Earlier we spoke about how to find a web designer. Design is an important part of creating trust in your brand. Today, we are going to discuss another important strategy to create trust in your brand: content creation.
When creating content, many website owners fail to recognize that content is an important element of your marketing strategy.
Whenever somebody lands on your website, your content and imagery are effectively your sales people. The content needs to be convincing, persuasive and give incentives to the reader to contact you and buy your product and service.
But how do you get your content to do that? We'll, that's what we are here to explain:
Website Content That Sells
The first thing to do when creating content is to define:
Who your ideal customer is and what their defining attributes are;
Understand the problems they face;
How you can offer them solutions that solve their problem.
Now understand the mindset of your customer. He or she is trying to solve a problem related to your product. In our case, our customers try to find a website. Since our ideal customers are business owners, we know they are looking for a professional website that can generate leads and converts customers. As a result, our content reflects that.
If you understand the NEED of your customer, and you can immediately show him or her that you can address this need in a professional manner, than the battle is already half won.
Caveat: The Best Sales People Are Mentors
Once you start trying to sell to someone, you activate the 'sales wall'. Many sellers approach a sales man with their guard up, the erect a wall of suspicion. And that is the correct attitude: after all, sales people could have their bottom line in mind more than the customers need.
To avoid skepticism, structure your content so that it becomes a guide or a mentor in the customer's quest to solve his or her problem. You want to have a conversation with your prospect that is free of pitching and selling. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a call to action, but it does mean that you should focus on the problem, not the sale. At least, not just yet.
Add a Call to Action
There is a term that was coined in the late 90's to describe the average surfer: 'wandering drunk'. This seems a bit harsh, but on the Internet, everyone seems to have ADD. Content is scanned, people stare at pages an average of 10 seconds before they decide whether they like your site or not, and you get very little time to sell your proposition.
You already know that your content needs to be targeted. It also needs to be short, to the point, and visual where possible.
But you don't just want your visitors to understand that you can solve their problem. You want them to CONTACT you.
'That's what the contact' button on my site is for', you say. We say: 'on the net, you have to be more obvious.'
Numerous studies have shown that if you end your copy with a way to contact you, either by calling or via email, you will dramatically increase the amount of people who contact you.
On your website, it is important to tell people what you want them to do: 'you found your solution, now contact us'.
The Beauty of Content Marketing
Television ads work because of their wide reach, but they convert less. Websites convert more visitors to customers than TV ads (in general) and with the help of SEO can attract a large number of visitors month by month.
Why do websites convert better than TV ads?
Because TV ads interrupt. You are watching a program and all of the sudden your are told of a solution when you really rather be relaxing. It works, because with enough exposure, you start feeling that the brand is somehow 'familiar'. But it takes a lot of repeated exposure, and that is why mobile phone companies for instance advertise so often on TV and elsewhere.
Websites are different. When you get a visitor, it is because he or she did a search on Google or another search engine and landed on your site. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. So if you can convince them that you have a solution right there and then, your chances of having the visitor contact you are dramatically higher than a TV ad.
And that is why you should pay attention to your content. It is a powerful marketing tool, but often misused. Follow the guidelines in this article, and you should see a rise in the amount of people who contact you after visiting your website.
The Westboro Baptist Church {wiki} held a demonstration in front of the Twitter office in San Francisco on Thursday. Even more people showed up for a counter protest, featuring the best protest signs I’ve ever seen. See more signs at Laughing Squid.
The dancing house
Prague’s “Dancing House” is nicknamed “Fred and Ginger,” for obvious reasons.
Such a controversial design would normally be denied, but former president Vaclav Havel is a strong supporter of avant-garde architecture … and he owns the building next door.
When deciding on a design for your website, two challenges arise:
choosing a layout
and choosing a color scheme for your website.
When you start thinking about how you want your website to look and how you want it to behave, it is best to do a search online and find other websites that you like. Bookmark the sites you like and make notes of the specific elements that attracted you to the site. Don't worry too much about looking to similar, during the design process, your site will start looking distinctively different from all the other sites out there.
