Booklet printing is used for a variety of commercial purposes. People print booklets to make training manuals, travel guides, program overviews, pamphlets and many other things. The booklet is nimble, perfect for use in a variety of industries because of its readily distributable nature as well as the ease with which people can read them. Since booklet printing can be done in several different ways you may be daunted as to how to create particular full color booklets for a certain type of task. Do not worry, there are several general guidelines you can adhere to to produce efficient and quality booklets.

Below are 5 easy tips to take in consideration when printing booklets? Why seven you ask? Well we judged that these are the key guides that encompass all the jobs a booklet has to deliver. It is not as hard to remember as the Ten Commandments. Think of it as the 5 habits of highly effective booklet making that will make your life easier.

1. Booklet templates. The most efficient way in designing a booklet is by using a template. Templates already have the proper formatting and style which you can use. More often than not, there are several booklet templates out there for the different kinds of booklets that people can create. Booklet printing services can also offer a few booklet templates themselves for you to choose from. Using these templates save time. This frees you from concentrating on the main purpose of the booklet which is the content.

2. Write concisely and well. A booklet is not a novel. It is a “small book” hence the name right? Try to convey your thoughts clearly with a constant style. You can of course be flowery with your words, but not

at the expense of lengthening the booklet. Booklet printing is about having an easily read material for everyone. So write as simple and effective as possible.

3. Use headings and subheadings. Headings and subheadings are the major markers for a booklet. Don’t be afraid to use them. It is actually better for readers to have these headings. This gives them the chance to skip to the information they find most interesting. For a theatrical program for example, some people want directly to read about the cast and characters. You can even try to be memorable and use interesting tag lines as headings.

4. Use simple easy to read fonts. Some people think it is cute to use different styles but this can affect the readability of the booklet. Use a relatively simple and easy to decipher font for most of the content. Use a theme if possible and be consistent when using it.

5. Add pictures and graphics. A booklet full of text isn’t very fun to look at. Even if it is a training manual, realize that a picture can paint a thousand words. Besides describing something in a booklet why not show it? Use images as well to improve the look and feel of the booklet. Add in dividers or borders. Place “clip arts” if applicable and of course have an eye-catching cover picture.

Those should be the bare basics you should remember when making a booklet. They are a quick reference guide to help you create any kind of booklet you desire. Of course there are other specific things you can do, but these five will lead you to have a decent and respectable booklet ready to print.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit:

Print Booklets

A recent study showed that customers are looking for 4 things when they engage in business or avail of any customer service:

1. Customers want prompt and friendly service.

This means having a frontline person who is friendly and who can give them what they need right away. Fast and friendly service is the name of the game. Whether you do it on the phone or person-to-person, the way to generate clients and keep them is to provide them quality service ASAP.

The rule of thumb is to NOT keep your customers waiting. So if you are a poster printing company for example, you would do well to provide fast turnarounds for poster printing if you want to keep your customers coming back to your shop. You better instruct your employees then to give importance to providing prompt and friendly service, which your customers would definitely appreciate.

2. Customers want their problems solved.

It is a cliché really but your customers go to you because they have a problem that needs fixing. They need help. It is a no-brainer that they will not need you if they do not have any problem, right? And trust me, there are millions of problems that they need you to fix for them. They will seek you out if they know that you can provide the solutions to their concerns. And what is the best thing about it? You get paid for your efforts.

3. Customers want flexible policies.

Do not tell them “Sorry, it is company policy,” or “Sorry, we cannot do that.” That is the quickest way to lose your customers. Your clients would want to hear instead that you can be flexible – enough to give them what they need. Flexible enough that you fit their expectations of your company.

Do not make the

mistake of driving your customers away by sticking too much to policies that you alienate your customers, and worse, impress on them that you do not want to have anything to do with them. Policies are made for your own advantage, not your customers. We all know that. But for you to really keep your clients, you have to shake your rules a little to accommodate what they need. That is, if you want your clients and customers to come back and tell their friends about you.

4. Customers want you to fix any mistakes you made, and give a little extra in return.

It is not just taking care of your customers when you make a mistake. If you want them to come back, you need to go one step further and do something extra for your customer.

