4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum

What’s the most important piece of your business’s web presence? Your website, of course.

Creating a website requires a good deal of thought; it’s important to plan what information you want on the site, what the layout will look like, and how you’ll connect each piece together.

Think of your website as your hub; it’s what people will see when they look for you. Here are four elements of a successful business web presence that can help ensure that your first impression is a good one.

Before We Begin

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Your very first step should be to define the goals of your website. Most businesses should have at least three: to create an online presence, to differentiate your business, and to capture leads.

1. Creating an online presence is the most basic reason for building a website. This means building a site that includes your business information, highlights what makes you special, and gives consumers a way to contact you.

2. Making your business stand out takes a more advanced strategy. Maintaining a blog that portrays your thoughts and insights can help your website stand out and help consumers better understand your business.

3. A good business website can be used to capture potential leads. As the site grows it becomes a community for customers and potential consumers. Connect with potential consumers and find a way to continue marketing to them. Your website can be the elevator pitch and your connection the long sell.

The Website

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With our goals in mind, we can begin to explore specific elements of a strong website.

The homepage will generally be the initial point of contact with your consumers. A good homepage will answer the questions “What do you do?” and “Why should I trust you?” Consumers will make a split-second decision on whether they’ll stay to learn more or go to a competitor. Don’t lose them at the start.

An “About” page can further reinforce the trust factor. Explain exactly what your company does, in-depth. I want to know who you are, why you do what you do, and what makes you special. This page should make an impact and impress your consumers.

Finally, create a “Contact” page. This page should clearly explain to your customers how to get in contact with you. Make sure it outlines your address, phone number, email address, and any other way someone can reach you. You might even want to include a Google Map with directions to your store or office.

These three pages create a basic online presence, but not much more. If you want to set your business apart from everyone else, the best way to do that is to create a company blog.

The Blog

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For some reason, many business owners shy away from blogs. What they don’t realize is that most business “News” sections are blogs. “Blog” simply defines any continually updated news or content section of a site. In fact, this is technically a post on a blog.

So why is a blog important? For one, it shows that you know what you’re talking about. It helps you identify yourself as an expert or unique. Secondly, a blog is constantly updated. It gives readers a reason to come back to your site. The more contact you have with your consumers, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Also, consumers have become savvier and will search out information. They want more than a simple explanation of what your product does. They want to know how to use your product, examples of interesting things people are doing, and how you can make their life easier.

After you have a site with information and a blog that is ever-growing, you’ll begin to experience a growth in site traffic. It would be a shame to ignore these potential customers. Which leads us to our next step; lead capture.

The Newsletter

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It’s here that we begin building leads from your website’s visitors.

The first and most important element is a newsletter form. I use Aweber to handle my own personal newsletter sign ups and delivery. I just write the actual newsletter and format it.

There are a number of other services you can use too such as MailChimp and ConstantContact; it simply depends on what you want. Do your research and choose a program you like. The newsletter cost quickly pays for itself. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate sales.

Getting consumers to sign up for your email list means you no longer have to wait for them to come to you, you can go to them. You can offer your core consumers specials and keep them up to date on new products or changes.

Social Media Accounts

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Another option for capturing leads is social media. Microblogs and social networks such as Facebook () and Twitter () can help you connect with and contact those within your core community. For this strategy to work, your blog should serve as a central hub. The hub sends consumers to your respective social media profiles to build the connection.

Businesses with a Facebook Fan page can include a Fan box on the site to make it an easy process to fan the business page. If you have an active Twitter account, consider adding the “Follow Me on Twitter” button. These two elements can help turn a one-time reader into a connected consumer.

When you’re building an online presence, the most important aspect is your website. It’s your hub and your first impression. Are you using the right elements to maximize your website’s effectiveness?

Small Biz: Build a strong Web foundation.

If you’re a small business owner, you know just how challenging the current economy is. But, it’s also a very good time to be a small business. More and more buyers are looking online for the services or goods you provide and, today, it’s much easier for small businesses to compete for those buyers.

How? With your website, of course. That is, if you make it more than a static brochure for your company.

To use your website to attract and engage prospects, foster trusted relationships, and demonstrate your product or service–you need to create a foundation of compelling content.

Here are two points of good news for small business owners who pursue this approach:

1. Buying behavior for purchasers of goods and services is changing. More buyers are doing their initial product and service research on the Internet, prior to making a purchase decision–and many ultimately decide whether to buy based on a company’s website. In fact, in a survey of 200 buyers of professional services, RainToday.com found that 74% of buyers were greatly or somewhat influenced by a company’s website when it came to making a decision to buy. Only 3% reported that a company’s website held no influence with them when it came to buying.

