Writing effective website copy is a hugely misunderstood occupation. When looking to reduce costs on a project, one of the first expenses to be cut – if it was even considered in the first place - is often the copywriter. After all, if you run a business, you should know how to string a sentence together, right? Everyone knows how to read and write when we leave school, so many assume they are suitably skilled to write the copy for their websites without having to pay someone else.

In these days of search engine advertising, search engine optimisation, blogs, social networking sites and more, the humble email has become the maligned and underestimated marketing tool, employed as an afterthought or out of habit rather than with careful strategy and planning. But, with care, email can become a central and effective part of your online marketing strategy.

After all, isn’t this exactly how you came to be reading this article?

If you’ve ever wondered whether there are any benefits to using subdomains or subdirectories within your website, you’re not alone.

Designing your website architecture is an important step, so it is essential to understand the different advantages to using subdomains and subdirectories so you can best decide on the strategy for your own site.

You may have heard the term Social Media thrown around a lot, usually in the context of Web 2.0 and other bits of jargon designed to make the novice feel like an outsider.

Yet social media is one of the newest platforms for online marketing and is fast defining the direction many successful businesses are moving.

Social media refers to the internet trend towards website interaction and online community building. Starting out merely as chat-rooms and bulletin boards, the marketing potential has exploded with the arrival of Facebook, MySpace, social bookmarking sites, modern blogging techniques and more. 

Marketing companies are fast realizing that the future of advertising is going to be interactive. The beauty of online social media is that this interactivity is within reach of even the smallest online business.

The battle to convert site visitors into customers is hotting up and many websites will fail by not understanding the issues that affect customer behaviour.

Recent research has demonstrated that price was the major factor in online purchasing decisions, and that postage costs mean online sellers are competing with traditional stores.

But if online businesses solely compete on price, eventually, profit margins will be shaved so much that price differences will be nominal and profits will suffer. If all the competing online stores have prices within the same narrow band in an attempt to stay competitive, there is nowhere left for the marketer to go. Or is there?

Online marketing has given businesses large and small all over the world the ability to compete on a level playing field. But although your online store has the potential to reach more potential customers than you could ever dream of, converting them into sales is often overlooked in this constant push for a high Google position and a strong link campaign.

Too many online marketing campaigns focus on achieving high levels of traffic. But if that traffic doesn’t produce a corresponding increase in sales, the return on your investment suffers

A strong home page grabs the unsuspecting visitor by the eye-balls and punches your message direct into their brain. Okay, that might sound a little overdramatic, but without an effective hook that plays into your customer’s motivations and desires, your home page risks losing customer interest and makes the back button the most used link on your site.

Yet the home page is still often misused and misunderstood by businesses launching new websites.

There are many common mistakes made with home page design, but here are some of the most common and most damaging to your online business.

Links work in exactly the same way. Apart from the obvious traffic flow from providing as many ‘roads’ leading to your website as possible, the search engines calculate these links in determining the reputation and ranking of your website in their search results.

As discussed in part one of this article, producing strong linkbait content (articles and items designed to attract readers with dynamic headlines and topical information) are the best way to produce plenty of quality links to your site (backlinks). But with a bit of time and effort, you can also create plenty of your own backlinks that equally count towards your site’s reputation.

Social media concepts have enabled many websites to allow interaction from site visitors. The ability to leave comments, participate in discussions and swap internet stories with like-minded people has produced many opportunities to create a strong internet profile for you across the world wide web – all with links attached.

There comes a time in the life of any website when you should step back and look objectively at whether it still achieves the goals you originally had for it.

Successful businesses can have many websites over the years and understand that the costs of rebuilding from scratch are often less than the incidental expenses and losses caused by an inefficient site.

People choose to overhaul their website for many reasons, but if any of the following five scenarios apply to you, your current website could be doing your business more harm than good.