I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, subscribe to my newsletter, enjoy!Tash
As you work on your website, there are some key activities to making the site more attractive (and therefore effective) for both humans and search engines.
Of course the key feature of a successful website is providing useful information – great navigation and design won’t do much if the content is lacking – but the following activities will make the content more accessible.
1. write for websites
Website content is not the same as content you would write in a letter or a printed brochure. Our eyes work slightly differently on a screen compared to a page and people have different expectations so web content needs to be short and start with the most important information.
Website content also has the advantage of hyperlinks so it is easier to refer to other information directly, including defining words and terms away from the main content.
2. utilise keywords and phrases (we’ll cover this further in this series, too)
A keyword or phrase is what people and search engines look for to judge if a web page is relevant; so keywords for this blog post could be web content, content, website, effective and SEO.
In general, the more you use a keyword, the more your page will get noticed in relevant searches so it is important to know your keywords and put them into your content. However, you need to balance adding keywords with readability of the content.
3. tell people about your site (check on Friday for the next post in our series for ideas)
The best website in the world won’t bring in business if no one knows about it so get the message out there! Whether it’s telling your friends or paying for a TV ad, or a multitude of options in between, you need an ongoing process of telling people your website exists.
4. keep the site fresh and current
Fresh fruit & content has more appeal
Websites need to be updated and changed – you can’t just make it great and then leave it for years. While some content really doesn’t need regular updates (there’s only so many ways you can write “our phone number is 1234”!), frequently adding new content to your site gives people a reason to come back and makes it more attractive to search engines.
Some ways to keep your site fresh and current are to avoid unnecessary dates, removing old dates (e.g. for events in the past), add a blog or a feed (whether from a RSS feed or social media) and to add new portfolio items and testimonials.
5. link to related information
There are two main reasons to add links throughout your website content. Firstly, it can make things easier for your site visitors as they can find related information very easily. Being easy for your visitors gives them a good feeling about you and also means you can lead them along various steps to your action points.
Separately, search engines use links as part of their formulae in ranking your site against similar ones, so having more links to your web pages can help your search engine results – even links from your own site count.
Do you have some old products or services ‘gathering dust’ in your business? Maybe it’s a product or service that is doing well but has more potential than is currently being used.
Have you thought about refreshing these things into something new?
New ways to present old content and ideas
Sit and brainstorm all possible uses of your product or service (including all potential problems it could solve) – go outside the box and don’t just think of the obvious things it was designed for.
Warfarin was originally developed as a pesticide to get rid of rats and mice but has long been used as an anti-coagulant in heart patients.
Patsy Sherman was inventing a compound to protect equipment from aviation fuel and discovered it would repel stains – she invented Scotchguard.
Dr Pemberton’s nerve tonic and headache restorative, French Wine Coca, was adjusted during prohibition in the US. The new syrup was mixed with soda water to drink and became popular under the name and logo Pemberton’s bookkeeper developed that day – coca-cola.
By finding new uses of a product or service you can open new markets and perhaps open new avenues. Even if you don’t find anything marketable, you may find a new marketing idea or just get some creative inspiration (some new blog posts or articles, new product ideas, a different production method, etc)
So how big a list can you brainstorm for your older lines?
I just read a great blog post about goals – well, Julien specifically wrote about the goal of reading a book a week but I like some of his points for general goal following.
Side track – a goal of reading a book a week is great, especially if reading is not something that comes naturally to you. I admit my biggest issue with reading a book a week is that I love long books and with 4 kids, one a week is a challenge! With literacy week here this week, though, maybe it’s a challenge you may want to consider…
The best points Julien made about reaching goals…
break it down into reasonable steps so it’s less overwhelming. For instance, based on books of 250 – 300 words, read 40 pages a day to reach 52 books a year. To get 100 blog or facebook subscribers in 6 months, aim for 4 a week. To finish the Tour de France, start riding your bike for an hour a day and build it up to 6 hours a day!
set up a routine – it’s much easier to follow steps when they are habit and you don’t have to think about it
keep up to date or ahead – letting yourself fall behind (especially early on in a goal) can be disheartening and makes it less likely to be achieved. Don’t accept excuses – do build up some credit to cover issues later.
