There’s more to driving your site to succeed online than just adding a blog and content syndication to your site. You need to market it, and in turn your brand (often yourself). With the birth of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it has become common practice to think that a site will succeed purely by bolting on a blog, and sticking up some photos and regularly updating the content.

At to that the social phenomenon, people started adding send to a friend links and social network tags, such as Digg and Facebook. Those are great tools, as long as your users click on them and share your message. You could do it yourself, or ask your friends to do it, but it starts to look a little bit obvious and also reduces your rating on those sites if you continually push your own content in. You need to come up with ways to connect with them and make them want to do it. If you’re really good, and connect well, you don’t even need these tools – look at how well Apple does if you need proof.

This is where the advertising industry has one up on web development companies, and where they should learn from each other. Part of their mission is to connect with the customer – in this case, your site’s user – and make them feel you know them and that they’re special. Rather than relying on you to try and work out what to do and write, they aim to deliver elements that appeal to a broad audience, and bring them in by going a few steps further.

1. Know the brand’s customers. OK, for a new brand, this is where the brand and marketing guys come in, and it’s a little more tricky to get right first time, but what I’m going to say in this blog covers that (think competitors). But what does knowing the customer mean? It means start by looking at who your loyal customers are. The ones that have been with you a while, and will stay with you. I’ll say for example to be generic, that might be the 30-50 age group who grew up with your brand and stayed with it. Then look at the ones around that. How can you market to them without alienating the ones you already do so well with? Read what they read. Watch what they watch. It’s tricky, and something that takes a lot to get just right – I’m about to start doing this for one of my clients and I’m can’t wait to start!

2. Get to know the brand’s rivals. This is a bit of a no-brainer if you think about it. We all know it makes perfect sense, but we also know it’s an easy thing to forget or skim over. What are they doing? When are they doing? And most importantly, what do we do better than them that could boost our market share? Then ask if there’s anything they do better that we need to steer clear of – that’s not to that if they really do do it better, you can’t use it, but make sure it won’t come back to have a detrimental effect on what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Know the brand’s products. Does this sound like an extension of the last points in a way? It shouldn’t! If you don’t know everything about the products you’re trying to sell, how can you do a better job of selling them to people who know nothing about it? Know the strengths. Know the weaknesses (but don’t tell the client). Live and breath their products if you can – or find someone that does.

4. Stay in touch with your users. In the day and age of database this, and database that, it’s easy to slap a ‘Stay in touch’ box on a website. But ask yourself what that actually means? Does it mean a monthly, or bi-annual newsletter perhaps? Perhaps it never gets used. I don’t know. All I know is that when I see that box, and I see it not used to it’s best effect, I get upset. That box means that someone has looked at your site, and thinks that you have something that others don’t, and they want to make sure you tell them what you’re doing. If you don’t talk to them, you’re missing a real opportunity and at the same time letting them down! But then, why not go one step further if the product permits. Why not encourage your users to turn that email address into a user account on your site? One that lets them enter competitions periodically? One that actively encourages them to come back, and also gives you the chance to make their experience that little bit more personal? Make them realise that you really connect with them, and want to ensure they get even more from you than they already have.

5. Get to know them better. When users register for a site, you general collect the basic information. Collecting more than that is difficult, but why not ask them anyway? If you can find out that a large chunk of your sites users actually fall into a category that you want to target in point 1, then you know you’re on the right track or have succeeded. Why not ask them how old they are, what they do, how they found you, would they recommend you, and what they think of you. That’s all information you can potentially use later on to do an email or other promotion to them to help make them feel special and that the brand connects with them. OK, so some of those questions are a little sensitive, and they don’t need to be mandatory, but you could give them an incentive to tell you – and that might encourage them to tell their friends too… Suddenly for that one person, you might have 10-20 more customers just for asking more questions to sell to them.

6. Now work out how to deliver. This is a huge topic, and something that I couldn’t possibly cover here. What sites to advertise on. What sites to contribute to. What will appeal to the online community? Should you be thinking about a viral campaign or a competition? Would a Facebook application or Facebook group work well for you? Perhaps a blog would be enough… Ultimately, it boils down to your client’s budget, but you also need to make them aware of what can be done to give them the best return on their investment.

So that’s 6 points. There’s a lot more than that I could write, but that’s a brief take on what I see as a basic strategy to beginning to succeed online. There’s more to come that feeds off that, like viral marketing, banners, offline to online. The list goes on, but you can see where my head is. I’m in the position of moving from being the Technical Director in charge of delivering sites, to being someone more strategic who comes up with the ideas.

I see the web as a world of opportunity. And damn I’m excited by the direction I’m moving in! Please let me know if I’ve said anything you disagree or perhaps really like. And if you want to give me some words of encouragement that I’m going in exactly the right direction, I always welcome and encourage any feedback.