Imagine you are standing in the crowd and you want everyone to look at you (all 50,000 of them).

No chance. It’s the same problem as the internet.

How would you get yourself noticed in the football crowd?

One answer is that you could be one of the famous guys on the pitch wearing a #1 jersey. People have already heard of you and they already have their attention focused on the place where you are standing.

Let’s assume though that you are not already a famous person on the internet.

So how would you do it?

Try this: get a small group of friends who are with you at the match.

Get them to stand up and raise their arms with you. Then sit down.

Do this again. Do it a few times.

Pretty soon you’ll find that 10 people sitting around your friends are copying the message too.

Soon after that 50 people are doing it. Then 100, then 200, then 500, 2000, 50000.

You might not have the whole stadium staring at you, but you’ve got them to spread the message that you and your friends started.

How did it work?

You created a message and then amplified this by getting your friends to copy it. You repeated it until other people near your friends noticed it and recognized it as a familiar message (a mexican wave) and started copying it, knowing that other people would do the same.

The key here is that the message is recognized, repeated, familiar and easy to transmit. That’s all it takes.

People notice people noticing stuff (read that again if you want).

OK – how do you apply this to your website promotion?

Same technique. Find a message about your site. It could be a story, or a tagline, or a viral video. Make it simple and easy to understand and base it on familiar things.

Find some friends who will copy your message, and make sure they do this a few times just to get it noticed.

They could talk about your story on some blogs, pass on your tagline in some emails or digg the viral video.

If the message is simple enough and interesting enough to pass on it will build and amplify over time as more people pick it up.

So there’s your website promotion. Easy (!) Clearly the key here is to get the right kind of message. Keep it simple, make it clever and give it a try…

In order to do this successfully you’ve got to create some open space where your customer can give you some feedback.

Of course there is a problem here with your typical website. Most websites are set up to pitch (i.e. present) a product, or an idea. This is a one way conversation from the website owner (you) to the customers. Without this valuable feedback from your customers how do you know what they are looking for? How do you know if your product works for them?

The challenge here is to start getting feedback via your website. Your web measurement tool will give you some information on where your visitors come from, what they are searching for, and how they navigate around your site. This is a good first step. To go further you need to start engaging direct with visitors via online surveys or email questionnaires.

Talk to your web designer about this. Ask them how they can help you to start listening to your customers.

If they can’t then you’ll just carry on pitching…