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…

An individual can only have one personal Facebook account. Using multiple accounts violates Facebook’s terms of use, and may result in having one or more of your Facebook accounts shut down.

If you want to have two separate identities, one as a business person and the other as a friend and family member who wants to stay in touch, you are out of luck. You can create a Facebook “personal” account for your business, but then you can’t have a separate personal account.

There’s a bit of a way around this: set up a business fan page, which is different from a Facebook account. An individual Facebook user can set up multiple fan pages, one or more of which can relate to business concerns.

Businesses need to be choosy in who sets up their business fan pages. The key administrator for a business page cannot be reassigned. Until Facebook fixes this, the original administrator is permanent.

Recently we had a client whose employee set up a business page. When the employee left the company, there was no way to transfer administration of the page to the business owner. Luckily, the employee had left on good terms, so the owner was able to create a new fan page and work with the former employee to invite the old fans to the new page.

For this reason we recommend that the business owner initiates the business page setup with Facebook. Then, and only then, should the owner assign an employee to be an additional administrator for the page.

Do you want help setting up a Facebook fan page for your business or organization? Lakenetwork.net is offering a FREE workshop Tuesday, September 7, from 8:30 to 10 a.m. at our office in Eastlake, Ohio. The class size will be limited to 4 participants. We will be offering this workshop more than once. Click here to sign up for the workshop or register for information about our workshop series.

To find out more about Lakenetwork, visit our Web site at lakenetwork.net where you will find our online portfolio and links to sites we’ve designed.

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)