Layout often seems a daunting decision to make, but you will soon notice that the best sites have similar layouts. Reinventing the wheel makes no sense, as it would only serve to confuse the user. E.g. you could put you logo at the bottom right hand side of the page, but users would not notice it. We expect logos to be at the top left. This is true for most elements on your page. Just look around on the web, and you'll quickly notice what I mean.
Colors are more challenging and matching colors is as much an art as it is based on making educated decisions.
Nevertheless, there are some simple guidelines that will greatly simplify your decision process.
Step 1: Choosing Your Primary Website Color
Your primary color will set the mood for your website. It will instantly communicate the emotional tone of your company and is therefore one of the most important decisions you will make. In order to understand the feelings your primary color will generate it is time to go to the shrink.
The Psychology of Colors
Blue: coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness; can also imply sadness, depression.
Blue has a calming effect on our brains. Just look at the sky or the sea, and you'll feel its calming effect.
We tend to associate it with safety and stability and it has become to signify intelligence, reassurance and trust. It calms our energy and enables us to focus better, think more rationally.
It is for this reason that blue is the color of business. Business offers pragmatic solutions to our needs and problems, and strives to create stability and progress in our lives.
Blue is a great color for sites that deal with practical problems, intellectually challenging solutions and brands that aim to give you more control over your daily activities.
The U.S. Air Force choose blue as their primary color to emphasize that they are not focused on war, but on creating stability in the world.
Red: energy, passion, excitement, power; also implies aggression, danger.
Red is a powerful color, a real attention grabber. Our instincts register as passion, fire, love and lust, or on the dark side with war, violence, blood and aggression. Psychological tests have shown that red raises blood pressure and can cause perspiration.
Red is associated with blood: the flushing of cheeks, the redness of a woman's lips.
There is a reason why stop signs are red: your eye is drawn to them, we are hard-wired to notice red.
Sites that deal with romance will also benefit from using red as a primary color.
Youthful brands that aim to tap into the passionate nature of their audience tend to use red in their branding, example in case: Coca Cola.
Note: Pink is the softer side of red. Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.
Green is the color of spring, of fresh grass, of the Earth renewing itself. As a result, it has come to signify health, growth and wealth. Green symbolizes renewal, and fertility.
Green is shown to be a color that relieves stress and improves healing.
That is why many healthy choice brands embrace green in their branding as the example below illustrates:
Orange is very blatant and vulgar. It makes you immediately start having feelings.--Wolf Kahn
Orange is the color we find most in autumn, or towards the end of a day. It is vibrant and warm, a bit removed from the passionate and sometimes dangerous nature of red.
Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite.
The telecommunications company of the same name choose orange as its primary color to reflect its youthfulness and zest for life and to illustrate a more carefree attitude.
Black: power, elegance, secrecy, mystery.
Since the dawn of time we've known black as the color of night, a time when darkness shrouds the world in mystery. It is often associated with evil and menace or mourning and death. This is however a purely cultural preference, as the ancient Egyptians used to associate black with life and rebirth, seeing the night more as a gestation period (the sun was reborn every morning).
Black has also come to symbolize power and elegance, popularized in fashion because of its slimming nature.
The colors in Batman's logo did not come about by accident. It tries to express the menace, the power and the mystery of the dark crusador, while the yellow tries to show the mission of the Batman: one of hope and renewal of the world.
White...is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black...God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. - G. K. Chesterton
White represents cleanliness, purity, and spirituality. It represents life and marriage in Western cultures, but it represents death in Eastern cultures.
Dove's branding focuses on using white to appeal to women and promote its main message of cleanliness.
Color tells people who you are
As a brand, one should not underestimate the power of color. Color tells your audience how you perceive yourself. It plays an essential part in your communication strategy and should be chosen with care.
Share your ideas about branding and color
Use the comments to share some of your thoughts on color and branding, and upload your logos to illustrate how brands make use of colors to communicate their messages.
