A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a
Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a
stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company's service. Unfortunately the page had no useful
content, no
call-to-action and no
Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn't need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.
So you're ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here's five tips for building a self-marketing website!
One: Useful Content for your Target Audience
Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a
blog and writing posts every few weeks. You'll see measures like "
keyword relevancy" increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add
videos and
photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.
Two: Give away something valuable or useful
Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful
quiz, professional analysis, a
PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your
contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a
sales lead generator!
Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions!
It's amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:
- Who is the target audience?
- What would draw them to the site?
- What do we want to get from them?
Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You'll want to end up with Defined Goals: what
quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.
Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your
marketing and
publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google
Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one "converts" better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the
Defined Goals you've set? Once you've finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!
An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it's
conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.
Five: Don't Be Afraid to Get Professional Help
If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you'll almost certainly get your money's worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece
What to Look For in SEO Consultants for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.
The DiMeo family owns and operates several of the largest blueberry farms in the world, right here in the "blueberry capital of the world": Hammonton, New Jersey. They have an existing website that is hand-edited. We created a second site using WordPress. 
When a user of the Google Toolbar visits a page with Sidewiki notes they see a small blue button of the left side of the page with two white chevrons (see screenshot on the right). Clicking on this opens the Sidewiki sidebar. Here they will see comments left by previous visitors. They are be able to add their own comments. 
Beth Kantor's nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it's possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn't happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I'm more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon--fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other "micro-blogging" services. These tend to be so much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press conference. I'm sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event's end. They could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that "social media" is inherently social, which is to say that it's about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.