This month we have created a series of blog posts that take you through every step of creating a website for your business. We looked at creating effective content, finding a web designer and creating a marketing funnel to convert your visitors into customers.
In this final blog post of the month, we’ll do a quick round-up with every step required to create a successful business website.
Step 1: Define your target audience
Before you create a website, you will need to understand who your customers are. Understanding your customer needs and lingo will determine the look and content of your site.
The logic behind this is simple: you want your website to be found by someone who is looking to solve their problem with your product or service. Your content will have to clearly outline that you understand their problem and that you have the solution, and explain this in terms that your audience can understand.
Next you’ll need a domain name. A domain name is a web address that people can type to find your business. E.g. the domain name of this website is http://onlinedesignbureau.com.
You could of course trust your web designer to buy the domain name for you, but then ask the designer to immediately transfer it in your name. Your domain is the most important part of your online presence, it is the place where your visitors can find you again and again. If you don’t own it, you are vulnerable to losing your domain one day.
Read this article for more information (and inspiration) on buying a domain name.
Step 3: Hire a web designer
Of course you might think we are biased: we are a web design agency and we advice you to hire a web designer.
But the logic behind it is quite simple: if your website doesn’t look professional, you are going to convince only a small amount of your visitors to buy from you. Looks do matter. And a web designer can make sure that your website looks like the rest of your brand (or help you create a brand that presents a unified look and message to the world).
Another advantage of hiring a web designers know what converts visitors into customers and can help you develop powerful calls to actions for your website (more on that later).
You’ve already established who your audience is. Now you need to convince them that you understand their problem and provide an expert solution.
Delivering that type of content is where many websites fail. If your content is to self-centered, you will not convince anyone you care about them and will deliver great value.
Your content needs to be customer focused, discuss the problem they are facing with detailed information on how you will solve this problem. But your content also needs to be short and easy to absorb.
Content creation seems like an art, but there are some simple principles at play. You can learn more in our creating effective (sales) copy blog post.
Step 5: Build trust in your website
Great, you’ve got a professional design and have great content that is customer focused. That means your website will be converting visitors into customers quite nicely already.
But you can increase this conversion rate by adding features that build even more trust in your website, such as:
Step 6: Create a marketing funnel and powerful Calls to Action
The logic behind this is straightforward: if you clearly tell your visitors what to do, it is more likely that they will do it. You don’t want your website to just get lots of visitors. You also want your visitors to perform an action, whether it is clicking on an ad, contacting you via email or phone or subscribing to a newsletter.
And the way you can increase the chance that visitors will perform this desired Call to Action is simply by telling them exactly what to do.
Feel we left anything out or need clarification about this topic? Leave us a comment. Or if you already have a website and need advice on everything to do with website creation and marketing, ask your questions in our forum.
And of course, if you are looking for a web designer, have a look at our web design service, contact us or call us: (214) 302-7631.
Welcome to our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed the steps in this tutorial, you now have a professional looking website with effective copy and powerful calls to actions to get business from your business. You’ve added a blog and started writing content and have clear idea on how to promote your content. Today, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of adding a forum to your website.
SEO + Automated Content Generation
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.
This post is part of our ‘How to create an effective website‘ series. If you followed the series, then by now you have a website that looks good and is customer focused. Today, we’ll be adding a blog in the mix and teach you how to promote it.
Yesterday Sirius, an online member of our Community, spoke in our Forum about his strategies to make money online. You can read the discussion here.
We just wanted to add to the discussion by giving you a quick overview of the 15 steps we recommend to create a popular blog and make money from it.
Create a blog about something you are passionate about.
Design it well. First impressions matter on the web.
Develop your personal brand e.g. ‘the marketeer who guarantees return on investment’, ‘the chef who tells you what really happens in kitchens’, ‘the merciless burger connoisseur of DFW’ (burger joint review site), etc.
Create your call to actions for your blog: Facebook connect, Facebook Fan page, Follow on Twitter, Social bookmarking, email to friend option, contact us info, provide a RSS feed for your blog and publish a newsletter with subscription, etc. Capture leads and use every medium to keep your audience engaged with your brand
Post content to all these channels
Create community: use blogsearch.google.com and find relevant blogs, engage through valuable comments and blog post exchanges. Search for topics on Twitter and communicate. Join topically relevant forums and engage. Join Facebook Groups and fan pages and network with the audience you find there.
