Historically businesses have spent millions each year to obtain and keep their market share. It is a way to expose your message to people and to gain new customers. Additionally it is a way to “brand” or solidify an image to consumers. For websites it is a way to get visitors that may not yet know about you. Some campaigns have a guaranteed result like Pay per Action, but others have fewer guarantees, and rely heavily on the quality of the campaigns. It is not certain and it is not easy to determine the success your company will have over time. With advertising you can buy an exact amount of impressions or viewings by consumers. There are many ways to buy this, and many ways to specify your ultimate goal. Are you looking for traffic from anyone or is your customers exact so that you want to direct advertising? Advertising also allows you to push for certain events or specials.

1000 visitors for $12!

There are still great deals out there for Internet advertising. I recently purchased 1000 visitors for $12!! It is about tapping markets before others see the value. Can you do this? Well maybe, that was kind of an accident that it worked so well, but that is what is possible. If you work to understand your industry online, and words that might be searched for on search engines you have the best chance of getting high value.

Many industries have focused websites that have great rates on banner advertising. We look for trade sites or focused sites, which are a good match for your site.

Many search engines such as www.overture.com have many keywords for sale in your area. For some companies the list can be over 100 keywords! We can create a program where we manage the purchase of these words, handle the wording of the ads, and make bids for words based on your budget and goals. There are other search engines we can handle bids for. Contact us to get information.

If you sell merchandise there are malls, which offer good exposure to people in the buying mood. Some of our favorites are amazon.com, froogle.com, and bizrate.com.

The importance of advertising online is that your competitors are advertising online and that you do not want to let them get a head start on capturing and understanding on how to make money on the internet. It is a great tool for understanding markets, getting out your marketing message, making sales, and then finally giving customer service in a timely fashion that people like.

Additionally many research projects have found that internet users are often highly educated, have larger incomes and are often decision makers for their families and companies. Sounds like a great customer to me!

We usually suggest jump starting your site to help traffic right away. In this section we will talk about ideas on getting visitors through other methods than those we have already discussed.

1.         Firstly it is a nice idea to analyze what your competitors are doing. This hopefully was done when you were deciding on keywords, but you might want to change your scope some. What do they do for sales, advertising, multiple sites, etc. Are those techniques that you should do and do better? It is great to understand how your industry is changing. Knowledge is power and knowing what other companies are doing can help you design your site, make promotions, ask for links, pay for advertising, and acquire customers.

2.         Make a Newsgroup Posting about your company and/or products. This is a good way to spread your message to a focused group with an interest in your message. Make sure to observe newsgroup for a few days to notice if commercial messages are approved. This is also a great way to show your knowledge with thoughtful comments to readers. A member of your company that is knowledgeable about your company and the internet would make a good choice for someone to make these posts.

3.         A new way to inform others about your company is through Blogs. These are informal message boards where people can post there daily thoughts through an easy to use interface. This is similar to a journal with paper but is online and is a page or a separate website like www.blogspot.com. The person who makes this record or journal could be an employee and could be a low, mid-level person or even the CEO. Several companies have CEOs that wish to communicate with customers in this way. Sun Microsystems, GoDaddy.com, and the list goes on.

4.         Affiliate Program Building - Many websites have built their traffic from nothing to millions by giving referring sites a percentage of sales gathered from that referral. This was first done by Amazon.com and it went from being an obscure book company with a strange name, to being a household name that the vast majority know about and use! This can be done in-house with server based software or can be helped with companies like Commission Junction. You can visit them at www.cj.com

5.         Make sure your staff has an email address on the new url that is working properly. Have them learn to use email if that is new. Then have your company personnel create a signature for their emails. This is a name, email address, website address, and marketing message on each email message they send. Your employees should be spreading knowledge of what your company does to all the people they meet on the web. All the companies you write to, all the newsgroup postings you make, all the forums you post to will have a unified message with no mistakes, missing info, or other distractions.

6.         This is a great time to change offline collateral. This can be business cards that need the new email addresses and website addresses. It could be brochures that point to the web for more information or to get coupons or get more information. It could be clothing or promotional items that now need the website address. The possibilities are endless.

7.         Let employees, customers, and all interested parties know about the new website, its features, and what it will do for your business. The first to know should be employees so they can master the new resource, inform customers about how to use it, and for sales and marketing to see the new marketing messages. Employees are a great area for feedback and quality control as well.

8.         And finally the most important activity to do while your site is getting indexed and the rankings are normalizing is to get as many high quality sites to link to you as possible. This is listed last but this might be handled well by people other than the above activities. It is good to get these as quickly as possible. If you get a lot of high quality links the time it takes to get listed will decrease. You will want to consider directories like Yahoo and the DMOZ Directory. Both are extensive and high quality. Look for more directories and possibly industry specific websites. You can search for other companies in similar but not competing industries that might be interested in linking to you. Review your competitors links.  How do you think they got them? Can you do the same technique?

These are all changes you can do after your site is designed, the SEO is done, and you are waiting for results. Good Luck!

http://www.axialis.com/axicons/index.html. This one is quite handy and allows you to run the program off of your computer. There is a free trial available and you can buy a single license if you choose to keep it for $14.
There are others out there, feel free to search for yourself.

Once you have a design you like you can save it and then see it with your browser. To do this one needs to be uploaded to your server with the name of “favicon.ico”. To do this you need to upload to your main directory of your website. This will be the same directory as your index.html file. If you have lower level folders for articles, products, or other files you will need to upload a copy of this file to each folder that you think someone might bookmark you from. Like for a shopping site you might have a copy in the main directory, the product directory, and any other directories. That way no matter what folder the web viewers are in when they bookmark the site they will get a copy of the favicon.ico.

An example of how popular the browsers that support this have become can be easily tracked by how many people created a “file not found” record in your server logs for the favicon.ico file until you make one. For many people that is the first time they have heard of this file. Once you create and upload your own copy of this image to all the main folders you will not see these “file not found” errors. You will have a nice looking graphic that represents your site well and may help you get noticed, as you will stand out in the bookmarks of the visitors that have book marked you. Getting repeat viewers to your website is even better than getting new visitors as they have already warmed to your message and are closer to being a customer that all of our businesses strive for.