Why You Should Add Videos to Your Website

Experience shows that a message conveyed visually will be retained or remembered significantly longer than a written word. (See Use Pictures to Improve Memory.) On a website, where your message must be conveyed quickly and convincingly to make a lasting impression, adding a video allows your viewers to receive your message via two ways—by written words, and by pictures—so you, in a sense, more than double your chances of being remembered.

Additionally, internet experts suggest using videos creatively as a prime tactic to encourage viewing, and ultimately, sharing. For instance, you can introduce a video to a blog post, or add it to an e-newsletter that links back to your site. The hope is that viewers will share it, thus increasing traffic to your site. But, the first thing to be concerned with is making your videos interesting. As Michelle Bowles puts it, “if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining, or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it.” (See Encourage Viewers to Share.)

Giving consideration to the type of video you provide is important, as well. Are you providing information, encouraging sales, or displaying testimonials? Each has its place and purpose, and should be carefully weighed with respect to the overall design and purpose of your site. Online marketing guru Catie Foertsch shares some pointers about creating different video types. For instance, avoid “talking about your company—that would be a commercial, and viewers hate commercials. Talk instead about how visitors can solve their problems.” (See Three Kinds of Video.) If your purpose is to sell product, videos can help convert visits to sales. Business-to-business expert Glen Bently explains, “Use interactivity. The power of online video is twofold: 1) it is a highly engaging medium and 2) viewers can take immediate action on what they see. Give the viewer choice points during the programming. If you integrate calls to action like "send me more information" into the program, you will build relationships with viewers and increase vital viral opportunities.” (See Getting the Most Out of your Online Videos.)

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

What is an Email Autoresponder?

Autoresponders are automatic replies to emails. Often times they are used to let anyone who emails you know that you’ll be out of the office for an extended period of time. They are a great way to assure your customers that you have received their email. Autoresponders can also be used to keep in touch with customers, introduce products, or count down to a special event.
If someone is receiving an email from you via an autoresponder, let them know why. It can be as simple as “thanks for signing up for our newsletter” or “here is the product information you requested.” Part of letting the customer know why they are receiving an email is telling them who the email is coming from. Include your company name in the subject line and the “from” field.

Give the email recipient the chance to opt-out of your autoresponder. They are less likely to opt-out if they know who the email is coming from, why it is coming to them, and that they will receive valuable (informative or money-saving) content.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

How Can a Monthly Newsletter Impact Your Business?

You need to let your customers know that you are better than your competition. One easy and effective way to let them know is through your monthly newsletter.

Newsletters can be used to

• Introduce customers to your employees.
• Show off your years of experience.
• Introduce new products or services.
  
• Highlight one or more of your products.
• Advertise upcoming sales and specials.
  

HIT Web Design offers the Stay-N-Touch marketing program. This uncomplicated database allows you to collect valuable customer information. With Stay-N-Touch, visitors to your website can choose to opt in to your e-newsletter.

If you need help creating a professional looking newsletter that contains knock-your-socks-off content, HIT Web Design’s experienced writers and designers can create a newsletter for you at an affordable price.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Continuation On Color And It's Importance To Your Marketing Message

Continuing on the theory of color and how it can affect your viewers and sales, there are three colors that go along with the primary colors. When you mix red and blue you get purple, when you mix yellow and blue you create green, and when you mix yellow and red you have orange. These colors can be significant and important in the message they convey to the users of your site.

Purple in the past, and still to this day, represents royalty and nobility. Many think of it as a creative color, a rich color representing depth of thought or wisdom. It is often a good color for creative sites or websites that encourage education or have something to do with education. It is often used in various shades for winery sites for its obvious association with the wine grape.

Green is an often associated with nature, plants, healing, and spring time. It is a soothing color that is easy on the eyes. It is generally associated with vitality and productiveness. Because it is so easy and pleasing to the eye it is a good color to use in abundance on a site design. It is a great color to use for any website that has to do with nature, natural processes, farming, landscaping and anyone who works with the outdoors.

Orange is one of the warmest and most inviting colors. It carries with it the warmth of yellow and the vitality of red making it a wonderful color to represent energy. It is a good color to use to represent fun, vigor and cheerfulness. Orange is an appropriate color for a site that wants to convey a fun message; it's a great compliment for green in representing vitality and nature. It is often used for restaurants and food vendors. Orange is associated with fall as well.

