The modern way to market on a website
Building your own website is not for the faint hearted, but in this day and age it's totally possible – even if you're not tech savvy. I should know as this is exactly what I've done. Now, my website may not be perfect but it's doing the job I need it to right now. And, until you have enough money to outsource it, you can do the same. Obviously it's a preferred choice to get a designer to do this for you, but whether you do or don't, here are some key points to bear in mind.
The purpose of a business is to create a customer, so as an entrepreneur creating, optimizing, and promoting, content is essential if you’re going to fill the top of your sales and marketing funnel with more targeted, relevant website traffic and leads. The good news is that if you create, optimize and promote your blog on your website (or quite frankly on another's) you’re going to get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads than those who don't. That's quite a large figure!
Anyway, here are 7 ways to help you generate more leads on your website and boost your marketing efforts.
The ultimate way to create a performing website
1. Blogging
As you know every website has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources i.e. from social media sites and the blogosphere. However, nowadays this all depends on whether your website is well optimized and how valuable it is to your readers i.e. useful, relevant, interesting, and so on. Adding a blog to a website is therefore a very powerful way to achieve this. In addition it’s also a great way to convert leads into clients. By having valuable and relevant calls to action, allowing your readers to subscribe, and encouraging them to follow you on social media are great ways to leverage your blog and get more. The more active you get online – on your website – the faster you'll grow.
2. SEO
70% of the links search-users click on are organic, which is why if you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a blog on your website, then you've got to optimize it. You have to give your valuable website content the best possible chance of drawing traffic in from the web. You need to maximize your ROC – return on content. Search engines look for fresh content so that they can serve it up later in search results so if they're not indexing it, results won't show it. The more fresh content you create on your website, the more often search engines will come back looking for more.
3. Mobile
Mobile is huge and if your website isn’t mobile friendly then you’re missing a trick. In fact I’d go so far as to say you have to redesign it! When mobile optimizing your website, you must consider smaller screen sizes and slower bandwidths. This may mean using smaller images and font sizes, and thinking about how much content is displayed on a single page. If you outsource this to a designer, just ensure you let them know. Ask for a website that is “responsive.” If you’re building your own website, I’d suggest using a WordPress.org. website. They have multiple mobile friendly templates. Once again make sure it is responsive. Theme Forest is a good place to start.
4. Social
Social media isn’t a fad, or a silver bullet, but it has changed the way we market. And, whether you like it or not the world is becoming more social. It's not just about the number of fans, friends and follows you have. Studies have shown that being active on Twitter and Facebook increases the number of inbound links, traffic and leads. As a result, companies are now favouring an increased investment in social media and blogs. Obviously there’s a right and wrong way to use it, and it’s imperative that you engage in conversations and not just blab about your own company/brand. It's about delivering meaningful content, having a dialogue and engaging with others. Blog posts shared on Twitter get 117% more page views than those not shared. Linkedin proves the most effective platform for B2B and Facebook for B2C. However, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, Linkedin and YouTube combined (source, Shareaholic, February 2012) so you might want to experiment and see what works for your brand.
5. Analytics
I'm going to put it bluntly…there’s no point doing anything unless you’re measuring it. You need to know what works and what doesn’t. If you can't measure how many visits, leads and clients your different campaigns generate, you need to either get help with this or think again about why you're in business. Google Analytics provides a way to do this.
6. Tools
If you have a website, check out how it's performing by going to this marketing tool Marketing Grader. For SEO you can use SEO Scorer or ScribeSEO.
7. Resources
Nathalie Lussier is an online business triple threat, serving up digital strategy and integration along with do-it-yourself training programs that will turn your website into the asset you know it should be. She’s the creator of The Website Checkup Tool, and she loves getting techy with it, martial arts, and drinking green juice. Whilst I built my own website, I used many of the techniques Nathalie taught and that's why I have no hesitation recommending her to you here.
Please let me know if there's anything else you'd recommend by posting a comment below. Watch out for my check list on building a website that's coming soon. It will be useful if you're outsourcing your website design or designing your website yourself.
Until then….With love and gratitude – as always,
