Think about starting anew, and leaving your old one be.

Think about a micro site as a companion to your main website. Micro-sites typically cost than $5,000, and can be done with our freelance network and your staff.

• Pharma or OTC site: Health products in the pharmaceutical and OTC segments cry out for content. Web audiences are looking for help with their problems, whether it be beauty issues, minor ailments or major illness.
• Brand-centric site: Start a micro-site around one of your defunct or declining brand names. Show the history of the brand, the users of the brand and explain its current products, however modest. Allow readers to comment and post about what they like about the brand.
• Retailers: Build a separate site around one of your fashion lines or departments. Post concept ideas. Encourage readers to comment on merchandise, selection and direction.
• Financial Services: Build separate micro-sites around service-oriented stories and financial advice. The big banks do this, but create your own content relating to your offerings. Develop separate branch profiles, where you “brand” individual branches of your bank and the employees there.
• Resort Destination Guide: Build your own mini-Fodor’s guide to the area surrounding your resort, including neighboring attractions, restaurants, parks, churches and transportation. While  you might have some of this on your hotel’s site, putting it on a separate site, with links back to your booking site, will help not only build your resort’s traffic, but to reposition your resort as the most important hotel in the region.
• Magazine Ancillary Sites: Most magazine websites are all about giving away your valuable content in the hope that someone will click on some ads nearby. How about ancillary sites that revolve around niche products. Or why not test out a new pilot magazine concept as a website first?

Questions? Call us at 703-745-8602.

The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

This quote works on so many levels. But it is most appropriate to web content, and company blogs. If you want to be connected to the issue, you have to post something about it. It is that simple. You can talk about the issue, you can think about the issue, you can imagine the issue. You can even dream about the issue. But until you post something on the web, you aren’t the issue. Someone else is.

Talking to companies, they want to be a part of the discussion, the ideas, the thought leadership. But the only way to do that is to get into the game.

1. Spigit: I love Spigit, and learned about it through Hugh Carpenter’s blog (he is V/P of product). I would love to see how it works at a big company. Basically, it is sort of a Basecamp but for companies that generate ideas. Plus, it’s alot snazzier looking. The great thing is the ideas that are posted to Spigit by companies then can be analyzed by other staffers, including ROI calculations. It looks nice, so it would seem fun to use. Disney used to keep all its great ideas on a shelf. This brings the idea to all companies. If there is one service that could pull the U.S. out of its job-losing hole and democratize creativity, Spigit could be it.
2. Wordstream: A Firefox Plugin, this helps web writers optimize their copy for SEO while it is being written. The add on helps writers in conducting keyword discovery, keyword research, keyword grouping, search marketing workflow and for turning research into action.
3. LeadLander is a web analytic software that is connected to a database. Basically, it helps salespeople use web analytics reports to provide for lead generation and customer intelligence.
4. FreeConferenceCall.com: Nothing new about this service, but I’ve found handy, often.
5. Yammer: How could something that is just like Twitter, for internal uses, work at a company? I am using for a company-wide test, and find that it gives remote workers like me a chance to keep up with the office buzz.
6. Ning: I’ve seen this service used more and more, including uses as varied as a local business entrepreneur group, Yes941, Robert Kay’s Fiji travel site FijiGuide.com and the  men’s bible study Samson Society.

• Wufoo is an online html form builder from Tampa’s Infinity Box. It makes it easy to have all sorts of forms, ordering and such without a developer. Building forms is fun!
• Sitepoint.com profiled the “must have” chrome extensions, including Firebug Lite, Resolution Test and Eye Dropper.
• Fast Pencil is a terrific way to put together a book, quickly. You still have to write it, but features in it allow you to format it quickly, and paginate it. A new Fast Pencil service will help execs write their own books.
• Survey Monkey: This is not a new site, but folks really seem to make use of it. Best idea? Taking surveys of customers on issues that relate to your industry, then releasing the information in surveys.
• Architizer: It’s a site for architects and architect junkies. It describes itself as Architizer is a new way for architects to interact, show their work, and find clients. It is an open community created by architects for architects. One architectural project has dozens of contributors, from the intern who made the conceptual models to the construction administrator. Not alot of content, but I like it.
• Wibya: This is a tool that enables your readers to “tweet and write to your Fan Page from your website and share your content.”

