In this five part series of blogs, we’re going to talk about what your website needs. There is a lot more than five things that your website needs, but we’ll talk about five to get you started. These things will help elevate your website from just a placeholder and a business expense to a useful and productive part of your business that well help you GENERATE income.
Contact Info
I’ve been building websites since 1997. I’ve made some good ones, some dumb ones, and everything in between. Interestingly enough, many end users often tell me, or tell my web design clients that they couldn’t find their contact information.
After hearing this, I started asking question for other web designers, and I’ve discovered that it’s a common problem.
I look at the sites in question, and I can always find the contact info – but for some reason – people miss it!
So here’s what I recommend.
1. Put your contact information in your footer or sidebar – so that it shows up on EVERY page.
2. Make a “Contact Us” page – with all of the relevant contact information. You might want to have a form that gathers email addresses that you can use for marketing.
3. Don’t forget to include your contact info on ALL of your social media profiles and directory pages!
4. Include your contact info with your “Call to Action” if appropriate.
In this five part series of blogs, we’re going to talk about what your website needs. There is a lot more than five things that your website needs, but we’ll talk about five to get you started. These things will help elevate your website from just a placeholder and a business expense to a useful and productive part of your business that well help you GENERATE income.
4. Call to Action
I wrote another post on CALL TO ACTION in the Good Copywriting series, but I want to point out that every website needs one. In fact, it needs MULTIPLE calls to action.
I recommend a call to action on every page of your website. I think they work best if they are graphical – a brightly colored button or arrow.
They could be a “fill out this form” – which would also allow you to collect email addresses for a newsletter. They could also be a “Call us today” or a “Stop in today” depending on how your site is setup.
But a call to action needs to be CLEAR – CONSCISE –BOLD – URGENT and very clearly TELL your reader what you want them to do.
In this five part series of blogs, we’re going to talk about what your website needs. There is a lot more than five things that your website needs, but we’ll talk about five to get you started. These things will help elevate your website from just a placeholder and a business expense to a useful and productive part of your business that well help you GENERATE income.
3. Social Media
Social media can be a huge time suck. But the truth is – your social media platforms might actually have better SEO than your own website!
Make sure to get links to all your social media profiles on your own website. This allows your customers to easily connect to a platform that makes it even EASIER for you to market to them.
ALSO – make sure you have a “like” or “share” button – so that with one click – website visitors can share your blog posts or your page. (It helps if while you are blogging – you give them the kind of content that they would WANT to share.)
In this five part series of blogs, we’re going to talk about what your website needs. There is a lot more than five things that your website needs, but we’ll talk about five to get you started. These things will help elevate your website from just a placeholder and a business expense to a useful and productive part of your business that well help you GENERATE income.
2. Blog
Everyone says, “You need to blog!”
But you might not have any idea what that means, or you might not think that you have the time to do it. I’m not going to jump into HOW to setup a blog. If you don’t have a blog on your site yet – you need to know that setting it up DOES take a bit of expertise to set it up. At the risk of sounding self-serving – I can help you set up a blog, but I will have to charge you to do it. A LOT of people, though, have a blog, or a news section on their site, and they just never update it.
“I don’t have the time to blog!” They say!
To be honest, this post was written along with about 26 weeks worth of blogging – all in about a four-hour period. In one afternoon, I did a half a year’s worth of blogging.
The good news about MOST blogging platforms, is that you schedule your posts. You don’t need to keep coming back. You can work ahead and get it done in advance.
A. Do it. Schedule it. Then just make it happen. If you put it off, you’ll never get it done.
B. Start with a plan. You can split your blogs up into 4 week or 6 week series, and then just break those up into small three or four paragraph articles. THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE LONG. Just write a few sentences.
C. What do you write about? Think VALUE ADDED CONTENT. Write something that answers questions about your business. Write a quick article that tells your clients/customers how to get more out of your services, or how to use your products. Maybe you blog is a list of your weekly or monthly specials! Just get SOMETHING on a plan.
In this five part series of blogs, we’re going to talk about what your website needs. There is a lot more than five things that your website needs, but we’ll talk about five to get you started. These things will help elevate your website from just a placeholder and a business expense to a useful and productive part of your business that well help you GENERATE income.
