One way to take a website from a stale page to one that it is more engaging is add something that moves such as a slide show.  It makes the message more memorable.  Billboard companies often promote this principle on their rotating boards and have studies about their effectiveness.

Traditional web developers create slideshows in flash because it is very reliable, looks great, and almost everyone has the flash player.

However, people who specialize in how to make sites that rank well in the search engines tell that the search engines do not reliably find content in flash files, in spite of eager announcements by Google and Adobe.  So the captions on your website and the words in the pictures will not necessarily be read and catalogued by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  So the content could actually hurt your search engine rankings.

The solution is to use a javascript library like JQuery to produce the slide show.  The individual pictures and any key word rich captions that you want to use will be in the regular text flow of the page, which means there will be no confusion about whether the search engines will find the information.

Another advantage of using a library like JQuery is that it is designed to work across multiple browsers, unlike hand-coded javascript, which may not work in all browsers unless you include a lot of “hacks” for individual browsers.

You can see samples of projects coded by A Site that Works using JQuery at http://arenalawfirm.com, http://factoryatfranklin.com, http://asitethatworks.com/design-samples-2/

Every business primarily focuses on one of three positions in the marketplace

• Low Cost Provider (i.e. Walmart, Amazon)
• Brand Leader (i.e. Bose, BMW)
• Service Provider (i.e. Disney, Nordstrom)

The Low Cost Provider is someone who competes primarily on price for a particular level of quality. The Brand Leader is the company that delivers the latest innovations in their market space first. The customers may be buying the “latest and greatest” or a brand that gives them status. The Service Provider understands their customers’ needs and desires before the customer does and treats them appropriately. The customers of this type of company are willing to invest their money in someone who will truly take care of them or guide them in their selection.

Your website copy should reflect your primary business style. Otherwise, it may confuse visitors or attract the wrong customers to you. For instance,

• A Low Cost Provider could have price and product comparisons and statements on the home page as well as featured product specials.
• The Brand Leader may want to use the best graphics and special effects throughout their site. The look must speak to their core audience. Does it explain what the “latest and greatest” is?
• The Service Provider may want to include a blog about what they do for their clients on a regular basis. Great site navigation and ease of use should be paramount.

Does your website reflect one of these core competencies?

Here are 8 ideas for you.

1. Remember that 99% of the time you are not going to make a direct sale through online networking. (Online networking is about opening doors so you can make a sale.)
2. Write some blog entries that are free basic information about something you are an expert in with no direct sales pitch.
3. Write blog entries about stuff that really gets you excited or that you wish would go away.
4. Create a photo-gallery in picassa, flickr, photobucket or where ever and include your hobbies; let folks know when you post new pictures through “status updates.”
5. If you take pictures and travel, consider geo-locating them in your album
6. When you find something of interest on the web—tweet about out it, link to it on your blog, put a posting in delicious or dig, mention it facebook or myspace.
7. Tweet about the “stupid” stuff in your life (not just the serious and not just the sales) (Same for status updates). I probably do not care that you are about to brush your teeth, but I might find it interesting that you just went on a 5 mile run.
8. Use the tools in linkedin, plaxo, myspace, facebook, friendfeed, etc. that let you see what is going on in other people’s lives. They often have pages where you can see the “updates” others have made.

What Is an RSS Feed

An RSS feed is a way for anyone to automatically distribute information without having to send email and risk it being filtered out as spam. The information is broken down into topics with titles and possibly some other additional information. Having an appropriate RSS feed will increase traffic to your site and help you market yourself because a variety of services will pay attention to you that will otherwise ignore you.

For the technician, an RSS feed is information displayed in a special programing language called XML. The programmer who creates the RSS feed will read information from a database, file system, or other file, and will cause the server to display the information in a format with specific XML “commands.”

Anyone with a good blogging software like WordPress or Blogger or Typepad, etc, is already making use of RSS Feeds (unless they found a way to turn it off or make it completely private.) A blog shows up on your website as a regular page, but it also creates this RSS feed thingy for you. (You can see mine here: http://asitethatworks.com/feed/)

One of the cool things is that you can create an RSS feed on any topic or groups of information from pictures, to recent projects, to blogs etc. (You do not have to “blog.”)

How Does an RSS Feed Help You

The really cool part is that several organizations and companies that help make the internet work in the first place, actively look for pages with this special coding. They keep lists of them and they check them very, very frequently for new content. They then pass this information on to their users in a variety of ways, not necessary as the original RSS Feed. The Google and Yahoo search engines are one such place.  However, to really get noticed, you should notify certain services, such as Ping-0-Matic, Feedburner, or Technorati, that you have updated your content. You can make these submittals by hand, or you can have a programmer do it for you so that it happens automatically.  (That is one way we can help you.)  However, if your RSS feed is for a private group, there is no need.

Another cool thing is that when you know the link for your feed you can provide this link to other places such as ning social networking sites, linked in, twitter, etc. It is just like providing someone your website address, just a little longer and more complicated. It might be better to copy and paste or send via email or link, rather than say over the telephone. (Ning is a free online service for creating and sharing your own social networks, such as a church group, civic organization, sports team, etc.)

As I mentioned above, RSS feeds can also be used to get people information without you having to send them an email. The “catch” is (yeah, you knew there had to be a catch) that to reach this objective people have to subscribe to your RSS feed. Unfortunately, you cannot make them subscribe; and this is also where the process is currently breaking down for many folks. As of mid 2009, most humans (the real targets of what are doing) are not getting their information via RSS feeds. However, the ones that use RSS feeds are more likely to be loyal to you for having an RSS feed because you are helping make their life simpler. If they like you enough to subscribe to your RSS, they really like you. Remember too, that organizations such as Google and Yahoo love RSS feeds; so they are still very important, even if they do not have wide and direct human appeal.

