Website

If you're paying every month for a website, are you making sure that your getting the most for your money? If you just have a series of static pages sitting in cyperspace for people to read and then move on, you're definitely not making the most of your site.

Here are some things to do. Make sure your website keeps track of how many"hits" you get each day or week. How can you assess the effectiveness methods you're using to draw people to your site if you don't know how many people are actually visiting?

Also, have some things for people to do on the site. If you're selling widgets, you could offer a free leaflet on how to use widgets, for example. You could have a video for them to watch. If you're a singer/songwrite or a voiceover actor, you could have one free audio download.

Have links within your pages to other pages on your site, but be careful of links to other sites. The goal is to keep people on your website and to ultimately have them buy your product or use your service.

Offer to send them a free e-newsletter. When signing them up, ask for a little more information than just their e-mail address, such as where they live, what they do, what their interest are. It's up to you and your needs to determine what to ask. But don't ask so much that they will be intimidated. This will give you valuable information about the people who are interested in your business. There are companies that provide e-newletter services for you, so you don't have to figure out how to program your site to do this. All you have to do is sign up with a service.

You can also sign up with companies that provide standard shopping cart services to websites so you don't have to invent the wheel on this one. Shopping carts don't necessarily keep track of who purchased what, however, so it might pay to have a programmer design your site so that you can know when someone is a repeat customer and what their needs are. You'll see an example of this kind of customization on Amazon.com. 

Provide content that is of value to your visitors. And have sections that are updated at regular intervals, at least monthly. People are not going to keep coming back if they always see the same things. You want to think of your website itself providing a service to your customers.

Blogging is one way to have updated content. Blogs are very popular with internet users. Another popular thing to do is to provide industry-specific news updates. If you provide timely and useful content, people will come to rely on you as a source of useful information.

The more people rely on you for timely information and great products, the more they'll keep coming back. So go ahead and do something today to liven up your website.