The Busy Business Owner\'s Guide To Having A Successful Website

1. The Busy Business Owner's Guide
To Having A Successful Website
By Lynda Nicholson
www.StLouisWebsitesThatWork.com
The Purpose Of This Guide
The purpose of this guide is to help business owners to have a website that attracts
more customers and increases sales and profits. It's what I call a website that works.
Technical jargon makes it hard for business owners to make the right decisions so I've
tried to keep things simple.
Who is Lynda Nicholson?
I was born and grew up in England. I studied for my
degree, Physics, at Newcastle University. After
University, I worked in industry as a Software Engineer
in Technical Sales. I later worked as Regional Sales and
Marketing Manager for a chain of Harley St plastic
surgery clinics and for a large home-goods company.
This has given me a great background of both technical
AND marketing skills.
I moved to St Louis in 2006 and have been working in
Internet Marketing since then. I specialize in helping
small to medium sized local businesses get more
business online. This is one of my passions!
My other passions are horses and the country lifestyle.
When I’m not taking care of or riding my horses, I
spend time volunteering in the community and being
with friends.
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2. The Three Big Issues Involved In Having A Successful Website
To succeed on the Internet, you need three things:
1. An attractive website that feels appropriate to your customers.
2. The effective use of tactics to attract visitors to your website who have an
interest in buying your product or service.
This is an important distinction. Trying to get visitors who are not interested in
buying is pointless but people do it and others sell services to help them.
3. The effective use of tactics to encourage the website visitors to start a
relationship with your business in the way you want.
The formula for success is simple.
More Visitors x Better Conversion = More Customers, Sales & Profits
If you keep focused on that simple formula, you won't go far wrong.
There's a financial saying - “sales is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality”.
In Internet marketing, visitor traffic statistics and Google rankings are vanity issues if
they don't turn into more customers, sales and profits.
Please Do This Quick Exercise
Please go to www.google.com and type in the type of business you own and your area.
Look at how many results Google shows as matching the query.
Because this guide is written mainly for businesses in the St Louis area, my examples
are focused on this region.
This is what I found when I tried it for accountants, printers and office cleaners.
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3. Google pulled up 3.1 million, 3.3 million and 2.5 million website results for these
three common services.
The message is clear.
Just having a website isn't enough.
The odds are that it won't be found by people searching in Google and the other
search engines. Your website has to be promoted by using the most effective
techniques for attracting visitors... and that's still only the first part of the process in
having a website that works.
The Internet Isn't Full, But There's Plenty Of Competition
Fifteen years ago, Internet marketing was easy.
You paid for a website to be developed and people found it easily in search engines
like Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos because so few of your competitors had websites.
These days it is very different.
If you're going to have a successful website, you need to start planning to beat your
competition from the very start.
That's why this guide is so important.
It will help you to focus on the few key things that will help your website stand out,
attract visitors and get you more customers and sales.
Just in case I've reduced your interest in having a website, let's have a quick look at
the alternative marketing methods.
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4. Traditional Marketing Is Expensive & It Isn't Working As Well As It
Used To
Traditional marketing methods like:
• Direct mail
• Telemarketing
• Newspaper and magazine advertising
• Radio and TV advertising
• Yellow Pages and other printed directories
are expensive and mostly rely on interrupting the thoughts and intentions of your
prospective customers and imposing your agenda on theirs.
The big problem is that people resent it.
They are irritated by getting so much junk mail.
They hate it when the telephone rings when they're eating their evening meal or they
are relaxing after a hard day at work.
They think of marketing as a waste of their time and fast forward through the TV
advertisements they've recorded on Tivo.
Even worse, people have seen so many irrelevant marketing messages, they've
developed a way to automatically ignore them so they don't even go into the brain
and have the effect that the marketers want.
To see what I mean, if you watched live TV last night, try to think back and see how
many advertisements you can remember watching?
I bet it's not many.
