The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Chapter 9. The Content-Rich Web Site

If you've read from the beginning of the book, at this point you might be tempted to think that each of the media that innovative marketers use to reach buyers—including blogs, podcasts, news releases, and all the rest—is a standalone communications vehicle. And while each certainly could be a self-contained unit (your blog does not need to link to your corporate site), most organizations integrate their online marketing efforts to help tell a unified story to buyers. Each medium is interrelated with all the others. Podcasts work with blogs. A news release program works with an effective Web site and online media room. Multiple Web sites for different divisions or countries come together on a corporate site. No matter how you choose to deploy Web content to reach your buyers, the place that brings everything together in a unified place is a contentrich Web site.

As anyone who has built a Web site knows, there is much more to think about than just the content. Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all important aspects of a good Web site. Unfortunately, in many organizations these other concerns dominate. Why is that? I think it's easier to focus on a site's design or technology than on its content. Also, there are fewer resources to help Web site creators with the content aspects of their sites—hey, that's one of the reasons why I wrote this book!

Often the only person allowed to work on the Web site is your organization's ...