Promoting Your Site will require as much attention as the design of the site itself. If the site is advertising / selling your products it should be treated as a shop in its own right - with all the advantages of no overheads, open 24 hours a day, and accessible to a world wide market. It would seem foolish to open a shop in the middle of nowhere, and never inform anyone of its existence! The business potential of having a website is huge, and not to be wasted! Every company is unique and we appreciate that you will have a far greater knowledge of your business and your customers than ourselves, therefore with your interaction we can research your target market and propose potential marketing strategies to help you achieve the very best results.

Search Engines
To generate a large amount of traffic to your site it is essential that you are listed on the major search engines. At 21st Century Marketing we have a great deal of experience at designing our pages to be search engine friendly. However becoming listed is a lengthy process and may require several weeks or even months to index your site. How fast your site is listed depends on each individual Search Engines database update schedule. To speed up this process it may be well worthwhile to pay the individual search engines (particularly the most popular) to consider your site for listing much sooner.

Reciprocal Links
In order to generate more traffic to your website we can research your target market and identify appropriate sites to contact to request a link. It is good practise to offer a reciprocal link as this service is usually not charged for. The more sites that link to your site the better, since not only is your visibility increased, but search engines will see your site as being more popular and are likely to list it higher.

Web Rings
A Ring is collection of web sites that have a similar interest linked together in a ring. Links on each web site in the ring allow ring surfers to move from one web site to the next, eventually traversing the entire ring and ending up where they started. There are thousands of rings in existence today covering nearly every topic imaginable. We can research suitable web rings and set up your company on the ring.

News Letters
With this feature, we would add a 'sign-up to newsletter' link on your site. One of the primary objectives of offering free newsletters is to build-up a customer e-mail list. It enables you to justifiably contact them on a regular basis. For example, have you ever employed the services of a company and then required them again six months later, only to find you had lost their contact details. That company has lost a potential sale - don't make the same mistake! Newsletters should keep your customers attention with quality information that establishes your credibility as an industry expert and develops a solid rapport with them.
We can collect the list for you, or you may wish to receive them yourself, and every month or as required a bulk e-mail can be sent out. The e-mail addresses you gather are not (as can be purchased) a list of random addresses, they are a targeted list of your best potential customers and they have given you permission to contact them again. Most importantly, they will welcome your e-mails - and even just seeing your company name appear in their inbox, will keep you fresh in their minds.

Newsletters are a great opportunity to:
· Offer special promotional pricing
· Announce updates on your services / products
· Announce industry news
For example if your company organised world wide escorted tours, you could include a 'destination of the month' or humorous / informative accounts of recent trips.

Guest Books
Allow us to set up a Guest Book on your site and have another excellent method of obtaining e-mail addresses from people who have displayed interest in your company. They can also act as authentic testimonials, which can be read by anyone visiting the site. Once a customer has completed an entry in the guest book, you will receive an automated e-mail to notify you. Then it is a simple case of visiting the guest book site to read and authorise the e-mail and it will appear on your site.

Site Maintenance
Regular site maintenance introducing new products / services are essential in order to keep your customers returning to your site. A special offer is always popular with customers and is a good way to promote new products, or clear stock that is surplus to requirements. It is also common practice to have 'special web prices' to entice customers to buy online. For example if the product being sold was clothes, it may well be necessary to undercut store prices to compensate for the disadvantage of not being able to try the item on prior to purchasing.

Log Statistics
Once a marketing plan has begun to be implemented it is vital to have a way to review the traffic visiting your site. This will provide information on the marketing methods, which are working, and also on those that may be proving unsatisfactory.
Since the days of simple counters, website trackers have become increasingly advanced. The downside of course is that many produce over complicated unnecessary statistics and their results can be misleading. Here at 21st Century Marketing we have become familiar with many, and our current favourite 'Freestats' (unfortunately not as free as its name suggests!) provides easy to read relevant statistics, and concise informative charts that can be accessed from any PC with an Internet connection (although requires a user name an password.) The tracker is invisible on the site itself. It not only advises where traffic is coming from, but also what page of your site customers entered and exited, most popular pages, and various browser information.

New legistration regarding the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations are to be brought into force by 31 October 2003. These new regulations will amongst other things, make it legal requirement for businesses to obtain consumers' consent prior to sending unsolicited direct marketing by email or SMS. They will also require certain information to be provided to consumers in relation to the use of 'cookies'. At 21st Century Marketing we are always on top of the latest news and would be happy to provide further information on this should you require it. .....