Web Design & Internet Marketing: a Practical Business Approach

 

 web design: 1 simple way to get more visitors to contact you [4:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (593)

The problem is that most visitors are a little nervous about contacting your business from your website. Find out how to make people comfortable and boost your contact rate by over 50% with a simple addition to your website.

Audio Transcript:
Today we are going to talk about one simple way but very powerful way to get visitors to contact you on your website.

Now here’s a problem: when a visitor comes to your website, they are generally scared to connect with your business. On some level, some might be quite nervous and some might not be that scared but on some levels there’s resistance to contacting a business.

Now, a visitor might come in and check out, two, three, four, even 10 pages but when they get to your contact page and they have some choices to make to pick up the phone, or to click a link to email you, that’s where you run in to trouble.

Picking up the phone to call somebody you don’t know is naturally a little terrifying, unless, you are a professional telemarketer. That’s something that’s not going to be on the high point list for a visitor.

Even clicking an email address can be a little intimidating because if you think about it, once you click a link to email a company, you have to type in something into the subject field and you also have to type in something into the body of the message.

And you don’t really get any head start it’s just making it up on the fly and that might be a little tough for some people. Now, what’s the secret? How do you do it?

The way you have to do it, you have to have a contact form on your contact page. Contact forms are safe havens. They give people a step by step process to contact your company.

And here’s a simple and yet very powerful contact form. You ask for a name, you have a name field, you ask for the email address with an email address field, you ask for the phone number with a phone field and then, you ask for the message with the message field.

And what happens is…those are easy questions for people to answer and they are given in a structure that makes them feel comfortable. So they’ll type their name in and they’ll say, “OK, that’s done.” And they’ll type their email address in. OK, that was an easy one and then phone number, they may or may not want to give you. So make sure that the phone number field is optional.

And then once they’ve typed in a couple of things, when they get to the message box, they’ve warmed up. Their brain has warmed up to the concept of connecting with your business and they are ready to start typing. And they will fill that message box with whatever’s on their mind. And then hit the “send” button and send that message as an email to you.

Now as a trick here that’s something else that works well, you get the opportunity here to ask the person a question or two. I would try to think of one question real easy question that will help warm them up when they’re connecting with you but also might give you a good piece of information.

So, if you were an executive coach and you are in a coaching business you might ask what your current position is at your job. That might be an easy question to ask somebody and help you get started in your conversation with them.

You can also add a little check box to have visitors subscribe to your newsletter if you publish an email newsletter. That’s another good thing to do. But what I would also recommend to do is to put your telephone number and your email address link on every page of your website.

So usually it could be on a side bar, it could be on the top up in the mast head so that on every page it’s easy to pick up the phone and call you if that’s what somebody is looking for. They don’t want to dig through for this information. People are in a hurry.

Now here’s how this plays out, on our website, in our client’s site that we watch, easily 90% of all sales increase come through our contact form. Maybe 5% of leads come in through an email, in fact I haven’t seen an email come in a long time, occasionally people would pick up the phone and call if there in a hurry, but 90 to 95% of contacts come in their contact forms. So if you don’t have a contact form in your website, you need to get one on right away.

That’s it for today.

 

 Compell your website visitors to act on your site [3:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (505)

Here’s the problem: Most websites don’t work simply because there is no compelling information for visitors to act on. Getting visitors to your website is half the battle. Once they get there what are they going to do? Put your sales hat on and think about how to publish timely information on your website to turn cold visitors into warm prospects. If you can’t update your website yourself make sure you check out the article on gaining publishing control of your website. And as always, please feel free to comment :)

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to compel your website visitors to contact you, and we’re going to do this through a restaurant example.

Now the number one goal of all websites is when the visitor comes to them, to get the visitor to act on something to pick up the phone and call your company, to email you, to buy something, perhaps to download an article or brochure, or giving up an email address, to possibly subscribe to your newsletter or fill out a request for quote form, something like that.

Before I get into the restaurant example, I want to talk a little bit about the mindset that you need to be in. I want you to think a little bit about your business and what products or services you provide, and what things change in your business. Specifically, things that change on a regular basis that you’d like for your customers to know about. These are the kinds of things that should be brought forward on your website, and focused on.

Now you might have new products and services that you can offer informational downloads about. You might be hosting events that require sign-ups online, improvements to products or services to discuss. Maybe you’re an information producer and you want subscribers to sign up for your articles. Or perhaps you’re retail and you carry limited quantities of things if you’re a gift shop or florist.

