Web Design & Internet Marketing: a Practical Business Approach

(Watch the 5 min video below) The problem with many websites is that navigation buttons, images and animation are invisible to Google from a linking standpoint. In other words, if you don’t have real text links in your navigation buttons, Google will have trouble finding your subpages. The image links won’t work for Google. This means your potential customers can’t find your website. Watch the following video to learn how to check to see if your website is blocking Google.

Audio only:

 

 Is your website blocking Google? [4:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (558)

Audio transcript:
Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, if your website has so many images or animations on it, that they are getting in the way of Google’s ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.

So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it’s all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that’s a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.

Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn’t even have that page in its database.

So, it will never show up in a search and you just won’t get found. And that’s the problem. Now, how does this work? Let’s just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.

Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can’t, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It’s actually a piece of animation. And Google can’t read animation. It doesn’t know what to do with it.

And it doesn’t crawl through it. Now, another way to do it is, let’s take a look at another image that’s linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, “Save image as,” that tells you that that’s an image.

And even though it is linked, Google can’t crawl through it. Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you really went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, and you won’t find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.

So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it’s literally blocking Google’s ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible.

It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google. And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it’s database.

And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.

And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it’s friendly to Google. Use these open source platforms like Droople, Junela or WordPress.

They are free, they are infinitely customizable, and they come with templates, and they are great. Now, I would like to sign off with a little thought provoking question. Is your website building your business? And that is it for today.

(see 5 min video below) We finally put together our 1st company video promoting a unique Pay per Lead website solution. It is targeted towards commercial and residential cleaning companies that don’t have a website or have one that is ineffective. The way the program works is our company builds a website at no charge, promotes the website online, and then charges clients only when their phone rings from the website (or when they receive an email lead from the website).

Now why did we build a video to tell this story? Because video is compelling. Text and photos that describe a product or service pale in comparison to watching a movie with animation and sound. Also it is a difficult concept to explain to people (ie sell).

I previewed the video below to my Tuesday morning business group today to help educate them about what my business does. I wasn’t sure how they would react but at the end everyone asked me to forward the video to them and 2 members wanted to talk to me about new business. Not bad for a group of 20.

Your business: Think about what you sell and what story you can tell… and the secret to a good story is simply 3 things:

1. Problem: hook your audience with a typical customer problem that you can solve for them
2. Agitate: give examples of these problems to make them squirm
3. Solution: solve their problem and be the hero

Can you find the above three chapters in the video below?

Now at the end of the video I would love your opinion and if you know any cleaning companies in your area that have websites that suck (no pun) let me know :)

 

 How to build a successful home page [12:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (684)

Your home page on your website is critical to the success of your website and your best stuff needs to be there. So how you build a great home page? Listen to the audio podcast to find out how to go about brainstorming and prioritizing the elements that need to be promoted 1st.

Audio transcript:
In today’s podcast we’re going to help you determine what to put on your home page. The problem is, is that the home page is the most important page in your website.

It is the one that gives the first impression to new visitors and the official amount of time that people browse your page is 10 seconds.

That means you only have 10 seconds, maybe less to grab someone’s attention about your products or services and get them to click into a sub page for more information. Otherwise, they are going to bounce from your home page and go look at a competitor’s site.

Now yesterday I had an interesting meeting with a client who was in frenzy. He had printed out every page of his website, spread it out on his conference table and was busily crossing out photo’s and buttons and rearranging pages and marking additions and truly having a stressful time out of trying to arrange his new home page.

He was taking the spilt bucket approach. Basically he spilt all the parts of his business out on the conference room table and was trying to rearrange it like a jigsaw puzzle so it all made sense. This is very inefficient and is really not a very good way to go about trying to figure out what is going to be on your home page.

So, how do we craft a successful and compelling home page? You have to start with a clean slate. You have to forget what you have on your website now. Turn off your computer; shut your laptop down because what you have probably isn’t working.

The approach to take is to review the parts of your business first. That is, the services and products that you sell, the bits and pieces of promotional items; you want to go through the foundation of what your business is about in order to trigger priorities that will float up to the home page.

Once you review how each product or service is doing for your business, how important it is for your business, you will naturally get a sense for whether or not it belongs on the first page of your website.

Now, our client sells kiosks. He sells them to universities and hospitals, churches and they get sold for different applications. So we had a conversation about all his kiosks, all his promotions and how he goes about selling to a new customer. That started triggering ideas that would eventually make them sales into the home page.

Now, I’m going to give you a plan on how to get the right information to your home page. The first thing you want to do is get out a blank piece of paper and just write home page on the top of it. Just put it down.

The second thing you want to do is you want to go wrangle a friend or hire some marketing person to be a sounding board. What’s going to happen here is you are going to have a conversation with this person about your business. You can do it over the phone or you can do it face to face. But you want to find somebody who is good at asking questions and digging deeper into your business.

So I’m going to give you seven questions that this person that you bring in will ask you so you can sit back and answer, to think about your business and answer them as best as you can. So here we go.

Question number one– Let’s talk about the history of your business. How did you get started? What was the motivation to start? What are some of the interesting things that happen along the way?

You want to start writing this down on paper. Have the person you hired or your friend write this down. If there is something particularly interesting that would be interesting to one of your customers and it jumps out. Write that thing down on that blank piece of paper called home page.

