1. Keep it fresh –
Update your content regularly, create a page or section on your site for
news, updates, reviews, articles, features or new products whatever is
relevant to your business. Fresh content is a great draw card for
visitors and it gives search engines something new to index.
2. Join the Blogosphere – Become an authority within your community by hosting a blog on your site. Blogging is your opportunity to speak directly to your clients or customers, promoting credibility and trust in your brand. Many CEO’s are taking time out from their meetings to blog and it is quickly become a must have tool in the marketing arsenal.
3. Peak Performance – The web makes it easier than ever before to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing. Make use of the great tools available to check on your site or campaign performance. Monitor your web traffic with Google Analytics and always look for areas you can improve on. Enhance the frequently visited pages of your site and revamp the areas getting less traffic.
4. DIY Web Solutions – There are a lot things you can do yourself to ensure the success of your website but do it yourself websites jobs are not a good idea for serious business. If you are incorporating a website into your advertising and marketing strategy, budget for it and call in the pros to help you get the job done, you wouldn’t fix your own plumping or diagnose your own medical conditions would you?
5. Get in your users head? – Build your site with your users in mind, what do they want? What information will they be looking for when they visit your site? Can they find it quickly and easily? What do they need that you can give them?
6. You have to give before you get – Build credibility by writing articles, reviews and blogposts within your industry or community. Be seen to be active, become an authority or resource, give information and expertise in your area and you will get great returns in credibility, trust and brand awareness.
7. Lights, cameras, action – Create a video, host it on your site and submit it to YouTube. Testimonials, product guides, site tours or something fun and interesting related to your business will engage visitors and keep them on your site. Extra traffic from YouTube is a bonus.
8. Speed it up – If there is one thing that will send your visitors straight for the back button its pages that are slow to download. You need to cater for the very short attention span of the average web user and ensure your pages download quickly. You should test the download speed on both broadband and dial up so all your users get good download times.
9. Know your audience – Your audiences are current customers, target markets and potential leads. People that might visit your site with various aims. Knowing who those people are helps you to target your sites information to get the best conversion rates.
10. Stay Focused – Once you know who your audiences are you need to focus your site’s look and feel and content towards those markets. For professionals its best to keep it clean and simple but for creative industries you can move outside the square.
11. Easy Money – If you are selling online make the payment process as painless as possible. During this process only gather the essential information you need for the payment to be processed.
12. 3 Clicks – Your user should be able to navigate to a purchase page within 3 clicks of the home page. Or alternatively they should be able to find the information they are looking for within 3 seconds of being on the home page.
13. The hook, line and sinker – Quality content is the driving force of your site. For both users and search engines it is the key to increasing return visits and search engine rankings.
14. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords – Location and frequency of your keywords is important in the race for a better ranking but more important is the research and development of those keywords. When you are building up target less competitive more specific keywords, as your site matures you can look at going for more generic highly searched terms.
15. Tagging – In the real world tagging is frowned upon but in the virtual world it’s necessary for survival in the search rankings. Meta tags are written into the code of your site to help search engines and users identify what each page is about. Every page should have its own title and description tag. Use targeted specific keywords in these tags.
16. Link Juice – Incoming links are one of the most important ingredients required for gaining a good search ranking. Links from sites relevant or related to your industry are the only kind you should target. General directories are good also but be sure to avoid link farms and bad neighborhoods.
17. Top Ten – Everyone loves a good top ten list, its great link bait and can generate a lot of traffic to your site. It can be a list of anything related to your business, something interesting, funny or controversial also works.
18. Stay Connected – Keep in touch with your customers / clients on a regular basis, so they keep you fresh in their minds. You can do this effectively via an email marketing campaign.
19. Personal Touches – Provide a contact phone number and address if you want to sell online. People need to know that should there be a problem with their purchase they can speak to a real person rather than sending an email into cyber space.
20. Free Stuff – People love getting things for free, so offer some kind of incentive if you are trying to get someone to take action. Free shipping is a good one and so are free consultations or quotes.
21. Contribute – Get involved in the industry by contributing to online groups, blogs and forums. Make a name for yourself amongst industry peers.
22. Pay Per Click – Do the research and do it right. Target your campaign on words that are highly specific to your products or service.
23. Link up – Make sure your internal link structure is solid and it is easy for the bots to navigate through your site. Do this by using text links in your content that direct to pages in your site. Also make sure your navigation is easy to follow and you keyword rich pages aren’t too deep.
24. Keeping in theme – Each page should focus on a theme or key message. Link to other pages on the site in the copy but stick to one theme or message on the page.
25. Check out the competition – Get to know your competition, what are they doing that’s working for them? Learn by their mistakes so you don’t have to make the same ones.
26. Get listed – Submit your site to general directories as well as industry specific ones.
27. Show off your credentials – If you have credentials or memberships to associations related to your business then display them on your home page. If you can get them to link to you even better.
28. Deliver what you promise – If you say you are going to update your blog weekly, send a monthly newsletter, offer incentive specials to members or put new content on your site then do it.
29. Get Social – Social media is a great way to market your business. It is a different channel that what you might be used to in terms of the way you interact with customers. Use social media to find out about the market, engage and interact with customers but avoid the hard sell. Set up a profile on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Keep it up to date with what’s going on in your business, post video, blogs, upcoming events, talk to people, be social, give something back to the community.
30. Keep it simple – Keep your site simple, clean and easy to use, think about your end users experience. Think about the way your users find what they are looking for and set up your navigation accordingly.
