6. Poor Design White text on black backgrounds. Yellow on purple. Blinking logos. Flashing text. Micro-print. Flavor of week fonts. All scream unprofessional. Ugly websites get ugly results.

7. No Follow-up You are missing an incredible opportunity if you are allowing your visitors to exit your website without leaving an email address. Collecting email addresses is The #1 objective for your website. These addresses are only chance you have for transforming cold browsers into hot buyers (and sellers!)

8. Misspellings and Bad Grammar Misspellings spell disaster. I always recommend reading every page of your website out loud. This way you will hear sentences that don't sound right. This is also best way for catching words that your spell checker overlooked.

9. Resume Oriented vs. Benefit Oriented Some realtors make mistake of thinking that their visitors care more about resumes than listings. Leave your certifications and job history to your contact page. Make sure listings, community info, and featured properties are front and center. This is what your prospective clients want - give it to them - quickly.

10. Never Advertised Build it and they will come is not true on Web. With over 6 billion web pages, your website is just a blip on radar screen. Your site will get swallowed alive if it is not actively promoted.

Do a quick checkup of your website and see if these 10 offenders are hurting your websites success. With some minor changes you can turn your website into a lean, mean, prospecting machine.

But your primary goal should always be to make news. You accomplish this by helping to make your company, your product, your service or your idea so fascinating that reporters stand in line to write stories about you.

Example: Steve Jobs at Apple consistently makes news because his designs and concepts are so beyond that of his peers. His visionary ideas do not always translate into profits, but they almost always generate national news stories: MacIntosh, Newton, iBook, iMac, and now iTunes.

The lesson here is: If you want to make news, you must become “remarkable.”

“Remarkable” is not something you bolt onto company or paint onto your product. It should be seed of your company’s culture from Day One. If you lack this quality, then reinvent yourself. Find a remarkable product, service or idea around which you can grow a remarkable company.

This isn’t as hopeless as it sounds.

Consider water. Who in their right mind, during 1980s, would ever have predicted that bottled iced tea would inspire a marketing war in 21st Century? Then came Snapple.

Consider off-road vehicles. Then came Hummer.

Consider trading cards. Then came Pokemon.

Here’s a note for aspiring CEOs everywhere: A team of topnotch PR Rainmakers should be at your side from first day you begin to develop a new product. Why? Because they can help you build “remarkable” into your product.

The pattern today is for designers and marketers to create a product, then to call in PR team to churn out media kits and press releases. News flash: That doesn’t work any more.

Reporters are burned out on flash of New Economy. They want real stories that will pass muster with editors and with readers.

If you want to anyone to notice your company, you must make news. And that means you must hire a PR Rainmaker to help you install “remarkable” into your company, your culture and your product from start.

Copyright 2003 by W.O. Cawley Jr.