Frankly, I believe this mostly comes from legal departments, who are older, and do not understand the nature of information. The reality is that a fact cannot be copyrighted. The organization of the facts can, but one cannot copyright whether something happened or not. If a reporter is first on the scene of a plane crash, others do not have to actually see the plane crash to write about it. Otherwise, there could be no news.

What is the line between scraping and aggregation? Each instance is different. If the story is only 100 words, and you filch 80 of them and give no link, that’s theft. But if someone pulls an 80 word intro from a major online think piece, and gives a link, then that’s not. There is no way to draw a firm line on the issue, as each case is a bit different. We must all interpret things as we move along in our work, and well-meaning folks can easily figure it out.

And any newspaper writer knows it. It’s called the PM Lead. It’s a basic of journalism. When you’ve missed the big story, you start with the other story as a beginning point, and then you source out some quotes of your own. It’s then your story too.

This Lent, I have seen very easily the value of aggregation, as I gave up Drudge Report for Lent as I felt that I was checking too frequently. For those who don’t read it (I am surprised at how many don’t), Drudge rarely writes his own stories, except for short news items that are genuine scoops. He merely links to other sources, using a courier font and good news sense to make something of value.

The things I am missing this Lent go to the value of an aggregator. What are the aspects that make it unique from the stories it covers?

1. The Humor. The selection of stories is often funny; it’s like reading great headlines on a big city daily of old.
2. The Time: Drudge saves me time, having to look through myriad websites for information is wasteful. Not only do I know from the site what’s news, but I know from the site what the other TV hosts will be talking about.
3. It’s an equal opportunity offender. Certainly, I know the overall slant of Drudge, but he never resists a good story.
4. The Human Condition: A monkey that’s in rehab for smoking and drinking! Bartender in topless bar sues for pregnancy discrimination! 75 year old sues 65 year old for age discrimination! Athlete blames bad ski run on porn! Washington man electrocuted by peeing on power line! It’s all larger than life, and I am missing it.
5. The newspaper sampling. Drudge links to a wide variety of newspapers. While some appear more than others, the overall array of sources is vast. Drudge adds a unique element to the news; he writes new headlines, and his curatorial genius at picking a great assortment of stories is unrivaled. He doesn’t actually even copy anything; he adds a layer to it.

Now, the big newspapers haven’t taken on Drudge, just Google. The service that Drudge provides them is invaluable, namely a stunning amount of web traffic. It would be instructive to try to put a price on the value of Drudge links to the mainstream media. Yesterday’s blazing headline on Al Gore’s New York Times essay must have brought them millions of uniques.

The issue seems to have died down a bit since last year, when Dean Singleton went on a rampage with his buddies at the Associated Press, though we are certain it will be back in some form.

The pity is that the not that the newspaper industry will “win” this issue. They can’t. Technology prevents it. The pity is that they aren’t learning the lessons of Drudge. They are lessons that were good 100 years ago, and still of value today.

Find great stories, write great headlines, and do it all with a sense of humor and enthusiasm.

That’s it.

I will be happy to have Drudge back this Easter.

That’s a shame, because obits are some great information, and they are one way that the newspaper can both emphasize its usefulness in print as well as deliver long term search engine benefits to a newspaper’s website.

But obits, as practiced by most daily American newspapers, are seen mostly as a revenue opportunity, a way to get some bucks in collaboration from the guy at the funeral home who places the ads. And newspapers do the most counter-productive thing with the content of the obituaries after they are printed, namely brokering the information to a third party.

