Launching a website is a lot of work. So be sure to have fun.

The Internet is a place for serious business, but it’s also full of distractions both hilarious and informative. While you can find anything on the Internet, there is a casual atmosphere that pervades. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Loosen your tie a bit and be prepared to laugh.

While your business is undoubtedly serious and very important, it’s OK to crack a joke now and then. It’s OK to link to a funny video or write in a style that’s a little more casual. You don’t need to be a complete jokester, but you should be human.

Have some fun. The more fun you have with your site, the more people will notice. Launching a site is a lot of work, but it shouldn’t be a chore. Make it fun by having fun. You’ll enjoy and your readers will, too.

Once you’re up and running with a website it’s important to pay attention. If you’re going to reach your goals and objectives you need to be watching for the appropriate indicators that measure success. These may be your site’s traffic or response from the site or customers or whatever it is you’re tracking.

Just be sure you’re tracking them. Use a stats system like Google Analytics to track some of the big numbers. If you’re tracking things that aren’t automatically trackable like number of customers or responses you could just set up a simple Excel file (or a free Google Doc, to continue the economical streak). Maybe you’re tracking multiple numbers, like customers, sales, web site visitors, RSS subscribers, Twitter subscribers, etc., and an Excel file is an ideal way to bring them all together. The point is to pay attention to the important numbers and see how your strategies and tactics are working.

Especially as you’re getting started it will be slow going, so don’t get discouraged. Your website will need time to become established and you’ll need to spread the word. Your customers won’t realize you have a website until you tell them. As word begins to spread and your plans fall into place you should see your metrics begin to rise.

After a little time you should be able to notice if your efforts are paying off. This is especially important because you don’t want to waste time on something that isn’t working. If you’re posting blog entry after blog entry and your site’s traffic is still flat, you might need to try something else. But if you notice a little rise each time you post a blog entry that might be an indicator that you’re doing something right.

Keep in mind that you can’t put complete trust in the numbers. There are always other indicators that might trump the numbers (for example it might not directly bring in customers to blog, but blogging might give your brand an unquantifiable shot of respectability). And it’s also easy to become obsessed with the numbers. Especially when you can look at snazzy graphs you might be tempted to check your stats every day. Resist the temptation. While you do need to pay attention to what’s working, you can’t obsess. Instead obsess with getting your content right. Figure out how to track your stats and then do it infrequently enough so it’s not a distraction, but often enough that you can spot patterns and react accordingly.

Above all, be patient. You can build a website in a day, but you can’t build a great website in a day.

There’s a recession going on. We’re a long way away from the dot com boom. It’s OK to be cheap with your website.

I’m not suggesting cutting corners and getting sub-par design or tech help. Those things cost money and you’ll need to invest in them. I am suggesting being as cheap as you can. Be economical.

It’s easy to dump a lot of money into a site. And don’t forget the time investment. You might not be paying yourself like you would a contractor to write for your blog, but your time is still valuable. It’s easy to dump a lot of resources into a site before you know it’s worth your investment.

One of the great things about the web is that there are a lot of extremely cheap or even free services out there, and some of those do exactly what you need. Try a free service before committing to hefty monthly fees. You might discover the monthly fees are worth it. Or you might save yourself a pile of cash.

One of the best blog services and content management systems out there is WordPress. It’s free. But setting it up, customizing it and keeping it updated might be beyond your skill level, which is where a pay service might pay off (like ours).

While you’re saving money, don’t forget about making money. Spending a little on your site is worth it if it starts to bring in more money. Hopefully your site will quickly bring some health to your bottom line (that’s the point, right?).

But don’t forget that there are extra ways your site can bring in money. Especially if you’re running a blog it’s worth considering some of the extra revenue possibilities. There’s always advertising, which may or may not work for what you’re trying to accomplish, and there are also referral opportunities. Some of your business partners may offer a small kickback when you refer paying customers. Amazon runs a popular affiliate service that will pay you a small percentage when click-thrus turn into sales. It may not amount to much, but a few dollars from Amazon when you review books might help offset some of your costs.

As you’re trying to sort out the timing issues, what you really need is a plan. You need to think through what exactly you’re going to do with a website and how you’re going to do it.

• What do you hope to accomplish with your site?
• What’s the end goal?
• What’s it going to cost? And does the goal justify that cost?
• How’s it all going to work?

You’ve got to ask the big questions and you need to come up with serious answers. Just like your business, you’re going to get out of a website what you put into it. If you don’t put any thought into how it’s going to benefit you, you’re likely going to get haphazard results. But if you come up with a solid plan, you’re much more likely to succeed. You came up with a thorough and detailed business plan for your business (hopefully)—so likewise you need to come up with a detailed strategy for your website.

