When I was in the Navy I learned about an interesting success concept. When it came to the subject of furthering their careers, a lot of time seemed to be spent by officers discussing the subject of “Face Time“.
Face Time was time spent face to face with the commanding officer or other senior military leaders. The idea being the more time you were right in front of the skipper, the more easily your name would come to mind when he had to sit down for fitness report competitive rankings. And the more he was thinking about you when he was trying to decide which of his fine officers to rank first, you had a greater chance of getting a higher ranking.
As an aside, I had a roommate who held to a corollary of the Face Time principle which said, “Negative face time was still face time.” Personally I wouldn’t subscribe to his idea. I don’t want to be known as a screw-up. But he has a point. When some celebrity does something stupid or gets arrested (or gets arrested because they did something stupid) it makes the papers and gets their name out. Even so, I wouldn’t recommend that approach.
Anyway why to I bring this subject up?
If we want to be successful, if we want our business to grow to improve our financial health, then we need to get our business in front of potential customers. We need Face Time in the market place to get our name out there.
Obviously the web is a great way to do this.
Most businesses spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to set up traditional static web sites and then either spend tons more advertising dollars marketing their web sites to drive traffic in, or they just end up with a tiny piece of dusty internet real estate that hardly anyone ever hears about.
Yet if they were to add just one element to their web site it could dramatically increase their traffic, giving them more face time and thereby improving the effectiveness of their virtual resource.
If they added a blog to their web site, they would have a low cost (or even no cost) element that would vastly increase traffic over time because blogs are inherently search engine friendly for a number of reasons.
The topic is huge and deserves more depth than I can give it right at this moment but let me leave you with just one example of what I’m talking about.
In Savannah we have a group called The Creative Coast Initiative. It is a project of SEDA (the Savannah Economic Development Authority) with a mandate to build relationships to attract more technology related business to Savannah. The CCI has a big and growing web presence that has been around since near the beginning of 2004, or about 21 months. They even have a list of Savannah Blogs on their site.
The whole project is a great idea and they are doing a wonderful job.
But here is an interesting comparison. SuccessCREEations has been in existence for just over 2 months. My first post was on August 23, 2006.
How do you think the traffic would compare between the two sites?
The Creative Coast Initiative has a site for an organization with a four member full time staff with the mandate to get the word out about the local community. They are backed by a large economic development organization. Their web site is very comprehensive and they have been around about 10 times as long as SC.
SuccessCREEations is a blog built and manned by one guy who works on it in a very part time capacity. It has only been in existence for a tenth the time and has a $0 marketing budget. And my only purpose here is to explore success.
Yet a quick comparison of Alexa rankings of the two sites is telling. The Creative Coast Initiative is currently ranked 707,626. SuccessCREEations is already ranked 644,298 – and we’re just getting started! That’s a huge difference in traffic.
Am I a genius at marketing a web site? Nope. Do I know tricks and secret black hat methods to generate instant traffic? Not a chance.
The difference is simply the inherent power of the blog.
Most businesses can incorporate a blog to their static web site and tremendously improve their Face Time in the web market place. And what’s the point of building a site that doesn’t get maximum exposure?
