On your journey to build relationships, you have developed a substantial web presence by sharing your content and interacting with your online connections. You share in order to help. Always avoid giving people the hard sell no matter what.

Your main objective for writing and syndicating content in your niche or industry is to provide other people with valuable, educational, and useful information. As you share more and more of your content, you start to build stronger and stronger relationships with the people in your online communities. You establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME) and you keep strengthening your credibility and your reputation by interacting with others and consistently providing them with information that can help them to solve their problems. There is no other motive for you whatsoever. Nobody wants to be “sold.”

A right time and a wrong time

From a practical perspective, as a business owner, there will come a time, of course, when you will be selling your goods and/services. Just remember that your approach to selling your offerings to other people must be done in the most appropriate and unobtrusive manner possible. An appropriate place to connect your readers with what you are selling is at the bottom of your article in a resource box on your landing page. It is very important to remember that you shouldn’t consider selling anything until you feel that the relationship with the other person is strong enough to withstand it. The trust and credibility must have a very strong foundation before that point. Always remember to avoid (at all cost) allowing your content to sound like a commercial.  If you don’t avoid this, you may suffer consequences in two very important ways: your readers may reject you and your articles may be turned down for publication. Most of the article directories have strict guidelines about what they will and won’t accept for publication. Self-promotion is a giant no-no!

There are several things that you must try to avoid when it comes to your content:

• No name dropping: You should try to keep your content as generic as possible when discussing product brand names. It is ok to mention specifics in the resource box but it is not ok to mention specifics in the body of your article. You should use the article to give your readers helpful tips and tricks, and other pieces of information that you feel they will find valuable. If you provide them with useful information, they will keep coming back to you for more.
   
• Avoid mentioning money: Anytime you mention a price in your content, you are automatically trying to sell what you have to other people. There is simply no place for it in the content that you are providing to others. That is what goes on an advertisement. Never use blatant sales text in your articles.
   
• Not educating your customers: It is extremely important to communicate in as transparent a way as possible. This transparency should start at the very beginning of your relationship and follow through forever. The more honest and forthright you are with other people, the more they will respect and trust you. If you include this in the foundation of your relationship, it will take you very far.
   
• Not being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes: If you are able to make other people understand that you are one of them and that you truly understand what they are going through and how they feel, they will relate to you on a human (and emotional) level. You should never give them the impression that you are different (or God forbid, above) them. First of all, it isn’t true and second of all, you won’t get anywhere with an attitude like that.

Conclusion

Your focus should always be on helping other people. If you put them first, you won’t run the risk of being misunderstood or coming across negatively. Your objective should be to continue to build credibility and knowledge and to continue to hold the position of being the person who others come to when they need answers. You should remember that you are selling something every time you interact with another person online. What you are selling is creative thought, valuable information, and compelling and exciting interactions.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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You get a very large volume of traffic to your business’s website. Your website is exciting and interesting. People are compelled to visit. However, how do you get them to stick and to keep returning over and over?

There are many different ways to go about enticing your website visitors to stick on your website for a prolonged time period as well as to consistently return to your website over and over again.

• Every page is a landing page: Any one of your website pages can be a landing page. Not everyone who visits your “About” page arrived there from inside of your website. You should build each page with the idea that it is the first one that your website visitors will see.
   
• Content that really pops: Having dynamic content on your website that entices and excites your readers is the reason that they will keep returning over and over again. The more strongly your content touches your visitors, the more inclined they will be to continue to visit your website. 
   
• Use the truth more than link bait: There are numerous people who use link bait (information to entice people into visiting their website) to draw people. However, if your content doesn’t match the link bait, your website visitors won’t be happy. There are some websites that have lost visitors because there were too many articles that contain link bait. If you are going to use it, be careful and very discriminating. Make a point of being as sincere as possible with your visitors.
   
• Never tease your visitors: You must always take the relationships that you have with your online connections seriously. It is acceptable to pique their interest early on, however, you must deliver the real thing as quickly as possible after that. Social media is made for human interactions. Always make your visitors understand that you have the ability to solve their problems.
   
• Keep your promises: If you promised your online connections something, such as a “how to” article on a topic of their interest, any sort of publication or any other piece of useful information, you have a responsibility to give it to them. That means give and not sell. If you don’t do what you have promised you will do, people will never trust you again. Remember, your social media and website interactions are all about relationships and trust.
   
• Emphasize the WIIFM statement: An extremely important part of the content on your website is theWIIFM (What's In It For Me?) statement. This focuses on the customer and you are communicating how you are going to help them to solve their problems. It is never about you as a business owner. It is about satisfying their needs and wants.
   