More than the apology and remedy to a problematic situation, you also need to give yourself a chance to go beyond their expectations. This means seeing to it that everything worked out fine for your clients. By giving them a call to check on them, or giving a 10% discount on their next purchase; or even by not charging them for that particular purchase – you are giving yourself a golden opportunity to position yourself as a kind of business that they would want to go back to every time.

Great customer service is not just lip service. It is all about doing something more than a little extra to your loyal clients. More so, that they would keep you at the forefront of their minds every time they need the kind of service you provide. And it is also great for word-of-mouth marketing, by the way.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit:

Poster Printing

Five Nifty Ways to Make Your Site Sticky!

‘Stickiness’ is one of the most overlooked aspects of sitepromotion. Webmasters, jump thru hoops to optimize theirsites for the search engines, work like mad to find the right keywords, and double over backwards to build links.

The mere mention of PR Rankings can have them frothing at themouth!

Yet, many webmasters ignore the one factor that can greatly improve ‘all of the above’.

That factor is ‘stickiness’!

Does your site stick to your visitors. Do you make a good impression. Will they remember your site. And most of all,will they come back?

How sticky is your site? Will your visitors spend 30 seconds(if you’re lucky) on your site and then quickly surf on. Never to be seen again!

If that’s your scenario — you’re missing a key element in your site’s construction. The one factor that can really determine the extent of your site’s success.

That factor is ‘stickiness’ — how effective you are atgetting your visitors not only to remember your site, but actually getting those visitors coming back for more.

Here’s how you can greatly improve the ‘stickiness’ of yoursite. Most of these steps are easy to implement – and onlytakes a few minutes of your time.

1. Add to MyYahoo Button. Place this button on all your key pages.There are over 30 million people using the ‘MyYahoo’ sites and growing. Visitors can add your RSS feed url to their ‘MyYahoo’ sites and your site’s content will instantly be updated when they open their Yahoo page.

Don’t have a RSS Feed for your site – you can get a freeone from sites like eBlogger. Just make a blog about yoursite’s updates or publish your ezine in a blog. Then place this feed and blog on your site.

2. RSS Button or Logo. This is the orange ‘xml’ or ‘rss’ buttonthat you see on sites that are ahead of the game. Visitors cangrab the rss feed and place it in their feed readers or aggregators.

Your site’s content will be instantly transmitted to these visitors and they can read them and visit your site for more information. You can input ‘full

contents’ into these feeds orjust place a headline and a teaser. Thus, drawing visitors backto your site.

3. Bookmark. Simple, but many people forget to remind visitors to bookmark their site. Make it easy to bookmark your site. Have a bookmark button on all the pages of your site. Just geta script and place a bookmark button on your site. Just do it!

You can get a free script from Michael Bloch:

– WWW.TAMINGTHEBEAST.NET –

4. Build an Opt-in List. One of the most essential ways to make your site sticky. You MUST have your own ezine or opt-in list. Place a sign-up form on all your web pages.

Capture your visitor’s contact information. Make them your subscribers. Make them an offer their can’t refuse! A free ecourse to introduce yourself to your visitors. A free ebook/software/contest – whatever it takes to get your visitor’s email for further follow-up.

Then send out monthly/weekly/daily emails to your list offering helpful information. Bring your subscribers back to your site for any updates, promotions, information, etc. that you offer on or thru your site.

5. Content. Don’t forget the obvious factor. You must have great, helpful, entertaining, useful…CONTENT! Without great content — the reason people are on your site in the first place — all the above ‘stickiness’ factors are useless!

Content is the reason we go back to a site. If you don’t have good content on your site — all the tricks in the world won’t help you get your visitors back to your site. Make sure your visitors have a good reason to come back to your site — provide great content and information.

Then implement all the nifty ways mentioned above and you willbe on your way to making your site sticky.

Keep them coming back for more and you will reap the rewards.

Titus Hoskins

—-

To Create a blog within minutes – visit this link:

RSS Report and Create Blog Guide.

Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of bizwaremagic.com.

This article may be freely distributed if this resource

box stays attached. Visit http://www.bizwaremagic.com

for more simple solutions to your online marketing tasks.

