Getting people to come to your website is one of the biggest challenges of running it once you have settled on a good host. The fact is that there are as many websites out there on the internet today as there are drops of water in the ocean: way too many. Getting people to take time out of their busy day to see what it is you’re putting out there ain’t easy.

Marketing guru Seth Godin talks about the notion of the “purple cow.” When you’re driving through farm land, you might say “hey, neat, cows!” but do you ever really get that excited? Can you tell one cow apart from the rest? Have you ever stopped the car, gotten out, and looked at one? Of course not. But if you saw a purple cow, chances are you’d at least pull over and take some pictures and tell all your friends about it as soon as you got home.

A purple cow is something weird, extraordinary, bizarre. It might not be the heartiest, healthiest cow in the world. It might be old and frail and not really all that great if you’re looking for milk, beef or leather. But if it’s naturally purple, isn’t that strange enough to at least draw attention to it?

Marketing often comes down to not being the best at anything, but being something out of the ordinary. Of course, today’s extraordinary is tomorrow’s mundane, as those little yellow balls on top of car antennas have shown us.

Maybe you can’t afford top web designers, maybe you don’t have the experience to make the most stellar, high-production-value website in the world, but if you can do something weird, something odd, something different, out of the ordinary, a “purple cow” of sorts, then you’re at least guaranteed noticeability.