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Just Give ‘Em What They Want!

Doug Williams @ 5:30 am

This blog entry was posted on February 27, 2011.

This is web marketing made simple. Too many businesses build up websites and online businesses that pitch services and products. But is this what they want? Are you delivering it the way they want it and when they want it? This really means listening carefully to your customers and delivering what they are seeking.

How does this work with website marketing? On the web, people search to fulfill a need. They search for a solution to a problem. You just need to clearly understand what their need is and then figure out how to deliver it faster, better and smarter than your completion. You need to articulate why you are the best solution.

What happens if you have what they need, not just what they want? Sometimes you do have the better mousetrap. People just plain don’t understand that what they want isn’t what they really need. How do you work this into your website?

  1. Attraction: First you need to attract traffic to your web page. You need to optimize around the best keyword phrases that describe the need. Some people will search for the common solution; others will search for the problem so they can find a solution.
  2. Problem: Describe the problem and the pain points that are impacting your best buyers. By showing that you clearly understand their pain, people become much more open to buying.
  3. Benefits and Advantages: Describe how your product will benefit your buyer. What advantages do you have over your competition? Why is what you provide the very best? Once your visitors can see why they need what you sell, you can share the features and details of your product.
  4. The Close: Don’t forget to ask for the sale. Give them a clear and visible action to take. This could be to buy, sign-up or to join.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



PayPal Payflow Outages Possible March 10-17 with Datacenter Move

Doug Williams @ 4:57 am

This blog entry was posted on February 25, 2011.

Paypal announced the moving of their data center for their Payflow payment gateway. This move could result in interruptions in service for websites that use the Payflow gateway. The Payflow Production migration will occur March 10-17, 2011. This move will result in new IP addresses being assigned.

Websites that use fixed IP addresses in their stores will have to have their IP addresses updated. See more information below.

Paypal Payflow is a payment gateway that allows ecommerce websites to take secure online payments using credit cards and debit cards. With Payflow Pro, customers don’t leave your site to enter their payment information during the checkout process.

New IP addresses will be assigned and website owners that use Paypal Payflow may need to make one or more of the following changes to your environment.

  • Flush your DNS cache if your applications cache existing IPs defined see source reference.
  • Update your application or system configuration (e.g. system hosts file) if you hard code IP addresses.
  • Check and/or update your firewall configuration to ensure that outbound access to the new IP addresses is permitted.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Use Your Website as a Lead Generation Machine

Doug Williams @ 6:47 am

This blog entry was posted on February 23, 2011.

A lead generation website is a special type of website. You use this to develop leads for your business and you can sell excess leads to others. I am talking about creating a website developed for the sole purpose of generating leads. These are sites that help visitors get pricing or referrals.

  1. Unbranded: A great lead gen site should be unbranded and not part of your main sales website. People are much more likely to engage with a site that is not trying to sell them anything. Offer to do the work of lining up quotes or putting them in touch with a professional.
  2. Domain: Select a domain that is descriptive of what you are offering. This could be HomeBuilderQuotes.com if you are putting people looking for a custom home together with contractors.
  3. Targeted Traffic: You will create a highly targeted website around a single topic. You can use organic SEO or an Adwords campaign to bring in highly targeted traffic. Focused and targeted traffic will bring in targeted leads that will convert better.
  4. Build Trust: People will buy from people that they know and trust. Provide quality and helpful content. Take the time to build a relationship and establish a connection with your visitor. Show respect and a willingness to help.
  5. Provide Value: Show that you provide value by signing up for your list. This starts with an incentive when they sign-up such as a free ebook, free report or a free sample. Your follow-up emails or lead nurturing, should continue to add value and establish the relationship.

This works even when you are only need leads from a specific region. You can market the “surplus leads” to other companies around the nation.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Number One Rankings Isn’t the Goal for SEO

Doug Williams @ 4:57 am

This blog entry was posted on February 21, 2011.

Too many people focus on the quest for a #1 ranking as the ultimate success for a search engine optimization campaign. SEO is not about rankings improvement. Rankings should only be an interim indicator for improvement. SEO needs to bring more of the right kind of traffic…People that are highly interested in what you offer.

If rankings are not a good measure of SEO success, what is? Is it traffic to your site? No it is getting more results from your website. This could be sales, leads or phone calls.

To start an SEO campaign, look at the website. If you drive enough good, quality traffic to it, will it convert that traffic into results? Effective SEO also uses CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). You have to do both if you want to improve your bottom line.

What are the right measurements you should be monitoring as you watch your SEO program progress? Choose from the following list.

