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It’s now almost three months since I last made a post to this blog. Naughty I know. But all part of proving something to myself that’s important.

You see I want blogs to a part of my online strategy. And while the main site was being developed, I wanted to see what effect running a single blog would have on driving traffic.

With just ten blog posts the sites Alexa Ranking went down to about 800,000. Now this is nothing that special.

But think about this, there are many fully developed web sites out there with many pages that have been developed – at a considerable cost – that have Alex Rankings way down in the 9,000,000s!!! (So not much bang for buck there then!)

I wanted to see what would happen if I left the blog alone for a while without making any new posts. I wanted to find out if it died completely or whether it would find a level and just stay there.

Well, so far the Alexa Ranking has fallen to about 1,640,000. Still not that great but it’s still attracting some traffic. And all for less than a dozen posts.

So having proven how easy it is to get some traffic from making just a few posts every week, I’ll now be making much more regular posts to this blog.

Especially now that the main site is nearly ready to be launched.

Stay Tuned…

Whether you believe it or not you probably don’t know what is going to capture your visitor’s eye and attention.

You may think you do and you may get lucky, but most often you’ll probably be somewhat wide of the mark – from a little to a lot!

That’s not to say that you’d be so wrong that you should feel bad about it but it’s just the way things are. It’s hard to read people’s minds.

The end result is that your visitors will not take the calls to action you would like them to take. In short converting visits into leads and leads into sales will not be as good as it could be.

A small positive increase to your sites conversion ratio could have a significant effect on your sites overall business performance.

A little while back I was doing some consultancy work for a big company with a big web site. They had spent a lot of money on designing a new look and feel for the site – all based on a set of corporate standards.

The end result looked OK. But I was taken aback when I asked a very senior member of staff if they had ever tested the new look and feel to see if it would work well with the visitors to their site.

The answer was a very definite no. They had their own in house set of corporate standards and that was that, they didn’t need to test anything.

The standards committee had done that! (Incidentally the corporate standards had never been tested against their target audience either!)

So the moral of the story (aka Internet Marketing) is to listen to what your visitors are telling you. And you can do that without your visitors ever knowing, providing you test all aspects of your site for best conversion.

Stay Tuned…

One thing that hit me very early on when I started to get onto the Internet was this… virtually everything you read, see or hear has a basis in copywriting.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a small piece of text on your home page, a long sales letter, the title and content of an email, the content of a Google Adwords ad, what you say in a audio or video clip. In the end it’s all a form of copywriting.

That means that good copy has the power to get you sales leads and also the power to convert and close those same leads.

Thereafter, you can use that same power of copywriting to offer products and services for continued repeat business.

And the fact is, it is always easier to make offers to existing customers and clients that result in sales, than finding new customers and clients in the first place.

So if there is one skill that should be at the heart of your online business it should be your ability to write good sales copywriting. (Traffic alone will not make up for it!)

At the very least you should know enough about copywriting even if you employ someone else to do the job for you.

(In fact now I come to think about, I would say that’s especially important!)

Because, as I’ve said before, you can’t be there in person to greet each visitor to your web site.

And whatever you learn about copywriting for the web can also be applied to your offline business too. The effort will not be wasted.

Stay Tuned…

And that’s a great idea! Because once you’ve made contact with a visitor it would be great to keep in contact with them thereafter even if they don’t buy anything from you the first time they come to your site.

The fact is most people don’t buy the first time they come to your site. Maybe they’re not sure of your credentials or the price or the offer and the value they might get from it.

Staying connected with a visitor gives you the opportunity to go back to them and deal with any objections they may have.

It gives you the opportunity to stress what’s in it for them by emphasising the benefits and what they could mean to them.

The question is how do you do that if you’re relying on your visitor to come back to your site? Maybe they’ll never return meaning you’ve probably lost them forever!

Well, there’s a couple of ways to keep in touch. One you’ll very probably know all too well and one you may never have heard of at all.

The first is good old email. And yes it does come with a SPAM issue, but emails do get through and you can actually help your visitors with their email to improve the chances of them seeing your emails.

The second is called Direct To Desktop (DTD). This is like a private email facility and it relies on your visitor installing a piece of software on their computer so you can, in effect, send them private messages.

Email is something you’ll use straight away with them and DTD is something you can use once they get to know you better.

Stay Tuned…

OK, so we’ve looked at Interrupt and Engage but that still leaves Connect.

Connect is where the rubber meets the road, as they say. Any good web page on any good business web site will have a reason for its existence. After all if a web page has no purpose why invest in it?

Each web page costs money to develop and maintain and so on. But what I mean by a web page needing a reason for its existence is that it needs to get the visitor to perform a call to action.

One of the key things that only a few people, and businesses, really get their heads around is that the web is a direct response medium. That means that people respond to it, or not, within moments.

So, if your site does not align itself with that thinking then even if you get vast amounts of targeted traffic, little business will be done.