Keep doing this, day after day: write one blog post, network in social networking sites and forums, interact with bloggers, it will build awareness of your blog.
Once you have plenty of content and some following, offer yourself up for speaking engagements. Come up with an original theme, offer to speak for free to begin with until you are known in the circuit.
Approach magazines online and offline and offer to write articles.
Leverage all the attention you get: start creating seminars and teach people. A seminar of 10 people works for now. You’ll get big soon enough.
Now that you are building some worthwhile traffic, start adding affiliate programs to your blog: Commission Junction, Amazon, local businesses, etc. Now you’re making some money.
Write a book. This will get you more exposure, more speaking engagements, more seminars and some TV and radio gigs.
Now you website should be attracting lots of traffic. Start reaching out directly to advertisers who share your target audience and begin raking in the money.
Remember that as with everything in life, it is all about a combination of hard and smart work. Blogs and books about online marketing tap into the 80’s yuppie culture of making big bugs fast without much effort. For most of us, this is a dream. Some of us do win the lottery.
But you can slug it out for 18 months, creating a blog post every day, raising awareness of your blog daily using the methods we suggested in our 15 step program, and you will start seeing results. Make it easy for yourself and do work with offshore workers, virtual PA’s, etc. You’ll get more done and it doesn’t cost all that much.
Don’t get fooled, this isn’t about making astounding fortunes. Your blog, providing it has valuable content, you communicate with a carefully selected audience in the social networks they hang out in and treat them with respect, will provide you with a steady income. The ammount of income will be dictated by your negotion skills with advertisers and the amount of traffic your site gets.
This blog post is part of our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed our advise, then by now you have a website up and running that looks great, has great sales copy and can gain the trust of your visitors. It also has powerful calls to action that tell your visitors what to do once they land on your site, meaning that you can capture leads and start a permission based marketing campaign (because your users signed up for this!). Today, we’ll be looking at how you can make your site even more successful.
That means, you have to give your site that little extra in order to win the sale from your competitors.
In this blog post, we aim to give you the 10 ways in which you can achieve this.
1. Have a Unique Selling Proposition
People never visit just one site to buy a product. They compare prices and features. Being the cheapest option isn’t necessarily the best solution, people also want ’service’ or a sense of cool or just greater usability. The iPhone isn’t at all the cheapest solution on the market and Apple’s service can leave a lot to be desired, but it has the add-on value of being ‘cool’ and extremely versatile.
Understand that your product, service and company will be compared to others. Therefore, you need to show why you are different, and why people should choose your product over others.
2. Content is King
Good content does several things. First of all, it informs your clients about your product. Second of all, it helps them to explore all the different facets of your business. They might arrive looking for one thing on your website and discover another product or service they weren’t aware of. And content helps you to be found in the search engines. Google and Yahoo really do nothing else but analyze content on the web and then try to match people’s searches with the content that is the most informative and useful to the searcher.
If you want to learn more about content for your website, visit our article on creating effective content.
3. Have a Powerful Call to Action
It is not enough that a user finds what he or she is looking for on your site and wants the product. The user must know what to do next. And it needs to be right there and easy to use. If you prominently feature buying options in your content, you will promote more impulse purchases, if you prominently feature contact details in your content, you will see an increase in people contacting you. Learn more about Calls to Action and creating a marketing funnel for your website.
4. Accessibility
Make your website compatible with all the different operating systems and web browsers available. Somebody visiting your website in FireFox or the Opera browser should still see your website correctly. People who use a Mac instead of a PC must see your website the proper way. Many website owners visit their website only on their PC with the Internet Explorer browser and aren’t aware that people who use a different browser or system might not be seeing their website correctly, or might find that certain menus don’t work.
People with disabilities make up a large percentage of the population. You can increase your sales by that percentage by making your site more accessible to people who may have an issue that make it hard for them to buy your product. A visitor might be visually impaired and require your website to display correctly in their special software. Deaf people who want to view your video content will need an option to turn on subtitles.
5. Test, test, test
Faults might be hidden in pages buried deep in your website. That page might however be the page that people land on first via a search in Google. Therefore it is important that you adequately test every page and make sure it displays and works correctly.