Most PC's or Mac's will only have a handful of fonts installed. There is little overlap between the default installed fonts on these various systems. Already with many browsers, and increasingly in the future, readers will be able to decide on the fonts they want to view web pages with. With CSS, you can suggest a number of fonts, and cover as many bases as possible. But don’t rely on a font being available regardless of how common it is.
These figures are the cumulative total of about 8 survey submissions per week since January 2003, 2633 total. The Windows applet-based survey was introduced on 21 April and is currently recording the frequency of 281 of the most common Windows fonts.
Jakob Nielsen's Readability Guidelines for Website Font Size
Do not use absolute font sizes in your style sheets. Code font sizes in relative terms, typically using percentages such as 120% for big text and 90% for small text.
Make your default font size reasonably big (at least 10 point) so that very few users have to resort to manual overrides.
If your site targets senior citizens, use bigger default font sizes (at least 12 point).
If possible, avoid text that's embedded within a graphic, since style sheets and font size buttons don't have any effect on graphics. If you must use pictures of text, make sure the font size is especially large (at least 12 point) and that you use high-contrast colors.
Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site's visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don't recommend such a button for mainstream websites.
Maximize the color contrast between the text and the background (and do not use busy or watermarked background patterns). Despite the fact that low-contrast text further reduces readability, the Web is plagued by gray text these days.
We've already discussed how to convert website visitors into customer through some advanced website marketing techniques. These techniques focused on how to get visitors, capture leads and use that information in an automated marketing and sales strategy. We also discussed about giving incentives to spread the word about your website.
But all these advanced marketing techniques are useless if you cannot gain the visitor's trust. And how to gain trust is the topic of this article.
Look as Professional as You Are
Looks do matter. Most visitors will click away from your site if it doesn't look well designed. This is especially true in markets that are more mature. You need to make sure that you look better than your competitor, and preferably look as good as any other respectable business.
Stand By Your Product / Service
Offer Guarantees
Offering Risk Free Guarantees helps to reduce worries about what happens if the product / service isn't as portrayed on the site. You know that your brand delivers quality, but people who learn about you for the first time have no idea whether you are trustworthy and deliver as you say you will. That is only to be expected, and you can address this worry straight away by offering a list of guarantees.
This way you can close the door on "what if something is not right" type of reasoning and brings your visitor one step closer to buying from your company.
Offer Social Proof
Social proof is what others say about you. Because it is a 3rd party that makes the statement, it is some of the strongest trust-winning arguments your site can offer.
Awards
Granted, qualifying for an award can be an expensive business, as many associations require a 'contribution' before they even start considering you. But beyond the politics and the up front cost, winning an award still shows skill and professionalism.
Customer Testimonials
Testimonials can really help build trust in your brand, especially if they are from well-known local names or ubiquitous corporations. The most helpful testimonials briefly describe a problem, how you solved it and what made your service special. It is also helpful if somehow you can make the person who delivers the testimonial more real. For example, on our testimonials, where possible, we like to link out to the LinkedIn page of the person who gave us a positive review. Or you could link to the corporate profile page of the person in question.
Case Studies
Case Studies can give your visitors a picture of how you will work for them, how well you have performed in the past and demonstrate the longevity of your brand. They are at their most powerful when combined with testimonials.
Press Mentions
They can be a lot of work to come by, but here in the US, the press tends to be very helpful when it comes to reviewing businesses. In everything you do, keep the press in mind and keep relevant industry and local magazines updated about your progress.
You and Your Staff
Staff qualifications, past employment and previous achievements are all important indicators of how well your company will perform when engaging with it.
Another positive effect of introducing your staff or yourself via your website is that you put a human face on your company. If your visitors can see the real faces that drive your company, they can identify with your brand a bit better.
Office Address and Company Registration
Nothing tells visitors you are serious more than clearly showing your company information. Yet many relatively unknown brands forget to do this. As a result, they lose sales, many of them from customers who want to buy a product or service from someone in their locality.