Ultimately, the best motivator for someone to connect with you online is a deadline for something. Let’s say it’s a limited quantity of a product, or perhaps a service you’re only going to do up to a certain point in time, or beta test for something. I apologize for that beta test word, that’s pretty geeky, but I think you get what I mean.

Now let’s take a look at the restaurant example. You might ask, “What can a restaurant do with a website? That seems to be an odd combination.” But I’ll tell you, we have a local restaurant here, who’s also a client. Their website does fabulously for them. They have live music on the weekends. What do they do? They post their event schedule on their website, so you can go to their site and see who’s playing and on what dates.

The other thing that’s interesting is that their slowest night, around here, is a Wednesday night. So what they do is they do a two-for-one special. You can come in and have two entrees, a glass of wine, a salad and dessert for the price of one. Thirty-five bucks I think is what is what they charge. It’s very popular.

Why did it become popular? Well, they’ve been collecting email addresses for a long time. They have comment cards on their tables, where people can leave a comment and leave their email address. And they also have a sign up box on their website for people to subscribe to their email newsletter.

So once a week they push out an email that tells their subscribers what musicians are coming and when and what the Wednesday night diner special is, because the entrees change every Wednesday night.

They have collected over a thousand email addresses. I was in there last Wednesday and the place was packed.

So think about your own business. Maybe you’re not a restaurant. Maybe you’re a service business. But think about the things that change in you’re business and you would like your customers to know about. If you can create deadlines, these are the thinks that should go on your website.

Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

To listen via audio podcast:

 

 From Video: Find out what people are saying about your business [4:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (497)

Transcript:

How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?

How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.

She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?

Well, the secret here is to go to “Google alerts.” Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.

It’s really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.

So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I’ll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.

Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don’t have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.

So, let’s create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here’s my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.

Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don’t. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, “the complete website” those three words need to be in order, “the complete website” for Google to actually post an alert.

Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word “the” the word “complete, ” and the word “website” randomly streamed throughout it. And that’s not helpful to me.

So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it’s interesting for me to read what’s going on in “Facebook” and “My Space”, and “You Tube” and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.

But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.

Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are saying about your business online.

Many clients contact me wondering if they should purchase additional domain names.

Here is an email from a recent scam (maybe you’ve seen it):

Dear CEO,

We are Asia Domain Name Registration Limited, which is the domain name registrar centre in Hongkong. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the April 16 2008, we received an application formally. One company named ” OMS Investment Corp” applied for

The Domain Names:
wovenworkz.cn
wovenworkz.com.cn
wovenworkz.hk
wovenworkz.mobi
wovenworkz.tw
wovenworkz.jp
wovenworkz.co.kr etc…

 

 Get found in Google... hire the right seo provider [8:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (123)

…that will get your business found in Google. In this podcast I will tell you about the 3 major areas that your search engine optimization provider must cover… and how much to expect to pay for it. Click play above to listen.

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to get found in Google, or how to hire a search engine optimization expert. This is something you probably don’t want to do yourself and you’ll want to hire out, and it’s not that expensive if you do it right. Now what is search engine optimization? It’s best to explain through an example.

Let’s say you’re a fence installer in New Hampshire and you have a website that you want to get found in Google. Well, your hope would be that a prospective customer would go to Google and type in the keywords “fence installation New Hampshire” and your website would show up, they would see it, click on it and go to your website.

If you specialize in wrought iron fences, you’d want similar results. Someone types in “wrought iron fences New Hampshire,” boom, there’s your website. Or by town, that’s very powerful too–if somebody lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, they type in “wrought iron fences Lebanon New Hampshire,” and you want your website to show up. That’s what search engine optimization is.

Now in order to hire somebody to do this work for you, it’s helpful to know what the basic procedures are for proper search engine optimization. I’m just going to share with you what we do and get great results with. The procedure we use falls into three basic steps: keyword research, keyword installation on your website, and then proving the effectiveness of the research, the data analysis.

So the first thing that has to be done is your search engine optimization expert has to research the scope of key phrases that people might use to type into Google to find your website. You should know how competitive the key phrases are, and almost more importantly, how popular the key phrases are, because you want to go after the popular keyword searches. When that research is done, you should have a pool of 100 to 300 different key phrases that people might search to find your type of business, and people search very specifically and that’s why this pool is so large.

Second thing is keyword installation. Let’s say you’ve picked 10 key phrases that are real important to your business and you’ve decided these are the ones I want to show up in. The search engine person you’ve hired needs to install those keywords on your site, and they install them in two general segments. One is visible text. The text that you read on your website needs to have those key phrases baked into them: the header text, the link text, the actual plain-copy text that’s on your website–you need to bake that in.

