(excerpt from 5-Minute Marketing) by Penny Sansevieri
First things first. Having a website is a must, even in today’s world where social media follows us wherever we go. In fact, a website is especially important now. Social media sites change all the time. Having the stability of a website is the single most significant thing we can do for a business, product, or book. Today you’ll find a number of ways to build a great-looking site for free. If that seems too good to be true, it is.
What you cannot gain from those free services is an understanding of how to make your site effective as well as attractive.
Below, I’ve outlined important things to keep in mind for those of you who want to build a site and for those of you who think your site may need a tune-up.
Establish Your Goals
First and foremost, please understand why you are building this site. A site that lacks a single goal is a site without any real direction. Will you use your site to build your mailing list, sell your book, attract more business, or book more speaking events? You may want your site to do more than one of those goals I listed; however, you must choose which objective is the most important. That objective is what you will build your homepage around.
Understand Your Customer
When designing your website, it’s important to remember that it’s not actually about you, but is about how you can help your customer. Design your site to clearly communicate how you can address their problems. Until you understand your customers and their single biggest reason for visiting your site, you will very likely stumble through the rest of this piece. When you can pinpoint what drives visitors to seek out your site, you can create a homepage that will not only welcome your customer, but convert them, too.
It’s Not About “you.” It’s About YOU!
Most websites use language like “I” or “we.” What’s wrong with that? Saying words like “I” or “We” takes the focus away from your visitor. Again, design your site to revolve around your consumers and their needs. Consider the following: “This financial guide will help YOU understand YOUR debt and retire early.” Now consider: “We’ve developed a financial guide packed with helpful information people will benefit from.” Which website would you visit?
Website Copy
Now that you know the importance of you and YOU, let’s talk about the rest of the words visitors will read on your site: your website copy. Creating website copy that is effective is critical. Authors and business owners often write their own copy but do not include copy that is effective from a marketing perspective. If you feel like you’re hitting all of the points in this article but still aren’t selling via your site, the problem could be your website copy. Your website copy should include compelling calls to action to convert visitors into customers. How do you know if your copy isn’t working? Ask someone who knows. This might be your end user or a professional who can evaluate it. Automated evaluation systems are out there, but I’m not a fan of those. You want an actual person to look at your copy and tell you what’s working and what isn’t.
At the heart of every website must be the marketing principles that include well-defined goals, a mission, and an understanding of the principles that go into creating something that isn’t about you, but about your end user.
Write a Newsletter
As I mentioned above, while having a social media following is great, it’s not enough to simply be popular online. Facebook, although still a great resource, has largely gone to paid advertisers. If you aren’t running Facebook ads, your updates probably aren’t consistently showing up in your fans’ newsfeeds. Through a newsletter, you can ensure that you’re consistently communicating with your followers. Building a newsletter is simple and can be free with sites like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Aweber.
Don’t Expect Something for Nothing
I’ve talked a lot about giving someone something in exchange for an email address. We live in a world where we are inundated with email, so you need to give your visitors a compelling reason to provide their contact information. In the past, giving a chapter of your book or a free report was enough to drive sign-ups. Now, consumers expect more, and you need to deliver. For some folks, offering a $25 gift card in a monthly drawing could be a great way to drive sign-ups.
If you don’t want to give away a gift card, Backlinko has an excellent strategy to double, triple, and in some cases, quadruple the sign-ups you get to your website by expanding on popular blog posts and offering an upgraded or enhanced version of those blog posts. Let’s say you have one post that you know does amazingly well. It’s been shared a lot and has a ton of great comments. You can expand on that post and share it with users in exchange for their email address. Click here to see the full post.
Include Testimonials
We hear about online scams all the time, so the answer to my next question may seem obvious. Would you ever buy something from someone you don’t trust? No! Yet I often see sites without any kind of testimonials, reviews, or social media love. Including testimonials, reviews, or your number of social media followers helps to build trust and show your consumers that they, too, can belong to a large tribe of adoring fans. If your social media numbers are low, you can skip this until you grow your numbers, but testimonials are definitely a must, whether that is written or visual.
Whenever you can, record people using/reading your product, or get them to record something after they’ve used/read it. Why? Studies show that having one enthusiastic consumer testimonial is more effective than any other promotion. You can also do it for them. Here’s an easy way: Invite them to Google Hangouts and record a testimonial using their YouTube connection. It’s very easy to do and a simple way to grab more video for your website!
Direct Visitors
Once you’ve gotten visitors to your site, you need to direct them, which means you need a strong call to action. You should have several different types of these action statements to make the sale. Here are some of the most popular:
- Contact us
- Learn more
- Call now
- Take our survey
- Request a consultation
- Click here
- Apply now
- Ask the expert
Knowledge is Power
Installing Google Analytics is a fantastic way to gain insight into your marketing efforts by measuring traffic, where visitors are coming from, which keywords are driving them to your site, and your bounce rate. A bounce rate is the percentage of people who “bounce” off your site after landing on it. Regardless of what anyone tells you, there is no typical number for this. If you’re not sure, check with your web designer or someone who understands your market.
Whether you’re making your website from scratch or simply giving an existing site a tune-up, the tips mentioned above will help you create a site that incorporates marketing techniques to make it effective, address your visitors’ needs, and provide you with knowledge about visitors to your site.
Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and Adjunct Professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book-marketing and media-relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book-marketing campaigns.