Foreign Perspectives

As always, the answer is “it depends”.

If your website is one of the majors, the answer is “probably not”. Would it really make any difference if Amazon decided to spend another million dollars promoting their site? I think not. After all, there can’t be many people around who haven’t heard of them these days and realistically nobody is going to buy twice the number of books through them no matter how much they’ve promoted the site.

On the other hand, if you’re like most organisations, essentially average then it probably does make a difference. Unless your name is very well known then you do need to invest some money in getting your site into search engines and perhaps also through PPC programmes such as adwords. If you don’t do that you run the risk of becoming an also ran in your business niche which was the fate of many small bookshops having an online offering at the time Amazon was launched.

Finally, there’s the special case of start-up websites. If you don’t promote them, nobody will know about your super-duper new site. For these, what you need to to usually is to spend a little at the start to get your site into the search engines to begin with (usually under $50 is enough) and start higher level SEO investment three to six months later.

What you’ll find after a while though is that, regardless of your level of investment in promotion, the traffic on your sites will grow over time. In my own case this growth is roughly 3x year on year which keeps things at a manageable level for me: the growth rate that suits you may well be different of course.

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