And that's despite the fact that TV commercials with their sight and sound have the
ability to reach into our emotions and are the most powerful weapons a traditional
marketer has.
But most of the time they don't work.
Even when they do, it's normally on a drip, drip basis through repeated exposure.
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5. The end result is that traditional marketing methods are in trouble.
That's because we know, both as consumers and business buyers that we can find
what we want, when we want it on the Internet.
We don't have to play the marketer's game of interrupting us anymore.
The Internet has given us confidence in our power to stick to our agenda and ignore
the marketing messages that are thrown at us every day, regardless of what we want.
Our new way of buying is much more efficient on our time.
When we're ready to think about making a purchase or want to investigate a problem
or opportunity we can go to Google and very easily find what we want.
The Internet has given customers power and freedom.
Its attractions are irresistible and unstoppable.
It's also helped suppliers who can spend much more of their time and money focusing
on potential buyers who are ready to buy or getting ready to buy.
Traditional marketing is a scatter-gun approach... occasionally it hits a target and
finds a new customer.
Unfortunately you have to pay for all the misses.
Internet marketing is much more focused at helping people who are looking for the
information to support their buying decisions when they are thinking about buying.
To take advantage of the opportunities that the Internet gives to businesses to get their
offers in front of people who want to buy, you need a website. [Strictly speaking there
are other ways to have a presence on the Internet but they don't have the credibility of
having your own website.]
To make your investment in your website pay-back, you need a website that works.
Part 1 An Attractive Website
Your website should look good and be easy for your visitors to use and move around
logically to find what they are looking for.
It should also be easy for you to use and to update. You don't want to find yourself
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6. paying a website designer each time you want to make some simple changes.
What's an attractive website?
We each have our own opinion so if you have strong views on the kind of design you
want, it's a great idea to keep a record of the websites you like and why you believe
they are attractive.
Is it the color scheme used?
Is it the header that appears on every page?
Is it the basic design?
Is it the way the words and pictures are used to reinforce the message?
Is it the way attention is drawn to an offer that makes readers want to act?
When you've got a good list, share this information with your short-list of website
designers and listen to their feedback.
An attractive design is important but please be aware of one thing.
Sometimes there is a trade-off between attractiveness and success.
You've probably seen websites that make you shudder.
The best Internet marketers are very savvy and test what works.
Sometimes it is the plain (even ugly) websites that sell best.
Pretty websites for the sake of being pretty leave little impression other than “it looks
nice” or “you have a great website designer.”
There are a few things to avoid which make it very difficult for your visitors to get
the information they need to buy and may even scare them away before they start
reading.
1. A poor contrast between the words and the background.
This is easy to read.
This is more difficult.
Generally be careful of reverse print where the writing is in a paler color than
the background. When it works well, it can look striking and different...
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7. White on black can look distinctive
but it is harder to read and will be tiring on the eyes of your readers. There's a
good reason why most books and newspapers keep things simple – black
lettering on a white background.
2. Using the wrong fonts.
Again, in an attempt to make your website look distinctive, some website
designers use a fancy font.
Like this.
Or this.
But as you'll have noticed, even a few words are hard to read.
The general advice is to use sans serif fonts (without the curly bits on the
letters) like Arial and Verdana for online messages and serif fonts like Times
New Roman and Georgia for offline communications.
Here are the examples of popular fonts:
This is Arial – a sans serif font
This is Verdana – another sans serif font
This is Times New Roman – a serif font and used as the main font for this
document
This is Georgia – another serif font
You can prove the general advice for yourself by looking at how huge Internet
companies like Google and Amazon use sans serif fonts and how newspapers
and books use serif fonts.
You shouldn't change font styles very often on your website. Using one style
for headlines and titles and another for the main text can be very effective.
3. Using the wrong font size.
As people get older their eyesight generally gets worse and they won't tolerate
websites that make them squint because the words are too small.
