• Just being part of the OnlyBuisness.com community and marketplace means that you are already doing significant web marketing and promotion to thousands of new businesses and potential customers This, in itself, will drive great amounts of new potential customers, who are interested in your product/service type, to your site.
• However, there are a number of additional Web marketing tools that you may consider, in order to promote your website, and keep your brand, products and services ‘top-of-mind’ for your prospective and current customers, and to gain more potential customers and markets. Here are a few examples listed below:

  1. Newsletters – A newsletter is an information sheet sent out by a business or organization, that keeps its interested markets in constant contact with them. It is often styled in the format of a small newspaper or mini-magazine. Newsletters generally contain information that is of interest primarily to a special group or to the company’s market that have requested to be sent a newsletter. ALWAYS get permission from people/businesses before sending them your newsletter. To not do so is rude and often illegal. A top tier company that can help in sending newsletters is Constant Contact

  2. Banner Advertising - A web banner ad is a form of internet or online advertising that entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by allowing them to link through to the web site of the advertiser. The advertisement is typically constructed from an image (GIF, JPEG, PNG), or a multimedia object. A top tier company that can help in setting up and managing banner ad campaigns is Double Click

  3. Email marketing - A top tier company that can help in setting up and managing email marketing campaigns is Constant Contact.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the process of stimulating the numbers of visitors to your Web site by achieving high ‘page rankings’ in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user OnlyBuisness.com provides some in-built tools for members to improve their SEO positions: i.e.

• When building your website, the OnlyBusiness.com system allows you to enter specific keywords and page titles for your website and pages, all of which is opened up to the search engines for indexing.
• With the sheer volume of our member network, and the natural links that this will create to your website, this will drive your site position up in the major search engines.
• Also, any time that a site visitor comes to the OnlyBusiness.com network and community, they will effectively be able to access your products and services as well as your website, though our consolidated catalog presented on the site.
• OnlyBusiness.com promotes all of its members at various times, listing all auctions and websites on the OnlyBusiness.com home page for a period and then having all of these accessible from the home page.
• Note that any marketing coverage or media exposure that any member and/or OnlyBusiness.com gets, will necessarily drive more traffic into the OnlyBusiness.com network and community, where your website and your products/services are listed.

However, there are other ways you can stimulate your site.

1. Embark on a ‘Pay-Per-Click’ campaign for your OnlyBusiness.com website - Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites, especially search engines. Pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost per click or CPC . One link to a PPC application where you can advertise your site is at Google Adwords

2. Consider using Affiliate Programs: An affiliate program is a form of web advertising that remunerates the affiliates for driving traffic to your site. An affiliate program uses a marketing concept where intermediaries and/or consumers attract additional consumers to your site. A top tier affiliate program company is Commission Junction

Listed below are some useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:

• Easy-to-Use Navigation: OnlyBusiness.com provides a base structure for a very easy navigation path through your website. However, as you can add further links and site pages, the navigation of links on your site will play a big role in determining how long your site visitors and prospective customers stay on and explore your site. Be clear on what you want your visitors to ultimately do – How are they going to become your customers? Just putting products on the home page does not build any credibility with a site prospect, so keep in mind that they need both easy access to your products and services as well as being able to read content about the company, know about its management and history and what its mission is, and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
• Clean and Elegant Layout Design: A crisp, clean and professional layout that has your company’s brand/logo easily discernible, the information neatly and carefully laid out, and that uses a lot of white space, enhances a site's looks. Consider what it feels like to walk into a department store, with the products easy to get to, well-organized and with the environment looking clean, professional and almost waiting for you to arrive in order to service you. Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, your website IS your commercial environment. Make it a pleasant place for your customers to stay and do business with you. Focus on your content (keep it short, sharp and powerful), use images to communicate ideas, don’t put too much content or imagery into each page so that you site looks ‘cluttered’. OnlyBusiness.com have provided some pre-designed templates (with imagery and ‘guide’ content already in place) of varying ‘looks’ to suit a variety of industry-types, or members have the option of selecting a ‘default template’ without any pre-designed imagery or headers in order to build up your website with a greater degree of design flexibility.
• Optimum Load Time: Make sure that your imagery used on the site is of a small memory size (e.g. 20kb-80kb) to help ensure that the ‘load time’ for each page on your site is low. If prospective customers are forced to sit for 10 seconds to see your website or pages, they will simply go to another more efficient potential vendors website.
• Design for all Types of Users: A site that is easy-to-use by as many different types of users as possible always encourages greater site usage and transactions. Large chunks of content that require long scrolls of a page typically is found to be disinteresting by site users and is typically not read. Make sure that your font size is not too small (for people to strain to read) and that it is not too large (which makes your site look unprofessional and poorly made). A good idea is to look at other sites of top companies and see how they design and develop their websites.
• Ensure that Your Website is Updated and Relevant: Make sure that your website content and product information is kept fresh, relevant and up-to-date. If you have a ‘News’ section, makes sure it is updated on an ongoing basis to keep your customers and visitors well-informed and confident that you consider your website as a serious part of your business. If you approach your website seriously, so will your market. Make sure you also include relevant and useful content on your website that helps customers do business with you. If you have showrooms, retail stores, offices or practices, a map of where they are located may help people if they wish to come to your showroom.

