Online marketing has evolved from a basic website just marginally better than a newspaper advertisement, into a sophisticated and exciting vehicle for showcasing a business and increasing revenue.
How Fresh Is Your Expertise?
You establish an online blog or website to sell product. You use those sites as a springboard to getting your audience to rely on your knowledge and expertise. You then generate sales from repeat customers who feel they can trust what you have to say. That is the basic principles behind online marketing. You make yourself available to a target audience and provide answers and solutions to their problems so they will turn to you when they need help. To master this technique, you constantly provide your readers with information you have gleaned from your own experience in the form of blog posts and articles. However, if you have been at this for a long period of time, it may seem you have already covered all your bases. When that happens, you can easily make the mistake of allowing your content to get stale. Readers who come back searching for news and up-to-the-minute article posts can quickly become dissuaded by your lack of new information.
How To Stay Fresh
If you have written all of the content yourself over the months or years since you have established your site, even topics you love can become old. The key to getting and sustaining interest from readers and search engines alike it to always provide something new. This may be the right time to go back over and review all of your posts to date. Are there any new angles you can use to expand on old information? Have you been following industry news and events? Brainstorm ideas based off old posts. Look to your own audience for feedback to find out what information they really want to know that you have not yet provided.
Depending on your niche, it can be difficult to keep current without rehashing what you have already put out there. It can also be difficult to keep up with the writing of a single site, let alone several. Many business site owners are reluctant to outsource the content portion of their website because they are concerned about a writers’ lack of experience in the industry. They also have stayed away due to the difficulty of navigating or keeping up with bidding sites freelancer writers use to acquire jobs. In the end, rather than look for help, many site owners simply fail to keep up with the writing and posting that is vital to their website.
How to Outsource Successfully
Freelance writers do work out of popular bidding sites but there are also many content writers who are experienced in web writing that look to establish long-term relationships with small and medium sized business. A new trend that is gaining speed is the use of write-on-demand sites, such as ReliableWriters.com where customers can enter specifics about articles or blog posts like word counts and topic guidelines and have completed posts emailed within 24-48 hours. Establishing a relationship with a content provider can be instrumental to a busy site owner who is also working to shore up the sales end of the business. Write-on-demand sites also eliminate contracts or other obligations associated with hiring employees to write site content.
Site content is an essential part of any online marketing plan. From white papers to full length articles and even social media posts, website owners need to invest time, money, and a lot of effort into their online marketing if they are looking for success. The bottom line is if you can’t do the writing yourself, invest in someone who can.
Top 7 Website Design Mistakes to Avoid
Many start-up companies and existing small businesses fail to realize that first impressions count when it comes to web design. If your visitors aren’t impressed with your website within the first few seconds they enter, they will more than likely leave your site and visit somebody else’s. Whether you have an existing website and you’re thinking about redesigning it or you want a completely new website built from scratch, there are a few things you will want to avoid.
Here are 7 web design mistakes to avoid:
- Avoid having error messages displayed on your web pages. Code error messages look very unprofessional. Error messages give people the impression that something has malfunctioned on your website. As a result, your visitors will instantly leave.
- Visitors should know exactly what your website is about as soon as they enter your website. When visitors aren’t able to make out what your website is about, they will quickly get bored and leave.
- Make sure your web content is easy to read and scannable. This is where many people often make mistakes. Avoid having large blocks of text. When visitors enter your site, they will usually not have time to read your content word for word. To make web content easier to read use lists, headers, subheaders and bullet points. This helps people to filter through content much faster.
- Don’t forget to add valid contact information on your website. Having contact information builds creditability. Include your business phone number, business address and email address. If you decide not to include your phone number or address, make sure you include your email address.
- Make sure your web content doesn’t contain spelling or grammatical errors. Your web content can affect the overall quality of your website.
- Don’t overdo it with flash and animation. This can be a turnoff to your potential customers. When it comes to web design, keep it simple as possible
- Make sure all your links are working properly. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking onto broken links.
Last but not least, hiring a professional web design team can help you avoid many of these mistakes. They will build a website that will impress your visitors. The key to having a successful website is a site that is well designed, user friendly with web content that’s easy to read. A well designed website is more likely to turn visitors into customers.
What You Need to Know About Measuring Your Marketing Results
There’s not much point in working so hard to create a marketing process unless you intend to track and measure the results. Without measuring the results, you have no way of knowing what’s working, what needs improvement and what you need to do away with altogether. There are many different things you can measure and analyze about your site.
Here are a few things you should consider:
- Who are your readers?
- How many of your readers are unique?
- How much time are they spending on your site?
- Do they subscribe to your blog?
- How many readers click through for more information?
- How many repeat visitors do you have? Do they interact in any way?
Each of these areas can be measured and those figures will help you improve your blog or website. So how do you find this data? By measuring the web analytics and there are a couple different ways to do that.
Your hosting company probably tracks some of the analytics of your blog and can provide some useful information. You can get much better stats from other services, however. In order to have a service track the analytics of your web pages or blog posts, you need to add a tracking script with a bit of HTML code in your page code. This is usually found in the footer of your page. This tracking code will send information to your analytics service every time someone visits your page.
You can find several free analytics services available on the web, but you may get more detailed data if you opt for a paid version. Like many other incredible free web tools, Google provides free Analytics that will give you excellent data. With Google Analytics, you can find out everything you need to know about the people who visit your site. You can look at the statistics by the day, week or month. Google Analytics tells you how many visitors your site has, where they came from, how long they stayed on your site, how many pages are viewed on average and much more.
This information can help you in several ways. For example, if you learn most of your visitors come through your Twitter stream, then you know your time spent marketing on Twitter is having a positive effect and you should continue or even increase those efforts. Conversely, if you see that you have no visitors via search engine traffic, then you may decide the keywords you are using aren’t driving the traffic to your site.
Tracking unique visitors to your site tells you how many separate visits people make to your site. Don’t confuse unique visitors with new visitors, however. Unique visits can come from the same person at different times.
When you know how much time visitors spend on your site, you get another piece of information showing how interesting and effective your copy is. If people spend only a second or two on your site, the visit shows your copy didn’t compel them to stay. This is called your bounce rate- referring to your visitors bouncing right off the page. You want a nice low bounce rate- certainly under 50%.
By seeing how many visitors to your site click-through to see more information, you learn whether your content is doing its job by leading site visitors to explore your site and convert into buyers. You can even track things like email campaigns, banner ads and other types of advertising to get a complete picture of where your revenue is coming from.
Tracking the analytics of your blog or website is a vital operation if you want to create the best site you can have. By studying statistics about your site visitors, you can learn what to change on your site to improve the rates. The more traffic you can bring to the site and the longer you can keep people there, the better your chances of converting that traffic to sales.