BrightSurfer

Many people create websites to help their customers work with their business in some way, whether it’s for selling products online, providing an online service or application (as in “computer program”, not “submission form”), or just announcing what the business does off-line and how to contact the staff for service.

It’s difficult to make your online marketing strategies work if many of your customers are not online, though. Many people have Internet access, but some rarely use it. In some cases, you may have a customer base that largely does not subscribe to any type of Internet access; in certain communities where online access is a new thing, some of those people cannot think of any good reasons to use the Internet. So give people reasons to use your website, and maybe they’ll come around!

Ideas, creatively speaking:

• Use your website with your face-to-face marketing efforts. Offer coupons on your website, and put out a clear announcement as to where people can find those coupons. Then, if you have anything you want people to see, you can easily post it online with the coupons (or linked from that particular page). Also, insert your website address into all your printed stationery, business cards, and newspaper/magazine ads.
• Offer something useful on your website that has something to do with your business. Perhaps publish a list of links for resources on information for your work industry, products, or local community. You can link directly to your local newspaper online and include a syndication feed of their headlines on your site if they offer it. You can start a blog and simply entertain potential customers by talking about your business, or by talking about anything, really. Publish an events calendar for your business or your local community. Publish a “favorite websites” list and keep it up-to-date, so that you have a reason for people to actually use a computer to check it out and revisit often.
• Start an email list for announcements. Include coupons or promotional offers in the mailings, and let people know that in advance so that they have a great reason to sign up. Use this list to announce a great new product or service when you begin to offer it.
• Once you’ve joined a professional network or social network online, you can let people know that you exist on the Internet and that you’d love for them to add you to their network. And if they’ve never done anything like that before, well then you would be their first contact!
• Talk about your favorite websites to your current and potential customers/clients. Then when they ask, “Do you have a website?”, let them know…
• If you run a shop or a place where people may wish to sit down and hang out, look into having a secure Wifi connection installed so that people can use the Internet on your business’ premises, if they bring a laptop that can make the connection. It’s a big bonus if you actually have a computer that can be hooked up to the Internet for public access. In either case, make your website the homepage. Caveat: don’t do anything like this without really looking into it at first, because the pitfalls can be rather ugly. Also, avoid this if it doesn’t make any sense for the type of business that you run. Copy shops and cafes usually have Internet terminals with great success. It would probably not mesh well with an antiques shop, however.
• Offer to take digital pictures of your customers when it’s appropriate for them and for your business. Upload them to your website. Tell them where the pictures will end up…
• Do you have a voicemail greeting for your business? Make sure that it includes your website address!
• Do you hand printed receipts to your customers? Set your cash register or receipt printer to include the address of your website.
• Any other creative suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment on this post!

It seems crazy that everyone online wants to be connected nowadays. Everyone wants to know one another! Indeed, social networking has been one of the most popular applications on the web over the past few years. But did you know that you can use social networking to help your business?

As an individual, it can’t hurt you to set up free accounts with all the major social networks (MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, and even Flickr and YouTube) and include the address of your primary website in your public profile. Just be careful with the amount of information that you share publicly, and make sure that there’s nothing listed that would embarrass yourself or degrade your reputation (or your business’ reputation). Avoid publishing crazy or bizarre images, obscene jokes, excessive personal information, etc. Use your best judgment when building profiles on social networking sites. Once you have your profile online, feel free to seek out friends and family to add them as friends - as a personal tip, this will help you stay in contact with many people easily via message and announcement features, reducing the time it takes to communicate with people and allowing you to send out any message you’d like quickly and effortlessly.

Now that you have your social networks setup, it’s time to set yourself up with professional networks. The best place on the web for professional networking is LinkedIn. Their site is very well designed to appear mature and businesslike. The major functions of the site work very well for people connecting with their professional networks, and the site has a very good reputation among professionals (who generally find MySpace and communities like it a bit juvenile for their tastes). Here, you can connect with all of your professional friends and family, and it is highly recommended that you use this site to connect to your clients, vendors, and major customers as well. You cannot go wrong with offering a connection, and you can benefit tremendously from using LinkedIn to keep track of people, their skills, their professional experience, and their business preferences.