• Leverage your family and friends: Before you reach out to any of your website visitors, test your online communications on your family and friends. You need to use language that is not overly sophisticated and that is sincere. Your family and friends will give you an honest evaluation of your communications. If they don’t understand something that you have written, you should consider simplifying the language and making sure that your meaning is clear.
   
• Treat your visitors as people: There is nothing more disheartening on the receiving end than excitedly visiting a website only to be treated like a number. As the business owner, you need to regard each of your website visitors as individual people with hearts and minds of their own. Returning to the basic principle of building meaningful and trusting relationships, if you treat your website visitors as a collective lump, you will never be able to build relationships with anyone.

Conclusion

The advice and tips that have been discussed here are all important and they are all simple. You need to use them on a consistent basis. One of your top priorities should be to continue to build relationships with your visitors and to get them to return to your website over and over again. The more they get to know you and what you can do for them, the greater your chance of eventually converting them from friends to clients.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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You have heard the term “bounce rate.” It is the percentage that represents how many visitors leave your website directly from the page on which they entered the website. A high bounce rate usually means a low conversion rate.

There are several reasons why you might be experiencing a high bounce rate, such as

• It takes too much time to load your web page
• Your landing page is too complicated to navigate. It is not user friendly
• The wrong sorts of visitors are being drawn to your website

With that said, there are several ways in which you can lower your bounce rate significantly, which will be good for your business.

Website and layout design

Your website design is one of the most important factors when it comes to bounce rate. Your website should have colors that are pleasing to the eye and you should try to avoid graphics that “pop out” in the middle of the page because those are very distracting. Your website content should be arranged in a manner that is logical and there should not be an over-abundance of words. You absolutely should have your website designed by a professional. Also, you need to make sure that the HTML of your website is valid so that similar results show up in all of the search engines.

Strong headline

Of course, the headline is the first thing that people are going to read when they land on your website. If the headline doesn’t entice the visitors, it will be all over. Your headline must communicate what the visitor will gain from visiting your website (What’s In It For Me [WIIFM]). In other words, the visitor needs to know that you have the solution to his or her problem.

Well-written text

You need to make sure that your title, headers and meta-tags of each of your web pages are relevant to the rest of the content. You might want to have an abstract in the first paragraph of your text or try to answer questions in your opening paragraph that your readers have asked. Optimizing your content is, of course, extremely important so that the search engines will give you high rankings.

Friendly language

The language in which your content is written should be friendly and human. You should never have content that sounds like you are a corporation instead of a person, no matter which business you are in. Short sentences are definitely recommended. You must speak to your target audience in their language.

The size of your web pages

It is very important to make sure that the sizes of your graphics are appropriate. You also need to make sure that the text/HTML code ratio is as low as possible. Try to keep the loading time of the pages as short as possible. This is important because the users will be more inclined to visit your website again and again if it is easy and quick for them.

Easy navigation

Your website must have a menu that is easy for users to navigate. When people visit a website, everything has to be simple for them. If possible, your website menu should not be on the bottom of the screen. You should have the content arranged in categories and keep important pages a click away and no more, if you can. Another sensible thing to do is to suggest relevant products and/or services on your web pages and to put links in logical and strategic places so that they can benefit your visitors.

Optimize your website for the best keywords and key phrases

When considering search engine optimization (SEO), always remember to optimize your web pages for the most relevant keywords. You should have 1 to 2 terms on each page. Your keywords should appear in important parts of your website, such as your titles, headers and opening paragraphs.

High-quality links

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to increasing your exposure online. You need to make sure that the links that are pointing to your website contain anchor text. The links should always be relevant to your offerings and they should lead to content that is interesting and informative.

Conclusion

When it comes to your website, you need to successfully lead people to what you have to say and what you have to offer. You must consider many different things. Not only are traffic generation and website views important but bounce rate, the average amount that a visitor spends on your site and conversion rates are also extremely important and are strong contributors to the success of your online marketing campaign.

Remember that when the visitor comes to your site, they must always find what they are looking for. If they don’t find what they are looking for within 8 seconds, they will move on. That is all the time that you have to make a really strong first impression. Your content must always be clear and concise, you should never have distractions on your web pages and you should always allow your visitors to have the option to search and you should make suggestions for other pages that they might find interesting and helpful.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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You have a beautiful-looking website. You originally invested a great deal of money to have a reputable firm design and build it yet you see almost no return on investment (ROI).

When you start to look into why your website is ineffective, you start to discover that not only are you not increasing website traffic but you are actually losing traffic, losing potential customers, and losing the opportunities of establishing new relationships. In fact, your website may be failing to attract visitors at all.

