websites

The "You" Factor

Recently I designed a website for a client’s new online business. They had provided me with a description of the business and a few pages of content – and with that we created a very clean, nice looking WordPress website. We even created a squeeze page with a newsletter sign up so they could get a jump on building their list. Two weeks after the site was complete, I received an email from them complaining that no one had subscribed to their newsletter yet and they were upset. Why was their new site not working? They even went so far as to look into hiring one of those so-called “SEO Guru’s” who promise they will get you millions of customers overnight! (Yeah, sure.) I assured the client that their site was fully set up with all the SEO tools websites can have – and send them a list of things they could do to help draw traffic to the site.

I’m still unsure if they took my advice and starting investing time into promoting their site – but the experience proved to me that many people still have the “If you build it, they will come” attitude about websites. As a designer, that’s a lot of pressure. And pretty much impossible.

So I did a bit of research on the concept of websites just “existing” and making you money. I downloaded every report I could find from so-called guru’s and discovered, through the haze of buzz words and empty promises, that each of these gurus are pushing these magic “X-Factor” techniques that are guaranteed (!!) to make you $10,000 overnight (!!) while you sit on the beach sipping your margarita. Everyone said the same thing, and most of their tools do work. But the thing these gurus left out was the amount of time and energy YOU need to put in your site to build it. Yes, it’s possible to create a website that will make passive income for you. It’s possible to wake up in the morning with those awesome “You’ve got money” emails in your inbox. What is not possible is for you to create a website and then do nothing, and expect the money to just start rolling in. Websites are not the Ronco™ Rotisserie – you can’t just set it and forget it.

The X-Factor Tools

There are tools that have been proven to work in building a profitable website. Below is a list of the big ones, the ones all the gurus profess and I have seen work. Check out your own web business and see if any of these pieces are missing.

A subscription program (eZine or Auto-responder series)
A “Pink Spoon” page or section, offering a freebie to your subscribers
An easy to navigate, browser-friendly website with information on who you are and what you can offer your clients
A blog or article section of your site with fresh content
An easy-to-find way to connect with your visitors – contact form, call in number, or email address
Social Networking accounts for you or your biz (Twitter, Facebook Fan pages, Linked In profiles, etc…)
RSS Feed – a one-click way for visitors to sign up to receive updates from your site
Multimedia – use videos and audio to connect with your visitors and promote your site.
Advertising – either AdWords or cross promoting with your networking buds
Affiliate Programs
Membership sites or Forums – so your visitors can interact with each other
Downloadable products or programs at various price points

By far these are not the only ways to build a profitable business, but these are some “big dogs” when it comes to promoting your business online. But the list – and the work – does not stop there. You have to try and envision your business as a living thing. It needs care and maintenance to survive. It needs YOU to grow.

The You-Factor

So you’ve got a great website, a nice little freebie for your subscribers, and introductory video about your business and a twitter account. What’s next?

Spread The Word. Once all the basics are in place, you need to start creating the buzz for your business. Take a look at all the contacts that you have – send a quick note to them announcing your business. Add links to your business everywhere you can on the web – social networking sites, friend’s websites, on your email signature – heck, wear your URL on your t-shirt if you think it will help! In the early months of a site, you cannot rely on good SEO alone to drive traffic to your site.
Tell Your Business’ Story. Make sure when you are marketing your new business you are clearly telling people what you do. I find many times I create a beautiful website for someone and even after it’s launched I still don’t exactly know what they do or how it would benefit me. When promoting your new site, use very specific terms to descirbe what you offer and who it”s for. That will also help with the “word of mouth” marketing. If Suzie gets asked if she knows anyone who does X, and she remembers your new business sells X, she will pass on your info. If she doesn’t know you do X, she can’t spread the word.
Get Your Expert Status Out There. Don’t rely on your newsletter alone to showcase your knowledge. Take old articles and publish them as blog posts (with a teaser to subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of the post). Submit your articles to article-sharing sites. (ezinearticles.com) Post your articles on Facebook. Offer guest posts on your friend’s sites. Do anything and everything to get your knowledge – and name – out there.
Plaster Your Face Everywhere. Don’t let your awesome video just sit alone on your site. Create a You Tube channel. Add your video to MySpace & Facebook. Open up a 12seconds.tv account to share your videos. You can even subscribe to video sharing programs that will put your video out on every video site imaginable (tubemogel.com or heyspread.com)
Make Sharing Easy. Add “share this” buttons everywhere on your site. Sales pages, regular static pages, blog posts, etc… make it an easy one-click for someone to spread the word on you. Many bookmarking sites provide easy copy&paste code for your site so you don’t even need any code knowledge to add it. (reddit.com, digg.com, stumbledupon.com, Technorati.com or Yahoo Buzz)
Make Following Easy. Utilize your RSS feed by signing up for a Feedburner.com account, which gives subscribers more options to receive your feed. Add links on your site for your visitors to follow you on Facebook or Twitter.
Get Your Voice Heard. Record yourself reading your article and add a “listen now” button to your posts (see AudioAcrobat.com). Look into services like Blog Talk Radio where you can share your knowledge and hit a whole new market.
Make Friends. Join networking sites, enroll in group mastermind programs and participate in events where you can get in front of people AND gain business knowledge. Pass out your business card!! Schmooze! You’d be amazed at the number of people who find me through their networking circles – word of mouth is still the best marketing tool out there.

