The Top 10 Tricks for Today's Successful Websites
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This presentation, presented to the Charlotte Technology Partners, highlights the 5 concepts of the new web and lists the top 10 tricks/techniques employed by today's successful websites.
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The Top 10 Tricks for Today's Successful Websites
- 1. Top 10 Tricks Of Today’s Successful Websites A Close Look at How to Improve Your Website Presented to: Charlotte Technology Partners
- 2. Websites are now expected to be more than brochures, they’re expected to be a business tool. Is Yours?
- 3. The Five Concepts of the New Web
- 4. #1 Websites are not necessary… access to information is.
- 5. #2 Boring website = Boring business
- 6. #3 Customers want what they’re looking for, or else they’ll go somewhere else to get it.
- 7. #4 If they wanted to search for it, they’d just use Google!
- 8. #5 Teach them & they’ll trust you. If they trust you, they’ll buy from you.
- 9. The Top 10 Tricks for Today’s Websites +1
- 10. #10 Professional Brand & Design
- 11. #9 User Friendly Navigation
- 12. #8 Targeted & Optimized Pages
- 13. #7 Multiple Contact Points
- 15. #5 Case Studies & Testimonials
- 16. #4 Build Your Database
- 17. #3 Engage Your Audience
- 19. #1 Analytics & Performance Tracking
- 22. Thank you for your time! Brian Hamlett is the President and owner of mPower Consulting, an online marketing consultancy based in Charlotte, North Carolina. His goal is to “Make the Web Easy” for businesses and organizations to leverage the power of the Internet to fuel growth, increase sales, attract new prospects and build strong relationships with customers. He is routinely invited to speak to groups on topics such as: social media for businesses, online marketing strategy, building better websites, using the web to cut operational costs, and digital relationship-building. Contact him or learn more about him by going to: www.mpoweringu.com
Editor's Notes
- Visitors to your site will make their a judgment of your business within the first 5 seconds They will look at your brand They will look at aesthetics of your site They will look at the layout, design, and organization of your content Psychology of visual interpretation A nicely designed website = a well-run, professional business If you need to do it yourself, buy a template TemplateMonster.com ThemeForest.com
- <7 core navigation links Follow the “2 Click” rule <2 levels of navigation Condense extra content pages Use simple navigation systems Suckerfish (vertical drop-downs) Stack-levels (horizontal fly-unders)
- In the first 10 years of the Internet the idea was always, “Get them to my homepage.” Therefore we loaded up our home page with just about everything we thought a visitor would need to see. This is no longer the case. With visitors looking for specific content and wanting it within 2 clicks, it’s now important for our organizations to create specialized and optimized content for each potential need of our visitors. Think of the titles of the individuals viewing your site. Can you prove it? No? How can you? Create a specialized page for the key target prospect profiles Make them easy to find from the homepage (highlight the pages) and in the navigation Track the number of visitors to those pages. We’ve all heard this big focus on “SEO” and how our pages should include certain keywords, but remember, people are still reading the pages… not just computers scanning for keywords. With that focus on SEO, do be sure that every page has the necessary meta tags, a relevant title and copy, and that all hyperlinks are actually working.
- For people to trust you, they need to be able to reach you. Accommodate any preference by providing multiple ways to reach your organization. Phone number/Fax Mailing address (not as important) Email form over just an email address Skype? Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter?
- The wide-spread use of the web and the easy access to trusted information has increased the idea that we can all “self-teach ourselves” whatever we need to know. Couple that with today’s tight economy and people have become even more wary about who they deal with. Sharing a bit of your knowledge in the form of educational content not only shows your expertise and understanding of certain situations and solutions, but it also may help your visitors complete a few steps on their own. Empowering your visitors with those few steps can help bring your organization to the forefront of their mind once they become stuck and need help. Taking something complex and simplifying it even to help a visitor understand goes a long way in educating them how your service/solution can be of great benefit and goes a long way in persuading a prospect where marketing message can fail. Create these resources in the form of: Blogs Wiki’s Whitepapers and reports eBooks, guides, and presentations Online videos
- People want to learn more about your organization and how you are to work with, so give them examples. They want to know they can trust you and the more you can show other successful clients who trust you, the more opportunity you will have for them to trust you. If you can, provide this in multiple formats (this is new, but effective) Highlight what you did for a client (tell the results!) and how you worked with the client (if your product/service is more on you working together.) Think “Customer Attraction Story”
- The saying “You live and die by your database.” has never been as true as it is today. People’s attention is being pulled all over the place and you need to be sure that you can keep your brand, messaging, and offerings at the forefront. This can only be done by building your database. Create subscription/capture points where valuable information is offered in exchange for permission to send future messages. Newsletter Download report/whitepaper Attend a seminar/workshop/webinar The important thing to remember is that “context is key.” Your visitor signed up for something specific and have expressed a desire for something specific, stick to that to protect your database. Be sure once you’ve built your database that you keep using it… EFFECTIVELY! Do not blast a sales pitch or promotion (unless it’s a crazy one like 50% off!) Keep the messages relevant and consistent to what your audience has asked. Segment your overall list into sub-specialties (think sales promotions, educational content, specific industry news, etc.)
- With the explosion of social media, your visitors are consuming information like never before, BUT they’re doing it on their terms and in the tools they feel comfortable with. It’s time to engage them where they are and allow them to take you with them: Add tools such as the “Share This” button that allows visitors to share and discuss your information on social media sites Provide the ability for visitors to post feedback directly to your site about your reports, whitepapers, blog posts, etc. Identify your best customers/brand evangelists and give them access to “exclusive” information that they can use in their own content, reports, etc. as long as they cite you as the source. These “backlinks” and references will help increase your page rank in the search engines and help spread your information… thus spreading your influence
- Many of your visitors will have different motivators for being on your site, ensure you provide multiple ways to engage your organization to capture them all. Sign-up for newsletter Download our whitepaper Join our workshop Schedule a demonstration Buy now! Without asking for anything, you leave your visitor to guess what they’ll do next. Make it easy for them to plug in somehow and get the relationship going.
- Be sure to have installed a full-featured site analytics package such as the free Google Analytics Track more than visits to a page, you should be tracking: Visitors breakdown Number of visitors % New over repeat Bounce rate Time on site Average number of pages viewed Traffic sources Top viewed pages Top entry pages Top exit pages What you’re looking for is where changes need to happen in order to improve overall performance
- This is where your website truly becomes a business tool. By providing multiple engagement points, multiple subscription points, multiple contact points, the focus moves from capturing to responding and the most successful websites have mastered this! Create a process that keeps engaging your visitors by thinking “What next?” Scenario #1 Person signs up to download a whitepaper on utilizing a specific piece of technology in their business. In your “Thank you for downloading” response letter you mention a specialized newsletter that helps combine technology such as the one they’re interested in with others to complete a solution – highlighting problems it solves and benefits it offers. Person agrees to sign-up for the newsletter. In the “Thank you for signing up for our newsletter” you highlight a webinar that you are hosting that answers the “Common misconceptions of XYZ technology and how to get the most from it.” The person is interested so they sign-up to “attend” the webinar. At the end of the webinar, you offer a transcript of the event for free and couple it with the offer for a “Free Analysis” simply by visiting a special URL where the person can request the analysis. The analysis now presents the key opportunity to start engaging in your sales process.