"I went through three other web designers before you came on the scene! I thought I was the ultimate jinxed person when it came to having a website. Honey, I'll sing your praises from sea to shining sea!"
Kathi Appelt - Children's Book Author
http://www.kathiappelt.com
8 Elements EVERY Website Should Have
By Chris Hunter
If you’ve been running a website for a while, or even if you’ve only been “online” for a little while, then you know how important it is to get people to your website. Well, we’ve come up with five great tips to make this happen and keep them coming back!
Please read on and take every one of these tips to heart. They’re sure to help you literally drive traffic to your website!
People like new things. I like going to a couple of sites in particular daily to check to see if there have been any updates. Then there are the websites I used to visit daily, but now I only visit once per year because for whatever reason, they stopped updating their website.
Hey, I can’t really throw stones, you know? I get caught up in business and life just like anyone else does. I have to literally force myself to write new content and come up with something new not only on Brazos Valley Design’s website, but also on some of the other websites that I own.
So what’s the solution?
Force yourself. When you find yourself sitting in front of the T.V. bored and flipping channels, get the ‘ol laptop out and start typing! What do you think I’m doing now? I quite often do this to either perform research on the Internet, or work on catching up with work while watching Will and Grace, Friends or E.R. My laptop combined with a wireless Ethernet card has become one of the best investments I’ve ever made!
<shameless plug for business partner>
By the way, if you don’t have a laptop, my business partner, Jeremy owns
a computer company called Advanced
Micro Solutions, and can get you the absolute best deal in town on a new or
even a used laptop! His phone number is 979-696-4267.
</shameless plug for business partner>
So how much new content is enough? I think it depends on your current site traffic, your goals for your website, and how much you want to put into it. Your website is just like a business, you get out of it what you put into it. If you force yourself to commit to two hours of updates per month, that’s more than a whole lot of websites out there, including possibly your competition (hint, hint).
Stale content is a traffic killer. If you haven’t updated your website in a year, then your traffic (and possibly sales) most likely will reflect this. Write some new content and either send it to us to add to your website, or update your website with your content manager! Do it now and don’t put it off!
I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it until I’m blue in the face; put your website’s address on all of your printed material. If you have business cards, you should not only have your phone number, address, and email address printed on them, but you should also have your website printed somewhere on them as well.
Printed material is expensive, so make sure you put the correct information on it before you print it. If you have a brochure, make sure that you have your website address printed on it. If you send a postcard out, be sure it’s printed on it as well.
How about your car? I’ve seen websites on cars or car magnets and I wrote it down at a stop light and visited it later. It’s inventive and it works.
Or what about TV or Radio commercials or Newspaper or Magazine advertisements?
Shoot, if you have a billboard, make sure it’s on there. The point is, if you’ve got somewhere to put your website address, make sure it’s there! Get creative! Yell your website address from the top of your building if you have to! Just watch out for the police or the people in the white van with the little white jackets!
By the way, if I haven’t mentioned it before, we offer all of these services (with the exception of billboard advertising) to all of our clients. We’ve partnered with several printing companies to help bring you some of the lowest prices in the industry, so please keep us in mind when it comes time for business cards, brochures, postcards, or magazine or newspaper ads.
Do you send email? Well of course you do!! Email has become the business commucation tool. Almost all email clients, including some online ones such as MSN or Yahoo, have the ability to add a signature to all of your email addresses. This is something like:
***************************
Chris Hunter
Web Unlimited
VP Sales & Operations
http://www.webunlimited.com
sales@webunlimited.com
979.696.2500 (tel)
979.690.9234 (fax)
***************************
Make sure that every email you send out has your website address on it. People use signatures to find out more about you or your company. If you’ve been in contact with me, then you might have noticed my signature on every email I send. I want to make it extremely easy for people to get in contact with me and this is one of the easiest and most effective ways to make that happen.
One of the proven absolute best ways to keep people coming to your website is to get them involved. If people have a vested interest in something, they are going to keep going there. For instance, if you are involved at your church by being on a committee, you’re going to keep going back there. If you’re not involved at all in anything, most likely you won’t be visiting quite as often.
The same principle applies to your website. If you’ve devised a way to keep people involved some way in your website, either through a forum, a picture gallery, some coupons, or even a contest, then they’re most likely going to keep coming back to your website.
For example, I go to Home and Garden Television’s website at least weekly because I’ve signed up for the $1 million Dream Home Giveaway (hey I can dream too). I keep going back because I have a vested interest in winning that dream home!
I also go to Cotton Patch’s website (one of my favorite restaurants) quite often to print out a coupon before I eat there! Now that’s a great way to keep people coming back to your website!
So the point is, get inventive and keep people involved in one way or another. Once they get used to coming to your website, you can deliver other products or news to them and they’ll be more receptive to your message!
If you need help with ideas on how to get people involved, give me a call or email me and we’ll brainstorm on some ideas that fit you and your business.
This is a newsletter.
I know, I know… I hear you sitting there reading this saying, “Duh Chris!”
Newsletters have proven to be the absolute best way to market to your website audience. The problem is that in the past year or two, Spam has become a huge issue. I get about 300 unsolicited messages per day in my inbox, so I definitely understand.
But you know what? I absolutely love getting email newsletters that I’ve subscribed to. Especially the ones that have great information (kind of like this one)! If I get information delivered to my inbox that I feel that I need, then I’m going to keep going back to that website. It’s that simple!
So you should devise a simple solution for your web audience to be able to sign up (and remove themselves) for your newsletter. The truth is, you can deliver an email newsletter easily.
If you want to deliver an email newsletter all you have to do is come up with a list of recipients, write the content in your email client (i.e. Outlook Express or Netscape Mail) and send it out. The problem is that now-a-days almost everyone has one form or another of a Spam filter and by using the method described above, your email has a very high chance of getting filtered out.
What is the most effective way to deliver an email newsletter then? Well, I’m glad you asked! An email newsletter has a better chance of getting delivered and read if it’s personalized to the reader. If you notice in the “To” field in this email newsletter, it says your name. It also says your name in the subject line and in the content of the newsletter.
People are most likely to read something that has their name on it and it has a higher chance of getting past the spam filters. It’s proven and it works. Look, you’re reading this newsletter aren’t you?
We have developed software that helps us with this. If you would like a great way to drive people to your website, please consider using this software. It will increase your sales, your traffic and can actually help answer some of the easier questions you get day-in and day-out.
Ok, so you’ve read all the way down here. I’m proud of you! I gave you a lot of information! But I recommend focusing on one of these tips at a time until you have it perfected and then move on to the next tip. Some of these can be implemented easily; some of them take a little time.
For instance, I recommend implementing these tips in the following order.
But the biggest thing you can do to help drive traffic to your website and thereby increase sales is…. (drum roll please) do it now. It doesn’t matter if you know how to do all of these things if you don’t do it now! Follow Nike’s slogan. Just do it!
Until next time, take care and remember:
“We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it – but sail we must, not drift, nor lie at anchor. Make it happen.”