—-

When we ran the contest back in 1998 we had a idea there would be a few visitors but we got a big surprise. We had up to 1000 people per hour from the local area sitting on the web site waiting for the cop to come in the drive thru. We ran the contest for 2 months and it was the best advertising we had ever done. It produced more then 500 new customers per month and caused a bunch of people to get involved in a contest we felt was going to be middle of the road. As I met with a marketing guru 2 months ago we had sat and chatted about advertising that worked and the Donut shop cop came back to life.

We had been looking for a way to bring customers to our new products that we had been offering on the net  www.nostingkypits.com  & www.growumgreen.com these products needed to get out to the public and get know we felt this could be accomplished with donutshopcop.com. as we had a list of emails that I had collected from jokes friends and family had sent me I sent out a email inviting them to have a look and see if they wanted to join and play the game.

After I sent out a total of 1500 emails personally addressed we got a whopping 85000 hits. It may have to do with the fact of offering win your weight in donuts. Also the fact is when the friend who you referred wins you also get the same prize. This month we are doing some test advertising for a company in Cambridge. It seems to

be going ok and people are hitting the site just fine.

Some of the equipment we are using for this can be bought off the shelf if you have the desire to set this up. We used a ATI all in wonder pro for capture. For the camera we used a Samsung video cam on a video cable back into the card. The computer is a old p3 500 with 128 megs ram on Windows XP. The cam software is Webcam32 it is a breeze to setup. It pushes a still back to the server every 60 seconds. It all sits on a cable connection for a local business. There are from 3 to 9 cop cars in the donut shop each day and your chances of winning are high.

For the first win we give them a Tee shirt and some product samples with all names going into the draw for the monthly prize. We plan to offer bigger and better things as we go along. Internet access (1 year DSL connection), lease on a car for a year, boats , bikes and other products as we get rolling all it takes is a little imagination and the sky is the limit.

On our next venture we are going to setup other cams in fast food places and it may be a cop or who knows !!!!

The cam is setup on the Tim Horton’s in Waterloo Ontario Canada.

Looking for help or more info you can contact me directly

Richard Willis owns and operates Donutshopcop.com he also owns and operates Puterdudes a full computer service company. he has been in the computer business for the last 17 years involved with different companys and projects.

Most people who are not doing well on the internet withtheir website don’t know the cause.

They worry that they are not generating traffics.

But they have never paused to ask why the visitorsthey are getting are not buying from them.

I have been to many good websites as well as bad ones.

Most of the bad ones have many design flaws.

Some ask you to place an order with a credit card, and yet they have no information about the company such as the company’s physical address, phone and e-mail.

Some of the corporate websites have very small fonts which are difficult to read.

Some have too many graphics and photos which cause the loading of the website to slow down.

Some websites will not allow you to see the content until you have subscribed to their e-zines, whether you like it or not.

You have to go back to your website and re-examine it thoroughly because you may have committed many design sins that may be turning your website visitors off and make you to lose sales.

You may never get the design right easily at the first time.

The trick is to keep changing and testing the content.

Don’t just write one and then stop.

Learn from your mistakes and keep moving on, always testing, revising and improving your website for greater impact and profitability.

Below are some design sins to avoid so as to succeed in your website promotion.

They will help you to empower your website and sky rocket your sales.

(1) Lack of compelling headline

(2) Lack of believable testimonials

(3) Lack of sub headlines

(4) Lack of attractive benefits

(5) Lack of features

(6) Lack of strong guarantees

(7) Not asking or answering questions

(8) No proof of benefits offered

(9)

No contact information for questions

(10) No endorsements

(11) No conversational writing

(12) Too long of sentences

(13) Lack of deadline to order

(14) Lack of free trials

(15) Presence of spelling mistakes

(16) Grammar mistakes

(17) Too light of text

(18) Too dark of background

(19) Ad copy doesn’t blend together

(20) No breaks in ad copy

(21) No bullets

(22) Ad copy in all CAPS

(23) Few ordering options

(24) No visual aids

(25) No comparison to competition

(26) No reminding of benefits or deadlines

(27) No information about your business

(28) No appealing adjectives

(29) No appealing phrases

(30) Too large of text

(31) Too small of text

(32) No emotional appeal

(33) Too large of paragraphs

(34) No story telling

(35) No underlining or bolding of keywords

(36) Too short of ad copy

(37) Too long of ad copy

(38) No facts or case studies

(39) Hard to understand jargon

(40) No free bonuses

(41) Too low of price

(43) Too high of price

Don’t get me wrong, not all 42 of my ad copy sins willapply to each and every ad you write.

