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By Terri Seymour in Website Promotion

about usIf you own an online business, you need to provide an About Us page. Unfortunately, many sites neglect to give this page the attention it needs and deserves. Many people do not realize the importance of an effective About Us page.

Your About Us page has the distinct purpose of letting people get to know your company, which will help build the foundation of trust and respect that is needed for a successful online business. For certain businesses, the About Us page can also be used for recruiting new employees, sales reps, etc.

So, take some time, look over your About Us page and see if it utilizes any or all of the ten features listed below.

1. Company History – Give a brief history of your company and how you got started. Explain how long you’ve been in business, the purpose of your business and your experience. This is also a good place to add your mission statement.

2. Focus on Benefits - Be sure to focus on the benefits your company will provide the customer. Your potential customers want to know what you can do for them, not how you do it.

3. Introduce Yourself and Crew – Be sure to give your name and the names of those who work with and/or for you. You would be surprised at how many About Us pages I have read that contain no names whatsoever! Give a very brief background on yourself and your workers so your visitors can get to know them.

4. Special Skills and Accomplishments – Highlighting any special skills you have or accomplishments can help to build your credibility and separate you from your competitors. If your company is a green company be sure to highlight that as well. Let people know what your company stands for and against.

5. Toot Your Horn – Provide testimonials, awards and names of notable clients. Don’t be afraid to let people know exactly how accomplished you and your company are. This will also help build credibility and trust.

6. Use Photos – Be sure to add some photos of yourself and your workers (if any) so people can feel more human contact. Actually seeing the person or people behind the website will make it more believable.

7. Personality and Passion – Give your company some personality. Accentuate the passion and commitment your company possesses. Let your readers see the human side of your company.

8. Social Media – Be sure to add your social media site links. This will give your readers another avenue to keep in touch with your company.

9. Coffee Clutch – Write all of this information as if you were sitting over coffee and chatting with your visitors. Don’t make it sound like a dull cookie cutter page. Add life, vigor and sparkle to your writing.

10. Contact Info – ALWAYS thank your visitor for coming to your site and offer your contact information. Let them know you are available to answer any questions or concerns. Adding your physical address is shown to raise the level of confidence in your company as well.

Although the About Us page is often overlooked by the site owner, it can be a very powerful way to attract customers and increase your conversion rate. Do the research and take the time to write a compelling and powerful About Us page that will boost your credibility and gain the trust and respect your business needs to survive!

Don’t be one of the 95% of people who fail at their online business. Terri Seymour can help you make money online. Find out how to increase your traffic and sales with her popular “How to Build Your Online Business” ebook for FREE at: ==> http://www.SeymourProducts.com

By Steve Shaw in Website Promotion

contentWhen you first get your website up and running, your first thought may be to implement some article marketing strategies to get the traffic pouring into your site. Your sole thought may be to do something “out there” in order to produce the results that you want on your site.

There is one step that should happen prior to that though, and it’s one that a lot of site owners overlook. Before anything, you need to develop the content on your website. You see, in order to attract readers, you need to have some reason for them to be at your website.

What sort of information are you providing?

What problems are you solving?

How are you helping your readers?

You may attract readers when you submit articles, but if you don’t have any “stickiness” on your site, then the increased viewers don’t do you much good. They just show up at your site and immediately click away because they haven’t found the information that they’re looking for.

Before starting to market your site, go to the effort of adding content that will make readers want to stick around. Here are some ideas for you:

1 – Create a Blog That is on Your Website

With a blog, you will be creating a regular stream of content that is fresh and helpful to readers. New content gives readers a reason to keep on returning. Sites with regularly updated content tend to rank better in search engines as well.

You can do this by simply setting up a WordPress blog. After your blog posts are published for the month, then you can rewrite them and submit them as free reprint articles. Making the content you create do double duty is a great time saver and helps you maximize your time.

