One of the most important aspects of web site maintenance is content updates. New content in the form of new products and services, monthly special offerings, useful tips and noteworthy news articles and press releases will give your audience a reason to keep coming back to your site. This will also increase your chance of converting your visitor into a customer. If your web content is stale, visitors will search elsewhere for the things they need. It is therefore very important that the company web site is updated and enhanced regularly with new content and technology. See it as a way of protecting your site and investment.

As you think about upcoming maintenance you would like to perform on your site please consider these two tips that will help encourage returning web site visitors:

If you have a website, chances are pretty high that you spend a lot of time looking for ways to market your business online. In today’s economy, paying for advertisements might be out of your budget. That’s why Blue Water Media has put together a few ideas for promoting your website inexpensively.

Add Your Business to Google Local
One of the easiest ways to bring visibility to your business is by using Google Local. It’s free, easy, and only takes a few minutes. By registering your business with Google local, you increase your chances for people to find your business through Google Maps and localized searches on Google.  When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. Register at www.google.com/local/add

In our continuing effort to remain ahead of the curve and expand our internet marketing techniques, Blue Water Media attended the Search Marketing Expo in New York (SMX East). After a quick train ride up the east coast, Ernest and I arrived in New York ready for a full schedule of informative workshops and networking opportunities.

Our schedule of marketing workshops covered a wide range of topics with progressive techniques and strategies that included:

• Internal Linking Tactics - This session took a look at how to leverage internal navigation and links to maximize your rankings in the search engines.
• Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing - In this session, we looked at what happens when you combine landing pages with multivariate testing tools - tools that let you change various elements of the page dynamically to see which tests better with people.

After working with CEO’s and business owners for over 10 years, I can say without reservation that one of the most consistent challenges facing my clients has been lead generation and new customer acquisition. You might remember the term Lifetime Customer Value (LVC) from Business School. LCV is an extremely useful piece of data. I’ll touch on three things in this article - what is LVC, how do I figure out my product or service LVC, and how can it help improve my bottom line?

Yes, wipe the sleep out of your eyes! Lifetime Customer Value can tell us a lot about where our business currently is, where we are going and more often than not, how to achieve forecasted growth and margins. So, what the heck is it? First off, you’ll need to calculate a product or service life cycle (how long a customer is likely to do business with your company) before we can get a handle on LCV. Let’s say you have a total of 500 customers and they typically tend to do business with your company for 2 years (life cycle). Over the course of those 2 years the company recorded a total net revenue 1.5 million.

Most marketing executives admit that their campaigns rely on far too much guesswork. Rapid change, mercurial markets, and the sheer number of factors to consider make it difficult to predict how many messages will hit their intended targets. Some companies, however, are looking to scientific techniques and methodologies to improve their accuracy and boost their bottom line.

“Boost Your Marketing ROI with Experimental Design,” published by Eric Almquist and Gordon Wyner in the October 2001 issue of the Harvard Business Review, discusses how statistical techniques long applied in other field can be adapted to predict how a marketing campaign will influence consumer behavior.

The practice of testing different forms of a marketing or advertising stimulus isn’t new. Direct marketers have long used simple techniques such as split mailings to compare how customers react to different prices or promotional offers. But traditional testing becomes expensive when evaluating more than a few alternatives. Since companies now use many more marketing channels and adjust prices, promotions, and advertising messages merely by editing an electronic file, they send out an enormous stream of “stimuli.”