How to get your website to become effective and remain effective

You should have a balance between graphics and text on your website. The website should definitely be aesthetically pleasing but should have valuable content that is easy to download at the same time.

You should always test your website on more than one browser. What looks fantastic on one browser make look terrible on another browser. Many people still use text-only browsers at this point in time.

You should always remember to be meticulous with your website; keep it clean and up to date. You should look for ways to update your site at least once a month. If you let your visitors know that you are doing this on a regular basis, it will be an incentive for them to return to your website often. Even if they visit your website only because they are curious, they are still visiting.

You also need to make sure that you are reviewing your website analysis on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing for sure if your website is totally doing what it is supposed to do.

Issues with your positioning and branding

Website conversion rates: Differentiating and clearly articulated value propositions have a profound effect on website conversion rates. The conversion rate is a measurement of visitors who fulfill your intended outcomes. Those outcomes could include contacting you directly, buying a product from your site, signing up for a blog feed or newsletter, etc.

Your value proposition, which should be the centerpiece of your homepage, should answer the question “Why should I choose to do business with you instead of your competition?”

That is the most important question in business. People struggle with it all of the time. If you are missing an opening message that really grabs your visitors, it can seriously have a negative effect on the ultimate success of your business.

If your website visitors go to your home page and leave quickly, something isn’t right. Your content is not enticing them enough and it is not answering the fundamental questions “Can this company fulfill my needs” and “Should I explore this website further?”

An area of your website that can prove to be problematic is your landing page. The landing page is the first page that a visitor sees. The reason for this is that you generally have some well-indexed content that your visitors have found in a search engine.

It is key to understand how the visitor thinks here. Visitors come to your website to find something specific. It is irrelevant how they may have found you (on purpose or by accident). Initially, they may have absolutely no interest in you and possibly no idea of who you are at all.

It is critical that the first page that they come upon on your website engages your visitors instantly and communicates a solution to their unfulfilled needs. Additionally, your content must be compelling enough to attract them to other areas of your website. You need to make them want to learn more about you. It is not sufficient to merely give them a lot of good information. Otherwise, they will take all of that in and then they will leave.

Hopefully, your traffic reports are detailed enough to communicate to you which keywords are effective at bringing visitors to each page of your website. This helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from, mentally.

If your website visitors are reading the page and leaving, you have succeeded at giving them what they want but you have failed at drawing them to the rest of your website. This can be fixed. You need to improve your navigation and make it more compelling and you need to have calls to action on your website pages.

There are many websites that offer great information and compelling content and that’s the end of it. It is so important to guide visitors to the next step that you wish them to take. If you count on your website visitors to do this by themselves, there is a great chance that they will either make a different choice than the one that you want them to make or they will just leave your website altogether, which can impact how much business you do.

Issues with building your credibility

Testimonials that are authoritative, powerful and specific can have a serious impact on your website’s conversion rates. You must ask yourself the question “Am I potentially losing business because my website does not adequately establish my credibility and value?”

A great way to get in touch with this is to review your website for credibility by building content, for example, testimonials, case studies and client lists. You should distribute your testimonials throughout your website, using one- or two-line excerpts that are appropriate for the content on each page. The testimonials can be about a product, a service or the value of subscribing to your blog or newsletter.

Be sure that all of the content is linked to and from other pages so that your visitors can find it very easily. If, after that, you start getting more phone calls or Emails, you will know that you have done something positive to make your website more effective.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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• Your font should be easy to read and the correct size for your audience
• The background and text colors should complement each other
• You should use a limited number of font sizes and colors throughout your landing page
  • Font styles: Arial, Geneva, or Helvetica are the best fonts to use. The reason for this is that they are simple and easy to read.
  • Font sizes: 10- to 12-point fonts are the best sizes to use for body text. Other sizes will slow down the pace of the reader. If you have an older audience, you may want to increase your font size by a couple of points. Also, you should allow enough spacing between lines.
  • All caps: Don’t use text in all capital letters. It is more difficult to read.
  • Line length: Blocks of text over 50 characters wide are more to read. You might want to consider using hard returns in your paragraphs so that your lines don't become too long when shown on wider computer screens.
  • Contrast: It is a good idea to have a high contrast between background and text because it increases legibility. The best combination of colors is black text on white background.
  • Text background colors and images: White backgrounds for body text are very effective also. Navigation and header background colors should be relatively light to enhance legibility. High-contrast graphic images are not a good idea as background for text.

 Availability: When visitors look at your landing page, they should be able to understand which options you offer. Your navigation needs to stand out and be consistent and in a predictable location.

