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Email marketing can be a quick and efficient way to promote your business.  The easiest way to collect email addresses for email marketing is to add a mailing list/newsletter sign up form on your website.

Do not buy a list from anyone!  These lists usually contain emails from individuals that do not want to know about your service, and will label your email as spam.  Buying a list could potentially show your business in a negative way, because you are sending out email that is not wanted.

By putting a sign up form on your website, those who are interested in your services and emails will sign up.  These are valuable leads that could result in a sale.  If you talk to your potential or current clients on the phone, you can also ask them if you can sign them up for your mailing list.

If you are starting a mailing list, and already have current clients; simply ask them if they can be added to your mailing list.  That way you can start building your list.

The best way to go about email marketing is to build your list from scratch.  Do not buy a big list thinking it will result in a fast profit, because most likely your business is going to end up looking like spam.  And that is not the email marketing result you want to achieve!

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Flash websites may look visually appealing, however there area number of drawbacks to full flash websites.

Whenever a client comes to me and starts talking about a full flash website, I let them know the drawbacks and suggest maybe adding some splashes of flash here and there.  Maybe a banner, or a flash image, or a flash header, but I strongly suggest for them to stay away from full flash websites.

Ultimately your website design must be user friendly for everyone who may potentially come to your website.  If it is not, you are potentially driving clients and customers away.  You want to make sure everything you do to market your business drive people to you, not away.

A few of the cons are:

Search engines can not read flash: Flash is not search engine optimization friendly.  Flash is not html, therefore search engines can not read your content.  When you have a flash website, your website simply will not rank well in search engines, because the search engine can not read your content.  The only way that flash websites do well in search engines, is if there is two versions of the website.  The first one being flash, and the other being html.  The downside to that is that you have to maintain two websites.

Bandwith and page loading time: If you choose to have a full flash website, you will need to remember that someone who may have a slower connection will have to wait a very long time for your page to load; if at all, depending on the size of your flash website.  A full flash website will also create a big impact on your bandwith as well.  One thing to remember, if someone attempts to load your site, and can not (or if it loads very slowly), most likely the person browsing your site will leave your page.

Requires a plug-in: Flash is a very common plug-in, however not everyone is going to have flash installed on their computer.  If someone coming to your site can not view it, or has to download a plug-in to view you, you can potentially drive that person away from your website.  Not everyone is going to want to download the plug-in, just so they can view your website.  If they do not have flash installed, they just may move on to the next site and leave your website for good.

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As you are building your website, you will probably hear a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  If you are new to putting a website on the internet, you may be wondering why SEO has such an importance in your design and marketing efforts.

SEO is more important to your website marketing efforts then in the past.  A few years ago you could get away with only putting in META tags, and that is how search engines read your website.  However because people started spamming meta tag keywords, search engines started getting smart and started ignoring the keyword area on your META tags.  Many search engines do ignore the keyword area in your META tags.  Therefore you can not solely rely on your META tags to work for you in your favor.

You will have to optimize your site in many other ways, so that search engines will look at your site more, and in a positive way.  It can take a long amount of time to get your site where you want it placed in the search engines, but with a lot of hard work you can get there.

One thing you must be aware of is SEO companies who say they can get you into the number one spot in a very short amount of time.  These SEO companies who make these claims use black hat tactics, which will result in your website being banned by search engines.  Black hat uses non organic tricks, and essentially “spams” the search engines.  You want to make sure that the work you put into your optimization is organic, and you never want to end up with a website that is banned.  If your website does get banned, it is extremely difficult to get it unbanned.  You do not want to put yourself or your business in this position.  It is better to take the time and do it right, then be banned from the search engines.

Some SEO tricks that do not work:

Special search engine pages: Although these pages are not considered “bad”, they are not necessary for organic search engine optimization.  The only time you want to have special landing pages is if you have a marketing campaign going, and you want to direct people to a specific landing page.  But for optimization, these are unnecessary, and do not help your website optimization overall.

Optimizing only one keyword per page: This is another technique that does not help your website overall.  Your entire website should have a few keywords that will be optimized over the entire site.  However there will be a couple pages that have a few other keywords, but you do not want to focus on only one keyword for the page.  When someone searches and comes across your site, you want them to see as many pages as possible show up on the search engines.  The more your website is optimized, the more someone will happen to click on to your website.

Not using tables in HTML: Some ‘solely’ CSS designers will tell you that you can not use tables in HTML.  This isn’t true.  Those designers are trying to get your business to re-create your website.  It is a scam in essence.  The choice between CSS and a table layout is in actuality personal preference.  But one over the other will absolutely not help you in search engine optimization.

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Let’s talk for a minute about simple navigation…

When you are thinking about your website, you will need to start thinking about the look and presentation of your website.  But you must also start thinking about those who will be visiting your website, and you must always remember that some of your current or future clients may not be very web savvy.  Therefore you always must think about easy and simple navigation for your clients and customers, and your website must be easy for them to navigate around.  If it isn’t, there is a good change they will get frustrated and leave your website for good, and not take a second look at it.

Difficult navigation potentially will loose you customers, clients, and traffic!

You may know how to get around your site, and you may know exactly under what category other subcategories sit, however you must put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never seen your website before.  Think about when you go to a site for the first time, and you just may be looking for something in particular.  Have you ever gone to a website where you have to use the search just to find something?  This is exactly what you do not want to have happen.

Whether you are creating the website yourself, or if you sit down with your webmaster, talk about the menu and navigation.  Make solid navigation aside from the usual home and contact us buttons.  For example, if you have a fairly large site with content for about us, bios, and mission, all three of these areas can go under “About”.  You can create these sub-pages a couple of different ways, think about if you would either want a drop down navigation menu, or if you would want the user to click on about, and then have a sub menu on the side.  If you have a very large site with many sub-pages I would suggest that you have the user click on the ‘about’ page, and then they would be able to see the list of sub-pages.  However, if you have a smaller website with not too many sub-pages, I would suggest a drop down.  Do not use a drop down if you have more then 5 or 6 sub pages, if the drop down is too long it may overwhelm the user, and it will not look professional.

Your final navigation should be user friendly, and simple.  Before you site goes live, make sure you do a test run.  Have someone go through your site, someone that has never seen it before, and ask them to search your site for specific items.  If they have trouble finding anything, you need to take a second look at your website navigation.

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