Let's say you have a website. You probably feel pretty good about it. You have a presence. People can find you. You're out there. Sure, these are all good things; the only problem is everyone has a website. A website is the bare minimum.

A website is only just enough.

As a small business owner, as an entrepreneur as an upstart you must standout. You are the underdog. Underdogs don't out hustle the more established folks by doing just enough. And if you only have a website, you are only doing just enough.

Want to build your business and exceed your goals?

Do more than just enough.

Hold on, let's get down to it. If you consider how advanced the internet has become in just the last 5 years, if you only have a company website you aren't doing just enough.

You're doing less than enough.

You're doing enough to exist, but not enough to excel.

You're doing enough to be counted, but not enough to go over the top.

I'm sorry. I really like you. I wish you the best, but the truth is you're behind the curve.

You can change it, but to do that, first you need to change how you see the web and the possibilities. You've got to decide if you're serious about your business? Is your business concept a winner or a loser? Can it work? Is it working? What to do about it? More of the same isn't the answer. Making your website more pretty isn't going to cut it. You need to diversify.

I may be blunt, but I'm not exaggerating. Like John McCain says, "Time for some straight talk".

A business website should be only one piece of your web presence. You should also have a presence on every social networking website out there. You should have articles related to your business all across the information superhighway. You should belong to all the major (and some not so major) business networking sites. You should have a video on YouTube, a Face book, a MySpace and a Squidoo page. You should be everywhere other business owners congregate, share ideas, exchange referrals and talk shop.

You must be there.

No excuses.

No exceptions.

Sure, it takes time to set up marketing mechanisms across the many websites that are available, but it's time well invested because your company website isn't the end all to be all of generating buzz and finding leads on the internet, your website is just the beginning.

Make a commitment to your business and cease and desist looking at those social networking sites as options. They aren't options, they are necessities.

If you need more reasons to justify putting your resources into more than a company website, just take a look at Barack Obama's surge. Obama-mania owes much of its energy and support to the social networking sites that it uses. Get involved and secure some of that same viral power for your business. 99% of it is free and 100% of it is good business.

Welcome to the first day of your new way of looking at promoting your business on the net.

Go get started yesterday.

Like a lot of web developers, I'm not always that disciplined when it comes to the file naming convention I use and I sometimes end up with a situation whereby I have some files that are in lowercase, some that begin with a capital, and some that are a bit of a mixture.

One web site I maintain contains about 2000 web pages and has about 20,000 hyperlinks. As you can imagine, I had one of those sinking feelings when I was told that in order to migrate the web site to a new content management system, all the file names and hyperlinks would need to be changed to lowercase.

Whenever I am presented with a problem like this, my instinct is always to write a Perl script using one or more regular expressions to solve the problem. This particular situation was no exception.

Change a string to lowercase

The following regular expression changes all the characters in a string to lowercase. The first part of the regular expression finds a hyperlink, and the second part converts the string. (Just in case this article is not displayed correctly, there should be a single backslash in front of the 'L$1').

Change a filename to lowercase

Likewise, changing a filename itself is very simple. The following two lines perform the task quite nicely:

(Again, there should be a single backslash in front of the 'L$name'.)

If you need more information on how to incorporate the above code snippets into a complete script, feel free to contact me directly.

In any type of sales if you're not tracking your leads, your sales, your conversion rates, etc. then you are missing out on an opportunity to expand and grow your business; in the Internet Marketing world this is especially true.

There are plenty of free tools on the Internet nowadays that allow you to see how many visitors you are getting, what geographic location they are in and 'how' they got to your website. The 'how' they got to your site is the most important question of all.

You may be getting 500 visitors a month of which 300 may be coming from advertising source 'A' with another hundred coming from advertising source 'B' and yet another 50 visitors coming from advertising source 'C' with the rest coming in small increments of 1-5 from different ads that you've placed on the Internet.

One good reason to track your website visitors is it lets you know whats working in contrast to that which is barely working if working at all; this way you can save time and energy focusing on what works and tossing aside what doesn't.

Another excellent reason is, as stated before, to save time. You want an online business to enjoy the increase in time available to spend with your family, on hobbies or on whatever you want to do. If you're laboring at a computer all day wasting time on what doesn't work then you are also wasting precious time that would better be spent elsewhere.

There are all kinds of free trackers on the Internet but one of the best I've ever seen is Google Analytics. You can see everything from the number of visitors your site had from day to day, but you can also see their geographical location as well as how they were referred to your site. This is very important as you want to know what is working and what isn't. Another benefit of Google analytics is that it doesn't leave a little box at the bottom of your page which allows both you and all your visitors to see your site statistics. With Google Analytics you place a small piece of code at the bottom of your page which is invisible so only you have access to your stats.