2. Many small businesses still limit their website to static information about products, location, hours, and contact information. More surprisingly, 46% of small business owners surveyed did not have an active website, according to the 2010 Small Business Marketing Forecast published by Ad-ology Research. Talk about an opportunity! If your competitors aren’t using websites effectively–or at all–that allows you a huge head start.

Create Your Inbound Marketing Platform

This approach to marketing is referred to as “inbound marketing.” It focuses on allowing customers to easily find you–using compelling content as a magnet to attract the attention and interest of qualified prospects for the service or product you’re selling. (“Outbound marketing” refers to more traditional methods such as advertising and cold calling where a company is focused on going out and finding customers).

There’s more good news here for small business owners: using inbound marketing to attract qualified prospects and buyers does not have to be difficult and you can use it whether you’re a solopreneur or have many employees.

Creating the content that serves as the foundation of your inbound marketing, however, can be time consuming and resource intensive. So, your best bet is to approach this thoughtfully and strategically.

How to get started:

• Know what you want to achieve. Set your objectives first, then identify the content that will help you meet those objectives. For example, maybe you’ll publish a blog (to attract prospects), an eNewsletter (to retain customers), and perhaps a Facebook fan page (to foster community, share special promos, etc.). You can expand into secondary content (i.e., videos, audio interviews, etc.) to feed your primary content–but don’t lose your focus.
• Match the content your ideal prospect wants/needs with your strengths. Is there something you do that your prospects want to learn? Consider adding a blog to your website, like the charming Craigie on Main. The blog for this bistro features recipes shared by the chef and is a popular draw. (As is the online reservation system.) Do you have access to information of particular interest to your prospects? Joy Tarbell Realty publishes a main blog, niche blogs, related articles, and tools–all valuable content for prospective homebuyers, sellers, and renters.
• Consider content beyond text. Additional content options include creating a photo blog, video blog, or a podcast. Cosmetic dentist Helaine Smith includes simple video demonstrations and customer testimonials on her website. These can be very effective at helping prospects overcome fear and objections. Sometimes a picture is worth a 1,000 words.
• Make the most of what you’ve got. You don’t have to start from scratch–build on content you may already have. Professional services firm Rally Point Webinars is expanding its content foundation by posting articles (repurposed from their enewsletter), alongside webinars that demonstrate their expertise, and case studies that showcase customer success.
• Keep it simple. Don’t try to do it all–in addition to your marketing, you’ve got a business to run! As Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42, recommended when we spoke recently, most firms should focus on no more than three types of content, using secondary “feeder” content as appropriate.
• Integrate with social media. Use your website (with it’s compelling content) as your hub. Share links on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to direct traffic to your website. And, make it easy for visitors to your website to share your content with others (for example, by including retweet and share buttons). Sharing quality content is an effective way to attract potential buyers to your website and generate inbound links to support your SEO.

Creating content does require consistency and ongoing attention. However, that’s also the beauty of it. Unlike a brick and mortar foundation, you don’t build it all at once. Your content library will continue to grow and attract prospects over time as you build it. Block by block.

Twitter to add a connection platform, @anywhere.

AUSTIN, Texas–Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the “@Anywhere” platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.

A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off “hovercards” that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.

The placeholder Twitter account ‘@anywhere.’

“Discovery is one of the hardest challenges,” Williams said. “It’s putting these in context where you’re already aware of them…Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.” The company has 13 launch partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing. As Williams describes it, “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.

While Williams was still speaking, a post went live on the Twitter blog about @Anywhere, describing the technology as “a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the Web.

Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com.” Indeed, a philosophy similar to Facebook Connect.

Williams was interviewed onstage by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, in what was arguably the most highly anticipated event of the SXSWi lineup. A massive event hall at the Austin Convention Center was filled to capacity, with a line snaking through the hallways half an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin.

It was a quick demonstration. And the Twitter CEO was sketchy about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year. Williams described those as “a couple of the first guys that we shared our full stream of public Twitter data with.”

There are 50 million Twitter “tweets” posted every day, Williams said.

“Inevitably, it’s going to take experimentation,” Williams said of how the business side of @Anywhere will evolve. “Google started out thinking that they were going to sell search services.”

A report circulated last month that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi, stemming from comments that the company’s head of product management made in a conference panel. Company executives had heretofore been ambivalent as to whether they would start rolling out ads any time soon–or ever.

SXSWi is more or less Twitter’s birthplace: the company made its debut there in 2007, and became an instant sensation with the early-adopter geek crowd. It took about two more years before it could be deemed a legitimate, mainstream sensation, but SXSWi is its home turf.

