Web Content, Design, & Promotion

Does your website position you as an Object Expert in your field?

Is your website so focused on short-term gains that it neglects to promote your "obvious" expertise?

If you are a coach, consultant, or the owner of any other type of service business, it should be immediately aobvious to website visitors that you are obviously an expert in your field. You possess the background, competence, empathy, and professionalism needed to solve your market's problems or help them achieve their goals.

To learn more, download a special issue of Guerrilla Marketing & Design entitled, Become an Obvious Expert.

Or, even better, visit Elsom Eldridge III's Obvious Expert website and order his pathfinding book, How to Position Yourself as The Obvious Expert in 90 Days or Less Without Spending a Forftune on Advertising. 

It contains hundreds of case studies. There's also space for you to describe the steps you're going to take to become an Obvious Expert in your field.

How to profit from visitor assessments on your website

An assessment is a one-to-one communication that makes it easy for you to learn a lot about your website visitors.  Here are four of the things you can learn:

1. E-mail address. You learn the e-mail address, and often the names, of visitors interested enough in your product or service to fill out the assessment form.
2. Problems and goals. You can find exactly what challenges your website visitors are facing, what problems they need to overcome and what goals they want to achieve.
3. Previous solutions. You can find out what solutions they've tried in the past; what worked, and what didn't work.
4. Urgency. How urgent is this problem? What is the visitor's intention to buy?

To learn more, visit www.assessmentgenerator.com.

Use web audio to boost response and keep visitors longer

Web audio is here: no longer must your website be silent.

And, thankfully, we're not talking about chintzy sound effects or "audio clip art."

Audio adds great impact to personal greetings and welcoming statements, third-party testimonials, and it can help you sell your services as a speaker.

Learn more here.

Boost opt-in response by offering a sample of your e-mail newsletter

Most websites include a permission marketing component, typically an invitation to "sign up for our free e-mail newsletter!"

Yet, relatively few web sites explain in detail why visitors should sign up for the newsletter!

This is crazy; it's foolish to expect me to sign-up for more e-mail unless I know exactly what I'm going to get in exchange for my e-mail address and permission to contact me!

So, provide me with compelling reasons to sign-up; tell me:

• Who can benefit from your newsletter
• The types of topics you cover in your newsletter
• What readers say about the quality of your content
• Your credentials for sending your newsletter

Better yet, offer a for subscribing...and don't forget to reiterate your privacy policy!

• Click here for information on incentives.
• Click here to find out how to display your newsletter on your web site.
  

3 steps to success

Looking for a simple way to encourage website visitors to do what you want them to do?

I'm constantly amazed by the number of web sites that simplify complex tasks by using the "3 Steps to Success" approach.

For example, Ebay makes it easy to buy something, Blogger and Typepad make it easy to publish your first blog post, all using the "3 simple steps" approach.

Do you?

Natural selection will take care of volume

A recent Seth Godin blog mentioned that a new blog appears every six seconds, and he asks, "when is tthere just too much noise?"

I don't think see a problem with the proliferation of blogs, because only blogs with relevance and style will succeed. Natural selection is a great "filter."

Plus, it's not a "numbers" game, as much as it's a "target market" game.

It's more important for most businesses to utilize a blog as a way to keep in consistent touch with clients and prospects at the lowest possible cost, i.e. customer retention, than it is to worry about the number of blogs yours has to compete with

Start with your core market, do whatever it takes to build consistent and intimate relationships with them, and then worry about what might work--or might not work.

Worksheet still available

If you did not receive my free website planning worksheet, feel free to e-mail me.

If you'd like, I'll also send you a copy of my Guerrilla Marketing & Design newsletter titled: "Is Your Web Site Too Hard?" It describes some of the design errors that may frustrate visitors to your web site.