So, while I admire the ideal of the newspaper obituary (seen here in an image from online Obit Magazine, as practiced, they are now evidence of why the daily newspaper monopoly has deservedly crumbled.

I worked at a small afternoon daily in Petersburg, Virginia called The Progress-Index, once part of Thomson (which drained it dry and pumped cash out) and now Times-Shamrock. It is a quite amazing feat that the newspaper is still around. But that’s a separate story. Every day, someone typed up the obits as they were faxed in by the funeral homes. As editors, we had to read them and proof them. But we charged for them, over a certain number of free words, a deal that was worked with the cooperation of the funeral home. I wish I could recall if the newspaper charged for the words at the end, that included very long mention of the funeral home. Sometimes you even had a LOGO of the funeral home inserted inside the text. Now that’s branding!

If you wanted a few short words, that was free, justified by the idea that the newspaper had “paper of record” status.

Now, us fussy self-righteous journalists of a post-Watergate vintage stick their noses in the air over mixing editorial and subsidized content. Like Jane Pauley did so long ago with the Today Show where she refused to read ads, we will have nothing to do with THAT! But when it came to obits, all bets were off. The practice with our paper was that the editors had to edit the paid obituaries, something that “pure” journalists were not supposed to do. But we did it anyway.

Furthermore, there was a class distinction. We would give something free away to rich and influential people (namely the “news obit”) and then charge poor and less influential people a few bucks for a “paid obit.” Furthermore, we would run the obit in ugly looking type that was less nice than the real newspaper.

The only way newspapers got to this cheapskate journalism was over money. In the old days, newspapers would just publish information from readers. Weddings, parties, visitors, and yes even obits, were written by the family and submitted to the newspaper, which edited and verified them. They saw it as a service, of being a part of the community. The funeral home merely confirmed the deaths, so there were no fakes.

The American practice of obits was different than the practice in the U.K. In London newspaper, the newspaper obit is taken seriously. Writers are honest about the faults of the deceased. The people featured in obits were interesting, as well. Not just for the rich and powerful, but anyone interesting might have a chance at a news obit.

I go into this long explanation because at the death of the father of a close friend, a quite newsworthy one, the newspaper online obituary linked to a third party side, Legacy.com, where one could leave comments about the person, as well as read the obituary for a certain amount of time. It came at the same time I got a request to write about an online obituary service, Tributes.com launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor in February of 2008. That site aims to link up with other media partners that include radio stations, and combat the monopolized obituary industry, citing a recent study by Northwestern University that talks of the pressures on newspaper obits.

“The Internet is transforming the way people grieve,” said Taylor in a press release, “and the Obituary classifieds was the last laggard classified section that hadn’t made a meaningful transition from print to online.”

There are significant revenues though figuring out what they are takes some work if you aren’t in it each day. Newspapers don’t like to publicize how much they make on dead people, and few newspapers publish the rates online as it is such an insider club. Andrew Alexander, writing in the Washington Post’s (NYSE: WPO) blog, puts their revenues at millions, and said that their section gets three times the traffic as them metro section. Some obits can run as much as $500. Most newspapers (how nice!) only offer the paid obits as pre-paid. Granted, running an obituary desk is a staff cost for newspapers (a great explanation of the reason is online at the West Central Tribune of Willmar, Minnesota). There is nothing morally wrong with charging for obits, especially if families want to put in all sorts of junk about their beloved that has no interest to readers except for entertainment value.

But that makes this a plum opportunity for competitors.

