Chances are a significant part of your marketing budget is invested in attracting traffic to your website.  If you aren’t experiencing an increase in sales or subscribers then you aren’t benefiting from the investment.   Here are some things to evaluate on your website.  If you discover you are committing some of these web design and content errors, then it’s time for a website redesign.

Say “Bye-Bye” To Visitors When Pages Are Slow to Load

Online shoppers or information seekers are not known for their patience.  Think about how you feel when you sit waiting for a page to load.  Do you just click away to another page?  That is the typical response.

Marketing companies love to test pages and concepts.  One study by the team at Gomez provided some eye-opening statistics.  Four out of every ten online shoppers will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in after 3 seconds.

How do you know how fast your pages load?  Testing on your own machine without clearing your browser isn’t a valid measurement.  Web browsers cache web pages and it’s likely your computer has your web pages cached.  Clear your browser cache before you test to delete any cached web pages.

Your web developer should have installed Google Analytics on your website. Check your analytics to learn how long people linger on your web pages.   There are a number of variables that lead to poor click-through.

Below we’ve listed the most common causes of slow loading pages which are not caused by hosting issues like bandwidth constraints or network problems:

• Internal links to other websites that are down or slow to respond
• Multi-media
• Malfunctioning or poorly coded widgets
• Scripts
• Images

Often a web page has a link to a website that is slow to respond.  If that doesn’t get resolved, then you should break the link to that website.

Video stored on shared hosting can be slow to load.  In fact, this may cause a visitor to exit before viewing it.  Look at different solutions for presenting videos.

Scripts and widgets are notorious for fouling up load time.  If these programs cost you visitors, get rid of them.

Image size affects load time.  It’s not uncommon for novices to load up pictures that are extremely large.  The resolution is great, but the size of the picture is way too large for web purposes.  Scale down the size of images to kilobytes, not megabytes.

Check you sites today for these errors leading to slow load times.  If you need help, give us a call today at 0433 399 29.  Often a redesign not only improves web pages load time, but provides more logical navigation and focus for visitors.

Marketing is the backbone of your business.  Some would argue that your marketing plan is more important than the products offered.  If you don’t have a strong marketing plan you are limited to word-of-mouth to inform people of your business offers.

Today’s business must combine offline and online marketing strategies to remain competitive.  Online marketing is critical as consumers increasing move to researching products online.  Many businesses with a physical building think that their marketing plan should only include offline advertising strategies.  On the other hand, people with an online business tend to be heavy into online marketing and ignore offline strategies.

One of the simplest offline marketing strategies which an online marketer can easily implement is to have some business cards printed and branded for your business.  Of course, having business cards won’t do you any good unless you engage with the public. Check in with your business association, chamber of commerce, and similar business groups.  Many require a fee to join, but in most cases you can participate as a guest.  Start engaging with the public and look for ways you can help others grow their business using your own services.  Another venue to work your charm is at tradeshows, community fairs or sales.

Brick and mortar businesses have to embrace online marketing strategies even if only in a small way. Today’s consumer expects to find businesses online and if you don’t have a website, your credibility takes a hit.  Similarly, you’ll need to engage in some form of social media whether Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  Pinterest is becoming a powerful social tool for businesses which have success engaging people with photos.

If you are interested in a fresh web design, business cards, brochures, or need help putting together an online marketing plan, contact us today at 0433 399 294 or use the contact form here.

Using a website to gain more visibility in the marketplace is rather “old school” as a reason to set up a website.  After all, there are expenses to creating even the smallest web presence.  Today, savvy business owners use their website for lead generation and want to get the most they can from every visitor to their website.

Components of a Lead Generation System

There are several components to lead generation via a website or blog.  The basic components include an offer to the visitor in exchange for some information from the visitor.  Really, capturing a lead online isn’t that much different from offline.  There may be a need to foster more trust online.  This can be done with a really irresistible offer to your website visitor.

