Foreword to Getting Hits

I remember those simple days when the only place you announced a new World Wide Web site was the NCSA What's New page. It was an easier time to get attention. The Web was like a big trampoline, and jumping up and landing in one spot would create sympathetic waves everywhere else. It was also a time when the whole Internet would be down - yes, just essentially off - for a few hours a time because of things that seem trivial today. It was simultaneously a very small world and one stretched very thin.

Then Yahoo and Netscape came along, and the small world suddenly got very crowded - and thick.

Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when we knew very little. Web site creators didn't didn't know who was out there, how many people, what they wanted, or how to reach them. There were no search engines or indexes, just pages of hotlinks. At times, it seemed like all there were were pages of hotlinks. Oh, yes, and we had to walk uphill in both directions, clutching 10 miles of fiber optic cable.

Just as in the "virgin" forests of the American West, denizens and a landscape already existed on the Net, and the rush by average folks into the territory changed the ecology of the Net profoundly. However, unlike the original "pioneers," we could simply make more acreage, an option not available in the real world.

We were counting on folks to arrive in droves, starting with people who were like the very first early adopters who bought television sets. (According to the Seattle Times, 6,000 families in Seattle had purchased televisions before any signals were being broadcast in the area - "Honey, let's gather round and watch the, uh, blank picture tube...") Those of us who had gone ahead on the Net thought we had gone the early television adopters one better: everyone had computers and most folks had modems, so surely, if we built content, they would come.

Luckily for those of us who started business based on the Web, like the Web hosting and development company I co-founded in June 1994, we bet correctly; when the paradigm shifted sometime in 1995, and early adopters gave way to the merely technologically aware, the battle for attention really began.

Churn and Chaff

Curious whether anyone really had the inside skinny, and eager to share perspectives with others in the same boat, I started the list in July 1994; within a week a thousand people subscribed, and it seemed like there might be a future in this Internet thing after all. The list was moderated, which meant that there was a chance of gleaning some wheat out of all the chaff.

The list endured for two years, until June 1996, when the weight of all the new users constantly pouring on the Net and onto the list - the foam of the churn, as it were - scared off the remaining veterans. The forum became an endless rerun of the same questions, as most Internet marketers had and have two primary concerns: announcing the site and generating a buzz from the launch, and keeping traffic returning.

What was terrific before the influx of new sites was that announcing and hyping was easy. Even when we transitioned from the NCSA What's new Page to multiple forums for finding and announcing sites, your site still got a tremendous boost from being listed in Yahoo. If you were lucky, Glenn Davis (now of Project Cool) picked you as a Cool Site of the Day, and you suffered or enjoyed the "Death of 100,000 hits." You probably won't believe this now, but some sites - especially governmental - actually asked not to be named Cool Site, as they didn't have the bandwidth, staff, and equipment to handle it. As late as July 1995, one of our clients' appearance as a Cool Site generate 20 times the normal day's traffic.

The press was so highly focused on this "new" phenomenon that any reasonably savvy marketer could get a write-up (or ten), or at least get his or her URL mentioned all over the place. Back in January 1995, a Forbes writer called me up and asked me how you publicized a site - "besides getting quoted in this article," he added.

The maturation of the net meant it was ever harder to really get the word out about a new site. you had to stand out from the background radiation, as hundreds and then thousands of new home pages and sites started up daily; you had to be as big or important as the major magazines, newspapers, software companies, and Internet content firms going online daily. In short, you had to become savvy.

Getting Hits is all about savvy. With the sheer volume of pages and sites on the Internet, unless you're IBM or Time-Warner, you have to use smarts to get your site noticed, not bulk mail. Simple things like maximizing the effectiveness of your signature line in e-mail; targeting your Web ads and finding the right destination for them; or even just learning how to get listed correctly and fully in Web search engines can push you into the awareness of ten or a hundred times the users you would have had. Or, better yet, than your competitor is getting.

People have asked me over the last several months for a book that will address these issues and give them the ability to stand out from the crowd. Now, in Getting Hits, I have it - and so do you. This book will make you clever.

Glenn Fleishman
Seattle, Washington
January 1997

From Getting Hits copyright © 1997 by Don Sellers. Reproduced by permission