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"MAKE YOUR WEB
SITE WORK MORE SO YOU CAN WORK LESS"
By C.J. Hayden, MCC
Do you
know how your web site fits into the overall marketing
strategy for your business? Do you have a strategy for your
web site as a marketing tool? If you're like many
entrepreneurs I speak with, you probably don't.
All over the world, small business owners are spending
thousands of dollars on building and maintaining web sites
without being able to answer one big question: What do you
want your web site to do?
Creating a web site without a marketing strategy can be an
expensive and time-consuming mistake. Here's an illustration
from the more familiar world of paper and postage. Imagine
that you hired a graphic designer, printed 5000 four-color
tri-fold brochures, and when the boxes arrived, you asked
yourself, "Gee, what shall I do with these?"
That scenario may sound a bit embarrassing as it stands, but
let's take it further. Suppose the first idea that occurs to
you is mailing your new brochure to a list of 500 names you
collected by exhibiting at a trade show. But then you
realize that you didn't design the brochure as a self-
mailer -- all 6 panels are filled with graphics and copy.
To mail your brochure, you will now need 500 envelopes. Of
course you want to use the ones printed with your address
and logo, but how much do those cost apiece? And do you have
500 in stock? What will be the cost in money or time to get
envelopes printed, addressed, and stuffed? How long will all
this take? Was any of this in your budget when you had the
brochures printed?
The brochure example can tell us much about what goes wrong
in creating web sites. Many sites are constructed to be
simply electronic brochures. Entrepreneurs often get their
sites designed by sending their printed brochure to a web
designer, and saying, "Put this on the web."
So here's what is wrong with that. If you want your web site
to attract traffic, your web site must be DESIGNED to
attract traffic.
You have a choice in designing your site and integrating it
with your overall marketing strategy. You can choose to make
your site an electronic brochure with no consideration of
how to attract visitors built into the design. If you do
this, it means that you must direct traffic to your site by
other means -- advertise, promote, exhibit, speak, write,
network, prospect, mail, call, etc.
Unfortunately, most small business owners find this out
after the fact. They put up the site and then slowly realize
that no one is seeing it. So they start spending time and
money on banner ads, on-line malls, classifieds, postcards,
bulk email, posting articles, exchanging links, and more.
The alternative is to design your site to attract traffic in
the first place. If you're going to spend all the time and
money to build a web site, doesn't it make more sense to
have the site bring you customers rather than you having to
bring customers to the site?
To create a high-traffic web site, it must be search-engine
friendly. 85-90% of all web site traffic comes from search
engines. When a customer types in a keyword phrase you hope
will bring them to you, your site needs to be one of the top
10-30 results shown or that customer will never get to you.
To earn top positions in the major search engines, you or
your web designer must know the guidelines the engines use
to create their rankings, and mold your site to meet them.
Some of these guidelines relate to the content of your site,
and how it is organized. Others have to do with the
technical details of how your site is constructed. If you
don't want to know these specifics, you'd better hire
someone who does. That's the problem with letting just
anyone who calls themselves a web designer create a site for
you.
Looking at a designer's portfolio of completed sites will
tell you only a small part of what you need to know about
their abilities. Who wrote the content for those sites? Who
designed the page layout and navigation? Where did the
graphics come from? And here's the most important question:
What did the designer do to make those sites search-engine
friendly?
It's a rare person who possesses the four-way combination of
design ability, technical expertise, marketing know-how, and
search engine savvy to create an attractive, useful web site
that will attract traffic AND generate paying customers. You
know which of these capabilities you already have, and what
new skills you're willing to learn. Make sure you hire
people who have the rest.
Copyright © C.J. Hayden, Read more
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