"Build it and they will come!" does not apply to the Internet. Unless you pro-actively market your website no one will visit it. To encourage the right people to visit you must employ a variety of tactics. The first is simple, and wholly up to you:

• Put your web address (URL) in everything you communicate: brochures, stationery, business cards, email footers, proposals, signage, T-shirts - everything. And be specifically prominent about it on your business cards.

This is what we call offline marketing.

Online marketing is where the website is marketed on the Internet using a combination of the following strategies. Pilot can help either by setting you up initially so you can manage these yourself going forward, or by managing them all for you.

• Search engine optimization: preparing your website so it can be easily indexed by search engines. This involves creating meta-tags (title, description, keywords), and making it easy to update them. It also involves making sure the pages load quickly, and that images you use have alt tags, etc. There are tests we can run which tell you how optimised your page is and gives it a score.

• Search engine posting: there are many, many search engines out there as well as the big ones (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) While you can wait for the search engines to index your site, you will speed up the process by posting your site's meta-tags to these search engines. There are a number of 3rd party services which will do this for you. It is important that you change the meta-tags slightly to give the impression that your site is being updated. There is an art to constructing the right meta-tags.
• Google Adwords: Google provides a service where you can actually pay to appear under keywords you are targeting. You create a small text ad which appears on the right hand column of the search list. You pay only if someone clicks on your ad and is taken to your website. The more you pay the more prominent your ad. The genius of this service is that you can actually target which countries will see your ad (so it's not wasted in markets you are not interested in), and that you can tightly manage your campaign budget. When you reach your daily budget ceiling the ads simply don't appear any more.

• Yahoo Sponsored Searches: this is the same as Google Adwords but in the Yahoo environment.
• Google Site Targeting: whereas in Adwords you are targeting keywords and your ads appear in the search listings, in Site Targeting you can actually have your text (and image ads) appear on websites which are part of the Google network. You can select websites by industry or service. You pay not by click throughs but by per thousand visitor views.
• Google AdSense: where you place your ad in the websites in the Google network, but where you pay only if a visitor purchases something from your website (only applies to e-commerce sites). Typically you pay between 10-20% of the sale.

The beauty of these online marketing tools is they come with very detailed reporting. You can see which keywords are most used, which ad has the most responses, etc. and you can change your campaign instantly in response.

If you think you could benefit from any of these services, contact Pilot for a consultation. We will look at your site and design an online marketing campaign which works for you and your budget.