We're often competing with other website designers and website hosting systems for business. It's a tough market out there!

Customers and prospects are presented with many excellent options, making the decision even more difficult. The questions we are asked most often...

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Creating an online presence with useful content is key to a successful presence on the Internet. The following summarizes an article about how to improve your company's overall Internet marketing strategy (The Costco Connection, May 2012, page 22-23). 

1. Offer information to consumers

Many people prefer to search online to learn more about a product or service seen in ads elsewhere. Your company's website should focus on helping visitors make smart buying decisions, educating consumers even before they call you or speak to a salesperson.

2. Make it easy to find

Use good keywords in your website's home page, title tag, and page content so that search engines will find your website. Be sure to interview your current customers to find out what keywords they would use to find your company. And, if you provide local services, be sure to include keywords that mention your geographic zone, such as "website design in Tigard and Portland, Oregon."

3. Focus on content

Good content is essential to Internet success! In addition to providing frequently-updated, fresh content on your website, you should seek quality links from other relevant websites as well as blogs of your own, links from other related blogs, and educational online videos that you create to help customers get the most from your products and services. 

4. Incorporate social media

Combining a quality website with a YouTube channel, Facebook fan page, online press releases, blog entries, Twitter, and other social media will round out your Internet marketing strategy and tie everything together to increase awareness of your company among consumers.

Other resources

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free tool for researching keywords and phrases tailored to your website)
• Wordtracker (free trial of subscription-based tools for finding good keywords and phrases and identifying websites that would be good candidates for a linking campaign)
• Ezine articles (free tool for posting informational articles that are offered free to websites and email newsletter publishers)
• SES (conferences about Internet marketing and search engine strategies)

Blogger platforms

• Blogger.com
• WordPress
• Technorati
• Cool Tools blogs (like this one)

» Read entire article in The Costco Connection 

System Update: 4.18b - [5/18/2011]
System Update 4.18 is available to all Precision Computing Arts/Fastwebdev web hosting clients, and it's chock full of useful and fun features, which are summarized below. If you have any questions or would like us to help you implement these features, please don't hesitate to contact us!

Animated image transition effects
Go to the design area to set up animated transition effects for your image galleries, rotators, rotating banners and content slider components.

Austrailian e-commerce updates
This feature displays the shopping cart prices/total including tax. To enable the feature, go to the "customize fields/international" settings page and check the "Use Australian VAT tax display" box.

Product ID on product catalog page
Go to the general settings page to enable the product ID display. When this option is enabled, the product ID will be displayed to the right of the product name on your product display page. There are 2 settings, one for the product category and another to display the product ID on the detail pages.

Social networking link
When the Facebook link is enabled, the Facebook like button is now displayed along with your social networking links. To configure social networking links, view your website, click the settings button and then click the social networking link on the left side of the page.

The Huffington Post recently reprinted a blog article by Anne Hill titled "5 Great New Social Media Strategies." Read the complete article. I've summarized this article for you below*.

Most companies today understand they need great SEO for their websites, and they need to actively participate in social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. However, there are some new FREE options for you to consider in your quest for successful Internet marketing. These include:

1. Set up a Yelp Business Profile. This is especially useful for storefronts, but can be used for non-storefronts as well. Yelp provides a mobile app for finding products and services while you're on the road, and Yelp has an extensive set of features that allow people to review businesses and post events. Visit yelp.com to get started.
2. Get listed in Google Places. It turns out that being listed in Google Places will improve the Google search results for your business. If that's not an incentive, we don't know what is! Visit Google Places to get started.
3. Increase your visibility as an expert on Quora. Quora bills itself as "A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it." Quora is a place to learn and to have others learn from you. Visit Quora to get started.
4. Use video to get your message across. There's nothing like a video to showcase your products, services, and to give your business personality and pizazz. A small video camera or smart phone will get you started for little money. Post to YouTube and other social networking sites.
5. Use Meetup to create or join a group for local events. This tool is perfect for businesses that regularly hold informational meetings. Visit Meetup to get started.

* Special thanks to Kevin McGinn of Kevin McGinn Stables for bringing this article to our attention!