It's Not About Web Traffic Anymore

Tweet

I had an "A-ha" moment the other day thanks to my friend, Barbara, founder of Bloom with Barbara Scala.

Barbara is an enterpreneur that offers life coaching and a variety of services to facilitate career transitioning and networking among women. In other words, she gets around; both offline and online, and she's been doing it for a number of years now.

Like everyone else, Barbara knows that Web 2.0 has been a real game changer for her online presence. But, I didn't really hear it framed this way until speaking with her about it over the weekend.

"It's not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It's about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That's what I'm paying attention to now."

- Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

She's so right when you think about it. Instead of focusing on building unique visitor stats, businesses need to be focusing on deciminating unique content around the web virally.That's the way to garner the most eyeballs to see exactly what you want them to see.

What does it mean anyway to have site visitors that come to your site and look at the wrong thing?

What looks like more of a presence on the web; a site with decent unique visitor stats or having your viral video popping up allover Facebook, e-mail, hundreds (if not thousands) of smaller sites?

I'll give you a great example of a success story.

I subscribe to Momsrising.org. I never, and I mean never, go to their web site. But, I am aware of what they are up to intimately.

Last May, I got a viral video put out by Momsrising customized to make me "Mom of the Year" just in time for Mother's Day.

It was a howl. It was a fake two minute newscast about my winning "Mom of the Year" singing my praises. It had soundbites, video of a march with my name superimposed on a street banner and my name dropped in on graphics. It was a clever customization job and, as a Mom, I sucked it up. At the end, I had the option to plop in the names of other Mom friends sending their version to their e-mail (giving Momsrising a new contact in their database).

I sent it to twenty friends and no one complained. Most wrote back thanking me and telling me they sent it out allover the place too. They all loved it.

In the meantime, Momsrising garnered literally over a million new contacts for their database.

Brilliant!

And, it had nothing to do with driving traffic to their site.

Thanks for articulating this so well, Barbara. I didn't realize I was at a loss for words until you gave them to me.

Renee Oricchio

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987.