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Ideas For Your Website
When starting out with
a website it's easy to envision providing the web surfer with
information about your company and what it has to offer and even perhaps
offering a method of purchasing the products or services you offer right
there on your site. However, many people draw a blank after that.
And just offering information and a change to purchase from your website
is a good start it should not be the total sum of what your website has
to offer. In fact, so many websites only offer those things that
if you do the same your site will be lost among the thousands of other
sites that do the same. It's important that you find more to offer
with your site so that you can set yourself apart from the crowd.
In this article I will
attempt to provide you with many more things that you can do on your
website. The more of them you adopt into your website the better
your changes of gaining marketshare. There are also things outside
of your website that you can do to help in the promotion of your
business. You need everything listed if you can do it.
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Use your
Website Address like you do your Phone Number.
Literally everywhere you publish your telephone number you
should also be publishing your website address. On your
company letterhead, press releases, yellow page ads, newspaper
advertising, radio and TV ads, company vehicles, brochures,
invoices, quotes or estimates, the bottom or top of every page
of your catalog, etc.. Wherever there is a telephone
number there should be both your website address and a contact
email address.
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Web Cards.
You probably already have business cards and you have your
website address and email contact information on them already,
right? Well here's an inexpensive thing you can do to help
promote your website. Purchase inexpensive business cards
that are exclusively for your website. Have the web
address be the main part of the card in large bold print.
Include a short description of your website or what it offers
and be sure to choose and eye-catching color for the card that
matches your website. Now send a couple of these out with
every letter or invoice or even bill that you mail. Tack a
few up on your local grocery store bulletin board, the coffee
store bulletin board, your barber or hair stylist bulletin
board, etc. It's a mini-flyer for your website and your
job is to get it seen where ever the opportunity appears.
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Promotional
Gifts.
If you can swing it in your budget then get some promotional
items with your website address on them. Pens, Pocket
Calendars, Tape Measures, etc.. Find something that people
will find useful so they keep it around and put your website
address on it. My insurance agent sends out a pocket
calendar every year. It's the size of a business card and
had a full years calendar printed on it along with his contact
information. Every year I replace last years with the new
one in my wallet. It's very handy to have a little
calendar in my wallet and more than once I've talked to friends
or acquaintances about the good service I get from my Insurance
guy. And I can whip out that card from my wallet to give
them his phone number.
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Articles
Create informative, useful, related articles for your website.
Just like this document that you are hopefully finding
informative and useful. You may have found this article
while doing a search on one of the popular web search engines.
And now that you are reading it here the hope is that you
purchase something for yourself here or bookmark the site for a
friend that you know would like this information and then I hope
he will purchase something. But even if neither of you
purchase I've still gained your traffic and I've had the
opportunity to display some paid advertising to you. All
of which is beneficial to both of us. This article also
gets my website exposed more in the search engines. So the
more of these articles I have on my website the more exposure my
website gets.
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Map to Your
Store.
If you have a storefront then it's important that
you provide a way to make it easy for people who wish to come
visit your store be able to find you. Placing a map to
your location on your website or a link to a map on one of the
popular mapping services would be beneficial.
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After The
Sale Information
Order Tracking is a common feature of e-commerce websites, but even if you
don't have a shopping cart program, your customers will enjoy
this kind of after-the-sale service. Whether the product is ordered over the phone,
through email or even by coming to your location, if there is
any shipping, processing or manufacturing involved it would be
convenient to your customers to be able to look up their
purchase's
status on your website. You can also create a "Thank You"
web page and send your customer an email with a link back to the
Thank You page. Include current specials you are having or
offer them a discount coupon on their next order on this page.
It's just another way to get your products and services (your
website) back in front of their face.
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Email Newsletter
Newsletters are not difficult to create, but they can be
difficult to create on a regular basis and for them to be useful
you will need to be committed to producing them on a regular
basis. If you can do this, then it makes for a great FREE
GIVEAWAY on your website. People love getting something
useful for free. And if you provide useful information in
your newsletter you can advertise it as a valuable thing that
you are providing to your web surfers as a "Thank You" for
visiting your website. There are many free programs
(scripts) available that will manage every aspect of creating
and maintaining an electronic newsletter on your website.
All you have to do is produce the newsletter. I don't
recommend using a newsletter service where they provide the
content as this provided content is "watered down" because you
are not the only one providing it. The best newsletter
content is unique and personal.
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White Papers
/ Testimonials
Provide white papers, customer profiles or endorsements that
detail how applications can be used in a specific industry.
Creating a white paper section that explains how a specific
product or service is used in a specific industry to solve a
problem or increase productivity. This gives potential customers
insight into how a specific service, product or technology will
help in the course of a day. This type of web page is very
powerful persuasion. You may have noticed that most of the
big store online shopping programs now have "Customer Reviews"
of their products and stores that offer services have "Case
Studies" that are the story of how this company or it's product
has help one of it's customers.
