Archive for category web marketing

Your brand name is what causes the consumer to lock into your brand image. Ideally, your website domain name should reflect the brand, i.e., www.australianopen.com. If you rely on Web-based sales, it is imperative you carry your brand name and image throughout your website. This includes artwork and graphics, but of critical importance is to keep that name in the domain name.

Sometimes the domain name isn’t available. You can try to purchase the domain. Be prepared to pay a premium for an aged brand-related domain name. Don’t be tempted to by a domain name with a .org or .net extension. People will always choose .com first before trying another extension. One exception to this is if you are branding for an organization like The Red Cross or www.redcross.org. For businesses and professional, get a .com top-level domain. Don’t be tempted to use hyphens in the domain name either. That makes it harder to remember.

If you can’t get a www.yourbrandname.com domain, consider using your tagline. A short, simple tagline is best for this. To borrow from Foster’s tagline, a brand related domain name could be www.australianforbeer.com.au.

Another option is to use a keyword phrase that receives a good number of local searches on a monthly basis. Google Adwords tool is free and easy to use. Brainstorm a few relevant keyword phrases and then find out if that domain name is available. For example, you have a business offering different types of cruise packages and charter boats on the Sydney Harbour; you might find www.sydneyharbourcruises.com available.

Once you settle on the top-level domain consider buying up all the other domain extension for .org,.net,.biz and so on. This prevents your competitor from using these other domains to compete with yours. Unused domain names typically cost less than $10 a year. This is a smart strategy to secure your online name.

Another way to capture people searching for your website is to brainstorm different spellings and purchase those domain names. Domain registrars allow you to redirect these domains to your main domain. For example, people may type in www.sydneyharborcruises.com instead of www.sydneyharbourcruises.com. You discover that www.sydneyharborcruises.com is available and purchase it. Now you just redirect the one domain to point to the main domain called www.sydneyharbourcruises.com.

Before building or redesigning your website, think about your target audience. What information are they looking for and the tone of the content. If the target audience is brides looking for a unique and memorable way for a wedding reception, make sure you have photos and content written along those lines. Of course, share your brand guide with the graphic artist responsible for the web design. He or she needs to incorporate the correct font, colors and brand usage within the web design.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools continue to dominate the online marketing landscape, but email still remains one of the most effective methods for building customer relationships and should be a cornerstone of any marketing campaign. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where users are bombarded with constant messages and information, most people will look at everything in their email inbox, even if it is just the subject line. This is why email newsletters remain a viable marketing tool. The following steps will help optimise your marketing newsletter to increase subscriptions and, in turn, increase sales.

Make an intriguing offer

The sign-up form is the most important part of the newsletter itself, because most people need a compelling reason to add to their already full inboxes. Describe what benefits subscribers can expect, including discounts and useful industry tips and information. Content is critical to a successful newsletter, but a convincing pitch is essential.

Find balance between too often and not often enough

Constantly spamming the inboxes of your mailing list is the quickest way to get subscribers to unsubscribe. However, if you’re sending messages too infrequently, your subscribers may not remember your company or be as intrigued by your sales pitches. A balance must be maintained between the two extremes, but sending newsletters once or twice per month is typically effective.

Keep the design clean and simple

Keep the design simple to ensure your message is easy to read. Include enough white space that each element of your newsletter is easy to find. Be careful when using large graphics or images. While they can give your newsletter an attractive and professional look, many people block images when reading email, so they will see large white space instead your images.

The subject line is critical

Nobody will open your email if the subject line does not grab their attention. Make your subject line specific, yet short and to the point. Highlight the most important information of the newsletter and describe the exact benefits the readers can gain by opening the email.

Don’t oversell

Your newsletters should be more than just a relentless sales pitch. Provide useful industry information to prove to your subscribers that your company is an industry expert that can be trusted to offer a premium-quality product. Readers are constantly being sold anything and everything. Offer them something more than a sales pitch.

Useful e-Newsletter services

Many e-newsletter services are available to help you begin your email marketing campaign. Two of the more intuitive services are MailChimp and iContact.

