I spend as much time marketing "Taming Beast" as I do developing it; most professional webmasters will tell you same. The topics of preparing sites for promotion & other marketing techniques is covered in various articles on my site.

As I mentioned, interactiviy and content is key to creating "brand" loyalty. Several years ago I was involved with Recruitment and Training in Eastern Australia. In our area, there were a number of organisations we were competing with. The other groups had "Here we are" pages, but we went a step further. We had all usual details regarding our company; but we also posted up positions vacant on a daily basis, gave employers and candidates an easy way to contact us via forms, had a number of articles and information resources for job seekers and employers in place, links to resume generators etc etc etc. The end result was an excellent traffic flow, added incentive for employers to advertise with us, more suitable candidates for positions we were advertising and we also received a substantial grant from government to further develop service. We were "little guys" in terms of physical resources - but we were biggest online presence in our area, and well known via our web site. The site also added dollar value to business itself as it became an important asset. When tendering for other services, web site became an important selling point.

In my next articles, we'll start examining various ways of conducting business online, including shopping carts, establishing merchant accounts and how credit cards are processed.

It is no longer "cool" to have an interactive web presence for your business - it is vital.

Michael Bloch  michael@tamingthebeast.net  http://www.tamingthebeast.net Tutorials, web content and tools, software and community. Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development solutions. _____________________________________________ 

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Dad gave me a truly worried look. He said, "Aw son, just HIT thing."

Well, I did hit it then. And job only took five more minutes to finish. Oddly enough, even though I managed to hammer my hand two or three times, I was proud that I'd just gone ahead and done it.

Of course, Dad did practice what he preached. He had a whole quart jar on his dresser at home filled with broken watches that he'd smashed doing exactly what he was advising me to do. He kept them as a reminder, he said, that if you'll just go ahead and do job, you can afford to buy all watches you need.

But lesson I learned that day has never left me.

And even today, nearly 40 years later, when I'm tapping tentatively away on edges of some job or other, trying to launch a new website without making any mistakes, or trying to figure out which script I need to install but I'm reluctant to invest time to just install one and see what it does, I still sometimes hear my father's voice:

"Aw son, just HIT thing."

When I hear that, I have to grin because he's still urging me to take action, be less cautious. Just go ahead and get job done, never mind bumps and bruises.

And that's not a bad lesson to carry through life.