In the past, your web designer might have been the only one working on your website. But with today's technologies and expectations, you as business owner, content contributor, or marketer can have an expanded, active role in posting information on your website. 

The garden is an appropriate metaphor for websites. Websites can be seen as living and breathing things based on the interactivity they can foster. They are virtual gardens that you stake out and refer to by domain. And you, the owner of your site, can be the gardener.

Website gardens benefit from attracting beneficial organisms, i.e. customers, and giving them a spade to dig with, tools to see what's going on, tools for interacting with you and your site and your business. Customers and readers expect to be able to comment on blog entries, to follow up on issues, to really have the ability to gain useful information and engage with you online and not just via email.

Ergo, interactivity and being able to post information yourself is an important component in making your website an engine that can help you promote your products and services.

Benefits of website gardening:

1. The more information you post (as long as it is well organized), the larger the footprint of your garden on the web, which improves your chances for more website traffic driven by search engine indexing.

2. The more items you've planted (i.e. blog posts) the higher your credibility in social media avenues such as LinkedIn and Facebook (as long as posts are relevant and professional).

3. Regularly generating information for your website has indirect benefits in other ways; that of self-discipline, of policy development, etc.

Gardening tools and techniques:

- Blogging and other Social Media use
- Use of tools for engagement such as QR codes
- eNewsletters (like Constant Contact) and the ability to sign up on your site
- RSS subscriptions, Google Feedburner
- Commenting capability

To be continued…

OK, so you’ve got a new web site. How are you going to get people to come to the site?

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the main method of web site promotion. But Web 2.0 has arrived, and now you’ve got a number of tools to use from the driver’s seat of your web site.

Here are some ideas for consideration:

1. Have a blog? Claim your blog on Technorati and get feedback on the popularity of your blog.

“Getting Started with Technorati”

2. Generate compelling blog content that relates to your web site business. Find an educational mission and write about it.

3. Use Facebook. Create a business fan page and post engaging, relevant content on your page. We post information that corresponds to our educational mission (helping people promote their web sites) on our fan page.

Keep your audience in mind–don’t post spam; post information that can really be of use, and interact sincerely with people who are in your networking group.

Social media resources

4. Post your blog entries on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles

• Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs (searchengineguide.com)
• Three Blogging Tips (best-tutorial.net)
• Build Your Brand Through Social Media (lazerpromotions.com)

SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNICAL HOW-TOS

Share your web pages on social media
Addthis.com creates html code you can insert into your pages to facilitate sharing.

Create a business page
Tailor your facebook postings so that official business-related posts come from a company fan page.

Post tweets to Facebook

Shorten your Twitter URLS
Bit.ly is a URL shortening service. Go to their website, insert a long url into a box, get a short bit.ly link that forwards to your long url.

SOCIAL MEDIA NORMS

“The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing”
This article advocates a consistent approach in branding your social media business presence.

Worksmart eMarketing
Social media marketing blog.

But there’s one element that never changes: Writing words that sell.

“Words That Sell: A Thesaurus to Help Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas” is a classic marketing book available on Amazon.com, published in 1984 and reprinted in 2006. Words That Sell has come to our rescue many times in creating vibrant copy that persuades and informs powerfully.

If you get stuck for just the right word, most regular dictionaries and thesauri can leave you cold. You need words that grab ya.

Does your company “pride itself on its reliability?” How dull. Add some zing with words like:

• High-performance
• Durable
• Built to last; ruggedly built.

Why not say that you have high standards, stringent standards, rigorous standards, or that it’s laboratory tested or precision engineered? Heck, why not say it will “last a lifetime” or “last for generations”?

Is your product powerful? Or is it dynamite, high-voltage, Herculean, titanic, Promethean, muscular or masterful?

Author Richard Bayan wrote that he rummaged through huge stacks of magazines, newspaper, brochures and catalogs, listened for compelling phrases on television and radio, and combed dictionaries to create “your personal magic kit.”

Words That Sell is a super tool for creating great copy. Hmmm . . . maybe we should reword that:

“At last! Now there’s an even better way to write mesmerizing copy! Words That Sell stirs the imagination and adds professional writing skills to your toolbox. You’ll wonder how you ever got along without it!”

According to a poll conducted by Target Marketing magazine, more direct marketers plan to increase spending for online methods. E-mail leads the pack of most-used media with 52 percent of marketers expecting to increase their spending. Next is direct mail (41 percent expect to spend more), search engine marketing otherwise known as paid search (40 percent), search engine optimization (37 percent) and direct response space advertising (24 percent).

Other interesting results from Target Marketing’s poll:

Direct mail was reported to be their best return-on-investment generator of new customers (32 percent), e-mail is second (22 percent) and catalogs are third (10 percent).

For customer retention, on the other hand, 35 percent of the marketers polled say e-mail marketing has a better ROI, followed closely by direct mail (31 percent) and outbound telE-marketing (10 percent).

Target Marketing conducted this survey in January by e-mailing its questionnaire to 19,000 of the magazine’s print subscribers who have opted in to receive e-mail messages from the magazine. The article is available as a pdf on their Web site, http://www.targetmarketingmag.com.

But advertisements are attention-grabbers by nature. Traditional Web advertising methods using banner ads, pop-up ads and paid ad listings can disrupt your carefully crafted design. Who wants Flash animation or looping text to divert attention from your own message?

In a recent issue of Web site Services magazine, Tiffany Guarnaccia writes that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be integrated to carefully match your site’s style while bringing in extra revenue.

Some of the options are:

• in-line contextual PPC ads embedded within the text, much like hyperlinks
• advertising placed on the invoice page of a recent purchase from your e-commerce or storefront site
• PPC directory ads that fit in with your directory or database site

Ms. Guarnaccia said some of the PPC providers promote themselves as well as the advertiser (such as Ads by Google) and you may not want that much of an outside presence on your site. A few of the providers offering a more low-key pay-per-click partnership are 7Search, MIVA and Searchfeed.com.

Online advertising can be an excellent source of income for your company while maintaining your sites design integrity.

Happy clicking!