Building A Business Website: Step 4
September 10, 2008
Step 4 in Building A Business Website:
Create a Website Strategy
Step 1 in Building A Business Website is to determine what you want your website to accomplish.
Step 2 in Building a Business Website is to perform a SWOT analysis. Identify your business’ strengths and weaknesses and determine if your website can help support your business where it is weak.
Step 3 in Building a Business Website is to know your audience. It’s essential to remember that you are not designing this website to please you. You’re designing your business website for your TARGET AUDIENCE.
Now, the fourth step in Building a Business Website is to create a Website Strategy.
In order to develop a website strategy you must first establish clear goals for your business website. Then, you need to establish how you’ll MEASURE your website performance. You’ll need to establish OBJECTIVES in order to measure your website success.
Objectives are the goals of the website while strategies are how you will meet your objectives. So, in order to create a website strategy, you must first set a measurable goal.
For example, if the goal (objective) of your website is to improve customer service, then you’ll need to find a way to MEASURE whether this objective is being accomplished. One way to MEASURE that stated objective is to monitor the number of customer support telephone calls. A reduction in phone calls with a corresponding increase in website traffic is a sign that the website is meeting the objective of improving customer service.
When you have established the objective and how you will measure whether or not those objectives are being met, you’ll then know which metrics to watch.
In the example above, if you didn’t know that the objective of the website was to improve customer service, then you wouldn’t know to monitor the volume of incoming calls for customer services. Without that important metric, you wouldn’t be able to determine whether or not the website was meeting its objective.
Creating a website strategy is simply how you’ll go about meeting the objective for the website. It’s amazing how EASY the whole website strategy discussion gets when you first establish an objective.
With an objective in hand, creating the strategy becomes the “easy” part of creating website success.
Building a Business Website: Step 3
September 8, 2008
Step 3 in Building A Business Website:
Know Your Audience
The first step to building a successful business website is to determine what you want your website to DO for your business.
The next step to building a successful business website is to perform a SWOT analysis of your business- including your competitors.
Now, we’re to what may be the hardest part of building a business website: Knowing Your Audience
This is your business website. You are not designing this website to please you. You’re not designing this website to please your spouse. You’re designing your business website for your TARGET AUDIENCE.
I once had a client who had previously hired a gifted web developer to create her original website. The original web developer correctly “nailed” this client’s personality and developed a site with the client in mind. The site was funky and fresh. I featured photos of the client in a very Audrey Hepburn type of attire/attitude. The colors were dark purple and orange and the art work was very hip and modern.
Unfortunately, this client was providing goods and services to individuals in the financial sector.
So, for the first six weeks after her website was launched, this client was happily cold calling prospective clients. She happily provided her URL for her website to those who showed and interest in her services - and when she did she noticed an alarming trend. When she gave her website address to prospective clients, she noticed that they suddenly refused to take her phone calls. At first she wasn’t alarmed, but when she quit giving her web address and landed a couple of clients, she contacted me in a panic.
We redesigned the site and toned down the “hip” vibe. The original web developer would have said the new site was “stuffy” and “boring”. We went from using purple and orange to navy blue and gray. She got new head shots and this time, she wore a suit and assumed a traditional “formal” pose.
The result was amazing. When she began giving the URL of her new website to prospective clients, she landed 10 of the next 12 prospects who visited her website.
This is an essential Web Site Success Story which clearly illustrates the “design your website with your audience in mind”.
You’re designing this website with your AUDIENCE in mind.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- WHO is coming to your site? (Current customers? Prospective customers?)
- WHY are they coming to your website?
- WHEN will they be coming? (Before the sale? After the sale?
- WHAT do they expect to find when they get to your website?
- HOW can you make your website easier for them to use?
The only perspective that is important when it comes to your website is your visitor’s perspective.
With this in mind, ask potential users to “test” your ideas for your website before you begin the work of development. A potential user’s opinion can offer valuable insight throughout the process.
By asking for your customer’s input, you’ll not only get a better idea of what you need to do to create a successful website for your business, but you’ll also be demonstrating your commitment to them, your customers.
Just be forewarned, you may not always LIKE what you hear. In my business, when I asked my clients how they wanted their website tutorials delivered, I had video in mind for the delivery. Creating an online video is faster and easier than creating a written version. Unfortunately, my clients overwhelmingly “voted” for a hard copy of the tutorials so they could print out the tutorial as they went through it.
