Although the first impression is critical when it comes to websites, there’s more to an effective website than meets the eye. For marketing purposes, what you don’t see can have a major impact on the ability of your site to be found by people who want the products and services you provide. It would be like locating your business on a busy highway then erecting a wall between your company and the road so nobody could see it as you drove by.
So what can you do to help your website be found? This critique will focus on Internet marketing. Typically, good graphic designers lack the marketing background to maximize the effectiveness of your site for you. This article focuses on the things you can do in the design of your website to become more attractive to the Internet search engines. [...]
Do you remember the last time you met someone and took an instant like or dislike to them? Have you ever bought a book because your first impression was so strongly positive? Regardless of what decisions you’ve made based on first impressions, we all do it. In sales and marketing, it’s long been known that we make our first impression on a prospect in the first 20 seconds. If it’s not positive, we may never get to make a second impression.
First impressions are more critical in Internet marketing than they are in business because people can click off your site and onto another almost instantly. In fact, research shows that you have 1/20th of a second to make that first impression. Nobody makes a decision that fast on the content. The first impression your website makes depends all on the appearance, which includes pictures, white space, and graphics. I personally find examples help me understand concepts better so I’m going to analyze Slater’s 50/50’s website to show how this works. With his website, Scott Slater continues to demonstrate a good understanding of marketing. For my purposes, it’s instructive that he misses a few more subtle points, which I’ll mention as we go along. Overall, Slater’s 50/50’s is a good example of what a small business can do to promote itself. [...]
I’ve had numerous clients who wonder why their websites fail to produce sales. The answer is simply the lack of marketing. Traffic doesn’t just happen because you have a URL or website address and a presence on the Internet any more than it does if you have an office in an office building or an industrial park. Having had a small business in a commercial park, I can assure you, we did not have walk-in traffic. The Internet with millions of websites is worse than any neighborhood in the world for trying to be seen just by having a “presence” on the web.
No matter how gorgeous your website, it’s only an address on an overcrowded virtual marketplace. The fifteen proactive marketing ideas I list here will enable you to expand your reach beyond what you ever could with a storefront. You can attract people looking for what you offer. Soft sell sales & marketing activities enable you to develop trust by showing that you care about your prospects’ challenges and dreams. You are giving them a taste for what you can do to help them. And when they are ready, you help customers buy through guiding them and by describing the benefits instead of manipulating and [...]
Social networking without looking like a spammer
It seems everything in life is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s called social networking because people want to be social and interact. They want to become part of a community. On the other hand, the Internet marketing is full of spammers, people who only care about their own profit and have no sincere desire to engage with you beyond getting your money. In this case, the spammers aren’t filling email boxes but rather cluttering blogs with meaningless comments. So how do you become part of the Internet community while avoiding looking like a spammer? Interestingly, it’s easy. First, look at what spammers who put comments on blogs [...]