My website is launched, now what?
Creating your first website is a major step. But once it is launched: now what? A website needs to be driven. As a small business owner your time is limited and driving a website CAN consume a lot of time.

Brenda now offers Webmaster Services. A comprehensive program bundling multiple organic services at a monthly rate to boost your search engine rankings, tackle reputation management and more.

The internet changes so frequently. What worked five years ago no longer will net the same results. This can easily frustrates website owners. My blog is devoted to these continuing changes.

Here are more ways to drive your website you can take charge of.

Why Facebook?

Specifically it is not “just Facebook” it is all social networking which helps drive your site. But if your business doesn't not exist solely online you have more leeway in choosing to join the social network world "today", but it needs to be included in your business plan.

Somewhere you have to decide how much time you have to devote to this. Facebook makes it easy—it isn’t going away with over 1 billion users—some are likely existing clients. Add a Google+ button to your website and let it do the work. LinkedIn in a professional network, join and connect as you have time. Find the social networks which can be eased into your business day. Use Pinterest if you have products, artwork, photography for advertising.

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Add a video.

Everyone is looking to add video to their website. YouTube is a free hosting network and adding video to your website definitely gives you another element to be indexed with Google.

While camcorders are fairly priced you need considerable time to edit and polish your video. The prep to write the script can be daunting or you chance losing your message and your viewer. It is not an easy task to turn out a professional solid video.

For a full service videographer visit our partner Douglas Simon Photography.

A slide show can a simpler solution and less costly. If you are considering using a video in your online advertising it might be the answer. Brenda creates professional slide shows. Here is an example of a simple video message:

For another idea: View RylexOnline's Google Maps video.
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Add a blog.

Blogging is a great way to drive your website because it provides new content to your website, which is something Google looks for.

There are free/offsite blogs, but give thought to this before creating a free blog. While you can put links to your website, a blog RESIDING on your website has more weight in organic (Google) searches.

Free is easy to get up and running, but won’t give you the greatest value. There is a leaning curve and it is best too optimize any graphics and photos you use. You can post links back to your site for some help in driving your website. Keep in mind it isn’t easy to move your blog files at a later date, and with some services you won’t be able to do this.

Time is the factor to weigh before taking up blogging. It can take 15—30 minutes easily, depending upon the depth of your articles. You cannot copy and from other sources just to fill your blog. Google recognizes duplicate content and penalizes it.

You want your blog to educate your web visitors, and connect with others in your business category community. You also want to contribute to other blogs with a link back to your site, but again, this needs to be authentic, thus the time factor becomes substantial.

My own blog's purpose is to easily pass onto my clients changes in the Internet community and operations for their business websites. Trends come and go and it is information I want to get into my clients hands so they can drive their websites. You can keep it simple and effective!

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Email Marketing

Email marketing isn’t going away. Our inboxes are full of them and for good reason: they work.

There ARE laws governing email. Each marketing email must include how to unsubscribe instructions. Acceptable is: “reply to this email with unsubscribe in the subject line”. When you receive these requests you must remove from your mailing list. Being tagged as "spam" will risk your emails reaching your potential clients and getting blacklisted is a headache you want to avoid.

Those slick, pretty emails emails (HTML) from amazon.com can be created with the help of your web designer. The files you see are actually hosted on your server. The email is small so it quickly drops in your Inbox, then grabs the files to display. Quick and custom layouts.

You need to be aware that while you can design your email you can’t guarantee how it will be viewed. Each recipient chooses how they receive and display their email—often blocking all images. Outlook then asks, "Do you want to download blocked images?" While amazon.com sends lovely layout – those who choose NOT to download images receive a clunky email with blank boxes for pictures. Your web designer inserts text.

Another option: You can create your email design in Publisher and save to send as email. Using Publisher means you must optimize the photos (= you need to know how to use a photo graphic program). If your email is laden with un-optimized and large photos the file size will be too large to send as an email and annoys people to the point of blocking, or flagging as spam. One client sends me the images for the newsletter email and I optimize. The finished file is larger than an HTML hosted email would be, but small enough to be acceptable to send as email. This is a way to begin - and budget minded. Also note – the above user email rules apply – and your design may not show up as you intended. It can be frustrating, but if you keep it simple – it is do-able. Test, test, test is the key.

If you choose to send email from your domain email – check with your web hosting regarding email lists. If you have less than 300 emails on your list you are probably within their limits. But most web host companies limit how many emails you can send within a day – if their maximum is 300 – you won’t be able to send any other business emails in that day.

There are a couple of good reasons for this limitation.
1.When so much email is being sent through a server (where your web site resides) it is uses up resources better left to keeping your website downloading fast.
2. Next is the spamming factor. If web hosting doesn’t limit the email activity spammers run rampant. Most websites are hosted on shared servers. Once spammers get ahold of a server they will drag down all the sites on that server. When the spamming activity is tagged by Yahoo, Google – webmail – it will begin to blacklist that IP address (your web host server) as spam – which now compromises all the sites. Be thankful to your web hosting for being watchful!

So what to do with a large email list? Use fee based email marketing company. These typically have templates to choose from and create your layout. You will upload your email list. Their software helps combat being sent to the spam bin (though nothing is foolproof) and helps manage the opts out.
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How to Drive Your Website:

Custom web designer serving Chino, Rancho Cucamonga, Orange County to Upland, and beyond in Southern California.