First come up with some goals. What do you want your site to accomplish? Your goals should be big picture:

• A restaurant might want more diners.
• A realtor might want to sell more houses.
• A nonprofit might want more donors.

Next figure out some strategies to accomplish those goals:

• A restaurant might offer coupons to lure in more customers.
• A realtor might use educational marketing to set themselves up as an expert and draw more customers.
• A nonprofit might use storytelling to get their message out there and engage more donors.

Now you’re getting somewhere. But how are you actually going to make these things happen? Come up with some specific tactics:

• A restaurant might use Twitter and Facebook to post coupons.
• A realtor might launch a blog and post three times a week to start educating potential customers.
• A nonprofit might create videos of the people they help.

Finally you need to come up with some objectives to measure everything by. How do you know if you’re succeeding if you don’t have some measure of success? This can be tough because you need to be realistic but fair. Results might be slow to come at first.

• A restaurant might want to see one new customer per week using the coupons.
• A realtor might want to see steady growth in traffic over the first month, hitting 500 unique visitors that first month.
• A nonprofit might want each video to be seen by 50 people.

And the questions and goals and objectives can keep building on each other. Blogging might be the tactic you take, but how are you going to get 500 people to visit the site? You need to keep refining and clarifying your plan with detail after detail. You’ll get those 500 people by posting three times a week, e-mailing all your friends to spread the word, asking a well-known real estate blogger to do a guest blog post, etc.

You can quickly see how much planning and thinking you have to do to pull this off. But that’s what you need to do if you want to succeed. The web isn’t the place for casual or sloppy marketing. If you’re going to get started with a website, you need to do it right. Be intentional. Think it through. If you manage to do that you’ll be doing more than getting started with a website—you’ll be on your way to succeeding.

The timing for a new website can be tricky. You’re faced with two opposing ideas: fast and slow. It’s tempting to dive right in and get started. It’s also tempting to sit back and slowly ponder how technology may best help you.

Fast
The web is all about speed. It’s one of the inherent advantages of the web. You can post something instantaneously. There’s no printing, no shipping, no waiting. You create it and you can post it. Instant delivery. If you want to launch a website for your organization, you could have one up today. Doing it quickly is the name of the game.

Of course you can go too fast. You can dive in too quickly and make too many mistakes. You can over-reach, over-stretch and over-commit yourself. Suddenly all that speed has turned into wasted effort.

Slow
While there’s a temptation to take advantage of the web’s speed, that can also be a trap. Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t be afraid to go slowly and test the waters. Don’t dive in and promise things you won’t be able to deliver. Figure out what works for you and your organization and what’s actually sustainable. Take time to ask the important questions. And take more time to figure out the answers.

Of course you can go too slow. You can never get around to posting your takeout menu online. You can forget about the ideas you had at the beginning and before you know it your website has lost its potential. You’ve forgotten to update for months at a time and suddenly no one cares anymore. That audience you built has disappeared.

Like most of life, balance is the key. Don’t go too quickly, but don’t poke along either. Take your time figuring out what you want to do, but then do it quickly. Don’t spend all day writing blog posts or Twitter updates, but write a few and see if you like it. Spend 20 minutes a day and see if it’s something you’ll stick with.

Don’t just be slow, be deliberate.

Don’t just be fast, be efficient.

That strategy needs to come first. It should drive which tactics you employ and which tactics you don’t touch. The strategy should explain why you use the tactics you do.

A restaurant may opt to use Twitter because sending random updates from a cell phone on the fly is a lot easier than finding time to sit down at a computer and draft a blog post. The tactic is appealing. But strategically finding a quick and easy way to deliver coupons and discounts to an army of fans is what’s important. That’s the goal. Twitter is just the tactic.

A consultant might turn to blogging as a way to capture and broadcast their expertise. The strategy is to employ educational marketing to inform their audience and establish themselves as a voice in the field. Blogging is just one of many tactics that would accomplish this goal (and a particularly good one).

A hip and eclectic music shop might see Facebook as an ideal way to connect with their crowd. The strategy is relational marketing. It relies heavily on the personality of the shop and demands a tactic that’s going to communicate a lot of personality. Facebook would be an ideal tactic to execute that strategy—it’s a perfect place to exude style, opinion and fun.

Before you get too carried away with the latest new tactic, make sure it fits with your overall marketing strategy.

Intel’s Fan Plan is the latest example. They’re giving discounts on Intel laptops to anyone in the Fan Plan for one day only—Monday, Nov. 30, aka Cyber Monday (the biggest online shopping day of the year, in contrast to Black Friday, the biggest in-real-life shopping day of the year). But the catch is that the more people who join the Fan Plan, the greater the discount will be.

