jim.shamlin.com

Marketing on the Internet

There's a lot of hype about the Internet, and nobody really seems to understand the nature of the medium. A Web site advertising doesn't mean a flood of new customers and overnight success. In fact, if not managed carefully, it can do your business more harm than good.

Yellow Pages Plus

I think the author is way off here: she indicates that a local business may not need a Web site at all, and feels that it "closely resembles the yellow pages of the phone book."

However, she is right in stating that a Web site has far more "space" than a yellow pages ad, and can be a good compliment to traditional listings: simply printing the Web site address can enable a customer to obtain a lot of information about your business by going to your site.

What to Put on Your Site

A lot of effort is wasted on drawing a large audience to Web sites: a site that draws a small audience of paying customers is more valuable to a business than one that gets millions of "hits" from people who never purchase a thing from the company,

Other than that, the advice on what to put on a company's Web site is way outdated: it's limited to the content of first-generation brochure sites.

Designing an Internet Site

Another butt-ignorant bit of bad advice is that a person with little skill can knock out their own Web site in a short amount of time.

How to Help People Find You Online

She covers some of the basics of online promotion, in a very rudimentary way: get listed in search engines, solicit links from other sites, help your customers when the want to promote or recommend you on their personal sites, buy advertising as appropriate.


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