Modeling Your Website After the Greats - Offer Value Instead of Just Price
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The Internet has redefined trade wars and price wars. You want to undercut the market. Somebody else has the same idea. Who has the cheapest product is no longer the question your average (is there any such person?) consumer wants to know. Instead, they want to know who will deliver fastest, who has the best terms, and who has the most credibility.
For sites that just offer content, it's all about value. With no value, even a highly ranked site will see its hits tapering off. Even when things are free, like email services, value is paramount. Check the Gmail versus Yahoo Mail battles, or Yahoo against every other free email provider. Yahoo only retained market share by continually adding value to their product via services like Messenger, Geocities, Groups, and large memory blocks.
Always offering value assures the customer he is getting value for time spent on your site. Peterson.Com site offers search facilities for job seekers and college students, apart from other services. Others offer content, free ezines, free ebooks and downloads or up-to-date information. Keep the customer on your site and keep the customer coming back by offering content. This is a technique that you ignore at your peril; it is a task that requires constant review of your content. As I wrote earlier, there is no instant success, no overnight number one (unless you use pay per click) on the search engine rankings.
Brand Your Site
This is the model that will keep your site immortal. When people think of online search, they think of Google. For online books, it's Amazon; online airline ticket auctions, Priceline; online job postings, Monster; free email, Yahoo Mail; online auctions, eBay. The examples never end. Your site branding encompasses everything from your domain name to the actual service you provide, whether it's content or products, to how you provide your services. Great site branding is a must for a great site. If your site lacks an image or an identity, it is eminently forgettable. And people will forget it; in this way you lose the most priceless marketing tool, word of mouth or "cyber buzz."
Some of the large sites have started disobeying the models of branding, assuming that they are big enough to do it. This is a mistake; it leaves them open for someone else with better branding to step into the gap. It has happened to businesses well before the days of the Internet, and it can happen again just as easily. And since this is the Internet, extinction, not relegation, is guaranteed. A super site that is watering down its branding is Amazon. They want to become an online retail store; perhaps we should ask Mr. Bezos what percentage of his earnings come from only books.
Network!
The final rule is networking; this is made easier via affiliate programs, cross linking between sites and submission to search engines and directories. The giants do it via partnering; see Yahoo's search formerly done through Google. They also make exclusive deals, and mergers and acquisitions. Two of the most prominent examples are Yahoo buying Overture and eBay purchasing PayPal. This increases web presence, and creates synergy instead of competition. In that case, everybody wins.
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