Does Your Web Site Deserve to be Fired?

If your website was one of your sales staff would you be happy with his results? A good website design should deliver you quality leads and generate a return on your investment – not just than just sit there and look good.

Remember that website design is a marketing activity not a technology decision. So many people seek out a web developer as their first port of call when they need a website. But that’s putting the cart before the horse.

Your first activity when contemplating a website should be to think about your marketing objectives and what job you need your website to do for you.

To do that let us revisit the sales person analogy. If your website was a sales person what should its sales process be? How will it get customers to engage with them and your company. Thinking about this analogy forces you consider what information and functions your website needs to get you real sales results.

For a start, You need to arm your online salesperson with information to they can appear knowledgeable about the benefits of your products and services. He needs to be able to succinctly articulate what your unique selling proposition is.

You need your salesperson to acknowledge that customers are different stages of their buying process and therefore have different informational needs. For example, provide product comparisons for people who haven’t yet decided on the right product, but also provide in depth product information for those who are further advanced in their decision process.

You need people to trust your online salesperson too, so consider what do you need to do or say on your website to engender trust. Even the aesthetics of your website can contribute to trust. A shabby looking website from 1992 isn’t going to help your image.

Not everyone will buy or engage on their first visit. Your online salesperson needs to provide a reason for the customer to come back. Constantly updated content gives people reason to return. Make sure your website is a worthy destination. A website that never changes is like a retail store that doesn’t change their window display. It makes people think they’ve already seen everything you have to offer and they won’t bother to come in.

At some stage in the process, your online salesperson needs to ask the customer’s name and contact details. To do this, you usually need to give them the promise of something in return (eg. early notification of specials, a free assessment). This is a critical point in your sales process. Now your visitor isn’t anonymous, he has a name and you know how to contact him and have permission to do so. At this point, you can call them an actual “lead”. Yippee.

Once your online sales person has promised something they have to deliver. They need to follow up on their promise. If you promised email notifications of sales, make sure you do it. Take every opportunity to re-engage with them. That means more opportunities to communicate with your customers and ultimately make sales.

If you actually want to sell your products online, at some point you need to facilitate the sale. Online shopping cart facilities make this easy. Design your sales process so that it provides a good shopping experience. No-one likes waiting in a checkout queue and similarly online shoppers don’t like clunky purchase processes.

So when you’re ready for a new website – remember, the brief to your web designer should read more like a job description than a shopping list.

Jane Davies is founder and Director of Cat and Moose Marketing Solutions and specialises in online marketing in Brisbane. The core philosophy is to create and design websites that deliver real marketing results rather than just sit there and look good. Cat and Moose Marketing Solutions also advises clients that online marketing be used as part of a broader marketing plan.

Using Twitter To Market Your Business

What is Twitter? Are you kidding? Twitter is the most powerful communication platform on the web today. It is taking the Internet by storm and there are around 10,000 new users per day signing up to participate in this internet revolution. Just pause and think about the marketing opportunities that are available to the Twitter user.

Twitter is best described as a micro blogging platform. You are limited to 140 characters each time you do an update, which initially, may seem a small amount. However, as you become more experienced, it’s just amazing what you can fit into 140 characters.

That said, Twitter is much, much more than that . It’s kind of like one huge global chat room.  It all depends on how many people you follow on Twitter and how you use it.  If it’s in the thousands, then your “Tweetstream” will be running fast and furious with everything that’s coming in. If you are only following a few hundred, or even less, then things are much easier to keep up with.

You can use Twitter to market your business. Actually, when effectively used, Twitter can be a great advocate and help to your entrepreneurial endeavors. Whatever you do, at no stage of your Twitter career start posting sales tweet after sales tweet.  Your career will be short-lived if you do and people will unfollow you very quickly.  Twitter is about supplying marketing information to those that wish to follow you. A steady flow of self promotion diminishes the experience and your authority.  By all means use Twitter post links to your products or sites, but keep them to around 5% to 7% of your total tweets at the most.

You need to first be aware that rushing out and following a heap of people can make you look like a potential Twitter spammer. Build your following base slowly . As time goes on, if you are chasing quantity, then you will be able to add more at a time, but initially I would suggest you stick to 50 for a start. The reason for this is that when you follow people, they will most likely follow you back . Many people don’t do this automatically, although some do, particularly in the internet marketing space. Some people will actually go and look at your Twitter home page to decide if you are worth following.  The time you spent setting up your profile really pays off here.

Getting leads with Twitter can make or break your offline and online marketing. Do it right and reap the benefits. I’m talking about leads, traffic and sales. Do it wrong and you’ll just be another annoying spammer.

