Cyber Sales: entice shoppers to your site.

• Author: Lindberg, Kelley J.P.
• Position: E-Tailing

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the Internet, banner ads were king. If you had a web site, you bought banner ads on other companies' web sites, you sold banner ads on yours and everyone was happy. Customers sometimes even noticed the banner ads and stumbled upon your site. E-life was simple. No more.

A JUPITER MEDIA METRIC REPORT ESTIMATES that by 2005, each of us will be exposed to 3,000 ads a day, with nearly a thousand of those exposures from online sources. Businesses already struggle with how to make their message rise above the din of Internet advertising. With the numbers of ads continuing to rise, the struggle is taking on epic proportions.

First Things First -- Your Web Site

Too many companies put up a web site and then ignore it. Like a fading flyer tacked to a telephone pole, it might get noticed by the occasional passerby, but it probably wasn't worth the effort.

So how do you make your web site attract attention?

"There are two areas to look at," says John Austin, president of e-small.biz, a WSI Internet Consulting affiliate. "What does your web site look like, and how are you being found in the search engines?" Austin, who works with small businesses in the Salt Lake City area as well as Denver and Colorado Springs, helps clients unravel the complexities of marketing on the Web.

After designing effective web sites, Austin measures customer response. "Search engine optimization is an ongoing engagement," he says. "We look at who's visiting the site, how long they're staying, where they're coming from, and what pages they're visiting. We make monthly changes (to the site and to search engine keywords) based on those results." Because search engine keywords determine how high on the list your site appears in a customer's search, Austin's company also provides software that prevents the competition from stealing your search engine keyword scripts.

Pictureline is a successful Salt Lake City bricks-and-mortar business that supplies photographic products to professional photographers. In 1999, Pictureline's owner and president, Jens Bach Nielsen, created pictureline.com as a shopping site. Last year, Nielsen says pictureline.com moved a half-million dollars worth of cameras, film and other supplies, "And that was with three hours worth of attention a week, and done out of my house." A few months ago, Nielsen hired a fulltime web designer and opened an office in Exchange Place. "We hope to triple or quadruple our sales this year," he says.

...