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?

In the past year or so, several people have come to me saying that they needed to move their site to a new web-host because they were extremely upset with their current hosting provider. However, the web host also controlled the domain name. Therefore, the old webhost could lock out the client from any information.

These situations are not pretty.

As I mentioned in the last blog entry, it can make good sense to have someone handle your domain name registration. If this situation represents you, then do the next best thing. Make sure you are listed as the official the owner of all your domains.

Your first step is to do a “whois” lookup. One good way to do this is to go to http://whois.domaintools.com/.

As of 11/11/09 there was a single text box on the page for you to enter the domain name you are interested in. Enter a domain name in that box; then press the “Lookup” Button.

The page that comes up has several tabs. You are most interested in the “Whois Record” tab.

As you scroll down you will see a line that says “Registrant” followed by a name and an address. (Not to be confused with the “Registrant Search” line above.) This section shows the owner. The email address of the admin or technical contact receives important emails regarding changes to the account. For instance, transferring the domain name to a new registrar is a multi-step process that involves a series of emails to the email address of the administrative or technical contacts for purposes of approving or disapproving certain steps.

If you are not listed as the domain owner, then work with your webhost while you are still on good terms to ensure that you are listed as the owner of the domain name.

A client of mine wanted to know how to efficiently blog and do social networking.  As I look for tools, I can certainly see how all of this can be confusing. 

This post is an experiment using a new browser called flock.  After setting up my personal blog to accept “desktop publishing,”  I am using Flock to write this post.  The picture below was dropped in using flock’s “web clipboard,” which means I could have gotten it from anywhere.   However, it appears that it needs to be on the web somewher, not the local file system.  However, if you use a picture from a website, if they change the location or remove the picture in the original website, you would lose your picture.

Anyway it is a cool experiment.

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.

Of course a site’s links have to work and the forms have to submit properly. But what really defines whether a site works is whether people visiting your site take the actions that you want them to take.

As shown in the image to the right,

1. There are a lot of people in the marketplace.
2. A few of those people will visit your site and give you a chance to begin a conversation with them.
3. A number of those will go somewhere else within 10 seconds of reaching site.  (These are your “bounces.”)
4. Some of the remaing people  will actually take some sort of action that you want: call you for more information, request a proposal, buy a product etc.

Our goal at “A Site That Works” is to maximize the funnel.

In our post next week we will tell you some of the things that shrink or expand the funnel.