Focus on What You Want Visitors To Do

When a visitor pulls up your website, what do you want them to do? If you are a small business owner, the answer is obvious: you want them to purchase a product or service. How do you get them to do that? There’s a lot that goes into it, so let’s start with one helpful concept: Focus on
What You Want Visitors to Do.

Should visitors to your site:

• make a purchase?

• fill out a form?

• click on a link?

• contact your company?

If you aren’t sure what you want your visitor to do, how will they ever know? Starting with the very first line of copy on your website, your content should lead your visitor to the goal you have in mind.

Make effective use of your homepage. If you want a customer to make a purchase, then your home page should focus on the products or services you are offering. If you have multiple products or services, you will want to make sure your customer can purchase multiple products or services as easily as possible: this means you will want shopping cart functionality on your website.

If the purpose of your website is to generate sales leads, don't put a form on your "Contact Us" page and hope visitors stumble across it. Instead, make it a dominating feature on every page. You’ll also want to make sure that the copy on the page further persuades the visitor to fill out the form.

If you want your visitor to click on a link, then don’t bury the link in a large paragraph of text. A colorful “Click here for more information" button is an easy way to get your customer to click on a link and end up where you want them to be.

No matter what you want your visitors to do, your contact information should be in an easy-to-find place on every page. What if your visitors have questions about a product? What if they can’t get a form to submit correctly? Do everything you can to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do.

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.

The Importance of Color in Your Website

When creating your website there are a lot of considerations, not the least of which is the actual design and color scheme itself. This can affect your sales, how people see your company and how they use your site. There is an entire field of study called color theory or the psychology of color, but you don’t have to go to years of school to pick the colors for your logo and/or website.

I’d like to introduce you to the field of color awareness by briefly going over the reasons behind color theory. First off, there are physical reasons behind why color affects us the way it does. I don’t want to get sidetracked on this as it isn’t necessary to understand why we see colors the way we do, it is only important to understand how they affect us and how they affect the way we buy. I do want to point out that most of color theory is what they call “soft science” in that it isn’t really provable by scientific method nor can it be explained by mathematical reference. That doesn’t make it any less true. Statistics in sales often “prove” something beyond a shadow of a doubt.

First we will look at the primary colors. Because there are only three primary colors, all other colors come from those, making the primary colors some of the most significant. The three primary colors are Blue, Yellow and Red.

Blue, the color of the sky and water, is associated with coolness, serenity, stability and solidity. It invokes a sense of permanence and strength due to its association with the sky and the sea. This would be a good choice in colors for a financial institution or a mortgage company.

Yellow is almost always linked with the sun. This is pretty universal throughout the world, so this color conveys the same message in almost every culture. It is generally associated with energy, happiness, optimism, warmth and heat. Yellow captures people’s attention better than any other color because of its brightness. It is usually a good choice for schools, daycares and creative enterprises.

Red is the color of blood, so can be linked with vitality, life and passion. It is an aggressive color in many ways and is a hot color because of its association with flame and blood. It can also be used to convey danger. This makes it an exciting color and one that is associated with thrills and energy. It is often used in association with fast foods, certain restaurants and anywhere people want to associate vitality and thrilling energy.

More tomorrow on this very important subject.

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

Converting Visitors to Buyers

You’ve worked hard at creating your web site. It is now complete, live for everyone to see, and now you need to do some business. You want the site to pay for itself and become a benefit for your business. So you’ve worked equally hard to get people to the site, bring it into the public eye and make it visible to the world. However, all the traffic to your site means nothing if you aren’t converting those visitors to actual paying customers.

How do you accomplish this? Through a process called conversion. Conversion is the process by which you take browsers, or viewers, and turn them into a customer; someone who pays for your goods and/or services. Your conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to your site compared to how many of those visitors are actually buying. Without this all important conversion, the work and money you have spent getting those visitors to your site is wasted. So how do you change the viewer to a customer?

According to Forrester as of August 2007 the average conversion rate in e-commerce is 2.9%. Your target then is to match this or exceed it. Increasing the conversion rate of your online business makes sense in a lot of ways. You’re maximizing your efforts in marketing and making those dollars make more sense for you as well as increasing revenue without spending further marketing dollars or manpower. There are some simple ways to make sure you are doing all you can to maximize your potential in conversions.

First of all, make sure you’re providing great content in the site. I’ve talked a lot about that in earlier blog entries and can’t emphasize enough how important great written content is. Make sure your content is grabbing your visitor’s attention and that it tells them exactly what it is you want them to do immediately. Don’t make them guess. Along the way, think about ways to build customer loyalty – that way those marketing dollars not only get a onetime customer but build a future relationship that keeps bringing the customer back again and again. Some kind of reward for the customer to return usually works – maybe a coupon for a percentage off on their next visit to your site.

In short –

• Write and implement great content for your site
• Grab your visitor/buyers attention and hold it
• Make it easy for them to know exactly what you want them to do on the front page
• Find ways of building your customers loyalty

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.

Creating Quality Site Content - Avoiding Mistakes with the Search Engines

You need desperately to market your site and have a limited budget. The natural alternative for you is the search engines. If you have a high ranking in the various search engines you have a better chance of getting traffic and customers to your website. There are a number of ways to achieve this, one of which is to do what is called search engine optimization (SEO) and get what is called ‘organic’ traffic to your site – in other words, traffic from natural site ranking. This can be a tough thing to do and takes a lot of work. It takes so much work and is such a tricky process there are companies that specialize in that and nothing else. But again, we’re back to you having a limited budget, and hiring someone to do SEO can be expensive. So the natural alternative is to do it yourself, but, again this is a lot of work, though worth its weight in gold if it helps your business succeed. What you do not want to do is try to cheat the results and have your site rank high by doing what the search engines consider to be dishonest. This is commonly called ‘spamdexing’ or ‘spamming the search engines’ and get your site banned from them altogether, and that can be a disaster.

The following list is directly from Google and can be seen in its entirety by going to Google and looking up Webmaster Guidelines or by going to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&src=top5.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I’ll have more tomorrow on the right way to create a user friendly as well as a site that is friendly to the search engines.

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.