1. SEO
Search Engine Optimization is always changing. Google wants to prevent people from gaming the system. So they don’t tell you exactly how to get the best results. A recent rollout has changed everything that we all thought we know about search, but one thing is absolutely clear. The BEST thing you can do for your SEO is to use natural, organic content that features the keywords, the questions, and the answers that people would be typing into a search engine to find you.
A) Beware the “Front Page of Google” promises. No one can guarantee that. If a gentleman stops in your store and hands you a pamphlet promising to get you on the front page of google, he’s offering you something he can’t promise. He MAY be able to deliver – but chances are just as good that he could fail to deliver.
There ARE things that those companies do that you can do yourself, or even pay someone to do for you. Those things will HELP you boost your SEO – but where you land on google can NEVER be guaranteed.
B) Content is king.
The latest google search algorithm actually is based on question and answer based search.
Take the time to think about WHAT QUESTIONS your TARGET CUSTOMER would be asking if they were looking for you.
“Where can I find sledgehammers in Phoenix?”
“What restaurants in Rochester serve shwarma?”
“Who sells homebrewing supplies in Harrisburg?”
As you are working on your site – find a way to work those questions and answers into your content. This is easy if you are blogging. You can simply ask the questions, provide the answers, and hit post. Make sure you write good copy – and include a call to action for each of those posts!
C) WordPress – there are a lot of options for your website – and wordpress is not for EVERYONE – but for MANY – it’s a fantastic option.
I find myself using the All in One SEO plugin, and the Google XML Sitemap plugin on every site that I build. These plugins will really help you interface with the search engines, and make it easier for them to index your site and locate the information that they need.
D) Backlinks – The degree to which other sites link back to your site is important. However – the quality of those sites, and their relationship to your topic matter as well. It won’t help if your site is only linked to unrelated sites. It will help if your site is linked to similar sites.
E) Social Media – Facebook and Twitter have excellent SEO. Set up a profile and link back to your website. We’ll talk more about social media in a few days.
F) Directory Listings – Yelp. Merchant Circle, UrbanSpoon, Google Places, and online Yellow Pages Listings are all golden.
Photo Credit: Ivy Lee
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard #wisdomwednesday
Keep this in mind as you are doing your writing! Sometimes “writing” gets in the way of your message!
Obviously, Original content is best. But do you know what else is good?
CURATION!
This is where you share someone else’s blog post. You write an introduction – or copy the first sentence or two – and include a link back to the original article.
This is really good for filling in the gaps in your blogging plan.
If you are keeping a bookmark folder of articles you like – you might find some that you don’t want to RE-TELL – but would rather just share. YOU ARE ALLOWED TO THAT!
Just don’t copy their whole article – and I recommend writing a sentence or two of introduction.
If you need some help with it – I use the “My Curate” plugin for wordpress – and it has a bookmarklet that makes it easy to gather and curate content.
We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike #wisdomwednesday
Writing – whether it’s creative writing, short stories, letters, poems website content, blogs, facebook posts, twitter posts – the truth is – WRITING IS IMPORTANT! The Writer is the one that makes life interesting!
You don’t need to write long bloviating posts. Tell a story. Make a point. Highlight an idea.
SURE there’s a lot you could say about any one topic – but you don’t have to say it all.
More words a better blog post does not make. –Yoda (not really)
Here’s two crazy truth’s about your blog that you don’t want to know.
1. No one reads it.
2. It doesn’t matter that no one reads it.
I know that sounds CRAZY with a capital P.
You should assume that NO ONE is clicking your blog everyday just to read it, because they love reading you. YOU MAY have that – and if you don’t have it – YOU MIGHT EVENTUALLY ATTAIN THAT. But in the meantime – look at your blog posts as fishing hooks.
The more you have in the water, the more potential you’ll have to snag someone.
(This is why a CALL TO ACTION on every page and post is important – it funnels them to take action and give you their money, or whatever it is that is your END RESULT.)
As people are searching for answer to the question: Where can I get a good steak dinner in Cleveland? They’ll find your blog post. Your job is to answer the question – and then sell them something.
You may occasionally have a self-absorbed high and mighty lofty sermon to deliver via blog post – and there’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT on occasion – just make sure that you recognize that what you are doing when you blog is to write to get google’s attention, and get google to send readers your way. Then your job is to sell that reader something… whether it’s to click on another post – or to buy your book, or shop in your store.
You ought to be able to do that in a few paragraphs.
