Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Click Here
For The ''walton.com''
Facebook Fan Page!
Like everyone else, I’ve used Facebook to friend people from High School that I never liked and find relatives that I’ve never met. Not that it hasn’t been fun, but it was a black hole of witty comments and annoying Farmville requests.
I listened to a seminar recently about the advantages of having a Facebook fan page for your business. It’s a place to interact with people and allow them to interact with each other. You can build your own little community around your business.
It allows you to update every one who “likes” you. You can send messages to everyone, which you cannot do as with a personal profile. Because it’s based on your business, people who join it have essentially raised their hand and said “I’m interested in your business. Tell me more.”, so you don’t have to feel funny about trying to sell stuff to your friends.
It should be a party, not an Amway meeting. People should feel free to hang out and talk to each other. You should have chips out and some music playing to make it more comfortable for everyone. Be a good host.
That’s what I am trying to do.
Please check out out my Fan Page for “walton.com” at www.facebook.com/waltoncom. I have a bunch of my personal friends there now, but if more SEO, small business, and Etsy people show up, that will make things more interesting for all of us.
If you’re not sure about Facebook fan pages, or how they could help your business, you can play with this one and see what they do.
I hope that by seeing there are other people just like you, dealing with the same questions and issues, that we can work together to help make us all more successful. If you feel like you’re out in the cold, all alone, come on in and meet some interesting people.
I’d love for you to stop by and see what’s happening. Leave a comment. Meet a new friend. Hang out.
Please click here or on the icon, then click the “like” button when you get there.
I’ll see you there! Thanks for stopping by.
Posted in marketing |
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Everyone on Etsy wants more traffic. You can get more traffic from search engines if you optimize your site. That’s called SEO, “search engine optimization”, by all the cool kids.
Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.
SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.
What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.
They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.
Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.
Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.
When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.
Pick your top 3 keywords.
You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.
Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.
That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.
They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.
Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.
Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.
When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.
As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.
If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.
As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.
**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.
The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.
There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.
Feel the power.
Posted in SEO, featured |
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
This is the second in a series that I want to revisit. The original article outlines exactly the research we did on one shop’s competition so we can plan out how to beat them in the search engines.
Why Do They Rank So High?
Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.
westcoastseaglass.net
westcoastseaglass.net has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition-part-2.html
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
If you are new here because of the free SEO book promotion that I’ve offered, thank you very much! Over 60 people have downloaded the book since Warmth posted her thread in the Etsy forum.
Please take a minute and look around. Most of the site has been aimed at small businesses, but lately I’ve focused on the needs of crafters.
Regular readers of my blog know that I built a site for my wife’s friend, Deborah at www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com which opened my eyes to the needs of the whole crafting community.
I think there are some posts here that will be valuable for a crafter. I plan on writing more with crafters in mind. It seems like there’s a huge need for Internet marketing information here.
I see a lot of pleas for more traffic to your Etsy shops. I think I can take my experience and knowledge of small business (and large business, for that matter – read my “about me” page), and apply it to crafters.
I do plan on more good things for crafters, so please stick around. If you have a specific question, drop by the forum and ask it there. I’ll answer it as soon as possible.
Heartfelt Mouse
I’d love to hear what type of things you are interested in, and what you have problems with, so I can address those needs.
I want to especially thank Etsy seller Warmth for her kind review of my SEO book. That was beyond gracious. It means a lot to me to see someone say, “I am no longer feeling stupid and helpless regarding SEO.” Warmth warmed my heart with that.
If anyone wants a really cute mouse, you know where to go!
Stay tuned!
Posted in crafts |
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
As part of the training site that is being worked on, we’ve built a forum to discuss this stuff.
Comments are nice, but a forum allows you to ask me anything and get an answer, as well as asking each other and building off everyone’s knowledge and experience.
The Forum is OPEN!
I want this to become
a community instead of a destination.
When the training site is complete and launched, the forum will be part of it, and as such, it will cost to be a member.
Right now, before everything is complete, we’re trying to build up the membership, so it is FREE.
If you join right now, it will be free forever. You will have a free lifetime subscription. Even after the training site goes up and it costs other people money to join, you will still have your free subscription to the forum.
You will also get a discount in the price of the training, when that’s offered as well.
There are not a lot of members yet, so there’s not a lot of conversation yet. Please jump on in and get things started. You can tell all your friends that you were there when it started.
If you have a question, I’ll be eager to answer it. Ask me anything about Internet Marketing, WordPress, Web Development, or Small Business. Ask whatever pops into your head.
Check out the Untangling the Web Forum.
