2) Your marketing objectives have to be supported by your sales team - sales team has to be incentivized to respond to inbound e-mails and requests for information via a contact form in a timely manner, within 24 hours or sooner. If you have a geographically dispersed sales team then make this clear on web site by providing specific contact points for states, regions and countries.

3) Make sure you IT person/department attends your marketing planning meetings with your sales team - your web site will need some type of a lead capture setup that redistributes leads based on function and/or geographical responsibility. Your IT staff has to create a database solution that captures, stores and distributes leads - this does not need to be done in-house, products like Act (the market leader in contact management software) are now web-enabled, you can capture leads via a web server and share leads with others via a browser and very inexpensively.

4) We don't advocate popup advertising for most of our client's advertising campaigns. But, we have "crossed over to other side" and we do (highly) recommend using popups on our clients' web sites to present opportunities that in turn capture leads. Studies have shown effective popup lead captures increase lead generation by 40-85% depending on market segment. Popups can be set so they only launch on a frequency basis per session (visit to a web site) or a number of times for a specific visitor - they don't have to setup so they are intrusive and annoying.

5) Last but not least (drum roll) - make customer's usability experience most important aspect of your web site. Create a user interface ("experience") that is pleasant for your visitors; i.e. use standard universal (top of page and local page left) menus, utilize 2-3 sentence paragraphs with lots of white space, don't overload your pages with graphics that slow down load times and make sure your contact points (phone, e-mail) are readily available from every page.

So, to summarize; advertising is shifting from traditional to web-based or interactive if you will - so, to get on board this tsunami build a web site that communicates with your prospects/customers, provide contact points via telephone and e-mail via site, involve your IT and Sales staff with lead capture process so they are all stakeholders and utilize popups to accelerate your lead capturing.

2) Utilize plain vanilla text link advertising - find web sites or portals that have traffic that is comprised of customers who are in your market segment. Then, add a text link (banner ad or graphic button if you will) to a page or pages and negotiate a media buy that is based upon a "cost per click" basis; i.e. paying only for traffic that clicks through to your web site.

3) Creating and deploying a "link strategy" campaign (i.e. getting a site listed via other web sites) is one of best self-sustaining interactive marketing processes available to any company seeking to drive qualified traffic to a web site. This process is not based upon more traditional "reciprocal links" procedure but incorporates some web-based competitive analysis. You start by analyzing links that are pointing back to your top 3-5 competitors' web sites and then establish relationships with these sites and also submit your site to top and second tier directories to augment number of links.

4) Newsletter insert advertising used to be considered rather mundane and not very effective. But, if you contrast effectiveness of this process versus new opt-in e-mail response rates heretofore-lowly newsletter advertising has new and vastly improved luster! Also, in past it was difficult to track when and if people clicked on a text link ad in a newsletter - but new technology enables virtually any publisher to provide you with this information, enabling you to track your ROI for media buy. Finally, real beauty of newsletter text advertising is that it is very targeted and people want to receive information so you can be confident your ad will at least be viewed by some finite number of prospects.

5) Search Engine Ranking has come of age in last 12-24 months - you can now easily create and deploy a traditional (title, description, keywords inserts in content, submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented with a pay per click ("PPC") process. Deploying both ensures you derive long term (traditional rankings) and short term (pay per click) results, with latter being driven by amount of funds you have in your marketing budget.