But there's a trade-off. The most valuable part of a web-page that gets the most
attention is known as “above the fold”. This is the area that can be seen without
having to move the slider to scroll down.
4. Using too few or too many images.
Photographs, diagrams and drawings will make the web-page look more
attractive and can communicate much more effectively than just words.
Imagine how hard it would be to describe an elephant accurately without a
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8. photograph.
However, in general, it is the words that sell.
5. Doing anything that significantly slows down the loading of your website.
Most visitors to your website will have a broadband connection which makes
this much less of a problem than it used to be. But as technology has changed,
the demands we put on it also increase and people get even more impatient.
Big videos often need buffering and may be using precious capacity if people
have a limited broadband service. Other technologies also take time to load.
Google has admitted that it specifically includes load speed as one of the
factors it considers when selecting which websites to rank the highest.
When you're thinking about design issues, take a look at your main competitor’s
websites. Imagine you are a potential customer who doesn't know much about what
you sell.
• How good an impression does the website make? Why?
• What do you like and dislike?
• What makes you want to contact the business or get to know them better?
• What puts you off making contact? Does this look like a deliberate way to
qualify leads?
Then take a look at the websites you look at for products and services that you are
thinking about buying and do the same exercise.
While your customers won't think exactly like you, we are pre-programmed to
respond to many of the same triggers that attract and repel.
Part 2 - A Website that Attracts Visitors
The second element of having a website that works is to get a steady stream of new
people visiting your website.
This traffic can only come from a few sources:
• The search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Other websites that give you or sell you links from their websites to yours. This
includes the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Emails and mobile messages that encourage customers to click through to the
website.
• Offline promotional methods that encourage customers to visit your website. In
fact your website is likely to become the centre-point for all your marketing
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9. because it lets you tell your entire story and message.
In this guide, I want to concentrate on the first point, getting visitors from the search
engines.
It's the search engines that make Internet marketing such a big change from
traditional marketing.
For the first time, customers are able to find recommended websites based on typing
a few words into the search query in Google.
There's never been another marketing medium that lets you target so precisely the
message you give to potential customers right at the very moment when they are
looking for solutions to problems or products and services to buy.
As well as helping St Louis based businesses improve their marketing on the Internet,
I also work in a specialist niche, equine marketing, so I'll use an example of people
searching for horse riding lessons to show you just what I mean.
If people search for the generic term of riding lessons and click over to a website, it
has to discuss riding lessons in general terms.
But if someone types in "horse riding lessons for children", then the website can
focus on child safety issues that parents are concerned about before booking lessons.
If someone types in "horse riding lessons for adults", the website can focus on how
horse riding relieves everyday stresses and how it can help people to lose weight or
stay fit and slim in ways that are much more fun than running on a treadmill at the
gym.
The message is very different because the motivations behind the desire to have
riding lessons are different. The offers that you can make are also different.
Yes you could combine riding lessons for children and adults on the same page but
your message becomes both longer and more confusing. That means that its success
rate is likely to drop.
Design And Traffic Strategies Combine
When you start thinking about the different combinations of what you sell and who
may buy them, you can probably see that your website needs are more complicated
than you first thought.
Your website needs to channel visitors down the right pathways if they approach it
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10. from the home page of your website domain. Individual pages need to be found in
Google if they make a detailed search.
This match of solution message to problem search is one of the reasons why websites
with blogs can be so effective. Menu-driven websites have to be very structured but
blogs can benefit by being unstructured. That gives them a broader scope to pull a
wider range of visitors into your marketing net.
Getting Traffic From The Search Engines Like Google
Google dominates the search engine market with 65% to 70% market share with
Yahoo and Bing much smaller. For many business sectors, the domination of Google
is even bigger.
I'm therefore going to focus on how the Google search engine works.
There are three parts relevant to local businesses:
1. Businesses listed in the organic or natural search results. These are the websites
that Google has decided are best suited to the search term used.