This is just a general guide to color and I hope it serves to inspire you to learn more on your own about how to use color to attract and hold the attention of visitors to your site. Color is very important in marketing and this is something your graphic designer can help you with. Don’t make the mistake of just going with your favorite colors – your favorite colors may be entirely wrong for the message you are trying to get across or will be most effective in marketing your product. My recommendation to anyone when looking at colors for their site is to go out and look at the most commonly used colors on their competitors sites and websites that are associated with the product and/or services that are related to theirs. This will give you a guide to go on when picking your own color scheme.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

SEO Versus Paid Search Engine Ads

The best way to make sure your site has great ranking in the search engines is so simple it seems like it is too good to be true. Simply write the content in such a way that it is of most benefit to the customer/viewer you are trying to target. That’s it!

With that said, it does take some thorough research. You need to figure out what your customers/viewers will be searching for when they look for a website that has to do with your business, and then write the content accordingly. This should be fairly easy as hopefully if the customer is in fact searching for your type of business simply using the keywords about your business in the content of your site will go a long ways towards creating a site that is friendly to the search engines, and will help you get the positioning you need. Another great way of helping your ranking is to have sites that are ranked highly link to your site. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can cheat the search engines, even with reciprocal links. Avoid linking to “bad neighborhoods” (sites that are known for spamming the search engines) or scamming links to your site in any way. It can ultimately lead to your being banned altogether. However, legitimate links are always helpful.

Another benefit of great content is an increase in your conversion of site viewers to actual buyers. If your site doesn’t make someone want to buy from you, getting traffic to the site ultimately means nothing. I will touch on this subject more in future blogs.

In talking about search engines as a marketing strategy, I would not be doing anyone a service by saying that relying on search engine traffic for your business is a good thing. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and if they suddenly change something that causes your ranking to drop, sales can plummet. This is something that is completely out of your control and can in itself be disastrous. Instead of just SEO, I would recommend a more conventional method by employing SEO as well as paid advertising on the web and search engines, such as Google Ads. The paid advertisements under the keywords of your choice that you bid on can be extremely lucrative and can often be worth their weight in gold.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Marketing Your Website

You’ve created a site – now you need to market it. If you don’t tell people about your site no one will know it is there. A website is just like a physical location. If you build a store on top of a mountain, no one will know about it. The same goes for the web. If you build a site, no one will know it is there unless you make a splash, bring attention to it, shout it out to the world.

A good way of doing this is all the usual, conventional, practical methods of advertising such as print, radio and television, as well as lesser yet effective methods such as magazines, billboards etc. That costs a lot of money however and some people just don’t have that budget. I would still recommend looking at these methods and trying at least some of them on a limited basis, depending on your budget. However, there is another method; one that is not as effective or as lucrative as other methods, but works none the less.

Search engines.

Now, if you are like most businesses you are going to have a lot of competition out there. All of your competitors want to be found under most if not all of the same search terms you do. This can lead to some pretty fierce fighting for position on the engines, especially Google as it currently holds the title of champion in the search engine arena. According to comScore Media Metrix Google accounts for 74% of all search engine traffic, Yahoo has 14%, MSN 9%, Ask has 2% and all other SE's share the remaining 1%. With the amount of searches going on every day in the world, even 2% with Ask is a large number, but no one can hold a candle to the top dog, Google.

This means you need to optimize your site, for the most part, for Google. That doesn’t mean you ignore the other engines, but with 74% of the traffic, Google is obviously the lion’s share and it only makes sense to do it with them in mind.

How do you optimize a site for the search engines, or more relevantly, Google? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it. What you do NOT want to do is what they call “spamdexing” or “spamming” the search engines. Doing so will be considered a scam and will get you banned from the search engines altogether. This is disaster and to be avoided at all costs.

More tomorrow on how to optimize and how to avoid spamdexing

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

How Much Time Should I Spend On Social Networking?

Back to Basics: Quality and Word-of-Mouth Advertising

As a business owner, you can benefit by harnessing the power of networking sites, but you must employ extremely subtle strategies. According to David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author, “The online community at social networking sites hates overt commercial messages.” (See The New Rules of Marketing and PR, p. 229.)

Before diving into the details of actively using social networking for marketing purposes, however, considerable time must be spent focusing on your business itself.

• First, you must make sure your have good quality products and excellent customer service, not just lip service, empty promises, and hype.
• Second, you must make sure your website is artistic, professional, and effective—meaning it contains well-written, substantive content that is presented in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Why? People talk.

