How Military Tactics Can Explode Your Web Traffic

Back in the 90s, Pres. Bush had the Joint Chiefs come up with some pretty cool scenarios to take Kuwait back from the Iraqis. They did their job with flair. Each maneuver Saddam could conceive off, Bush’s Generals had a solution. They thought the plan was airtight. Or so they thought…..

The war dragged on far longer than Bush expected. Casualties exceeded maximum tolerance, and too many tanks ended in the scrap heap. The Joint Chiefs realized that complex planning always fails in the heat of battle when infinite variables come into play: weather, militia, slippery slopes, even stray goats!

Credo: giving the Colonels, Majors and Sargeants a by-the-book resolution to battle conditions isn’t smart. It’s simply impossible.

The army then fell back to another method: The Commander’s Intent. Fundamentally, this tactic espouses extreme simplicity and does away with complex scenario planning. Commander’s Intent is simply giving a simple statement of intent- without abstractions, qualifications and fluff. It’s the operational objective at the core.

In the past, a General would say “Take Area 67, and if the Iraqis come from the west, advance the fifth battalion to flank them. If they come from the north, send in the paratroopers. In case of overrun, fall back to…. etc etc” It’s this sort of planning that did the army in. What if there wasn’t a by-the-book response to an unforseen scenario?

Under the Commander’s Intent method, a General would simply say “Take Area 67 and exercise all resources to defend it to the last man. Your discretion.”

Simple. Straightforward. No confusion. With this tactic, the privates all the way to the majors kept in mind the Commander’s Intent (CI) and acted accordingly. If their action didn’t positively contribute to the CI , then it was scrapped. The war eventually reached satisfactory resolutions.

So what’s this got to do with Web Traffic? Plenty.

Did you notice that there are a lot of websites out there stuffed silly with conflicting information? Check out Yahoo’s mainpage. What exactly is it trying to promote? News? Socials? Instant Messaging? I’m so confused, I rarely stay on their page.

Or what about ICQ?  The ICQ of 1999 was cool. Simple and sleek, it offered a great way to IM people. But fast forward to 2007 and you have an ICQ that’s bursting with features, you no longer know what exactly its trying to be.

I’ll get to the point: when you want to sell something with your online enterprise, keep things simple. Visitors must comprehend that there’s only ONE thing you offer, and ONE thing you do well. Otherwise, they won’t know why they visited you in the first place.

KEEP THINGS SIMPLE! Remember the Commander’s Intent? Soldiers knew where to go and what to do because they knew the singular objective of the Commander. And they followed thru.

In the web world, people visit Google more often than Yahoo. People deploy YM more than ICQ. Why? Mostly because of the cleaner, simpler interfaces of Google and YM.

I run dozens of domains, but I keep the features and services sparse on each domain. By niching, I maintain laser-focus. I also create expert status for each one.

One of my sites offers executive coaching services. When I first launched it in 2002, I made a mistake and bulked it up with all manner of widgets and features: online chat, trivia sidebars, news bits, forum on dating, free email and what not. I thought it would make the site sticky- how wrong I was! This severely undermined the site’s professional image and people didn’t know what the heck the company offered!

Remember the cardinal rule: keep things focused. Drop the fluff.

Now get out there and evaluate your websites. If you can’t come up with a simple statement that describes the intent of your site, you’re bleeding customers. I guarantee that.

Fly high and dominate!

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