That information is captured on a contact form or opt-in form.  Best practice is to use some kind of automated system to capture the lead into a contact management database.

However, in the simplest form the capture mechanism is an email or contact form.  Relying exclusively on a telephonic method to capture the lead is not very effective.  People may balk at making a phone call or decide not to leave a message if there isn’t a real person answering the call.

Information to Capture

The next question to answer for building a lead generation process is how much information to capture in the opt-in form.  Lead capture software or online forms usually allow you to define the type of information and whether or not it is a required input. In the earlier days of online marketing the recommendation was to minimize the number or required entries.  The reason for this was to minimize the number of reasons to give your website visitor a reason NOT to complete the form.  That stance has changed.

In order to get the most from the visitor you have to define the most desired outcome of getting that lead and then frame up the required fields around that outcome. Those pieces of information comprise the fields on the form.  You may include optional items, but don’t go overboard requesting a dozen information points.  No matter how great your offer, people still demand some level of privacy online.

Dentists and physio therapists typically don’t convert patients via email, but they may get them in the office with a phone call.  The more attractive the offer to the online visitor, the more personal information they are likely to share.

In the case of a dentist, offering them a free teeth whitening service when they come in for a checkup is a darn good incentive. The visitor is likely to provide their phone number in the form – or even call the office for an appointment.  However, they may actually prefer leave their email address off the form.  Had you relied exclusively on them providing their email address you would have lost this lead.

If you would like some guidance setting up a lead generation process on your website, just complete the form on this page and we’ll contact you to discuss your goals.

Article Marketing – An Executive Summary

Article marketing is simply sharing your knowledge with others and receiving a short “about the author” blurb (including a link to your website) at the end, in trade.  There is a spin-off using articles to build links, such as guest blogging. This short post is about posting articles to directories.

Articles can be written to build authority as a writer or to build a brand.  As there are links included in an article, they are also a tool to build up inbound links pointing to a website.  The purpose here is to build authority for the website.

How it Article Marketing Works – The Executive Summary

1. You write articles or hire someone to write them on your behalf.
2. The articles are submitted to the top article directories. Article directories accessed by millions of people looking for information on various subjects or for content to post on their own ezines or blogs.
3. Other website publishers, including bloggers, go to these directories to find content that they can publish on their sites.
4. A website owner finds your article, likes it, and publishes it on their site or sends it out in their newsletter – with your author byline included.  This also includes a link to your website.
5. You get free exposure to their audience.
6. The more popular the topic of the article, the more it is published.  As long as the byline, also called a resource box, is included this can result in many links pointing to your website.

As you can see, there are two major benefits to submitting to the article directories:

1. Getting website owners and bloggers to publish your articles. The important part here is a catchy title and quality content.
2. Getting your articles on the article directories themselves as they have their own set of rules a writer must adhere to. The key to setting these articles up to increase your page rank lies in having a powerful resource box containing a link back to your site or blog.

In addition to writing a quality article, there are two essential components you need to make your Article Marketing efforts succeed:

• Your Resource Box (byline plus link containing contact information)
• A powerful article title that incites curiosity and accurately promises the exact information you deliver in your article

Guest Blogging vs Ezine Directories

There is another benefit to using article marketing.  This occurs more when an article is posted by a guest blogger to a non-ezine website. People offer these types of articles to other website owners with the added incentive that the article is unique or published to a few select sites.  The article is not distributed to thousands of directories, but only one or a few. This is important when building authority for a brand.  The more influential and relevant the website, the greater weight your link is valued by search engines.

The goal of guest blogging is to leverage the reputation of the blog to which the article is being published.  In this case, search engines may assign more weight to the links coming from that blog.  However, the real power is that your business website or blog benefits from the traffic coming in from readers who enjoyed that article.  If readers find the article beneficial then some of them may drift over to your own website or blog to find out what else you have to offer.  That means your article generated more traffic, not just links. That is powerful article marketing.