The Web is a realm of pure capitalism the likes of which has never existed before. More than any particular industry or field, it is truly a consumer's market. While just having a website was once enough to stand out in the crowd, it is now a world overpopulated not just with legitimate competition but a countless number of charlatans and inexperienced teenagers posing as service providers. With so many fly-by-night sites acting as background noise, a soft spoken website is easily drowned out.

There is already a vast array of material available on how to use your website as a marketing tool, both on the Web and in publications like Ping! Zine. Rather than rehash all the tips you've already seen countless times, I want to help you look at development in a slightly different manner. While most web developers see their craft as a matter of coding and graphics design, psychology is an under-appreciated element that will help you gain an edge on the competition.

Rather than focusing on marketing a website, this article is intended for those using websites to market businesses. That's a subtle yet crucial point that will make more sense as you continue reading.

Synergy – The Big Picture

If you look at the largest and most lucrative businesses in existence (online, conventional, or both), there is a dynamic sense of synergy to be found. Synergy, in a basic sense, is the idea that the total can be greater than the sum of the parts. It's more than mere diversity, as it can be thought of as a self-partnership where each individual aspect of the business builds on the constantly growing strength of the others.

For conventional businesses, this might be done by offering varied but related services and products. Selling a specific product is good. Selling that product and a related magazine is better. Selling the product, the magazine, and speaking at conferences is even better than that. But selling a product that gives includes a 1-year subscription to the magazine that advertises that and other products while promoting conferences which, in turn, help sell all the products and magazines is beyond best of all – it becomes a new living entity all unto itself.

Not only can an analogous form of synergy occur on a business website, but it can be done easier, faster, and cheaper than in any other medium. All it requires is the willingness to put all your cards on the table at once.

Going Beyond Branding

You've probably already seen that keywords are ancient history. Though an Internet domain like SomeKeyword.tld instantly describes your goods and services, it must be weighed against the more memorable SomethingClever.tld. Instantly identifiable names like Google and Yahoo! penetrate one's consciousness more than SearchEngine.tldever could.

The step after choosing a domain is to create a logo or image of some sort. This could be something meaningful or purely abstract, but again must be memorable. There are plenty of Web-based businesses that try to get by with their domain name pasted over a picture of a keyboard or monitor, so don't kid yourself if you think you are being clever. The logo you choose needs to be one that is uniquely yours, as it can say much more than words and in a shorter amount of time.

For most businesses, this is where the branding process seems to stop. I argue that they are falling short because they have gotten so caught up in the mechanics of the process that they have missed the big picture. Specifically, this is where the psychology I alluded to begins to come into play.

To demonstrate this, let me ask you a few simple questions about your business website. Could a potential or returning customer uniquely describe your business in a phrase or just a word after visiting the website? Could they describe the "personality" of your business? Could they say anything meaningful about all of your goods and services, even those they haven't had direct experience with?

Websites and businesses do speak, even if it isn't verbal. They even have personalities; they could be humorous and playful or, well, all business. To go beyond simple branding requires you to take your website from being a stale collection of text and images to being a living, breathing organism.

Word of Mouth... Even Online

As computers and the Internet have taken more important roles in the business world, those who came before have largely lamented the presence of technology. They will claim that it strives to remove the relationships between you and the customer and that it makes business even less personal than ever. I, however, argue that this is only because so many of you are doing it wrong.

There is no excuse for a web-based business to be considered cold and impersonal. Your business is living in an epic, border-less economy where customer interactions are not hindered by geography and time zones. Message boards and other forms of online communities allow you to interact with customers from anywhere in the world at any time of day. Even when you aren't there, your presence is felt thanks to your old posts and replies and help to sell your business even while you sleep.

More importantly, customers can interact freely on an online community. Unlike many conventional businesses, customers aren't influenced by location and the odds of a potential customer and a previous customer ever crossing paths is quite slim. Your interactions with customers on your website are there for the world to see. When you are helpful and receive customer thanks and praise, visitors notice it. Every time someone sees these interactions or gets responses directly from other customers, you've helped to win over new customers without having to spend a dime on advertising.

