The strategy for your website is a part of your large business strategy, which, in turn, is built on a business model. Moreover, most companies realze that copying or adapting someone else’s business model is neither an easy or smart path to success. This is also true of non-profits and churches. Rather, the business should identify who they are trying to reach and see what elements they can enhance or replace with Internet technologies and improve your reach of your current audience. Also, how can you use Internet technologies to reach a larger audience?

The website is one component of that. Social networking can take you beyond that and extend the power of your website. As a general rule today, the website has both a static and dynamic component.

• The static component of the website defines something about your mission, who you are, has answers to typical questions, and tells people how to contact you. The static component contains multiple pages such as Home, About, FAQs, and Contact Us.
• The dynamic part tells the story of what is going on and gives movement to your website. This dynamic part is often called a blog. The search engines like life and movement, and at least in our case most of our traffic comes into the website through the blog. The pages in the blog are stored as posts.

The Econoweb sites we develop can contain both a static part and a blog. Both are content managed; that is, you can update your Econoweb site easily using a simple internal editor with password access.

Take a look, for example, at the layout of our business website page. At the top (even on this page, which is a post in the blog) are two menu bars. The top menu is for the static part of the website and the menu options access different pages. The lower menu bar is for the blog, and the options here access categories of the blog. There are actually far more categories than shown on the menu bar. If you go into any of the categories, a sidebar there will give the access to other categories. The pages in the blog component are called posts, and the blog is interactive – you can comment on any of the posts, including this one.

The Bigger Picture

Your website is actually part of a bigger picture of even your web presence. This is how you might see your web presence at this point:

You can put that website out on the web, but it is much like a theme park in the desert. Unless you have roads to it AND people know how to get there, they won’t find your site and won’t go there. You have to create this larger picture. How you define this larger picture is up to you. Let’s look at one approach.

This is the concept that I use for my own websites. The social networks are used to build the roads to the website and blog. The inbound links are indexed quickly by the search engines. For this reason, you can start early using the social networks; but you shouldn’t add pointers to your website until your website is ready. If you are building an Econoweb site, we will show you later how to build those links.

Twitter – this is a good place to start, as it is easy to use. Your object here is to put something in your tweets that can tease them into your web site – normally to specific blog posts on your website. Twitter indexes your tweet immediately; that is, anyone search on Twitter on your keyword will find your tweet immediately. Google will take a little longer to find your tweet.

Facebook – This is popular because there is such a large user base on Facebook. You can also put a pointer to your website in your profile. Be careful, as commercial pushing here is frowned on in Facebook and you can get banned doing too much of it. You can, however, set up your own business on a “fan page”. Read the rules for using this. You can also joint groups on your topic of interest or start your own group. Again, the name of the game here is to tease users into your website or blog.

Linkedin – This is a professional social networking site that draws its user base from corporate executives and other business leaders. You can put your profile here and, as in Facebook. You can also join (or create new) groups of specific interest.
There are many other players in these social networks (such as Foursquare, YouTube, and many more). What works for you depends on your goals.

Using the Search Engines

Our ministry site is more dependent on the social networks and the people we know. This business site, however, is primarily dependent on vistitors arriving from searches on the search engines. This means strategic keyword phrases that a search might use to solve their problem are used with the search engines to direct them my to resources, services, and tools. The keyword phrases become very important, as they are the link. The process of making this work is called search engine optimization, or SEO. Our website designs contain basic internal SEO enhancements; but we also teach you how to do a lot of this yourself.

Putting the Pieces Together

Sue has a store in Memphis that sells wedding gowns. She doesn’t have many repeat customers. All she needs is a good static website – no blog. It would help, however, if she could market herself as a full-service store for wedding services by providing links on her website and networking with other wedding services for her clients, such as a service to print wedding invitations and another that bakes wedding cakes.

Susan owns an organic food restaurant in North Carolina. Her business really picked up when she added a blog to her website that published recipes for many of her menu items. She also uses the blog to announce special discounts and new entrees. She’s just starting to use the social networking sites.

Take some time in planning your site to see the concept you wish to use for your web presence. Social networking is cheap in direct costs, but is very time consuming. If you plan to use those sites, start with a single site and get familiar with it. Don’t use the networks and other sites to point to your website and/or blog until these are working. Spend some time learning how they work while you build your site.