The First (and Best) Marketing Lesson I Learned

I built my first “website” back in 1995.  It wasn’t really a site, just a page.  Does anyone else remember those days–when people would ask about your “page” instead of your “site”?  I worked pretty hard to get this page where I wanted it.  I learned html by reading some links I found on this really cool site called Yahoo!  I did all the html in a vi editor, ftp’d the default.html file up to my student account at school, viewed it with Mosaic, edited, uploaded, viewed, edited, uploaded ad infinum. 

I was so proud of the finished product.  It was hideous–a black background with a mugshot-like photo of me that I’d scanned at the computer lab.  The font color was flourescent puke green, and I’d even gone to the trouble of using those tricky <ul> and <li> tags with links to my favorite sites.  Actually, I think I made an effort to use just about every tag I learned.

What, you may ask, would prompt a perfectly lazy college student to take time off from drinking beer and watching Animaniacs to do such a thing?  The answer is obvious–chicks.  All I needed to do was get my handsome mug up on a black background with flashy green letters and the ladies would come flocking, right?

Not exactly.  This was my first and probably most valuable lesson in internet marketing–KNOW THE MARKET.  See, chicks weren’t using the internet back then.  Sure, some were, but for the most part girls didn’t know or care about the web back then.  Hell, most guys didn’t know or care about it either, and the ones that did were nerds like me.  If I wanted to get people to come to my site I was going to have to either populate it with either porn or Dungeons and Dragons info.  Campus policies stopped me from the former (thankfully), and ignorance of elves and fairies stopped me from the latter.

So I was stuck with a super cool web site that no one wanted to visit.

Something to think about whether you have a site now or are thinking of launching one–WHO will be coming to this website, and WHY would they want to come here?  If you can’t recognize the who and the why, your site will come up short in fullfilling the needs of they user and they will go elsewhere.