I just read an interesting article in the business section of the Sunday Times. It’s an interview with Robert Small, founder of Miniclip.com. He gives out a lot of good advice throughout the article, however there’s one piece of advice which stands out from the rest.
Here’s that piece of advice, “Make your product great and it will get talked about. Don’t get distracted by PR and marketing until you’ve got that right.”
It really is great advice, and advice which many (if not all) web developers should follow. You have to work hard on your product, be it content or an online application before you start to market it.
You’ll waste money if your product is terrible and you begin to market it, it’s just not worth it, and anyone who visits your site will just leave because it’s not up to scratch. When you advertise, you’re hoping to retain some of the people you attract to your site, and you can’t do that if your site sucks.
Before I start to spend money on advertising this blog, I want to make sure that I have good, useful content. I want my site to be useful to visitors before I begin to spend money on paid reviews and ad spots. That’s what you need to do for your website, make it great before you start to market it.
It really isn’t worth advertising until you have the product to justify that advertising. You’ll just waste a tonne of money, so work hard on developing your site first, and then begin to think about advertising.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Nice article. I agree that it’s easy to get distracted by the idea of promoting and marketing a website but it’s very important to make sure your site is great before you launch it.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:56 am
[...] Aaron Falloon. Good is not enough. Make it great. [...]