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Many people planning an internet campaign start by assuming that they need an elaborate website when they actually need marketing. A simple page on an existing website may be all the content that you need for many campaigns. If you are an NGO working in a coalition with other groups, you may not need to create any content at all - you can market content that some other group in your coalition has already created.
The most important requirement in any Internet campaign is effective marketing. You cannot expect people to support your campaign or visit your website without marketing. Fortunately, there are many effective marketing techniques for Internet campaigns. Here are just a few.
Beyond search and webmail sites, news sites (and news portal sites that get their news from news services) are the next most visited sites on the Internet. Thus, the first step in online marketing is a lot like the first step in offline marketing - write and promote a press release:
Spammers have given email marketing a bad name, but nevertheless, it still can be done ethically, legally and effectively. If you are an NGO in a campaign coalition, make sure that all the groups in your coalition commit to mailing a message about your campaign to their mailing lists. This can be a free and very effective way to spread the word.
Some credible internet community sites, such as Care2, will do mailings to their members for other organisations for a fee.
There is much more that can be said about email marketing. I'll be adding more on this important topic to this site in the future. Subscribe to our email list using the form on the upper left if you want to get the latest updates.
Purchasing small text ads on Google searches is an unobtrusive and yet often effective way to get the word out about your campaign. You can cap the costs to fit your budget.
There are many other advertising techniques, including banner ads, that may or not be effective for you. Allocate a small test advertising budget and try different approaches until you find one that gives a good response.
Technorati, the main blog search engine, tracks 50 million blogs. This sounds impressive, but it really means that there are millions of poorly written, seldom updated and rarely visited blogs out there. These are useful for search engine tactics like Google bombing but not much otherwise.
On the other hand, there are plenty of high traffic blogs and discussion forums. (It's a sign of the times that the most linked-to blog in the world is written in Chinese.) Information on these sites will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Links on these websites will bring plenty of traffic and increase your search engine rank as well.
It can be just as difficult to get your campaign mentioned on a popular blog as on a news site. But it's well worth the effort to try. Boing-Boing, the most linked-to English language general news blog, has a submission form here and more details on how and what to submit here.
Different blogs publish different kinds of stories. It is worth while reading through a few high traffic blogs carefully before deciding how to pitch them stories about your campaign. If you have a campaign about a specialised topic, then your odds of promoting it through blogs are higher - you can use Technorati's Blog Finder or Google's Blog Search to find specialised blogs that may be interested in promoting your campaign.
There are also a number of very popular discussion sites such as Slashdot. These are not as well cataloged as the blogs and so are harder to find. Getting a story on an active discussion site can also attract a lot of traffic.
It may be wise to spread your marketing campaign over time so you do not attract so much traffic that the website being promoted cannot handle the load - a phenomenon called the Slashdot effect.
If you have interesting or humourous images, you have a major campaign advantage. Image sites like Flickr (for still images) or YouTube (for video) are red hot right now and are attracting a huge audience and lots of media interest.
You can register and upload your images to these websites and create personal profiles and captions to draw attention to your campaign.
Websites and email lists are the "traditional" channels for online marketing campaigns. But there are other options as well.
For example, Yahoo widgets are small applications that run directly on the desktops of people who install them. Widgets range from useful (clocks or weather forecasts) to fun (many games and pictures of the day) to silly (animals that wander randomly around a computer screen). There are thousands of widgets available for download. If you create a widget yourself, you would have a direct channel to the desktops of the people who choose to install it. The widget engine is, unfortunately, a hefty 11 megabyte download (6.7 megabytes for OS X), and so the audience is more limited than it is through web browsers or email clients. Nevertheless, it is worth considering.
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