Your web site is up and running, now what? This is the $64,000 question. The problem is, what works for one web site won't necessarily work for yours. So where do you start? First, realize your market. Sure you are a Realtor and/or a mortgage broker, but what is your "online" market. Who do you want your message to reach?  Figuring out your online market is vital to your success, more importantly, once you have realized your online market, the next step is to find out where those people are "online"  Here's where you begin your channel development.

With channel development, your goal is to create as many lead generating channels as possible. A great place to start is with portals and search engines such as AOL, Yahoo!, Excite, Google and so forth.  Portals and search engines receive over 90% of  all Internet traffic which means your online market will more than likely find you on these mega sites. My personal favorite is Google. With Google you can open an AdWords account for a mere one time $5 setup fee, then depending on your daily budget, be it $1 per day or $100 per day, you then place bids on keywords, such as "Florida Real Estate" or "Los Angeles Commercial Properties", hence your online market.

When people type in your selected keyword(s), your site will appear as one of the top sponsors, whether you are the first or fifth listing depends on a couple of variables such as bid amount (the higher your bid, the higher your listing) and popularity (the number of clicks you receive, etc.). With Google Adwords, your listing not only appears on Google.com, but also on America Online (AOL) and Ask Jeeves as well as thousands of smaller web sites through a program called AdSense which is what appears on this web site to the right of your screen.  There is a similar program by a company called Overture who is about to be acquired by Yahoo! for approximately $1.63 billion.  This is the company to first introduce the concept of bidding for placement which is usually referred to as Cost-Per-Click (CPC) or Pay-Per-Performance (PPP).

With Overture, your web site listing appears on MSN, Yahoo!, Lycos, AltaVista and InfoSpace. I recommend opening an account with both Google and Overture, run a few small test campaigns with each program to see which service works better for your site. Keep in mind you get what you pay for - literally. If you place your bid at $1.00 per click and your budget is $1,000, you are going to get 1,000 pre-qualified guests to your web site. These are people that went to a search engine, typed in a specific keyword, saw your listing in the search results and clicked on your link so they know why they are at your web site as opposed to some random visitor who has no clue how and why they ended up at your web site to begin with.

Now, after a few thousand or so clicks, you do not see an increase in qualified leads coming in from your web site, we can assume that your web site is not up to par in the areas of user friendliness. On our next feature, we'll discuss how we can improve the performance of your web site so you can turn those clicks into clients.

You got the hits, now what?