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.
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever
Cute baby
Donut Seeds
Mamihlapinatapai
Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
Take a break
Caffeine – how it works
Make us laugh. If you have any cool emails, forward them to us to best-of-our-inbox@onlinedesignbureau.com
We get a lot of questions on how you can rank well in the search engines. This is a vast topic matter that will be extensively discussed in our blog. For now, we just wanted to give our audience some quick pointers about the essential components of an SEO strategy. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask them in our SEO forum.
A brief overview
As with every specialized knowledge, we can draw broad strokes, while reminding the reader that the devil is in the detail.
Our SEO 101 Guide will open with describing the broad principles. They will give you an eagle eye overview of the framework in which we work coupled with a short overview of how these principles have developed historically in the search engine algorithms.
Raw PageRank (a.k.a. Link Juice)
Let’s start with the smallest factor of interest.
PageRank used to be an important factor in SEO optimization for Google. Today, it is somewhat important, but it’s advocated effectiveness is more myth than reality.
PageRank was a simple algorithm that calculated the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. In other words, it wasn’t the amount of links that point to the page that were important (this is a frequent misconception) but rather the chances that somebody could stumble upon your page.
In the hay day of SEO, PageRank was extremely important. You could install the Google Toolbar, that gives you an indication of the PageRank of each page. The trick was then to get links from pages with high PageRank, as this would increase the probability of a surfer randomly clicking on links to arrive on your page. The algorithm would then list you higher in the search engines simply based on this algorithm.
Since the beginning of the Naughties search engines have gotten smarter, and PageRank has declined in overall importance, in many ways because it was such a random way of assessing the value of a page.
Key Words on the page
Next on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.
But for now, a quick overview:
It is important that keywords that are indicative to the search appear on the page. In other words, if a searcher looks for ‘electric kettles’ and your page is about ‘electric kettles’, those words better be on the page. Seems obvious, but quite often we don’t know what search phrases our audience would use. This would then require us to first find out what key phrases are the most popular when people look for our services. Once we know these key phrases, we should then include them on the page.
There is a whole ’science’ behind on-page optimization, and we will be addressing this in-depth. The science also extends to optimization for visitor to customer conversion, and this will be addressed in November’s tutorials.
Anchor text in Backlinks
Backlinks move your site to the center of the web
More important than the keywords on the page is the words used in the link from an external page (on a different domain) than your page. If your page is about search engine optimization, and an external page links to you for the keywords search engine optimization. than that will count towards how relevant your page appears to be to the search engines, especially if the link comes from a page that is contextually relevant to your topic material.
The influence of anchor text in external links has been declining in the past, because this is yet another element that can be gamed by SEO’s. But if you have a lot of backlinks to your site, you will see a definite uplift in your position in the search engines!
Domain Trust / Authority
Way way back in the history of SEO, when the industry was still in its infancy, an astonishing 7 years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Domain Trust didn’t really play a role that I knew off. Today, it is THE factor in SEO.
If Google decides that you are a trusted domain (like the BBC or Wikipedia) you will do well in the search engines for all key phrases that are relevant to topics you discuss. That is not to say that you can’t be beaten by pages that have lots of backlinks (see the previous page), but you will have to try a lot less to get far superior results. In fact, Google’s algorithm update this year (called Vince) has given even more weight to the fact whether Google trusts your brand or not.
So the task at hand is to write lots of quality content and become a trusted domain (this can take years) – or the second best thing: get lots of links from trusted domains (we’ll discuss this in future updates).
Conclusion
Although we will discuss some tricks other than the four main categories above, adhering to the above rules will take up most of our discussions and activities when optimizing your site for search engines. The recipe is simple: don’t worry too much about the myth of PageRank, focus on creating quality content with strategic placement of keywords, accrue backlinks across the web and fight hard to become a trusted site (the best way to avoid calamity with each new search engine algorithm update).
Over the next month, we will give you step by step instructions how to achieve success in each of these categories.
Over to you
Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think we left some essential information out? Or do you have questions that require clarification? Let us know, we love to hear from you.
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.
Many people are frustrated that they don’t seem to be able to generate any leads from LinkedIn, while it seems to be the perfect vehicle for others. This tutorial will help you in generating business from LinkedIn.
The topics we will cover are the following (click on the link if any of these topics interest you in particular):
Without an account on LinkedIn, you aren’t going to get very far, so join LinkedIn here.
Once you’ve confirmed your email address, you’ll be able to fill out all your details, such as experience, previous work, education and contact preferences. Do this, it will help people who want to find someone with your skills.
2. Add connections
Make sure you connect to friends, family and former colleagues. LinkedIn will make this easy for you by looking in your email address book to find contacts who already are on LinkedIn. You can also use the search box on the top right to look for people you know.
Once you are connected to colleagues and friends, you can then browse their networks, find potential prospects and ask the people you are connected to for an introduction, or simply directly contact the decision makers in these businesses. But more on how to generate leads on LinkedIn here.
3. Add your company’s website and blog as links
People will want to browse these links to learn more about you and will add to the credibility of your profile.
4. Make your Profile more informative
Many people skip this step, but it is very important in being more informative and establishing your personal ‘brand’. LinkedIn offers many applications that can help your profile come alive and be more ‘interactive’.
Add a PowerPoint presentation
The Google Docs Application allows you to upload your main PowerPoint presentation straight to your LinkedIn introductions page. If you are only going to use one application on your LinkedIn profile, this is the one.
