Pick a Niche
Don't try to be all things to all people. Your website will end up being a mile wide and a half inch deep. Instead of speaking keenly to the specific needs of a tightly-targeted audience, you'll say something watered down to many, thus not leaving a particularly memorable impression on anyone.

Ask yourself if your audience is narrow enough. That's right: narrow enough. The more highly-defined your target group is, the more exacting your website can be to meeting some critical need they have. You will have to address some critical need most of the time in order to pull them into your website with some reliable frequency. The need may be information, some utility (like a calculator that is geared to the specifics of a given industry), a database, an archive, or it may even be an attractive price on a cappuccino machine that serves 120 cups of Java to your closest friends.

Attention! Figure Out How to Get It.
Look, the last thing you want is to have your spiffy new site launched and no one shows up except for you and your competitors:). The biggest mistake I see today is people blow their whole budget on website development and leave nothing for promotion and PR (Public Relations, as in distributing press releases). Do one of two things:

1. Reserve a piece of the development budget for marketing. Of course, site developers won't love me for saying this because it means you'll have to scale back the site.

2. Go back to the well and ask for more money. Tell your management they need to **amortize** the investment they are making in the site with a marketing budget, else they'll have the slickest site nobody's ever heard of. There's a distinct look of realization when management realizes this wisdom. It's a bitter pill sometimes, but they'll probably respect you for biting the bullet and raising the issue, if it hasn't been raised already. The alternative is something similar to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of a bridge where there are no cars lined up to go across.

Selling the Traffic You Have.
Many sites get erected because they have an interesting editorial angle. Amazingly, many of these sites don't think twice about how they're going to sell the advertising "avails" (availablities) that are created. You have to ask yourself some serious questions here.

Are you going to hire a "rep" to sell those avails? How much will you pay him or her? A good one isn't cheap. Will you have reps in LA and New York, where much of the media sales happen? Even if yours is a local site, this isn't entirely out of the question to consider.

Perhaps you'll farm out the sales. Often, the rep earns a percentage of the sale plus some "draw," or money up-front you pay to your rep to tie him over until those sales start to come in. The ratio is often 50:50, but there is no hard and fast rule here. Some reps are paid entirely on a commission basis, but you better have a hot product that many people want right off the bat if you're going to attract a good sales person to you.

Check out ad auctions like Flycast.com. Or you may want to be part of an ad banner network like DoubleClick. Many of the large networks deal in huge volumes and would need millions of impressions a month in order to make it worth their while. You have to ask yourself, "What am I going to do to draw millions of impressions to my site?" If you think you'll be generating less than a few million impressions to your site, look into Ad-Venture Network, which has a minimum requirement of 500,000 impressions from you monthly and sometimes less, if you have a very unique high-end audience. Ad-Venture works with you in three different ways:

1. They will rep your site as a stand-alone site, rather than part of a network. The cpm rate asked for on your behalf with this plan is between $30-$50.

2. They will include your site in what might be called an "affinity network," whereby your site is grouped with other sites of similar ilk. This is helpful when selling avails, since they often will do campaigns based on sports, business/finance, or games. The cpm here is slightly less than the first option because it is a little less targeted.

3. Run of network, whereby ads will appear on your site that are somewhat random, but are sold at a cheaper rate. The asking price for this plan to the advertiser is $25 cpm. Be aware that most rate cards are very negotiable and advertisers know that. They're apt to ask for discounts, sometimes very deep discounts.

In addition, Ad-Venture sells other types of avails, such as sponsorships, button placements or a position on your email update service. With Ad-Venture, there is no up-front cost for you. If they sell avails on your site, they will pass along the cost of serving the ads, which is about 50 cents cpm and then charge you the agreed-to commission.

Another place you want to check out is LinkExchange, which allows you to barter ads on your site for exposure on other sites. The ratio is typically 2 ads appearing on your site for every one of yours appearing elsewhere. You won't make money doing this, but it's a good way to turn unsold ad avails on your site into exposures on other sites that will build your traffic and awareness. Know that just about every single site out there on the web has a good amount of unsold ad space. You might as well put it to work with LinkExchange.

Beware. Some ad networks gather and use the data collected from your site. Some may supply it to their clients, while others promise to only use it for internal statistical analysis. This may or may not be an issue for you, but do know to ask about it whenever you're discussing a relationship with an ad network. It's not the sort of thing you'd want to have as a surprise down the road.

The more specific your topic, the higher the "cpm," or cost per thousand. This means you can charge more for the eyeballs of hard-to-find people. Look to the magazine universe for an analogy. Fortune Magazine or Ad Age will get more money per reader than People Magazine or the Enquirer. While your cost per visitor will be higher, you're apt to have fewer of them because it is a smaller audience. To augment your advertising revenues, you may want to syndicate your content. I do this with my Web Digest For Marketers (WDFM) newsletter. I license the short reviews in batches of ten. I call them "ten-packs." Since I've already made the reviews, I can sell them for less that what it would cost another publication to make.

Finally, I've found that having testimonials from advertisers on my site is an extraordinary potent selling tool. If the ad that ran in my newsletter was successful, I ask them to say what they liked in a brief paragraph. For their efforts, I always thank them by offering a discount on a future ad or sending them a copy of my book, "Essential Business Tactics for the Net." BTW, without announcing it, I always send a copy of my book to people who have advertised. Much more often than not, I find that brings in repeat business.

Pointing to Your Site Online
You want to advertise your site on other sites. You might buy those online avails on other sites, or hopefully be able to save some money and barter ads between your site and theirs.

One of the best-kept advertising secrets on the Internet is advertising on email mailing lists. There are over 60,000 of them. Now many of them don't accept ads, but lots of them do. Ads are cheap to buy and cost nothing to produce because it's all done in email. It's worth your valuable time to search these three databases and see which ones in your niche accept advertising (Check out: The List of Lists; Liszt; and Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists). There are "one-way" lists like my WDFM, which goes from me to 12,000+ people. "Two-way" lists are discussion lists, like Online-Ads. Here, 6,000+ recipients can talk back and forth between each other. Make sure you advertise on a moderated list where the moderator keeps the discussions on-topic.

Ultimately, whether you advertise with banners on sites or on lists, make sure you give your target group a darn good reason to come to your website.

Pointing to Your Site Offline
You must must must consider offline promotion of your website as integral to your plan to attract traffic to your site. Maybe your content or attraction is so good it gets talked about and pointed to in the trade press. Nothing builds traffic like a third-party editorial endorsement. Print or broadcast ads are a big help too, if you have the budget for it. Remember, you can do a barter deal with a print publication the same way you can with another website.

Think about having an event on your site to draw in visitors. Even better, design a campaign with weekly or monthly events. Whatever it is, it has to be snazzy enough to cause them to write down the url, go to their computer, fire up their browser, and then go to your site. You must make sure to give them something juicy enough to sink their cyberteeth into:). LC