And a little tip here: If your search engine person is a copywriter, that’s a real plus, because you want to weave in these key phrases, but you want to make sure that the copy is still readable–that if a human comes to your site and reads the copy, it makes sense. The second thing for installation is there are hidden areas that most webmasters know about where they install these key phrases. They’re called “title tags,” “meta tags,” and those are the two biggies. There are “image tags” and there are other areas, but that’s the installation process.

The third and last thing you want to make sure your search engine optimization person does is that you want to make sure that they prove the effectiveness of the work that they’ve done. You want to see, after you’ve paid for the work and they’ve done it, that you’re ranking better on the key phrases that you chose, and there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is they should be looking at your analytics, which show you the actual visitor traffic to your website. And two, they should produce a “before and after” scenario for you.

So let’s say you have 200 key phrases that are in your pool. They should be able to give you a report that shows you all 200 key phrases and where in Google each phrase is landing. Are they on page one, are they on page two, page five, page ten? And you should look at that before the work is done and that same report should be run after the work is done, and the “after” report should show an increase in position on a lot of those key phrases. The analytics should show more traffic coming to your site, and it should show you the actual key phrases that people are typing in to get to you. So with a combination of those two reports, you should have a good sense of whether the work actually worked or not, and ultimately, your phone should be ringing.

Here are three questions to ask your would-be search engine optimization provider. One, what kind of research do you do? Listen carefully. Two, how is the installation handled? How do they actually install the key phrases? What’s their philosophy? Three, how do they prove to you that the keyword installation helped? Those are three really solid questions.

Here’s a side note. There are a few directories you might want to submit to as well, or get your search engine person to submit to. One is called Dmoz, one is Google Local Search, especially if you’re a local business, one is Yahoo Directory, and there are several others. But note that today, you’re not submitting to Google, you’re not submitting to Yahoo, you’re not paying somebody to do that for you; Google will find your site. They usually come back–every 30 days, 14 days, or two days, depending on how frequently you update your site–and Google looks for changes. And once the work is done with the optimization, Google will pick it up. Google can pick that up in a day. So just be careful of recurring fees.

Now here’s the big question: How much money do you spend on optimization? Well, optimization really falls into two categories. One is for local search, less competitive. Two is for national search, much more competitive, and you can expect to spend more. For local search, you’ll be spending well into the hundreds of dollars. You’ll probably spend between $500 and $1,000 for somebody who’s going to take you through the whole process.

And think about the payoff. How many new clients do you need to get that money back? One? If you’re a fence installer, you probably need one client. Even if you spend $1,000 on the search engine optimization, you get one new client out of that who found you online through Google, boom, and your money’s back.

Now, national search is a little trickier because it can be very competitive, usually it’s quite competitive. You’ll want to look at– and this is where your search engine provider will help you–how many other websites are competing for you. If you sell PCs and you’re going against Dell and Hewlett Packard, you have a very long fight and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars, and still might not come up where you want to be. You’ll talk about things like back links and getting into social media, writing up blogs, article marketing, Facebook, social bookmarking–there’s lots of things to do, lots of money to spend.

However, if you’re a national business and your website has never been optimized or has had very little optimization, even though you don’t end up on the first page of Google with an optimization, you will most likely still generate quite a lot more visitor traffic, and that’s where your analytics really pays off. You can see, “Gee, we have 500 visitors a month, 1,000 visitors a month coming,” and after the installation that bumps to 700, 1,400, 2,000 visitors, and you know that your money has paid off.

As always, please feel free to comment and subscribe :)

Let’s take a look at a real search in Google: Look up a local florist say in Framingham, MA. If you typed in “Framingham florist” you would find a list of Google generated business links at the top of the first results page. If you ran a florist there you would want to make sure your business was on this list. You would also make sure that your business’s website address was included so visitors can link directly to your site. Watch the video below to find out how to get your business in Google’s Local Search in less than 10 minutes.

 

 Gain publishing control on your website [4:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (91)

Here’s the real problem. There is a lot to talk about in your business. You have new products, new services, you might have specials, seasonal promotions, holiday promotions, customer stories, case studies. Maybe you run a restaurant and you have menu items, or you host musical events and you want to get PR out the door. There are a lot of things happening in your business, and guess what, you should be getting it out on your website.

Now, what’s the problem here is most of us are locked out of our own websites. What I mean is that we have to go through our webmaster in order to get something changed on the website. And it’s just too much work, too much money, to get everything that’s going on in your business out the door on your website.