Security
Customers do worry about passing along information to you, from being spammed when giving out their email address to being defrauded when entering their credit card details. That is why it is important that you tell your customers how you keep their information secure.
Transparency
Allowing your customers to interact with your website and to leave content is the ultimate show about how confident you are about your brand. You will come across the occasional 'crazies', but people know people and can see beyond that. If the bigger picture is positive, people will trust your brand.
Allow Users To Create Content / Products
A simple 5 star rating system where appropriate can give indicators about the public mood about the content / product the visitor is considering. It can also give you an indication which products fail expectations and should be axed. Once you axe a product, negative ratings don't matter, because it is no longer shown on your website.
Allow Users To Comment
Again, this shows that you are confident about your product / service, and can also be an interesting survey tool.
Offer a Forum
Some brands can benefit and in fact reach out to their users by implementing a Forum on the site, where users can freely discuss things they value in their daily lives and want to exchange thoughts about. Of course, the forum should remain relevant to your product / service.
Offer Useful Tools
The tools you offer to help to facilitate the decision can help your visitor to choose your brand and give a feeling of professionalism. Tools you can use are:
Interactive forms that assess the best product for you
Interactive questionnaires
Client login for project review
Online appointment setting service
Auto responders when visitor contacts you (e.g. 'We received your email and someone will follow up your enquiry within the hour')
Etc.
Trust in Your Brand = Higher Revenue
Creating trust in your brand is paramount, and it is worth the effort. If you want to learn more about how you can improve how your website generates trust, feel free to contact us.
Over To You
I am sure there are many things we have left out. We'd love to hear your ideas, so leave us a comment!
What are some of the things you need to look for when you want to hire a web designer or a web design agency? Here, we aim to give you some handy tips that can aid you in your decision making process:
Step 1: Searching a Web Designer or Web Design Firm
Do a search online for web designers + your local area. That way, you will find web designers that are local to you and that you can keep accountable. One way of suppressing cost is by looking for foreign website developers, but keep in mind that creating a website is never a one-off job. You will want updates in the future, your web designer will from time to time need to update the security of your site to prevent your site from being hacked, and you might want extra functionality.
Always look at more than one web design company. Do you like the design of their site? Then check out their portfolio. Do you like the style of the work they've delivered? Does the work look sufficiently different from site to site? If the answer is no, you are dealing with a company that only can create a generic, 'one-look fits all' site. If the answer is yes, you have found a design company that is flexible enough to cater for different needs.
Step 2: Conducting the Interview
When talking to a web design firm, really notice how much they talk about your business. This is a good indicator of what type of partner they will be in the project. If they try to close the sale too hard without showing interest in your business, they will offer little value. Only a firm that wants to know your business intimately will be able to represent your business as it is.
Make sure you ask them if they do all the design work of their websites themselves. Some firms hire outside designers and only take care of the technical side of creating websites. That means that you are dealing with a middle man when it comes to trying to get your site designed, and Chinese whispers can soon get the better of your project.
Equally, ask them if they did the programming of the websites in their portfolio themselves. If the company doesn't know how to program a site and hires third party service providers, you might be facing unpleasant surprises that the firm cannot solve easily. Programming a website isn't that hard for a firm, but managing a third party programmer (usually in India) can lead to a number of accountability issues.
Ask your web designers for a structured process on how they develop a site, clearly detailing every design phase. It will show you how organized they are. They should be giving your an opportunity for input with every step along the way, otherwise how could you make the site into an accurate representation of your company?
Do they know about SEO? SEO is the art to have your site rank well in the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your site should be designed with the search engines in mind, so that you can be found online for your products and / or services.
