If you want to sell a book, you have one opportunity to make a good first impression... on the cover. If you wander through your local bookstore, you will see thousands of tomes vying for your attention. If one catches your eye, you might pull it off the shelf for a closer look, inspect the back cover, and read the inside flaps. If the book passes this quick assessment, you might start flipping through, sampling a few paragraphs or maybe reading its table of contents.

Now imagine a publisher's horror if booksellers stopped displaying books by their covers! What if, instead, they opened up each book to what they thought was a particularly relevant page and simply left it open for customers to read in order to determine whether or not they would buy the book? How would they compete with other books? How would they get your attention with compelling titles and vibrant photography and illustrations? This is exactly the challenge web designers and web content editors face when they create and maintain websites. Any given visit has as great a likelihood to begin on a subpage as it does the homepage. Traffic to your site that begins with a subpage can be referred to as indirect traffic as apposed to direct traffic, which starts from your site's homepage. Sometimes indirect sessions eventually click to a site's homepage, while other times they do not. While we like to think that our homepages allow us to put our best face forward, in many cases, a homepage is the second, fifth, tenth, or seventeenth impression... if it adds to the impression at all.


No doubt, the dynamics of indirect traffic presents some problems for conventional marketing and copywriting. I'll talk about some of the ways these problems can be addressed, but first I'd like to point out some benefits and opportunities that indirect traffic to your website can afford.

Many of your site's visitors will come from search engine results or links from other sites directly to one of your site's a subpages. As a result, the content on every subpage has an opportunity to compete with content from any source in the world. For example, suppose, hypothetically, that I know something about maintaining a productive, clean, and well-protected chicken coop. If I did have such knowledge, and I had a blog, I might put some of my insights on the subject of effective egg laying environments online. Now suppose you're a new hobby farmer (can you tell I just moved into a new house in the countryside of lovely Chapel Hill, North Carolina?) and you want some good tips on setting up a chicken coop. You might go to Barnes and Noble, wander through the farming section, and pick up a book like Chicken Tractor or Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance (I didn't make that title up). Of course, my practical tidbits on raising chickens would be nowhere to be found among these classics. On the other hand, if this hypothetical chicken newbie went online and typed "chicken yard tips" into Google they might find my theoretical page on how to raise egg layers without all the stinky mess. Now my content concerning chickens could be read and compared to any other source... whether they are published and distributed on paper or not.

On the web, content on every page of your site has the chance of being considered alongside the world's knowledge of the given subject. As a result, you don't have to be a famous author with a powerful publisher to get into the marketplace of ideas. You just need a website and a keyboard.   next >