Links, and online marketing

To have visitors to any website is needed to succeed online. Without visitors to the website it will be like having a physical shop with no customers. We find a physical shop when we walk in the street and become attracted by the shop window. But on Internet we need to be found in the search engines to get any customers. Customers coming to a website is called the traffic of the website. The more traffic to you website the more success you can have with your website.

Of cause there will be other aspects than the simple number of visitors to your site to estimate your potential success with the site. It is very simple. The type of your visitors is an important factor. Are you getting the type of visitors you want to offer your information, service or products for?

If you create a site for retired people you will not get much use of swarms of school children flocking to your site, I guess.

The type of visitors to your site will be determined quite a lot through the search engines, like Google. If you are able to be found for the keywords that exactly your kind of dream visitors are searching for in Google, then that will be fine. Accordingly the whole challenge of optimizing your site for the best useful keywords is very important. See for example a background picture as one of several stock photos here at A-Z Fotos.

You can do a lot on your site for that optimization of keywords, but what is even more important is that you get links with the best keywords in the link text from other sites to your site in question.

Here is an example of a webpage about Seychelles Travel for Vacation where the url of the web page has the same keywords as the headline of the page, about travel to The Seychelles in the Indean Ocean for vacation – a typical excotic island vacation.

 

You can also make use of links related to travel and island vacation in this way, see: Tropical Cape Verde Islands in The Atlantic Ocean.

For online marketing the one way links mechanism is one of your best friends to achieve a lot of qualified traffic to your excellent website and to get new customers flocking to your site again and again. Without traffic a website is like an abandoned physical shop. With lots of traffic to your site your virtual reality will become like one of the most successful shops in the street.

How to Analyze Website Traffic

Site traffic is the life blood of any Web site. For better or worse, much of any site’s traffic is dependent on how search engine submission software including 1000′s of sites built in. This is a great way to increase traffic and ranking for your website . SiteUnseen supports both network as well as cookie authentication of a search by specifying the number of levels that a search should tunnel into a website . Restrict or allow a search to cross domains.

Web traffic is not just your visitors and the transfer of millions of data or files. Your business is at stake here; so do not ever neglect all the aspects of your site. Web analytics services are all about monitoring, analyzing and “relevant” reporting of website usage. Information from website traffic tracking can help improve website performance, visitor experience, usage levels and contribute towards enhancing website productivity, using web statistics and web tracking techniques.

Website traffic represents all those people that get a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Web Analytics out to advertisers who seek Yahoo’s help to build custom micro sites, as well as to third party application developers who build widgets and other mini apps for Yahoo! Website traffic is monitored through various tools. Many of the best tools are free, but the results may need some interpretation. Website traffic analysis is one of the best ways to identify and dissect the traffic your website is receiving. By learning more about how people find your site, what they do when they get there and which pages lead to the highest conversions, Spectrum can provide you with the most successful internet marketing program.

Web analytics tools let you see which search engines are sending you traffic as well as the most popular keywords used to find your site. What if you are not spending any money at all on online marketing? Web analytics specialists sometimes use proprietary software to gather and analyze your data. The more pages you have, the higher the cost of analytics.

Basically, finding out how many “hits” your website has is easy, there are a lot of free monitors which can tell you this. But if you want a deeper analysis of your Internet traffic, you would need help from professionals skilled in management traffic and analyzing website logs. Basically this is an exercise in finding out what visitors want and providing it. Always be flexible and willing to make changes.

Hits simply means the amount of information requests received by the server. It is much more productive to measure the amount of visitors that visit your website and the actions they are taking when they are there.

VisitorVille represents your web site as a city, complete with dynamically resizing skyscrapers, buses, taxis, helicopters, limousines, and animated people. See your visitors interact with your site in real time. Visitors prefer to view products and pages that interest them, so they usually share information for that purpose. However, visitors typically prefer that they be asked for their permission to send them marketing e-mail or to share

their contact information with partner companies.

Visitors are extremely goal oriented and task driven when they use the Web. They will quickly scan a page to determine if it contains or links to the information they want.

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Working at website optimization

Online businesses have become very popular so that millions of people are working to get traffic to their websites. Without some excellent tools, you won’t have a very good chance of winning a good online presence.

Is it that important to focus on Keywords?

Taking a good look at keyword positioning is the most important starting point. The best internet marketing gurus all say that Micro Niche Finder is the best weapon in your arsenal for this task. Keywords are a great place to start, but there are a couple of other issues to deal when starting an internet business as well.

What about a Website presence?

Making a good web page will help a great deal if you are going to find success online. One way to help supplement income is with adsense websites. If you make a concentrated effort, you will find a variety of made for adsense templates on the internet.

These particular areas are of primary concern if you are to be a success at online marketing.