Today, websites are more than just “online brochures” for your customers to look at. It’s your online presence, your online storefront, advertisement, commercial, and ‘sales person’ for your customers to interact with… and like any well-run operation, it should have a supporting cast to maximize its productivity or return.

Here is a list of a website’s best friends and essential tools that should be used:

1) Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides you with easy access to information about your website’s traffic and can assist with measuring the effectiveness of any ad/marketing campaign. What I love about this online app, besides the FREE price tag, is how easily I can isolate and analyze subsets of traffic. Not only can I view daily, weekly, or monthly statistics, I can also break it down to which pages are being viewed the most and for how long. Some other great features allow you to see where the traffic is coming from, what keywords are being clicked on in search engines, and what paths people are taking as they view your site.

It’s relatively easy to install, but if you do not wish to mess around with your site’s coding, ask your web designer to do it for you.

2) Google Feedburner (for blogs and updates)

This is similar to Google Analytics, but more for your blog’s RSS Feed. Here you can view how many subscribers your blog feed has and how many are actively viewing content.

3) Social Media

Social Media is a finicky thing, and it really must be used wisely. On that note, it’s not necessary for every business to use one. If you do, don’t overbear fans and friends with advertisements. This can be viewed as SPAM and doesn’t build a good image. When used correctly, social-media marketing allows you to build a community around your product/service and encourages personal interaction. Of course managing a fan page can be a full-time job in itself (I’ll leave this topic for another posting).

Whether you plan to use Social Media or not, you should at least sign-up for all of the popular ones. This way, you secure your name early and prevent those from using your business’ name.

4) Email Signatures

A FREE marketing tool that you should be using in both your business and personal emails. Some argue against the use of a signature in personal emails, but I think it’s okay. It’s a friendly, unobtrusive reminder that you have a website and provides another easy-access link.

5) Newsletters

Newsletters offer a way to ‘stay in front’ of your clients, reminding them that you are there. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly, newsletters can be used to update your clients company news and special promotions; drawing traffic to your website. Services like Constant Contact and MailChimp offer an easy way to create email lists, track open- and click- rates, and flag invalid email addresses. They even have an easy way to create sign-up forms that you can link to. Of course, there are rules and ethical practices that should be followed so that you don’t appear or get flagged as SPAM. MailChimp provides some free resources and best practice tips: http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/.

What other tools or applications do you use alongside your website?

Comment and share your thoughts with the tek-uniQue community.