Without any doubt, an Internet presence should be part of your overall marketing strategy. There are now over 100 million people on the net and growing exponentially. The internet population is expected to grow to 3.2 trillion by the year 2003.
Examine how you are going to integrate the Net into your business. Think about it - if you are not connected - by definition, you are disconnected.
Your email and website addresses are derived from your domain name. For example, if your domain name is meetingseurope.com, your website`s address will be www.meetingseurope.com and your email will be [email protected]
Select your domain name carefully. It is your identitiy. If you are serious about doing business on the web and investing time, effort and money on its promotion, you will need to get your own domain name. You can either make your own search and look for a name that has not yet been taken or use one of the many domain name brokers on the net.
Your domain name is your passport to business around the world. You can market your company, your products and your services to a worldwide audience by creating an Internet site. You can project a larger picture of your organization through this site - creating a `shop window` in markets that you would traditionally find difficult to target. You can be contacted cheaply, efficiently and internationally via email.
The .com or .org addresses will give you more credibility among Americans because there are the most commonly used addresses in the United States.
You should also get a domain name that describes what you do rather than the real name of your company. This is because when people search, they will probably not know your exact name. For example when I am looking for an incentive resort I will type in the search box “incentive resort”, and not any particular name of any specific resort.
Even if you already have a webpage with the name of your company, you might want to put up a gateway page that will lead to your main page. For example, if the domain name of your website if “Xtours”, that page will not come up if the searcher types “tours for conventions”. If you have a gateway page named “tours4conventions” that leads to “XTours”, the searcher can find you.
Be sure to put your website and e-mail addresson all your business cards and correspondence and in any print materials or ads you produce.
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