The key to success is consistency. Hard work and luck help too, but just knocking it out on a regular schedule is incredibly important. Web site promotion is no different; you have to tell people to visit it consistently and continually.

Now, saying, “I’m going to be consistent,” is quite different from actually doing it. Otherwise, everyone would keep their New Year’s resolutions instead of letting them fizzle out by March.

So it helps if you can attach your marketing reminder to something you give out all the time. That way you don’t have to always remember.

Here’s an example from a price label on a dress I recently bought. Notice how Calvin Klein stamps their website on every label. That’s an easy and consistent way for them to remind people they have a website.

Calvin Klein's web address is on every price tag

Look at the back of this price tag from REI. They’re using it to consistently remind people they have a member reward program.

REI reminds customers of its member program on every tag

Yes, you need to be consistent with your SEO and your online newsletter, but look around you and note the other missed opportunities to mention your organization and its website. Start with your website and see how it can promote itself. Your business cards? Outgoing voice mail? Car bumper? Attach it to something else that’s always being distributed that you might never have considered, and it will make your job that much easier.

Want more ideas? Our task-a-day web promotion checklist gives you many ideas you can use to promote your site.

Have ideas? Leave them in the comments below.

We just hosted a webinar with some friends of ours at Dinkum Interactive about search engine optimization. It was great and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far.

One of the biggest lessons we addressed during the presentation was the importance of looking beyond just the technology and just the marketing when it comes to coaxing people to find you on the Internet. It’s much more than having the right tools or writing the right copy. So-called search engine optimization is a full-on effort that ensures that you’re always promoting your company and making sure that people are always learning about you.

But there are a few things you can do to help coax search engines to move you up their web pages. One is clean URLs.

Every page on your website has its own address, or URL. Search engines, as do people, like to see these addresses when they make sense. So they’ll avoid cataloging those pages with such addresses as

http://www.talance.com/aspweb/ur123/do/results?firsttime=y&
set=search&referer=&edition=&sortResultsBy=TopicRelevance
=9644205E04CF9DBF1B850C0219204572_1188832070933&
urn=urn%3Abigchalk%3AUS%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B112707510

And prefer addresses that give a clear indication of the information on the page, such as:

http://www.talance.com/about-us

This can be done automatically if your CMS (content management system) has clean URLs installed. Then it will read the page’s title and make that the URL, rather than a mechanical string.
Try it out, and see if suddenly more people are able to find you online.