What are your ideas on increasing online engagement for your business?

[Joel]

I am curious how, if you owned a business, you would increase the number of customers registering with your online site. What techniques would you use to have people commit to registering with your site? How would you notify them you are online register-able?

[Hussain]

In general, people are tired of registering and re-registering to websites. There's just too many companies that want users to register, so users (people that commonly use the internet a lot) are tired of registering. What is or has been happening for a while now is the OpenID movement. Many people say that "why do some websites only allow you to comment using twitter or facebook" and this is precisely why. It's easier for a company to have someone comment on an article by simply clicking "share with facebook" then to have someone fill in a form and confirm their email address. The OpenID movement is precisely based on this and common supporters include facebook, twitter and linkedin.

As far as owning a business is concerned, if you're selling something online, you don't need people to register as members (as far as I recall). By just allowing them to purchase something using a secure payment gateway and shopping cart, people will be able to buy things online without having user-accounts. I've seen a lot of companies whose business it is to just sell and not create an online presence, use this strategy.

In order to promote your site, just get your site SEO geared and maybe use a bit of social media as well. Online-marketing is an extensive topic and there's a lot of resources online that you can use to promote your businesses online presence.

I don't understand the question about notifying customers. You can just advertise your companies website together with the company's name on things like business cards or banners. Once people visit your site, then they will see that they can register or even just buy things without registering.