8 Ways to Make Your Website do the Work

So you know you need a website, but maybe you're looking for ideas on how to USE your website effectively. Why get a website unless it helps you accomplish business goals, right? Here are some ideas on what your website can do for you.

1. Use your website for 24/7 sales opportunities

Whether it’s with PayPal or an online shopping cart, a website gives you the opportunity to sell your products and services at any time of day or night. It’s important to give your customers the option of purchasing something when they want. Make it as convenient as you can and provide options.

Note for non-profits:

Maybe you're not selling products, but you probably have donors, or events where people can purchase tickets, or some kind of service that you can sell online. It's very easy to accept online donations using PayPal. Read our blog about the benefits of using PayPal.

2. Use your website as a marketing tool

It is often said that a picture paints a thousand words. You can talk to your potential customers for hours, trying to convince them that you are a professional, top of the line company that can satisfy their needs…or you can let them see for themselves by looking at your website. If it’s properly crafted, a professional website will add loads of credibility to your business.

Be careful though. A homemade looking website can do just as much damage to your credibility as a fantastic website can add to it. You do not want to give your business an amateur feel. As tempting as it might be to have your 14 year old computer-tech nephew create a website for you on the cheap, it's usually not a good idea. Get a profesionally designed one, even if it's a very basic starter site for $400-$500. Related - 5 Easy Ways to Enhance Your Website

3. Post PDF files of your printable brochures or announcements

Save some money on printing by posting your brochures and other handouts on your website. You can still hand out some physical copies but many people would rather have the digital copy anyway.

4. Use your website is an informational tool

A website can save a lot of time and money by being the centerpiece of your marketing material. Make sure that any information that you would want to be made public is easily found on your website. Here are some ideas for general information you can post:

• Contact information (email, phone, fax, etc)
  
• Physical directions to your offices using Google Maps
  
• Information on products and services
• Prices
  
• Calendar of events
• Press room page with articles, press releases, or news features

5. Get referrals easier

Say one of your loyal customers recommends your services to a friend. If their friend is a little unsure, all he has to do is visit your website. If your website looks great, you have a new client.

6. Get feedback easier with an online form

It's a great idea to have a little online form on your contact page. This will let people contact you directly through the website. It looks professional, is easy to setup and manage, and will make life easier on your customers.

7. The search engines will bring potential customers to you 24/7

Through the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, your potential for reaching new customers is huge. You don't necessarily have to be an expert in search engine optimization to get traffic through the search engines. If your website is simply coded correctly, with the correct keywords scattered throughout your content, you should get some traffic.

If you REALLY want to get the most you can out of the search engines, invest in an SEO (search engine optimization) expert. SEO experts know all the tricks on how to drive relevant traffic to your website. It can be a costly investment, but the payoff can be huge. Just make sure that you hire someone who you trust.

8. Your website can reach people who you never would reach otherwise

Think about the potential...you can actually sell to people who have never even heard of your company. Geographic location is no longer much of an issue. People who find you through Google or Yahoo would probably never find you any other way. Your potential just goes through the roof when you have a properly created website that draws traffic from multiple sources.

Having an effective website is like having another employee who works for you 24/7. It is a time and expense commitment up front, but once you have it created it becomes a long term investment.

The Importance of Article Writing

A very helpful tip for improving your online presence that we are highlighting this week is article writing. Article writing can be a chore and it's difficult to make the time for it, but it's extremely helpful and we strongly recommend everyone use it as part of their online strategy.

Help Before You Sell

The first reason we recommend that you engage in article writing (some people prefer the term "blogging") is that it gives you credibility. With article writing, you can achieve "expert status" in the eyes of your potential consumers. That may be enough to distinguish you from the competition. Help your potential customers first, and they will be more willing to trust you with their hard earned cash.

Content is King

The second reason articles are so helpful is that search engines LOVE good content, which they will find in your articles. There isn't a better way to help your website rise in the search engine rankings than supplying great content to your website. In many markets, it's very possible to be ranked #1 in Google simply from having a Search Engine friendly website and a steady supply of unique articles.

Goals in Article Writing

As we alluded to in our web content writing guide, there are different goals in writing web content for your website. Primarily your goals in article writing are educational. Like we mentioned, you also want to write for search engines, but it's very likely that your articles will just naturally have good keywords in them without you having to intentionally put them in.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep promotional writing to a minimum. In other words, don't just talk about how great your business is and why your readers should hire you. That's not the purpose of the article. It's recommended that no more than once per article you inform your users of your services. The way you do it is also important...we suggest saying something like "oh by the way, if you want help in this area we can help you, so click here". Don't make your services the focus - keep the focus on helping your readers by educating them. Your readers are looking for helpful information, not a sales pitch.

