I’ll just qualify post this as a bit of a rant right off the bat. Cheap hosting is killing small businesses by tricking them into thinking that their $5 or $10 is such a good deal, they don’t need to do anything else online. I have had meetings with numerous small businesses that basically brag on how cheap their hosting is. However, not one of them brags about how much business, leads or sales their website is bringing in. Do you see the correlation?

Hosting a website, at least the disk space and bandwidth is becoming almost free from many large providers. But only hosting your website will get you few results in today’s Internet marketplace. With millions of new pages hitting the web every day, you need additional Internet marketing services, tools and strategies to stand out online.

Here are just some of the additional website marketing services you should be looking into adding to your monthly fees of having a website:

• SEO - Organic search engine optimization can move you up the search ranks and produce traffic
• PPC - Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target terms, specific areas and even track it’s performance
• Email Marketing - Using permission based email marketing to stay in front of your customers is a must due to it’s cost effectiveness and ability to be tracked. It takes just pennies!
• Analytics - Your website can report to you just about everything going on with it. Data is king, leverage it!
• Business Blogging - Roll out new content, increase SEO, establish expertise, connect with customers and build a following.

Here at Five, we will never have a $10 monthly hosting fee or anywhere near that. We offer a monthly managed service that combines web hosting with a content management tool, web analytics (stats), support and basic SEO. From there we have further marketing services to customize what is best for our clients. It’s not our interest in hosting 10,000 websites that move little business, we’re into quality websites that make a difference to their owners.

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

Here are some valuable email marketing tips and links to other great blog posts on email marketing for those of you still wondering if you should do it. The biggest tip of all … do it. The features, benefits and low cost of email marketing make it one of the most valuable marketing strategies for many companies. The tips below are aimed at pushing you off the fence and getting you started today.

Email Marketing Tip #1
Understand how important it is. The consumer is giving you permission to market to them. “Yes I want to hear from you” and “I want to do more business with you” are fabulous statements. Signing up to receive email from your company is saying just that.

Email Marketing Tip #2
Start collecting email addresses today. You’ve probably seen graphs or numbers on what your savings account would look like if you started saving at age 16 (makes you want to slap yourself), the same is with building an email list. Simple accumulation of just 15 email addresses a month for the past 3 years would have you at over 500 addresses on your list. Any business can do this and a few simple list building strategies can get you to 5 or 10 times this number.

Email Marketing Tip #3
Any company, organization or service can put out valuable e-letters. Not just value in the form of a major discount on price, but value in product or service education, use tips and more. Take the time to make a list of possible content ideas and make two columns. One for money saving discounts or special offers and another for value added information or education. In many cases a great email campaign will include one of each of those in each send.

If my tips for why you should start email marketing today have somehow left you unconvinced, take a few more minutes and read from others:

• 10 tips for your first email campaign from Digital Web Magazine
• 7 long term marketing strategies on a budget (#5) from Small Fuel Marketing
• Start building an email list from Mike Alvero
• Email marketing for e-commerce from Website Werx

Feel free to share your email marketing “ah-ha” moment, additional tips or success stories with us.