Also ask how you will be invoiced. Never accept a 'payment up front' arrangement. Instead, look for a deal where you pay 50% now, 50% after satisfactory delivery of the website. We offer payment terms of 30% at the beginning, 30% midway through and 40% payable 30 days after the website has been launched, giving you every opportunity to spot mistakes in functionality before you have to pay the full sum. It is important that you can agree with your web designer that you don't have to pay on the day of completion, but that you get plenty of time (a minimum of 14 days) to 'play' with the live site to find if there are any glitches. This makes the web designer more accountable.
Ask if they will maintain your site. The more dynamic your site is, the more it will need security updates, in order to make sure that nobody can hack your site. What are their terms, how much will you be charged on a recurring basis?
Ask them if they offer technology that helps you edit your site yourself. You don't want to have to call your web designer each time you need to update text on your website or each time you want to add an image. You should be offered a simple way to update your website yourself.
Make sure that any contract states that you own the copyright of the look and content of the site and that you own the domain name.
Tell your web designer what your deadline is and what sort of compensation they offer if they go beyond this deadline.
Your website is a crucial part of the success of your business. If you pay attention to the above tips you will find a web designer who will be able to meet your needs and help you make a success of your website and in turn of your business.
If you'd like to talk with us about your website design project, please contact us.
The next couple of weeks we want to build a step by step tutorial in building a website that is geared towards the successful promotion of your brand. If you follow the advice in the blog posts over the next couple of days, you will create the foundations of long-lasting and scalable success.
Every website needs a web address or domain name where it can be found. Usually, your web designer will help you in making the correct choice, but how should you evaluate his or her recommendations? Or what if you want to register a website address yourself?
This guide aims to help you with these questions.
Finding an Available Domain Name
A good place to check for available domain names and potential variants is NameBoy. It will show you web address alternatives, and what names are still available. Even if a domain name is taken, you can still go back to their homepage, enter the domain name there, see who owns it and how you can contact them to discuss buying the domain name from them (warning: this can be an expensive option!)
Another great service is Picky Domains. For $50 (or free when you are a blogger) you can get help finding the ideal domain name. If no ideal domain name is found, you pay nothing. This can make the ordeal of finding a suitable domain name relatively easy for you.
Your Web Address Should Ideally Be the Same As Your Company Name
Our firm is called Online Design Bureau. As a result, we registered the domain name onlinedesignbureau.com and all of its variants (.biz, .net, .org, etc.)
Microsoft owns microsoft.com, Apple owns apple.com. Examples are league.
But why is this important?
When people know your brand name, they will conduct a search for your brand online. The website that is most likely to show up is the site that has a web address with an extension (.com, .org, .biz) at the end.
You want that result to be your site. How bad would it be if you did a search for Sony, and the first result (sony.com) did not belong to the Sony corporation? Exactly.
For that same reason, you should also register all variants of your brand name. At least the ones that would have relevance in the countries where you trade. So when you register a domain name, register all the suggested variants as well. E.g. Microsoft owns .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us and all other variants on the net. You do not want one of your competitors to buy up one of these domain names and undermine your brand.
Choosing a Good Web Address When You Have No Company
Sometimes you want more than just a corporate address. You might want to build an alternative site, or you might be a blogger without a corporate brand behind you. How do you choose a good web address then?
1. Your web address should relate to your product, service, business or the content you deliver
What do you do? If you are a plumber in Dallas, Texas, a good website address name could be plumbingdallastexas.com. If you write about agriculture in Nebraska, a good name could be agricultureinnebraska.com. Etc.
Think about what best describes what you do and then try to find a catchy web address that corresponds with that.
If consumers might get confused about alternate spellings, register these domain names too. For instance, if you run a blog that speaks to both US and British readers, keep in mind that the Brits spell many words differently. Register domain names according to this spelling. You can then redirect these extra domain names to your main website.
2. Your web address should be memorable
Yes, the main source of traffic for your website will be the search engines. But once in a while your website might come up in a conversation between 2 people you might not necessarily know. If they tell each other they found this great website and that the other should check it out, you don't want it to be something complicated like AnantharamanSubbaraman.com. However, if I told you that the main competitor for Ikea is thisisfurniture.com, than that is a name you might be able to remember until you come home, or would find easy to type into your browser. An added bonus is that if you own thisisfurniture.com, it isn't hard at all to have top billing for the search 'this is furniture', the brand name of the company.