  1. Conversions: Number of sales, leads, sign-ups or phone calls that come in from your website.
  2. Conversion Rate: This is the conversions as a percent of visits to your website.
  3. Bounce Rate: This is the percent of people that arrive and leave right away as a percent of total visitors. This not only measures if your site is interesting, it measure if you are attracting the right crowd. Less than 50% is a good bounce rate for informational websites.
  4. Rankings: Yes this is still a good measure, just not the primary one.
  5. Total search traffic: How many total visits came from the search engines?
  6. Unbranded Search Traffic: How many visits did you receive from the search engines that did not include your company name or brand name? You want to exclude traffic that was already searching specifically for your company.
  7. Alexa Ranking: This is a measure of the popularity of your website as compared to other sites on the web.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Google Web Fonts: Open Source Fonts for Website Design

Doug Williams @ 5:33 am

This blog entry was posted on February 19, 2011.

No more using fonts embedded in images or PDFs to get the look you want on your web page.

Instead of depending on a few web safe fonts that are installed on a website user’s local machine, you can now expand the fonts you use to any font in the Google Fonts Directory and apply it to any web page. You are able to do this using style-sheets and the Google font API.

Google Fonts was launched last May. These Google Web Fonts allows you to choose a font and add the font to any web page, blog or web application by adding a snippet of HTML and CSS.

Instead of being limited to Verdana, Times or Arial fonts, you now have access to a huge variety of fonts. These fonts are served up by a browser request instead of having to exist on a user’s computer.

Browsers: The Google Font API is compatible with most browsers. This includes Mozilla Firefox (3.5+), Microsoft Internet Explorer (6+), Google Chrome (4.249.4+), Apple Safari (3.1+) and Opera (10.5+). These fonts also work with most mobile operating systems including Android 2.2+ and iOS 4.2+. Unsupported would simply see the alternative font you specify in CSS.

Cost: All fonts are open source and you can use them for free. You can also elect to pay for a font which is used to help compensate font designers. Google uses these donations to commission even more open source fonts.

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Filed under: Website Design



Web Marketing for the Small Business Owner

Doug Williams @ 5:02 am

This blog entry was posted on February 17, 2011.

Marketing on the web is less about web technology and more about marketing your business. Web marketing is about understanding who your best customers are and why they need what you have to offer. You need to understand what makes your business special and unique, and then you need to tell visitors know how you are the solution to their problem.

Message: Your message is much more important than a showy website. Shock and Awe may have worked in the Gulf War, but it has no place on a website. Designers may love a showy site with eye popping Flash designs, but this doesn’t impress potential clients. Instead focus on a clear and compelling message.

Think Conversion: Design the solution you can provide so that it solves your visitor’s problem. Make it visible, clear and compelling on your home page. Design a selling sequence with a clear path to action. Take the time to answer their unasked questions. Design trust elements into your website to lessen their fears and show that you are indeed a trustworthy solution.

Interaction: Web marketing is about reaching and interacting with the individual. It is harder to create a lasting impression in a single encounter. Devise a way to interact with visitors on an ongoing basis. Use opt-in newsletters or have an interactive blog on your site. Add social reviews to your products you sell. Add in online surveys, email marketing, links to subscribe to your Twitter, Facebook or your blog feed.

Website Traffic: You need people interested in what you sell. Decide where your traffic is going to come from before your website is launched. This could be Paid ads such as Adwords, organic SEO, social media, email marketing or some other search engine marketing method.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



SEO For Absolute Beginners

Doug Williams @ 3:21 pm

This blog entry was posted on February 15, 2011.

Search engine optimization is about getting your website to appear prominently in Google’s results. SEO influences by carefully focusing your efforts on a keyword phrase and using it prominently and tastefully through your website. It is about creating content that is so compelling and interesting that other websites want to link to your content.

Plan: Start with a plan, what products or services do you want to promote? What are your most profitable products? What are your highest volume products? Who do you sell to? Think like a customer. What problem is your visitor trying to solve when they search for what you sell?

Keywords: Always start by identifying your most important keywords. Keywords are what your customers think of when they search for what you provide. Choosing keywords is part art and part science. You need to understand the psychology of how and why people search. People search the web to find information, answers and a solution to a problem. Choose keywords and plan which page each phrase will be used on.

On-Page SEO: Apply your keywords to each page of your website according to your plan. Use the keywords in your Title tags, H1 tags, visible body text, hyperlinks that link to internal pages, etc. Your page headline should grab your reader’s attention and contain keywords. Body text should stimulate interest and assure your reader they are in the right place.

