Building a Web 2.0 Marketing Strategy From Scratch

In January 2004 nobody was pitching “Web 2.0 strategy” decks. The phrase existed in a few corners of the tech press, but the shift it would later describe was already visible if you knew where to look: blogs were multiplying, RSS feeds were quietly becoming the way serious readers tracked new content and Google had just bought Pyra Labs’ Blogger the year before, a signal that publishing tools were becoming mainstream infrastructure rather than hobbyist software. This is a build guide for putting that shift to work, before it had a catchy name.

Start with a blog, not a brochure site

A static site tells people what you sell. A blog, run on something like Movable Type or the newly launched TypePad, lets you show up in search results for the specific questions your customers are typing into Google, and it gives you somewhere to post more often than a redesign cycle allows. The businesses getting real traction in early 2004 treated the blog as the center of their web presence, not an add-on.

Publish an RSS feed and make it easy to find

RSS readers were still a niche habit, but the people using them (early adopters, journalists, other site owners) were exactly the audience worth reaching first. A visible RSS link meant those readers could track your updates without visiting your site directly, which mattered more than it sounds: it turned a one-time visitor into a subscriber with almost no friction.

Turn on comments and respond

Enabling comments was a genuine decision in 2004, not a default. Businesses that allowed and answered comments on their blog posts built something a brochure site couldn’t: a visible record of real back-and-forth with customers. That record did more for trust than any testimonials page.

Show up where the conversation already exists

Forums, Usenet-descended communities and early social sites like MySpace (barely six months old) were where niche audiences were already talking. Rather than trying to pull people to a branded destination, the more effective move was participating honestly in spaces that already existed, answering questions and building a reputation before ever mentioning a product.

Watch Flickr and Wikipedia, even if you don’t use them yet

Flickr launched in February 2004 and Wikipedia was closing in on a quarter million articles. Neither was a marketing channel yet, but both were proof of the same underlying pattern: ordinary users, given simple tools, would generate more content and structure than any single company could produce alone. That pattern is worth watching closely, because it’s about to become the whole story of the web.

Measure with what you have

Analytics in 2004 meant server logs, Urchin or WebTrends, not the free, friendly dashboards that would show up a year later. Track subscriber counts on your RSS feed, comment volume and referral traffic from the forums and blogs you’re active in. Crude numbers beaten consistently over months tell you more than a polished report run once.

A realistic first quarter

Pick one blog, one feed, one community to participate in honestly and give it ninety days before judging results. The compounding effect of consistent posting and real participation is slow to start and easy to underestimate, which is exactly why most competitors won’t stick with it long enough to see it work.

Where this leads

The specific platforms mentioned here will mostly be replaced or renamed within a couple of years. What won’t change is the underlying lesson already emerging in 2004: the businesses that let customers participate, comment and be heard are building something a brochure site never could.

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Read more strategy pieces from this era, browse everything published in 2004 or see the Digital Business Marketing Awards.