Continued from page 1
#4 Bring them back. OK, so it’s unlikely anyone will make your site their homepage. But you can get people to come back if you give them an incentive. To develop leads: publish a series of articles online. Or set up a Blog. Send email alerts when you post new content – better yet, create an RSS feed. Post survey results, best practices, Q&A with your experts. Hold webinars for potential customers or paying participants. Deliver ongoing project information online. Set up an extranet. The details depend on your particular business, but you can probably do more.
#5 Keep it fresh. “Oh, just leave it up. Something is better than nothing. Nobody will notice.” Old stuff might fool some of
people some of
time. But for
most important readers – return visitors – out-of-date content can be a red flag. At best it says you’re not paying attention; at worst it says there’s something seriously wrong with your company. So stay up late once in a while and post new information. Or hire someone who will.
Creating and maintaining a website isn’t rocket science any more. But like most useful things, it does take careful thinking, tinkering, and rethinking to get maximum marketing power from
Web.
By
way, MarketUP falls into
camp of ‘those who stay up all night working on their website’, and on some of our clients’ sites too. Sure beats howling at
moon.
Just for fun - other tangled webs: ‘Engineering a Spider’ [ http://www.isa.org/NVTemplate.cfm?Section=News_and_Views&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=38472]
When we practice to deceive. [http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2004/08/oh_what_tangled_9.html]
This month’s headline – “Oh,
tangled webs we weave, When we practice to deceive.” is attributable to Sir Walter Scott, Scottish romantic novelist, from “Marmion” http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/14174.html
1997 Presentation by Peter Magnusson – with Internet evolution and forward projections. Interesting. http://www.sics.se/~psm/ar97/sld011.htm
If you have a question or topic you would like to see in Knowbits, write to Donna Lehman: dlehman@market-up.com

Ms. Lehman is Founder and Principal Consultant of MarketUP. She authors Knowbits, a monthly ezine of marketing tips for small business. MarketUP is a Berkeley, CA based consultancy for a number of startup and small-mid sized companies. Prior to MarketUP, Donna spent more than 17 years doing design, communication, and B2B marketing for start-ups and Global 100 conglomerates in various industry sectors.