There are over 200 million members on Facebook, while MySpace has about 100 million. Many of these are asking each other for product recommendations, directly or indirectly. If your product or service measures up, they will speak highly of you. If they go to your website and like what they see, the will bookmark you. Either way, you benefit.

A recent study shows that women are turning to social networking for fun, entertainment, and to connect with friends at a higher rate than ever before, and they are twice as likely to turn to blogs verses social networking to get product recommendations. (See Social Media Optimization.)

If your products or services don't cut the mustard, look out, because, according to Mike Grehan, online marketing guru, the algorithms that drive search engine results are changing to include, with much more added weight—

1.) product recommendations on social networking sites and blogs for your products or services, and
2.) bookmarks placed by unique visitors to your website.

Thus, the days of key word manipulation to get to the top of the list of search results are going by the wayside. Soon, it will be your good products and services that get you there, not just your good use of key words. (See Mike's Is There a Link Between Search and Social? article, pp. 12-13.)


Time Well Spent

Knowing this, you can see that your efforts to use social networking as an avenue to promote your brand and your business is crucial to long-term growth. The key to success is to experiment! Try placing videos on YouTube, inserting interesting articles into your Blog, creating profiles on MySpace, and establishing Groups on Facebook—and see what happens. You might find the next internet spokesperson star is sitting inside the walls of your own company!

You can track your hits easily by employing the technology at www.bit.ly, where you can enter web addresses (say, your YouTube video, for instance) and see how many people are stopping by to see it. Spending time to measure and analyze results is the only way to see if your efforts are paying off. It will take some time to find the right niche or angle for your business, so dedicate enough time and resources to see the effort through. Don't cut things off prematurely.

Also, it's important to update your material frequently, even daily. Since web users want the latest information available on the subject they are searching for, search engines in turn look for the freshest material online. By changing your content, you can insure optimal results in search engine rankings. (See Content Optimization.) This of course will require a committed and dedicated staff to manage, and the unflinching support of the organization behind them.

For more tips on optimizing your web presence and harnessing the power of social networking sites, contact the professionals at HIT Web Design.

For the First Time, Divided Shoppers Prefer Web to In-Store

For the first time, the web has surpassed the store as the preferred way for multi-channel shoppers to purchase holiday gifts, according to the e-tailing group's third annual "Mindset of the Multi-Channel Shopper Holiday Survey," sponsored by ATG, Retailer Daily reports.

Nearly half (49%) of those shoppers say they intend to do their holiday gift buying online, compared with 44% who plan to do so in-store, found the online survey of over 1,000 adults who shop online four or more times per year, spending at least $500 annually.

Other key findings:

Reasons for shopping online start with saving time (88%), locating hard-to-find products (84%), greater selection (83%) and avoiding the crowds at the mall (83%) - all surpassing saving money, which is still an important factor (80%).
Because of the tough economic climate, 52% of consumers plan to buy fewer holiday gifts this year. The average number of gifts is projected to be down from 16+ last year to 11-15 this year
Although consumers plan to buy fewer gifts and spend less for those gifts, 72% (vs. 65% in 2007) are planning to research products online prior to purchasing.
Over 91% plan to purchase the same number or somewhat more gifts online; that's equal to last year's levels.
"Value spending is definitely the mantra as these multitasking consumers watch and monitor the web to get the best deals," said Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group. "Holiday gift buying is particularly impacted by this propensity for shopping smart as consumers preview online to get the most for their money."

Convenience and efficiency have clearly made shoppers more comfortable with the online channel, as evidenced by more products' being sold across a broader range of categories as well as increased usage of tools and information, according to the e-tailing group.

Additional findings:

The No. 1 customer reason for not buying more online is the high cost of shipping; that's according to 78% of those surveyed:
Free shipping (95%) and sales/specials (83%) are at or near the top of the list of what influences the buying of gifts online; another is keyword search (86%).
For 42% (vs. 30% last year), gift cards will account for 11-50% of their online holiday spending. Wish-list use has also accelerated, with 35% (vs. 25% last year) reporting that they have shopped online from someone else's wish list three or more times.

"Although the internet is now the shoppers' channel of choice, economic pressures are making the stakes high for merchants. They need to continually learn from and react to their customer's multi-channel demands," cautioned Kelly O'Neill, e-commerce marketing director for ATG. "It is imperative that practical solutions be deployed wisely throughout the holiday season and into 2009."

For additional information, or help with your website please call Heritage Web Solutions at: 1-866-754-1441.

Article by: VOX Marketing www.marketingvox.com