MailChimp lets you create email lists, track who has viewed the messages and integrates with useful third party applications like Google Docs and Zoho. MailChimp can build your email campaign in just three steps

1. Create the email list by adding information including list name, reply-to email and your company description. Then click “Save” and your list is complete.
2. Populate your list with email addressed by importing your contacts or adding them manually.
3. Finally, write your e-newsletter message and have MailChimp send it out to every address in your list.

iContact is also a very user friendly e-newsletter application. Its interface is visually appealing and easy to navigate, and its innumerable features let you customize your email campaigns to your precise needs.

These features include:

1. Survey builder – Create surveys to receive input from the people in your email database to focus your newsletter and promotions to your customers’ precise desires.
2. Message scheduling – Write out all your newsletters in advance and let iContact send the messages to your database on an automated schedule.
3. Open click tracking – Keep track of who is opening your emails and who is putting them in the trash folder.

• Content is and will always be king – The phrase, “Content is king” has been overused so often that it already sounds more like a cliché. Yet, this adage remains true ever since. The rule of thumb is simple—constantly update your web content with fresh, steamy content (relevant, of course). As robots dig fresh content, keep adding unique and quality content regularly to attract then and help you rank well on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
 
• Backlinks are key – The more backlinks you have, the merrier and the better. But keep in mind that quality has much more bearing than quantity. The goal is to get backlinks from high quality, high ranking websites that are related to your products/services. Plus, you need to avoid link farms and other spammy pursuits at getting links back to your website. Instead, there are numerousniche directories that you can utilize to submit your website to or some blog articles, and generate backlinks.
 
• Keep tagging – Create keyword optimized title tags for every page of your website. Your keyword should be as near to the beginning of the phrase as possible. Also, remember that the title tag of your web page can be different from the heading title of the article itself.
 
• Map it out – Create a sitemap so that search engine robots can easily visit and index your pages. A sitemap is basically an XML protocol that notifies the search engines about the URLs or web pages on a website that can be crawled. Alternatively, you can use Google and a number of free applications that generate sitemaps.
 
• Anchors away – Use the same keywords for your anchor texts that link to the different pages on your site or when backlinking. Having anchor texts instead of using “click here” helps site visitors and search engines understand what they’re going to find when they click the link.
 
• Link deeper – Don’t forget to create deep links, which is linking to a web page other than your home page. Deep linking ensures that you have backlinks coming in to as many web pages as possible. Deep linking also signifies that you build links to relevant and worthwhile content or webpages of your site.
 
• Start blogging – Create a blog about your products/services and make the URL as: yourdomainname/blog. The advantages of starting a blog are: it helps in adding fresh content, you get extra SEO love when other websites link any of your blog posts, and you also get new content when readers leave comments on your blog.
 
• Tag those pictures – All images on your site should also be well-optimized with targeted keywords. Describe them briefly using alt tags to help search engines that index images find your pages easily, offering greater chances of getting higher search engine rankings. Also, adding image alt tags or alt attributes help the visually impaired to easily access your website using a screen reader, including those visitors who use image search and text only web browsers.
 
• Don’t dare to trick the search engines – Using hidden text, joining link farms, keyword stuffing, and other practices that meant to mislead search engines is not a good idea. Doing so can only harm your ranking, and the penalties will certainly outweigh the temporary benefits. So, keep it clean and to avoid being blacklisted by the major search engines.
 
• Don’t forget your human readers – Always remember your human visitors when optimizing your website—and not just the robots. After all, SEO is meant to help your readers discover the informative content on your site. So, make your content interesting and useful while keeping in mind both the humans and the search engines.