It’s all about the customer. Make sure you design your business website with your customers needs in mind!
Domain Name’s Role in Website Success
August 18, 2008
Recently, I’ve been absolutely stunned at the importance of choosing the right domain name for a website. It’s not that you can’t overcome the choice of a poor domain name (such as Keys to Website Success) but choosing the right domain name certainly gives your fledgling website a giant step ahead of the rest of the game.
Choosing a domain name with the “right” keywords can literally be the difference between website success and website failure.
I installed a Wordpress self hosted blog for a client about 6 months ago. Like many of my clients, she had trouble getting “motivated” to post regularly to her blog. After 4 months, she had only posted 10 articles, many of those were poems. To say she wasn’t using frequently searched keywords in her posts would be an understatement.
When she asked me to look at her log files, I have to confess, I was expecting the worst. Her posts were erratic both in frequency and content. However, I was PLEASANTLY surprised when I ran a log file analysis. Despite her erratic posting, she was still getting several hundred visitors a day to her self hosted Wordpress blog. Digging deeper into the log files gave me the answer to the secret to her website success: she had registered the “right” keyword domain name.
By registering a domain name which contained the keyword string used by people to find her services, this client was enjoying an incredible level of website success! Website visitors were signing up for her newsletter and returning time and time again to read her blog.
So if there were one word of advice I would give someone looking to start their new website, it would be this: register the right domain name.
Finding the Right Keyword Domain Name
It’s really quite simple to find the right keyword domain name.
Begin by visiting the Google Adword Selector. Test your potential domain names here. Test various combinations. For example, the keywords “success factors” are searched, on average five times more than “success strategies”. So if you’re trying to decide between two domain names, one that includes the words “success factors” and one that includes “success strategies”, you’d be better off registering the first name over the second.
The internet is more than a decade old and great domain names that are available are hard to find. That’s why you need the following tools:
The Word Wizard allows you to combine your keywords with your location. Simply enter the word you want to optimize for, choose “before or after” and then pick if you want to combine that word with a US state or a major city. VIOLA! Localized search engine optimization magic!
On the other hand, maybe you don’t want to confine your self to a particular US location, then there’s another tool called the Domain Twist This domain name registration tool allows you to combine two different keywords into dozens of domain name possibilities. Sometimes, the addition of an e before a keyword combo is all you need to snatch up a great keyword specific domain name!
I had another client who set out to deliberately built a self hosted Wordpress blog using this strategy. Within 4 weeks, she found her blog at #4 in Google on her keyword. To say she’s ecstatic would be an understatement.
Search engines drive incredible amounts of traffic. Picking the right keyword domain name can help you to achieve website success - even if you’re doing everything else wrong (like the client first mentioned in this article)! However, when you do everything right (like the latter client) it can turn into real marketing magic for your website.
Your Website Success Strategy
June 20, 2008
There’s one secret you probably don’t know about developing a website success strategy. Over the past decade, I’ve worked with hundreds of solo entrepreneurs, helping them to develop websites and other marketing systems to assist them in building their businesses.
Yes, you read that correctly. It’s not a typo. I said BUILDING THEIR BUSINESSES.
See, as I look back over my client list, I’ve realized that the clients who are still working with me eight years later and beyond are those who have built SEVERAL businesses, or at least built several business web sites.
Many people who are getting ready to build a business website usually don’t recognize that the key to developing a successful website strategy is to set up SEVERAL websites, each one targeting a tightly defined niche market.
For example, one of my most successful clients is currently operating no less than 10 separate “businesses” or rather business websites.
She’s spent the past six years building each of these separate business websites. Some are more successful than others, but that doesn’t mean she’s dropped the websites which aren’t performing up to expectations.
While a couple of her business websites aren’t doing as well as the others, when you combine the results from all 10 websites, they still provide enough monthly income to keep her daughter in ipods and designer duds.
In addition, the customers from these less profitable websites frequently become customers of her more profitable websites. Each website acts as a sign up for her single newsletter and through that newsletter she introduces her subscribers to the other variations of her website.
As a matter of fact, that’s how she’s built her highly successful businesses. She essentially selling a single product line and as she adds new products, she updates each of the 10 websites.
