Make your site valuable - make money, achieve or get visited

Web 2.0 is a great marketing label. What does it mean? This debate reminds me of a Pharmacist friend of mine. He would always buy a particular line of expensive perfume for his Chemist shop, because he noticed that it was a good mover... until he put in a new accounting system that showed that it went all right, but no-one ever paid for it. Visitors are not automatically the clients you want. They may not be making you money, or helping you achieve your business outcomes.

The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0 (Gigaom.com is a broadband weblog edited by Om Malik, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine... ) discusses the discrepancy in views between the group that want the first lot of visitors (presumably so they can sell the website for a bucketload of money), and those with a real business model that focus on scalability, monetizing model, competitive strategy and those other things that are the real factors that determine the success of a facility.

Nick Wilson from Performancing (my new favourite read) spells out exactly how to strategise a launch of a web site using web 2.0 in Using the Web2.0 Bandwagon to Jumpstart a Real Business

There's no doubt that dumb as we may find some of the web2.0 "oooh, i made a website!" silliness out there, if you pitch it right, and get a kick start from blogs like TC and others where the blog/web2.0 crowd is dense (pun not entirely unintended) you can get an awful lot of link love. And I'm thinking that if you're smart, and build your site with Search in mind, you may just be able to jump the "tech gap" (the gap between your first 25k users and real users.)

Real users .. hmmm. I'm finishing a business strategy web site document for a client this weekend (as you can tell because I just HAD to do a blog post instead) that is having to address this very issue - creating a collegiate community with a membership that achieves the business outcomes - almost to the point of excluding the public. These two papers have affected that thinking (well, that's my excuse anyway).