Although setting your primary objectives is vital, it is just as important to identify your secondary objectives. By setting appropriate secondary objectives, you will be more prepared to achieve all your online goals. Many companies identify only primary objectives for their Web site and completely neglect secondary objectives that can help them succeed online. Following are some common secondary objectives for online businesses to consider:

• • The site should be designed to be search engine friendly.
• • The site should be designed to encourage repeat traffic.
• • The site should have viral marketing elements that encourage visitors to recommend your products or services to others.
• • The site should include elements to leverage its sales force.
• • The site should incorporate permission marketing, where visitors are encouraged to give you permission to send them e-mail on a regular basis.
• • The site should be designed to encourage customer loyalty.
• • The site should incorporate stickiness, encouraging visitors to stay a while and visit many areas of the site.

Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly

Creating a site that is search engine friendly should be an objective of every company that wants to do business on the Internet. Search engines are the most common way for Internet surfers to search for something on the Net. In fact, 85 percent of all people who use the Internet use search engines as their primary way to look for information. By using keywords relating to your company in appropriate places on your site, you can improve how search engines rank you. You want these chosen keywords in the keyword meta-tags as well as in each page’s description meta-tag. Some of the other places where you want to have these keywords are your domain name if possible, your page titles and page text, your Alt tags for graphics, and your page headers. Many search engines place a lot of emphasis on the number and quality of links to a site to determine its ranking. This means that the more Web sites you can get to link to your site, the higher your site is shown in search engine results.

Including Repeat Traffic Generators on Your Site

Every Web site should be designed to entice its site visitors to return again and again. No matter if the primary objective of your Web site is to sell your products and services or to create brand awareness, generating repeat traffic to your Web site helps you achieve these goals. Generating repeat traffic to your site is a key element of your online success and can be accomplished in numerous ways. Using contests and competitions, as well as games, advice columns, and many more techniques, can increase your Web traffic.

Getting Visitors to Recommend Your Site

The best exposure your Web site can get is to be recommended by a friend or unbiased third party. It is critical that you try to have elements of your Web site recommended as often as possible; therefore, you should have a way for people to easily tell someone about your site and its contents. The best way to encourage people to recommend your site is to include viral marketing techniques such as a “Tell a Friend” button on your site. You might want to include some variations on this as well. Under articles or press releases, you can have an “E-mail this article to a friend” button for people to refer their friends and associates to your site. Virtual postcards are also a good way to get people to send more people to your Web site. There are many ways to encourage viral marketing.

Leveraging Your Sales Force

If your objectives include trying to sell your products, you might want to leverage your sales force by making use of an affiliate or associate program. Affiliate programs once again use the advantage of having your site recommended to create traffic to your site. The difference is that an affiliate program is more formal than just having your site recommended by site visitors. Most affiliate programs involve having a contractual agreement, having specific links placed on the affiliate’s site to yours, and having software to track where your traffic is coming from so that you can compute and send referral fees to your affiliates as they are earned. The contract usually states the compensation you will pay to your affiliates for the sales they produce. This is one more way to have other people working to build traffic to your Web site.

Using Permission Marketing

You always want your company to be seen as upholding the highest ethical standards and being in compliance with anti-spam legislation, so it is important not to send out unsolicited e-mail—or spam—promoting your company or its products. This is why it’s important to develop a mailing list of people who have given you permission to send them messages, including company news and promotions. When you’re developing your Web site, an objective should be to get as many visitors to your site as possible to give you their e-mail address and permission to be included in your mailings. You can do this by having numerous ways for your visitors to sign up to receive newsletters, notices of changes to your Web site, coupons, or new giveaways.

Creating Loyalty among Visitors

The way to create loyalty among visitors is to provide them with some incentives for joining your online community and provide them with proof that you really appreciate their business. You can do this by having a members-only section of your Web site that has special offers for them as well as discounts or freebies. When people sign up to join your members-only section, you can ask for their permission and their e-mail address to send them e-mails regarding company or product promotions and news. People like to do business with people who appreciate their business. We are seeing a real growth in loyalty programs online.

Including “Stickiness” Elements

To get your visitors to visit your site often and have them visit a number of pages every time they visit, you need to provide interesting , interactive, and relevant content. You want to have your site visitors feel as if they are part of your online community and to want to make your site one of the sites they visit every day. You create “stickiness” by including many elements that keep your visitors’ attention. Your site can have a daily advice column, descriptions of your many products, a discussion forum with constantly changing interesting conversations relative to your products, a news section that is updated daily, as well as a weekly contest that site visitors can enter. The combination of these elements makes a site sticky. You want your site to be a resource people return to often and not a one-time event.

Setting your Web site’s objectives before you begin building your site is essential so that you can convey to your Web developer what you want your Web site to achieve. You obviously want to create a number of different objectives for your site, but many of the objectives you set can work together to make your Web site complete. Whatever your objectives might be, you must carefully consider how best to incorporate elements in your Web site and your Internet marketing strategy to help you achieve them. Successful marketing on the Web is not a simple undertaking. Before you begin to brainstorm over the objectives of your Web site, be certain you have read and studied all the information that is pertinent to the market you are attempting to enter. Read everything you can find, and examine the findings of industry experts.