Chapter 4 - How to Build a Collection Site
Only Two Reasons Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. There are only two reasons your customers are online.
- They check their e-mail accounts. The Internet s Killer Application is e-mail and will continue to be e-mail. Watch what someone new to the Internet does when they are online. Check e-mail, then surf. If you work in an office, you probably already have a routine around checking your e-mail. If you are connected at home, what do you do just before bed? Check your e-mail! It is addictive and everyone online is hooked.
- They are looking for information. People surf websites looking for information that is of specific interest to them. Remember that when it comes to your specific site and the information that you provide. Either they know about your site or they do not know about your site. What this means is that your valuable information isn t valuable to them unless they are looking for your site specifically, (they know about it) or your site places high in the search engines or directories so they find it during an online search (they don t know about it).
Key Point!
There Are Only Two Reasons
People Go Online!
In fact, I picked a recent survey that pointed out business owners use the Internet more as an information source than as a channel for buying goods and services for their business. In a recent survey, retailer websites barely made it into an entrepreneur s top ten web categories.
Feed Search Engines.
Capture E-mail Addresses Internet marketing for small business is a two website sales process. If you are a big multinational company that has spent a mint on building a brand and you can afford to build a complex e-commerce shopping application, by all means sell on your single site.
If you are a small business with a limited budget and have bought into e-commerce on your website, give me a call when you ve spent all your money and still cannot turn a profit online. I know. I have been there.
Key Point!
Optimize Your Main Site for
Search Engines and Capturing
E-mail Addresses!
The only sale that will be made on your main website is by the visitor. In fact, you are the only one who is doing the buying.
The purpose of the main website is for you to buy the valid e-mail address and the right to continue to communicate by e-mail with the visitor that you want to have as a customer.
Let me say that again in a different way. You are buying the right to continue a sales conversation with the visitor. You are going to give them valuable information in return for their e-mail address.
The second purpose of your content site is to become a honey pot for the search engines.
Collect as many e-mail addresses as you can. Provide tons of information about your niche and selling proposition in a manner that looks great in the search engines and directories.
Developing Your Theme
Search engines work hard at improving the value of their searches. When a person searches for a keyword or phrase, the engine does its best to bring back as many relevant pages as it possibly can. What this means is that the search engines now place more value on the relevance of the actual content. In earlier days, it was enough to create a technical environment that made sense to the search engine.
In the past, Internet marketers could get by with html tricks, meta tag spamming, special doorway pages, and optimization for individual search engines. Today a search engine checks to see if the actual content, the meat of the site, is relevant to the actual search query.
Search engines continue to improve at making sure that a search actually returns something of relevance. That s why a site that focuses on a theme, a specific niche or topic, will rank higher than any page that is using webmaster tricks to get a high ranking.
Searchers want information. The search engines want to give the searchers the most accurate and valuable information available. Our theme site provides both of them with what they want.
How do you know when you have a theme? Go back to Step 1. Remember I asked you to come up with a Big Fat Claim? Were you able to come up with a single phrase that described your business?
Your Big Fat Claim and your website have to be in sync. Look at your website. If a search engine came to your site and went through all the text, the links into your site and the links out of your site, what single phrase would it use to describe the site? Would it be your Big Fat Claim?
The phrase you came up with and the phrase the search engine comes up with have to be the same. If you get the theme right, you get the search engines right. If you cannot boil your theme down to a single phrase, stop and look again at your business.
It is your ability to focus on a specific problem and solution for a known market that determines your success. This is true offline and online. Remember what I said about what it takes to be successful selling online in the first section? If you cannot sell a product or service in the real world, what makes you think you will be successful selling it online?
Pick a niche and stay with it offline. Pick a niche and overfill it with content online.
Vertical or Horizontal Themes
What happens if you cannot get your website s essence or theme down to a couple of words or a single sentence? What happens if there really are 10 good keywords that describe your small business?
You have to make a choice between a Horizontal and Vertical Theme.
Key Point!
Set Up a Theme Site as a Collection
Point for E-mail Addresses and
Search Engines.
If you cannot come up with a single theme and you find you really do have two independent and separate content themes then you should register new domain names and make independent Vertical Theme Sites. If you do not separate them, you can kiss your search engine traffic goodbye. Because your site is no longer high when it comes to relevancy, you will suffer from a lower ranking than you should have.
