Potential customers become very frustrated when they realise information on a company’s website is out-of-date.

Make it a monthly procedure to go through each page of the website and ensure the content, particularly data such as rates, is relevant and timely.

When you are writing content for your website, consider if parts of it are likely to become out of date quickly, and consider reworking that part so that it requires less attention down the track.

Encourage your staff to take ownership over your website and contribute content, come up with marketing ideas, and make suggestions to enhance the website.

A blog, for example, is in excellent way to allow staff to write articles on areas in which they are experts.

You might also run an email newsletter that features an article written by a different staff member each month.

Your staff will feel more involved and responsible for the business as a result.

If you operate more than one website, or if you utilise phone numbers in your advertising, consider the option of leasing multiple freecall (tollfree) numbers to enable better tracking through this medium.

Your phone company (or some clever PBX systems) can provide reports on call activity, which you can then apply proportionally against leads and sales made via those channels, and merge this data with similar data collected through your website or statistics package.

Spammers use scripts that crawl the web and fill out forms, hoping the form will result in someone receiving their spam message.

This causes problems for business owners who can become inundated with spam through their contact/enquiry, order and booking forms, making it difficult and time-consuming to sort through and find the legitimate submissions.

Two effective ways to prevent, or minimise, this type of spamare:

• Have your web developer modify the form to discard any form submissions that contain more than three URLs (which would never occur in ordinary usage)
• Have your web developer install a CAPTCHA (part of the form that requires the user to do something, such as identify a word in an image, that a computer script cannot do)

The former is non-intrusive, and might suffice for many websites. The latter is intrusive, in that it requires your visitor to do more work, but might be worth it in order to reduce workload in sifting through countless spam form submissions.

We all receive spam, although it is interesting to see what constitutes “heaps” of spam amongst different people. For some, that might be 10 spam emails per day; for others, that might be 1000. Certainly, the longer your website has been around and the more popular it becomes, the more spam you will receive through email addresses referenced on the website, as well as email addresses that spammers guess based on your domain name.

Here are some tips for reducing and managing the spam you receive:

• Prevent a large amount of spam by never using your primary email address when signup up for websites, posting on discussion forums, etc. Create a second email account for this purpose; this way, you can easily filter those emails into a separate folder, or delete the account entirely.
• Only display generic email addresses, such as info@, on your website; reserve name-based email address, such as john@, to internal and direct communication. This helps reduce spam being sent to your day-to-day email address.
• Ask your web hosting company what spam prevention or tagging systems they have in place, and learn how to use them effectively. For example, you might be able to nominate a threshold at which suspicious emails are deleted, or have emails tagged as potential spam, or have suspicious emails forwarded to separate email account that you check less frequently.
• Learn how to use email filters (or rules) in your email program. If your web host uses software such as SpamAssassin, you can create an email filter that moves emails with a particular spam “score” to different folders. This allows you to keep your inbox clean, and you can check your spam folders once a day or once a week.
• Never respond to spam (by return email, by clicking a link, or by sending a read receipt.) A response tells the sender they have found a valid email address, and will simply send you more spam.

By understanding spam and utilising the tools available to you, spam can be transformed from a serious time waster to a mere annoyance.