The main difference between a brick-and-mortar building and your website is that there is no way for your customers to drive by your website on the way home from work. You need to tell people where to find you and your going have to roll up your sleeves and put some work into it.

In addition to getting people to visit your site, you need to give them a reason to stay and come back. Whether it's monthly sales event information, industry news, or media, you need to be making contact with your target market. The important thing is to start thinking about new and interesting ways you can promote your products and services online, because we all know that no matter how small an idea starts, the power of the internet gives it infinite potential. An easy way to start is to start writing down answers to all of the questions people frequently ask about your business. This is a great place to start a dialog because you already know people want to know these things.

If you are going to constantly update your website, your customers need a way to be notified when you add new content. The best way to do that is using a technology called RSS. Now, before you get intimidated by the acronym, it stands for "Really Simple Syndication". There, that wasn't so bad, was it? It's just a small file that sits on your website that has all the current articles stored in a portable format. People use different types of programs to "subcribe" to an rss feed by adding the url address of this file to their subscriptions. A "feed reader" is like a newspaper that you program yourself by adding the sites that you like to read, and then it checks that site frequently and let's you know if there's been an update. The international symbol for rss is: . Some browsers will display this icon in the url bar if the page contains an rss link. You can copy this link into any feed reader to subscribe to the feed. This makes it very convenient for you to connect with your customers.

Make sure that people have an easy way to contact you and interact with you and encourage them to do so often. It's important to respond to customers comments, suggestions, or complaints. If you think about it, they're helping you be better, even if they're complaining. You can't pay for the kind of insight your customers are willing to give you if you just listen.

If you're going to run a website, it's important to commit to updating it with some degree of frequency. Depending on your business it can be as little as once every 1-2 months, or as often as every day. Whatever you decide, you need to stick to it and set aside time to make it worth it.