How powerful is the internet?

When I set out to establish (virtually overnight) my new e-commerce business back in 2003, I had a couple of key advantages over my competitors.  Most notably, I came to the business with a strong background in technology marketing and some meaningful experience mapping systems to businesses.  And even more interesting and relevant was the insight to how the internet (Google) views content and ranks information.  The latter came via my sojourn at Stilo Corporation; a company with a suite of very technical products designed to engineer content and make it available for a variety of uses including re purposing on the web.

While Google page ranking is a black art at best, in 2003 it was generally accepted that Google established relevance and a higher ranking for non-commercial content such as that generated via blogs and message boards.  I had (and still have) a Ducati motorcycle-related blog and chose open source e-commerce applications that had particularly powerful indexing and tagging capabilities – and paid close attention to product description and naming conventions almost to the point of irrelevance.  With an abundance of cross linking between the e-store and the blog, I gave Google two weeks to crawl my sites and when I saw my page ranking start to climb on selected search terms,  I launched the store as a paid advertiser and participant on four major Ducati-centric forums and a couple of message boards.

The e-store was an overnight success, but two things happened that I never counted on.  One, to this day, still baffles me and it relates to the dismal failure of my toll-free number.  I was the only player in the market who offered a toll-free service and yet with hundreds of hits and dozens of orders per day, the phone for the most part lay dormant in its cradle.

The other was the extreme power that message board and forum content can have on an e-commerce business.  I made sure that all my posts contained a store-hyperlinked signature that would be continually carried through as a valid reference every time I posted or was quoted in a topic thread and this had a very positive effect on my page rankings.  The problem was that although I carried a reasonably broad product mix, I had done an aggressive product launch (leveraging my blog) on a new Italian exhaust line which drove me to #1 on Google (over the manufacturer).  I watched with amazement as my store and blog traffic skyrocketed within 45 minutes of launching via posts to the message boards and forums.  I carried a few other Ducati exhaust brands and within 90 days of the buzz I had created – despite all my best efforts to the contrary - loudbike was established as the “go to source” for Ducati exhaust systems in North America.  Within six months I had no choice but to go with the flow and drop most of the non-exhaust-related items from the e-store. 

The cart dragged the horse – all the way to the bank…

Stephen M Munro