• Create your website using efficient Search Engine Optimization methods – Employ SEO starting from day one. Why wait when you’ve already spent a fortune on your website only to find out later on that it wasn’t search engine friendly. Don’t forget to apply page techniques, such as meta tags, headers, keyword density to further improve your website’s search ranking.
• Have a strong Search Engine Optimization plan – Never assume that just as long as you build and launch your website, you are going to get the top spot on search engine results page (SERP). It takes a lot of effort to build a website that’s based on off-page optimization and other solid SEO guidelines. Off-page optimization is the process of building links from relevant third party websites to your website. The higher the Google page rank (PR) of these sites, the better search engine ranking your site will get. As a rule, be sure to incorporate your keywords within the actual link text.
• Leaving your search engine ranking to pure luck is not an advisable approach – That’s why search ranking improvement should be an ongoing mission. You must take SEO seriously if you want to continuously progress and eventually dominate the search engine results page. Execute your SEO plan accordingly and work it out until you reach the number one position. Once you’ve attained your desired results, set a maintenance plan into place to keep that spot for good.
• Reaching the top of search ranking is no joke – In fact, those sites found in the top 2-3 positions get the most traffic. Now, if your site isn’t included there, it means you haven’t maximized your website’s SEO potential. Therefore, you’re not growing your business as large or as productively as you can. So never be contented at mediocre results or settle for anything less than search engine domination.
• Improve your website’s visibility and search ranking now – Start from where you are and work your way up. While getting top search rankings that you can be proud of takes a lot of work, time and patience, the fruits of your labour will certainly pay off once you see a huge ROI.

A website is a very powerful tool to promote your business online. However, when you are quite new to web development, you are more prone to make errors along the way. To help you avoid them, find out below the biggest mistakes people make when building a website.

1. Improper domain name – You should pay a special attention to your domain name. Choose a catchy, easy to remember domain name related to your business. As most people are likely to forget long names, it’s better to pick shorter domain names. It’s also advisable to perform a key word research and try to include top key words into your URL.
2. Inferior design poor functionality – Having a website is useless if no one can access it with much ease. Superb design is predominantly based on consistency. Menus must appear in the same location on every page. Links must have the same color and typeface. There must also be a visible logo at all times. It’s also important to define your target audience and incorporate their preferences.
3. Very complex or too slow – While flash animation is fascinating, it may be too complicated for some visitors. Although visual appeal matters, it must complement with functionality and ease of use for the average user. Plus, a more elaborate design usually takes longer to load on many computers.
4. Static site – Format, design, and content are all time-sensitive. As technology is dynamically changing, there will constantly be new tools available to make websites look and perform better. Don’t build a website and forget about it. Update content from time to time as you see fit. And maximize new applications to make the site look and work better.
5. 404 error messages and broken links – Verify if all links on your site work; find faulty or inappropriately labeled links, as you’ll most likely lose visitors quickly if they see a “404 file not found” error message. If you have a big website, you may want to add a form so users can report a broken link. Doing so also lets users know you are in control of any issues they may encounter.
6. No contact information – Users and potential clients need to be able to reach you easily for any questions, concerns, or suggestions. Having a “Contact Us” page is similar to having a business card, which should be accessible from any page of your site. Moreover, make sure to actually attend to these messages either personally or via an auto-responder.
7. Disregarding statistics – Visitor traffic data and reports are available for your site, which may be obtained from your web hosting provider or offered by a third-party. By constantly tracking your statistics, you can aptly modify your marketing and design towards those frequent visitors, or determine weakness based on which target market you are not attracting.
8. Free or too inexpensive hosting – No matter how enticing these services are, remember that the success of your website largely depends on the stability of your chosen web service company. An efficient host provider should have virtually zero downtime, and offer services like technical support, etc. You may want to read testimonials about the web host company you’re eyeing on or perhaps take advantage of their free trials (if there’s any) before making your final decision.
9. Neglecting spiders – Search engines utilize spiders to find your website. Ensure that your pages are carefully designed to rank high on search engine results; this process is called Search Engine Optimization or simply SEO. Choose only ethical SEO techniques so as not to be banned by search engines.
10. Not hiring an expert – Creating a website is not for everyone. Avoid do-it-yourself methods and get a professional to build your website, especially if you’re a beginner. Though it may be rather tempting to let your friend’s computer savvy son set up your website, you should think twice of such a decision. There are reasonably-priced web designers and companies who offer customized services to give your website a professional look and feel it deserves.

These are the top 10 biggest mistakes people make when building a website. Do veer away from these at all cost to guarantee a well-designed website you and your audience will love.