Unlike a brick-and-mortar building, 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 you're 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 through monthly sales event information, industry news or media, you need to make contact with your target market. Start thinking about new and interesting ways to promote your products and services online, and remember that through the power of the internet, even the smallest idea has infinite potential. An easy way to start is by writing down answers to all of the questions people frequently ask about your business. This is a great place to start a dialog because people already want to know these things.

If you are going to update your website often, you need a way to notify customers when you add new content. The best way to do this is a technology called RSS. Don't be intimidated by the acronym- it just stands for "Really Simple Syndication". That wasn't so bad, was it? It's a small file on your website with all your current articles stored in a portable format. People "subcribe" to an rss feed by adding the web address of this file to their list of subscriptions using a "feed reader," essentially a newspaper that contains information from all of their favorite sites and checks these sites frequently for updates. The international symbol for rss is: ., and some browsers will display this icon in the address bar if the page contains an rss link. Customers 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 customer's comments, suggestions, and complaints, and to keep in mind that even complaints can yield valuable advice. You can't pay for the kind of insight your customers are willing to give you for free, if you just listen.

If you're going to run a website, it's important to commit to updating it fairly frequently. Depending on your business this may be as little as once every one or two months, or as often as every day. Whatever you decide, it's important to stick to it and set aside time to make it worthwhile.