1. Include Your URL on all printed material.

Including your URL (aka your web address) on all of your other promotional material might seem like an obvious thing to do, yet there are many people who don’t take full advantage of this technique.

Your URL should be printed on anything and everything possible including stationery, business cards, brochures, invoices, literature, store-front signs, and even vehicles.

By doing this, you are maximizing the use of existing materials to advertise your site as well as reinforcing your brand to all existing clients.

2. Social Media

First of all, what is Social Media? This is a term that includes blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, and forums. These sites encourage people to interact with each other and make it very easy to get your message out to the masses.

There are millions of people using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn everyday to make comments, share personal information, and share links.

Social bookmarking is a way to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Social bookmarking sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious, and Slashdot.

So, go create a profile for your business at any or all of these sites and use it as a way to expose more people to the content on your site. Of course, this will be even more effective if you actually engage in conversations and interact with other users rather than just “spamming” them with promotional links.

3. Submit your site to Online Directories

There are a ton of different directories online. Some are all inclusive, some are industry specific, and some cater to local businesses.

Two free options for listing your local business are Google Local Business Center and Yahoo! Local . These are both great ways to make sure people can find your site when doing a local search.

4. Traditional Advertising

Yes it is true that the print media industry is declining as more and more people realize how much more efficient and effective the internet is. That being said, print media is still important. This is even more so for local businesses.

Many people still read newspapers and magazines for their news and a nicely designed print ad could draw them to your site. Another traditional form of advertising is the radio. Radio ads can help attract listeners to your site as well.

Keep in mind that these methods may not work well for certain types of businesses. It is important to know your intended audience before shelling out the cash for traditional advertising.

5. E-mail Marketing

When I say e-mail marketing, I don’t mean unsolicited mass mailings, also known as spam. I’m talking about things like starting a Newsletter, or including a custom signature at the bottom of all e-mail correspondences.

A periodic e-newsletter is a great way to keep people interested in what you do. It is important to include and emphasize a sign-up option on your site. Make sure it is easy to sign up. Also, using a well designed HTML e-mail template will make your newsletter more appealing.

A custom signature at the bottom of all e-mails should include your name, business name, URL, with an active link to your site and can also include an image of your logo or a custom designed banner ad. This signature will be seen by everybody you communicate with through e-mail. It will make it easy for them to get to your site and reinforce your brand.

After doing all these things, how will you know if they are working? The best way is to use some sort of statistics program to track activity on your website.

Most commercial hosting packages include statistics tracking abilities, but I recommend Google Analytics because of its great depth, flexibility and visually appealing reports and graphs.

If you need help setting goals or analyzing your data, I offer this as one of my services. Please contact me to discuss in more detail.

1. Favicons


A Favicon, short for favorites icon and also known as a shortcut icon and bookmark icon, is the little logo you see next to the address bar of your browser. They can also be seen in your favorites or bookmarks section. They are great for strengthening your brand and visually separating a bookmarked site from all the others.

It never ceases to amaze me how many “professional sites” lack a favicon. After all, it’s not that hard to create one. Implementation of a favicon is super easy too. All you need to do is add a bit of code (which is a link to your favicon image) to the head area of the page and make sure to upload your favicon.ico to the root directory of your domain.

2. Analytics

Google is amassing a huge amount of awesome and useful services, and one of the greatest is Google Analytics. Conveniently integrated with Gmail, all you need is a Gmail account and access to a domain in order to use analytics. I’ve used many statistics programs in the past to keep track of traffic to various sites, but none have had the depth and ease of use that Google Analytics offers.

To implement, just copy and paste a bit of code into the footer of your page. That’s it! Now, sit back and wait for the traffic. The amount of info about your site and its traffic are staggering. Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Unique Page Views, Pages per Visit, % New Visits, Traffic Sources and Viewed Content, are only a few of the many different things you can find out about. These are all displayed in a variety of easy to understand graphs, charts and lists. Also, giving others access is as easy as typing in their Gmail address.

3. XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are used by search engines in order to easily navigate your entire site for indexing purposes. They can also be used by humans who want to see all the links on your site or who are looking for something specific.

An XML Sitemap is simply an XML file with a list of URLs for a site that also includes additional metadata about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site. XML Sitemaps can be found (if they exist) by typing “/sitemap.xml” after the domain name in the address bar of your browser or sometimes you can find a link (usually in the footer) to the sitemap from the page itself.

4. Custom HTML email to match the site

This is something that won’t be apparent until you interact with a site. After leaving a comment about a blog post, sending a message with a contact form, or signing up to receive updates via email, etc. a user is sent an email from the site. Now wouldn’t it be nice if all those emails were customized with an HTML template so they would retain the look and feel of the site and strengthen the brand? I think it’s a nice touch.

5. Page not found 404 error page

When you type in the URL of a page that doesn’t exist, by default, the server gives you a “Page not found 404 error” page. Although there are ways to minimize the chances of it happening, there is no way to prevent someone from looking for a page that doesn’t exist on your server.

One way of making sure people don’t get lost, loose interest, or get confused is customizing the 404 page. It could be an interesting graphic, something funny, or anything you want. Included on this page should be prominent links to your home page, portfolio, products, or whatever it is you really want people to see.