Number two–Talk about the services and products that you sell. Write them all down and talk about each individual service; each individual product. Who you sell that service or product to and how important that service or product is to the business.

Who is the customer and why are they a customer? Why do they buy your service or product? Now if there is anything in that part of the conversation that jumps out as important write that down on that blank piece of paper that says home page. Although it’s not blank anymore.

Number three– Competitors. Talk about your competitors. What are they doing? What are they not doing? What drives you crazy about them? Why do you do a better job? Why do you do it faster or why do you do it at a better price? If there is anything in that part of the conversation that jumps out, write it down. Write it down on that piece of paper?

Number four– Do you publish any news about your business? Do you publish a paper or email newsletters? Do you send out press releases? Do you do case studies? Do you write articles? Do you have a white paper or 10 to talk about?

Do you have any video or audio? Do you put any events together on premises? Or off-premises that might be worth talking about? If there is anything that you do that mumps out as important to you, write it down on that piece of paper that says home page.

Number five– How do you communicate with your customers? Here we talk about what you do on paper to communicate, what you do on the phone in sales to communicate. How you follow up with leads.

Do you do any direct mail? Do you produce any brochures or produce any articles that you submit? If there is anything here, again, that jumps out, write it down on that piece of paper. Things that you communicate that are really important to your business might want to be on the home page.

Number six: talk about promotions. How do you promote your product and services? Do you do specials? Are you telemarketing? Do you do regular annual, seasonal, holiday promotions of any kind? And just write a long list of everything you do to promote your business.

And then choose one or two that jump out and write them down on that piece of paper that says, “Home page.”

Number seven: Here’s the last one and here’s the trick. Call outs, calls to action, I say this word, it’s marketing gig speak but what it means is, when somebody comes to your website, you want to produce something that they will look at and say, “Wow! I need that” or “I want to learn more about that.

That looks really interesting.” And that’s called a “call out” or “call to action”. It calls the visitor to click on something or to fill out a form or to pick up the phone and call you. It makes them do something.

Now, you might have a newsletter, an email newsletter that you want them to sign up for, that’s a call to action. You might sell a practice service that you’re quoting, you’re always quoting out, and you would want perhaps to have a request for quote form on your website.

If you have a nice slick brochure that you hand out to people, well, get an email address and let them download that brochure. An interesting tit-bit here, a market research that I read recently says that 75% of people that are on the final stages of the buying process are willing to give their email address in order to download a sales brochure.

White papers, same thing, perhaps, you can capture an email address to have the visitor download a white paper. And of course, picking up the phone and emailing you.

These are calls to action and while you’re having this conversation with your friend, think about the things that you sell that might be a good call to action for that product or service or to find out more about that product or service.

Now, when you’re done, that original blank piece of paper that says “home page” is going to be filled with all sorts of things, company information, products and service information, promotional information, communication information and of course what’s you’ve written down here are the things that are really the most important to you.

You might have stars next to some of these things that says, “Geese these are really, really important.”

The idea here is you have now created a rough draft of what your home page says. You probably have too much information here to really successfully promote on a page. But this is your rough draft home page. And now the trick is to prioritize all the things that you thought were important to the business.

And I would recommend you choose one, two, three, maybe four things to talk about, about your business on the home page.

Once you start getting into 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, unless you’re CNN.com, you’re going to start confusing your customers. It can be too much to look at. So the challenge is just to pick just a few things to promote on your home page.

Now in the Kiosk Manufacture meeting that I had yesterday, what I found out is that they were setting out regular press releases. They sent out a quarterly newsletter, and that the owner was interested in publishing articles.

And so we decided, “Hey, we are going to create a news blog for the business and we are going to feed some of the news items onto the home page.” So that would become an important element to a new visitor who came who would say, “Hey, there’s a lot of great stuff happening with this company. They are staying current and there’s helpful article information there as well.”

I also found out since they sell kiosks that there’s an interactivity component of the business. He wants people to see what the kiosk can do and hey why not create a video of a screen cast of a kiosk in action.

And it’s simple, could be a screen capture of a…let’s say it’s a student on a campus, so university campus that’s using a kiosk to find out when the next bus, shuttle bus arrives, how that would happen.

Or you do screen shots and you do a voice over to capture that and you put it on. And video today is becoming more and more compelling. You will likely have a short blur about the company on your page and I recommend writing 40 to 80 words no more that describes who you are and your experience, what you sell, and what’s the benefit to the customer.

And that’s a tough one to write but it’s a very important one which should be on the home page, should be a quick read for when a visitor comes to it.

And we also figured out that their kiosks break down by application and by industry. So, we’re breaking out as whole product segment into his top categories: hospitals and universities, information or check in, survey, etc. rather than lumping all the kiosks into one big product category.

So, there it is. There is some work involved in getting your home page correct but it’s worth it. It is the most important part of your business. It’s critical to keeping people interested in what you do on your site and it really boils down into breaking down your own business and having a review with someone is the best way to do it. Break down your business into its components and when you’re discussing all the parts of your business, your priority will naturally flow to the top and you grab those, and those superior things that have gone to your home page.

And that’s how you goal a successful home page. Hope you found that helpful and that’s it for today.

 

 web design: 1 simple way to get more visitors to contact you [4:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (595)

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 (507)

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.

 

 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.

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