Where I've seen communities used most effectively is probably on the NEXCESS.NET's forums. When I switched to them as my hosting provider, I became a part of that community. Not only do customers get support from NEXCESS.NET's employees, but from other clients like myself. Many businesses would shy away from providing so much free support on their website, especially from non-employees, because they are looking at support primarily as a source of revenue. What the guys at NEXCESS.NET seem to understand is that much like in a retail store, not everything is sold for a profit. Providing a few services for free can pay large dividends in the long run.

Another way to cultivate word of mouth is to make affiliate programs available to your current customers. The way these work is usually that for every new customer that someone brings in, he or she would then receive a discount or a share of the profits from that new customer. It can be thought of as a reseller program but without all the hassles and costs that those often entail. This sort of program could be applied to just about any goods or services delivered in an automated fashion and provides you with quality word of mouth advertising at minimal costs – especially since you don't pay anything out until you've already turned a profit.

It's Time to Get Personal

As I mentioned before, your business and website should have a visible personality. Given that fact, what more natural personality to have than your own?

Think of all the antiseptic business websites out there. You see the words on those sites but do you who wrote them? Can you say anything about who they are, what motivates them, or if they are even a legitimate business? If your website is there to promote a small, relatively unknown business, you may have a problem reaching new customers.

As I mentioned before, the Web is absolutely saturated with people trying to make a quick buck. To be noticed among them, you need a well-established reputation. If you don't have one yet, it's time to get personal on your website.

Mentioning yourself by name is a good start. If your website represents a corporation, you may not feel comfortable talking about every employee by name. But it's important to have a spokesperson of sorts. Who best represents your company and is the proverbial backbone? This could be just the person you need to act as your public face.

Pictures are good, too. Although it doesn't really have much to do with business, people like to know there are human beings on the other side of the screen. Again, you may not want every employee or partner's picture on your site, but there should be a few so that customers can match a face with the words. Do you have an office-front or even just a room devoted to your business? If you do (or even if you can fake it), pictures of your work area bring a subconscious air of credibility.

For an especially small or new business, you may want to get even more personal than that. Do you have a blog? If so, consider moving it to your business website. The more your website establishes you as a real human being with a family, ambitions, and character, the more comfortable people will feel contacting you for the first time. Not to mention, the less likely they will be to treat you with disrespect.

Even if your business exists solely on the Web, don't be tempted to live and die by automated forms and email. You may not expect to do much business over the phone or via postal mail, but having a number and physical address will again make you seem more real and trustworthy. After all, if you don't make all this public, what are customers to think you are hiding?

If you have an instant messenger account, be sure to have that as an option for contacting you. You can even use some scripts to let the visitors know if you are online at the moment without having to add you to their buddy lists. IM conversations aren't the most formal setting for business discussions, but people are quickly getting to a point where they are more comfortable communicating in this way than over the phone. But it's essential that you

Let's Not Completely Neglect Design

I don't want to overemphasize the importance of design, but I do want to mention a little about it. This is a huge topic unto itself, but there are some common mistakes made.

Once you have some logs and statistics collected from your site's traffic, take a look at what pages visitors are looking at and where they are going afterwards. When my sites have gotten linked on SlashDot, I've gotten quite a few hits to collect data on and what I've found is about 80% of your site's visitors will never click to anything else linked on the page they are looking at. Most of the others will click to no more than three other pages. When you view your logs, notice where this is happening and on what pages.

If your site requires more than a single page-view to get to the meat of what you are offering, you are throwing away your traffic. This is another area where the concept of synergy is very pronounced. Linking within the site in context in addition to having major links in a sidebar, header, and somewhere below-the-fold is a good idea.

Don't be afraid to run your own "ads" on your site within content. As much as people say they hate ads on pages, they are found there because they work! You may want to use a simple script to rotate different ads that link to services and products available on your business website.

One final point on design is more of a warning that anything else. Have you noticed how so many of the websites out there look so much alike? That isn't necessarily because it's a good idea to look like everything else. Try to balance functionality with uniqueness; after all, there is no law that says you have to use a standard three-column design. If you are using any content management software, do your best to avoid looking like you are. At the very least, use a custom template and not one that everyone else is using.

