Build Website Traffic By Being A Published Expert In Your Field

Our Family of Trade News Websites Offers You Fantastic, Free Marketing Opportunities No Matter What Business You Are In

Profit from Web 2.0 Marketing Principles

It doesn't matter what field you're in. Nearly all fields and industries have trade publications. They publish on a regular schedule, offering the latest industry news, opinions, and information. Many of them are among the most famous names in publishing.

For investors, think: Wall Street Journal.
Medicine has literally hundreds of trade publications, led by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The American Bar Association publishes Business Law Today for lawyers.
In the music industry, it's Billboard.
The entertainment industry has reams of trade publications, led by Variety and People.
For computer geeks, the leading trade publications are Byte and PC.
Therapists take many of their cues from Psychology Today.
The auto industry has Motor Trends and Car and Driver.
New business owners regularly consult Entrepreneur Magazine.
Advertising and Marketing people take their cues from AdWeek.
And there are thousands more, covering every industry and trade known to mankind.

I'll bet you wish that you could somehow get yourself written about or published in your market's leading trade publication, because it's free advertising on a monumental scale. It's well known that articles in trade magazines generally guarantee the subjects of those articles loads of attention industry-wide, and it doesn't cost them a dime.

It Even Works Locally

The phenomenon of getting big marketing gains from articles published about you or your business isn't limited to trade publications. Even local newspapers can have the same effect.

Up until last year, my wife had a gardening business here in town, which she called Gardens By Louise. She gave it up because she wanted to move on to other things, but her experience with that business is instructive. We had only moved to the town where we live in 2004, but an article written and published about her the following year in the local paper (circulation less than 10,000) generated so much new business for her that she ended up hiring two employees to help her handle it all. People she didn't know would stop her in the street and say, "Hey, I saw your article in the paper. It was great!" Some people even cut it out and hung onto it, calling her years later to inquire about her gardening services. It was phenomenal.

Web 2.0 Marketing Comes To Trade Publishing

The growth of the Internet has laid the groundwork for a major change in how trade publications work. Already, the leading ones are establishing websites to meet the new and growing demand. However, on the Web the field of trade publications is still in its infancy and is wide open. Over time, many are going to find that they just can't retain the same level of support online as they've experienced offline, because they simply don't understand the online world as well as they understand the offline world. It's going to be companies like ours who really know how to leverage the Internet to best advantage who will gain the most from the Web explosion in trade publications.

The stage is now set for the trade magazine approach to translate onto the Internet. Web 2.0 is the next step in the evolution of trade publications, and it's about to become an online phenomenon. Wikipedia has an interesting article on the subject, in which they wrote the following. (This is the way the text appeared in 2008.)

"Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies....

"...The Freemium business model is also characteristic of many Web 2.0 sites, with the idea that core basic services are given away for free, in order to build a large user base by word-of-mouth marketing. Premium service would then be offered for a price."

If you think about it, you'll realize that traditional trade magazines are nothing more than the pre-Internet version of Web 2.0. They are a community of product or service providers grouped into a single publication. The information is provided for free (usually paid for by advertising and perhaps a monthly subscription, which often gets waived for professionals in the industry), and the result is that the trade publication is incredibly influential within its respective industry. The "premium" side of the business is offered by all the companies and providers whose innovations and news ideas are featured in the pages of the publication.

Here's an example of a similar project where we've already succeeded in building such traffic. Our sister company, Nolan Chart LLC launched a website (which we market) in August 2007 called The Nolan Chart. It specializes in providing news, opinion, and information in the field of politics. Contributors sign up for free accounts similar to our new trade websites, and they publish articles that get read by readers from around America and even around the world. The site currently gets hundreds of thousands of visitors each and every month. In fact, in January 2008 we hit an all-time high of over 600,000 visitors just as the U.S. presidential primary season kicked off. Much of the traffic came as a result of the Ron Paul phenomenon that swept the Internet, and we were a part of that. In fact, the Nolan Chart website is recognized within the grassroots Ron Paul movement as being a leading player in that movement. The website was not created for that purpose, but it sure shows the power of having the right website at the right time in the right place!

Become Recognized As An Expert In Your Field

One of the biggest benefits to being a contributor to an online trade publication is that over time it will translate into greater levels of recognition for you as an industry leader. There's nothing like that kind of recognition when it comes time to land a big deal you've been working on!

First Published: July 24, 2008
Last Revised: June 4, 2011