Williams says that @Anywhere taps into Twitter’s deepest values of openness and transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open,” he said. “A door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing.”

From the start, Twitter has had an extensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that have led to a colorful array of third-party developer apps. “Openness is really a survivor technique,” Williams said. “It’s being open to the idea that you are wrong, and that other people probably have some good ideas.”

Web Marketing 2010 – Your Action Plan!

It is now 2010, your website is up, you’ve got some Google ads working for you. You send out email campaigns and you wonder why your phone is still not ringing. Here is your action plan for 2010 – Your Web Marketing Plan!

We will discover the Top 10  Web Marketing Trends in 2010 and how to successfully utilize these tools to explode your business! We will gauge your potential success and return on investment using The Dr.’s  patented HEAT METER!

HOT! - Invest today!

WARM! – Give it a try, but don’t spend too much time/money on this.

COLD! – This is so 2009,  leave it alone.

Trend #1: Search Engine Optimization
Advice: WARM!
Sites with relevant content and credible links will continue to rule the search rankings in the coming year, but 2010 has the potential to reveal a few new standards. As the volume of web content continues to grow, consumers will demand even more relevant and personalized search results. That means search engines will be looking for more relevant and personalized content from publishers and brands. In fact, the search engine algorithms are already beginning to pay more attention to date of publication, geo-location, mobile device browsers, past behavior and social media content.

Don’t abandon your current SEO strategy in search of personalization, but make sure you allocate a portion of your budget to testing content, keywords and links that are targeted toward niche audiences. Test keyword and link placement in social media, local content and mobile websites, and make an effort to more frequently refresh some of the content you devote to search engine rankings. Once the search engines have tested these new search targets and revealed some concrete standards, you should be prepared to invest accordingly.

Trend #2: Paid Search
Advice: HOT!
Paid search hasn’t seen a revolutionary trend since the idea of the long tail was applied to keyword bidding. That’s OK, because consumers will still use search engines in 2010 as a primary means of finding products and services to fulfill their needs, and they will still be clicking on relevant ads. Search advertising prices will remain reasonable, and average returns will remain comparably high as larger companies with decreased search marketing budgets continue to allocate resources to lower-cost SEO tactics in hopes of attracting visitors at lower prices. 2010 has the potential for even more downward pressure on price-per-click if Bing can gain enough loyal searchers to attract business away from Google.

You won’t exactly feel like you’re in the driver’s seat when your search marketing placement choices are limited to Google, Microsoft or both, but that doesn’t mean you should shy away from investing in the highly qualified leads that paid search is capable of producing for your small business.

Trend #3: E-mail Marketing
Advice: HOT!
It isn’t hard to justify an investment in e-mail marketing when the cost of sending e-mails is so low. The low cost isn’t the only reason to send e-mail, however. Most consumers still consider e-mail to be their primary form of communication, even though there are several alternative ways for consumers to subscribe to periodic content from small businesses.

E-mail marketing will remain highly predictable in 2010 and may even become more powerful as e-mail service providers improve social media integration, search engine access to archived e-mails, auto-responders and new integrated applications. If you don’t already use an e-mail service provider, invest in one in 2010. If you already use an e-mail service, invest in your e-mail list and in producing valuable content to nurture leads and attract repeat customers.

The cost of building a permission-based list is likely to stay the same in 2010 as it was in 2009, but more than one-third of consumers changed at least one of their e-mail addresses in 2009–due to job changes or other economic factors. Spend more time and money in 2010 focused on keeping your e-mail list current when those consumers return to work and change e-mail addresses again.

Trend #4: Social Network Marketing
Advice: WARM!
Social media has one redeeming quality for marketers–lots and lots of eyeballs. That’s attractive if you’re a major brand, but profitable interaction will continue to be the exception for small businesses in 2010 rather than the rule. A good test of your social network marketing potential is to survey your current customers to see how many of them consider social networking to be a primary form of communication. You should probably experiment with a Facebook fan page and a Twitter page if you find that a meaningful percentage of your current customers indicate an interest in following your business.

Make 2010 your year to test content that attracts repeat and referral business. Your current customers are more likely than total strangers to respond to offers posted on social networks because they already know you and trust you based on their prior purchases.

Trend #5: Blogging
Advice: COLD!
If you’re writing a blog to help with search engine rankings or to inform existing customers, you should continue to test or invest. If you’re blogging in an attempt to attract new prospects and convert them to customers, however, 2010 will be a year that exposes the blogosphere’s vulnerability to the law of averages. Converting prospects into customers depends on driving visitors to content that maximizes conversions, and that means your conversion rate is only as good as the content on your landing page. If that landing page is your blog and your blog changes frequently, your conversion rate is only as good as your latest blog post.

