If your company needs to host a website you should make sure that you don't under-invest. The old addage "you get what you pay for" applies here. Match your needs with the different capabilities of web hosting firms prior to signing on the dotted line. For example:
- How much disk space do you need to operate the website?
- How much control do you want over the website?
- Will you be selling stuff on this website? If so, you'll need a shopping cart or some sort of program to allow you to collect payment (i.e., PayPal)
- What kind of service response are you looking for?
- Know the reputation of the network you are considering
A quick reference to find out about who owns a domain is http://www.whoisdomaintools.com/. There are others as well and my favorite (due to their owner and image) is http://www.godaddy.com/ if you are looking to pay somebody right up front without looking around at all.
If your company is looking in to CRM suppliers and running email marketing campaigns, I definitely would suggest taking the time to talk with a professional first but if you aren't that type and need to get up and going right away, I'm a big fan of http://www.constantcontact.com/. I was put in a situation at a research firm where we cut costs and canned our "professional" and I had to sit down and figure out how to get a monthly email campaign to all of our bigger clientele. From the beginning, I knew nothing but Constant Contact had me up and running campaigns with pictures and anayltics (like: who opened my emails, who asked to be removed, etc....)
On a side note, if you ever need to run an online survey for your company and are in the same (above) situation where you are super-underqualified to pull that off. Don't fret and go run and tell anybody until after you've checked out http://www.surveymonkey.com/. Seriously, same results as Constant Contact. Both websites can make you turn out product that looks like you've been doing it for years and are a downright professional. I actually got asked to do some email "consulting" work after a few businesses received my monthly emails.
To really stay on top of your game, the guys at Congruent Media suggested a few websites (the first three) and I've added a few of my own. These websites will keep you in the midst of industry knowledge and show you how a few of the professionals are pulling off great campaigns:
- http://www.clickz.com/
- http://www.dmnews.com/
- http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ (this is one of my favorite's and they'll send out white pages every so often as well.)
- http://www.marketingpower.com/ (this is the American Marketing Association's website)
- http://www.brandweek.com/
- http://www.fastcompany.com/
If you are going to be the person whose responsibility it is to do your "search engine marketing" again, I say, consult a pro for this one. I talk to people who swear they know what their doing on this one and still have no idea how to get their company listed anywhere closer than page 9 when the keyword being searched for is their company name. Again, here's a couple to reference:
Now, let's say you have a small business and you sell a niche item. For example, I have a product that is a boat docking device called the "Buddy on the Docks" or the Buddocks. We have a small website that attracts minimal traffic (http://www.buddocks.com/) and we're looking to try to pull some traffic by using "click through" advertising. In the lunchtime session, they discussed four of the Top Pay-Per-Click Networks, which were:
- http://www.adwords.google.com/
- http://www.searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
- http://www.adcenter.microsoft.com/
- http://www.ask.com/
I'm partial to Google so I used Adwords. Right before Christmas I put the Buddocks up on Adwords and did the whole thing by myself on my lunch break at work. You can set it to pace out your budget (since we know on the internet if you use the wrong keywords and don't have a spacial setting, you can go through your money with little to no results very quickly.)
I took my time and set up a few keywords for the niche industry and picked what parts of the United States I wanted the listings to target (I looked at the top 5 states that had the most lakefront property since the device is for 28-foot boats or smaller.) Finally, over a few weekends I played with the header. I found this to be important. Since Adwords keeps a nice dashboard of your results, mark the dates you change your header around until you get your higher percentage numbers.
If you have a bigger budget and want to find out how to get your banner on hundreds of websites. There's a company that can maximize your budget and get you better results and (another homer promo) the company is Baltimore-based. It's http://www.advertising.com/.
And, to make sure I go full-circle, web analytics is of uber-importance if you actually want to measure any results. I stand by (and apparently so do the professionals at Congruent Media) Google Anayltics (www.google.com/analytics).
In the meantime my newfound fascination with Avinash Kaushik's blog (http://www.kaushik.net/) Occam's Razor will now rank up there with my most-visited website's along with Mike Doughty's blog, http://www.thephatphree.com/, http://www.sportsbook.com/ (gambling is an addiction), and http://www.perezhilton.com/. Of course, not one of those were actually pertinent to business and/or advertising.
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