My question is what are newspapers going to do about it? Thoughts:

1. Careful with third parties. Why share revenue with a third party? Newspapers need to own the information themselves. When a person dies, they become a part of a historical record, and people from generations on will be interested in the lives of the deceased as long as there is geneology, which has Old Testament roots, so it will be around. So why should a newspaper share those long-term keyword and search engine benefits with an outside site, when THEY are the ones that are doing the hard work of processing the obits? Certainly, they need revenue but building your local brand, franchise and web traffic must come first. And some newspapers might need third-party partners to help with online, but keep it at a distance, just in case.
2. Why do they charge to keep a newspaper “up” on the site after only a year? Some newspapers leave these notices up permanently. Many do not. The few dollars made on charging for this might be nice, but long term, this information keeps the newspapers website as the central hub of community information.
3. Keep the funeral homes at arm’s length. Deciding on how and if you have paid obits is one thing, but remember that being to close with the funeral home is not good for your brand. Funeral homes are customers of newspapers, not partners.
4. Why not allow comments on obits for a longer time than just after the death? This is a way for local papers to build readership, especially with partners like Facebook.
5. This discussion applies to weddings and engagements, too. It was only a decade or so ago that newspapers published these free, with the simple but elegant idea that when readers read the notices, they would look at the ads for bridal shops, jewelers and department stores. Then they started getting cheap, started charging, and the ads dried up. This happened at the Times-Dispatch and Virginian-Pilot, and it ruined the Sunday lifestyle section revenue.
6. Newspapers need to understand that obits, even of the lowly, have an information value. Doing research for a consumer products company’s marketing department, I found clues to the early history of the product from an obit.
7. This will be more critical in an age of tablet newspapers, if that comes. Local parties will want a simple way to see their local obits, with a local spin, and the newspaper is the best source.
8. Matrix of web links are aided by obits. For newspaper sites to be powerful, they need to build up a network of linked pages. Imagine the SEO benefits of having all your newspaper obits published as separate pages on the Internet? All of a sudden a small community paper begins to truly dominate the information.
9. The outside revenue threat is great. Craigslist is a very imperfect product, yet with only a few employees has stolen billions in revenue away from newspapers. This can also happen with obituaries. Yet newspapers can compete with Craigslist by offering better, more tailored ads, and a larger audience.
10. Connect with churches, libraries and historical societies. Funeral homes aren’t the only ones that deal with the deceased. Opening up connections with local churches allows for all sorts of revenue. What if newspapers published eulogies and services in podcast form? There are many opportunities, not only with advertising revenue but from ancillary services.
11. Legacy newspapers need to consider how their microfiche archives (and photos of the deceased) can be tagged, displayed and turned into text. Don’t just leave it up to Google; figure out a way to digitize.
12. Don’t discount the value of the printed edition. The printed obit means something to families, and no one wants to keep a fading home laserprint of a loved one when they can have the actual printed clipping, perhaps encased in lucite.
13. What happened to births? Newspapers used to routinely publish births, and local newspapers still do. They need to appear in local papers again, or at least online.
14. This isn’t easy. It’s not as simple as just posting all your obits online. It needs a few weeks of thinking how your community dies, what rituals there are, and crafting a solution that builds your newspaper brand and franchise. How much gets printed, and how much goes online? Photography, keywords, tags, typography and style issues with words are important, and must be crafted locally.

Garland Pollard is a freelance web editor/consultant and business writer in Sarasota, Florida.

Remember. Each time you post something on the web with your church’s name on it, you spread the word about you, and your faith. In addition, register your church’s name in each of the social media websites; it will help you build links back to your main church website.

• Skype: Use Skype to broadcast sermons to homebound parishioners and across the world. Skype can also be used during meetings and services to talk to missionaries around the world who are working with your church.
• Twitter: Group and youth leaders can use Twitter to talk to members. Have them post the Twitter feed to Facebook; it can be done automatically.
• WordPress: Use blog softtware like WordPress for managing the content of your entire church website. Encourage ministers and even your choir and music directors to have their own blogs and post content related to their work. Not only sermons can be posted, but links and resources for study after church.
• Flickr: Post documentary-like pictures of the church buildings, as well as photos of church events. Tag each photo so that it can be found by others looking for photos of other things. Take photos of food drives and other church events. You should also post photos from mission trips as they happen.
• Use Facebook as an ersatz congregation directory.
• Scribd is an excellent service that allows people to post documents like bulletins, newsletters, sermons and such. Use it to post religious documents for other churches around the world. For instance, you can publish study materials, worksheets and even Sunday school coloring sheets. Make sure that whatever you share has your church’s website, address and telephone on the sheet, so you get some value out of it.

