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Wish You Were Here:
How to Promote and Market
Your E-Cards
by Katherine Khalife
Simply adding a collection of e-cards to your website won't by itself bring additional traffic or help you to market your mission more effectively. For your online greetings to be successful, people first have to be able to find them. And with so many e-card pages competing for attention, getting Web surfers to find yours will require some effort on your part. But if you do it right, it will be time well spent. Here are some important tips:1. Optimize your postcard page for good search engine rankings
"Free e-cards" is the most popular term people type into search boxes when looking for online greeting sites, so be sure the title, description and keyword tags of your Web page include that phrase. (If you don't know what I'm talking about here, don't worry; your Web designer will know.)For a history museum offering Civil War e-cards, for example (and congratulations to the first one that does tie e-cards into this popular topic), a good page title would be: "Free e-cards - Civil War virtual postcards from the YourName Museum". The description tag could say: "Civil War history comes to life on free e-cards from the YourName Museum. Send a free historical online greeting to your favorite Civil War buff today."
In addition to getting the phrases "free e-cards," "free online greeting," and "virtual postcards" into your title, description and keyword tags, you also need to work them in several times in the actual text on your postcard page. Your page should have approximately 250 words of text to serve as "food" for the search engine spiders, and remember that search engines can't read text that's embedded in images.
Finally, be sure to include a link to your e-card page from your home page and, preferably, from every other page of your site as well. For an extra boost with the search engines, the history museum in our example could title that link "Free Civil War e-cards".
2. Submit your postcard page to search engines
After you've optimized your e-card page, submit it for free to the following engines: Google; All The Web; AltaVista; Northern Light; Lycos; and DirectHit. These links will take you right to the submission page at each engine. (Enter the URL of the e-card page, not the URL of your home page.)You only need to submit the page once, and I advise my clients to submit by hand rather than using submission software. And no, it's not necessary to submit to "1,500 search engines!!" as some submission software ads suggest; submitting to the ones I listed is really all that's necessary.
In addition, however, it might be worth your while to pay the $39 annual fee to submit your page to the Inktomi database, which supplies results to a number of engines. That will get your page listed in those partner engines within just a few days.
One final note: don't expect instant results from your other search engine submissions. It can take as long as four months after you submit for your page to actually show up in search results at some of them, so just be patient.
If your e-card page contains a number of high-quality card selections, you should also try submitting the page to the Open Directory Project. This directory is very important because it supplies results to AOL, Netscape and many more. It's crucial that you submit to the correct category at ODP. The above link will take you to the appropriate directory section. From there, choose the single category that best fits the type of e-cards you offer. Once you're in that category, click on the "add url" link and follow the submission instructions carefully. ODP generally only allows one listing per website, so if the editors do reject your e-card page submission, you can request that your main ODP website listing description be amended to include the fact that you now also offer e-cards. Read the ODP guidelines for further information.
3. Links, links, links
Just as important as the previous steps is getting other websites to link to your e-card page. Inbound links increase your chances of being found by Web surfers and also help boost your search engine rankings by improving what's called your "link popularity." Getting a link from appropriate sites is usually only a matter of sending a courteous e-mail to each site's webmaster and requesting one.One website that you definitely want to have link to your museum e-card page is MuseumStuff.com, a very popular portal site featuring a special section devoted exclusively to museum e-cards.
To find popular e-card directory sites of a more general nature, check Google's list of electronic postcard directories, which lists sites by page rank, and also Yahoo's list of e-card directories. If you're really ambitious and want to find even more linking possibilities, do a search at Google for "e-card links," "online greeting links," and "virtual postcard links."
Further, continuing with our example from above, the history museum offering Civil War e-cards should also request links to its e-card page from Civil War-related websites. (Just as you should request links from gardening sites if you're offering botanical e-cards; from general-interest African American sites if you're offering cards with an African American theme, etc.)
4. Be certain your e-card visitors can find your home page
When you add an e-card page to your site and properly promote it, many people who have never been to your website before will be entering for the first time through your e-card page. Be sure that when they arrive there they can also find the rest of your site! It's amazing how many postcard pages I've seen that don't provide a prominent link to the site's home page.Also be sure to take advantage of the promotional opportunity afforded by the notification e-mail that card recipients will receive when they've been sent an e-card. Along with the "card pick-up" instructions, you should also include a short blurb about your museum and a link to your home page.
5. Don't forget to promote your e-cards offline too
Finally, your members, volunteers, advisory board and your entire local community should be made aware that your website now offers e-cards. Send news releases to local media announcing the addition and you'll soon find area residents helping to promote your site by sending e-cards all over cyberspace. You might even want to consider running a "design an e-card" contest at local schools, with winning entries featured on your postcard page.<<Part II: Adding e-card capabilities to your website
<<Part I: Ideas for museum marketing with e-cards
Copyright © 2001 Katherine Khalife All rights reserved.
For reprint permission, please e-mail info@museummarketingtips.com
Katherine Khalife is a writer and consultant specializing in museum marketing, customer service and heritage cultural tourism. See the Services section for information about her Internet marketing workshops and other services.
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