January 4th, 2010 Newsletter

Happy New Year! I don't know about the rest of you, but the Christmas break seemed to rush by far too quickly. We here at G4 Ventures Ltd. saw the end of 2009 as a busy project time and we have some great projects that we will be releasing very soon for our clients (stay tuned for those).

This newsletter will touch on the following topics:

• New Support Tutorials
• Keeping People Coming Back
• Client Spotlight

New Support Tutorials

We are constantly adding to our FAQ section as we receive questions from our clients. The latest additions are:

• How do I upload and link .pdf or .doc files within an article?
• How do I delete files from my content directory within Joomla?

Keeping People Coming Back

Let's assume for a minute that you have begin to see some decent traffic to your website (hopefully you have - if not, you may want to review some of our previous newsletters). So people are beginning to find your website, what are you doing to keep people coming back? Today we will discuss 3 different methods of keeping people coming back:

1. Update your content or publish updates regularly
2. Let people get notifications when site content is updated (RSS Feeds)
3. Publish a newsletter that provides helpful information for people

Some of you are using your websites to sell products and simply by adding new products and promoting them on your website you can help to keep your site content fresh. Others of you have more static websites that not a lot changes on (but you need to find ways of putting up new information for people). Unless you are operating within a global market, there are only so many new local visitors who you can attract on a month-to-month basis. So, you need to encourage current visitors to your site to return to your site (and hopefully tell their friends about it as well). Each of you is a specialist in some area related to your line of work. You need to share what you know with people so that they get to know more about you and your business (and give them a reason to choose you over your competitors). Some of you might think you are giving something away for free, but don't think of it that way - think of it as advertising (for free!). Consider a news section or blog on your website that gives you a place to put up-to-date information for your customers to keep coming back to read.

Once you begin to update information on a regular basis, you will want to give people ways to find out when you have posted new information to your site. A quick and easy way to do this is through RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and what it does is allows people to subscribe to updates from your website. Joomla allows you to quickly and easily create an RSS feed for one section of your website or the entire site if you choose. Every time you publish new content to your site, people who are subscribed get that update in a simple to read format. This feature is great for your clients as it allows them to be kept up-to-date with what you are publishing, but it is anonymous and doesn't allow you to know who is viewing your content (and to market directly to those people).

It is for this reason that we also recommend publishing a regular newsletter that clients can subscribe to. You can use the same information that you post to your website in your newsletter but the added bonus is that you now have the contact information for the people who have subscribed to your newsletter and you can offer them special deals and market specifically to these people (because they have shown an interest in what you are doing). Joomla offers several tools to set-up and manage newsletters within your website so that you can get started quickly and easily.

Not sure how to get started? Contact us to find out how to begin getting your website working for you.

Client Spotlight

From time to time we like to spotlight one of our clients websites. We hope that you take a few minutes out of your busy day to check out not only the services that they offer, but also their website features and design (you may get ideas that you would like to use on your website).

In late November we were approached by a local advertising company about getting a website set-up for them. Because they already do graphic design, they brought us a site design that they had been working on and asked us to make it a reality for them. Levi at Art-Rageous Advertising Ltd. was great to work with and we got their website up and running in record time.

Here is a preview of what their site looks like:

We hope this mailing was helpful. If you found it useful, forward it to a friend. If you didn't, drop us a note and let us know how we can better answer your questions and meet your needs by using our contact form.

Jeff Meadows

Director

G4 Ventures Ltd.