2 – Create a Page on Your Site That Addresses “Frequently Asked Questions”

Now, it depends on what type of business you have as to the appropriateness of this idea, but if you have a service based business, a list of FAQs can be a really helpful bit of info to offer. This also saves you time, because potential customers can find answers to their questions immediately and there’s no need for you to answer the same question repeatedly for each individual person.

3 – Create a List of Helpful Sites and Link to Them

It may seem counterintuitive to link to other sites (won’t that make people leave your site?), but actually the opposite is true. Your job as the site owner is to provide information that is helpful to your readers. Many times there are websites that provide complementary services to your own that people would benefit from (let’s say you’re a real estate agent, and you provide a link to a mortgage calculator). When you compile these resources for your readers, you are creating a more valuable website.

4 – Add a Web Page That Tells About Your Niche

Some people arriving at your website may have very little information about what you do or what your niche has to offer them. It is worth your while to compile some basic information that will act as an introduction to your field.

5 – Create a Web Page That Catalogs Your Articles

When you start publishing articles, they will be very helpful to your readers. Why not let the readers of your website know about the articles you’ve written and give them an easy way to find them?

You can separate your articles into sub-categories to help your readers find the information they need. This “library” of your articles can be a web page containing the title of the article, a short description and a link to the article.

If you want to create a site that your readers love, anticipate their needs and put content on your site to satisfy them. Really, the more you create a website that your readers appreciate, the more you’ll be pleasing Google as well. Google just wants to send their search customers to websites that offer the information that they’re looking for. You can put your website in position to satisfy that need by creating a website full of helpful information.

Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot – and it’s all 100% free! Go to http://www.autoblogit.com for more information.

By Joyce Campbell in Website Promotion

webdesign3So you have your brand spanking new diploma in your hand, and you are ready to hang your shingle out and open for business. But wait – you know you need a website. So at that point you might invest several hundred pounds (at least), in getting someone to create the perfect website. The colours are stunning, the graphics are amazing. Perhaps it has a nifty little flash thing going on in the header with a montage of meaningful photography. It goes back and forward between you and your designer for weeks, tweaking it till you get it just right.

Then… oops – you need some copy. So you bang something out, get your designer to drop it in for you, and press the go live button. Then you wait. Perhaps for a very long time. I’m not saying your design and branding isn’t important. If you are selling a creative service such as web design, graphic design or photography, then probably it’s very important. Nevertheless, there are a few key things you need to check in your copy, or your website will never work as hard as it should for you.

WIIFM?

When people buy stuff, especially intangible ‘stuff’ like coaching, the question that is always in their minds is ‘What’s in it for me?’ Yet again and again websites and promotional material talk about you. It’s never about you. Just because you think you are great for coming first in the class, your client doesn’t care. They probably don’t care about all those professional organisations you are a member of either. They want to know if you understand their problem and can solve it for them. They want to know the benefits of working with you.

Use Carrots and Sticks

People have different preferences around motivation. If your personal preference is to move towards nice things, then that will be reflected in your writing. However, for a lot of people, they need to feel pain before they will take the first step. So ensure that you understand the pain that your client is facing and talk about how you can solve that – and what will happen if they carry on as they are.

Cut the Jargon

Between any group of people, jargon and abbreviations can be a useful short-hand for communicating what you mean. Your client doesn’t know it, doesn’t need to know it, and certainly doesn’t want to feel confused and patronised by it. Write normally, as if you were having a conversation.

Cut the Fluff

It’s a rare person who lies awake at night worrying that they are not in touch with their authentic selves. I’m not saying that they aren’t disconnected, and that the disconnect isn’t causing them unease – but that is not how they will describe it to themselves. Spend some time talking with your ideal client and discover how they talk about their problems. Use the same language in your website and marketing materials.

Write for the Screen, Not for Paper

People appear to read differently on screen, and you need to provide landmarks for them to hang onto. Use a clear font, at least 12 point, in a sans serif font (ie, a font without twiddly bits on the letters). Have lots of white space, use spaces rather than indents to mark paragraphs, and pick up key points with bold, bullet points, and numbering. Keep paragraphs short – if they are running over 6 lines, go back and shorten them.