Cheat a little occasionally to stay on track and interested. Surprised by that one? By cheat a little I don’t mean lie to yourself but just take the easy option occasionally. So if you’re reading is falling behind a book a week, deliberately choose a short book you can finish off fast. If training for the Tour, ride your exercise bike instead of hitting the streets in a storm. Building a blog readership – post a really short post or a summary of old posts instead of sweating a long post. Cheating like this is much better than stopping your actions altogether.
You don’t have to be linear all the time. It depends on your goal, but sometimes allow yourself to go a – b – c- f – e – d- t- g- h- k instead of following a straight line. This will keep you moving if one step hits a delay and can provide some variety if you’re loosing momentum and interest.
What does this mean in a practical sense? Going back to our earlier examples, if you can’t get into book 4, put it aside while you read books 5 and 6; instead of riding an hour uphill every day put in the occasional day of two hours on the flat; skip a post on your blog and submit a guest post somewhere else.
So what do you think – will these tips help you reach your next big goal? Share your goal here and the impact of these tips, too, if you like.
I’ve managed to catch up on some newsletter and blog reading in the last few days so I thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones so you can benefit from them, too.
All related to business today, some back-end details (like blog security) and some customer related issues, but all worth a read. In order that I think of them…
Part of establishing and managing a site is making sure that the information is easy to find – the design and content are important but with a poor site layout, they are not going to work as well as they should.
In short, navigation is about letting people travel around your site easily to find what they need.
While you may well link to various pages of your site within the content (and I strongly suggest you do!), this is not part of the planned navigation. Navigation is more about menus and major links (such as banners and graphics on landing pages).
For the most effective navigation, it needs to be simple and not offer too many choices so it is worth thinking about what people really want to know when they visit your site and what you want them to know. Once you have refined the key areas, you can put them in as menus and key graphics (either graphics that link to relevant pages or graphics that give the information directly).
your physical location (especially if you want people to visit you)
delivery information, including costs
hours of operations (if relevant)
what you do (and don’t do in some cases)
prices and related terms (for example are your prices in AUD or euros? do prices include local taxes?)
Don’t be surprised if getting the navigation sorted takes a while – it is important to get right and can involve a number of steps. Once you have a draft navigation planned, I suggest the following actions:
leave it for a a few days and then check if it is simple and effective
test it – think of a question someone might want answered and try finding it through your proposed navigation
ask your web designer and content writer what they think of it – their experience will provide good feedback
get others to test it for you – if they find it confusing or distracting, change it even if it passed all other tests perfectly!
Before you get stressed or give up on your website at this point remember that you can change the navigation later (nothing is set in stone on a website) and good content with lots of informative links will compensate for some navigation weaknesses. You can work with good navigation while you aim for perfection!
No doubt you’ve heard that it’s a good idea to have a clearly defined market and to keep your prices as high as the value (rather than discounting all the time). It’s good advice.
Susan Oakes, however, gave a suggestion for expanding your offerings to suit a lower price market. Normally, business success doesn’t include going for a cheaper market but Susan’s idea of offering something new and cheaper is sound.
The idea is to make a product or service that either lacks the bells and whistles or is effectively a DIY version, meaning you can sell for less and appeal to a lower budget audience without detracting the price or value of your main product or service.
Want some examples?
For those who don’t want to pay for a professional writer on small tasks, I produced a writing tips eBook. A much cheaper option for small businesses but still getting me a sale – all my eBooks follow a similar concept
if you usually sell water tanks fully installed, maybe offer them for DIY homes as well
wedding photographers used to sell a completed album, possibly in a package with the negatives. Now many offer a disc of images as a cheaper option as well as a full album with the disc
a web designer could set up a series of templates and sell them as a digital product while still doing the more expensive tailored web designs as their main service
Is there a way you could expand your business to include a lower budget client? Think broadly or add your business in the comments and let’s see what ideas others can find for you…
So now you have a domain name and some hosting, your initial web copy is live and you have a web designer working on the look of your site. But what do you say when the designer asks how many pages you need or what is to go into the menu?