Posted in free |
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
I was working on a video project for a church. They wanted a video to show at an “appreciation” dinner, where they feed all of the volunteers that work hard all year to make things happen and do thing to help other people, both inside and outside the church.
They wanted to open with this verse. I thought it was appropriate for anyone with a small business, regardless of your religious beliefs (and yes, I know you have them.)
“God has given each of you some special abilities; be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God’s many kinds of blessing.”
1 Peter 4:10 (LB)
Posted in business |
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Here’s a list of SEO terms that you should be aware of, if you aren’t already. There are more where these came from, so go check out the site.
Long tail
In SEO terms, the ‘long tail’ refers to the less obvious, more specific (and therefore less competitive) but still relevant keywords and phrases you can optimize your site for. So instead of trying to optimize for very general and competitive phrases such as “coffee”, a long tail phrase might be “buy Costa Rican coffee.” For a very competitive field such as coffee, you might have to think of even more specific and niche phrases than that in order to find the ones you can rank highly for.
Why You Should Care:
If you are a small business, or just starting out, the long tail will help you find free & targeted (there’s that phrase again!) traffic. You will be able to rank more quickly for long-tail phrases instead of wasting your time trying to compete for very general terms that have established competition.
SERPs
This simply stands for Search Engine Results Page – i.e. the list of results that comes up when you perform a web search.
Why You Should Care:
That’s where you want your site to be!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.webtrainingwheels.com/2009/11/online-marketing-terms-seo-edition/
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
I’ve written up a page on Untangling The Web. As I thought about how it fits in with what I’m trying to do, my wife suggested that I make it brand and put all of my ideas into that bucket. Great idea.
I want to train people who are not experts
The idea is that I want to train people who are not experts in how to promote their business on the web. I am almost finished with a book about SEO. I will rewrite my Web Site Starter Kit book to make it more appropriate. I see videos and more pages of information coming. I’ll start to publish the newsletter every week, with valuable tips on how to do things, I want to dump out my brain so everyone can, well, maybe that’s a bad analogy. You know what I mean though.
The first step in that quest is the new design of the site. The blog is now on the home page, where you can see that I’m writing about good stuff, so people will be more likely to stay around and read more. That’s the plan, anyway.
I wrote a page describing the concept. I put on my sales copy hat and wrote what I thought was a pretty good page, describing what to expect and how it will benefit you. Here’s a quote and a link. Go read the rest of it and subscribe to the newsletter.
Untangling The Web – Training
With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars.
Today is no different. It’s adapt or die.
Many people who own a small business know that they should “do something” about the Internet, that there is a huge opportunity out there somewhere, but they are not quite sure how to do it, much less do it efficiently, and if that they miss that opportunity, it might mean the end of their business.
The biggest issue that we heard from small business owners, and everyone else, for that matter, is that they don’t understand this stuff. No one has the time to find and distill all of the information. They do research and the technical information that they find is too complex, too difficult to understand. They are afraid and overwhelmed by it all. It’s frustrating.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/untangling-the-web-training
Posted in sell on internet |
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
I haven’t gotten her approval quite yet, but I really want to help a friend promote her sea glass jewelry site. She does killer, beautiful jewelry made from glass that’s been rolled around in the ocean for a while to grind off all the sharp points and soften the look of the glass. You can buy commercially processed glass that looks the same, but she’s gathered all of hers from local beaches in Southern California. We meet to discuss all this on Wednesday.
I did some research to know what to talk to her about when we meet. I wanted to know what the best keywords should be and I wanted to know about her competition for those keywords. The first thing you should ever do when you are trying to SEO your site is to determine the correct keywords to target. Without that, you will never know if you succeeded or failed.
What Keywords Should We Target?
Starting with “sea glass”, I used Google’s keyword tool and found that “sea glass” had 2,433 searches a day. I assume that people were looking for all kinds of sea glass, where to buy bulk sea glass, methods for finding it or cleaning it or whatever else. It’s not that targeted at jewelry.
Next came “beach glass”. I’ve never heard to it referred to this way, but Google has. 1,332 people search for “beach glass” every day. We also have “seaglass” at 398 searches, “sea glass jewelry” at 325 and “beach glass jewelry” at 95. From there, we have all sorts of other keywords with less than 100 per day, including “sea glass jewellry” at 24, so make sure to check those misspellings.
These are the keywords we’ll concentrate on; sea glass, beach glass, seaglass, sea glass jewelry, and beach glass jewelry. Next we’ll look at who else ranks for those keywords.
Who is the Competition?