Tell Them What You Want Them to Do

The very least you want every visitor to your website to do is to sign up for your free giveaway. So have a sign up box on every page of your website, along with an entry or exit pop up. Have your contact details easily accessible on the site. A contact form will help minimise spam. Don’t do a ‘click here’ link to your email address – fewer and fewer people are using Outlook these days, and it is very frustrating to be using a web based email client and discover that you have no way of discovering the email address unless you install Outlook. Tell them that if they have the problems you outline on your site, then you should talk, and tell them how to contact you.

Don’t Delay List Building

If you aren’t sure exactly what you want your website to say, simply set up a squeeze page initially, and then start list building with your free offer.

Over to you!

Go and have a look at your own website, and run through the checklist below:

1. Is your copy aligned with what you actually do?

2. Check how often you use the words ‘me’ and ‘I’ rather than you – there should be many more of the latter.

3. Cut out the corporate speak – it fools no one. You are (presumably) not a member of the British Royal Family, so there is no need to use ‘we’ when you mean ‘I’.

4. Strip out all the jargon.

5. Re-write in the words your client uses to describe their problems.

6. Have a clear call to action.

Joyce Campbell is the creator of The Get More Clients System and http://www.TheGetMoreClientsSystem.com. She works with service-based solopreneurs to help them get more clients, make more profit and reach more people. Visit the website to get her free e-course, Six Steps to Ramp Up Your Online Presence. She is also an NLP trainer and author of How to Get Off Your Backside and Live Your Life.

By Jonathan McCulloch in Website Promotion

directresponseWhile direct response websites are thick on the ground in the online marketing niche, elsewhere they’re almost unknown. And that’s a shame, because it means vast numbers of website owners are losing out on a lot of income. Why? Because direct response websites make more money. Fact.

Why?

Simply because direct response marketing is more profitable, measurable and so much more controllable than so-called “image marketing” (because if you can measure your results accurately and precisely you then know where to do more and where to do less).

So let me share with you three very powerful, tested, and proven ways to make your website much more profitable:

First, every page must have one — and ONLY ONE — purpose.
As far back as 1937 direct response copywriting and marketing legend, Robert Collier, showed beyond any shadow of a doubt you cannot sell more than one thing at a time. Which in modern terms translates to… your web page must have one — and only one — action you want the reader to take at the end of it. And everything on the page as well as all the traffic-generating activities bringing traffic TO it must be put together with the end in mind.

Second, every page must have a call to action.
This follows naturally from the first point, and simply means you have to tell your visitor exactly what to do, why they must do it (and why they must do it now), what’ll happen if they don’t do it, and what’ll happen when they do. And this applies whether you are going to ask them to purchase something from you, sign up for an ezine or your emailing list, click through to another page, pick up the phone and call you, or something else. So use simple, unambiguous language and don’t assume anything beyond your reader being confused and needing his or her hand holding at every stage. Oh, and they’re lazy, too… so, don’t make the mistake of making them work for things!

And third, concentrate on collecting email addresses rather than making sales off the page.
While the reason for being in business is to make a profit, of course, and to do that you obviously have to make sales… you’ll get far superior results if you focus your entire website on becoming a lead-generating machine rather than just an online store. The reason is your conversion rate is going to be much, much higher — over 1,100% in my experience — if you put your energy into getting your visitors to subscribe to a mailing list where you can then demonstrate your value and build your relationship with them by email. Despite the enormous advantages of this approach, few business owners have the courage to have a go at it, because they in their blinkered way assume they need to be pushing hard for the sale all the time. This, of course, gives you a massive advantage if you have the courage to give it a try.

Want to uncover more tips and strategies to make your website vastly more profitable? Then… visit my direct response website now and claim your free copy of BIG Marketing Muscle for Small Business, where I reveal the simple and easily copied strategies I’ve put to work to give me direct response rates over 300% better than traditional techniques.

