Within our industry, each site shares similar goals, audiences and desired actions. By staying focused on our goals, we can best serve the needs of the various stakeholders that we interact with.
Aaron Wall created an interesting post called How Many Stakeholders Does Your Site Have? It's an article that every enterpreneur and Internet marketer should read.
Aaron states that the Common Stakeholders of Every Site are:
content creators
customers
suppliers
site members
bloggers
mainstream media
topical experts
other high authority link sources or publicity sources
search engines
For me, it help put into perspective the fact that our efforts at Voices.com reach beyond our customers and suppliers. There are co-creators in our content, such as the readers and commenters on the VOX Daily blog to the listeners and audio correspondents on our podcast, VOX Talk.
We are also responsible to maintain the integrity of the website so that each new visitor feels welcome and knows that they are joining an online community.
The idea of integrity can also apply to the website design. How so?
A well-designed website ( from color schemes, font sizes and navigation ) will ensure that visitors have an enjoyable experience. Secondly, other webmasters will be more eager to link to Voices.com. Hey, we're always up for trading links.
Finally, with all of the above in place, the search engines will not only discover new material on the website, but rank the pages according to their relevance.
To date, we've been extremely fortunate with dozens of #1 rankings and hundreds of Top 10 placements on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.
If you're a business-owner or Internet marketer, remember your stakeholders and you'll be rewarded for it.
