No business can afford to discount the opportunities posed by an online presence. This refers equally to an organization that may have traditionally focused on off-line activities or on “bricks and mortar” locations to drive sales. Whatever line of business, product or service, there are significant reasons for exposing your company to an increasing army of hungry and thirsty searchers discovering the Internet on a daily basis.
Your shop window to the world online will be your website. First impressions count for a lot here and you have but a few seconds to convince the visitor to stay before he or she clicks away to find another gem. While there are many ways to create your own website, should you be inexperienced or not in possession of a creative flair then you should outsource this task. There is a lot to think about when putting together a web site, but from a visual perspective, it must be immediately appealing.
Quite apart from the technicalities of making your website “visible,” which we’ll get to in a second, the content contained within must be sharp, to the point, entertaining, educational, informative, amusing, unique, bold, thought-provoking – or any combination of the aforementioned! This does not mean that you have to have a university-style thesis on every page, but you have to contribute something special and create that “hook” to draw your customers into the sales funnel.
Consider a ghostwriter or a specialized copywriter to create the content of your page, especially the page that is directly concerned with soliciting a call to action. Once you’ve convinced the visitor that your product or service is for them through the skillful creation of content as described, you must bring this all together, narrowing that sales funnel and prompting a purchase decision.
If you create a great visitor experience, then the first time visitor will be tempted to return. Offer them the opportunity to bookmark or to subscribe to your feed updates and you will commence a two-way communication, which can hopefully lead to additional sales and increased volume.
Your website must be a constantly evolving product. Try and add new content on a daily basis if you can and this is where blogs come in very handy. These days it is quite simple to set up your own blog using a platform such as WordPress or Blogger and these are particularly useful pages as they are set up to receive comments. Your overall credibility will soar if you have a well trafficked blog page with great comments, back and forth and positive contributions from others.
Your overall goal must be to increase the amount of traffic to your website as creatively as possible. This starts with search engine optimization, which is the process of ensuring that your page is appropriately coded and presented, so that it will appear within search engine results when people are looking for your product or service. Optimization includes strategic use of keywords, both primary and secondary, which not only tell the search engine operators that your page is relevant but which also adequately inform your visitors, so that they can go ahead and buy from you.
If you really want to grow your business online, make sure that you follow up with all prospects, leads and existing customers. Create a “squeeze page” by offering your website visitor something of significant value, free. If you creatively package this, then they will provide you with their e-mail address in order to receive this item. Following a process of “double opt in,” ensuring that they understand that they will be receiving communications from you, you can then send them your regular newsletter containing additional value added material and helping to establish that process of communication, leading to sales down the road.
How have you expanded your business online?
Matthew Toren
I’m surprised at how many offline businesses are resistant to jumping in to the online marketing game. What I have found through my resesrch is that the lack of quality education, infrastructure investment and the amount of noise about making money online has kept many business owners away. Others that I have interviewed are waiting until a more proven track record presents itself.
I’d echo Erik’s sentiments. So many people fear making a move because they’ve been misinformed or are simply afraid of testing new waters. Unfortunate for them. They’re just letting money slip through their fingers in the meantime.
Search engine optimization is a tricky business. Not only do you have to make sure that your website is coded optimally for search engines, but you should put effort into outside optimization such as back links. (Like what I’m doing here, posting on blogs and forums) The more back links you have, the higher your relevancy to the search engines, therefore increasing your page rank. An advantage to increasing your back links by posting on blogs is that you can learn a lot. Great article!
SEO is a tough task, but critical to the success of any website, fortunately with sites that run on CMS platforms like WordPress, SEO is made somewhat easier for the user.
Not only is SEO tough business, it’s also very subjective. Since only a small handful of individuals in the entire world (back room employees at the actual search engines themselves) know what’s really in the search ranking algorithms – it’s a subject that’s prone to disagreement among so called experts. The SEO business is also wide open to fraud. Many ‘SEO firms’ will promise the world and never be able to deliver.
John – I agree with you, that SEO is mostly about back links, which are considered the web’s way of endorsing a product or business, but I would like to point out that posting comments on most Blogs doesn’t get you a back link because of the ‘nofollow’ tag. There are still some blogs around that don’t use ‘nofollow’, but not many. Also, I suspect that Google considers those links to be not as valuable as genuine back links anyway.
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