OK, what I just said is completely wrong today. Today the technology is available for you to be able to post information yourself easily; even easier than Microsoft Word is to use. You can log in today, with a user name and password right on your website, add the information you want to add, click “publish”, and bam, publish the information right on your website. And if you’re really clever you hook it up so that when you click “publish” it spits out to your email list as well as putting it on your website.

So, the software today has changed. The game is changing. In the past software such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage, NetObjects, and many others were used by webmasters, still are used by web masters, and they’re installed on the webmaster’s computer. That’s where all the work has to live.

There is also software that you can buy that you can run on your own machine that will hook up, through some work, with a software that either lives on the webmaster’s machine or through the server itself. But it’s fairly complex, mostly problematic in my experience. I’ve used a bunch of these different software packages and they just don’t work great.

The best software, here are the three biggies. I’m going to tell you which ones are the ones to look at. Drupal is a nice piece of software. It’s content management, it lets you make edits right online. Joomla!, same thing. Joomla! Makes edits right online. And you can even use WordPress to make edits online, logging in, no software required.

Now, here’s the downside. If you have a site that you recently built where you’re not quite ready to rebuild your website, it’s going to cost money for you to convert your current website into one of these websites that allow you to edit.

If you were thinking about rebuilding your site, or if you’re looking at a brand new website, then what I would do is I would talk to your webmaster about using one of these three software programs to build your website.

Now, there’s an additional benefit to publishing your information, things that are happening in your company, online. The benefit is that Google loves this stuff. If you start talking about the promotions you’re having and the press and the case studies that you’re doing, Google picks up on this and they’ll come back to your website more often, and more visitors will find your website. And that increases the chance that they’re going to connect with you.

So, here’s what to do.

Think about the types of things that change in your business, things that you want to talk about, products, services, specials. Do you promote things on the holidays? Do you have inventory? Do you have performers coming onsite? Are there events that you want to publish on your website and let the world know?

Make a list of the things in your business that you’d like to talk about. And that list should be online. It should be available and it should be changing over time. And you should have the ability to easily make those changes.

And then talk to your webmaster about getting your website converted into this new software that is making an enormous difference in the performance of websites.

Once you start adding information to your website you’re going to learn the power of your website, and how effective it can be for your business.

Oh and let me know if you have had any experience with Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or any other content management software!

 

 Why you have to publish company news on your website [4:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (106)

Your 2 main challenges:

1. Driving visitors to your website
2. Building trust so your visitors will connect with your company

Publishing a company newsletter accomplishes both.

Comments welcome! Hey they might even get answered :)

Transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about why you have to publish a company newsletter on your website. There are two really great reasons to do this.

One, you have to draw visitors into your website, and doing that is a web marketing challenge. Number two, once visitors get to your website you have to create trust and that trust happens over time so that visitors will reach out and eventually connect with you. And publishing your news and publishing your articles on your website and sending them out via email is the way to solve both of those challenges.

Now, let me tell you a little story. Last Monday we published at 11 o’clock at night our latest company newsletter. It had to do with a new green, carbon neutral server that we just put online for our clients and at 1:47 A.M. Google picked up the news.

The next day I woke up and found an email in my box from the communication department at Rackspace, which is the company where we host this server. A Google alert had alerted them that I had published my news and they wanted to do an interview.

So I responded back, “Sure, hey that’d be great”. And on Wednesday we had a phone interview. That phone interview is going to translate into a case study which is going to go on their website, offering my company free publicity. Now you can’t beat that. And that doesn’t happen everyday but this is what’s happening online today, and you have to take advantage of it.

I have been publishing a company newsletter on the website and pushed out via email for ten years now. And I have to tell you that it has been responsible for a steady stream of new clients. It just works.

Let’s review. If you provide good information on your news website you will build trust over time. Publish what’s happening with your products and services, publish what’s happening with your company and give good, helpful information.

You can create a tips article. If you are in the carpet cleaning business talk about stain removal, talk about chemicals, talk about green products. All these things offer limitless conversation with your customers.

Number two, Google loves news. It just loves news on your website. What happens is, as you write the text that goes on your website Google will crawl it. And the more you write the more often Google will come back to your website and read through your text.

Your text will naturally be filled with keywords that people will type in to find your site. And what will happen is, say if you were a carpet cleaning company and you were publishing news, is if someone was looking for carpet cleaning in a certain geographic area, like Boston. And maybe they were looking for something about green, toxic free cleaning products and you had written an article about that, they might actually land right on your news page. They will bypass your home page all together and after searching on Google land on your news page.