Today, with new technology, you still need to run commercials and do in-store, and all those other things. But now, you need to do other things, including posting content about your company on the web.

One of the easiest ways to do it is through WordPress, the open source software. The software is free; you just have to adapt it, and set up a content plan to make it useful.

You don’t have to be a big company to think about content that complements your business. Industries and ideas include:

1. Book publisher: If you publish books, use WordPress to promote your back catalog. Give each title a WordPress page, and allow readers to comment and add information about the title and the author.
2. Hotel chain: Use WordPress to build a companion site to your main booking website. Give each property a “story” on the new website, splicing booking links throughout.
3. Restaurant chain: Use WordPress to build an online cookbook with recipes, chef profiles and stories about your culinary tradition. Promote each individual restaurant as a unique proposition, including local managers and staff.
4. Hospitals: Use WordPress to build a medical guidebook branded with your hospital name. Write stories featuring physicians, nurses and other hospital staff, as well as adding in other features on medical health.
5. Consumer brands: Build a WordPress site around each brand, including historical information and current usage information.
6. Airlines: Launch a guide to a destination, or build theme-based travel guides for special events and promotions.
7. P.R. Firms: Build a thematic website for one of your clients on the fly.
8. Newspapers: Create a micro-site around a special section or a major advertiser.
9. Architecture firms: Use WordPress to promote your past projects, and keep them in front of the public.
10. City or destination: Use WordPress to launch idea specific travel websites.
11. Natural resources firms: Use WordPress to build an ecology-themed website featuring sustainable harvesting of timber.
12. Energy firms: Launch a science-oriented site that explains energy usage and our need for oil, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
13. Utilities: With stories and diagrams, build a site that teaches students about how electric power is generated, and what the energy company is doing to help with conservation, etc. Use it as a recruiting and p.r. tool.
14. Attorneys and law firms: Create a website with information with helpful stories about your areas of case law, as well as historical information about your prior case work.

In Economics 101, it’s the classic “free rider” problem. Who will attend planning meetings and the statehouse? Who will investigate police and crime? Will news only get covered when there is an outburst, and it somehow gets posted by some unwashed blogger? Let’s call it the era of “Don’t Taze Me Bro” journalism.

But it does not have to be that way. There is a role for your the local paper, because in some cases, these local franchises have been the leading local brands in their markets.

That being said, there is a problem for newspapers. The incredible 30 percent margins, unbelievable power and unassailable position of your regional paper in past years have all made it hard for you to know what to do, and unable to act like the underdog. So far, your paper has redesigned pages, shortened articles, cut staff, eliminated bureaus, reduced paper size and redesigned your website now about, oh, 10 times. What the industry has done is put the newspaper in a severely reduced competitive position at a time when you need your scale and power more than ever.

Newspapers are the point where radio was after the advent of television. For years after television arrived, radio networks ran Hoover-era schedules of soap operas, dramas and westerns, even as television encroached on its audience. Radio’s audience declined. But one day, clever station managers realized that if radio was to survive, new leadership would have to remake it completely. Somewhere in the 1950s, the proper mix of news, d.j.s, traffic, weather, music and talk radio was invented, and the great radio stations survived. Rock music arrived. FM took off. And radio’s KDKA, WABC, KYW and the like thrived again.

The Greatest Regional Brands

Like the great radio stations, newspapers are important regional brands that need not go the way of the regional department store. The regional newspaper brand names mean something to the community. They evoke a region like no other. Use that legacy.

The Hartford-Courant. The Virginian-Pilot. The Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Los Angeles Times. Louisville Courier-Journal. Newark Star-Ledger. The Baltimore Sun. The Miami Herald. The New York Post.

