Social, search and marketing

A vast topic once you have your website launched is how to get people to find it. Whatever suits your business acquisition model - or even if you don't know what suits yet - we hope the articles here about everything from Facebook to SEO, blogging to email marketing will help.

As in the business world, as in the online world; it’s easiest to win new business from your existing customers. (Or should be, if you’re doing things right!)

So make sure you stay in touch with regular visitors to your website if it’s a blog or information site – or stay intouch with your existing clients if it’s a company brochure site. Have a newsletter sign up form somewhere prominent so you can collect their email addresses in a managed way. A newsletter system will allow people to unsubscribe when they wish (a legal requirement) and probably let you see how successful your newsletters are – eg. how many people open them, how many people click on links in them etc.

Be sure not to email people too much – don’t inundate them because they’ll just leave your mailing list. And don’t email them boring stuff – make sure you’ve got something interesting to say!

With regards to how often to email people or pop up on their social media, well, it depends on your audience and your business type, as well as the method through which you're contacting them. For emails, monthly might be a good rule of thumb – with things falling back to quartely for businesses who aren’t really about news, but just want to keep intouch. Unless you’ve got a very good reason, more than once a week is probably too often to email. Meanwhile, on Facebook you might want to posting messages a couple of times a week, and a lot more often on something like Twitter.