We’ll do a search for each phrase or search term and see who comes up in what order.
When we search for Sea Glass: Wikipedia comes first. I don’t think we’ll beat them, but they aren’t selling jewelry, so I don’t think we have to. The seaglassassociation.org comes next. Again, not sure we need to beat them, but it would be nice if we could. The next two are westcoastseaglass.net and naturalseaglass.com. These look like they might be our biggest contenders.
Let’s look at “beach glass” next. Wikipedia is first. The next two are relishinc.com and bytheseajewelry.com. These are the ones to beat here.
Seaglass returns Wikipedia and the association, followed by westcoastseaglass.net, followed by someone I’ve not seen before, then bytheseajewelry.com.
Sea glass jewelry gets us naturalseaglass.com again. They are followed by bytheseajewelry.com and westcoastseaglass.net. They are definitely on my radar now. jewelrybydaniellerenee.com looks easy to beat, but there’s relishinc.com again after danielle.
Beach glass jewelry gives us bytheseajewelry.com and relishinc.com first and second. Fourth is naturalseaglass.com. Our old friend westcoastseaglass.net is eighth.
It looks like our competition is westcoastseaglass.net, bytheseajewelry.com, naturalseaglass.com, relishinc.com, and if we can crush poor, sweet Danielle at jewelrybydaniellerenee.com, that will be fun too.
Read Part Two: Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
This is amazing. This is exactly what I can do and want to do for small businesses.
Quoting from BuzzMachine The local ad opportunity (and the danger of losing it)
The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:
* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.
* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”
* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.
In these stats lies a big – but fleeting – opportunity: serving local businesses by helping them use online well. By this, I don’t mean doing what local newspapers have been doing: trying to sell them display or directory ads, just as they did in papers but in a new medium. Instead, I mean redefining what it means to help them succeed online. This might mean helping them place ads smartly on Google with good SEO (see Fred Wilson’s tweet out of our New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY). It might mean finding was to help local businesses interact more meaningfully with their own communities. It might mean enabling armies of citizen sales people – neighbors who really know their local businesses – to serve and sell those advertisers. It might mean providing tools to help local businesses create better (more informative, more SEOed) online presences and providing them data to show them their return on investment. I might mean finding other means to efficiently sell local businesses (can phone rooms ever work?). And so on…..
The assumptions I so often hear about local advertising – it doesn’t work; it doesn’t pay enough; small businesses are ignorant – need to be updated. The assumption that most needs to be updated is that a business needs an ad. It may need other tools to be found in search and to reach the right people and to improve relationships with them. All that may count as marketing, but not necessarily with an old ad in a new medium.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/02/16/the-local-ad-opportunity-and-the-danger-of-losing-it/#comments
Posted in marketing |
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
I did some research on my new client, his site, and his industry. He has, or had, a web site built by someone else. I did some checking around to see where we stand before we begin. Here’s what I did.
Using the “SEO For Firefox” plug in and the Google Toolbar in Firefox, I found out that it’s been around for about 6 months. That will help us get out of the Google sandbox.
by NeilsPhotography
Using the “links:” search term in Google, where you type in “links:www.domainname.com”, you can find out how many other sites out there are linking to you. These are your “incoming links”. This one has 10 at the moment. That’s a cool place to start from.
It’s got a page tank of 0. That means there’s opportunity to improvement here! It’s got a good solid base, with a little history and some links to it, so when we start to optimize it, it should really respond.
This is much better than starting from a brand new domain name and new site, with no incoming links. Google doesn’t like those newbies. They could be spammers or child abusers or some kind of perverts.
Just like in the real world, they want to get to know you a bit before they trust you. It’s all about the reputation. Now that this site has been at the party for a little while, it’s time to make sure our hair looks good, that we don’t have bad breath, and there’s no food spilled on our shirt. Then we can walk over and introduce ourself to the host of the party, Google.com.
Posted in SEO |
Friday, January 30th, 2009
It’s really easy to believe that everyone else is like you. They aren’t.
Everyone tends to do it. It takes a conscious effort to not do it. I mean, you are a rational person. You believe everything you believe and think everything that you think. Why wouldn’t everyone else think and believe the same way? What are they? Morons?
It's really easy to believe that everyone else is like you. They aren't.
As you grow up, you begin to realize that not everyone else is like you. There are other people in the room and they might think, believe, and feel differently than you do. Bigots never grow up.
When you are designing your site and writing your content, do it from the users point of view, not your own. They are the ones that you have created this magnificent new web site for, so honor them by talking in their language and answering their questions and meeting their needs.