It is just a list you can use in the future.

If you currently have an ad copy, compare it to the list right now.

Your ad copy could make or break your sales.

May these web site promotion secrets help you to make a lot of money.

Warmly,

I-key Benney, CEO

I-key, a Millionaire CEO from New York City is the creator of “Mscsrrr: Millionaire Secret Cash System”,(investing online) program, which has helped thousands of ordinary people from all over the world to attain financial security and shining success during the past 2 yrs.

Mscsrrr Millionaire Cash System helps you to generate $1,500+/Week for life, from home or office, part time or full time. No large investment or hassles. Win $1000-$2000 free “cash”.

When I first began attempting to make money on the internet, I fell into the trap of advertising my website with “get rich quick” promoters and products, thinking I’d get mymoney back immediately with their allegedly wonderful services. After wasting hundreds of dollars on marketing, I decided to take another route: I tried pay-per-click searchengines and other conventional-but-expensive means of generating traffic.

I never really saw any conrete results, but I continued plugging away. I talked to business owners, researched different methods, and spent even more money… until I found a few methodsthat worked for me and have consistantly worked to give my websites exposure. I wrote this article to give readers like you the opportunity to skip the learning curve and move towhere I am now. This article will dispell the biggest misconception about marketing and will also give you information about the most effective method to build your onlinebusiness.

The most common misconception about Internet marketing is that you have to pay an exorbitant amount of money just to get traffic to your website and a steady stream of customers buying your products. This isn’t true. Pay-per-click search engines have their merits and e-commerce marketing companies can sometimes be effective, but they can also be very expensive, often driving you too far into debt to recover before you see any profits. This is precisely why less than 3% of people who begin Internet businesses actually ever see a return on their investment. In this article, I will explain why this isn’t necessary–and how you can skip this learning phase and begin using inexpensive andfree tools to begin putting money in your pocket immediately.

While there are many free and inexpensive methods to effectively market your business and put money into your pocket, I am going to focus on the absolute best, fastest, most profitable, and most recommended method among “gurus” and Internet millionaires:creating your own ezine.

You can begin today by signing up with an autoresponding email address, where you can send opt-in subscribers to be added to your mailing list. I would suggest using http://www.getresponse.com because it can handle the biggest loads. You can open an account for free, but I would suggest eventually upgrading to a PRO membership. Thisautoresponder is by far the most effective Internet marketing tool and after you see how it works, you will want to reap its full potential.

After you take some time to explore and understand your getresponse account, you can begin writing the first article of your ezine. Take some time to review your site and yourproducts. Make sure your ezine article properly reflects what you’re marketing–and make sure you have at least one link to every product you talk about in the issue. Give some general advice, but use persuasive sales language. Entice your potential customers, but do not stretch the truth too much; you want to gain as many TARGETED subscribersas possible. Remember: these people are opting-in to your mailing list because they WANT TO BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. When you have finished your first article, load it into your getresponse account.

Now you are ready to begin marketing your ezine. The best

and fastest method of gaining subscribers in my opinion is starting a campaign at http://www.leadfactory.com. Leadfactory will work with you on a pay-per-subscriber basis to help you create a mailing list of PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. If you work with Leadfactory, make absolute certain that the ad for your ezine and product is 100% accurate. Remember: you’re paying for subscribers, so you want ones that want to buy your products. I personally would suggest buying subscribers from Leadfactory to begin with, but if you want to go the completely free route, you can begin by signing up for the free trial version of Push Button Leads at http://www.pushbuttonleads.com. You can use this product for free for two weeks and then decide whether or not the amount of subscribers you get is worth the $20/mo. fee.