Back Linking: Google gives importance to websites that have other many other sites linking to them. Build links to your pages using web directories, articles, blog postings, etc. Links back to your site should use the targeted keyword(s) for that page. Back linking works best when you have a long term consistent rate of new links coming in.

Social media: For a long time the web has been moving social. For SEO, links from blogs, social bookmarks and user generated content like Squidoo are considered valuable links.

SEO is not forceful. It does not guarantee results. It is an art form, it is subtle and it is compelling. It takes persistence and patience. It does not happen overnight. Most of all you need to show that you deserve it with tasteful and quality content.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Mobile Website Design Best Practices

Doug Williams @ 9:19 am

This blog entry was posted on February 13, 2011.

Just like every business absolutely needs to have a website, now every business should have a mobile version of that website. According to the Global Mobile Data Forecast update, mobile data usage grew at a higher than expected rate of 159% in 2010. In 2010 mobile network connection speeds grew at 215%. By the year 2015 there will be nearly one mobile device per capita.

Mobile website viewing is growing at an accelerating rate

Mobile Sites Are Simpler

Your mobile site should be much simpler than your standard website. Eliminate many of your slow loading graphics and the site has much less text and should be very minimalistic. Look at ways to greatly simplify your design, your content and the number of pages. Focus your content on just what your mobile web visitor needs to know.

Use Valid Markup

Mobile browsers are not nearly as forgiving for bad code as desktop browsers. To insure a high level of mobile-friendliness, validate your mobile web page using the W3C Mobile OK Checker.

Target Smartphones

Design your mobile site for the SmartPhone.  This is the high growth segment in mobile. Even though Smartphones represent only 13 percent of the cell phones in use today, they represent over 78 percent of total global handset traffic. Smartphones are much more than just cell phones; they provide instant access to the web.

Display Sizes are increasing

Today 400×240 screen resolutions are common and is typical for a smartphone web design.  The new Apple iPhone 4 has a display of 960×640 and the Droid X has a 854×480. The Load speeds are a major concern as we wait for bandwidth to catchup to displays.

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Filed under: Mobile Web



Why Your Business Needs a Website

Doug Williams @ 4:34 am

This blog entry was posted on February 11, 2011.

Remember back in the early days when just having a website was enough to stand out and be noticed? In 1995 if your business had a website, you would be viewed as one of the elite and it was easy to attract visitor traffic. By early 2011 there were more than 250 million websites on the World Wide Web, making the Internet much more crowded and competitive.

Most businesses today have a website… or at least should. How do you compete and standout from the crowd?

The bottom line is that every business should be on the web to attract new customers. Web marketing can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Website marketing is more about marketing and less about website technology.

A website is much more than an advertising piece; it is an online business that requires careful planning. It is essential to create a website business plan complete with goals and strategies before you rush into a design.

In less than one second a visitor forms an initial impression of your website. They then spend a total of 3 seconds deciding whether to leave or look further. If they stay, you have a total of 10 seconds to build a relationship and get them to decide if your website is worthy of action.

Your website needs to clearly say how you can help your visitor solve an important problem and then convince them to take some sort of action.

Developing your call to action is one of the first steps in planning your website. The call to action should be clear in the headlines, the navigation and in the organization of the website. Make your offer clear, visually important and visible to visitors when they first arrive.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Make Your Domain Name Memorable

Doug Williams @ 7:55 am

This blog entry was posted on February 9, 2011.

It is very important to choose the right domain name for your website. Let me use my own company as an example.

In 2002 I started up my business as a consulting company and selected Doug Williams and Associates as my business name. Once my company name was established, I went searching for the right domain. The obvious one “DougWilliams.com” was taken. I knew shorter domain names were better, so I abbreviated my company name to “DWAssoc.com.” Seems logical doesn’t It?

This was a big mistake. Even though I did some things right – it was short, represented the company and was a .COM – I overlooked a few important details. It wasn’t memorable and people couldn’t remember what it stood for; every time someone asked me for my email address, I found myself repeating the spelling three or four times. The domain wouldn’t stick in their memory and didn’t strengthen my brand.

I finally went out and purchased “DougWilliams.com” and paid a premium price for it. This was the best decision I could have made. Even though it was longer, it was memorable and reinforced my brand. Now, I never have to repeat the spelling of my email address to anyone.

You can use your business name, brand name or keywords in your domain. Whichever you choose, the name of your website should be a memorable reflection of your business.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



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