The first step to do this is to define just who they are. Once you have them defined, forget everyone else. If you want to sell video games, your site will look much different then if you want to sell medical equipment.
It might be helpful to write down your definition of your users and tape it to your monitor, where you can remember them while you’re writing.
Their words, their needs, their solutions. That’s what you need to focus on.
Posted in content |
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Really? Is it really time for Twitter? They have clearly captured the platform and will be the way to the future of microblogging or whatever you want to call it, but I’m just not sure that the numbers are there yet. You need to have people to make it valuable. There are still too many pastors that don’t quite get why they need a web site.
It's Twitter Time for Your Church
Facebook has everyone and their brother on it now. I’ve met more people from my past in the last two months than I knew that I knew. It’s what’s happening now. Twitter is what will happen next year.
Do you use Twitter? Do you use it often? For what purpose? Do you follow more than you tweet? Please leave a comment.
Quoting from Church Marketing Sucks: It’s Twitter Time for Your Church
The Reasons Your Church Must TwitterAnthony Coppedge recently released a $5 e-book entitled The Reason Your Church Must Twitter.
It covers everything from what in the world a Twitter is to how your church can make maximum use of Twitter in various flavors–from simply having public conversations to using Twitter as a devotional tool.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2009/01/its_twitter_tim.html
Posted in church |
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I was walking a client through his Analytics stats yesterday, explaining what each page, each section meant. I asked him if he ever looked at these since we set them up. He looks at them as much as you do, which is never.
What traffic are you missing?
He didn’t connect the value of what these numbers and charts mean to how he can improve his site and make more money with it, as well as make it a better experience for his users.
As we drilled into the content part of it, I saw that no one, as in not one person, was looking through his portfolio pages. I realized that these pages have a smaller menu over to the side that people could easily miss.
Also, when I redesigned his site by bringing it into WordPress (of course), the top, main menu now has a different look and action than the original small portfolio menu. I used to just put a glow around the highlighted menu item and now I was doing the whole colored div background, which is much more apparent.
Now we have a menu that looks and functions differently and no one who ever clicks on them. HHHmmmm. What to do?
Next step, I put in the same style menu as the top, so they highlight the same. That should improve the click on those. We’ll be watching his stats to see what happens.
Read your Analytics pages today. What traffic are you missing?
Posted in statistics |
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
I’m offended by the “greasy hair” stereotype, but other than that, this article has some true things to say. I came from the web development world, where a budget of $30,000 was average. I worked at a company that developed a web site and sold it for $580 million bucks.
You don’t need that. From the article: ” Many people I know are fine with a simple and professional Web page.” That’s what I advocate, a simple, professional web site for FREE!.
Quoting from Small Business – We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Web Sites By Gene Marks
Many people I know are fine with a simple and professional Web page.
A Vested Interest in the Debate
When was the last time I visited the site for the corner Exxon guy or the sub shop across from my office? To see the price of gas? To get nutrition info on ham on rye?
If you search the Web you’ll find lots of people writing about how small business owners must have a Web site. Dig a little further and guess what? Many of the people shouting how absolutely critical it is for a small business to have a Web site are — drum roll, please — in the business of helping small businesses create Web sites. Surprise! Despite what all the business experts — including the turtleneck-and-vest-wearing classes — may say, Web sites are not an absolute necessity.
Good business owners invest wisely and for the most return. They’re not in business to run a site just because it’s cool or hip. Many people I know are fine with a simple and professional Web page. Let the turtleneck-and-vest-wearing, greasy-haired geeks suck their fees from someone else.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=013001HJPXZ6&page=3&full_skip=1
Posted in marketing |
Monday, January 5th, 2009
In the recent debate on how evil Network Solutions is, I neglected to give you the non-evil alternatives.
JumpDomain Whois
The easiest thing to do is go to an old registrar that quit answering my emails so I moved all of my domain names away from them. They had non-existant customer support, so I’m sure they won’t mind us using their tools.
https://domains.jumpdomain.com/whois/whois.cgi
Go to the URL above and put in your domain name. Hit Submit Query. It will also return all of the DNS info. Bookmark that page. I use it all the time. It’s by far the easiest and fastest way to look up available domain names without getting into trouble.
Whois?
First, if you are a Mac user (and I won’t get into that religious debate now), if you go into your utilities folder, there is an application called “Network Utility”. If you open that up, you’ll see all of the tools listed across the top. Click on “Whois”.
You can type in the domain name you want to check on and click on the “Whois” button. It will return all of the DNS info for that domain name or it will say “No match for…” the domain name you are looking for.