You are now ready to begin increasing the your ezine’s exposure. This requires MASSIVE ACTION and a lot of patience. You can begin by creating a boilerplate ad for your ezine that includes information about your products. Make the ad only a paragraphlong and use some persuasive sales language. You will then need to submit your ezine to ezine directories and ezine announcement lists. You can begin by going to google and typing in “ezine directories.” Begin submitting your subscription information (whateveryournameis@getresponse.com) along with your ad and any other information the site asks for. Do this to as many ezine directories as you can find. I would suggestsubmitting to a minimum of 50. This will seriously increase your exposure by putting your ad on all of the top ezine directories on google.

Next, go to Yahoo.com and sign up for an account if you don’t have one already. Use Yahoo to find ezine announcement lists and promotion groups. Yahoo has about 100 ofthese groups on their website and some of them have a significant amount of subscribers. To sign up for these groups, send a blank email to the group email list or the groupadmin. You should immediately receive an email back, asking you to subscribe. Subscribe to them – and do this to as many promotional lists and groups as you can find. Once you’re in the group, post your ad along with the address of your ezinewhateveryournameis@getresponse.com and the address of your site (if they allow it). This technique can win you between 50-500 subscribers each week. Make sure you use it to your advantage by signing up for as many group as possible.

At this point, you have gone further than most internet business owners ever get. Take some time off, relax, and watch your mailing list fill up with subscribers.

Make sure you continue to send out new ezine issues every week or every other week to let your customers know you’ve got new deals on your website.

Isaiah Hull publishes Work At Home Right Now, a fresh and informative newsletter about making money on the internet and using proven methods to increase your site’s traffic and profitability. If you’re looking for time-saving and money-saving tools, as well as honest business advice, come by and subscribe at http://www.workathomerightnow.net

Often, website owners would like to promote their new business but are strapped for cash. What a dilemma! How to market your product if the public doesn’t know your website exist? The odds are you will lack the flow of traffic to survive in the vast ocean called the World Wide Web.

You are shaking your head in agreement. A fancy promoter service is out of the question. It will not fit in with your budget. A viable alternative does exist. FREE PROMOTION HANDLED BY YOU!

By using the following *proven methods* you can effectively promote your site and announce it to the Internet.

1. Search Engines: Thousands of search engines exist on the Internet. But, you should only be concerned with the top eight or ten. You should manually submit to the top eight: Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, Northern Light, Infoseek, Webcrawler, and use one of the FREE automatic submission services like *SubmitPlus* to handle the smaller search engines.

2. Directories: List your site here too. Directories organize sites into categories. Good examples of Directories: Yahoo, Magellan.

3. Ezine Listings: If you have an e-zine to promote along with your site. Why not list it with one of the many e-zine services on the Internet. E-zine Library is a good one to start with.

4. Free Classifieds: You will have to submit to a ton of FREE classifieds to get any significant traffic. Why? You are competing with thousands of other Ads. Remember to work on your Ad copy and make it attention grabbing. Go to one of the popular search engines, type in Free Classifieds, and surf to the top 20 classified sites for beginners. Often, these sites will lead you to several other Free Classified Sites. In response you’ll get a stack of e-mail thanking you for listing your site while barking their promo. Best to get one of those free email accounts. Hot mail is a good one. So is Yahoo mail.

5. FFA Pages. Free For All’s are worth a try. Be prepared for a avalanche of e-mails from FFA web site owners. If your title is attention grabbing you will get a few clicks. Good Attention grabbing headlines, FREE, Limited

   Time, Limited Offer, Proven, Secrets, and many more if you brainstorm. Check out the sales literature delivered to you by regular mail. Check and see what headlines grab your attention. And why? Incorporate them into your Online Ads.

6. Signature File: A short message you include at the end of your e-mail messages. Suppose you publish a gift e-zine list. You might use this sig to promote your e-zine:

   
   
   Jane Smith webmaster@gifts.com
   
   http://www.gifts.com
   
   Subscribe to our FREE Weekly Gift Ezine, by emailing: gifts@gifts.com
   
   

7. Ad Swaps: Swap Ads with other e-zine owners if you are promoting an e-zine. Best to swap with a zine that has a larger subscribership. Go to one of the e-zine directories and search for zines with a similar theme. Send them a short, polite, e-mail asking if they would like to swap ads. You will certainly increase your traffic flow if you hook up with the right zine.