Your free book is waiting for you here: => http://www.jonmcculloch.com/big-marketing-muscle

By Shirley Crichton in Website Promotion

website salesWithout the right planning, you can easily spend a lot of time and money creating a website that doesn’t perform as well as you expected. So, whether you’re just creating your website, or you want better performance from your current one, here’s 8 Simple Strategies you must use to improve your website sales and profits.

No 1. Find The Way To Be Unique

Understand your unique selling points (USPs). Then you can make sure that you highlight them in your website copy. Many sites look very similar and the more unique you can make yours, the more people are likely to remember and buy from your site. Give your visitors what they are looking for and tell them why you are the person they need to provide it

No 2. Have A Strategy To Drive Traffic to Your Website

People will not just arrive at your website and buy your products, You have to have a continuous strategy to drive traffic to your website. Some ways you can use to drive traffic to your website are:

  • Pay Per Click Advertising
  • Optimization For Natural Search Engine Listings Mutual Linking With Other Relevant Sites
  • Article Marketing and Ezine Advertising
  • Having An Affiliate Program
  • Advertising Offline


No 3. Always Get Your Visitors’ Details

Always get your visitors’ names and email addresses. Then you can send them relevant articles and information regularly. Providing you send them useful and interesting emails, you will build their relationship with you and your products and make future sales more likely. Typical ways you can collect visitors’ names and email addresses are to:

  • Use an opt-in box on each page, offering a free sign-up incentive.
  • Use pop-ups, pop-unders or exit pop-ups, either in addition to the opt-in form or instead of it.
  • Offer a trial or demonstration of your product. Free access to a short extract from an ebook or audio, or maybe a two week free trial of a software product.
  • Offer something specially produced for the sign-up incentive, like an audio recording or a PDF report.

No 4. Use Compelling Headlines

Your readers will use your headline to determine whether, or not, they want to read the rest of the page. So, your headline must be dynamic and attention grabbing and express the benefits of the product. Internet users generally skim through sales copy and you need to make it easy for them to find key points. Keep paragraphs short and easy to read and identify main points with sub headlines.

No 5. Make Navigation Easy

Making navigation easy for visitors will improve your website sales and profits. If your site navigation is confusing, visitors will leave. Specific points to note are:

  • Clearly guide visitors to the action you want them to take.
  • Use text rather than graphics, or graphics with text instructions. Then what you want visitors to do will always be understood.
  • Keep your links in the same place on pages. Be consistent throughout your site.
  • Make sure your links show up easily against the background. Dark text on dark background is always difficult to read. Check the color after the link is clicked as well.

No 6. Use Graphics With Caution

Flashing animations or graphics, irrelevant to your site, won’t enhance your visitor’s experience, they just make it harder for them to read your content. Although they are great at getting people’s attention, limit graphics to uses where they enhance the content or clearly highlight an action to be taken.

No 7. Demonstrate Your Trustworthiness

Internet users are often cautious when buying anything online. Some good ways you can demonstrate why they should trust you are:

  • Include testimonials from satisfied customers.
  • List your contact information, including telephone number.
  • Display photographs of you and your products.
  • Use well known payment facilities like Worldpay.
  • Offer a guarantee and always honor it.

No 8. Set Up Visitor Statistic Tracking

Tracking website statistics is essential. Basic statistics you need to be monitoring are:

  • Website daily traffic statistics.
  • Opt-in or email sign up rates.
  • Sales conversion rates
  • Average visitor value

From these basic statistics you can monitor changes to your site and evaluate their cost effectiveness.

If you’ve already got a working site, use these 8 essential points as a check list. And if you’re currently putting your site together, make sure that you incorporate these simple website strategies to improve your website sales and profits from the very start.

Shirley Crichton is a UK information marketer, passionate about sharing what she has learnt with people new to this often confusing world . To learn more about getting your internet marketing business started and profitable, claim your free and comprehensive 95-page report ‘ Online Marketing Made Easy’ at http://www.ShirleysOnlineMarketing.com and give yourself a head start.

