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1.    Get listed on Google Local Business Centre. It puts you on Google’s Maps and sometimes even on the 1st page of Google’s search results.

Get Your Local Business Listing at -  http://www.google.com/local/add

2.    Make sure you Submit Your website to these 3 Search Engines:

•    Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
•    DMOZ – http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
•    Yahoo - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

3.    Install Google Analytics on Your website. This will allow you to easily track who is visiting your website, for how long, where they are coming from. An invaluable tool for measuring your website and marketing performance. It’s also Free!

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66983

4.    Setup an Email Signature, providing contact details, your name, business name and web address. And make use of a polite PS – to promote specials, deals, and offers. See - http://email.about.com/od/signatures/Email_Signatures.htm

5.    Track and store the, emails you send to contacts, leads, customers, in an online location, that you can access 24/7.  This is great as it stores your emails in a safe online manner that you can access from any computer, anytime. Basically an online Contact Manager , Address Book, and Customer Relationship Management tool all rolled into one! As they list on their website – you can use Highrise to:

•    Review a colleague’s notes before calling her contact at the printer
•    See all the follow-ups scheduled for this week
•    Set a reminder to write your client a thank-you note next Friday
•    Keep all important emails from a customer together on one page
•    Schedule a follow-up sales call with a lead in 30 days
•    Enter notes from a call with a potential client

Visit – www.HighriseHQ.com and learn more about their free start-up account.

6.    Create yourself a lens on Squidoo. Why? Because Squidoo is free and allows you to quickly and easily create
.
•    A signpost about something that matters to you.
•    A place to recommend your favorite stuff.
•    A popular way to get found more on the web

Google also LOVES content posted on Squidoo, so make sure you include a link to your own website in the Introdution. This will (over time) help improve your website’s page ranking on Google and other search engines. It’ll also give people more ways to find you and your business online (rather than the other way around)

Get Started - http://www.squidoo.com/wizard/step1
Need more help?  http://www.squidoo.com/creating-lenses

7.    Brand your car with your Web Address. Think about how much time you spend in traffic with someone staring at your car’s rear window. Captive marketing at it’s best.  Better still -  include your mobile number and a message for them to call you now to chat! (as long as you have a hands-free kit)

8.    Measure your Marketing, so that  you know what’s working and what isn’t. Keep a log-book/ record of how people found out about your business. You should do this for all telephone enquiries. 

And if you’re really smart – register a number of slightly different versions of your web domain and use these in your different marketing campaigns. (i.e. use a .net for one, .com for another, .info for yet another)

Why? Because you can then set-up redirects for these domains to your normal web address, and count every single visit that gets referred from them (as long as you’ve installed Google Analytics in Step 3)

This allows you to measure radio adverts, print adverts, brochures….  There’s no need to guess anymore whether your marketing is driving leads to your website … or not.

Make sure you do this on your website too (get your web developer to add a small drop-down menu of options as to how people found you) You can create your own form and replace your current email address link on your website.

Visit: http://www.formlogix.com/Form_Maker.aspx

9.    Add a social bookmarking toolbar to your website. This a great way to get other people to spread the word about content on your website.

Visit - http://www.addthis.com/web-button-select.html

10.    Set-up and send-out out an online Customer Survey. It’s a great form of marketing, and allows you to :

• Get Customer Feedback on Your Service and Product (always make sure to ask what is Good, and How You can Improve things too)
• Gain Marketing Testimonials (make sure you ask permission to use them)
• Make contact with previous customers

Think about questions you’d like answers to about your business. Like:

“How did you hear about my business?”
“What are the Things You Enjoyed about Doing Business With Us?”
“What are the things we Could Improve on?”
“Would you recommend us to someone else?”

Then spend some time gathering email addresses from your email client/ inbox, and draft a polite email asking people to visit the survey online. It’s often a good idea to provide a small incentive to customers to complete the survey like a discount off their next purchase etc.  This in-turn will promote business!

You can gather up to 10 responses for free using http://freeonlinesurveys.com

OR for more serious surveys try www.surveygizmo.com

Well that’s it -  10 Smart Things you Can Do Right Now
to Assist Your Website and Business.

I hope you have found them helpful and more importantly … useful.
Feel free to contact me to give your feedback and thoughts.