If you have more than one presentation, add them via SlideShare. The added benefit will be that your presentations will gain some exposure on Slideshare’s main website, so don’t post any company secrets here.
Add your blog to LinkedIn
Blog Link will allow you to integrate your company’s blog on LinkedIn. If your company has a WordPress blog, then use the WordPress application instead.
Show off your interest in the industry with Amazon
Show that you read the latest books in your industry and brand yourself as a cutting edge player. This will help others both to identify with you and understand that you update your expertise. However, make sure that you only show books related to your industry, as this is a professional network.
Keep it interesting
Not all applications seem to be created equal when it comes to their usefulness, but if you travel a lot, the travel application might be something you might want to add to communicate your movements. It will be a good tool to share upcoming trips, current location, and travel stats with your network. Before you travel to a location, always check it to see who else among your connections is in that city that week.
You can also keep the interest high with Polls and conduct a survey within LinkedIn or share some of your larger files that you can’t easily email via the box.net application. However, if you really want to share large files online then box.net isn’t very useful as a free solution, use MediaFire instead (there is no LinkedIn application for them, but who cares).
5. Create a more memorable and SEO friendly URL
Change the linkedin URL to end in your name or web site address. So instead of looking like this:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/722/21ca, it will look like this http://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzlammens
6. Allow your profile to be found in the search engines
Look to the top right for the Account & Settings tab. Click “Edit Public Profile settings” to control which parts your profile will be visible to search engine users.
7. Ask for recommendations from anyone you have ever done business with, worked for or worked with
Testimonials are the essence of social proof. Get recommended. If people have recommended you before, make it easy for them: send them their previous recommendation and ask them to republish it on LinkedIn.
8. Update your status messages on LinkedIn
Chances are you already update your business status on Facebook or Twitter. Using services like Ping.fm you can update all of these platforms with one single entry. Use this, save time and network better at the same time!
Step 2 Set up a Company Profile on LinkedIn
1. Go to the LinkedIn Company profile page and enter your company name and your email address. This ensures that you are a current employee of this company and that your company doesn’t already have a profile..
2. Once your email has been verified, you can provide basic information about your company.
3. Now when you have a skeleton of your company profile it’s time to provide more data about your company. Add location and related companies. Spice it up with logo. Editing a company profile is as easy as the above 2 steps. What’s better is that your colleagues from the company can also edit the information once they’re identified as belonging to a specific company group.
Once you have created a company profile, be sure to invite your colleagues to join LinkedIn and swell the number of employees on your LinkedIn Company page. This will help with your corporations credibility.
An example company of a page of our company on LinkedIn can be found here.
Promote your LinkedIn profile
1. Add a link to your LinkedIn profile in your corporate signature
If you are going to use LinkedIn as your networking platform, you should promote it amongst all your contacts and leads.
2. Link to your LinkedIn profile on your forum signatures
If you are active in forums make sure to add a link to your profile there
3. Promote your LinkedIn profile on the social networks you are part of
Spread the word, that’s what these networks are there for.
4. Join a group, there are tons of them
Add the top right of your LinkedIn page, you will see a search box. On the left of the search box there is a drop down menu, if you click on it, it will bring up the options, choose the ’search groups’ option. Start with searching for
Groups in your geographic location (most likely the cities you operate in)
Then groups that give industry advice to businesses (only choose those within your industry).
Join groups withing your sector.
Look what groups your contacts have joined and join these.
Or join more. Be as creative as you like.
If your groups have meet-up events that make sense to join, go to them!
Also read the emails you get from your groups and actively post news to your groups. Answer questions that are asked within your groups, post questions that might help you understand the needs of your group, this will help you to create a name for yourself.
Leverage your contacts to get introduced to THEIR contacts
Look at the contacts people in your network have and profile their contacts: are they part of your target group, could they need your business. Then either ask the connection you share to introduce you or call the company directly. The most useful benefit of joining LinkedIn is that it gives you a chance to learn who the decision makers are in a company and to contact them directly.
Track start-ups.
You can see people in your network who are initiating new start-ups by doing an advanced search for a range of keywords such as “stealth” or “new start-up.” Apply the “Sort By” filter to “Degrees away from you” in order to see the people closest to you first.
Discover leads
Create a group that focuses on solving problems for the target demographic that might be looking for or might need your product. When accepting join requests make sure that you accept people who have the right demographic profile.
Buy LinkedIn ads and serve them to your target demographic
Direct ads are powerful tools to generate awareness of your product
Creating relationships that help you and your business grow
Keep track of your colleague’s promotions and title changes on LinkedIn and send congratulations. They will probably show up on their profile or Network Updates before the company newsletter.
Network with professionals in similar roles in your industry.
Useful Tools
You can integrate Outlook with LinkedIn, and keep in touch with all your contacts in one place. A great tool to get updates every day of potential new contacts, contacts getting promotions or moving companies or special offers from contacts in your network. Download the plugin here.
There is also the FireFox plugin (also works for Flock if you use the FireFox derivant) and you can download it here. Make sure your FireFox browser is up to date first.
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.
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, which pushes up cost 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.
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 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.
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
Next on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.
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 
Many people are frustrated that they don’t seem to be able to generate any leads from LinkedIn, while it seems to be the perfect vehicle for others. This tutorial will help you in generating business from LinkedIn.
Show off your interest in the industry with Amazon
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 
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? 
.png)
