Excuse me.  I couldn’t help noticing that strange and interesting plant.

• Little Shop of Horrors

Unfortunately, we do not all work at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists.

Putting a strange and interesting plant in your window (or on your website) will not drive web traffic all on its own.

If nobody passes your window, then no one can see what’s there, nor can they tell their friends and acquaintances.

What you need is an integrated strategy that both uses your website as an asset and uses your other assets to draw attention to your website.  Here are some things to consider before working on your strategy:

• Do you have a way to build interest in your new site or new features before they go live?
• Do you have a method lined up to tell those people about the change once it has been made live?
• What existing materials do you have that you could leverage to spread this message?
• If you get press, what do you need to make sure you say about your website?  Would it make sense to release that information as part of a press release?
• Have you told your friends about your website (and its strange and interesting plant).
• Do you have the collateral to support the brands and messages your website advances?
• Have you built a playbook of that includes passive, everyday advertising?  For example, when you stop off for a cup of coffee, do you open your laptop and leave it pointing to your website?
• Can you adjust the message on your site in reaction to changes in the traffic?

While your URL is the address computers use to find your site, and the way repeat traffic will return - browsers will usually come through Google, or Bing, or some other site that includes a search.

To these search sites, everything you write can be thought of as an address (so long as you accept that an address simply a way to find a particular location).  To land prime real estate in this online search-based market, you need to look for two things: topics that lots of your customers will be interested in, and topics that not many other people have thought to write about.

If you can do that and have a strange and interesting plant in the window, then you stand a much better chance of having a random passer-by stop in take a look around and decide to make a purchase.

Feed Me!

This post was inspired by the 1986 musical, The Little Shop of Horrors.  If you can think of any other movies you’d like analyzed for online business lessons, leave a reply.