Mick

www.mickg.co.nz

This may not be a secret for some but I know the ones that don’t know it will find it informative.

Finding a good “active” website directory can be hard to come by considering there are more than 100,000+ on offer with hundreds being created each week.

When I refer to an “active” directory I mean a directory which is checked frequently by its owner to see if new sites have been submitted and either approve or refuse them ect. The only stats we have access to are stats we find by doing research on that particular site, for example some of the stats available to you are:

Pagerank <- You can check to see if a site is favored by google.
Traffic <- You can get a good idea of traffic from alexa.
Indexed <- You can check to see if google indexes its category pages.

The stats that we really want to know about are how many sites are submitted each week to that directory so we can see how popular it is. It would also be a good idea to know how many sites are approved each week and this will tell you two things, there acceptance rate and how frequent they check there site. With this information you can promote your websites more effectively and get faster results. As I run a directory submission website where we offer the highest quality directory submissions with that information we could offer our clients even better submissions and results.

This isn’t a sales pitch so I’ll stop talking about what we offer and get to the main point of this post, but I do need to use one more example so forgive me in advance. To keep our services at the highest quality level possible we have created and promoted a small network of our own directories and several of the directories are powered by a script called “indexscript”, we used this script for several reasons. The script has a decent admin panel which shows you stats about your website, like how many sites were submitted within the last 7 days, how many sites were approved ect. I noticed recently that the stats.php page isn’t protected and can be accessed by going to the stats link directly, so I went to google and carried out a quick search for “allintext:powered by indexscript” which brought back a load of directories powered by indexscript, I then added stats.php to the end of there homepage url and it displayed there site stats.

So for example I came across a site powered by indexscript and just simply added stats.php to the end i.e domain.com/stats.php and it displayed there stats, I searched google and no one had written a post about it so I thought I would share the information so you can compile your own list of active directories.

The main reason why I use directories to promote sites is due to the fact that it helps the serp’s greatly, but remember if you promote your website do it over a variety of sites don’t just use directories ect.

Find hidden stats on sites powered by indexscript

Previously the difference between Linux and Windows hosting made a huge difference. Picking which operating system to host your website made a huge difference in what you could do with the server and what you could accomplish with the website. However, in today’s context of cross-system web hosting, there is little that practically separates these two operating systems: Linux and Windows.

The first unique difference is how you access the server. Generally, both offer FTP access to your files, however, Linux is the only one that offers telnet or ssh access. This is probably due to the target audience that each operating system targets. While windows is targeted to the mass public, linux is probably more focused in that it provides many more features that would only be demanded by programmers and people familiar with computing and programming. In any case, while this may seem like a fundamental difference, there really is very little to separate FTP from telnet or ssh in the practical sense. While FTP allows you to download the file to work locally, telnet and ssh allows you to modify the root file on the web server by using unix commands.

The second difference between linux and windows hosting is that windows and linux support different languages. Linux tends to be associated with PHP, Perl and CGI while Windows is usually associated with ColdFusion and ASP. The database languages are also usually different, with Windows favoring Access while Linux users use MySQL. Windows also writes its pages in .htm format while Linux writes its web pages in .html. Ultimately these differences are minor, but can make significant difference if you are not prepared for it. Trying to modify Access files while you are using a computer that only has Linux can often be a surprising exercise in futility for the beginning programmer.

In terms of security, people tend to argue against Windows, citing a whole host of vulnerabilities. This is correct in a sense; while Linux tends to have the same amount of vulnerabilities, it is patched and updated faster due to its open source and free nature. This is in stark contrast to Windows vulnerabilities which are usually patched every time a new service pack is released. However, security also depends largely on your network administrator. With good administrators, your website is safe regardless of OS.

Ultimately, the choice is yours to make, whether you prefer windows or Linux. It is better to pick a web host based on its features and service rather than on what operating system it is running on its web servers. As the difference between the two is very little. However, if your website particularly requires a certain language due to the programmers you work with or any other language, it would be prudent to check for system compatibility before subscribing to a web host. If you do not require such specific details, you should simply sit back and let the web host handle these complicated technical details and focus on your website itself. After all, the content is way more important than the programming language or the OS of the web servers.