Creating a Web site that generates leads and sales for your business used to be an intimidating prospect. Now, many hosting firms offer advanced Web site creation and marketing tools that can help their customers drum up traffic to their sites, resulting in increased sales. nnMany customers take advantage of popular search engine submitter tools. These applications enable you to submit your Web site location to all the top search engines such as Yahoo! (yahoo.com), HotBot (hotbot.com), Google (google.com), Lycos (lycos.com), and Go.com (go.com). nnConsumers can also take advantage of search engine submitters to add their sites to many smaller, niche directories. Inclusion in these directories increases the site “linkability,” which refers to the number of Web sites with links to a site. The higher the number of linked sites, the better ranking you can get in major search engines that base their rankings on site popularity. nnAnother popular tool offered by service providers is email marketing. Many hosts have deployed applications that allow their users to send and track graphical newsletters, special promotions, and customer communications, with an opt-in option to help the users build an up-to-date contact list. nnAny proper email marketing tool will not directly assist in the distribution of unsolicited bulk email, or spam. An email tool should work to ethically elicit subscription information and to store it in such a manner so that consumer privacy is protected. Many Web hosts are including Web forms among their online marketing tool options that work to properly capture prospective client information. nnWeb forms are tools that companies use to create lead prosperity. With lead generation marketing tools you may decide to create several lead capture pages designed to generate interest from prospects on your business. The pages will allow prospective customers to enter their contact information such as name, telephone number, and email address. This is also called a lead capture form. nnAfter the information is filled out on the lead capture form, the individual is redirected to a URL that contains your main site. Simultaneously, information is captured within a database or is mailed directly to you so that you can take sales action. This sounds very easy to do, and it is, however when marketing online, many sites lack effective lead capture systems and worse, a lack of professional presentation. The goal is to seek powerful lead generation tools and presentations that capture leads and allow proper follow-up no matter the opportunity presented. nnA form devised and implemented through a hosting provider can provide a more streamlined lead generation system for your business so that you need not build your own form that might be unprofessional in appearance or unreliable in operation. The advantage of utilizing a form tool from a service provider is that it can be quickly deployed, and built online, in real-time without knowledge of script programming. nnSuch suites of Internet marketing services are offered by Web hosting companies such as Interland (interland.com), which, on top of the services described, offers promotional discounts from search engines and auctioneer sites. Yahoo! wisely bundles search engine submission for its own search system and marketing tools with its own Web hosting service. NTT/Verio (verio.com) also offers a site promotion tool.
Buying Marketing Tools from Web Hosts
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
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February 2012 - 2012 Hottest Hosts Directory
This edition of our Hottest Hosts buyer’s guide and directory issue is the fifth instance of the annual publication, a milestone that kind of snuck up on me, personally, but which I think provides an intriguing validation of the format, and of the principle behind it. The hosted services industry is a fascinating business (incidentally, …Read More
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October 2011 - The Killer Business Model
In pursuit of some inspiration for your killer business model, we sought out some of the really cool things being done in the hosting space by providers trying to stand out from the crowd. They’re not all huge companies yet, but they’ve all got some really interesting ideas, and more importantly, they’re looking at innovating in a way that could inspire some really original thinking from you.
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July 2011 - Understanding Small Business
In creating this issue of WHIR magazine, we provide a series of profiles to illustrate in great detail the variety in small business IT needs, and the hosting relationships that develop out of those needs.
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