The internet marketing priority list
Ian Lurie Aug 4 2011
In internet marketing, your top priorities are, in this order:
- Appeal. A desirable product.
- Quality. A product that doesn’t suck once people have it.
- Visibility. People have to find you when they need you.
- Stability. Your web site has to work.
- Ease of use. Make your site so easy to use, a brain-dead zombie could become a customer.
- Speed. Always strive to cut load times in half.
- Clarity. Write well. Use relevant, quality imagery. Explain yourself.
- Persistence. Provide lots of ways for folks to keep in touch. Don’t be a spammer. Just be available.
- Analytics. Measure everything.
- Aesthetics. Design your site appropriately.
Conspicuously missing are things like:
- Lots of traffic.
- Beautiful design. Appropriate doesn’t always equal beautiful.
- Awards.
- Gurus.
- Fancy jargon and the shiny thing of the day.
Keep it simple. Focus on what you need to do. Achieve the hell out of that. Then do it even better.
Other stuff
- Content marketing in a nutshell
- How to: Write a decent SEO recommendation
- 22 ways you’re making marketing difficult.
- Speak carefully
- WSJ, WTF?! Google Panda & Subdomains
- 18 random thoughts about internet marketing
- When everyone works together, SEO just works.
- 11 reasons smart people start internet marketing agencies
- 11 reasons no sane person starts an internet marketing agency
- Follow me on Twitter or Google Plus
Ian Lurie
CEO
Ian Lurie is CEO and founder of Portent Inc. He's recorded training for Lynda.com, writes regularly for the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Forbes.com and TechCrunch. Ian speaks at conferences around the world, including SearchLove, MozCon, SIC and ad:Tech. Follow him on Twitter at portentint. He also just published a book about strategy for services businesses: One Trick Ponies Get Shot, available on Kindle. Read More
7 Comments
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But I thought every internet marketer should be a guru? jk! ;)
It’s always the simple stuff that works best, but I suppose if word ever got out about that, the “gurus” would have nothing left to sell…
I still can’t believe how many sites I stumble across that are full of broken links and bad 1997 graphics that looks like it was designed by some droopy eyed armless children.
I think some people are just so desperate to earn an income online that they slap everything at warp 9, not realizing that if they would just slow the heck down for a tick, and look at what the successful people are actually doing …well they just might have a shot.
I think you set a record for packing the most knowledge into the shortest blog post…
In the restaurant business we used to say: if you focus on serving your stakeholders, you end up shortchanging your customers, and that results in disappointed stakeholders. But if you focus on serving your customers, you end up with happy, regular customers, and that results in happy stakeholders.
Start with solving the problem in a direct way and the rest will fall into place.
Great stuff, Ian.
There’s that word again “guru”. Just the other day I read a post regarding people who claim to be “Guru’s” of Internet Marketing.
Great post by the way.
Ian,
Thank you for this beautifully simplistic yet substantive reminder of what an internet marketer needs to strive for.
And thanks for not doing an exhaustive A to Z thing ;-)
Laura
Ian,
Thanks for this – you keep it very simple. I was in the middle of re-organizing my calendar for my future tasks and projects, and this list helped me align with what I wanted to focus on.
Also – great preso at MozCon and it was great to meet you there!
– Samir
Nice list there! I might have to disagree with #5 though…depending on how much client contact your business demands, you might want to discourage the brain dead zombies ;)