Mark McClure: President, TrafficStrategies.com, Tampa
By LOUIS HAU
Published March 29, 2004
Q. Your Web sites DepartmentStoresOnline.com and CouponBeach.com provide discount coupons for about 3,000 online merchants. Shoppers usually find you by typing the name of the product in a search engine and then clicking on your link. Explain how your business works from there.
Somebody may go to DepartmentStoresOnline looking for a coupon for, say, a Bose Wave radio. We offer them free shipping or 10 percent off. They click through to Bose and then we get paid a percentage of that sale. We use our experience from search-engine marketing to market other people's products. It needs to be very search engine-friendly, which means you can't have a lot of graphics. They're looking at the number of sites linking to you, which is called link popularity. A lot of text (is important, too), that's where they pick up the keywords. Say you're optimizing the site for flowers. If you have a lot of good text for the keyword "flowers" on your Web site, you're going to rank well.
Q. What can you offer an online merchant that has already optimized its Web site to capture a good search engine ranking?
They can only take up one position (on a search results page). We can take up, say, the top 10 results with DepartmentStoresOnline, CouponBeach and other listings. Another benefit of working with people like us is that you know exactly what your cost is. You know that you're only going to spend, say, 20 percent on a sale, whereas in the old days you were paying per 1,000 (online ad) impressions and you were not guaranteed sales.
Q. Given your company's name, do people ever call you asking how to alleviate motor-traffic congestion at Malfunction Junction?
All the time. In the beginning, we thought they were prank calls. But we get them quite often, a couple a month. People looking to go to traffic school. "I got a speeding ticket, how are you guys going to help me out?"
