Of course, the competition represents only one part of your business you need to keep an eye on. Just as important is keeping a healthy bottom line. As the economy has gone sour over the last couple of years, lots of business owners and marketers have decided to cut back on their web investments. Some did this as a matter of planning; for others, it was a stark necessity. As things continue to pick up, however, you’re going to want to be sure you’re doing all you need to do in order to bring in new sales and customers. Here are four things to consider adding to your business site, if you haven’t already:

1. Links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on.

Social networking isn’t just a newer way to find customers – it’s a different way of interacting with them altogether. But you’re not going to enjoy any of the benefits (like stronger relationships, bigger account values, and increased referrals) if no one ever finds your profile. That’s why it’s so important that you place links to your information at these sites on your home page, and possibly other places. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find you.

Another reason to take this step, like many on this list, is because visitors expect it. They’ve become accustomed to communicating with friends, colleagues, and vendors in social networking formats, and so if you aren’t there, they might wonder whether your business is staying up with new ideas and processes.

2. Video.

The recent increase in availability of high-speed Internet service, not to mention the lowering prices, has meant that online videos have become more cost-effective than they were just a few years ago. While video used to chew up too much bandwidth to effectively convey even the simplest of marketing messages, these days cell phones, netbooks, and other low-end computers can process longer clips easily.

The uses for video on your business site are almost endless. Besides creating sales materials, you can also release instructional pieces that show your customers how to use and maintain your products, introductory clips that draw visitors deeper into your site, and even “viral” sketches that spread your brand quickly from one user to another.

3. A blog.

There aren’t many companies or self-employed professionals who haven’t at least tried blogging, and for good reason: blogs allow you to communicate with your customers informally while helping your search engine optimization efforts at the same time. To get the most out of yours, though, you need to do more than make the occasional post. Instead, make sure visitors can find it easily, and then post fresh content at least a few times a month. Blogging might not be new, but it’s still growing; you can’t afford to miss out on the benefits it can bring your business.

4. A newsletter or free giveaway.

Unless you work for an enormous company with nearly unlimited resources (and maybe even then), getting people to your site is probably expensive and time-consuming. Because of that, it’s imperative that your visitors not leave quickly.

By using blogs, video, and social media, you should be able to hold more of their attention than you have in the past. But don’t stop there – make it easy to follow up with them later. Studies have repeatedly shown that it usually takes several contacts to make the first sale to a new customer, and yet many marketers give up after the first try. Whether it’s a free e-book, special report, newsletter, or other promotion, make sure you’re not letting traffic slip away without gathering a bit of information; you work too hard at finding people not to come any closer to a buying relationship.

In web marketing, or any marketing for that matter, there aren’t many “must try” strategies; what works for one company might not make much sense for another. You should try putting these four into play on your website, though. None of them is difficult or expensive, and they can keep you from falling behind the competition as buyers come back to the market.

Create a Marketing Timeline

Have a plan.  Start by laying out a detailed strategy for at least the first two quarters of the year.  This way you can begin to budget and allocate internal resources needed to make the strategy successful.

Keep What Has Been Working

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  Keep doing what has been working in the past.  You may be able to make a few minor adjustments to make those marketing tactics even better.

Test a Different Marketing Approach

If every year you decide to do the exact same marketing, you will never really know if other types of marketing are more successful.  Marketing tactics have changed drastically compared to 30 years ago…even 5 years ago.  Don’t be afraid to try different things.  Even if your marketing budget is small, do the research, understand where your target market is communicating, and find a new way to reach out to them.

Here are a few things you can try:

• Sponsor an industry newsletter
• Write a guest blog post for a well respected, high traffic blog
• Host/Sponsor a local meet-up in your area
• Invite clients and potential clients to your office for a Free Seminar
• Create a great piece of content that you can give away on your site (white papers, free tools, etc.)
• Test different discounts, special offers, promotions

Monitor, Analyze, Adjust…Repeat

In any marketing campaign it is important to be able to measure its success.  In order to do that, you need to define what you consider a conversion.  Is it a download? A contact form submission? A phone call?  For traditional media it can be a bit harder, especially for radio, TV, and billboard advertising.  But for the Internet everything is trackable!

Make sure you have a good analytics program to track what people are doing on your site.  You may want to invest in a phone tracking solution, so you can track calls that originate from your website.

Once you have a significant amount of data, it is important to analyze it by seeing which campaigns were more successful.  If certain marketing programs are generating more business and a better ROI, start allocating more budget towards those campaigns.  For the campaigns that did not return a positive ROI, you could try tweaking things like messaging, offers, keywords, etc.  Sometimes a simple tweak can bring back a big return.

Marketing Trends for the Upcoming Year

Forrester Research reported that Internet Marketing spending will increase another 13% in 2010.  More and more companies are starting to shift their advertising dollars from traditional media methods to things like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, video creation, e-mail marketing and mobile marketing.

We are really starting to see a major shift in how companies are marketing their products and services.  With social communication tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; companies are able to track and monitor the progress of their Internet marketing campaigns unlike traditional marketing.  In this down economy, business owners are being smarter with their advertising dollars.  Make sure you do the same and invest is marketing programs that are well-researched, targeted and measurable.

So…have you planned your 2010 marketing strategy?