Instead of blogging to convert your website visitors into customers in 2010, work hard to test and develop great landing page content. When you find something that works, don’t change it.

Trend #6: Web Presence
Advice: HOT!
If you want people to see the content on your website, it might make sense to advertise the location of your website content by placing ads on other high-traffic websites. Driving visitor traffic to your website isn’t the way to go for 2010, however. Instead, you need to spend 2010 driving your website content to the visitor traffic.

The difference stems from the fact that content aggregation websites like YouTube are boosting consumer demand for instant gratification and what I like to call “content nesting.” Content nesting allows consumers to browse through content fed to them through a single web page, or nest, so that they don’t have to click on links to individual websites all over the World Wide Web, which takes more time–not to mention that the results can be anywhere from unpredictable to shockingly irrelevant.

To take advantage of content nesting in 2010, your website content needs to be nested in as many content aggregation sites as possible. For example, a lot of people search for videos on YouTube. If you have a video on your website and it’s not also on YouTube, people on YouTube won’t bother searching for your website. To them, YouTube represents the total number of videos available to them on their topic of interest.

Trend #7: Mobile Marketing
Advice: WARM!
In case you haven’t heard, mobile marketing is all about marketing to people through their mobile phones and smart-phone devices. Small businesses haven’t had much of an opportunity to engage consumers on mobile devices, but 2010 has the potential to change that.

Demand is increasing dramatically for mobile applications and mobile web-browsing due to wider adoption of devices like the iPhone and the Google Android phone. As more people adopt these phones and features in 2010, look for small-business marketing services to start providing lower-cost mobile marketing solutions like text messaging, mobile e-mail marketing, mobile websites, mobile application development and location-based marketing.

Make 2010 your year to collect mobile preferences from your prospects and customers, and use tools like Google Analytics to see how many people are visiting your website on mobile web browsers. If you find interest in mobile interaction among your customers, begin testing simple mobile marketing campaigns such as sending a few mobile coupons via text or building a mobile micro-site for one of your products.

Trend #8: Podcasting and Online Radio
Advice: COLD!
Online radio is actually on a bit of a growth trend, but that’s just because so-called terrestrial radio is suffering so much that radio advertisers are switching their investments to digital formats. 2010 will be a year of exploration for online broadcasters as they struggle to find and attract loyal audiences. iTunes has long been the leader in podcasting, but there are still no clear leaders in internet radio.
Even if leaders emerge in 2010, internet broadcasters will need to make their media more sharable, more engaging, more trackable and more mobile to attract money from advertisers. If you’re looking to attract an audience by broadcasting or advertising on broadcast media, go with online video in 2010 and wait for radio to finish reinventing itself.

Trend #9: Online Video
Advice: HOT!
If a picture paints a thousand words, how many words does a 30-second online video paint? Countless buying emotions and memorable brand moments are possible with video. Until recently, spreading your message with video was limited to the television screen. In 2010, watch for video to become more accessible to small businesses through online outlets. Online video is interactive, memorable, widely accessible, cheap to create and highly shareable. There’s also a lot of investment happening around video, which is sure to create even more low-cost opportunities for small businesses to participate in video promotions in 2010.

Video presents a great opportunity for small-business marketing, but don’t think of video as a replacement for text. As powerful as video can be, it can be more cumbersome than text because you can’t scan a video as quickly as you can scan a page of headlines, links and text to quickly find the exact information you need. Use your investments to find the right balance for your customers.

Trend #10: Coupons, Discounts and Savings
Advice: WARM!
OK, this one isn’t entirely an internet marketing trend, but it’s important enough to mention because of the economy. 2009 was another tough year for retailers, and consumers are so accustomed to shopping for deals that they might begin to expect the plethora of deep discounts currently available to continue forever. If you’re engaged in heavy discounting to attract sales and survive the economic downturn, you’ll need to spend 2010 slowly weaning your customers off your lower prices, assuming that the economy recovers. Resetting expectations won’t be easy, so try swapping discounts for special privileges like loyalty discounts, free upgrades and other offers that won’t lock you in to price comparisons.

Internet marketing trends develop quickly, so expect many new and exciting trends to emerge in 2010. Don’t be too quick to jump on new bandwagons because consumers move more slowly than marketers and technology. Stay focused on attracting repeat business, deepening your customer relationships and solving problems for people. Those are the trends that never fail small businesses.

Dr. Social Media is actually Gordon Green of Weboptium.com you can reach him at THEGordonGreen@gmail.com www.weboptium.com