When our company pitches benefits of having a web site, we emphasize that a web site is not a form of advertising. An advertisement is owned by vendor who sells it to you. It runs for a specified amount of time and then is gone. It’s a one time shot to make an impression. A web site is a marketing tool that is up 24 - 7, specifically used for communication. It is owned by you forever, and you use it to communicate with outside world and through it, outside world can communicate with you.

Other communication tools used by companies are telephones, fax machines, snail mail and personal contact. You can sell and advertise with these tools, but their benefits are far more versatile as are benefits of your web site. And just as you have to pay your phone bill, though you own phone and fax, you must pay web hosting bill – but phone, fax machine and web site are your property and part of your company’s assets.  

Once your web is launched, it's time to start marketing with it. Most web designers will offer to do this marketing piece for you for a fee, but we encourage our clients to assign a person in house to do marketing piece. Why? Because web marketing is not difficult if you have a plan. It's an ongoing process. The Internet is constantly changing, and someone inside company should be familiar with status of web site and its growth and how it’s adapting to changing cyber world. It can take as little as one hour a week, and a person on inside is naturally going to have more zeal for seeing that your page rank is climbing and your visitor traffic increasing.

Here are our company’s Ten Suggestions to Marketing Your Web Site.

1. Check your web stats daily if possible.Pay close attention to number of clicks by unique visitors and referring site. These fields indicate how many individuals are visiting your site and where they came from. It will also show which search engines brought visitors to your site.

Most servers provide traffic analysis tools. There are also commercial programs that will give an abundance of web traffic information and analysis. One good web based traffic analyzer that has a good FREE version can be found at www.statcounter.com.

2. Scan major Search Engines for your company.

Run a search using your company’s name in major search engines (Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, alltheweb). Wherever your company shows up, check with that website to see if they will include your URL where your name is listed. It is best to call personally, and then follow up with an email.

3. Search your competitors.

Run searches on your competitors with major search engines to see where they are listed. See about getting your link listed on these sites or similar sites.

4. Check your area Chambers of Commerce.

If your area Chambers have web sites that list URLs of members, it may be worth your while to buy a membership with that Chamber – especially if that particular Chamber’s web site gets a lot of hits.

A Chamber advertisement is good for a whole year of membership. When you break it down to a monthly cost of having your link on their site, is generally is affordable. If your chamber has a high page rank, having your site listed there could boost your rank.

5. Put your web address everywhere.

Be sure to include your web address on ALL advertising materials (business cards, newspaper ads, web ads, flyers, brochures, stationary). A good rule of thumb – “if you put your company name on it, put your web site address on it as well.”

EzineAnnouncer automates ezine submission to directories and announcement lists, registration of articles in directories, submission of articles to ezines and article announcement lists and posting and tracking of free ezine ads. Article and ezine submission projects that used to take me a dozen hours each are now reduced by more than half which greatly improves my efficiency and profit margin.

EzineAnnouncer is easy to install and comes with five tutorial videos that are a must view for new users. Without viewing videos even most seasoned computer professional can have problems getting started with EzineAnnouncer. Even after viewing videos I had some questions which were answered by Jason in a timely manner.

Included with EzineAnnouncer is a database of article directories and announcement lists, ezine directories, free ad ezines, ezine announcement lists and numerous ezines that accept article submissions. Unfortunately, current database is sadly out-of-date which is not a problem if, like me, you have your own database which can easily be added to software. Jason has assured me that a newly updated database will be available in January with all current owners receiving a free copy.