By Connie Ragen Green in Website Promotion

How will you know when you are ready for your own membership site? This is an important question to answer as you get started online and build your business. I now have more than a dozen of these sites, but they are each set up in a slightly different way so that I can maximize my potential for increasing my income and reaching new prospects to show them who I am and what I do on the Internet that can help them to achieve their goals. You will want o take into consideration the type of niche you are working in, who you are trying to reach, and how your membership site will serve the purpose you are intending.

I believe that you can serve members no matter which niche you are working in, but you must take into account what they need and what they may be expecting from such a site.

For example, my niche is online marketing, which means that my people want to learn things such as how to drive traffic to their sites, list building, article writing and marketing, affiliate marketing, and more techniques and methods for increasing their revenue on the Internet. I have some smaller niches, such as dog training and real estate, where the goals of my prospects are very different.

Different people respond to what we have to offer within a membership site in very different ways. You may be offering audio and video recordings, or your market may prefer learning about the topic by reading articles, short reports, and white papers made available to them as PDF files. You can determine this in advance by seeing what others already working in your niche are offering, as well as by asking them directly, either inside of the member’s area or in a survey.

My people also prefer to have some live interaction with me on a weekly or monthly basis. I accomplish this by holding regular teleseminars and webinars trainings that each focus on a specific area I am teaching about. This allows them to attend live and get their questions answered on the spot, or to ask their questions in advance and hear the answers and discussion during the audio or webinar replay. Building this relationship is important to me and to them, so it is a win-win situation.

By now you can see that there are several models that may work well for your members. Do your research and then set up your own membership site.

And now I invite you to find out more about setting up your own membership site by visiting http://MembershipSitesMadeSimple.com Membership Sites Passive Income to see how a WordPress plugin can turn your site into a membership site right away, allowing you to create multiple streams of passive online income on the Internet.

By Ricky Weber in Website Promotion

Website PromotionIf you have the desire to build a website that earns enough revenue to make a living from, then you will no doubt have considered the idea of a content site, where you provide new content such as videos, images, or articles in order to attract website visitors. But it is not always easy to make money using this type of website, and depending on your circumstances it may be easier for you to make a living using a sales page or other type of online business model.

This article will show you why the content site business model is not right for all website owners looking to make money online, and the ways in which you can determine whether this internet business model is right for you.

If you are considering the idea of creating a content website for the purpose of making money, it is important to consider what your budget will be and what your time frame for creating profit will be. The main distinguishing factor between making money with a sales page and making money with a content site is this: You can begin to earn money from direct sales almost immediately and without a huge budget, however it can take months in order to build up the traffic levels on your content site to the point that you are able to earn any serious income. This means it is a long-term business strategy without immediate results, and sometimes you are required to go cash-flow negative for a few months before you begin to see any real money being made from your site.

So in order to determine whether the content site business model is right for you, you should see what your answers are to the following questions: Do you have a budget of over $5000 for your website? Can you wait, or are you willing to wait, for 3-6 months before you begin to see any real money generated from your website? Can you afford to have new content created for your website on a regular basis? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, then the content site business model may not be the right choice for you. If you are looking to see immediate results, it may be a better choice for you to use the sales page business model instead, since you can begin to get sales and earn money immediately instead of slowly building up your website traffic levels to the point that significant revenue can be generated.

If you answered “yes” to these questions, then you might be able to earn a significant amount of money by creating a content site as long as you can spend the time in the beginning to build up your traffic levels to the point that significant advertising revenue can be generated. An important part in this business strategy is to take the time in the beginning, sometimes months or even years, where you focus only on building up your visitor base (which can include being unprofitable in the beginning) before you focus on how you can take your traffic levels and make money from your visitors or users.

Do you want to increase your search engine rankings and earn more money? Go to NinjaSeoMethods.com and discover the top three “must have” search engine optimization tools to skyrocket the success of your business in record time!

