Summerford
October 15, 2007
To finish out the year, let’s look forward to next year with new ideas and a new approach to Internet marketing that I’m calling Dandelion Marketing. There has been a lot of talk recently about Web 2.0, defined below.
How does Web 2.0 affect you and your business? In a nutshell, the new technologies behind Web 2.0 offer new ways to expand your site’s reach and increase your business’s visibility on the web.
Expanding reach and widening your range of online influence is at the heart of Dandelion Marketing. The idea is that your business, its services, products, and people are able to spread (as if on the wind) to a wider area, plant themselves, and grow.
A quick definition of Web 2.0 to get us thinking in the right frame of mind:
“. . . a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.” Source: Wikipedia
How can this work for my site?
To take advantage of these new technologies and implement your own Dandelion Marketing strategy requires nothing more than a little focus. Specifically, it requires active engagement with your web site and its content as well as with the wider Internet community. You know your industry, your business, and its products better than anyone — share that knowledge. Sharing your expertise can take the form of a blog, regular press releases on important industry topics, how to articles, client stories, product reviews, or industry statistics. This new content, distributed through Web 2.0 channels like news feeds and social media outlets, allows your ideas and expertise to reach potential customers and clients wherever they are on the Web, not just from your web site.
It all comes back to content. I wrote my first newsletter about content in 2001. Content remains the factor, above all others, that first brings people (and search engines) to your site and keeps them coming back. Dandelion Marketing simply uses the content that once remained safely tucked within the confines of your domain name and tosses it to the winds (ok, the Internet community) so that it can take root and grow.
The more seeds you plant, the more flowers grow. It’s that simple.
To talk with us about ways in which Dandelion Marketing could work for your site, contact us here.