3. Good web addresses aren't easily confused with other addresses.
If your website is all about recipes, and you try to compete with a famous website called recipezaar.com, it might be unwise to name your brand recipebazaar.com. You'll end up being responsible for sending more traffic to the better known site.
4. Beware of trademarks
When web addresses were new, people made it a sport to buy up famous brand web addresses, and then 'cybersquat' them, often selling them on for major money. Recently, legislation has caught up with technology, and the legislator now favors the trademark holder. So if you'd own nike.com, chances are that Nike would still get the name if they took you to court and you couldn't justify how that domain relates to you or what you do.
As a result, it is important to tread carefully if your domain name could be confused with that of a major brand. You might put in all the work to promote your web address, only to lose it when contested.
Registering a Domain Name
Registering a domain name is easy. Probably the best value for money is by registering your domain with Google. For full disclosure, we are heavily integrated with Google's services and love these people. Again, your web designer will be able to guide you in this decision, or simply look up "domain registration" on a search engine of your choice and compare prices. You should never pay more than $10/yr for your domain name!
Over to You
If you have additional observations, or find yourself with additional questions that we didn't fully answer here, don't hesitate to leave a comment or contact us.
Forums = automatically generated content. The content generated by your users in a forum helps your site rank better for what is called 'long tail searches'. A research report from Google astonishingly revealed that about 50% of all searches are completely new, never seen before. A forum, having essentially randomly created content, is one way of catching these 'long tail searches' that you simply can't plan for.
Another benefit is that we don't always know the vocabulary of our demographics. Forums can catch this vocabulary, since the content is used by the target demographic.
Visitor Loyalty
If your forum is high quality and truly provides useful content, visitors can get very focused on it, checking in every day to learn more, ask new questions that arose and connect with their virtual friends.
Market Research
Being in direct contact with your target group allows you to be better informed about their needs, wants, questions and general culture. It is a great research tool.
Community Building
Forums are ideal to provide your community with a way to connect to each other. It is a fantastic tool to swap ideas, create meaningful relationships within overlapping industries and create a sense of belonging.
The challenges of building a forum
The many benefits that come with building a forum doesn't mean it is a walk in the park. When considering building a forum, ask yourself the following questions in order to assess that you can meet the demands put on yourself:
Kick Starting Your Forum
It can be very difficult to attract visitors to your forum. An empty forum basically has no hope of attracting people that participate. People need to see content, need to be able to explore topics. Creating all this content can be a lot of work. I spend a lot of time trying to share my expertise on our Online Marketing Forum and providing the visitor with answers to questions they posted. I am lucky to have a small community who provide so much useful content besides the posts that I submit.
As with everything in life, you need to ask yourself if you have the time to put into making your forum a success.
Managing Your Forum
Even a popular forum cannot be left alone. True, forums generate automated content, but still require a moderator who makes sure that the forum stays on topic and that valuable content is added everyday. Especially when you run a successful forum, this can become a full-time job. One way of coping with the volume of work is recruiting volunteers to moderate your forum. I am always surprised how many people want to contribute free time to develop a forum that discusses ideas that they are passionate about. From a sociological and psychological point of view, this can be explained by the fact that some forum members would have contributed content anyway, and enjoy the added status of being selected to become a VIP, a Forum Manager.
Spam Wars
Forums are a target for spam bots that leave all types of nonsense on your forum. Here at Online Design Bureau we upgrade our forum every month to deal with the ever growing sophistication of spam bots to take advantage of a sites capability to accept user generated content. The benefit of these upgrades is that forum managers don't have to worry about spam, as the spam bots are outsmarted each time they find a new way to bypass all the security.
Is a forum right for your website?