6. Communicate
Make sure your website offers capabilities and reasons for users to leave their email address or other contact details. It is important that you can send out communication materials to your customers from time to time to keep your company ‘front of mind’, to keep reminding them of your existence until the day comes that they need your services again.
A great way of doing this is by offering subscriptions to a newsletter, or a blog, or automatic updates on your latest special offers.
7. Know what your customers do on your site.
Use an analytics package that shows you how visitors found you, what they do once on your site and that keeps track of how many visitors eventually do what you want them to do: buy your product, contact you or subscribe to a service such as a newsletter. Knowing what makes visitors convert to a lead or sale and what turns them off is the most important knowledge you can accrue in order to learn how you can tweak your site to increase sales and lead generation.
8. Optimize your site for the search engines
SEO is the art of having your site come up in the search engines when your target audience types in keywords relating to your products and services. In fact, the search engines are the most likely way that you have found this page.
Understand what keywords your customers use and then use these words on your site to improve your visibility in the search engines. If you need help with this, you can always contact us or learn about our SEO services.
9. Advertise your site
Clearly feature your website on all your sales materials, from business cards to billboards. If your target audience sees your ad but needs more information before they buy your product, then your website can be a great information tool.
Also make sure you offer search as an option on your site, so that those people who type in your website address but are looking for a specific product or service, can easily conduct a search for that item.
10. Have a professional looking website
Looks do matter. Professional design builds trust. People will project the feeling they get from your website onto your company. If your website looks good, they will have a better feeling about doing business with you. This in turn will increase the number of visitors that convert to customers. in an earlier article we discussed how to choose a web designer.
You Design a Website To Sell Your Product / Service
That is your ultimate goal, so you should always keep it in mind. So why is it that so many websites are so inept at selling? Because they forget the two main functions of a website:
Lead Generation
Converting Visitors to Customers
This isn’t just done by having a website. You need to have a website intelligent enough to actually make the sale.
Designing a Marketing Funnel For Your Website
With Marketing Funnel we mean the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. The funnel is the instrument with which we guide them in this process. This process could look like this:
Prospect becomes aware of need
Prospect becomes aware of the brand that offers the solution
Prospect visits brand website
Prospect leaves contact details
Communication between sales staff and prospect
Prospect buys product / service.
Not all funnels will look exactly like this, and some steps in the funnel might be skipped. It is perfectly possible that your prospect visits your site and buys your product straight away. Other’s will need some convincing.
The important part is that you have a strategy in place for all contingencies, and a way to capture vital information along the way.
Coaching Visitors To Leads and Leads To Customers
Design your website with a few simple marketing strategies in mind to achieve higher sales.
Generating Visitors
It is imperative that you have an SEO strategy in place to attract visitors to your websites. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the art of creating a website that ranks well in the search engines for searches related to your brand, product or service. This is the most common way to attract visitors.
Other very effective methods include: PPC advertising (advertising via Google Adwords for instance), or any type of marketing that mentions your website. Always push your website in all collateral, from business card to thank you slip to brochures. If your collateral is missing material, your website can offer a living breathing brochure of information, updated with the latest information, easy to navigate and searchable. A website is the easiest way for customers to find information relevant to their need – and I am not just saying that because we create websites!
Converting Website Visitors To Leads
Okay, so you got the prospect to visit your website. Now, you need to convert him or her to a customer.
The prospect will either immediately buy your product, or you need to somehow capture their contact details and permission to market to them, so that you can maintain a meaningful relationship that keeps your brand front of mind until the prospect is ready to purchase your product or service.
Calls To Action That Lead To the Sale
Make sure that your phone number is prominent. Have a prominent link to your contact page and where possible offer a free chat opportunity, where the prospect can ask the questions that he or she has relating to your offers.
Capturing Contact Details of the Lead and Get Permission To Market
The following information will focus primarily on collecting email addresses. It is important that your prominently feature your Privacy Policy and if applicable, your Terms & Conditions, in diminish any anxiety of your more discerning subscriber.
Make sure that important landing pages feature at least some of the following:
Blog subscription
When you have a blog, clearly show subscription options to RSS and Email. If the prospect finds your blog interesting, he or she will sign up for future updates. The trick is that you keep your blog interesting and occasionally promote your services. Try to offer your blog content in three forms: textual, video and audio. That way you cater to all profiles, from the jogger who likes to learn from Podcast, to the visually oriented person who needs to see a video to keep their attention going to the avid reader.