Once you have your account on LinkedIn established, you can use the web to find the professional groups and community websites for your working industry, and you can see what they have to offer for online membership and networking, as well as offline membership and events. Example: for media workers, Mediabistro.com is an extremely valuable resource for news, job listings, community forums, and their AvantGuild subscription network.

Now that you know where you can find everyone online, remember to tell people about your social networking profiles, along with your website and marketing materials. Keep your communications brief, to-the-point, and as infrequent as possible. Use your social and professional networks as a megaphone for your company’s message, and watch your business soar!

By now, we’ve all heard the word “Google” used both as a noun and a verb, immediately bringing to mind the huge and incredibly effective search company online. Yes, Google is somewhat of a holy oracle when it comes to finding information, not just because it is the most inclusive search engine (it is, but there are others that tend to find different things on the web) or because it offers the most cool applications of any site on the web (it does, although many of those applications are either not ready for prime time, and some are a major distraction for someone looking to run a small business), but because of the power of its queries. And it’s likely that you don’t know much of what you can do from a Google Search query input box.

I have just the page to get your started: Google Help : Basics of Search. Once you’ve mastered the search basics, you can also look into Advanced Search. Then save the Google Cheatsheet to use as a handy reference. (Did you see how you can use Google as a calculator? That’s quite handy!) Things that you can look up directly in Google that could provide handy information: zip codes, area codes, phone numbers, package tracking numbers, street addresses, words for definitions, product make and model numbers, domain names (for when you want to see which sites link to a particular site), stock ticker abbreviations, and much more.

You can become even handier at finding information through Google by knowing which sites have information about certain topics, and including them in the search. While it’s true that you can restrict a search to a given site by typing site:www.website.com (with the correct website info plugged in), it’s quick shorthand to just type the title of a directory site (or the domain name) or useful service as the first word in a query. Examples: for the weather in Bryant Park, type weather 10036 or weather Bryant Park. Get a recipe for BBQ pork by querying recipe BBQ pork. Use Wikipedia for encyclopedic information (and sidestep their own website search, which is slower than Google) where it’s useful, like looking up biography information about the author Michael Crichton - that would be a query for wikipedia michael crichton. (note that capitalization/case is irrelevant for simple searches) If you’re looking up information about a movie (like, say, The Godfather) and want to use the Internet Movie Database to find it, query for imdb The Godfather. This is especially useful for getting the correct link first because The Godfather is also a book, a video game, a movie entry on Wikipedia, and an item for sale on Amazon.com. Looking for a profile of a baseball player? Query espn Albert Pujols. Looking for a review for a digital camera? Query cnet Canon SD700. You can try that with virtually any online resource and get relevant results quickly.

One more thing you should know about Google: there are quite a few applications that Google (the company) has released for end users, and they include Google (the search engine) inside the product. Although not all the same query fields are available across each application (some support more queries than Google Search, and some leave out certain Google Search capabilities), it may be worth looking into adding or replacing certain tools on your computer with Google products. Gmail, in particular, has very powerful search and filtering capabilities based on queries and tagging. Google Desktop Search is another amazing application, as it has the capability to index everything on your computer and make it all available for search through your own web browser! Google Desktop Search also offers the capability to store your local search index in your Google Account online, viewable only by yourself, for use anywhere in the world, but you can disable this function if you don’t want Google to have your local data in any form. Also, Google Desktop Search never publishes your local search index on the web for other people to see; your computer is the only one who has access to the data.

Finally, although this post has so far been The Google Show, it’s a good idea to remember that there are other search engines out there. While no resource could provide a complete list, you can start with the most frequently used search engines other than Google - Yahoo!, MSN Search (now called Windows Live Search), Dogpile, and Ask.com. Those sites also have a rich set of query command options, and it is possible to find web pages indexed by those sites that may have been skipped by Google. The most complete search effort involves using as many search engines as possible to look up the data you seek, so always remember to look in more than one place - even if that one place is an incredible place to look for things.