Marketing Tips: Creating a Successful Roadstop on the Internet Highway Marketing Tips: Creating a Successful Roadstop on the Internet Highway Today, many CMP-affiliated shooting clubs have established their own web sites so they can do a better job of communicating with their members and telling the public about their activities. Having your own web site can be an incredible marketing and communications tool. Here The First Shot offers you a brief primer on how to make a web site work: At first glance, starting a web site seems like a great idea. The information superhighway, however, is strewn with the empty shells of sites that failed, ranging from short-lived dot.coms to the first projects of eighth graders who probably understand more about the new technology than we ever will.  In marketing terms, web sites are passive promotional tools—they require the target population of Internet users who are interested in marksmanship to come to us, at least at first, rather than us going to them. This therefore presents us with two problems in developing and maintaining an effective web site: 1. People have to be able to find the site.  2. There must be sufficient motivation for people to want to visit and revisit the site. With this in mind, here are a few helpful suggestions: Picking a web site address: The first step in developing a site is selecting an available name (site address) that fits with the site’s content and is easy to remember. In principal, this should be easy to do. In practice, it can be a time consuming task that requires careful thought and research. For example, it would make sense to call the Civilian Marksmanship Program’s site CMP.COM. Unfortunately, someone else already has that address.  Linking with other sites: One of the advantages of the Internet is its inherent interconnectivity—you can “link” your club web site to many other sites, including this one (see www.odcmp.com). Of course, depending on your site content, your club does not have to limit itself to marksmanship-related sites. It would be possible, for example, for clubs with junior programs to link to local school sites and state student athletic associations. Getting hooked into search engines: Currently there are as many as 900 search engines, including the more recognizable YAHOO, LYCOS, MSN.COM, EXCITE.COM, that people use to find specific information. For under a hundred dollars, you can purchase software designed to register your site to as many as 600 of these engines, in particular the larger ones that are more recognizable to most Internet users.  Many search engines now also search for special site markers called META tags. These tags allow the web site programmer to use an infinite number of keywords. Creating an e-mail network: Many sites (including this web site—see the upper left menu e-mail request box on this site) ask visitors for e-mail addresses. These addresses can be used to keep interested users updated on events and activities, and can even be used to send users links back to the site to specific articles and news items. The CMP and The First Shot, in fact, maintains its own database of over 19,000 e-mail addresses, and we regularly send out updates on product availability and programs, as well as sending an e-mail link to this on-line magazine when each new issue is posted. Keeping the content current: Once the site is up, the hardest part becomes keeping the information on site current. This is especially true for small organizations and clubs who rely on volunteers to provide content. As a rule of thumb, club news should be updated a minimum of once a month, and event dates should be taken down after each event is held. Changing the overall look on a regular basis: The next time you walk into a grocery store, take a closer look at the items that line the shelves. Manufacturers spent a lot of money on product packaging, and on a regular basis, they change part of the “look” of their products to restimulate consumer interest. The marketing of web sites is similar in concept. Every six months or so, a change in the “look” of your club site can create renewed interest among users. Use visuals: Since the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet has become a highly visual medium. People expect to see graphics and photographs as well as text.  Keep in mind, for the Jim Morrisons of the world (see Flocking with the Turkeys on Thursday Morning in this issue) who are using older computers (i.e., over five years old, which in terms of computer technology, is ancient), memory capacity is a problem. Therefore, the number of kilobytes used in the design of a web page, especially for photographs, is an issue. The more upscale digital cameras, for instance, are capable of taking high-resolution images. Such images, though, may take over 200 kilobytes of memory (which would probably take a slower computer 20 minutes to download). We recommend limiting photographic images to under 50 kilobytes, at least until Jim gets a new computer.