Subscribing

Nevertheless, subscribing to an RSS feed is very easy, even if the process is not commonly understood or used by regular humans.

In the Flock Browser, when you go to a page that is an RSS feed that flock has not recorded as a feed you subscribe to, you will get a big message with a subscribe button on top. click the subscribe button and flock will automatically add it to your list of RSS fees that you can access from a handly list in Flock itself. Firefox and Internet Explorer (7 and above) have similar options.

Here are the instructions directly from the Outlook 2007 help file. (These are actually fairly straightforward.)

1. On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed. For example, http://www.asitehatworks.com/feed/
4. Click Add.
5. Click OK.

If you subscribe to an RSS Feed Service such as Gator , the process is probably very similar. (I don’t use one of those services, so I am not a reliable source on that topic.)

If you have a need for a custom RSS feed for information you want to present to people let us know. We will be glad to help you. Feel free to include a link to this information for clients and prospects if they need help figuring out how to subscribe to an RSS feed.

Most folks have heard of the proverbial “Elevator Pitch,” but did you know that your website has to have one too?  It is the headline of the page on your site people see first!

When people visit your site they will make an assessment of who you are in less than 10-30 secs.  That fact means that you have very little time to explain what you offer to potential customers. It means the headline on your page may make or break whether someone stays on your site to look around.

People come to the web to learn, not to be sold to.  Therefore, a good headline needs to lead into an informative article about a topic that helps your potential clients solve one of their problems.  The best headlines also have emotional impact because they address a concern, a problem, or maybe a possible joy of the potential client.

Your headline sets the tone for whether people can find some valuable information on your site or whether you are just another salesman.  Can You Describe Your Complete Offering In an Informative Headline?  If not get some help!

If you have seen a good headline, leave me a comment telling me what it is.

It is not how many of your checks have rubberized and are getting returned for insufficient funds.

It is the number that tells you how many people came to your site and looked at only one page–Meaning they probably did not find anything terribly useful or interesting there (or they saw your number on the homepage and made an immediate call).  A good bounce rate is probably less than 30 percent on a homepage.

If you install Google Analytics on your site you will have this information.  (We install Analytics on all of the site that we do.)  Some of the other tools probably also create these statistics.

Generally speaking, people have to get comfortable with you, before they pick up the phone and call you or buy a product.  Therefore, you want people to explore your site and get to know you. Once you start watching your bounce rate, you can adjust your content and improve your relationship building through the website.

Here are some tips to help you create better content.

Know Exactly Who Is Likely to Buy Your Services

No, it is never, ever “everybody.”  Everyone may do taxes or need a plumber, etc, but not everyone you meet is going to pay to have someone do their taxes or want you to be their plumber.  What is their income? Where do they live? How old are they?  Do they have a family?  What ages are the family members?

Define Exactly What types of Audiences Are Likely to Visit Your Site

For example the Billboard Company that wants to sell to end advertisers like the local resteraunt and the billboard company that wants to sell to advertising agencies.
The property management company that talks with Investors versus the property management company that wants to manage your PUD and wants to interact with PUD residents via the website

What is your intended audience looking for when they get to your site?

For example a person doing closings may make more money off of the Title Insurance, but the buyers and sellers are just looking for a reliable place to handle the paperwork.  (Title Insurance—oh that’s required, Ok slap it on there.)
Is a person looking for vending supplies looking for low cost vending or are they looking to enhance company moral with excellent choices in the break room that taste great and happen the same way each time.

How much of the sales process can you accomplish on your website

Are you making a complete sale, providing general company information, creating a sense that you are knowledgeable, providing important details about the services you offer.

Define what actions you want them to take

Call for a proposal, call for information, buy a subscription, buy a product?

Get some Testimonials

What are your good clients saying about you!

That is actually a trick question.

Content without Visibility Does not Create Many Leads

That is, if no one finds you, then no one can respond to the great calls to action that you have created.  However, good content improves your rankings in the search engines, so that people can find you easier.

Visibility without Content is Costly

Many of the things that you can do to drive traffic to your website costs you time or money.  It costs a lot of money to optimize a page for search engines.  Link campaigns to improve your search engine rankings are also costly.  Pay per click campaigns usually start at around $400/month.  (Google AdWords is an example of a Pay Per Click campaign.  These are advertisements that get displayed whenever someone does a search.)

Every time someone comes to your site because of a program you paid for to get them their has a cost.  Every person that leaves your site without taking the action you want drives the cost of converting that traffic into sales up.

Example 1:  You spend $100 to get 10 visitors and 9 of them “bounce” and you get one sales call.  Then you have spent $100 per sales call from your website.

Example 2: You spend $100 to get 10 visitors and only 5 of them bounce and 5 of them call you.  Then you you have spent only $20 per sales call.

What Do We Recommend?

We suggest you work on your content first, then on your visibility.  It is the more cost effective solution.  Good content will get ranked well in Google and Yahoo eventually.  So it does a better job of accomplishing both objectives if you are short on money.

Our Next Post will have some suggestions to improve your content.

In our last post, we showed a funnel to represent the transformation of potential visitors into potential clients.  Here are some things that can hurt or help you gain potential clients.

Our next post this week will cover whether content or visibility is more important.