Then you have a chance of them crawling through the rest of your site to see, hey, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re writing articles on all sorts of carpet cleaning topics, and you might have yourself a new customer.

So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to talk to your webmaster about adding a regular news feed to your site. Start by publishing once a month which I know you can do, and make sure that that newsletter also gets emailed out to your list. Now you have an email list, right?

Well, that’s it for now but I promise I’ll talk about building an email list another time.

 

 Website metrics: How to understand your website's performance [2:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (52)

You must understand how your website is treating your visitors. Here is your first step to enlightenment!

If somebody asked you today how your website is performing, would you have any idea? Would it be helpful to know what is working on the site and what’s not working on the site? Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Would it be helpful to know if visitors are getting to your home page and then just going away? Or, would it be helpful to know which pages on your site were viewed the most times? In other words, which pages on your website visitors found interesting.

And the reverse: Would it be good to know which pages visitors didn’t pay attention to at all, and were maybe even getting in the way? Or how about this: Let’s say you pay your webmaster to make some changes on your website. Would it be helpful to know if those changes made a difference?

Now to run a successful website, you have to know the good and the bad. Installing website metrics onto your website is the way to do that.

And guess what? You can do it for free. My favorite tool is ‘Google Analytics’. ‘Google Analytics’ gives you a great top-level view of your information and helps you make decisions on what to do next with your website.

So here’s how to get it. Go to google.com/analytics/home. Or you can just search for ‘Google Analytics.’ You’ll get a snippet of code that you’ll hand off to your webmaster, and they will install it on all your pages, and after about a week of tracking you’ll have the answers to the questions that I posed above.

Website metrics will tell a story about your website. It will help you understand what’s going on and will give you the clues to help you make better decisions down the road, and that will help your business.

Comments?

Here is the secret tool to help you brainstorm a terrific domain name, fast.

Comments, thoughts, or other?

Video transcript:
So, all the great domain names in the world are gone, right? Wrong. I have a secret weapon here that I use called “instant domain search”. If you go to instantdomainsearch.com you will be presented with this page, and this allows you to type and immediately know whether a combination of words is available or not.

It is a fabulous tool. It allows you to brainstorm different domains very quickly and know if they are available or not.

Now, a couple of pointers before we get going here. One, make sure you get a dotcom domain. You might be tempted to getting a dot net or biz or us, but don’t do it.

People remember .com. They don’t remember anything else. Get your company name. That’s very important, and if you can’t get your company name then gets a name that is easy to remember and that’s related to the business you’re in. OK, let’s get started.

Let’s assume we have a company named Smith and Smith Accountants, and we are looking for a website address. We click in here, and we type in Smith and Smith Accountants. And guess what? In the little green bar you see that dotcom is available so smithandsmithaccountants.com is available.

Now, a little trick here is you can press control, hold the control key down, hit the,’s’ key and it will save that name under your little save searches box here.

The next thing I like to do is actually see if I can find a short domain name. I’ll probably end up reserving the company name, but I want to see if there is a short one available because that one is just a little too long for people to remember to type when they have to key in your email address.

It’s a lot of work, and we don’t have any time to do anything these days so let’s do our customers a favor.

OK, so how do we do a short one? How about an acronym, ssaccountants? Nope, I get a red box. Dotcom, it’s taken, all right. Let’s back it up. How about cpas? Or cpa? That’s taken. How about cpas? That’s taken as well.

How about we do a little trick here and add a dash which is the minus sign in there which you are allowed to do? And that doesn’t work. That’s taken. Let’s knock the,’s’ off and ss-cpa.com is taken. So, that doesn’t work. OK, fine.

Well, let’s try another angle. How about smithsmith? Well, smithsmith.com is taken. How about smithsmithcpa.com? Hey, that’s taken, too; smithsmithcpas.com? Guess what? That one is available. Not bad, not bad.

Let’s do the trick of doing a control,’s’, and we add it to our saved searches. We have two domain names that are available for the business.

I think you get the point. You can quickly find something that’s available. Get a dotcom and what I would do here is I would definitely reserve the company name, smithandsmithaccountants.com, and I would also reserve the shorter name.

Now, I might spend a little more time finding something shorter than smithsmithcpas and something easy to remember.

But, I would reserve that one as well. I would make that one my main website, and I would use that for my main email. Then, I would point the company name to the shorter version of the website name.

That’s how you get a great domain, and you get to know if it is available right away.