Being a web designer, I get a lot of people asking about functionality. Sure, the design looks great, but how can you get that site available to many people at once? Well, first thing’s first: all of us in the field know that the simple key is experimentation. How else can you find new and unique ways to get noticed? To kick things off and demonstrate the ideal, take a look at the top ten list below, some of which you may never have thought of. If you like it, link to it. Linking has become a universal statement of respect, and as you are about to discover, a very important staple of marketing.

Without further ado, here is the:

Top Ten Ways For Getting Your Business Noticed In 2009

#10 - Yahoo Answers

You heard me correctly, Yahoo Answers makes number 10 on my list of major assets to a business plan.

If you’ve ever used this little guy for personal searches or general convenience, you might suspect nothing more than your basic “question and answer” kind of search. Nothing new there. You’ve been to ask.com (or askjeeves in the golden days), and probably answers and about.com so what makes this one different? Friends, one of the most prominent results of a Google search are links to Yahoo Answers, making it a HUGE benefit for link building. Consider how many times a single answer can come up in a Google search and multiply that by sometimes dozens of questions answered (each of course with a little link dropped in ;). As long as you keep it legit and have answers pertaining to the actual question, this one is a gold mine and is very underused.

#9 - Twitter.com

Twitter.com, if you’ve never used the site, is one of the fastest-growing social media websites available today. The message is simple: what are you doing?

If you don’t yet have an account for your business, definitely look into it. Like Yahoo Answers it is under-utilized, but the ease of access to information is incredibly helpful. With Twitter.com, you can potentially have dozens of “followers” who see your updates and in turn keep you in mind for future projects. With so many people connected between each other, Twitter makes it very simple to build links; if one person out of your followers finds your update interesting and replies or reposts, you’ve gained immediate access to even more potential customers, and the opportunity is endless.

#8 - Reserve Your Rights!

All too often I see companies out there that don’t take advantage of their portfolio. Web designers who don’t create link pages for their clients, maintenance experts who don’t reserve the right to leave a banner, or businessmen in general who don’t promote their businesses through jobs they’ve already done.

Now don’t get me wrong: by no means do I encourage you to leave your watermark without the client’s consent! But friends, that’s what good business practice and cooperation are all about. I’ve mentioned before that link exchanges have become a statement of respect, and this is exactly the situation that calls for it. If you’ve done an honorable job with your practice and everything you can for the client, they’ll have no problem promoting you in return for the extra traffic they get for the portfolio addition.

#7 - Partnerships

This one pretty much goes without saying, but again I’m often surprised by companies without partners in the business.

The web industry in particular is one with so many different niches you can’t really go wrong with investing in a partner. Hosting companies, for example, get tons of people emailing them each day about having a website designed without understanding what the word “hosting” means. So when considering where those companies direct extra clients, wouldn’t you like to benefit from the extra customers in return for redirecting them to the hosting company upon completion?

These types of exchanges are very common in today’s workplace, but in my opinion not nearly common enough. For this reason, strategic partnerships make number 7 on my list.

#6 - StumbleUpon

Many of you, I’m sure, predicted this one and still others are completely unaware of StumbleUpon’s magic.

No matter what kind of website you run, users all around the world have assuredly selected it in their StumbleUpon categories list. For those of you who haven’t used it, the service requires only a single click of a button before you’re whisked away to hundreds of thousands of sites organized by your preferences.

So what’s the big deal? Well, in many ways “Stumble” is the wave of the future and the best suggestion is also the simplest. Download it if you haven’t already, click thumbs up and “discover” your own site, and enjoy the extra traffic. You can even repeat for every interesting page, but please keep them amusing or somehow fascinating (like my site, perhaps.)

#5 - Search Engine Optimization

Alright, here’s the one that everyone wants and knows about. Literally every customer I’ve had this last year has asked me “how they can get to the top of Google” or Yahoo, or any of the other engines listed to the right. The answer can be complicated, and at times not so at all.

So many different companies have been founded for the very purpose of helping you reach new heights, and the importance of searches is equally well known.

Hopefully SEO’s position on this list is obvious enough, and for the BEST tips on getting to the top, wait for #1 and #2.

#4 - Craigslist

Of all tools available to businesses, there are few (actually only about… three) that are better than Craigslist. At this point, many of you have already been involved with the system, but perhaps not as much as you could be. Multiple posts a day on Craigs can be responsible for hundreds of people viewing your site, and of course every ad is free. Later on this week I plan to publish a more detailed Craiglist plan to get serious business coming your way, so be on the look out for a great scheme.

#3 - Link Building

There are a cornucopia of different ways to build links for your business, but let’s start with the basics. Link building is fundamentally making content enjoyable enough that viewers of your site voluntarily link to you. I can’t imagine how many links “the blue ball project” must have received just from a single tiled gif. Hell, half of you are looking it up as we speak. If there’s one key to building links, it’s providing information in a way that others may not have seen it.

Business is all about accessibility. Make your paragraphs short and your point shorter and you’ll get many more links than you would with a giant block of text. Also, there’s nothing wrong with humor, especially when your competitors do something stupid to make you look good

#2 - Start a Blog

If you weren’t already aware, SEO and blogs go hand in hand. With blogs you have the ability to update your site whenever you’d like and users can gain instant access to your RSS feed.

So how is this important?

Well if you’re one of those folks that wants to “get to the top of Google” this is exactly what you need. Google bots search for sites that are updated often, so a blog post a day might really keep the other sites at bay. On top of all the rest, you can tag your posts in a lot of cases to increase the amount of keywords that search engine’s find. There really is only one better thing to help you out and tie everything together but I HIGHLY recommend them both.

And the number one way for getting your business noticed in 2009 is…

#1 - Wordpress is your friend

There may never be a better tool for producing a popular website than Wordpress, and I say that both from experience as a designer and a personal user. Never before have so many plug ins for SEO and meta tags been combined into one easy-to-use system,  and for myself and my clients it’s more than worthwhile.

The way I have things set up I find to be the simplest of all: you’re given a simple menu to make your post and fill in your content (as I am right now), and below you’re given the ability to fill in all your tags that will come up in searches. It’s as easy as that. In a way, it’s SEO, tagging, blogging, updating, and often linking built into one platform. If you’re looking for an easy way to get a small business site started, this is the way to do it.

And of course, for my own plug: If you want this all and a well-designed page to show it off, I’m just the guy to do it. For all the rest, I hope this list has helped give you some new ideas to boost business in 2009. For partnership opportunities or more information, please feel free to contact me at the link above, and if you enjoyed my list please demonstrate the ideas by “posting it forward” and sharing the link.

All the best to everyone,

Chris D Griffin