Are you a manufacturer with a network of dealers who sell your product? If so, you could be missing out on a terrific opportunity to significantly increase sales. Yeah, I know I sound like a TV pitchman, but for a small investment and support, your dealers could be selling your product online and making money for themselves, and for you.
Wouldn’t you like to know what visitors to your site are thinking? Certainly an unhappy or pleased visitor could email you through your capture form, but I’ve discovered a better way. One of my clients turned me on to a new program; it’s great for all flavors of sites, but extraordinarily important for ecommerce sites.
When creating your website you should make sure you can answer this question. How does our website fit into our short-term and long-term marketing strategy? The website will be a key element of any marketing strategy so keeping the focus on the role it will play is imperative.
Even if you're not planning on selling online, a well-crafted site is an essential for any business. Many times we hear my business is very small, just me and a couple employees and our product really isn't sold online so why do I need a website?
Recently I read David Viney's "Get to the Top on Google" and fortunately for you, the whole book can also be read online.
In the last chapter of the book, Viney summarized his top tips for search engine success:
Seven Simple Things Everyone Needs to Know About Internet Marketing
Common Factors of Social Media Success
Question: Don't you think its tough to measure social media?
..."These doughnuts are a family tradition". "I wait all year long to get my fix". "Just the smell brings back such great memories". Do these sound familiar to you?
They both should inspire someone to buy!
Don’t all stand in line with your lips puckered! What I’m talking about is “Keeping It Simple, Sweety.” I read an incredibly useful and informative book recently called “Don’t Make me Think,” by author Steve Krug. The premise is that if your site visitor has to think too much about what to do on your site, they’re not going to do it – they’re just going to move on.
A few weeks ago an email circulated pointing out one hapless company’s image problem. Their website was upbeat, bright, with neon green highlights and a hip feel. But the actual company’s retail location was drab, old, with ancient signage and really the opposite feel to their site. While they may have intended to capture the web audience and show them how hip they were, their actual location was anything but, and the mixed message was killing them.
Your company probably has at least one – a lovely handwritten letter from a well-served client pleased to let you know how wonderful you are. (Makes up for the handwritten note from an unhappy client pleased to let you know how rotten you are). If nothing else, that school class you gave the tour to probably sent you a thank-you note, as well. Either way, if it was positive, you probably passed it around the office, pinned it to the company bulletin board, or sent it to everyone via email. But did you think to pass it around to your customers?
You’ve put together a brilliant blog post illustrating your company’s newest product, or an upcoming event guaranteed to make your business the talk of the town. The post goes live, and then a couple of hours later you check back and notice a comment sitting at the bottom. Expecting lavish praise, you find instead someone claiming your company cheated them, did a poor job, or (worse yet), fired them for no reason. This isn’t a nightmare, it’s an opportunity.
This is part 2 in an onging series called "YouTube Video 101". See this post and others to learn how hosting videos through YouTube may apply to your business.
Social media is all the rage these days. From building company Facebook profiles to placing videos on YouTube, a lot of businesses are jumping on board. YouTube is a great medium for putting the right kind of video on (I’ll get in to what may be the right kind of video in another post). With an audience of nearly 330 million user’s world wide, the format cannot be ignored. You can use YouTube hosting to present your video content to this audience as well as embed video feeds from YouTube in your company website. While YouTube presents some incredible new possibilities, there can be some drawbacks that companies may not be fully aware of. This post explores both the pros and cons of using YouTube’s service in business applications.
We’re not going to focus on the design or the layout of a website, although we may mention some basic elements that will relate to the design, but more importantly, we’re focusing on how the website is structured so it can be successful.
There’s no question on arguing how a website can help you obtain a successful online presence and that it’s the most effective marketing strategy one can have as a designer or a company. A successful website should already have basic information where a site visitor can learn, identify and quickly understand how you can help. Essentially, a website provides a solution to a problem.
Have you ever wondered who’s been on your site? Well, I suppose it would be nice to know names and addresses of people who browse your site, but that’s not possible – yet. I’m talking more general terms, specifically, how often your site gets visited.
While the recession continues to batter brick and mortar stores, online sales are still pretty hot (in comparison). When gas prices climbed through the roof last year and no one wanted to leave the house – everything you needed was just a few mouse clicks away.
Every month, all of us here at Sitepro gather together to discuss the websites that we've launched in the previous month (the photo to the left is Chris Landon leading this review session earlier today). It is typically accompanied by lunch, and the typical "employee banter" that one would come to expect at such a youthful enterprise. Yes, it's a lot of fun...but that's not to say that there isn't serious business going on here.
You might be wondering why we do this every month, and why it's given such high priority...It all has to do with learning what functions businesses are utilizing, and how they might apply to other types of businesses as well.
Web marketing is easy - put your web address on absolutely everything that will ever come in contact with a customer, prospective customer, or someone you hope may one day be a customer. Yet, how many times have you come across business advertising and marketing that omits a company's web address?
If you spend any amount of time on sites like Hulu or YouTube, you may have come across this clever new ad targeting small business owners. Advertising the "Recession Aggression Bag," a phony bean-bag style product that a small business owner can physically abuse and verbally demean to feel better about the economy, the ad does no promotion of Office Depot until you visit the intriguing URL promoted at the end of the ad: thesurvivalofthesmartest.com.
Click past the break for the full video.
This is the final post in the four part series: Why do I Have a Business Website and How is it Doing? The first post expressed the importance of defining clear goals for your website, the second post showed you how to assign a dollar value to those website goals, the third post explained how to create Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) to measure the performance of these website goals, and this final post will show you how to organize and look at these KPI's to make real data-driven decisions.