You need to assess whether:
you have enough visitors to make a forum viable
Whether they would appreciate having a forum made available to them
Whether you have the time (or the money) to generate the initial content that a forum requires to become successful.
Whether you or your web design agency has the technical know-how to set up and run a forum.
If the answers to the questions above is an resounding YES, you can reap the many benefits of owning a forum, which include repeat visits and visitor loyalty, the early beginnings to create a community around your brand, the benefits of having automated content generated and the SEO boost this brings by ranking better in the search engines for search terms you aren't even planning for.
A client asked me what I mean when I use the word 'assets'.
That's a fair question.
An asset is something that you build and can use without ever running out of it. A television advertising campaign is an expense, a brand is an asset. Because the brand gives you something extra (familiarity, identity, community, reputation, integrity, etc.) without needing to spend a dime extra. When you need to buy a list of leads, that's an expense. But when you have a list of people who gave you permission to market to them (via email, RSS, etc.), than that is an asset. Why?Because you know they want to hear from you. You know the marketing campaign will have an effect (by keeping your brand front in mind, addressing a real existing client need, etc.)
An asset means you're not just shooting in the dark, but that you get something extra, for free.
When you start up, you have no assets. When you are Google, you'll have many.
That means you should be working on building assets every day. What is your brand. What makes you unique. How do you convey this with personality. How do you get people to WANT to hear what you have to say. Every penny should invest in building assets, even while you are shooting in the dark.
When you start a business the hardest work is getting those first customers, those first subscribers, the first notoriety.
If you do a good job (and I'm sure all of you will), most customers will refer you on to 2-5 others at least. And if you do a good job, most of the second group will refer you to a third group 500% larger.
That is what we sometimes forget as start-ups. The fact that we aren't just marketing to the people we meet. We are marketing to everyone after them. So if your first group is lukewarm about you or your services, IGNITE them. They are your best marketing tool and your best bet for growth.
Earlier we spoke about how to find a 
Who your ideal customer is and what their defining attributes are;
Websites are different. When you get a visitor, it is because he or she did a search on 
Blue has a calming effect on our brains. Just look at the sky or the sea, and you'll feel its calming effect.
Red is a powerful color, a real attention grabber. Our instincts register as passion, fire, love and lust, or on the dark side with war, violence, blood and aggression. Psychological tests have shown that red raises blood pressure and can cause perspiration.
Yellow, the color of the rising sun, has come to signify hope, light and energy and simply looking increases the metabolism.
Orange is very blatant and vulgar. It makes you immediately start having feelings.--Wolf Kahn
Since the dawn of time we've known black as the color of night, a time when darkness shrouds the world in mystery. It is often associated with evil and menace or mourning and death. This is however a purely cultural preference, as the ancient Egyptians used to associate black with life and rebirth, seeing the night more as a gestation period (the sun was reborn every morning).
White...is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black...God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. - G. K. Chesterton
Looks do matter. Most visitors will click away from your site if it doesn't look well designed. This is especially true in markets that are more mature. You need to make sure that you look better than your competitor, and preferably look as good as any other respectable business.
Customer Testimonials
Press Mentions
Do a 
When talking to a web design firm, really notice how much they talk about your business. This is a good indicator of what type of partner they will be in the project. If they try to close the sale too hard without showing interest in your business, they will offer little value. Only a firm that wants to know your business intimately will be able to represent your business as it is.
Ask your web designers for a structured process on how they develop a site, clearly detailing every design phase. It will show you how organized they are. They should be giving your an opportunity for input with every step along the way, otherwise how could you make the site into an accurate representation of your company?
When people know your brand name, they will conduct a search for your brand online. The website that is most likely to show up is the site that has a web address with an extension (.com, .org, .biz) at the end.
Forums = automatically generated content. The content generated by your users in a forum helps your site rank better for what is called 'long tail searches'. A research report from Google astonishingly revealed that about 50% of all searches are completely new, never seen before. A forum, having essentially randomly created content, is one way of catching these 'long tail searches' that you simply can't plan for.
