about nigelparry.net
Strategies: Getting your visitors to advertise your website for you
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| (Photo: Steven Hoang) |
Websites exist for visitors. One way of maintaining a healthy visitor base and building site visits is by marketing your site. The Internet is a natural medium for the strategy known as "viral marketing"—a process by which you make it simple for visitors to disseminate your information to third parties without requiring your direct intervention.
The third parties then further disseminate the content, and so on, something that is both a simple fact of, and second nature to, the digital, networked medium of the Internet in which your site exits.
The content management systems used on nigelparry.net websites incorporate basic and effective viral marketing technologies: E-mail This, Boookmark This, Print This, and Syndicate This. All of these tools are generated automatically when you add an article to the site.
Following are examples of how these features are implemented on nigelparry.net sites.
1. E-MAIL THIS TOOL
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| A diary entry on The Electronic Intifada (EI) website, showing the pop-up E-mail This box which allows visitors to send articles to contacts, even when the visitor is not at their usual computer where their e-mail software is installed. |
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| The E-mail This feature on the Saint Paul Almanac website. |
2. BOOKMARK THIS TOOL
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For the Bookmark This feature, nigelparry.net uses an excellent free service provided by AddThis.com.
Above: The screen that pops up the first time you use the tool, asking you to select which social networking or online bookmark site you wish as your default.
Below: Once you have made your choice, hitting "Bookmark This" from that point on will default to your selected site—in this example, Facebook. |
3. PRINT THIS TOOL
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| Printable pages are stripped of images and online navigation elements for clean printing. Printable pages and the links that point to them are automatically generated by the Content Management System every time an article is added to the site. |
4. SYNDICATE THIS TOOL
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| The web feed generator on EI's website, showing someone in the process of customising EI's Coverage Trends news feed for their site. On the left, users can select which feed they wish to host on their site, specifying the number of headlines and which of the elements (headlines, date, summary) are included. Colors and fonts for each of the elements can be customised to allow webmasters to incorporate feeds that match the existing look of their websites. On the right section of the screen, and instant preview. Done? Click the "View Code" button and copy the generated HTML to your own site. From that moment on, the headlines will update automatically. Syndication is an excellent way of ensuring your site offers new content. |
For more information about syndication, learn more about web feeds on this site.
Interested? Explore other nigelparry.net sites in the portfolio to see how viral marketing features have been incorporated into their design.
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