New to marketing your business on the internet? Follow these tips and your efforts won’t be lost in cyberspace. 

The internet has emerged as one of the most important and lucrative places to conduct business. In fact, many potential customers will get their first impression of your business from your website. How can you make a stop at your website a positive experience?

• More important than anything else is organization. Don’t make traversing your website like hiking through Yellowstone without a map. Make it easy for the visitor to get the information he or she needs.
• At the beginning, place a clear statement of what your company does in just a few words. This will save everyone’s time. 
• Provide a listing of your products, with visuals. If you can list product prices, do it. If you have a large inventory, list the key products early on. Let the visitor go deeper into your website as he or she becomes more interested. But show your basic products early in the visit. 
• Show your brick-and-mortar locations. Make it clear where you’re located. A map is nice, with phone and fax numbers. 
• If you can sell through your website, all the better; most companies offer this capability today. If you don’t offer this capability, list your toll-free or fax order number or e-mail address. And offer a link to an order form that your customers can download, then print out and fax back you.
• Especially if you’re a small company, use photos of people. Give visitors a sense of your company’s personality by showing your senior people and staff. Make them friendly, not “corporate.”
• Offer a list of clients, completed projects or work samples. This is your chance to trumpet your skills and successes, so make the most of it. If you have some killer case histories or testimonials, don’t hold back. 
• Include e-mail capability. In fact, don’t create a site without e-mail. Otherwise, you’re an online merchant who doesn’t speak to its customers. Don’t forget to keep absolutely current with e-mail. If you neglect to do it promptly, the message you send is clear: “You are not that important to me.”
• Keep the information on your website fresh. You’ve got to change things often just to keep up visitor interest. Many websites carry a small indicator of when they were last revised. 
• If it works for your market, make your site fun to visit. Use clever graphics, and write engaging page headings to entertain readers.

Make sure you register your website’s name and address with the various search engines. Since most website visitors first find a site by searching for a keyword, you want to make sure you register your site under as many applicable keywords as possible.

The best way to accomplish this is to register individually with the search engines of your choice. The most popular ones today are Yahoo!, Google, MSN and AOL. You might also want to try a web tool such as TrafficBoost.com, which submits your website address to more than 500 search engines for a modest fee. Keep in mind that many small businesses today are also doing things like buying words on search engines to make sure their websites are part of the results of a user’s query.

RSS
A new, more intrusive technology is making the web even more useful. Called RSS—“really simple syndication” or “rich site summary,” it enables you to use your web presence as a channel to send information to subscribers or staffers at times when their computers aren’t in use. It’s similar to a TV. When your TV is turned on, whatever is on that channel is being pushed onto your screen. With RSS, however, you get to determine what information—or feeds—you’d like to receive from the channels. New material can be broadcast every 30 minutes or so, depending on the feed, the parameters the author has set and whether the computer is on.

Many blogs are able to push data or information from their database into an RSS newsfeed. Most RSS newsfeeds are downloaded into stand-alone newsreaders or through websites that convert single or multiple RSS feeds for viewing on the web.

Businesses can use the RSS/blog combination in many ways. A popular application is project management, in which you and your colleagues can use blogs and RSS to easily track and organize all aspects of a project in one place.

Project members can coordinate schedules, keep up to date while out of the office, track internal deadlines, communicate with contractors and consultants, and share knowledge from workshops. In short, it enables people to share information without having to send thousands of e-mails to everyone.
 
Web Advertising
What’s the best way to advertise your website on the internet today? Hands down, it’s search engine marketing, where you market your website via search engines, whether by improving its rank in listings or purchasing paid listings.

Improving your listing rank involves ensuring that your web pages are optimized to attract as many visitors as possible, such as making sure each of your page titles is designed to match a specific search query. Getting your listings in the top-10 search results can be a full-time job, but it can be rewarding.

Paid listings are also very popular. There are two types of paid listings programs: paid placement or paid-inclusion programs.

Most major search engines carry paid-placement listings, where advertisers are guaranteed a high ranking. These listings are usually separated from editorial results and labeled to show that they are ads.

In paid inclusion, you pay a fee to have your web pages included in a search engine’s editorial listings. However, it doesn’t mean that you will be ranked tops in the editorial results.

Affiliate Marketing Programs
Another form of web marketing that’s popular today is affiliate marketing. Many small companies participate in affiliate marketing programs, where they sell other companies products and services for commissions.

Here’s how affiliate marketing programs work: An affiliate partners with an online merchant. When you join that merchant’s affiliate program, you can put their links on your site. These links come in the form of banners, text, and a number of other, more sophisticated types of links. The HTML code for these links is supplied by the merchants. Then, if a visitor clicks on the links and buys something, you receive a commission. Commissions vary from 2.5 to 15 percent at the low end, and up to 50 percent at the high end.

Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to make your site more valuable to visitors because you are offering goods and services that are likely to interest them. In addition, you can earn extra revenue from your site through partnerships with merchants that compensate you for the traffic, leads and sales you send them.

Excerpted from Entrepreneur magazine’s Start Your Own Business (Entrepreneur Press) by Rieva Lesonsky and the staff of Entrepreneur magazine.