These franchises have legs, and the public trusts them, even though they curse the editorials. Use that legacy and history. People like the idea of reading a newspaper. Do not let your brand go the way of the regional department store. Unless you act, The New York Times will do to regional daily papers what Macy’s did to Burdine’s, Marshall Field and the rest.

Pronounced Dead Many Times

The newspaper has been pronounced dead many times, as have other media. A timeline:

• 1910: Recorded music will kill the orchestra.
• 1930: Radio will kill the newspaper, and the music industry.
• 1950: Television will kill the newspaper, and movies.
• 1982: Cable will kill the newspaper and the network news
• 1995: The Internet will kill the newspaper and the music industry.
• 2002: The Internet will save the newspaper and kill the movie industry.
• 2009: Kindle kills the newspaper, and bloggers instead scoop the greatest story of all time, the Second Coming!

Let’s get serious. Newspapers can reinvent their century old brands.

What to do?

First, believe that there are solutions. The important point is not to give the pessimism an inch. Instead, realize that there is a changed environment, and you need to establish a process for coming up with, and implementing, ideas. New ideas. And you have to completely commit to killing sacred cows. Your staff might be smaller, and have to work differently. Radio killed off Dark Shadows. CBS took the risk of moving Edward R. Murrow from radio to television.

To start, we suggest that newspapers:

1. Change the percent of R.O.P. advertising vs. insert advertising
2. Greatly upgrade the status of carriers
3. Selectively use bureaus for promotional purposes
4. Make the newspaper unique, even at higher cost
5. Drop online partners that don’t help you
6. Force the web staff and print staff to compete
7. Cut back on zoned editions
8. Stress the local brand, not wire copy
9. Ditch ombudsmen and send them out to report.
10. Move sports reporters to city desk
11. Go on old-style crusades
12. Emphasize news side balance
13. Re-hire retired staffers part-time
14. Make the design stodgy
15. Decrease photo size
16. Reorganize classifieds
17. Make weddings and obits free
18. Change minority recruiting practices
19. Don’t rest on old ad rates
20. Bring humor back into the paper

Last year, we put together a FREE 10-page PDF report called 20 Ways to Re-Invent the Local Paper. A link is below and here 20 Ways to Save Your Newspaper. The sheet includes the above ideas, each with descriptions.

Drawing by Thomas T. Waterman of Carter's Grove, part of the Historic American Buildings Survey. Carter's Grove was shut down as a house museum and sold by Colonial Williamsburg back into private hands.

The house museum was once the center of pop culture history in the U.S. But today, once notable places like Colonial Williamsburg’s Carter’s Grove have been shut down and de-accessioned, and house museums across the U.S. and Britain are struggling or closing.

I do not share the doom. I see the damage as entirely self-inflicted. Overly busy curators do make work. Directors lose focus. Boards become inwardly focused. Interpretations become didactic and boring. Donors get worn out, worn down and taken for granted. Capital campaigns take the place of actual mission.

One big hope for house museums comes from the web. Today, the Internet gives each museum a forum where it can communicate to the world. And in spite of budget cuts, there are more resources out there for museums than there were 50 years ago.

Cable television has dozens of channels exclusively devoted to history and home renovation, foundations are more plentiful and governments recognize the importance of house museums. It is time to go on the offensive. Note to boards: if you hear defeatism, you need to make a change.

When house museums are good, the public responds. People are fascinated by seeing houses, and stepping into the domestic past is rewarding in so many ways.

A few years ago, I heard Thomas Savage of Winterthur speak to an Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities dinner. He talked about his youth, visiting house museums, and the need to reinvent the house museum for new audiences. His analysis was on target; in the 1970s, when the Bicentennial was a national mania, attendance was a sort of ritual of families.

Today, most families do not go to house museums, except on school trips, and then only occasionally.

