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Posts Tagged ‘Website Marketing’

When setting up a website there are 3 main keys that need to be addressed.

Success Key 1 – Research

Keyword research is the basic skill or task that you must master if you want to be at all successful in the business of internet marketing.  Keyword research tells you what your customers are actually looking for and then you can target those keywords. We do this for all our clients.

Doing good research will almost guarantee that your site will perform a lot better than it is now.

You will find we concentrate on this a lot because by doing your research properly you can almost guarantee success. The late Gary Halbert used to tell a story about opening a hamburger stand. At his seminars he would ask the crowd this question:

“If you and I were both going to open a hamburger stand and you could pick any one thing to give you an advantage over me, what would you pick?”

The people from the crowd would shout back: “A great location” “The best-tasting hamburger” “A clean, attractive stand” “Excellent employees”

After a while of this Gary would pause and say: “Go right ahead and take all those, but I can guarantee my stand will outsell yours, because the one advantage I’m going to pick is… A STARVING CROWD!”

Success Key 2 – Content is King

Engaging your customers with good content is the next sucess key.

Most sites are simply built and left however the adition of content on a regular basis will help your rankings, give you a lot more options for people to find you and also provide your visitors with information.

It is your digital real estate.

Content can be anything from an article, information relating to your business like specials, products and services, videos and audios. They should be written in a conversational style. You are reading content right now.

Success Key 3 – Folow Up

Once you have visitors coming to your site its a good idea to get their name and email so you can follow up with them.

You can do this one of two ways.

You can use what is called an autoresponder which will automatically send a series of emails describing your products and services giving helpful tips and addressing any concerns or you can send a newsletter.

Most customers need to be follwed at lesat 7 times so that you can build relationship and make sure that when they are ready to proceed you are in the front of their minds.

Summary

Obviously there are many other things that can be done to improve the performance of your website however these are the main things we have noticed most businesses do not do and are easy to implement.

For more help on this why not contact us and let us help you set some of them up for you.

To do justice to this last post I contacted 10 website developers in our local area. I asked them all the same questions and listed the same criteria.

1. Ten pages all optimized for the search engines

2.     Ability to edit all pages my self

3.     Ability to add multimedia myself

4.     Ability to add ecommerce later on

5.     Social Bookmarking ability

6.     Must have a blog component

7.     Any training how to use the system

8.     Ongoing  support, hosting and marketing

The Quotes.

The quotes we got back varied from $500.oo to $7,000.oo so as you can see a lot of difference so it is best to shop around however lets narrow this down a bit more.

The three lower quotes did not allow me to do any changes myself or have a few of the other prerequisites. Basically they were going to build straight static pages so this was not acceptable.

Four of the most expensive quotes were going to add flash and lots of graphics (Brochure Style) and while I could work on the text myself the flash and graphics will not get me listed in search engines etc. Pretty but ineffective unless you are going to do a lot of branding.

So that left me with 3 companies that knew what was actually involved in having a website and making it work and their prices varied from $1500 to $3000 however these also never offered any ongoing training or packages to help me with marketing my website except the normal “we will add it to the search engines for you and do some SEO work”

One of these did understand that a website is an ongoing marketing system and offered an additional package for marketing but was very expensive.

A Few Tips:

If you can provide the textual content and have some idea what you want to achieve then your initial costs will diminish.

Remember a website can really only do one thing effectively.

It will either drive people to a sale or collect names and emails for later marketing. Your site can do both but it dilutes the overall marketing strategy. A domain and hosting a site is quite inexpensive so better to have two sites if you have 2 seperate goals.

Finally we investigated all the sites each business provided as samples of their work which looked nice but had glaring mistakes on them.

Things not to do!

a. They included the email address for the customer on the web site.

This is an absolute no no as there are programs that go trolling the net to get these addresses and then sell them to spammers so the poor customer will end up getting spammed and make their email address unusable. You should always use a form.

b. Many did not even have their details in the keywords.

Many of the sites had their company name as their domain name which means that unless you do some good content management they will not get found. Much better to have a domain if you are an electrical contractor in the south of Sydney like electricalcontractorsydney.com.au than companyname.com.au Now this is not a biggie but can help you get found almost instantly.

Also they did not have their service, location etc in their keywords. In fact nearly all had the same keywords and description on every page. This is just bad marketing and a waste of web design.

c. Nearly all had not added any new content since made.

Adding content on a regular basis even if it is just a summary on the different products and services you offer will not only get you ranked in the search engines a lot higher but also be a site your customers and visitors will come back and visit.

d. Alt Tags for their Graphics

Everything on your website is a possible link for a visitor to find you and adding alt tags to every photo and graphic will increase your visibility. Obviously some of these may seem like technical jargon at the moment but once you find out how to do it the process is very simple.

Summary: With no disrespect most web designers seem interested in building a website as a one time event. This is probably because they either do not understand the marketing process or they have come out of the traditional marketing industry, and while great designers, have no idea how the Internet works.

If you would like a free evaluation of your current website to see how it is working please fill out this form and we will process one for you and offer some suggestion on how you can get a better ROI on this underutilized asset.

There are a lot of websites residing on the Internet that unfortunately cost businesses a lot of money but do not provide the increase in sales 0r leads that they were designed to do.

The main reason for this is that they are brochures which have been translated from the old traditional styles of advertising. They look great but are basically ineffective.

Other business sites cram in unrelated information or poor Search Engine Optimization making them hard to find and even less inviting or engage the visitor.

Discover how to get a higher Return On Your Web Site Investment and some easy ways to improve your web sites performance.

How Should A Web Site Work For A Business?

A business website should work  like an extension of your business. It is like a sales agent that works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and filters out those that are interested in your products or services form those that are not. It does this by:

1. Making the sale
2. Make it easy for potential customers to find you.
2. Collect Names and Addresses
3. Provide content and information

This sytem is called Inbound Marketing. This is a system  that provides information in the form of content that is then distributed all over the Internet where your potential customers may visit and then draw them to your site via links and small snipets of information. You then get the opportunity to engage them using various techniques to lead them to the sale of your product or the collection of a name and email address.

The collection of their name and address then allows you to provide on going information which then will hopefully result in a sale.

A quick quizz to see if your website is working hard to help your bottom line.

1. Do you have the appropriate keywords for your business so your potential customers can find you?

2. Do you have systems in place to capture names and addresses and then automatically follow them up with relevant information about your business.

3. Are all your components optimized to provide additional opportunities to capture your potential customers interest. Graphics – media – text.

4. Does your website have a continual stream of content making it  attractive to the search engines.

5. Do you use offline techniques to drive traffic and capture names and addresses.

If you can answer yes to these quick questions then you are probably already reaping the success from your website.

If not then please feel free to use our contact form and we can do a free evaluation and target why you Business Web Site is not providing you the return on Investment that it should.

Click here for your FREE Website evaluation.