What to Write About

Here are some ideas on topics for your articles:

• Do-it-yourself tips
  
• Product reviews
• Industry news
• Helpful tips and ideas for your customers
• Client of the Month feature
• Interview style article of industry expert
• How-to training article
  

How Often to Post

We recommend that at a minimum you're posting new, helpful information at least once every 2 months. Ideally it will be much more often than that, but this is a good starting point for most people. We post two articles every month. Figure out what your goal is, what works for you, and stick to it.

Once you publish your article on your website, it's a good idea to announce it to the world. We recommend at a minimum that you post a link to your new articles on Facebook, Twitter, etc. We also suggest that you post them on article directories such as ezinearticles.com. This will help give you more exposure as well as bring incoming links to your website (good for SEO). It is a little time consuming to ensure that your articles get posted correctly in online directories but it's not difficult if you can put forth the extra effort.

The last thing to remember is have fun with it! No one is critiquing your grammar on the internet and as long as you're providing helpful information without ramming your own services in their face you should be successful. We plan on writing an article in the near future about the dynamics of a good article and what it takes to make each article successful. Stay tuned and happy writing!

How To Track Website Traffic Without Spending Money

How many people visit your website?
What city do they come from?
How long do they spend on each page?
Which page is your most popular?
Are people coming to your website through search engines like Google or Yahoo?

These are all important questions that you need to know about your website. And they're all available to you...with the right software.

By "right software" you'll be glad to know we mean "free software". Google Analytics (GA) is a free tracking software that you install into your website so that you can keep track of website statistics. In this article we'll explain how to setup Google Analytics, and how to use it effectively.

How to Install Google Analytics

The first thing you'll need to do is get a Google account if you don't already have one. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html to set up your account. Make sure you use a valid email address when you sign up because you will have to verify your account. Google will send you an email, and you simply click the link to verify.

Once you've verified your account, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. Click on "Access Analytics" then click the "Sign Up" button. That should lead you to a screen that looks like the one below:



Simply type in your web address, give your account a name (whatever you want, so you can recognize it) and click "continue".

On the next 2 screens, type your first and last name, and agree to Google's terms, and your account is created.

The next screen gives you a block of code that you have to copy and paste into the HTML of your website. In the most recent version of Google's code, this goes immediately before the closing head tag. Once you have the code on every page of your website, click "Save and Finish". After a couple days you should be able to start tracking visitors.

How to Use Google Analytics

One practical use is that you can track your marketing at a glance. Below is a graph from Google Analytics that shows web traffic to our website:



You'll notice right away that we got a little bit more traffic about midway on the timeline, and then shortly after that we had a large spike in traffic. It turns out that the large spike is when we had our last workshop, and the days before it is when we had email blasts advertising it.

You can track how many visitors came to your site because of different actions that you take. Whether it's Facebook ads, an email newsletter, an event, etc...you'll be able to instantly know how successful your marketing efforts are.

What Pages Are Being Visited?

One of the most basic things you can see with a statistics program for your website is what pages are being visited. The graph below is an example:



This is an extremely valuable tool, not just because you can see what pages your visitors are looking at, but how much time they spend looking at them. Reports like the ones above can help give you clues about how your website is working, or not working for you.

Let's give a real life example. One of the pages on your website is titled "Information", and you notice that it isn't being visited very much. This usually means that the link leading to it isn't generating interest ("Information" is a little vague and boring), or that people are having a hard time finding it. You can try renaming it from "Information" to something more specific like "Get Directions", or try making it stand out more so people notice it and will click it.

Custom Reports

We definitely recommend creating custom reports with Analytics. With the drag-and-drop functionality it only takes a couple minutes to set it up, and it really provides you with some very nice data about your website.

One custom report that we use shows how many unique visitors come to our website, then how many pages those unique visitors visit, then how many of those visitors are new as opposed to returning visitors. Then we show how many pages are visited followed by the average time they spend on the website as a whole.

You can get more in-depth than that if you want. As part of that same report we know what city our visitors came from, how they found our website, and what search phrase they used to find us (if they used a search engine like Google or Yahoo).

Setting "Goals"

A good way to track the success of your website is to set "Goals" through Google Analytics. You can easily set them up, and it's easy to keep track. Some ideas of what to track are:

• Newsletter subscriptions
• Social media interactions (if you have a Facebook button, see how many people are clicking it)
• Sales
• Downloading a brochure or catalog
• Time spent on a particular page
  

Hopefully this will give you a broad enough overview on how helpful Google Analytics can be. Good luck!