By the way, if you want to subscribe to our blog, this is where you can do it:
Promote email subscriptions to a newsletter.
Make sure the prospect can preview the latest issue.
Make some content only available to registered users.
It is a great way to capture email addresses and offer the registrant alternative subscriptions that he or she might not be aware of.
Other reasons to leave contact details:
Offer an ezine, ecourse, special report or ebook that requires signing up for periodic updates by leaving an email address.
Offer subscription to channels other than your site, where people might prefer to follow you: allow people to become a fan of your Facebook page with the click of a button (you can then push relevant info to them via Facebook), offer a Twitter link, Google FriendConnect and any other social network that is relevant to your audience.
Incentivise Word Of Mouth
And what if you have a visitor who knows somebody who needs your product? You want to make it easy for that visitor to spread the word!
In order to accomplish this, offer a “Tell a Friend” option that forwards the page via email to a friend, with a personal message from the sender. Offer “Social Bookmarking Buttons” so that visitors can share the article with their community and followers. Some sites might even benefit from offering a ‘bookmark this page’ button.
Your Site Is As Good As You Market It
Web Design is not just the art of making your site look good. It is the art of making your site an effective sales tool. Using some of the aforementioned tips will definitely help you to boost conversion.
Over To You
Do you have other ideas on how to effectively promote your website? Leave us a comment!
If you need a Professional Web Design focused on maximizing visitors and leads, feel free to contact us.
But doing all these things aren’t your only concerns. If you want your visitors to interact with you, buy products or services or make donations, one essential component is gaining their trust. How you gain that trust on a website is the crux of this discussion.
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!
Welcome to our series on building a business website. Your designer will talk about ‘branding’ your site and ‘choosing your house colors’. To be able to understand the psychology behind colors, we created this quick tutorial.
Colors influence your visitors
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 these sites and make notes of the specific elements that attracted you to the site. Don’t worry too much about looking too similar, during the design process, yourweb 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 chose 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 it 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. In the last 20 years Batman has been portrayed as a more tortured character, and the yellow was often removed from his logo in order to better reflect his menace and moral ambiguity.
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.
Overview of brands and their color schemes
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.
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.
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 customer’s 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’.
Content and SEO
The more content you create, the more your website can be found for important keywords in your industry.
Just like in real estate, on the web, websites thrive based on three rules: location, location, location. In case of your website, you should be prominently featured on the first page of google when somebody looks for your product, service or brand.
How to do this is part of a longer discussion, and we’ll discuss how to attract visitors to your site via social media and SEO in the two coming months.
For now, it is important that you know what people type into the Google search box when they are looking for a company like yours.
How to do this is demonstrated in this video:
Now that you know what your audience is searching for, make sure that you include these keywords in your copy. This will help your users find your website. Don’t force it though, keep your site sounding natural.
Mention your keyword once in your contents title, once in the first paragraph and once in the closing paragraph.
There is much more to this – including coding of your website (talk to your web designer) and some advanced strategies. Stick with us, because we will be discussing how to get your website to rank well in search engines in the coming months. You can also get help in our SEO Forum, where our community is quick to respond to questions.
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.
No-one will look at your website unless you have valuable content. You need to be interesting to attract attention and get others to talk about you!
In order to create good content, you need to understand who your target audience is and what type of content and style they’d value.
The Review process
Much of your success is defined by your own personality and the people you naturally connect well with. The first two questions to ask are:
Who did you do your best work with in the past?
Do you have easy access to that type of target market today?
This will define your target audience based on strenghts you already have.
Example
When Apple made their iPod, they defined their target audience as non-tech savvy. MP3 players were originally build for tech-savvy users, and the industry was embroiled in a technology war to create ever more features.
Apple knew that in the past it had already had success with getting non-tech-savvy users to use their Macs. Now they were going to target an audience nobody previously cared about: non-tech-savvy users who don’t look for advanced features, just a product that is easy to use. And thus the iPod was born.
Example for blogs – Andy Beard points out that targetendness, not hype, makes a big difference:
“I have very specific goals, and a very specific target audience. Some people measure success by how many subscribers or how much money someone makes from their blog. I have never had a front page Digg, but my target audience doesn’t really use Digg.
