Here are the top 10 advices that we offer for you to kick start this year with:
10.) Identify your product or service: Identify what you are offering and have a plan of your services and products 6 months from now. You can come up with some informational material for your services and products and build up content around it. Your core focus of your business should have a sound presentation in an intuitive and illustrative flow-chart manner. This can be a downloadable PowerPoint or an online flash presentation. After coming up with the material for your product you can roll it out gradually by setting dates for any new services or products’ updates.
You might want to research your market size and where competitors are first. You have to check to see if there are people out there who are willing to buy your product. For us, web design is a pretty unique skill even though there are numerous of competitors out there. You can go through a catalog and check to see if a relating industry has an ongoing ad campaign through a span of several months(If they are making money they would still stick to the same ad purchase). If you are in the same industry as your competitor in this catalog you can offer a different services or products.
9.) Online Content/Documentation: People are always curious about any new products or services that you may offer. This can be your competitor that you may find yourself working with in the future or a potential new client checking in to see if you are committed in your field of expertise. You and your company have this documentation ready to support your products and services. Every business makes business decisions based on ‘HOW MUCH’ support they can get online even in the case of two large corporations having the same product. If one company lacks the support in documentation than the other, it will lose the business opportunity from a potential client.
Most companies these days are after the more serious client that are willing to jump a tiny hurdle to learn more about their products. These are the people who are ready to spend on a these products. When a client needs a service or product they will give out their information just to learn more about this services and products. These contents show that you are there for them even when they are just looking at them online without you being there.
8.) Newsletter: Newsletter is a great way to tell your current clients that you are alive. People are always busy and to get an email of somebody they work with shows that there are activities going on in your business. When you send out a newsletter your clients are eager to open it to see if there are any offering they are interested in helping their business grow. To expand your referral rate, you can include a referral special pricing for them to use if they can get anyone else to use your products or services. This is a great tool to inexpensively grab the attention of your current client for more business and their associates without spending a dime on search engine marketing.
7.) Landing Page: Most people have not heard of a landing page and do not know what it uses are for. A landing page on a website sole purpose is to generate more sales or to get the information of the visitor as effective as possible. It is a hook with bait on it. A landing page is simple without too much distraction and radiates the professionalism of your business to attract visitors to go through the process and learn more about your service. Having a great landing is as effective as having a trained sale person 24/7 on your website.
6.) Organic SEO: Please don’t be fooled by many Search Engine Optimization company out there. They usually want to sell you on expensive PPC. Yes if you have the money then you can get instant results from these services that do not last the day you stop paying for it.
The secret of having a lasting result is to be organic. Your website can achieve this by ensuring that there are activities elsewhere directly relating to your site on the internet. These are sites that are relevant to your business. This is a great way of attracting people you don’t know to stop by and visit your website. Also search Engines gives you a higher score if the contents on these sites actually are related to your business. It does not stop there. Once our site is matured where you get constant traffic to about 1 million page views a month then you can start using PPC since there are a lot more going on in your site.
Before doing this you must prepare your website so that it is search engine friendly.
5.) Budget: Cut your maintenance cost on your website and hire people whenever it is needed. A full time staff maintaining your website will drain your account before you sees any rewards.
You should list out all the requirements that you want from your site. Get some help and discuss it with someone technical and list all the details point. Now you can weight which one is the most important for your business and sort your list. Not everything on the list is critical for your success. Most successful business online offers core functionalities only. Some of our clients have us set up really simplistic website but it is intricate thought out.
The next thing for you to do is call up a contracting company to get your website upgraded. There are many domestic companies that can get the work done and give you that assurance you need within your company’s budget. You can get an oversea company at a fraction of the cost but you also run into the complication of communication and trust issues. Altogether, you can find companies out there that maintain/upgrade your online presence without shelling out more.
4.) Design: Generally people can recognize what a well put together website look like. The well design can encompass the compatibility test with all browsers and still maintain its integrity.
Even if you have a great product with a marginal website, the first impression on your potential client can well turn them away to your competitors who offer less of product. The design is a measure of how well you care to look good and present yourself in front of your audience. It can help improve the number of visitors to your website.
3.) Grasp: If we can all stand on shoulder of giants then we would. To start off you must build a great relation with other companies. Build an alliance with them to sell your products and services and the other way around. This makes your business look for capable.
2.) Automate and centralize your business: Use today capabilities in technology to automate the things that take up most of your time each day so you are free to do things that are more important. Automate and delegate your worker to answer lesser important email without allowing them access to your account. You can automate the process of updating content on your website. With today’s technology we can link communication a lot closer to our peripherals without forcing ourselves to waste our valuable time traveling the distance. Sometime leaders of their company need to be out there to lead and not corner themselves with these tasks. With a structure automated system, you have more time to lead.
You can centralize your data if you manage satellite offices or multiple websites. Centralizing your data online helps save time to see what is going on in your business. This would reduce the paper work and time floating back and forth between offices and databases. With a structure system you can look at the report at anytime you please. The power of knowing what is going on in your work environment is at your will with a centralize system.
Right now I am working on an automated program that scours the internet for data that I can use for my company. This saves us a lot of time having someone at the office doing it manually.
1.) Goals: Prepare a short term goal for your website and what you expect from it. Assign these short term goals to people with your company who is responsible for it and give all of them a single due date and list down responsibilities for each of these goals. Revisit these goals and check them off. Do it over again.