10 ways to promote your biotechnology website

The promotion of biotechnology websites is difficult. The difficulty lies in part with the relative lack of resources devoted to biotechnology on the internet as well as the inherent difficulty in convincing others to link to commercial websites. I will review the 10 most effective ways to promote your biotechnology and life science related websites based upon our years of experience with online promotions. The items in this list are in no particular order:

1. Start a blog like this one. Start a blog related to your business. If you manufacture small interfering RNA molecules, blog about the latest developments in RNA interference technology. This will attract links from related blogs which will bring you targeted traffic. You can provide links to your company website and for branding purposes, create the blog as a subdomain for your main website. If your posts are interesting and insightful, this will also establish you as an authority in your particular area.
2. Use direct email to help retain existing visitors (and potential customers) and gain new customers. To retain past visitors you should use the principle of constant contact. Solicit email addresses from your visitors and with a properly written privacy policy, you can then email these subscribers with the latest news about your company. Keep the number of emailings to about 1 per month so that you don't have huge waves of people unsubscribing or create those who view your company as more of an annoyance than a provider of relevant and interesting content, products and services. To gain new visitors, find companies providing targeted email lists and send periodic newsletters describing new products or services. My company, Ion Channel Media Group provides extremely targeted opt-in email lists for promotion of your life science or biotechnology company.
3. Solicit links from related websites. This is probably the most difficult aspect of website promotion, but it is arguably the most important. Links are the currency that search engines such as google use to value your website. The highest value is given to links from related websites and those with higher "page rank" and fewer links on the particular page. So, links really have two values: one is to generate traffic directly from the link, the second is to increase your position in the search engines. Given the almost monopolistic importance of google in generating traffic, the latter is arguably more important than the former. If your website is purely commercial, you will have difficulty convincing webmasters to agree to add a link to your site. You should offer something of value and the links will come more easily. You can obtain customized content feeds from Ion Channel Media Group to help in generating quality content. This will have the added benefit of attracting so-called "natural links" from sites which find your content interesting. It often helps to offer a reciprocal link on your website. It is often not feasible (i.e. against company policy) to include a link on your main page, so create a separate section entitled "links" or "related content" and you can place the links there.
4. Grass-roots promotion. This really requires a lot of work to do properly. Grass-root promotion involves becoming acquainted with blogs, message groups, and websites which are related to your company's area of expertise. The best approach is to make targeted postings and blog comments. That is to say, find postings related to your company's offerings and discretely mention that you can provide a certain product or service to meet the poster's/readers' needs. Be respectful of the owner of the blog or message forum and do not make off-topic or excessive postings. Try also to participate in the general discussions so that you become viewed as a valued member and not just a mouthpiece for your company's products or services. The most valuable social networking site I have found is Orkut. You need an invitation to join, so send me an email if you would like to check it out. I have found the demographics to be excellent, mainly professionals with many high quality biotech forums.
5. Advertise. Find portals related to your company's expertise which offer advertising space and purchase a banner link to your website. Important issues to consider include the display rate (% of time your banner appears - typically ranges from 10% up to rarely 100%), banner format (i.e. flash, static/animated gif, DHTML etc...), targeting, and of course cost. For cost, you should try to find out the approximate cost in CPM (i.e. cost per 1000 impressions). While you will likely pay a flat rate for 1 month, you should find out the approximate cost in terms of impressions. Rates typically range from $5 per 1000 impressions up to $50 per 1000 impressions. For a comparison, Science magazine charges about $30 per 1000 impressions, but the banners are only broadly targeted. Ion Channel Media Group offers extremely targeted banner advertising at rates well below that of Science Magazine (CPM is usually under $10 CPM).
6. Directories. While directories are less important than they once were, there are many good, old, and established directories that can give your website a significant boost in search engine rankings. I have typically found that directories do not provide a lot of traffic on their own (typically between 1 and 5 visitors per week). An especially important direcory is DMOZ which freely distributes its directory and your link will be picked up by 100s of other websites, though the value of these other links are dubious. More importantly, Google seems to highly value DMOZ links and will give your website a huge boost in ranking with a good link in DMOZ. Biotechnology directories which I have found particularly useful for links include biochemweb.org, Cato.com, sciweb.com, www.biology-online.org and vlib.org which provides a good collection of old-school life science directories.
7. Log analysis. Go through your referral logs and find out which search terms are most popular or most effective in generating page views/conversions. Try to optimize the copy of your website to target these phrases. A good tool for log analysis is Google analytics which can tell you the number of page views for each search term, and goal/conversion tracking which are important estimates of the value of each search term. Google analytics is also a good way to track advertising and linking campaigns for their effectiveness on the bottom line.
8. Conference sponsorship. This can be a great way to reach targeted visitors and customers. If you are a portal-based website, you can act a media sponsor for the conference which provides great exposure in terms of a link on the conference webpage, your logo in the conference brochure, and distribution of materials at the conference. If you do not provide good content, you can pay to be a regular sponsor, but the costs can be prohibitive for smaller companies. I would suggest you find a way to be a media sponsor since the costs are almost nothing (except for printing and mailing your material). Some good companies that accept media sponsors include Select Biosciences, IBC, SRI, and Cambridge.
9. Press releases. If you have an interesting new product or service offered, a finely crafted press release can significantly increase its visibility and even attract attention from the conventional press. We have found that press releases attract a significant amount of highly targeted and valuable traffic. By valuable, I mean that we have found that these readers are more likely to purchase products, inquire about services etc... than general search engine traffic. We use prweb for our press release distribution and for a minimum $80 contribution, we see traffic coming in from google news, yahoo news, and their email wire service emedia. We also see traffic from blog postings and message boards related to our press releases or those of our clients.
10. Solicit blog posts. This is similar (but not identical) to grass roots promotion efforts. Get to know highly respected owners of blogs in your field. Suggest that they write a blog post about a new product or service. Offer them a link to their blog in return. Quite often, a cascade effect will be seen in which a single blog post will lead to several new blog posts from other blogs. Blog traffic can be very high quality depending on the blog and audience. You can search technorati for the most highly influential (linked to) blogs in the blogosphere. There are not too many life science blogs out there, but for any niche there are likely several which you can contact.