Stock Promoters- It is Time to Get Interactive and Use the Power of the Web
Posted by Tom Allinder
One of my favorite pastimes (not that I have that kind of time- really) is looking at stock promotional websites. In this post, I am not going to mention any names but… I am going to tell you how it is. Let’s get started…
Almost all Stock Promoter Sites are Billboards – Very few of the stock promotional sites I have seen have any sort of interaction between the site visitor and the content on the site. That is because the sites are built on static html and not on Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS (because it is database driven) enables your visitors to communicate with you. Before too long, static sites will be a thing of the past. If your visitors cannot engage with you, they will not come back. And if all you are doing is pumping stocks at them, they will not come back either…
Stock Promotional Sites only have Client News Releases as Content- What is content anyhow? Content in this case is information that is updated regularly on a web site. In the case of most promoter sites, this content is static and there is no way for the site visitor or user to “share” the content with others unless they copy/paste the link into an email or forum. In a contemporary site, the content is shareable very easily through a plug-in or widget such as Share This (like we use here). A content driven site enables your visitors and users to comment on content; it increases their sense of self value when a user feels that they can be heard.
Stock Promotional Sites only Promote Stocks- What if you had something else on your site besides just stock promotions? Try covering market issues such as we do at HotStockChat.com; engaging content will build the audience so that when you do go out with a new stock to pump, you will have an audience. I had a field day and built a huge audience covering the SpongeTech thing. Think about hiring someone that can actually string sentences together in coherent and flowing manner to add some actual content to your site. Or really get creative and do videos or slide shows about stuff you know will be interesting to people…
Stock Promotional Site’s Onsite SEO is non-existent- Imagine if you were higher in the search engines, your content would be found by a lot more people right? Most promoter sites have no onsite SEO built in. Onsite SEO is just part of the Internet marketing puzzle but an important one. Go run your site through HubSpot’s Website Grader and see how it grades out and you will see what I mean. Getting your site perfect with respect to onsite SEO is a good starting point.
Stock Promoter sites are not Marketed- Without marketing in an Internet Marketing World, your site will grow very slowly even if your onsite SEO is perfect. What is marketing? It is the act of building inbound links to your site. How do you do this? Through marketing; you need to market through email but even more importantly on the Internet and in Social Media. By the way, there is far more to social media than blasting away messages on Twitter and Facebook. People are marketers, not machines. People build real, organic results for you that increase your authority. If your site’s url is showing up all over the place, you get more visitors right? Speaking of organic, a pay per click (PPC) campaign will have limited results in many cases. 75% of the “clicks” on search engine results pages (SERP) occur in the organic areas inside the top and right columns. Once you stop paying, you will drop into obscurity again. There is more on this at a previous blog I wrote.
Very few stock promotional entities can survive on their network and connections alone. Most of the rest of us have to start somewhere. I will guarantee you this: Somewhere, right now, someone is building the next big and much more effective mousetrap for stock promotion. The Internet has changed forever and the way businesses are getting things done is through Internet marketing. Social Media and the so-called “Web 2.0” (the interactive web) is community based and things will never go back to the old way. Let me give you one little tidbit of information: HotStockChat.com averages a few hundred unique visitors a day. If I put something out really hot, I can get 1000-2000 “unique” a day. In October of this year, the 5th largest referring site for HotStockChat.com was StumbleUpon. I bet many don’t even know what StumbleUpon is and some may have never heard of it. That is because we market on StumbleUpon as well as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious Bookmarks, Technorati and a few others you may or may not have heard of.
If you are not marketing your site on these social media platforms, you are missing out on a big audience. That StumbleUpon thing I mentioned has over 8 million users. If you add up the users on all the social media platforms, you will come up with something in excess of a half a billion people.
You cannot effectively build an audience by blasting out messages to the masses. You have to attract them with good content and give them some sort of reason to interact with your site and keep them coming back. Many promoters are buying email lists and building lists. There is a more effective way to do it; it takes a bit longer (yes, it takes a few months to build all those inbound links and build an audience) but an organic list built through subscribership because people like your content is far more effective and will last longer than the paid stuff. It still costs money. But, in the end, you will pay for something, one way or the other and probably sooner than later.