Now that you’ve built a site you have to determine what is its purpose. There are quite a few things your web site can do. It’s up to you to determine the objectives. Here are a few potential objectives your site could have.

•    Increase awareness of you or your company, including who you are or what your specialty is.
•    Increase awareness of one aspect of your company, whether it be a separate brand if your large or a single service you’d like to focus on if you’re a smaller business.
•    Sell stuff. E-commerce is becoming exponentially bigger each year. Puts your goods and services online and sell them 24 hours a day.
•    Provide information. Online information saves administrative time as well as print money. Put your brochures, news releases and other resources online for distribution.
•    Collect market research. You can gather information about your customers or visitors through site statistics or surveys among other tools.
•    Build trust. Consumers like to research companies now. If you have a credible site they’ll likely feel more comfortable purchasing from you, whether it’s online or in a brick and mortar store.

When visitors come to your site they are more likely to stay if you offer them what they want. If they stay then you are likely to meet more of your web site objectives. So, you want to make them stay, obviously. Generally visitors are looking for a few things in a website – entertainment, education, information or a solution to a specific problem. They may be looking for one or all of these things.

To help them find what they want your site should be unique, deliver your company’s message clearly and reinforce your brand’s identity and be easy to navigate. Whatever your objective is you have to remember that your site visitors have their own objectives and you need to balance yours with theirs to be successful.

With the explosion of social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook LinkedIn and YouTube to name a few, many marketers are wondering about the promotional opportunities that they offered. While many of these sites enjoy large amounts of traffic, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll see lots of interest in your site unless you approach advertising on social networks in the right way.

It’s important to remember that social networking sites are powerful word-of-mouth tools. This means you rarely communicate with just target audience, rather you are talking to that audience and their friends, family and co-workers. This is because if your initial contact is appealing then the person that saw your message will forward it to the rest of their network. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

There are a lot of different ways you can advertise on social networks from creating profile pages or buying banner ads to buying advertising directly from the social networking sites. For example, Myspace allows you to fill out an online form that leads to a representative calling you to talk about different advertising options. Facebook has polls and flyers as well as additional options for sale.

While it may seem like, and occasionally be, a good idea to purchase advertising from these social networks keep in mind that the people using the sites are Internet savvy and quite possibly a little jaded or doubtful of any ads they’ll see. That’s why word-of-mouth is so important on social networking sites.

In order to create a reason for social networkers to share your information successfully you’ll need to research what they are sharing already. Then figure out how your site or products can be integrated into that. It may be a good idea to outsource the production of you Internet advertising to young, hip interns that know what entertains people in this sphere.

Another possibility is that Myspace and Facebook are too broad for your angle. Wikipedia offers a pretty comprehensive list of social networking sites here. Whatever your angle remember that intrusive, spammy acts just push people away. Let them know you’re there and do something interesting and the word will spread eventually

Local Search has been getting a lot of attention recently, but not many companies have been paying attention. Here are some reasons that you should.

Nelson/NetRatings MegaPanel hosted a survey where they asked roughly 2,000 random consumers about their online search and shopping. Surprisingly, almost half (49%) performed searches with a geographic modifier. And 86% of the respondents said they had used the Internet to find a local business in the past.

For all the people using the Internet to find a local business, search engines were the number one resource they used. In the survey, people were allowed to pick more than one answer and so the total percentages add up to more than 100, but here is how the usage broke down:

•    Search engines: 74%
•    Print yellow pages: 65%
•    Internet yellow pages: 50%
•    Traditional newspapers: 44%
•    Print white pages: 33%
•    Television: 29%
•    Consumer review websites: 18 %

67% of the respondents said they favor Internet yellow pages to the printed version. Most (84%) preferred the online version because they believed it was faster to find businesses that way. Others (63%) thought the online pages were more current. The one weakness was in thoroughness, 73% of people felt the print book was more comprehensive.

But, just being listed in your local pages isn’t enough. 75% of the people surveyed said they rely on multiple sources for their information. They look for things such as product reviews by other customers or mentions in a blog to secure their trust.

And while many consumers like to search online for a product before purchasing it, they also tend to go to a local bricks and mortar store to actually purchase the item. And 70% of the survey respondents wanted to stay within a 20-minute drive of their homes when going to a business.

So, while many businesses aren’t paying attention to local search modifiers, it’s a good idea to be one of the first. Then, by the time others catch on and join you, you’ll already be a familiar name in the neighborhood.

Most online marketing plans contain Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. With that in mind, you don’t want to just set a budget, pick some keywords and pay your bill each month. It’s important to look at the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

Google Adwords is a great tool that does a lot of the work for you if you’re using their PPC. They go ahead and calculate the conversion rate as well as the cost per conversion for you. That’s all well and good, if you understand the meaning of those two terms. Simply put your profit margin is the price of an item you sell minus the cost to you. A conversion rate is the percentage of people that click on your ads who actually purchase something. The break-even point for your PPC can be determined by multiplying your conversion rate and profit margin.

Ideally you’d like to bid on keywords using this formula to determine a maximum amount of money to spend per click. If you can spend less than the max on each click or have a higher conversion rate then you’ll move into making a profit, which is where we all want to be.

Another way to determine ROI takes months and months of historical data. If you have this information you can look at it to find out how often groups of customers return, if they buy more and what they purchase. This helps you determine the lifetime value of a customer, which can help you determine if you should bid for one-time buyers or lifetime customers.

Increasing your ROI on your PPC bids is important for increasing your profits, but it also helps you bid the highest for your keywords successfully. After all, there are only a few visible PPC spots on search engines and you don’t want to be throwing your money away.

Any type of business should have some sort of online presence. There are a few main types of presences and depending on your business you may need just one or a combination of two or more. Here is a little about each type of web presence.

Static websites are generally what they sound like – pages that don’t do a whole lot. They are similar to on online brochure in that they offer information, but don’t allow for much interactivity. Occasionally there may be an order page or newsletter sign-up or something to that effect on these pages, but static websites aren’t meant to be updated regularly. Static sites are good for people who want to establish a presence, but need to have face-to-face (or ear-to-ear) interaction with a potential customer.

The opposite of that is dynamic websites. Although, these look similar to static pages, they are updated fairly frequently with new products, articles or the like. Generally, these updates are done on a certain schedule – daily, weekly, etc. Business such as online magazines or shopping sites generally use dynamic sites.

A third type of web presence is a blog. Short for weblogs, this has become an increasingly popular for of web presence over recent years. Many service companies keep a blog that updates potential and current customers of what’s happening in their field. These should be updated fairly frequently as well, similar to the news. If people visit your site for your blog, fresh content keeps them coming back more often.

A final web presence is a third-party service. These are things like having an eBay or Amazon store. While you may not have your own site, people can still find you or buy your products on the web.

Many people will use a combination of these four types of web presence. It depends on your business goals to decide which is right for you.