There is hardly any company that does not care about their home page performance. It is a clear indication of what kind of interest a business creates. Especially for MFN, it is vital to have a successful home page. On the one hand, MFN's whole education division with workshops, on-site training, consulting, books and market studies is promoted via the web site. On the other hand, there are banner advertisements available for companies within the industry and they count on a high hit rate.

Many years ago, MFN made it one of its priorities to increase the number of direct visitors as much as possible. Direct visitors are those who deliberately visit a particular web page and these are the ones to be targeted. Reaching this goal was a huge undertaking, since a whole package of actions had to be implemented.

Action 1. Short web address: The first step was to change the very long home page address from www.metal-finishing-news.com to the shortest possible: www.mfn.li. A small action with big results. A shorter address is easier to remember and to communicate. Furthermore, it also fits in the smallest print advertisement and can be promoted well.

Action 2. Offer "A Value" at the home page: MFN has around 1500 complete articles with illustrations in its online library. Using a built-in search engine, the reader can easily find the publication of interest.

Action 3. Direct the customer to MFN web site: In all the marketing efforts of the magazine, flyers, post cards, e-mails, etc., MFN makes sure that the message itself is short and clear. For detailed information, the customer is always referred to the MFN web site.

Action 4. Cooperation with third parties in the industry: MFN cooperates with leading exhibitions, local magazines and international organizations. It places "partner-links" on over 30 different web sites. This kind of linking improves the rating at search engines and the number of visitors. Furthermore, MFN exchanges print advertisement with at least a dozen local magazines around the globe, which also contributes to the networking.

Action 5. E-mail Marketing: In order to promote its services, MFN has a database of nearly 250'000 e-mail addresses from the industry, sorted by country. It sends far over 1.5 million e-mails/year that are all linked to the web-site.

All these activities are paying off. In addition, because of the nature of the World Wide Web, the success is usually not linear but exponential. MFN increased its rate of visitors from around 400/day to over 2000/day within only 12 months!

Best Regards
Andrzej Wojtas (Ph.D.), Chief Editor of MFN, E-mail: andrzej@mfn.li

Author: Andrzej Wojtas