8. Write An Article: Write an article promoting your site or product. Write an article on a hot topic many people would like more information on and submit it to various e-zines. How do you find out what’s hot? Visit a few of the message boards and see what questions are raised often.

9. Tell Friends And Family: If your friends, family, acquaintances, have an Internet Connection, e-mail them telling them about your new website, and ask them to visit often. Offer a FREE incentive if they tell a few friends to surf over. Perhaps, a FREE Ad in your e-zine.

10. Leave Business Cards or Flyers: Leave these promo pieces with small businesses in your community. All relevant contact information; email address, URL, telephone number, should be included. Offer a freebie to anyone who visits your site. A free e-book, report.

Still think you have to spend Big Bucks to promote your site? This short article has disclosed easy, simple, solutions, to promote your site for FREE, and increase the hits on your site. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and Promote.

About The Author

Copyright 2001, SmallBiz Publishing.

BB Lee is Editor of SmallBizBits Newsletter. Join Our List Of Informed Subscribers Today! Receive Practical Advice And Homebiz Tips Monthly. Subscribe by emailing: Smallbiz-subscribe@topica.com

Behind every good web page are codes only the search engines read. These codes help the search engines match your page with requests from their searchers.

There are two types of codes – or “meta tags” – that you care about. One is keywords and the other is the description.

Keywords are words and phrases associated with your site. If you’re selling a book on how to housebreak your dog, for example, your keywords might include “puppy, housebreaking, house break, paper train, dogs, puppies” and others.

There are several rules of thumb you want to follow when working with keywords:

1. List the words in the order of importance. Some search engines only take the first 10 words; others the first 50 words, etc. You can’t have too many keywords, but it is important to list them in order.

2. Use multiple spellings of the word if searchers are likely to use different forms. For example, puppy is different from puppies in the eyes of a search engine. Likewise, housebreak and house break are different.

3. Use the plural. If someone looks for “dog” it will be found in the word “dogs.” On the other hand, if they look for “dogs” it will not be found in “dog.” Be safe – use plurals.

4. Use lower case letters. With only 1 or 2 exceptions search engines ignore capitalization. So if someone looks for “Dogs” they will find “dogs.” On the other hand, if they look for “dogs” they may or may not find “Dogs” since the search engine might consider it a proper name.

5. Use the language of your customers. If you’re a professional you might search for “canines” but most customers are more likely to look for “dog.” So while you can include the more technical term, do

so last in the list.

Your description is the other meta tag you want to write. Your description is what shows in the results of the search engine. It’s generally 2-3 lines long.

What happens if you don’t include a description? Often the search engine will make up its own description – taking the first several lines of your web page or the first few lines of code. Neither option is as attractive as the description you will write.

Remember that the purpose of the description is to make the site sound so attractive to your target audience that they want to click on your link in the search engine. So your best benefits and reasons why they want to visit your site should be in the description.

Finally, to really help the search engines find your site, use a descriptive title on each page. The title is what shows in the top bar of your browser. It’s what is listed in Favorites when someone sets a favorite or bookmarks your site. So you want the title to tell people what they will find when they visit the page.

For every page in your site, you should have a unique title, keywords for that specific page, and a traffic-pulling description. Yes, it is time-consuming to do that, but it’s worth the effort. You’ll be more likely to lead searchers to your page when they can see what they want in your title, your keywords or your description.

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet strategist who works with experts who are ready to turn their knowledge and their websites into Gold. Her reputation as a speaker and trainer has earned her the title of The Technology Tamer. Jeanette shares her news and views in OnlineSuccessNews.com

Does your website offer visitors a quick and easy way to recommend it to a friend? If not, you’re missing out on a potential gold mine of free traffic.

The benefits:

1. Automated website promotion. You set up the program and your visitors do the work of promoting your website for you.

2. You receive higher quality visitors. Your visitors will refer people *really interested* in your products or services. These people will be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter, request your free reports, and ultimately BUY YOUR PRODUCTS!

3. Nobody will every be insulted or upset by this promotion technique (as long as you make it clear that the message comes from their friend). People can only participate if they visit your website, and email will only be sent by people the recipient knows.