The real X-Factor in marketing your business is YOU. Think outside the box when you start a new business and use as many tools as possible to promote yourself online. The competition is fierce out there, and the time you invest in promoting yourself really determines your success. Once you have your basic tools in place, start by investing just an hour a day in getting the word out there. You’ll be surprised at how taking just that little amount of time out of your day can increase your site traffic – and your bank account.

PS – Don’t forget to check in on how you are doing! I highly recommend subscribing to tracking software (google.com/analytics) and actively track your sites performance. Take an interest in how people are finding you, and what keywords that are bringing them to you. Take that info and exploit it! If most of your traffic comes in through Facebook, then step up your game on Facebook! It’s obviously working.

~Victoria Potts Keale is a newbie blogger, website designer, entrepreneur extraordinaire, mom, wife, daughter, sister… well, you get the gist. She lives in her hometown of St. Louis, MO in an old haunted farmhouse with her 2 kids and drummer hubby. She has 15 tattoos and wants more. She loves 80’s music. She thinks writing bios in the 3rd person is wacky. You should email her and tell her what else to put in her bio – victoria@lynnraedesigns.com – but don’t spam her, cause she’ll get angry.

Please feel free to use this blog in whatever, but make sure you credit it back to the author (link it up here!!) and send us a note that you used it, cause we’ll give you some link-love right back.

Attract More Traffic by Optimizing Your Articles

Most business owners have heard that a great way to get traffic to your website is by posting tons of content, specifically articles, on your site. The idea is that google will find your articles, index them for the most important or relevant words used (keywords), and those articles will show up in the google search results when people search for those keywords.

A majority of the traffic to The Wealth Spa comes in via this “organic” Google traffic, but this was not always true. Here are some tips to make full use of your articles so you don’t waste the benefits of all your hard work.

1. Power Your Website Using WordPress (behind the scenes)

Google loves blogs – it indexes them faster and checks them more often for new information. If you host your articles on a site using blogging software, google will find those articles faster and it is much more likely they will appear when people search for your most important/relevant words (keywords).

But your website doesn’t have to LOOK like a blog to be POWERED by blog software. You don’t need that ugly one-column, ordered by date, unprofessional look — your site can look like a magazine, a corporate site, or whatever you want — and still be a “blog” underneath.

2. Use the Right Permalinks

Sorry to get a bit technical on you — permalinks are permanent website html links that are not those weird coded, computer-generated links with tons of symbols or weird numbers. If you have a blog, the html link of each page will be a weird code (domain.com/?=234) unless you change it to something that a human (and google!) can read. For example, a recent post on my site was thewealthspa.com/rock-star instead of thewealthspa.com/?=301.

I recommend that your permalinks should be simply the title of your article, which works especially great if the title of your article has good keywords (see tip 3). Not only will this help google to find your article and increase it’s relevance in google’s eyes, but it will also make it much easier for human beings to link to you.

3. Write for Long Keyword Phrases

It’s going to be difficult for you to get traffic for using words like “money” or “diet” — too many people are trying to get traffic for those keywords. But if you are writing articles for long or specific search phrases, like “christian financial advisor in St. Louis” or “what’s the difference between a trademark and a copyright” it’s much easier to get the traffic.

How to research keywords is too much to cover here, but once you have thought of some good keyword phrases, use those words in your title and similar or related words especially in the first sentence/paragraph of your article. Another great tip is to use a picture that describes those keywords, and name the photo file with those search terms.

4. Link to Good Resources

Depending upon the topic of your article, there may be a few (3 or less) resources that would be helpful to a reader of your article. These resources may include government documents, a news article on cnn.com, a book on amazon.com, a video posted on youtube, or a recent study on the website of a university. Think of valuable resources you would share with a friend or client who is research the subject of your article.

