Elements of a Successful Internet Presence

Define your goals. The internet is not only used for marketing, but for a variety of services and commerce, i.e. streamlining operations on an intranet vs. networking your office, supporting the needs of field personnel, posting information that your customers or suppliers use, setting up on-line ordering…

Promotion/Being found. With many firms having an Internet presence today, marketing of your presence is of much higher importance. Visibility in search utilities can be of lesser importance and greater difficulty. Requesting or purchasing links from local or industry sites with high traffic is critical to your success on the internet. Cross-marketing between media is extremely important. Distributing your email aliases and your website URL market your domain. Effective promotion is accomplished using an analytical approach (a more in-depth version of this page is available for clients). Consider allocating a significant portion of your budget here—possibly equal to what you initially spent spread over the first year, between your developer’s research and implementation efforts and the linking or "membership" fees.

Follow through. This is what will make the difference in your success or failure. You must allocate the time and resources to launch your site (complete the development and obtain effective exposure) and keep it alive with new information. Nobody goes back to a store that never has new inventory, or in this case, information (unless your inn or restaurant is already perfect and the website never needs changing).

Your consultant or developer can research and implement effective promotional strategies; be realistic about what you will commit to do yourself or with your staff and what you should pay to have done.

Review your stats—the traffic to your website—or have your developer do it for you. This will provide the basis for marketing investment decisions.

Review your website periodically. Test your inquiry form(s). You can't come in the back door of your store and never check what the front entrance looks like.

This page updated February 1, 2007.