START AN AFFILIATE MARKETING PROGRAM: This is one of the true gems of Web marketing. Affiliate marketing is a simple concept: Mo, who has a Web site that sells hvacr services and equipment, tells Curly, who has a Web site for, say, his local hardware store or home renovation business, that he’ll give him $5 for every Web surfer that Curly directs to his Web site and buys services. So Curly puts a description of Mo’s business on his Web site with a caption that reads “Go to Mo’s for all your heating and cooling needs!” complete with a link that leads to Mo’s Web site. When a surfer clicks on the link and then buys Mo’s services, Mo’s Web site tracking software credits the sale to Curly, and sends Curly a check for $5. Check out Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com) for more information on how affiliate marketing works.
CREATE “HOOK PAGES”: Many sites have attracted Web visitors by posting informational pages on a specific topic. The reason: Search engines tend to give higher rankings to Web sites that provide usable information from experts in a particular field. Your company’s own expertise in hvacr, for example, can be tapped to generate such pages on your site.
BECOME AN INFORMATION CLEARINGHOUSE: Essentially a “hook page” strategy with a large, information clearinghouse provides a virtual library of related information, instead of offering a few pages of information. Information clearinghouses require more work to create, but the benefits are generally more substantial, in terms of higher search engine returns and free links from other sites that point potential customers to your information base.
ESTABLISH A VIRTUAL PRESS CENTER: Increasingly, journalists turn to the Web to search for stories, develop ideas and identify experts to interview. Companies are more likely to gain free media exposure if they provide interesting information that the media can use to research and include in their stories.
BECOME A MEDIA AUTHORITY: A corollary to establishing a virtual press center is to present your company as the “go to” source for hvacr information. Quotable experts are the lifeblood of every news organization, so many big companies pay public relations firms to position their company executives accordingly. Now, thanks to the Web, every hvacr firm, no matter how small its PR budget, can do the same.
“Once you fill a niche and provide a unique perspective on your area of expertise --and once people are drawn to what you offer--they continue to return to you,” says Bob Baker, author of “Poor Richard’s Branding Yourself Online.”
“Not only because of what you do, but also because of whom you are and what you bring to the subject.”
One way to establish a beachhead in this area is to create an “Ask the Expert” column of your site, in which a company staff member answers basic, hvacr-related questions that are e-mailed to your site from the general public. For models of this technique, enter “Ask the Expert” into any major search engine.
ADD A BLOG TO YOUR WEB SITE: With the number of blogs on the Web increasing at a rate of two-per-second, according to respected blog tracker and search engine Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), increasing numbers of businesses are giving these informal, online journals a serious look as a new medium for outreach and promotion.
Blogs enable businesses to reach out to customers in a more casual manner and can help “personalize” the business. Blogs also can be an effective way to educate potential customers. An hvacr blog, for example, could highlight the benefits of installing or upgrading to a more energy-efficient heating or cooling system, detail prestigious projects an hvacr business is overseeing, offer detailed distinctions between your business and the competition, and the like.
For more info, check out Fredrik Wicca’s extremely helpful and free “Beginner’s Guide to Corporate Bogging” (http://www.corporateblogging.info/basics/corporatebloggingprimer.pdf).
ADD EDUCATIONAL WEB VIDEO TO YOUR SITE: Long ago, creating Web video was a laborious process requiring deep technical knowledge, great patience, a flair for tweaking, and hours--if not days--of production time. No more. With the latest round of Web video authoring programs (under $500), anyone with a basic knowledge of the PC can shoot and upload a professional-looking video to a Web site in about 10 minutes. Marketing uses for an hvacr business could include educational videos on how your products and services to save on energy costs, more detail on prestigious projects you’re involved in, and the like. One excellent video-to-Web program to check out is Visual Communicator 2 Studio, by Serious Magic ( http://www.seriousmagic.com )
-- Joe Dysart and Patricia Panchak