Planning the content of a site is only part of the story – you also need to decide how to divide it into page-sized chunks that people will find useful. You could write all the web content in one block and then divide it up, but I have found it more effective to decide what needs to be covered and how to group the information before actually putting the information together.
So the absolute basic pages you’ll find on most websites are:
‘home page’ is the first page seen under your main URL so it needs to welcome and captivate people
‘about us’ – gives some information about the business itself and the people behind it
‘contact us’ – gives a form and/or contact details so people can get in touch with you. This really is a necessity for building trust and having people act on your content
‘services’ or ‘products’ – a one page list of items is the absolute minimum to let people know what is on offer. This can be expanded to various pages about types of services through to a complete shopping cart for products.
Beyond these basics, you can choose to add any of the following as well:
I was happily reading a blog post nicely laid out with tables and sub-headings when I came across a sentence “change your pricing strategy to suite your business needs.”
I’ll say no more other than to give a new pair of misused words…
A business woman in a suit on a lounge suite – one little letter makes a world of difference.
suit: (verb) to be acceptable to or enhance something Will it suit you to meet at 10am on Wednesday?
Does your pricing strategy suit your business needs?
suit: (noun) a set of clothing, generally consisting of a jacket with pants or skirt; legal action; one of four divisions in a pack of cards club, diamond, spade, heart); a romantic interest. Most men wear a suit to a funeral. Jason was very pleased when he won the law suit against his competitor. Rachel’s hand of cards included every suit. After three years, Elizabeth accepted his suit.
suite: related things together as a set, such as a group of rooms in a hotel or a set of furniture for one room; music in one key but several parts Jane ordered a new bedroom suite at the sales.
These are the types of errors I spot naturally and instinctively correct for clients so if you are concerned about your word usage don’t worry about showing your writing to a professional writer/editor – apart from the fact we’ve seen it before, it is better one professional sees it and fixes it than you publish it and your prospective clients see it, don’t you think?
Recently I read that traditional marketing demographics are narrowing.
Traditionally, TV, radio etc needed broad categories to work with and it suited marketers to keep us sorted according to such categories (eg male or female, age 18 – 35 or 35 – 60).
However, social media is more interactive so can target people according to interests and tastes rather than assuming majority of x group has those tastes. For instance, instead of targeting all women aged 18 – 35 you can specifically target people who like cooking for friends.
It is an interesting thought and makes marketing both easier and harder, I think. For one thing, you can get very specific about your audience and approach that smaller group – in this case, a smaller group will have a higher response rate as they are already interested. However, it may take more effort to know who your demographic is (it is easier to assume men over the age of 30 than to categorise men over 30 with trade qualifications who like fishing for example!)
How well defined is your target demographic? Do you specifically target that group every time your business communicates with the public?
Without a good web designer, it’s very hard to get an effective website live to grow your business so here are my top tips in picking a good designer for your business.
look at the designer’s (not the design company’s) portfolio to be sure you like their work – and that they don’t all look like replicas of the same site
check their credentials – do they have relevant training? how much experience do they have?
ask others for feedback – check within your network for previous clients of the designer. And that includes asking your social media networks, too.
make sure you are very clear on what is (and isn’t) included in the price – remember to check details like copyright and licensing on tools
ensure you get full access to your site once it is done – you don’t want to be locked into the designer making every little change on your site moving forward (even if you want them to manage it most of the time, give yourself options)
customer service – if it is questionable during the query/quote phase, do you want to assume they will answer emails quickly when your deadline is approaching?
personal contact – bigger companies may give you an account manager rather than direct contact with a designer. Personally, I find it easier to talk with the designer than let my comments go through a third person and to be sure I get the same designer, but if you relate to the account manager you may be happy with that arrangement.
convenience – is the designer local enough to see them? Or are you comfortable enough to work via email/phone/etc?
price – look at what it includes before comparing it and remember that neither the cheapest nor the most expensive are automatically the best. Freelance sites, in my experience, under pay so I wouldn’t look there for realistic prices or the best designers
From personal experience, I thoroughly recommend Web Graphics By Email (although they are booked out for months) and Shel Design (very professional and accommodating).
etc needed broad categories to work with and it suited marketers to keep us sorted according to such categories (eg male or female, age 18 – 35 or 35 – 60).
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