Effective Promotion for Little Cost - Part 6
By Keith Lee

Hello to all my friends. This is the sixth of several articles that will contain marketing 
and promotion tips that can be very effective in promoting your site for little or no cost. So sit back with your favorite beverage, put your feet up on your desk (make sure the boss does not see) and enjoy. These tips are all proven techniques that do not include spamming. 

In This Issue

When was the last time you went to your favorite store or restaurant and sat there for what seemed like a lifetime before you received any service.  The person behind the counter is busy talking to her new boyfriend on the phone or chatting about the weather or some other topic with someone while completely ignoring you and your party. When this happens to me I have a special little section of my brain that I store that information into that says, don’t go back here again for a very long time, and I will generally tell the story of what happened to other friends know. 

Does this same thing ever happen to you? How do you react to it? See what I mean! So, as a business owner and a person who is trying to built traffic to our website, you don’t want your potential customers to have the same type of experience. When your customers email you they are expecting a response in a reasonable amount of time. If they don’t receive that response it promotes a negative image of your business. They feel that they have been ignored.

To avoid this from happening to you, organize yourself to achieve the best results possible from email inquiries. Handle new emails as they come in, try to answer all emails right away even if you don’t have the answer now. Inform the customer that you must do some research into there question and you will get back to them by a specific time, not ASAP. A specific time lets them know when to expect your next email. If the answer is still not available at that time then give them a reason why it is not and inform them what the best estimate is that you will have an answer.

Keep your inbox empty of messages so that you know what you have to respond to. Sort messages by priority as they come in and handle them accordingly. Keep your email program open and running so that you can respond to email as soon as it comes in. 

By answering your customers’ emails quickly you are building customer loyalty and you will be rewarded by more customer referrals, participation, visits. So stay on top of your emails you probably have received one while reading this newsletter.

Form Professional Partnerships

What does this mean exactly. Well it means to form partnerships with businesses that offer complementary services to your own or that will help you to promote your site. This is possibly one of the best, if not the best, way to promote your site and help someone else at the same time.

Partnerships come in many different forms. 
1. Advertising Partnerships – Exchanging banner ads with another site to promote each other. 
2. Co-Branding – Offering a free service to another that helps there business while promoting yours. For example, we provide a news service that runs as a ticker on the side of a page. At the bottom of the ticker it says “Provided by OneDog.com”, and when clicked upon the story pages have link to our site and mailing list sign-up page at the bottom of the news stories. In this way both you and your partner receive benefits from the service. 
3. Partners – Each site lists others as partners in a special section of the website.
4. Service Partnerships – Exchanging services with other businesses in an effort to reduce each others overall cost as well as promote the others business.
5. Event Partnerships – Combine your efforts to provide a special event by dividing the costs of providing the event between the two of you.
6. Content Partnerships – Providing links from your site to specific portions of another or by providing links within the body on mailings and newsletters.

Forming partnerships is one of the best methods available to promote your site. Many other types of partnerships are available to you. Be creative in exploring  ways to partner with another site. Find ways to help each other and you will be able to watch your traffic build.