Don’t over-do this tip, but if you give a few links inside your article to these type of “authority” websites, it can help google to release that your website is also an authority. But make sure to link to specific resources on the same topic (“deep link”) or google will think you are just trying to fool them with useless links.

My First Rejection.

Well, no, not really. I’ve been rejected before. But this time, it was different. I liked it. This time, it was exactly what I needed to hear.

You see, as a business owner and a site designer, I had a problem. For the longest time I would always, always say “yes”. I was the “yes” girl.

When I launched my new business this past January, I vowed to make changes. I vowed to set up guidelines for working with me – and to stick with them.

Creating a website or graphic for someone else’s company takes work from both sides – I need your feedback and ideas before I can get you what you actually want. I have created worksheets and questionnaires for my clients to fill out so I can get all the answers I need. That was one of the problems I had in the past – clients saying “I don’t care, do what you think is best” which is not conducive to building YOUR brand. If I design everything based on my style and taste, ultimately you will end up not being satisfied with your product. (Not to be confused with me building on an idea – that’s different)

So when I was contacted by a prospective client this week, and the email was a huge red-flag for me. It simply read “Hello. Please send me your skill set. Thank You.”. Right off the bat, I knew they didn’t take even a second to visit my website, since listed right there in plain english are my “skill sets”.

My reply was cordial and friendly – explaining my procedure for phone consolations and requesting for more info on the project over email prior to the call. His response was a flat out “No” – he needed his stuff now and could not wait.

Now, I understand the need for getting something done ASAP. I am sympathetic to that and I will bend my rules in certain situations. But assuming I will stop work on all my clients projects and prioritize yours when we have no prior relationship and when you refuse to send details over email is just, well, insulting to me. The reality is, I run a business, I am busy, I have clients – and treating me as if my schedule is unimportant is just rude.

So I was happy with that rejection. I celebrated (with a cookie, actually). It reinforced the fact that I was making the right decision by establishing my boundaries and standing by them. My clients know that they are important to me and that they will be taken care of. And for those who are not my clients yet, I hope you understand that my rules and restrictions are in place for two reasons – 1) Because I respect myself and 2) Because I respect my clients.

Here’s the real truth — I am not an employee. I used to feel like getting a client project was actually them doing me a favor. Now I recognize that it’s the opposite. Web designers are a dime a dozen… and everyone treats their business differently. I’m not reinvently the wheel here, I know there are other people who can do what I do… but what you get when you work with me is… ta da! Me! And while before I just lumped myself in the category of “just another web designer”, I now know I am different b/c I am personally involved in my clients project. I want them to succeed more then I want them to pay me (the money is just a perk).

So from here on out, my prospects and I interview each other – we decide if we should work together. I do not give the time of day to those people who treat me as if I am their employee, as if they are doing me a favor. Trust me, I don’t need those kind of favors.

Here’s me, jumping in…

So it’s been a few years now that I’ve been in the business of helping webpreneurs with their online businesses… and one of the most prominent business tools I’ve seen are these blog-thingys. So it’s 2009 now and since I entered this year with a jaded attitude (I lost my mojo late 2008 – but we’ll talk about that in a different blog post) I thought – “What can I do to 1) get my mojo back and 2) reposition myself in this industry” it came to me! Why not do for myself what I see my clients doing?!?! And now here I am with my newfangled blog – and I don’t know what in the heck I am doing here!

I can set it up. I can pretty-fi it. (Yes, pretty-fi. I make up words. It’s ok) I can promote it and SEO the heck out of it — but writing? Where do you begin????

So I investigated blogs. Which was cool, because I discovered that you can pretty much talk about anything you want and if someone wants to listen, they can… if they don’t, they don’t. It’s a nice change of pace for me, since I see the look on my husbands face when I talk sometimes. That look of “I soooo don’t care”. So now I have a new outlet and I’m guessing my marriage will benefit from this. But what I could not find in all those blogs was how to START. What do you say in your first, your second, even your fifth blog post? If I walked up to someone new on the street and just started rambling about graphic design they would probably think I was crazy and slowly back away, then take off running, right?

After agonizing for a few days over how to start, I decided to just make my first few posts just ramblings about my leap into the blog world. Albeit I may be running the risk of people slowly backing away from the computer, then taking off and running out of the room… but here in the blog world, I can’t see you running so it doesn’t make me feel so crazy.

So for those of you who didn’t slowly back away and then start running out of the room – Welcome! Welcome to me rambling about web design, graphic design, photography and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes me tick. I hope in the posts to come that I can provide you with stuff you need; tips, tricks, tools, etc.. I will make a point to include useful stuff amoung my crazy, sometimes snarky ramblings.

Until next time…