It sounds like a win-win, right? Even Fast Company is wondering if this is the future of advertising.

The problem is that it relies on you turning salesperson on your friends to get a better deal. On the plus side you’re scoring a better deal for everybody, so it could be worse, but that subtle little issue remains. Intel is effectively bribing you to tell all your friends about Intel.

I’ve got a better idea: Create a remarkable product that doesn’t require bribery to get people to spread the word. Go ahead and offer a discount. Incentives are great. But don’t make the size of that discount dependent on how many people I tell.

Swedish furniture brand IKEA also got into the mix of manipulating Facebook with a giveaway to promote the opening of a new store. They posted photos of the new IKEA’s showrooms to Facebook and encouraged people to use a popular photo-tagging feature of Facebook. The feature is supposed to be used to identify people in photos. When you’re identified, your friends will be notified and can check out the fun new picture of you. But IKEA encouraged people to tag products in the photo with their name in order to win them. Tag a product and you can win it!

Sounds great. But what you’re really doing is misusing a useful feature and turning it into a commercial. When photos of you pop up in people’s newsfeed on Facebook, they’re paying attention because they care about you, not some product from IKEA. But if you abuse that feature to win a picture frame, you’re wasting your friends’ time. Facebook has even tightened their guidelines on promotions and this sort of strategy could be a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Social media is quickly growing and maturing, and people are getting tired of being advertised to by their friends and family. People should advertise for you because they like your product, not because they want a better discount. And in the end, that’s just a better pitch. Who am I going to listen to? My friend telling me about a product he uses and loves, or my friend shilling a product he barely knows just to save a few cents?

Isn’t that just the way it goes?

The service guy blamed it on not rotating the tires frequently enough, which just isn’t true. He gave me an estimate for new tires that I’ll have to swallow at some point in the near future—but not right now.

When I got home I went online and started doing a little research. Something seemed fishy—tires should easily last 40,000 miles. And a little research was all I had to do. One Google search later and I’d stumbled across a common problem of uneven tire wear for this particular make and model. Across the automotive blogs and forums people were complaining about the same issue. At least I’m not alone.

Armed with that knowledge, I contacted the service department at my dealership to see if anything can be done. A growing mob of disgruntled customers isn’t something to dismiss lightly. I’m not expecting miracles at this point (especially with my car past the warranty), but it’s always worth asking.

That’s the power of the web. There’s no hiding. If your product or service has a defect or a major failing, annoyed customers will share that information, find each other and demand you fix the problem. Their ability to organize is incredible. If you think you can hide or ignore the problem, you’ve got another thing coming.

Address problems head on. Don’t try to bury your mistakes and pretend they never happened. Be honest and up front with your customer service and you won’t get burned.

I’m not saying you need to be a web expert and do everything yourself. But if you don’t take a personal interest in your site, your customers won’t either. More than ever websites are a conversational piece of your marketing plan. They’re no longer about broadcasting your message, they’re about interacting with your audience. And that interaction is something you can’t fake or outsource. By all means bring in help to do it right, but if you’re not engaged and putting some of your personality into your site, it’s not going to work. If the people actually running your site aren’t empowered to give it personality, it’s going to flop.

You can’t just throw something online and hope it works. But if you put yourself online, if you’re engaged in the process and care about what it says and how it says it, then customers will notice. It’s no longer just a bit of marketing, but it’s a connection.

If you’re not in your website now, change it:

• Start blogging. Talk about what matters to you and your organization.
• If blogging sounds too involved, try Twitter. Share your hopes, dreams and favorite tips in 140 characters or less.
• Give people something of value. What about your business is incredibly valuable? Find a way to put that online. Whether it’s tips and expertise, coupons to entice people to come in and see the value for themselves, or something else.

You can’t just slap up your name in cyberspace and call it good. You need to have a clear and specific strategy for how you’re going to use your website to help your business.

You need a plan:

• Educational Marketing – You could use your website to education potential customers about your industry. You offer insight and knowledge and build trust with potential customers.
• Customer Service – You could put your site to work as a 24/7 customer service representative. Pack your site with instructions, FAQs, tips and anything that will answer customer questions. You could pair it with the more immediate response of Twitter or other social networking sites to give it a more relational feel and answer questions that don’t fit the standard mold.
• Offering Value – You could offer extra value on your website with special deals, coupons, or incentives your customers can’t get anywhere else. Amazon offers value by being cheaper, easier and having a wider selection than any brick and mortar bookstore. If e-commerce isn’t your thing, maybe you’re offering free resources that give customers value and establish a lasting relationship.

Whatever you do, make sure your website has a strategy. The last thing you want is the digital equivalent of a phone book listing.