6. Site Marketing

Too many small businesses treat their site as a stand-alone marketing tool. Your site is really a part of your whole marketing package. It should be part of your on-going advertising, newspapers ads, and direct mail.

On other side of coin, always include your site's www address on all of your advertising and on your business cards.

Your site will come to nothing if no one can find it on web. Check your site's listing in various Internet search engines to make sure that your site is listed. If not, submit your site address for their review. Getting your business site listed on some search engines may take some time - from a few days to a few months.

If it is within your budget, a quicker way to get search engine placement is to pay for your listing. You may sign-up for a "pay-per-clicks" (PPC) search engine that may quickly generate visitor traffic to your site within a couple days. With these PPC search engines, you are paying for your site's listing within their search engine. Generally, advertising rates are low on these PPC search engines. You may be able get visitors to your site for less than 10 cents per click.

For more information regarding how your small business can effectively use PPC listings, check following articles:

~ “Managing a Responsible Pay-Per-Click Campaign” (www.agora-business-center.com/0103payperclick.htm)

~ “Tips for Using Pay Per Click Search Engines” (www.agora-business-center.com/0303ppc.htm)

~ “Search Engine Tips” (www.agora-business-center.com/0302searchenginetips.htm)

~ “Safe Bets for Start-ups” (www.agora-business-center.com/0802safebets.htm)

~ “Getting Traffic to Your Website Yesterday” (www.agora-business-center.com/1201gettingwebtraffic.htm)

~ “Smart Overture Gambits” (www.agora-business-center.com/smartgotogambits.htm)

7. Customer Information

Ensure that your site is designed in a way to ensure collection of site visitors' (and thus potential customers) email addresses.

Collecting visitor email addresses is vital because it provides a very cheap way of building future relationships and to for future marketing purposes. Make sure you let them know how their email addresses will be used and always provide your visitors option of not submitting their addresses.

8. Site Traffic

Ensure that your site is well monitored via your site host (see #5. Hosting Service). A site hosting service should be able to tell you who visited your site, from where, what pages they viewed, and at what time. This is all valuable marketing information that will allow you to further refine your site and improve customer service and revenue.

9. Effective & Efficient

Remember that your site is one of your windows for world to view, thus a reflection of your whole business.

If your site's opening page takes a long time to load online (display), your visitor and potential customer may not wait -- and move on to another site. To most people, a site's page can never load fast enough online. Look for way to reduce load time of all pages within your site.

In addition, when a visitor and potential customer gets to your opening page, can they quickly determine products or services that you offer? Again, if you make them search or guess what products or services that you offer - they may move on to another site.

10. Fresh Content

Update and change content of your site, especially your opening page, as often as possible, to ensure it doesn't become dated. Your opening page (like a retail store front window) is site page that needs to be on target and most attractive. This is page that you have to convince visitors browse your site and displays your validity as a professional business.

Lastly, a site is never done. Try to schedule regular reviews of your site by people inside and outside of your organization. Determine if there is a better way to display information within your site. Is there a better way for a site visitor to get to information within your site? If your site is going to be effective, it has to be continually evaluated. If site doesn't change from month to month, visitors and potential customers won't have a reason to come back. You want to give them a reason to come back to your site.

You want to encourage site visitors to return again and again - and thus provide your site more opportunities to convert them into your paying customers.

Copyright Steven Presar

Incentive Based

Incentive-based models provide consumers cash, credit, or other rewards for spreading company information to friends. This model is encouraging people to spread message actively because of incentives. Incentive based viral marketing campaigns will cost more than service-based campaigns.

Viral Marketing methods and techniques…

Viral Marketing works best in combination with e-Mail marketing, since e-Mail marketing provides Viral Marketing with a great communication medium. You can use e-mail to spread message. This could be done by sending e-mail messages to individuals or by joining e-mail discussion groups. Most of service based viral marketing campaigns are using e-mail as main technique.

Another medium to carry out your viral marketing campaign is through message boards and discussion forums. It is important to identify message boards and discussion forums relevant to your industry, product or service. By participating in these message boards and discussion forums you can create awareness of your company among target audience.

Writing articles is one of powerful ways to spread your message. All you need to do is allow people to republish it for free, as long as they include a paragraph at end of article containing details of your company. This method is widely used by companies providing professional services like search engine marketing and web advertising.

Freebies, Giving something away for free is another powerful marketing method available. Giving away a free something like e-book, mouse pad will encourage people to spread your message.