hi again! you know what I love about these questions already? you guys are very very well aware of how a website can work to market your business. Awesome.
okay... I'll address these three questions in the order they came in....
@Shade: Wordpress. Hands down. it is worth the learning curve for a few reasons.... I'll tell you my tale of woe (8 of swords) to win (Queen of Swords, I'd say,) as it relates to web development and the lesson I learned:
Three years ago, I had an idea to do a large community wellness event and knew that the website would be a must for it... but had no idea how to do websites. I shopped around and ended up with Coolbuild, which is a bit like Homestead... all-in-one stuff with a built in content management system. It was easy and cost me about $25 a month... BUT... before the first year's festival was done, I had realized its limitations. The biggest limitation was that I wanted sidebars/ blocks on the side of every page's content, and couldn't figure out how to do this. The whole site started to look very messy the more links etc I had, and putting pictures (images) in was a pain. Also, their "stock templates" became very very limiting and started to look ugly to me. At that point, I had also become very concerned about something else: Search Engine Optimization... for all the above reasons, it became glaringly evident to me about a year in, after consulting with pricey web developers etc etc, that I should have gone with wordpress. It is really the industry standard. As your site gets more developed/deep and you start worrying about Search Engine Optimization and general site pretty-ness, you start seeign more and more the awesomeness of wordpress. Trust me... i just consulted with a guy the other day who feels really stuck because 5 years ago he decided to go with Joomla and now his site is hundreds of pages deep so he feels stuck. Why the desire for wordpress? quite simply, it is the industry standard. You can add so many cool widgets and plugins to wordpress to make it do just about anything in the world. Want to do a membership site in a year or so that you had no inkling you wanted to spin out when you started? No worries... there are plugins like Wishlist and BuddyPress to plug into wordpress to make that happen. Want to add an email opt-in box to build an email list of prospects? Simply pop it in a widget to appear on your homepage and you're done, and it is in the right place (rather than wherever the sub standard systems allow it to appear)... want to redesign the entire color scheme or banner of your site? Simply create a new template and switch it out. The best part about wordpress, though, is that you will truly find that Google LOVES wordpress. if ranking in searched is anything you are even remotely considering using as a marketing strategy, wordpress will get you further faster. I know some of this will sound a bit like double-dutch right now, but trust me: it is worth picking up a copy of Wordpress for Dummies and learning. It's pretty easy once you get started. If you want to have a simple .com domain instead of a .wordpress.com address as your url, go to buy a domain at somewhere like GoDaddy or RegisterForLess... buy your domain, and then go get it hosted. I recommend hosting with BlueHost, as you can host an unlimited number of domains with them with unlimited space for $7/ month. Once you have Bluehost, you simply go into bluehost and add the script to put wordpress on your site. They'll give you a login name and password and voila... you are up and running.
Trust me on the wordpress thing... If you check out what most of the top tarot bloggers are using, you'll find they're on wordpress for the most part.
ok: next: Oona Owl... depends what sort of business website you have. Are you looking to generate local traffic for local readings? Are you looking to make online sales of products? Are you selling physical products or retail? So many possibilities. For me, getting a facebook page has been huge. I'd recommend reading Gary Vaynerchuk's book, Crush It, to get an overview of how to explode your business online using social media well. For local business sites, I would really recommend figuring out what keywords your potential market may be searching for online to find you (google Google's Keyword tool and play around on there, and if you really want to go deeper with keyword research, check out Market Samurai to help you out)....Once you know what keywords people are searching for you, focus some effort on getting ranked for those keywords. Making sure your keywords occur often in blog postings, page titles, link text, etc etc helps with this, as do quality backlinks from other sites. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a science unto itself that I have gotten paid to help other sites maximize... bt the basics are very simple. this is effective for local businesses especially, although it can be difficult for larger markets. Let's see... what else??? I like to drive traffic to some of my local sites by putting gift certificates for readings etc etc in silent auctions. Another thing I'll do to bring offline traffic online is run giveaways... on their raffle tickets I will ask for name and email (not phone number!) and make sure that I am being ethical about it by clearly stating that by entering the drawing they are agreeing to occasionally receive emails from me. Once you have built an email list, your marketing becomes free, easy, and you are able to develop an tremendous amount of rapport and goodwill with your customers if you do it right. The bible on email marketing, for me, is Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing".... an oldoe but a great resource and inspiration.
But... when you say "I get lots of looks but it usually ends there"... I definitely think you should read Permission marketing. When people click on a website, they are usually not in buying mode. They just want to check you out. We live in an attention deficit online world. Your main job when you get a web visitor online, is to somehow engage them for a while on your site, and then, after you have ensured that they love you, you ask them for their lead... preferable their email. there are awesome ways to do this and slimey ways to do this.... Seth's book is a good resource for how to discern btwn the two, but use your common sense. If you have an opt-in box on your site, make sure it is in the top right-hand area, above the "fold" of the site (meaning above the point that you have to scroll down).... this is the best place to put the opt-in box based on marketing eyeline studies. So.. long answer to your question.... look to build a relationship with your prospect before asking them to buy stuff from you. One thing that IS important to do with people on your site, ESPECIALLY if SEO is one of your marketing strategies....: keep them on your site for a longer period of time. Engage them. This lowers your "bounce rate"... bounce rate is what google measures in terms of how long people stay on your site. If their average site visit is longer, google figures the site must be "relevent" to the, and therefore will start ranking you higher for the keywords that the visitor found you through. The best super-ninja way to keep people on your site longer??? Embed some relevent videos (even youtube videos) on your site... if they're watching a video, they're not leaving!!! And your bounce rate goes down. But leave the selling of stuff to good email parketing instead of expecting them to buy on their first visit. Ensure they return to your site often by emailing them about your new blog posts, etc etc.
finally, @Canadian Girl: surveys. First, have you discovered Survey Monkey yet??? it is sort of the industry standard, and it's free
check it out. Surveys are obviously great market research, but you can also conduct very informal surveys of your facebook fans... what market researchers 20 years ago wouldn't have paid to have facebook at their disposal for market research... wow
if your survey is also trying to figure out what to sell to your leads, or how they would best like a service offered, consider this: most customers buy from you when you are solving their problems, pains, etc etc. Basic human nature stuff. So the best survey questions to ask are very often questions like these:
what are they trying to achieve?
what don't they know or need to be educated on to get where they wnat to go?
what are the main obstacles they face in getting there?
what have they tried before that hasn't worked?
what do THEY think might help them the most?
....if you can become the answer to all the problems they tell you about through these sorts of questions, you will likely be who they end up buying from
It's always nice, when conducting a survey, to give a little thank you gift to the survey participants. The thank you gift, if it's awesome enough, can be strategic enough to lead them to loving you more and buying from you, too. Goodwill goes a long way. In fact, Gary Vaynerchuk thinks so highly of this that his brand new book is called "the thank you economy".
okay... that should answer the first three questions pretty well. FYI, if you'd like more/deeper info on any of the stuff I've covered here, it's a bit tricky to explain sometimes without a visual. I've found that video works really well, as i can record my computer screen and talk folks through stuff that way easily.... so I'm creating some videos showing people how to do stuff like open a hosting account, design a wordpress template from scratch, build an awesome fan base for free on facebook, embed an opt in box on their website, etc etc etc. Obviously I can't post videos here, but if you want to pm me your email address, I can send you them that way. They're all free, of course
) so just pm me your email if you'd like them as I create them.
ok.. keep the questions coming!!
Laura