Just asking your visitors to recommend your website isn’t enough. You need to make it easy. Offer a form on your website your visitors can fill out to recommend it to a friend. Either put the form on every page of your website, put it in a pop-up window, or link to it on every page.

There are many ways to do it:

1. Javascript. See the Javascript resources on my Webmaster

   Resources page at http://www.busymarketing.com/links.shtml for a website with instructions on how to use the script.

2. CGI. I really like

   Birdcast at http://www.bignosebird.com – it’s what I use on my website. You can find more options on my Webmaster Resources page.

3. A service. Many remotely-hosted scripts are available.

   The most popular is Recommend-It at http://www.recommendit.com (which offers a contest as an incentive and allows you to add recommendation links to the email you send out). There is also a free program called Let ‘Em Know at http://www.letemknow.com which allows you to run your own contest for participants and probably offers more statistics. Either can be set up in 5 minutes or less.

Javascript and CGI scripts have the benefit of being completely under your control. You can customize them to work on your website and decide if and how visitors are notified about the origin of your script.

Services are easier to set up, but have to make a living somehow and may use advertising or big, tacky buttons with their name and/or logo in order to do so.

Don’t delay! Set up a Tell-A-Friend system on your website to watch the number and quality of your visitors improve without raising a finger.

About The Author

Would you like to see more articles like this? Dawn Gray writes Busy Marketing Tips! Subscribe today by emailing subscribe@busymarketing.com and get a free Search Engine Tips screensaver.

So you have your website and you’ve done everything right on the web – search engines, classified sites, newsgroups, bulletin boards, link sites, mailing lists, etc etc etc.

And now you think you’ve exhausted the possibilities of marketing your website and you can sit back and wait for the visitors to roll in, right? WRONG!

Here are 12 extra ways to promote your website without even turning your browser on:

NUMBER ONE:

Make sure that all of your staff know your website address. They know your telephone and fax numbers, they know your “snail mail “address – they should ALL know your web site address too. Make sure that any new staff have this information along with the usual contact details.

NUMBER TWO:

Print your URL and email address on all letterheads, business cards & compliment slips, in the format www.yourcompany.co.uk This way everyone that you ever come into contact with has your web address.

NUMBER THREE:

Business closed for the day? Why not put up a sign – “Open 24 hours a day on the WWW – www.yourcompany.co.uk” Spooners Restaurant (http://www.spooners.co.uk) did this and regularly get table bookings via email that they would usually have missed.

NUMBER FOUR:

Include your web addressL in your answerphone, or line holding message. Let people know that they can find information/buy products/ enquire about services via the world Wide web.

NUMBER FIVE:

Type your website address into your screensaver to remind staff of the address while they are on the telephone. This way even temping staff know the address

NUMBER SIX:

When potential clients call for information about your company, ask them if they have Internet access and send them to your website. This

means they can have the information immediately, without waiting for the postal system, and may help cut down on your postage bills.

NUMBER SEVEN:

Look for unusual promotional items at holiday times – WWW tiepins or brooches, computer shaped cookies, Christmas cards on disks (with the obligatory link to your website) – the choice is endless and it all draws attention to the fact that your company is taking advantage of the latest technology

NUMBER EIGHT:

Why not swap leaflets with one of your clients and reach a whole new potential audience? Every brochure we send out features a leaflet/business card from one of our clients – a favour which they reciprocate.

NUMBER NINE:

Magnetic car stickers featuring just your company name and website address help get you seen while you’re out and about and can be a great conversation starter!

NUMBER TEN:

Have t-shirts printed with your web address and logo – then give them out as prizes or promotional items.

NUMBER ELEVEN:

If you’re in a restaurant or hotel with a guestbook – sign it! And don’t forget to leave your web address. These guestbooks are left in receptions all year round and people tend to browse through them while waiting.

NUMBER TWELVE:

Make sure that any newspaper and other offline ads feature your website address prominently – don’t hide it away in the small print!

Nikki Pilkington is owner of Milton Keynes based Internet Marketing Company Nikki Pilkington.com, and writes articles, hints and tips to help people looking to promote their website for free, as well as running paid e-marketing campaigns. For more of her articles visit http://www.nikkipilkington.com and sign up to the newsletter.