Free Website Promotion Tool You Already Have

By Alexander Dolinin on February 27th, 2007

I’ve noticed a surprising trend among some new website owners. After investing good money in a small business website and continually paying for its marketing, they fail to use one of the most basic and free website promotion tools. It’s their website email, particularly their email addresses. It might seem very basic and obvious, yet it is overlooked by a surprising number of website owners.

Every website hosting plan comes with at least a few email addresses. You should set up something like you@yourcompany.com and start using that instead

of your old you587@earthlink.com. If this is not a self-evident truth for you, here are a few reasons:

• you@yourcompany.com is much more professional then you587@earthlink.com.
• Every time you send an email, its recipient is exposed to your website address and might visit it.
• Even if they don’t check out your website then and there, they are more likely to remember it when they’ll need it.
• When a prospective client requests some info, s/he will be expecting a reply from someone@yourcompany.com, not from some generic or unknown domain. Your reply will not be deleted and you will not loose a sale.
• Your email address will not change even if you change your ISP. As long as you’ll have a website, you will have you@yourcompany.com address.
• If you give email address to all your employees, even those who normally don’t get one, it will multiply your website promotion efforts even more. Especially beneficial if your company sells directly to consumers.
• If you still insist on using your old email address, you can set up your email at yourcompany.com to automatically forward incoming mail to your old address. Most website hosts have an easy to use control panel to accomplish these kind of tasks.
• You are already paying for it, you might as well use it.

Granted, this simple promotional technique will not overwhelm your website with traffic, but it requires no extra effort and the benefits are too many to pass it.

About author: Alexander Dolinin is a search engine optimization specialist with background in web design, web development and project management. He has been building and promoting websites since 1996.

Author's website: http://www.esherpa.net

Tags: Website Insights, Promotion.