4. Make it Easy to do Business With You It's all too easy to throw online roadblocks into paths of your visitors, perhaps without even realizing it. A couple of my favorite examples of this are:

* Site search engines that return "no results found", making visitor feel foolish. Clearly they're looking for something, so offer to have a representative call them - or provide further help with your search process * Asking for registration details prematurely, before you've created enough trust with a new visitor. Privacy issues and concern about spam are major barriers to volunteering personal information.

5. Every Page of your Site should Have a Strategy Whatever outcomes that you want from your site, you need to ask for them. Too many Web pages end weakly, with no clear calls to action. Don't make your visitors have to work to decide what to do next - they won't! Every page on your site should have a strategy - invite visitor to interact with you, or go to next page, but make it easy and obvious.

So, at appropriate place in each page (or at several points in page), include a link to appropriate form - "register for this meeting", "ask for an exhibitor packet" - or whatever invitation may be relevant.

6. Practice Multi-Channel Integrated Marketing Offline marketing activities, such as postcard campaigns can be extremely useful in driving traffic to your Website. Think of all your marketing tactics as inter-related, and not as separate.

Don't rely on search engines to bring traffic to you - there are many other ways to create online buzz:

* paid advertising - e-zine sponsorship / banners / pay-per-click searches * public relations and coverage on other sites * placing articles by your experts and speakers on sites and in publications read by your target audiences * and of course, targeted e-mail marketing to your existing mailing lists 7. Measure your Success The keys to evaluating return on investment in your site, to improving it, and often to further business development ideas can be found in your Web traffic reports. These show what visitors are looking for, how long they spend on site, where they go, where they leave, and what rate of response you get to various calls to action.

These reports can be daunting - a mass of figures, graphs and URL's. But I'd strongly suggest that someone in your organization should understand them. Otherwise, you're shooting in dark with your Web investment.