To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales.
Are their popular ideas or trends in your industry that you can combine to create a new product?
OurStage just did and created a whole new community.
American Idol was America’s most watched TV series last year, and YouTube is arguably one of the most popular online destinations.
OurStage looked at these trends and came up with a simple business plan: combine the two and create an online American idol type competition through user created video files.
In fact, they improved on the concept, by segmenting the music competitions into genres such as Acoustic, Indie/Alternative, Electronic, Metal, Solo Performance and Reggae, giving a forum for those who don’t champion pop music.
They further extended the model to include film makers who can submit their materials in categories such as Animation, Comedy, Short Films, Trailers, Documentaries and so forth.
Creative types can upload their content, and the rest of us can judge works side by side, vote for our favorites and see them progress ’till one takes the Grand Prize for that month (a whopping 5,000 US dollars).
What more, the power is put firmly back into the hands of the people who are actually purchasing CDs, concert tickets, movie passes and DVDs – in other words: given large enough a user forum, OurStage can inform on sure bet artists in all genres, something they could benefit from in a myriad of ways.
What is it that you can combine to create a product with added appeal? It doesn’t need to be anything as ground breaking as OurStage, but could be something as simple as combining an element of game-play with your education packages, combine calorie-counters with your food delivery service or trying to create a community around your brand.
Take Spotlight Live for an example: they created a hybrid between a restaurant and American Idol. Their motto is: “Eat, drink and be famous” and they offer a four-story performance amphitheater, setting the stage for aspiring popstars and starlets who are supported by a team of entertainment professionals to create the live performance of a lifetime. The acts are broadcasted online and on Spotlight Live’s own Times Square Jumbotron! You can come to their restaurant in the heart of New York’s Time Square to eat some whimsical American cuisine while watching live American Idol style entertainment.
To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales.
Do you know the needs and wants of your target groups. Could you further segment them and identify sub-groups who have need that are unmet?
Medical recruitment agencies focus on the nuts and bolts of the job when attempting to attract doctors and nurses.
MedRecruit has shaken up the game by explicitly including lifestyle in the process of matching doctors with positions. Doctors who sign up for their free service not only detail their medical specialty and grade, but also specify the location they want to work and what sorts of family, cultural and recreational opportunities they are expecting, whether it is skiing, surfing or bungee jumping.
MedRecruit proudly states that their service results in happier doctors and higher retention rates for the hospitals that hire them.
Are you working for a recruitment agency? Are there hard to fill positions that could benefit from this approach?
Or how could you further segment your target audience, by looking for needs that are yet not catered for?
To stay in the same industry: Connect moms found an unexpected gap in the market when they started an employment agency for young moms.
To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales. The first in our series is Vmeals, led by CEO W. Carter Hoerr. Vmeals is a beautifully designed site that takes full advantage of the new opportunities the web offers.
Vmeals website
Feet on the street model
Carter Hoerr: Vmeals is an “old” web-based business that relied on “feet on the street” sales reps to prospect and sell to customers. Our website was primarily an ordering tool used by our customers once we had sold them on our service.
Vmeals moves online
Carter Hoerr: In the last year, we’ve made a concerted effort to make our website more of a “virtual” sales and marketing tool. We added a video demo on our home page that explains our somewhat complicated corporate catering service and value proposition.
Lorenz Lammens: Vmeals shows us how a website can generate success by embracing the different media the internet allows us to use. If you offer a complex product, adding a video can increase comprehension of your offering. Ask yourself if your message strategy could benefit from incorporating different media solutions such as video to simplify the message. Integrating video in your website doesn’t need to be expensive. By using services like Vimeo or YouTube you can shift the bandwidth cost of streaming video to those providers, making it essentially free for you after the initial production cost.
Carter Hoerr: We can now track prospect visits to our site, so we know what they’re looking at, bounce rates, time on site, etc.
Lorenz Lammens: We discussed in an earlier blog post how you should segment your target market. The truth about defining your target market is that it is an ongoing process. Carter tracks his visitors and by doing this understands what content they find interesting. This enables Vmeals to understand what content their users want, and what different user types appreciate different content. Ultimately, by tracking the visitors to your site, you understand how a segment finds your web page and what content leads them to the sale. It also helps you identify bottlenecks (pages on your site where you lose the customer). You can optimize the sales process by taking the learnings from the successful sales and apply them where sales have failed. Tracking your visitor doesn’t need to cost anything. Solutions like Google Analytics allow you to implement an advanced tracking package on your website free of charge.
SEO and keyword research for Vmeals
Lorenz Lammens: if you are unsure what SEO means, read our article: “What is SEO?”.
Carter Hoerr: We updated our content and links to increase our SEO effectiveness. We added separate landing pages for specific PPC and email marketing campaigns, so we could track response rates and capture lead information.
Lorenz Lammens: Adding separate landing pages is important, because you want to know what marketing campaigns work well and which need updating. If you tie each one of your online marketing campaigns to one page, you can easily see which efforts generate traffic and conversion and which need updating. Read our blog post about tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaign for both offline and online campaigns.
Carter Hoerr: We added a separate Vmeals blog site to increase awareness, engage our customers, and improve our SEO. These changes have really helped. About half of our new customers find us now through online search or referrals, while the other half still come “the old way” through traditional sales rep prospecting. This has expanded our brand reach and lowered our cost of sales.
Keyword research and link tracking
Carter Hoerr: We use software (Hubspot) to carefully track our keywords and incorporate them into our site content. We also tie together our various marketing channels: web site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and PR to achieve higher SEO ranking. We’ve also worked on basic SEO like page URLs, meta descriptions, etc. Our organic search visitors run about twice the rate of our PPC visitors.
Lorenz Lammens: Hubspot is an excellent solution to grow your traffic. But for companies on a budget, the price charged by Hubspot might be steep. There are however free alternatives to the services that Hubspot offers. But that is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you want to know free tools for a specific problem you like to solve, feel free to ask us about it in the comments of this post, or ask for advice in our forum.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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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.
OurStage looked at these trends and came up with a simple business plan: combine the two and create an online American idol type competition through user created video files.
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 
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.
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
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 
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 