Terminal Whois on a Mac
If you are brave, you can open the Terminal application and type in “whois” followed by the domain name. That will also give you the DNS info.
Posted in DNS |
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Everyone knows that the economy is in trouble. How should you react as a small business owner? How are you going to pay the rent next month? Which employee are you going to let go? How will you keep your current clients? Don’t panic.
The easiest and quickest budget item fora small business to cut back on is marketing. There’s no immediate affect felt, so you think it might be safe to cut, but nothing could be worse for your business. The Harvard Business Review said:
It is well documented that brands that increase (marketing) during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.
The best time to take advantage of your place in the market is in an economic downturn. Because other people are quick to cut marketing, you will have the perfect opportunity to reach even more prospective customers. In a downturn, aggressive PR and Communications strategy is the solution.
Building or updating your web site is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to reach those prospective customers. Now is the time to put some time into reviewing your web site. Does it say everything it needs to say about your small business? Can you add features that allow more customer involvement or at least feedback? Maybe it’s time to have a professional review your site and give you suggestions on how it can be improved.
Now is the time to spend more on advertising, not less.
Posted in marketing |
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources » Blog Archive » How to Convert More Website Traffic into More Customers & Sales by Inviting Prospects to Take Action
Here Are 3 Easy “Calls to Action” to Convert More Website Traffic into Sales on the About Us, Media and Contact Us Pages
1. On the “About Us” page, after your bio, add a powerful client testimonial praising your expertise and your measurable and specific impact on the client’s bottom line. Then add the line “Ready for these kinds of results in your organization? Click here to get started now!” (This links to the contact page).
This call to action, in fact, can be used for any page that does not have an obvious next step.
2. Your “Media” page should not just be a collage of logos. It should contain short videos of your TV appearances, audio clips of your radio interviews or featured-expert interviews on teleseminars. It should also include links to the articles where you were quoted or links to your articles that got published on the top websites. Let the world see what a sought-after, in-demand expert you really are.
With that being said, a simple, but effective call to action would be, “Sarah B. Marketer looks forward to being the featured expert on your next program. To schedule her appearance right now click here.” (This links to the Contact page.)
3. The Contact page, by definition, is a call to action. It needs to take your visitor by the hand and lead them through the next step.
It should not just be a page that displays your mailing address, phone number, and main corporate e-mail. Rather, it should lead with a paragraph that congratulates the reader for their decision to take action. Then, it should explain the process for getting in touch with you. It should also describe what someone should expect once they contact you.
Next, guide them through a simple web form that asks specific questions. This way you can do your homework and present prospects with a specific response and action plan. Make sure to keep this form as brief as possible, and only ask questions that directly inform how you and your visitor would do business together in the near future.
Having a web form, rather than just a link to your e-mail address, guides your visitor to take a specific action. This raises their level of commitment to you and increases your chances that they will buy from you.
Bottom line: Make sure that every page on your website provides a roadmap for your visitor with a specific call to action. This is the only way your prospects will reach the destination that you prepared for them. And, it’s the only way you will increase your website sales conversions.
Read the entire article at SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources » Blog Archive » How to Convert More Website Traffic into More Customers & Sales by Inviting Prospects to Take Action
Posted in marketing |
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
My wife went through the draft with her pen and marked it all up. Anything that she didn’t understand is being rewritten. Some of my organization wasn’t clear, so I’m making that a little clearer. We want to make Web Site Starter Kit the best it can be, which means clear, concise communication.
They haven’t quite released WordPress 2.7 yet, so I’m still rocking the RC1 version of it. They say they will release the final version tomorrow. A few more screenshots today and it should be good to go.
Web Site Starter Kit should be released by the end of the week.
Posted in web site build |
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Seth Godin, as always, is correct about the way to make money on the Internet. This is as important to small business owners, churches, bloggers, and wanna-be millionaires. Look at your organization and figure out how to connect people. Connect you and your customers, your customers with each other. He’s got examples. Do this now.
Seth’s Blog: How to make money using the Internet
The essence is this: connect.
Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.
The essence is this: connect.
Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value.
- Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
- Connect job hunters with jobs.
- Connect information seekers with information.
- Connect teams to each other.
- Connect those seeking similar.
- Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
- Connect people who are proximate geographically.
- Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
- Connect like-minded people into a movement.
- Connect people buying with people who are selling.
Some examples? I think it’s worth delineating these so you can see that the opportunity can be big, if that’s your taste, or small if you don’t want to invest heavily just yet.
Read the entire article at Seth’s Blog: How to make money using the Internet
Posted in marketing |