Don't Aggregate – Syndicate

I've seen plenty of articles in the last six months emphasizing the importance of building a library of useful content on your website. Everyone should know this by now, but some businesses are taking shortcuts that aren't helping.

The shortcut that is being used on many websites is aggregation. Rather than writing their own content, websites are pulling from the feeds of other sites. This may get you some more search engine links, but they are just going to lead people to other websites. Instead, you should be writing your own articles and letting other sites syndicate your content. At the very least, it's low-cost advertising.

Depending on the nature of your business, there may be a limit to just how much information you want to provide for free. If you are selling products then tutorials on using them are a good idea to have available. But if you are providing services such as consulting and training, you obviously aren't going to put everything on your site for free. Even if this isn't the case, maybe you just don't know what to write about. So what can be done in these cases?

Consider the industry you are working in. Whatever it is, there is probably news on a weekly basis that is somehow connected to it. Take advantage of news as it happens by writing reactions, spinning current events into something that benefits your business.

For example, there was a lot of coverage early this year of the SHA1 encryption scheme being broken. Thousands of sites were covering this story, but nobody was explaining it in a way that clients would follow. An excellent reaction piece for anyone in IT or development to write would have been "How will the breaking of SHA1 encryption affect your business?" Within a short reaction, you could explain what this means, what the impact will be, and how your business could help.

Just because your business website isn't a news service, it doesn't mean you can't react to news as it happens. Before long, you will develop a large library of content without really doing all that much work. All you are doing is selling your business and putting it into context for potential customers.

Maximizing on Email's Impact

Thanks to spammers, email has gotten a bad reputation. You may even be wary of doing any sort of email marketing for fear of breaking the law. Even if you don't want any sort of opt-in email marketing, email can be integrated into the use of your site in a variety of ways.

Now let's say you do use a typical email newsletter. Are you putting the full content of that newsletter within the email? In order to bring more traffic to your site, consider just including summaries within them. For one thing, this will force potential customers to visit your site. Besides that, it means your email will be shorter and you can highlight multiple items in a shorter space, making recipients more likely to catch all the major points.

There are other ways to use email in tandem with your website, too. Using mailto: links on your pages may not work for everyone. Some people don't use email clients anymore. Even if they do, they may be viewing your website on another computer. For this reason, I encourage businesses to put formmail scripts on their websites. From any computer, a potential customer can then send you and email no matter where they are. Your form can also guide them to make sure they enter all the information you will need. They can even select things like whether they prefer phone or email contact. Unlike mailto: links, your script can transparently route these emails to different employees based on the content of the email or choices within the form.

Do It Better or Do It Different

One of the most important pieces of advice I ever got was at a conference where the speaker explained that you can't always do things better than your competitors. There will always be someone that can do things better than you, but better doesn't mean they can do it quite the same way. In other words, if you can't do things better then do them differently!

What this means to your business's website is something you'll have to figure out, but get your mind working on this kind of thinking as often as possible. In my own case, I can see things that I did years ago on my own websites that are now commonplace. For one thing, I kept an online journal years ago, back before the blogging revolution. For the last couple of years, I've also done online audio shows that deal with issues within the IT industry, before podcasting started getting popular. While these aren't all that unique today, at the time they were fairly revolutionary ideas.

No matter what your business is offering on its website, there will always be competitors getting more traffic, spending more on advertising, and able to charge less than you. For this reason, it's absolutely essential that you find a way to do something different. Don't just follow the trends – lead them.

Choose Role Models Carefully

My final piece of advice for making your website an effective marketing tool is to be careful where you go for advice. There are a lot of famous people offering guidance, both for free and for profit, on how to market your site or business. Be careful who you listen to.

Most of you reading this article probably have no idea who I am. My business ventures are rather humble, so many would say I have no business giving this sort of advice. For this reason, I tried to give unconventional (or at least uncommon) tips and back them up with evidence and personal experiences.

When you look for pointers on making your website more effective, I encourage you to avoid getting them from the celebrities who have taken their fame and turned it into business credibility. Rather, find out from the people who started with no online reputation and still managed to achieve success.

This article originally appeared in Ping !Zine.