Promise Media

Web site promotion has been a big challenge for traditional media companies and a much easier one for pure online plays.

Media companies learned their lessons about the Internet by building extensions of their core traditional brands. Audiences came easily because newspapers would promote the site in their print editions and TV stations would do the same on air. Audiences recognized the site names because they usually imitated the core brand names. Brand recognition was high.

Those same lessons don’t always apply outside of core Web sites.

Increasingly, traditional media is building Web sites that are based on uniquely online brands with uniquely online content. But they are not promoting them in uniquely online ways.

They tend to fall back on traditional channels such as their newspaper or TV station. The temptation is understandable because these channels often don’t cost anything other than inventory which is available more often when the economy is soft.

If managers and staffs have a promotional plan, it is common for the first priority to use the traditional inventory, then spend money on traditional channels and then give some thought to search engine optimization. Quite a few don’t even get past the first priority.

Even if they don’t have a spending budget, and especially if they don’t have a spending budget, online newspapers will build additional audience for their pure Web plays by focusing on a complete SEO plan, regular link-building tactics and purely online-oriented publicity.

When launching a pure Web brand, write a promotional plan that has both a set of traditional media tactics and another set of online-only tactics. Resist the temptation to rely heavily on the first. Sites that do so find themselves failing to reach their numbers because they are focused on the wrong audience.

In fact, it is better to emphasize the online tactics because they are typically less expensive and provide a much better learning curve.