By SEO Webmaster in Website Promotion

spamThere are many ways to spam search engines and trick search engine spider to increase traffic to websites. Some of these popular methods are better known as ‘search engine spamming.’ Let’s know more about these methods in order to gain clarity:

Keyword Stuffing:
It is commonly known as the repeated use of word or phrase in order to make a page look more relevant. There is a specific way of including keywords in a webpage. Determine your exact keywords and use them in different ways to include in the page.

Invisible Text:
In this method, spammers usually insert text that is a combination of repetitive use of keywords on a webpage. The main aspect of this kind of process is that it is discolored and make to look similar as the background color so as to making invisible for common users.

Tiny Text:
Many times, spammers use small font size to place their content. By doing so again and again, search engines may penalize the website.

Page Spoofing / Meta Refresh / Redirection:
This is a process that automatically redirects users to a newly developed webpage. Usually, spammers create a separate page for particular keywords. So, when users click on the link, it will lead users to a different page with very content with no relation with the mentioned keywords. Therefore, most search engines simply decline such pages.

Meta Tag Stuffing:
Usually, adding keywords to a webpage without putting in excess keywords is an accepted form of search engine popularizing. However, many people place high traffic keywords which are directly not related with a webpage in any way.

Common spam indexing techniques are content spam and link spam. Content spam may include: keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible, meta tag stuffing, gateway or doorway pages, scraper sites, article spinning. Link spam includes: hidden links, link building using automated software, page hijacking, cookie stuffing, Sybil attacks and link farms.

Other spam indexing techniques are cloaking, URL redirection.

Road2SEO is a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization Book for the SEO professionals. Road2SEO, one of the effective SEO Book helps you learn search engine optimization to create a powerful pipeline that drives a steady flow of traffic to your site. To learn SEO online use the powerful Internet Marketing tool Road2SEO.

By Nitin Aggarwal in Website Promotion

webdevOutsourcing is a valuable tool if you hope to succeed as a small business online. The simple reason behind this is that outsourcing to trusted freelancers will cut down dramatically on labor costs, leaving you the extra time and money to better spend in promoting your business through marketing and product development.

Of course, you must make wise decisions as an online company when it comes to outsourcing by using outsourced employees for the more menial tasks, like writing content, administration, web development, link building, and blog management, while leaving the more important projects for yourself and your top staff members, like market research, managing social media profiles, and networking with other companies in your niche.

Once you have hired several freelancers as your outsourced staff, using the best tools will cut down on serious stress, disorganization, and potential pitfalls within any project that you embark on. In fact, it is not recommended to outsource without using these time tracking tools under any circumstance, or you could risk long-term problems in the productivity and success of your company.

  • RescueTime: RescueTime is an ideal tool for outsourcing that helps you to control and better understand how your outsourced staff spends their attention and time. One of the best portions of this tool is that it does not require any data entry, and all you have to do is install a small application that will track what websites and software are being used by your employees. This is best to manage a team of several people, especially if they are not working in a physical office with you. This tool alone will keep your staff accountable for their time and work within any project that you hire them for.
  • ClockingIt: This tool is a free hosting application that will help you to keep track of time and tasks for any freelance project. ClockingIt offers project management features so that you can plan, see the project schedule, and know if any outsourced employees have fallen behind. The Time Tracking alone is a valuable feature that will give you reports to offer to your clients on which tasks were completed within a project in a certain amount of time.
  • BaseCamp: BaseCamp is helpful software for outsourcing to several employees, which will offer features like web based documents, milestone management, to-do lists, time tracking, file sharing, and a messaging system. This tool is, in fact, perfect for outsourcing to people all over the country or outside of the country so that they can collaborate, communicate, and upload their work within a project for further editing or feedback.
  • ProjectPier: This is a free PHP application that is used for managing teams and projects with a user-friendly web interface. This tool needs to be downloaded and installed into your own server, and it will help your staff collaborate, facilitate communication, and complete tasks in an organized manner as an outsourced team. For any small businesses starting out in outsourcing, this is an invaluable free tool that will give you the freedom to manage several employees within other areas of the country.
  • ActiveCollab: ActiveCollab is fantastic project management software that allows you to collaborate within your own server or local network. You can work with your own staff and outsourced employees in a simple environment that will help you control and manage all project data. Some of the features of ActiveCollab include tracking progress on projects, assigning tasks, team communication, e-mail support, shared files, notifications, time trackers, milestone management, and the ability to invite new freelance employees to a project.