2. Pay per click advertising. You can pay to have your website featured on the
first page without having to do the work necessary to persuade Google that
your website is the best fit.
3. Local Places & Maps. Searches for a particular product or service may show a
map with local competitors and links to these businesses are included in the
first page results.
If you want to get the most visitors to your website, you need to be using all three
methods effectively. If you don't, you leave an opportunity available for your
competitors to get business from customers who never have the opportunity to take a
look at your website.
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11. What Google Wants
Google is the dominant search engine for one reason. It consistently provides the user
with the best experience.
It quickly delivers a list of websites that closely match the search term entered. It
does this through a secret, very clever algorithm that marks every website it looks at.
Google has shared some of the factors that help a website to be favored and search
engine optimization specialists have established other factors that impact positively
through extensive testing.
This concept of relevance applies to all three ways for your website to be listed on
page 1 of Google – the organic results, the paid advertising and Google Places.
If you don't give Google what it wants, your website may as well not exist. Most
people when searching stick to the first page and very rarely does anyone go past
page 3 of the search results.
The Best Visitors Come From Organic Listings And Search Engine Optimization
Both pay per click advertising and Google Places are useful but the best quality
traffic usually comes from the organic listings which have earned their places in the
listings by search engine optimization.
Let's take a look at the top results for a search for “horses”.
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12. I'm going to use this example to highlight some of the important ways that Google
helps to identify websites that are the most relevant to people typing in a search
query.
The number one position is held by Wikipedia. This is what Google considers an
authority website and it is extremely difficult to knock down from the first position.
Wikipedia is one of the top ten most popular websites in the world, just behind
Google and Facebook.
The next three all have horse or horses in their website domain name. It's a very
strong indicator that the website is very relevant to the query. Wikipedia doesn't but it
does have horse in the longer link which again tells Google that the page is about
horses.
All four have horse or horses in the blue title link that is clickable. The word is
repeated in the more detailed description that is also shown on the search results. If it
wasn't, then the big computers at Google would think that the website isn't as
relevant.
Then if you were to click on each website listed, you'd find that each delivers on the
promise. The web-page is about horses with both words and images. Because it is
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13. relevant readers will either spend a long time looking at this particular page or they
will click through to other more detailed pages on the website.
Of course some web-pages don't deliver on the implied promise but Google picks that
up over time because it monitors how quickly people click away to look at other
websites.
There's much more to search engine optimization than I've covered here but I hope
you can see how you need to be thinking about ranking in the search engines from the
time when you first start thinking about your website.
Good search engine optimization can recover from these design errors but it takes
more time and effort.
Keyword Research is Essential
If you're going to design your website and even its domain name around the phrases
that you most want to rank for, you need to know what phrases are the most popular.
This exercise is called keyword research.
There's some art and science to it because the more popular the search term, the
harder it is to rank on page one.
There's also the problem that some phrases are closely linked to buying, other phrases
are linked to getting ready to buy and other phrases have little or no commercial
intent.
You can do your own keyword research because Google has a free tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
While it looks quite easy to use there are traps and many people find the work boring.
So, they rush through it and don't do it properly.
Because it is so important, I recommend that you outsource your keyword research to
a professional who will use their judgement to guide you to the best phrases to target.
Part 3 – Converting Visitors To Leads And Customers
Some Internet marketers will tell you that all you need to succeed with a website is to
get lots of visitors to it.
I don't agree.
Earlier in this report I asked you to stay focused on the simple formula for success.
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14. More Visitors x Better Conversion = More Customers, Sales & Profits
You need to be clear on what you want your website to do before you have it
designed.
First let me tell you that if your website ranks well in Google it will get three types of
visitors:
1. People who are ready to buy what you sell.
2. People who are getting ready to buy. They are not ready to make a decision at
this stage but everything on your website can help to attract them towards you
or repel them.
3. People who have no intention of buying from you, like your competitors who
are checking up on what you're doing or people who think you may have job
vacancies now or in the future.
