Thanks to the Internet, businesses no longer need to outspend their competitors to outperform them on the marketing front. Small companies can go toe-to-toe with established, deep-pocketed enterprises, virtually overnight.

But how? By leveraging the value a well-versed website designer brings to the table. Regardless of a business’ size or industry, a proficient website designer can help:

• Achieve a desired image and appeal to specific markets
• Enable prospects and customers to quickly find relevant information and easily complete tasks
• Build a customer base and increase leads, sales and revenues

Oddly, businesses frequently fork over significant marketing budgets to PR firms, radio, TV, and print publications. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, businesses spend about $400 billion on advertising annually, much of the money going to traditional channels, like television commercials. However, when it comes to their website — the marketing hub that pulls all marketing operations together — business owners often tighten the purse strings.

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So, your shiny new website marketing copy is finally in place. Congratulations! Even better, that same marketing copy is starting to bring in business. (Must be all those precise keywords and cleverly phrased calls to action.)

Before you amortize your investment, consider how those carefully crafted words can work for your business in other places. Repurposing your website marketing copy will:

• Reinforce your brand identity
• Establish consistent messaging
• Increase customer recognition

It will also give you more than your money’s worth.

Here are 10 possible ways to repurpose your website marketing copy so it works overtime for your company, online and offline.

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Buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for consumers, suggests a new San Francisco State University psychology study.

The study demonstrates that experiential purchases, such as a meal out or theater tickets, result in increased wellbeing because they satisfy higher order needs — specifically the need for social connectedness and vitality.

“These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being,” said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.

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Marketers typically cut interactive spending in a recession. But a Forrester survey of 333 interactive marketers revealed strong support for maintaining or increasing budgets, reported Forrester’s Josh Bernoff.

The categories of choice include search optimization, social networking, email and blogging. In fact, among 12 major categories only online displays ads looked soft.

According to Forrester, professional services, financial services and media marketers are most likely to plan increases in interactive marketing.

In a recession like this, Bernoff suggested marketers should focus on the measurability of their online and social applications and think in terms of building long-standing assets, not one-off campaigns to pump up quarterly sales.

Thousands of applications and millions of downloads are driving Facebook’s economy. Who’s behind it? Hackers.

Unlike MySpace, Facebook has opened up its network to developers, making it easy for them to make money from applications. A full list of third-party applications, designed to allow Facebook users interact with friends and networks, can be found in the official site’s application directory. They range from tools to compare people to applications that allow you to adopt virtual pets.

To witness this economy’s escalation, one only needs to stop by Adonomics (formerly Appaholics). The website, conceived by San Francisco-based programmer Jesse Farmer, provides stock-market-style analyses of Facebook features. Programmers can analyze the value of their applications in advertising dollars, and how it correlates to their applications’ growth.

Once a social networking site exclusively for college students, Facebook opened registration to the general public last year and attracted vast groups of visitors from outside the 18-24 year old age segment.  In fact, comScore reported last month the website grew to 26.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. in May 2007, marking an 89 per cent increase versus the same month last year.

Editor’s note: see Facebook security post

Businesses are starting to recognize it’s not the volume of online traffic, but the quality that counts.

Good traffic comprises relevant visitors who are likely to fulfill a desired action on your website, whether it’s to make a purchase, e-mail or call, subscribe to a newsletter or what have you.

Poor traffic, even in extraordinary amounts, is a waste of bandwidth. No matter how impressive the numbers, the wrong crowd won’t bring you desired results.
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