Home   Internet Marketing                                     Ward Hanson   Stanford GSB

Organic Traffic Building

Learning Objectives

Low-cost Traffic Acquisition 

 Electronic Word-of-Mouth

Affiliate Networks

Reaching Critical Mass

 

 

 

 
 
Readings & Tasks
Boase & Wellman
E. Rosen, Ch. 9 & 11
 
Case: Monster.com

Example Sites:
  Domain Names

How Search Engines Work (from SearchWatch)

Affiliate Networks

Newstand
___/ 06-01\______  The expensive online customer, eMarketer.  
___/ 12-01\______  A follow up study.  BCG. 
___/ 02-11-01\__ Valentines Day Brings Search of Traffic, Special events and holidays are great for bringing traffic.,  NY Times 

 

 

 

 Low cost traffic - the manna for many web sites and one of the most challenging tasks for Net marketers.  What are methods for generating traffic that do not bust the budget and require Super Bowl ads?   

  

What keywords describe the Man of Steel?

Shown below are the meta tags that Warner Brothers uses to describe the official site for Superman.  This is one of the major inputs search engines use to find and categorize pages - and are a cheap way to build traffic, especially for small sites.
<meta name="keywords" content="superman, interactive, Warner Bros., Warner Brothers, WB, interactive cartoons, animation, 3D animation, 3d animated cartoons, cartoons, multipath adventures, multipath, episodes, episodes superman, cartoon episodes, kids cartoons, children cartoons, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Bizarro, Tracker, DC Comics, message board, multipath storylines">

Just use "View Source" in your browser when visiting a site.
Case Prep Questions 
  • Why does Monster use such different approaches for their two sides of the market? 
  • Who are the key customers of Monster?
  • How would you evaluate the niche strategies of Monster?
  • Should Monster.com use online advertising as well as mass media?