I define success by who reads my blog within my target audience as my defined goal was to attract people within a specific niche, and even specific individuals.”
You cannot be everything to all men. If you want to win in business and create a successful website or blog, you need to be the best at what you do within your existing industry.
If you are not the world’s best within your market, all you have to do is to define your market more narrowly. What niche are you better in (or could you become better at) than any other competitor?
To find this niche, ask the following questions:
Does your market have an urgent pain and / or an irrational passion?
Are they actively looking to resolve this pain / passion (if not, find another answer to the above question)
Can you clearly define a niche around the pain / passion they try to resolve?
Do you have clear and effective answers to resolve the markets pain / passion?
Example
Keeping the iPod as an example, the pain of the audience was that they couldn’t use these complicated MP3 players and had no clear software to rip and download music to their devices. Their passion was easy access to music, but they had turned to the illegal service Napster.
So Apple not only created an easy player, but an easy music library called iTunes that also enabled the user to buy music in MP3 format directly from their online store.
Example for blogs
When Copyblogger looked for a blog topic, he realized that many people wanted to learn how to blog, but that there was no easy manual for the average writer who hasn’t majored in journalism and has no technological skills to speak of. So CopyBlogger seized on this target market and created easy to absorb content about becoming a successful blogger.
Your niche will probably be narrower, since the blogosphere today is more competitive and territory on the net is more effectively conquered niche by niche.
Profile your audience
Okay, now you have a clearly defined niche. You know who you work well with + that you have access to them. You clearly defined needs and wants that no-one is fully providing solutions for.
Now it is time to build a profile of your audience. You’ll create a general stereotype that defines your audience in such a way that you have someone you can imagine communicating with.
Answer the following questions: of the narrow target market you defined, what would you say are their
Desires (things they aspire to but not necessarily need)
Values (a code of behavior they define as ‘good’, ‘cool’ and /or ‘appropriate’)
Needs (things within your niche they cannot do without and if you provide solutions will ‘hook’ them)
Can they pay for the products you promote or sell?
What is their level of expertise (you need to pitch your ideas slightly above that, but not too far above that).
Conclusion
Answering all these questions will enable you to create a clear, living, breathing profile of an audience you already connect well with and have some type of access to (we will widen this access in future tutorials.) You will be able to speak in their language, conform to their codes and behavior and rattle their cage enough to stir their curiosity, enthusiasm and loyalty.
Leave us a comment with your own link building ideas. We value any contribution that keeps us motivated, points out mistakes or gives constructive criticism to help us improve our content and website.
You can also connect to our community in the forums. Discuss how to build links in our Link Development forum. We are always prompt to answer questions.
This is the third installment in our Building a Business Website series. In the previous article we explained how to select a web designer. We just wanted to quickly highlight things you should consider when choosing a font for your site, because this an often recurring issue.
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.
Before you create a website, you will need to understand who your customers are. Understanding your customer needs and lingo will determine the look and content of your site.
Next you’ll need a domain name. A domain name is a web address that people can type to find your business. E.g. the domain name of this website is http://onlinedesignbureau.com.
Of course you might think we are biased: we are a web design agency and we advice you to hire a web designer.
Great, you’ve got a professional design and have great content that is customer focused. That means your website will be converting visitors into customers quite nicely already.
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.
People never visit just one site to buy a product. They compare prices and features. Being the cheapest option isn’t necessarily the best solution, people also want ’service’ or a sense of cool or just greater usability. The 
Use an 
With Marketing Funnel we mean the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. The funnel is the instrument with which we guide them in this process. This process could look like this:.jpg "SEO - a vital part of your lead generation strategy")
It is imperative that you have an 
Calls To Action That Lead To the Sale
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
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 these sites and make notes of the specific elements that attracted you to the site. Don’t worry too much about looking too similar, during the design process, yourweb site will start looking distinctively different from all the other sites out there.
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 it 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 at the color increases your 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
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 
When Apple made their iPod, they defined their target audience as non-tech savvy. MP3 players were originally build for tech-savvy users, and the industry was embroiled in a technology war to create ever more features.
“I have very specific goals, and a very specific target audience. Some people measure success by how many subscribers or how much money someone makes from their blog. I have never had a front page Digg, but my target audience doesn’t really use Digg.
When 