The truth is that as a small business, there are no better tools that you can use to manage freelance or outsourced employees. Outsourcing has its own slew of benefits when done properly, and these tools will make the process much more organized so that you can delay or even prevent using a physical staff for years into the future. Speaking of future, outsourcing is truly a modern concept that is becoming more and more popular as small businesses turn to freelancers online for many of their day-to-day tasks and support. In the same manner, numerous skilled professionals are turning to freelance careers in work-for-hire so that they can outsource to online companies based on their specific skills and qualifications.

With the multitude of skilled professionals available for outsourcing, this is the perfect resource to enhance the success and productivity of your small online business!

Nitin has been a full time blogger for over three years. These days he is busy with his outsourcing provider venture – Offshore Ally, a full time virtual assistant company. His team of seo assistants are trained on most blogging and internet marketing related jobs, so if you are looking for any help then its the right place to get you started. You can contact him on his website or catch up with him on his twitter profile – http://twitter.com/offshoreally.

By Derek J in Website Promotion

webtrafficAlthough business owners and marketer’s are coming to recognize the importance of having a website for their business, how those websites are being designed and built is still very much a problem. In most cases, a website that replicates an online brochure is what most businesses have. The result thereof is ultimately a poor return on investment for the (often large amounts of) money they have spent on the site. Here are five essential elements that every business website should have.

Sign-up Form

Having hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website every month is no use if you are only capturing the details of a small percentage of them from people who actually inquire. What you need is a sign-up form that offers a freebie (a free report of interest to your visitors), a newsletter or something similar. This way, you are able to capture the details (name and email address) of the visitors to your site, as well as build your list of prospects.

Highly Visible Contact Details

The purpose of your a small business website is generally to encourage inquiries, which will ultimately lead to sales. It is therefore essential that your website has your company’s contact details clearly displayed on every page. Ideally, you should place the contact details in the header, or in the top right area of the page. Also, try to provide as many contact formats (telephone, fax, email, Skype) as possible.

Dedicated Sales Pages

This one is a little tricky, depending on your business. Ideally, you should try to have a separate page for each product/service, or group of products/services. This allows you to focus on marketing each product or service’s benefits, features, and so forth to its specific target market. It also gives you the freedom to provide extensive information on each product or service, as opposed to merely providing a product name or model number. Furthermore, this additional content assists in terms of search engine optimization (SEO).

Testimonials

Why should anyone who visits your website trust what you have to say about yourself? You are, after all, trying to sell yourself online. It is therefore always wise to feature testimonials on each sales or product page. Ideally, you want to place testimonials about each product or service on their respective page. I usually recommend placing them down the right-hand side column of your page, but it all depends on your layout.

Blog

You may think that blogging is some weird, new age concept that only the “arty” and creative people of this world indulge in – you’re wrong. Setting up a blog allows you to write about anything related to your business, for example: new products or services, events, how-to’s, insights and opinions. Be sure to feature a “subscribe” option on your blog, so that you can build that database of prospects as well. Blogging also assists from an SEO perspective, by continuously adding fresh, original content to your website, which Google loves.

As an added bonus to these five essentials, I always recommend using an analytics or tracking program, such as Google Analytics (which is free), to track the goings-on of your website and assess how much and where your traffic (visitors) is coming from. As with anything, commit to learning about the topic, in this case, internet marketing, and keep an eye out for new trends that may benefit your business’ website.

Derek Jansen is an SEO consultant and educator – Sign up for the Free SEO Course @ www.SEOBasicsCourse.com today.

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