Promoting, marketing, maintenance and updating

Promoting

Promoting a website in the narrow sense basically means driving traffic to it. Efficient promoting means higher click-thrus and ultimately: more sales. Marketing - in a broader sense - is a permanent, interactive process in which the marketer strives to influence potential customers, collects feedback information and tests and evaluates various aspects of the products and/or services marketed.

Back-office marketing: means the furnishing of the website with all features (e.g. meta-tags like keywords, descriptions, etc.) enabling the search engine robots to find it and rank it high. It is therefore imperative to have the site maintained on an ongoing basis.
Commercial websites require ongoing monitoring and regular updating. They need to offer something new to keep visitors coming back. Fresh content should be added regularly. Just as your computer needs backing up and cleaning, your website needs care. With multipage websites this can be a tedious task. However, it can be a lot easier with the use of appropriate tools. The site studio builder included in the the hosting packages sold by netreprisehosting.com makes it easy to change general site settings, templates, colours, to add and remove pages.
 

Active promotion: is understood to promote the site proactively, submitting it to classifieds, search engines, launching e-zines, mailing lists and analyzing website traffic, using networking, letterheads, business cards, all designed so as to promote your business, and get exposure to your website.
 

Search engine marketing:

It means the achievement of the highest possible position in search engines in response to relevant keywords. Searchers are not likely to read more than one or two pages (10 or 20 links with a brief description).

I have tried for free the WEBCEO utilities to research my keywords, to optimize my sites for high rankings in search engines. I could also submit your URLs to search engines, check your site's rankings with search engines. My initial experience was positive but I moved on to try the search engine optimisation tools provided for free as part of my hosting package with Omnis.

With so much time spent on my off-line businesses, I need to digitize as much as possible the routine tasks in search engine optimisation as well. SEO Lite is a promising option.

Search engine submissions:

You can increase visitors to your website by submitting it to over 1000 search engines and directories and up to 500,000 link pages using this website promotion service from Multimedia Australia!

Search engine submissions take their time. To reach your potential visitors or customers sooner, you can use alternatives:

E-mail campaigns

VerticalResponse, Inc., a leading provider of self-service and customized direct marketing solutions, empowers small and medium sized businesses to build, control and measure their own direct marketing campaigns. iBuilder from VerticalResponse is the most intuitive Web-based direct marketing solution on the market, allowing customers to deliver highly sophisticated and easy-to-deploy email marketing campaigns.

Constant Contact®, Do-It-Yourself Email Marketing® is the leading web-based email marketing service used by over 40,000 small businesses and associations. With Constant Contact, you can easily create and send email newsletters and announcements that get immediate and measurable results.
 

Advertise your website:

We all know that advertising budgets have to be controlled and used wisely. To gain control over the input it is now imperative to spend every advertising dollar in a controllable way, too.

One of the biggest pay-per-click sites is google.

You can also place your ad on thousands of sites with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks. (Actually, you can select the sites you want your ad ro appear in)

If our site does not directly sell anything and we still want it to receive increasing traffic, the most practical solution in my opinion is to apply a pay-per-click program (though it can be used to promote sales sites as well). We can find several affordable services that can run such a program for us making sure we pay only for genuine clicks (as opposed to software generated clicks, etc.).

Third party affiliate network services
In addition, once we start selling products or services from our website (being e-commerce enabled), we can increase traffic and SALES through a network of affiliates who will be paid commissions. Again, instead of spending our efforts, energy and money on re-inventing the wheel, the best solution - in my opinion - is to employ affordable and reliable third party service providers who track every sale and manage affiliate accounts while we can focus on other aspects of our business. Having a third party involved helps dismiss the doubts of affiliates about the honesty of performance reports.
Having a third party tracking affiliate service involves a strategic decision. You not only have to provide creative materials, texts, banners, etc. you also have to decide which category you want your site to be included in. You need to think about competing websites and decide in which categories and with which affiliate network you want to confront or if you decide to avoid them.
Your best bet may be to sign up as an affiliate!!! (for free) with several networks to get a hand-on experience with each of them and make your strategic decision after you have compared them with each other.

Affiliate networks worth considering:

Affiliate window ( UK); ClickBank  (USA); Clixgalore (Australia), Linkshare (USA)

Your own affiliate program

Start Your Own Affiliate Program
Start Your Own Affiliate Program For Free. JROX.COM Affiliate Manager is now available for download for free. Start building your affiliate network easily with JAM.

Updating

Information about your site's visitors, activity statistics, file access statistics, information about referring pages, search engines, errors, visitor country, referring sites, about search words and phrases is important for you to be able to cater for your visitors better. Educated decision about your site can be made on the basis of facts and figures. You may or may not have such a feature included in your hosting package (I do) and - to see how it works - you can download the shareware version of the Web Log Suite here.

Links

If your site contains links with other sites on a reciprocal basis, you may need to use Link Exchange Manager. Link Exchange Manager is a software program that manages your website's links pages in a time-saving way to reduce HTML coding and manual scanning for reciprocal links and dead links on your link partners websites.
Web Link Validator is a powerful site management and link checker tool that helps automate the process of website testing. The software performs thorough analysis of a website: finds broken links (including those using JavaScript and Flash), orphaned files, slow-loading, deep, outdated and small-sized pages.