When it comes to how you should use the Web to enhance your business, you might feel lost from time to time. My goal is to undo that feeling in a five part series of posts aimed at taking the broad topic of web management strategy for small business, and breaking it down into what I hope are simple, understandable, and useful chunks.

Take it from a guy who has to stay informed about these things, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of online marketing buzz words and the slew of new services with catchy names claiming to be then next big thing. What if you just want to put a simple and effective strategy together to make sure you have your basics covered? Using our 12 years of experience as a guide, I collected and organized a list of tools and methods that have time and again produced solid return on investment for our clients, and are both affordable and easy to implement. From this list I created a simple diagram above, outlining the life cycle of a comprehensive web management strategy for small business.

PART 1: DRIVE

The cycle tends to begin with “DRIVE” once a new website is launched. Despite being the start of the cycle, this area must continually be worked at and refined to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck.

Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is key to getting indexed well and easily found in Google and other search engines. Small techniques such as using location based key phrases and well thought out page titles can make all the difference in your search result placement.

Getting other well-trafficked and relevant websites to put a referral link back to your website is another great way to generate targeted traffic. This involves researching blogs, directories, and review websites that have related content and are popular in your industry or where your potential audience already spends time. Although this technique can be used to help your SEO ranking as well (think Google Page Rank) my recommendation is to focus on quality and not quantity when it comes to who and how many websites to contact.

Social sharing is another free technique involving adding buttons to your website that allow visitors to quickly share pages and content on the social media they use most. The classic examples are Facebook and Twitter, but there are plenty of others. We like to use API services like AddThis (www.addthis.com) which offer many social media sharing options through one small snippet of code and then refine what is displayed to only show the most popular options of Facebook, Twitter and Email a Friend.

Another great technique to drive traffic to your website that doesn’t require a ton of financial investment is paid search, with Google AdWords (adwords.google.com) leading the charge. For pennies-per-click you can put small advertisements on Google’s search results and on websites in their networks. And contrary to what you might think, people do click on them – a lot sometimes! Of course you need to decide how much you are willing to pay for people to click through to your website, but AdWords does a good job of providing you with the tools to maximize your results. Some basic features include: deciding how much you want to pay per click, the maximum you want to pay per day, where geographically you want your ads to show up, and much more. From the get-go after launching your website, this is one of the best, low cost ways to get immediate and targeted traffic.

Finally, I wanted to mention offline methods as they relate to driving traffic to your website. The best and simplest technique is just to stick your URL everywhere – letterhead, business card, the bottom of advertisements, etc. Also verbally telling your customers or potential leads to visit your website for more information might seem obvious, but if it’s the first time you actually owned a useful website, you might not be accustomed to mentiioning it!

That’s all for now, next week I’ll tackle Part 2: CONNECT.