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Website
Polls
Given the write questions and answers a website
poll can add to a web surfers enjoyment of visiting your website
and can provide you with useful information about those people
visiting your website. Don't get carried away with polls
though. Keep it simple and light and interesting to many.
It's a gadget, but not that many websites have it, so it's just
another little way of setting your website apart from the crowd.
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Contacts
A "Contact Us" page is a must have for your website.
If you have several employees or departments it's a good idea to
list all the various departments or employee contacts on your
website. Unfortunately this is also an invitation to
spammers who are looking for email addresses to add to their
lists. But despite this downside you need to provide it,
because one of the most popular uses of The Internet is to find
the correct or best contact point at a company. And if you
don't provide it you will be inviting frustration for your
customers or potential customers. If they can't see that
you want to help them contact you they will opt to go to your
competitor who is providing a better means of contact
information.
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Catalog /
Product Information
Even if you don't or for some reason
cannot provide the ability for someone to purchase what you
offer on your website you need to at least provide as much
information about all your products or services in a searchable
format. This is expected by those who are surfing the web
and if you don't provide it you will lose them to someone who is
providing it. There is no such thing as too much
information about your products or services on your website.
You've probably heard the phrase "Content is King" when it
comes to websites. And it is a very true statement.
Don't just provide information about your product. Also
provide instructions, educational information, examples of use,
example of who is using, who would benefit from using, etc. etc.
etc. You don't want to overwhelm your viewer, so how you place
this information on your website is important. You would
not want to have all this information on one page for example.
But artfully placing all this information by starting with
general information at the top level and giving the visitor the
option of "drilling down" into more and more specific or
detailed information is very beneficial. This is where
traditional marketing people make a huge mistake.
Professional marketers have been taught that if you get too
wordy you will lose your audience. While there is some truth to
that if you leave out information you dilute your ability to
draw in traffic. When it comes to websites you need to
provide all and even more information, but do it in a careful
way as to not overwhelm and you will reap benefit from having
all that extra and seemingly unnecessary content.
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Your Company
News
Another important thing about having a website is to
have FRESH information. Make a plan to regularly make
changes and additions to your website. A "Company News"
section is a good way to have fresh content on your site.
It's not the only place where you should make regular
contributions to your website content, but it's typically a good
place to have something new to say to your web surfers.
Search Engines also watch and typically give brownie points to
websites that are updated with new information on a regular
basis.
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Online Community
/ Forum
A very effective way of gaining repeat visits to
your website is to provide a way for those who visit your site
to communicate with each other. This is more effective if you
provide a product than a service, but in certain circumstances
it can work for either. Forum software lets you administer
the content that your surfers create and while there is some
fear by business owners that people will "bad-mouth" you
publicly to all your customers and potential customers the fact
is that rarely happens unless you really deserve it. And
when it does happen you have the ability to publicly display how
good your company is at resolving problems. Everyone
expects problems to happen from time to time and so they can
forgive problems IF the company handles them in a fair manner.
If someone is not satisfied with a fair solution most people
will view the problem as being the customers fault for being
unreasonable or having unreasonable expectations. The
result is your company looks good because you didn't hide
anything and you at least made an attempt to make the customer
happy. That is a good thing in the minds of most people
and can foster good will. This kind of thing can win
customers who may have been on the fence. A Forum also
accumulates information that allows customers a form of support
that is available 24/7. It can reduce support phone calls
to your company and become a searchable repository of useful
information.
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Business blog
A blog (short for weblog) is a personal online journal that is
frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.
Blogs are defined by their format: a series of entries posted to
a single page in reverse-chronological order. Blogs generally
represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose
of the Web site that hosts the blog. Topics sometimes include
brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other
social issues, and links to other sites the author favors,
especially those that support a point being made on a post. The
author of a blog is often referred to as a blogger. Many blogs
syndicate their content to subscribers using RSS, a popular
content distribution tool.
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RSS - Really
Simple Syndication
is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and
other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New"
for your site. RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing
content between sites (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney,
Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet,
and more). RSS solves myriad problems webmasters commonly face,
such as increasing traffic, and gathering and distributing news.
RSS can also be the basis for additional content distribution
services. It allows a web surfer to easily stay informed by
retrieving summaries of the latest content from the sites he is
interested in. He saves time by not needing to visit each site
individually. He ensures his privacy, by not needing to join
each site's email newsletter. The number of
sites offering RSS feeds
is growing rapidly and includes many big names. RSS is not
for everyone, but it could be beneficial to you and it's easy
enough to implement that you should at least look into it for
your website. Just search for RSS to find more than you'd
ever care to know about it.
You don't really need an edge to stand out from the crowd online,
you just need to make sure you include everything that you can
on your website so that you capture an audience from every possible
direction. Everyone has their unique way of using The Internet
and the more you have on your website that more avenues web surfers
will have of getting to your site or finding your website. As
you read above, it's not just about The Internet either. You
need to market your website in all the traditional way of marketing
as well as adopting as many of the new marketing methods as you can.
Bottom line is more is better, content is king, fresh keeps 'em
coming back, and uniqueness gets you found.
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