The first key conversion question is...
What do you want people who are ready to buy to do?
Call you? Email you? Visit your premises?
Whatever it is, you need to make it easy to do.
Nobody will call if they can't find your telephone number easily and quickly.
Nobody will visit your premises if they can't find your address or even better,
directions or a map.
If you've make it easy for customers to contact you, you're part way down the
conversion journey but you've got to motivate people to call.
Being easy to do business with isn't enough.
Why should they contact you rather than one or more of your competitors?
Is it because you've shown that you are the leading expert and the only credible
source of the product or service they want to buy?
Do you sell a unique product or service? If they want it, they have to buy it from you?
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15. Do you have a great reputation backed up by plenty of user testimonials, case studies
and reviews on your website and third party websites?
Do you have special offers that create a sense of urgency to act now?
Are you the supplier who makes it an easy and comfortable experience to buy?
Sometimes buying can take you out of your comfort zone because you don't
understand the problem/solution and to make a purchase, you have to trust your
vendor.
Whatever it is, something in your marketing message needs to persuade your website
visitor that they should make contact with you and find out more.
The second big conversion question is...
What do you want people who are getting ready to buy to do?
Most people start searching on the Internet for solutions before they are ready to
make the buying decision.
How are you going to begin the relationship that leads to you being trusted and
preferred to your competitors?
If you do nothing, they may forget which websites were helpful and which weren't.
Do you want people to bookmark your website so that they can come back to it
without having to go through the search engines again?
Or do you want people to download a report like this one which helps them to make a
better informed buying decision?
You can do it by putting the report directly on your website to download or you can
ask people to give you their details and in particular their email address.
The big advantage of getting the email address is that you can send them more
information that can be helpful and give them privileged access to special offers.
Again this is best considered at the website design stage because you can include an
email opt-in form on every page so that all your visitors have the chance to see it.
They may not act the first time but at least they have the opportunity.
This is the opt-in form from my website www.HorseWebsitesThatWork.com
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16. The email messages can be part of an autoresponder series which sends pre-written
emails out to your prospective customers on a pre-set time basis, whether you are
working or not.
Alternatively you can send out broadcast emails with special offers when you need to
boost sales or you want to tie in your products and services to a big news story.
Alternatively you may want to build your relationship through a social media site like
Twitter or Facebook and your website would need to make that clear.
Why Both Traffic And Conversion Are So Essential
My purpose in this guide is to help you to have a website that works. Remember that
is a website that helps you to make more money.
Let's take a look at some numbers to show why traffic and conversion are both so
important.
Visitors per Month Conversion % Number of Inquiries
100 2% 2
500 2% 10
1,000 2% 20
1,000 5% 50
1,000 10% 100
These are hypothetical numbers and in no way represent how well your business
could perform with a website. It will vary on a case by case basis.
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17. It shows that the big money comes from managing both your traffic and your
conversion factors.
If you do neither, your website will struggle to cover its own costs.
If you do one without the other, then you're missing big opportunities and perhaps
gifting customers to your competitors.
But if you do both, your website will become an automated 24/7 marketing machine
that continues to generate leads and sales for your business.
The Next Step – Your Invitation For A FREE New Website Needs
Analysis Consultation
I hope you've found the content of The Busy Business Owner's Guide To Having A
Successful Website helpful.
I've tried to avoid making it too complicated or technical.
The information is generic.
But I know that each business is unique and I'd like to help you to tailor your own
Internet marketing strategy to your own situation.
I offer a free, no obligation, 30 minute consultation called the New Website Needs
Analysis.
There's no selling in the session. We will focus on what you want to achieve with
your website and how it can be done.
If you like what you hear, I hope you'll give me a chance to explain how my Internet
marketing company can help you to achieve your objectives but it's up to you.
Call me on 636-328-7752 or email me at lynda@stlouiswebsitesthatwork.com and we can
arrange your free consultation.
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