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 Tract Association is venerable Quaker publisher dating back to the early part of the Nineteenth Century. They had a website but wanted a new one built with a content management system that would allow for easier editing. The new site is built in WordPress. Befitting the organization's ethos, the site is relatively plain but there's a lot going on underneath the surface.