Apply the same tactic to two sites and you will rank high for relevancy in both instances instead of poorly for one.
A horizontal theme may apply when you have complimentary themes. In this case, you can keep the same domain names but physically separate portions of the content in the site to reflect the complimentary themes.
I ran into this problem when I first started. How could my main site support the two themes that I had identified? Initially I was interested in Online Sales Training exclusively. If you had done a search on www.google.com for Online Sales Training you would have seen how successful I was at creating a highly relevant site.
When I first started the problem for me was that my main domain, the one with my name in it, did not support my training and professional speaking careers in the search engines. In fact, I did not rank well at all. I created complimentary themes around Internet marketing in separate directories on the same domain.
www.jamesmaduk.com/knowaboutjvs.htm is different from
www.jamesmaduk.com/subscribers, which has a slightly different theme from
www.jamesmaduk.com/affiliates/getlinks.htm. This approach allows me to
build relevancy in two key areas across a single website domain. It is a
horizontal approach.
The bottom line is that relevancy in content is key for search engines. Do your homework first then decide how many theme-based sites you need to give the searchers and the search engines what they want.
What Customers Actually Search For
Your site has tons of great content. What are the visitors searching for? Why not find out before you commit your business to a theme.
Live Search Displays
The following search engines include free pages that show real time search results. That means you get access to real time marketing information. Here are some examples.
The Ask Jeeves search engine has a Peek through the Keyhole feature that gives you the top questions that are being asked on their search engine. Try it now at: http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/peek/
Below is a recent example.
1. Music Lyrics
2. Maps
3. Games
4. Online Dictionary
5. Jokes
6. Britney Spears
7. Driving Directions
8. Weather
9. Baby names
10. Usher
Some of the other search engines include similar features. These include:
Search.com http://savvy.search.com/snoop
Galaxy StarGazer http://www.galaxy.com/info/voyeur.html
Mopilot LiveSearch http://mopilot.com/index.htm?go=live.php3
Yahoo Shopping: What's Selling Now http://st8.yahoo.com/OT
Keywords that Describe the Theme of Your Information Site
Your themed information site, the main site that you will use to bring in traffic and collect e-mail addresses, needs to be rich in something called Keywords . Keywords are the words and phrases that are sprinkled throughout every page in your website that the search engine indexes. This index allows the search engine to put websites into categories and organize its search findings. When a potential customer searches online, the Keywords that you used in your website play a big part in whether your site will show up in the search engines results. Which keywords you choose can determine if your website is included in a search engine, what ranking your pages receive and how it is displayed during a search.
Most search engine optimizers would agree that one of the most important things you can do for your website is to target the right keywords. If you target the wrong keywords, you may get lots of traffic but no conversions to sale, or no traffic whatsoever. Either alternative is disastrous for an online business.
Key Point!
Picking The Right Key Words
Can Make or Break Your Internet
Marketing Strategy!
Finding Keywords Now that you are serious about finding a good keyword, where do you start? There are a number of free tools that will help you find and analyze potential keywords that you have chosen.
- Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
- Lycos 50 "http://50.lycos.com
- Yahoo Buzz Index http://buzz.yahoo.com
- Good Keywords http://www.goodkeywords.com/gkw.htm
- Keyword Counter http://www.keywordcount.com gives a quick count of the number of times your keyword appears on your pages. You can also compare your keyword density with that of your competitors.
- Keyword Wizard http://www.keywordwizard.com does live searches on major search engines and so you can see the Top 5,000 keywords and phrases used by people.
- Wordtracker Software http://www.wordtracker.com/freetrial.htm
- WordSpot http://www.wordspot.com
What exactly is Wordtracker, and why is it so important?
With Wordtracker , you can plug in some keywords, and the web-based service will give you ideas for additional keywords that might work for your business.
The service will also tell you how competitive those keywords are (how many other web pages have been optimized by using those keywords and how many people have actually searched for those keywords in the past 24 hours at each of the major engines.
When it comes to picking your keywords, your goal is to choose a word or phrase that does not have a huge amount of competition but that (hopefully) a large number of people are searching for. This is where the KEI comes in. KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, refers to the number of times a keyword has appeared in Wordtracker's data compared with the number of competing Web pages.
