Growing Your Online Presence

How to go from a basic website to something much more powerful and feature-rich on a budget.

It’s common for killer features to be left off of a website because of budget constraints. Here are some guidelines to what tend to be good investments of resources for a given budget or site. These should give you a good idea of how to grow in a cost-effective way.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service, powerful, and easy / cheap to integrate into your site. Similar javascript-based Analytics packages can provide a second opinion, but we’ve found that Google Analytics is the most reliable.

Other stats programs like AWStats run directly on the Hosting server, and can provide more details in certain areas (bandwidth used on images, etc.). The software is often free, but more complex to set up and use than the javascript tools. On Hosting environments like our own, providing AWStats for an additional site is usually fairly easy, since we already have it set up on some others.

Adding more content or more varied content

Regularly adding quality content to your site will help you immensely with SEO and increase the overall quality of your site. For more details about how, see the Blogging Article.

Workflow Improvements

Sometimes it’s possible to make content adding more efficient or effective with some Programming changes, such as well-structured content types. Adding new content types makes sense if some content is not well supported by existing content types and there’s a lot of that content.

Other aspects of the content creation process can be automated as well, like converting a spreadsheet into a web format or automatically pinging Google News when you add a new Blog entry. These approaches tend to be appropriate for moderate to very large sites.

Social Media

Utilizing “Social Media” services like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Twitter can get your business extra exposure in certain demographics. You will basically trade sweat equity for marketing, since the services are generally free but there is overhead in keeping them all active and relevant.

However, your main site should still be the primary source of information for your customers. You have much more control over it, and you will not be able to fit enough content inside of a Social Media site to supplant it.

Integrating the Social Media sites directly into a site is possible, but varies in difficulty based on the service. Flickr can be quite challenging to use effectively, but YouTube is quite easy to add to a page.

E-Commerce

E-Com is a big ticket item that can give you a huge return when it’s appropriate, but expect to spend a lot to get it set up and maintaining it. Overall, it makes sense for high-volume retailers or extremely specialized / custom shops, but the actual implementation will depend on sales volume expected.

A simple E-com solution may make sense for public service sites or personal blogs. Basic merchandising or donation can be done through a number of 3rd-party systems, but a fully custom system is most often cost-prohibitive.

Benefits:

  • Additional source of revenue.
  • Provides direct access to your Products or services outside of your storefront coverage areas.
  • Once it is operational, it scales well.

Costs:

  • Special software for product organization, cart display, etc.
  • Internationalization is a complicated process, even for English-speaking countries (addresses and validation in particular).
  • Complicated rules involving shipping and taxes need to be customized for your business.
  • Requires a secure site, which is an additional cost for the SSL certificate, etc.
  • Any time that money is involved, you have to make sure that your entire site is held to a high standard.
  • Merchant accounts and online payment processing can be expensive.

Newsletters

Sending out occasional newsletters is a great way to get repeat traffic to a site. This works particularly well with E-Com sites, since Advertising a sale or discount can lead directly to sales.

However, the prevalence of spam emails and the variety of email programs has really made this process a challenge. Expect to spend a significant amount of time maintaining an email list, dealing with cross-client or spam issues, and otherwise getting a newsletter system to a usable state.

If you have something worthwhile to broadcast regularly to visitors who might want to sign up, a newsletter can be a great tool. However, it only becomes efficient at a large scale.