31. Offline marketing – running an offline marketing campaign that promotes your site is a great thing to do alongside your online marketing. It might cost you but in the long run direct traffic is very valuable and it’s good to be visible in the real world as well as the virtual.
2. Join the Blogosphere – Become an authority within your community by hosting a blog on your site. Blogging is your opportunity to speak directly to your clients or customers, promoting credibility and trust in your brand. Many CEO’s are taking time out from their meetings to blog and it is quickly become a must have tool in the marketing arsenal.
3. Peak Performance – The web makes it easier than ever before to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing. Make use of the great tools available to check on your site or campaign performance. Monitor your web traffic with Google Analytics and always look for areas you can improve on. Enhance the frequently visited pages of your site and revamp the areas getting less traffic.
4. DIY Web Solutions – There are a lot things you can do yourself to ensure the success of your website but do it yourself websites jobs are not a good idea for serious business. If you are incorporating a website into your advertising and marketing strategy, budget for it and call in the pros to help you get the job done, you wouldn’t fix your own plumping or diagnose your own medical conditions would you?
5. Get in your users head? – Build your site with your users in mind, what do they want? What information will they be looking for when they visit your site? Can they find it quickly and easily? What do they need that you can give them?
6. You have to give before you get – Build credibility by writing articles, reviews and blogposts within your industry or community. Be seen to be active, become an authority or resource, give information and expertise in your area and you will get great returns in credibility, trust and brand awareness.
7. Lights, cameras, action – Create a video, host it on your site and submit it to YouTube. Testimonials, product guides, site tours or something fun and interesting related to your business will engage visitors and keep them on your site. Extra traffic from YouTube is a bonus.
8. Speed it up – If there is one thing that will send your visitors straight for the back button its pages that are slow to download. You need to cater for the very short attention span of the average web user and ensure your pages download quickly. You should test the download speed on both broadband and dial up so all your users get good download times.
9. Know your audience – Your audiences are current customers, target markets and potential leads. People that might visit your site with various aims. Knowing who those people are helps you to target your sites information to get the best conversion rates.
10. Stay Focused – Once you know who your audiences are you need to focus your site’s look and feel and content towards those markets. For professionals its best to keep it clean and simple but for creative industries you can move outside the square.
11. Easy Money – If you are selling online make the payment process as painless as possible. During this process only gather the essential information you need for the payment to be processed.
12. 3 Clicks – Your user should be able to navigate to a purchase page within 3 clicks of the home page. Or alternatively they should be able to find the information they are looking for within 3 seconds of being on the home page.
13. The hook, line and sinker – Quality content is the driving force of your site. For both users and search engines it is the key to increasing return visits and search engine rankings.
14. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords – Location and frequency of your keywords is important in the race for a better ranking but more important is the research and development of those keywords. When you are building up target less competitive more specific keywords, as your site matures you can look at going for more generic highly searched terms.
15. Tagging – In the real world tagging is frowned upon but in the virtual world it’s necessary for survival in the search rankings. Meta tags are written into the code of your site to help search engines and users identify what each page is about. Every page should have its own title and description tag. Use targeted specific keywords in these tags.
16. Link Juice – Incoming links are one of the most important ingredients required for gaining a good search ranking. Links from sites relevant or related to your industry are the only kind you should target. General directories are good also but be sure to avoid link farms and bad neighborhoods.
17. Top Ten – Everyone loves a good top ten list, its great link bait and can generate a lot of traffic to your site. It can be a list of anything related to your business, something interesting, funny or controversial also works.
18. Stay Connected – Keep in touch with your customers / clients on a regular basis, so they keep you fresh in their minds. You can do this effectively via an email marketing campaign.
19. Personal Touches – Provide a contact phone number and address if you want to sell online. People need to know that should there be a problem with their purchase they can speak to a real person rather than sending an email into cyber space.
20. Free Stuff – People love getting things for free, so offer some kind of incentive if you are trying to get someone to take action. Free shipping is a good one and so are free consultations or quotes.
21. Contribute – Get involved in the industry by contributing to online groups, blogs and forums. Make a name for yourself amongst industry peers.
22. Pay Per Click – Do the research and do it right. Target your campaign on words that are highly specific to your products or service.
23. Link up – Make sure your internal link structure is solid and it is easy for the bots to navigate through your site. Do this by using text links in your content that direct to pages in your site. Also make sure your navigation is easy to follow and you keyword rich pages aren’t too deep.
24. Keeping in theme – Each page should focus on a theme or key message. Link to other pages on the site in the copy but stick to one theme or message on the page.
25. Check out the competition – Get to know your competition, what are they doing that’s working for them? Learn by their mistakes so you don’t have to make the same ones.
26. Get listed – Submit your site to general directories as well as industry specific ones.
27. Show off your credentials – If you have credentials or memberships to associations related to your business then display them on your home page. If you can get them to link to you even better.
28. Deliver what you promise – If you say you are going to update your blog weekly, send a monthly newsletter, offer incentive specials to members or put new content on your site then do it.
29. Get Social – Social media is a great way to market your business. It is a different channel that what you might be used to in terms of the way you interact with customers. Use social media to find out about the market, engage and interact with customers but avoid the hard sell. Set up a profile on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Keep it up to date with what’s going on in your business, post video, blogs, upcoming events, talk to people, be social, give something back to the community.
30. Keep it simple – Keep your site simple, clean and easy to use, think about your end users experience. Think about the way your users find what they are looking for and set up your navigation accordingly.
31. Offline marketing – running an offline marketing campaign that promotes your site is a great thing to do alongside your online marketing. It might cost you but in the long run direct traffic is very valuable and it’s good to be visible in the real world as well as the virtual.
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