Last week, I was at Fairfax’s Gunston Hall, on assignment for the annual Fairfax County visitor guide. The museum was taking the opposite tack as so many other museums. Instead of deaccessioning collections, they are carefully buying items that include pottery that resembles shards found in archaelogy. They are reaching out to new audiences. And they are regularly conducting research and moving around the rooms so as to better reflect their  evolving knowledge of the period. They are working with local churches and groups on events. They are reaching out and not standing still.

Reach out. Keep your museum open EVERY Day but Christmas and Thanksgiving. Make an effort to give to the community, and they will give back, in droves.

One other piece of advice. One of the most important parts of how a house museum can win visitors is to use the web. Here are some ideas.

1. Use your volunteers to put content on the web. Very often, there are many volunteers at house museums who sit around and wait for visitors, who only rarely arrive. Instead of boring those volunteers by making them sit by the door, get a few laptops and encourage them to key in information about the house to your website. Are there old letters from the owners? Type them up and post them online. Are there old minutes from the founders of the museum? Enter that information in. Other information to put on your website includes names and birthdates from local cemeteries, collections lists, diaries, archival photos, current photos and even audio tours. Do not rest until EVERY object in the collection is posted online, with a description. In Internet parlance, the “long tail” information is important in winning web visitors.
2. Open an Amazon or Ebay store in the name of the museum. There is no better way to sell items from your store than online. Yes, some house museums have expensive online shops. But most house museums do not have the budget. Make sure that you open a museum shop online, and with each item listed for sale, include links back to the main website of your museum. Ebay is also a great way to de-accession useless items that are not historic. An old piece of furniture from the director’s office? Sell it. Someone might appreciate a 1975 chair from a great old house museum.
3. Whatever new you post online, Twitter it. Most people think that Twitter is for getting web readership now. But it also functions as an index of sorts. So if you post a new web page on a historic clock at the house, then you want to “Twitter” the page so that Google can find it.
4. Advertise. Just be careful about it as you can waste lots of money. Remember that for-profit tourist attractions need to advertise to attract visitors. At your local tourism bureau meeting, ask other for-profit attractions about their budgets. Match that percentage. And use Google Adwords, putting a $5 a day limit on the number of clicks. You need to be in the game.
5. Share links with other local attractions. If there is a go-kart track down the road, put up a page of links on your website to other local attractions. Some stuffy people might look askance at this, but the reality is that if you want 13 year old boys to come to your museum, they might do it before or after a visit to a go-kart or Putt-Putt visit.
6. Put out press releases whenever you find a piece of lint. I exaggerate a bit, but make it a  practice to issue press releases regularly, even with small finds. If you have  a full time marketing person, you need to have releases go out at least once a week. While you might occasionally spring for issuing a press release on BusinessWire or PRNewswire, there are man free services where you can post press releases. Press releases will help bring search engines to your site, as well as encourage local newspapers to cover you.
7. Photos, photos. Take lots of photos for Flickr and other sites. Post them online, rights free.
8. Social media: Facebook is great, but it’s not about having a page. Yes, you might want to do like everyone else and have a Facebook page for your museum, but the important thing is that other Facebook users post information about your museum.
9. Content, content: Put as much content out there as you can. Put out educational materials. Put out research papers. Put it all up on the web. And you MUST ensure that your content works with local school boards.
10. Offer the house for free: Give away admissions to the house. LOTS. It’s all about word of mouth. Admissions are only a small part of the budget.
11. Stay away from Flash in websites. You don’t need fancy. You need WORDS. But do pay attention to how your website feels. You want the website to be modern, not “ye olde” as you are trying to attract people in 2009, not 1901. You need to attract the youth, not repel it.
12. Work with other groups on events. Some house museums want to have a strategy where you try to extract as much money as you can from groups who rent your house museum. You want to do the opposite. You want to open up your museum.

Contact Editor Garland Pollard for web ideas for your house museum. Or call him at 703-745-8602.