As I’ve said before in earlier posts, you can’t be there on your web site in person to talk with your customers. The web page has to do it for you.

Just like any other sales situation, at the appropriate time, you will want to ask your customer for the order. If you don’t ask for it you probably won’t get it.

Asking the customer for the order is just one of many calls to action you could make. And there maybe further points of connection along the way before you ever get a customer actually placing an order.

A call to action is where you make a connection with a customer. If they take the action you want you know you’ve connected. And if they don’t then you know you havn’t connected.

So getting connected is just the first step along the way. Staying connected is the next important step and this is where technology other than web pages starts to get involved.

Stay Tuned…

The other day we looked at how important it is to grab your visitor’s train of thought as they arrive at your web page. Failure to do that can result in them leaving within seconds.

But even once you’ve grabbed their attention you’re still not home and dry. You still have to engage with your visitor in some way.

That’s where benefits come in. We touched on this the other day too, but let’s take some time to look at benefits in a bit more detail.

First of all benefits are not the features of your product or service and benefits are not advantages either.

But features can lead to advantages that in turn lead to guess what… benefits.

But that’s still not enough, because benefits are only benefits if they appeal and resonate with someone at an emotional level.

That may seem like a strange thing to say and maybe not at all what you were expecting. The fact is we are all emotional creatures. And emotions sit behind virtually all our thoughts.

Yes, people are rational too, but so often emotions come to the fore when making decisions. Especially those to do with making purchases and buying things.

Next time you think about buying something make a mental note of your thoughts at the time to see if it really is a rational purchase or more of an emotional one.

Stay Tuned…

Many times I visit large web sites belonging to large global businesses. And many times I see a friendly “Welcome to our site” right at the top of the page.

Just as often I immediately click away. Why?

Well, it’s not that “Welcome” isn’t friendly or anything like that. It’s just that it’s… well dare I say, boring.

What I want to see, very selfishly – perhaps like most of us – is a hook that’s going to grab my attention for a second or two and then leads on to explain what’s in it for me if I stay on the site.

Some of these sites, (I must admit not all by a long chalk), haven’t grasped the idea that people are interested in benefits and what those benefits would mean to them if they could have them.

When someone lands on a page of your site you literally have seconds to do three things: interrupt, engage and connect with your visitor.

Let’s look at the first of those three magic words. Number 1: interrupt, why interrupt? The fact is that most people today have crowded minds.

Crowded out with a whole list of things they have to do or think about that are all clamouring for their attention. That’s a lot of competition for you and your web site to deal with.

So if you don’t interrupt your visitor’s train of thought and get their interest then your visitor will be gone in the click of back button.

Assuming they stay because you’ve grabbed them this then leads onto ‘engage’ and ‘connect’ which I’ll look at next time.

Stay Tuned…

So what is ecommerce and why is a business web site more than that?

First of all let’s look at the ecommerce end of things. Well, a web site plus a shopping cart plus a merchant account is basically what’s called Ecommerce.

That combination of things is what is at the heart of a business web site.

In other words people come to your site pick something they want to buy, ‘put it in’ their shopping cart and then go onto pay for it, usually with their credit card.

Thereafter you as the supplier fulfil your end of the bargain and deliver what your customer has bought. Either physically or via digital download.

In some respects that’s the easy part. There’s many different shopping cart suppliers out there as well as many different merchants offering payment facilities over the web.

But the tougher part is getting people to come to your site in the first place and then convincing them that they should buy from you and not someone else.

Remember, you’re not there in person to greet each visitor to your site. So all the good things you would usually say to them has to be there on the site working for you in your absence.

Then there’s other things to think about too. What about the people who come to your site but don’t buy right away but who might buy with a little more help?

So maybe as you can see there’s more to a business website that does ‘ecommerce’ than meets the eye. And that extra something is called marketing.

Stay Tuned…

For far too many businesses the start point will be “We need a web site!” Without really thinking about what they want to do with it or finding out what they could do with it. So they go out and find someone who can do it for them (or do it themselves!).

The truth is that web sites are still very fashionable and of course you don’t want your business to look old fashioned. It’s always nice to have your companies web site address on your business card.

Well, as reasons go that’s not completely bad. But there are better ways of coming to the decision than that if you want a web site.

There are some simple, dare I say, common sense questions you could and really should ask yourself.

For example why do you want a web site? What are you going to do with it? What could you do with it? How will you integrate it with your existing business?

How much is it going to cost you? And will you ever see your investment in that site come back to you in the form of more business or greater profitability? (And these are just a few of the key questions.)

That is of course assuming that you know how to use the web to market and sell your products and services.

The truth is that even if most businesses know how to market and sell in the ‘real’ world the majority of business don’t know how to use the web to market and sell online.

They assume that their web design company or new media agency have the answers. And thereby hangs a very interesting tale.

Stay Tuned…