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One of the ways in which lead generation is done over the Internet is by giving away free gifts, such as eBooks. On the Internet, leads usually mean email addresses of people who are interested in your business and the promotion is done through email marketing. The approach is quite simple. Marketers write an eBook that is relevant to their business and then promote it over the Internet. In order to get the word out, they will advertise the eBook on their website and/or blog. The marketers may also place classified advertisements on other business’ websites about their goods and services, paying them affiliate income.

As an inbound marketing tool, an eBook’s main purpose is to increase site traffic and act as a source of lead and audience generation. eBooks should be basic and interesting enough that non-experts understand and learn from them.

Internet visitors are generally very interested when they see free offers being advertised and eBooks are especially appealing because they always represent real value to the consumers. The Internet visitors will certainly try to click on the link and download the free eBook. This is where the process of lead generation is introduced.

When the Internet visitor clicks on the link, it will not take them directly to the page of the eBook download. They will arrive first at a webpage that will ask for their email address. That page will tell the visitor that if they provide their contact information (including email ids), a great deal of additional (and valuable) information will be available to them. Of course, the Internet visitors won’t mind providing their contact information because the reward will be to receive free things. This type of page is known as a landing page, lead capture page, or squeeze page.

Quality landing pages use success stories that the prospect would relate to when making a buying decision. As a general rule, Internet Marketers try to keep the content on their landing pages to a minimum. The goal of the page is to obtain the visitor’s email address; additional information could distract the user or cause them to "Click-Away" to a different website. Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent from typical landing pages. The absence of links is used to focus visitors’ attention on one choice: register for the email list or leave the site. Savvy internet marketers have discovered that convincing a visitor to sign up for an email list provides an opportunity to present that visitor with multiple sales messages over time, develop a relationship, and even cross-sell other related products.

After the visitor puts in his or her email address on the landing page, he or she will be redirected to the page from where the download can occur for the free eBook. At this point, the marketer has the email addresses of the Internet users who have taken advantage of the free eBook. In other words, the marketer now has a list of email opt-in leads, which can be used for additional promotions, such as email marketing.

Here are some tips for writing effective eBooks for lead generation:

• Know your objectives. What is your goal in writing your eBook? Clearly you want to generate leads and increase your database, but you should also have an audience takeaway goal. What impression are you trying to convey for your company, brand, or product and what response do you want from your audience? Are you looking to position yourself as the expert in your industry? Are you offering tips on a niche topic in hopes that your prospects will contact you to learn even more? Are you looking for a more interesting way of sharing your story or trying to establish your profile in the business community? Or maybe you’re looking to create awareness for your brand/product in a way that is helpful to your audience rather than promotional. Knowing your objective will help you set the tone for your eBook.

 

• KISS. Keep it short and simple. No one wants to read your 300-page eBook, and keep this in mind as you decide on a topic. Identify specific topics that will limit the scope of your writing. Fifteen to thirty pages should be more than enough for most eBooks. Remember, you aren’t writing a sales manual or company promotional material; instead, you are writing to capture and engage readers. With that in mind, don’t write in over-complicated language when things can be explained simply.

 

• Name your eBook. Done in tandem with identifying your goals and settling on a topic, choosing a title will give your eBook some structure. You won’t be inclined to digress too much from the concept of your eBook if you’ve already figured out a compelling title. And don’t be afraid of subtitles, especially if this is a business eBook. Subtitles increase your SEO rankings and more accurately describe what the reader is interested in.

 

• Write quality content. Yes, eBooks are downloaded for free (or in exchange for your reader’s email address), but people are coming to your site for a reason. Give them good-quality writing and show them that you are the expert that they think you are.

 

• Hire an editor. Although an eBook may not seem like an official document, you want to be sure that it is edited thoroughly. A professional editor can check for consistency of tone, grammatical errors, and anything else that might make your reader dwell more on the writing than the content.

 

• Design. eBook design is just as important as eBook copy. Sometimes it is even more important. A text-heavy, badly designed eBook will turn off your online readers, who have gotten used to stimulating, interactive online content. If you want to engage them, hire a professional designer to establish the look of your eBook. Use graphics and images in addition to the text, and don’t try to pack too much text onto any given page.

 

• Add an appropriate copyright license message to your finished eBook to let your audience know that they can share your copyrighted material. You can use a tool such as Creative Commons to accomplish this.

 

• Promote your eBook. You should promote your eBook anywhere and everywhere that you can. Tweet about it, post it on Facebook, share it with your LinkedIn groups, blog about it, and send it out to your established network.

To learn more how we can help you with the writing and editing of your eBook, please visit us at CompuKol Communications.

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