1. What is the purpose of your website?

• When building your OnlyBusiness.com website, you should have a clear idea of the purpose of your website. i.e. what you want to achieve with your OnlyBusiness.com website.
• Typically, there are four main types of websites. As an OnlyBusiness.com member, you can have your website fulfill the requirements of any one, or all, of these, if you would like:

  a. The Brochure Site

  b. The Lead Generator Site

  c. The Online Store

  d. The Turn-Key E-Business Solution

  a. The Brochure Site
  The brochure site is an online extension to all of your offline marketing and promotions. It is typically included and referred to in all of your company material and collateral items. It is also mentioned in any listing you would do for your company (e.g. in a Yellow Pages ad that you run, on your business cards, on any signage that you have on your store or your vehicle(s) and in your brochures or newsletter / mail-outs / letterheads, etc).
  
  The idea is that a user should be able to come to your online presence and see what the company is about, who owns and/or runs it, the products and services it offers, its history, etc. In today’s business environment, a quality website is necessary simply to give a business any kind of market credibility, and certainly more credibility that a business without a website (getting fewer every day) will not have.
  
  To not have a website, or to have a poorly made or poorly functioning website says as much about your company as having a dirty, stuffy office for potential customers to come visit you in. However, an online ‘brochure site’ does not, in and of itself, generate sales or customer leads/opportunities. It is perfectly acceptable to only have a brochure site for your business and for your marketing plan, if this is all you want to utilize and leverage the power of the web for.
  
  This full Brochure Site functionality is provided to all OnlyBusiness.com members websites completely FREE-OF-CHARGE.
  

  b. The Lead Generator Site
  The Lead Generator site is much like a brochure site, except that it is linked to a number of other sites and initiatives in order to drive traffic back to your site and potentially generate business. The purpose of implementing these ‘lead generation’ initiatives is to have as many people, and prospective customers for your types of products and services, to find your site while browsing on the internet.
  
  The idea is that the ‘lead generation’ initiatives will get these additional markets of users to visit and view your site and, based on the content and details that you included in the site, they will feel compelled to contact you (by either phone, fax or email). After that contact is made, hopefully you/your sales person has a better opportunity of making a sale to this ‘warm lead’.
  
  This Lead Generation functionality is provided to all OnlyBusiness.com members websites completely FREE-OF-CHARGE.
  
  
  c. The Online Store
  In order to build direct sales and revenues for your business through your website, you would need to have a section of your website dedicated to presenting your site visitors with a catalog of your products and services, and details about these products and services (e.g. price, description, images, etc).
  
  Visitors to your site would actually go through an ‘online storefront’ where they would be able to actually purchase products and services. They would add items to an online ‘shopping cart’ and when they have finished choosing the items they wish to purchase, they would proceed to the ‘checkout’, where they would enter in their credit card details and enter in their ‘Bill To’ and Ship To’ details. This would link to the banking environment through a ‘Payment Gateway’ in order to process the buyer’s credit card.
  
  This Online Store functionality is provided to all OnlyBusiness.com members websites completely FREE-OF-CHARGE.
  
  
  d. The Turn-Key E-Business Solution

  The Turn-Key E-Business Solution website provides all of the features and functions that your business needs, in a single, integrated system. Through a single administrative area, a site owner should be able to view, control and manage all of the various components in his/her web business environment (e.g. site content, orders, products, imagery, auctions, tradeleads, internal and external networks, messages etc). An e-Business solution is called ‘turn-key’ when it is a single seamless system where everything is needed to perform the required task.

  
  This turn-key web solution is provided to all OnlyBusiness.com members with their websites, web tools, community and marketplace, and their control panel area, completely FREE-OF-CHARGE. This turn-key solution will be extended in future phases of development, with each tool and application evolving into increasingly powerful and sophisticated tools, applications and services for use by OnlyBusiness.com members.

2. Immediate response and follow-up.

The immediacy of the web makes people expect quick responses to all queries. If they can't find the answer to their specific question at your website, or if they want to ask you some product or service-related questions, you must be prepared to respond to all e-mail queries within 24 hours or less. In the age of computers and the internet, communication is king.

OnlyBusiness.com provides its members with full communication capabilities to respond to queries and questions as built-in to their back-end administration area completely FREE-OF-CHARGE.

3. Networking

The internet gives businesses the awesome opportunity to collaborate with each other in a way that has never been done before. Most effective businesses work with other online companies that can offer complimentary services or products. This is common practice on the web. Link with other companies and network with them, in order to build your private business community of all the companies you know and trust.

OnlyBusiness.com provides its members with full networking and community group-building and communication capabilities as built-in to their back-end administration area completely FREE-OF-CHARGE.

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