Netpreneur

Add a Digg This button to your content

The Digg This button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to submit or digg their content on Digg. Join thousands of sites that have already added Digg This and seen their content exposed to the Digg community.

Use an online form instead of an contact email address

Many websites have contact email addresses. There are a number of reasons why an online contact form will serve you better

Send out a media release about your business

Whilst there are many things that you can do online to attract traffic, it's also important that you employ a number of 'off line' strategies to attract custom.  One way to to this is to produce a newsworthy media release to send to local media (or international media, if your story is good enough). 

Download the Alexa Toolbar and learn about your site ranking

Alexa have built a browser toolbar that provides you with some interesting information about your website and those of your competitors. 

Enter your business in the Telstra Small Business Awards

You will never know unless you give it a go. Dedicated to recognising the achievements of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across the country, the Telstra Business Awards has encouraged thousands of Australian businesses to greater success since its inception in 1992.

Add a signature to the base of all emails

I often receive emails that contain just the sender's first name at the base of the email, and that's it - nothing else.  By doing this, you are losing a valuable opportunity to market your business.

Use a domain-based email address, not an ISP or free email address

This one is a no-brainer, but many small businesses continue to use ISP email addresses or free email accounts, instead of using domain-based email addresses.

Set up a Facebook group for your business

If you have a loyal following of customers, you might consider setting up a Facebook group for your business.  Most people know what Facebook is - it's a social networking website enabling friends to keep in touch. 

Set up a public Google Calendar for your website

Google Calendar is a nifty tool that enables you to publish an online calendar for you and for your site visitors.  You can embed the calendar in your web page and it will always remain up to date.

Add your URL to Google

Google is the big daddy of all the search engines and it is almost imperative that you are listed in Google to be successful.  Well over half of the traffic to my websites originate from Google.

Submit your site to the Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) is one of the most important search directories on the internet.

'Suggest' your site to Yahoo!

Yahoo! is one of the world's biggest search engines and it is important that your site is listed here.

Don't try to deceive the search engines

In the early days it was easy to pull the wool over the eyes of the search engines.  You could stuff your page full of irrelevant keywords and appear at No. 1 without too much trouble - but not any more. 

Keep your page file size as low as possible

Whilst dial-up internet is slowly making way for faster broadband connections, there are still many people out there who continue to use dial-up.  Remember what it was like waiting for a page to load when you were using dial-up? 

Publish static pages, rather than dynamic pages

Dynamic pages with URLs containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) are ignored by many search engines.