The KEI is vital because it points to which keywords would be most effective for your theme based content site when it comes to search engines.
In other words, the higher the KEI, the more popular your keyword phrases are, and the less competition they have. According to Wordtracker, a "good" keyword to target is one that has a KEI of around 100, but an "excellent" keyword to target has a KEI of over 400.
Key Point!
Measure the Effectiveness of
Keywords With a KEI !
Look back at your Big Fat Claim. How can you tie your keyword phrases to your Big Fat Claim?
Use the WordTracker service and look for specific niche related words. Try to think of keywords that apply to specific areas your product or service is designed to serve.
Usability and Web Site Navigation
There have been loads of studies done on website effectiveness over the short life of the commercial Internet. You will find proof that your website must be set up in a specific way for it to be effective. Some examples that I found include:
- On average, a user will only wait 20 seconds for a screen to download.
- Only 10 % of users scroll beyond the first screen.
- It only takes 2-3 clicks before a user gets frustrated at most sites.
- 79% of users only scan a web page.
- Most surfers will only scroll down 3 - 4 screens.
- 73% leave after 3 mouse clicks.
- 83% leave a site frustrated.
- Poor navigation is the biggest complaint, not poor content.
I am sure you would agree with this assessment if you were searching for some specific information on a website.
The usability experts quoted in these assessments are probably right when the browser was looking for specific information. Unlike a larger corporate site, a small business site provides information on a single niche and is designed to capture e-mail addresses. It is not meant to answer every question your visitor might have.
These studies never looked at what is required to capture e-mail addresses, rank high in search engines and then sell products and services online.
I have three categories for websites. The first two are the common sites that you hear about in traditional business discussions.
The majority of websites are Information Sites . The sole purpose of this type of website is to inform the visitor. Information sites are dedicated to personal interests or a company and its products and services.
As these sites mature, they become Buying Sites . A buying site is one where the business uses the website as another distribution channel. It allows its customers to use the website as a place to complete a sale. These sites support a customer who has already made the decision to buy what the company is selling and just wants to confirm information before completing the sales transaction online.
The visitor knows specifically what they want, whom they want to buy it from and how much they are willing to pay for it.
Key Point!
Traditional Web Site Usability
Measurements Don t Apply to a
Small Business Web Site!
Usability and navigation rules apply to Information and Buying sites.
Finally, there are Sites that Sell . Like a virtual sales person, these direct sales pages persuade and influence the customers. This type of website engages the senses of a buyer, enrolls them in a sales process and then compels them to make a purchase online.
These sites are ideally suited for small businesses because:
- The customer may not have been looking specifically for your products and services.
- They did not have their mind made up to buy what you are selling when they entered the site.
- They didn t have to find the site with a search engine
- You did not spend tons of money advertising to get them to a site that sells.
Building a Collection Site
To be a techie or not to be a techie, that is the question.
You need a website to become involved in Internet marketing, that is a given. What you do not have to do is figure out how it works and I do not intend to teach you how to manually code a site in HTML or how to figure out how to create custom graphics and design for your site. There are lots of other books with a wealth of information about how to do that.
Take the time to look at my site http://www.jamesmaduk.com. I get compliments about that site from other small business owners all the time. I will get questions like, Who did your graphics? or How did you get the navigation all set up? While I would like to say that I am a gifted and creative web designer, the truth is that I have not created any of my 70 sites. Every single one of them was started from a free template.
I use a Microsoft product called FrontPage that came free as part of MS Office 2000 professional. Every site is created with the help of a wizard and a template in the standard FrontPage software. The navigation, the graphics, the look and feel, the layout, the buttons, everything you need to create a website is already built into one of the many templates.
Adobe has a similar product, so does Macromedia and there are lots of other free software packages that you can use to create your own site. Visit http://www.tucows.com or http://www.download.com for a listing of HTML editors and you will find tons.
All of these programs work in a similar fashion. You pick a template, a layout and the way you want the buttons to look and work. The program does the rest.
Some of you might be saying, I don t have time to figure out another piece of software or That stuff is still too technical for me . That is OK.
Call on your regular web designer or hire a freelance web person to create the site for you USING FRONTPAGE. Do this so that you can be involved when you want or need to. If they will not use the program that you choose, find another person to do the work. Let them know that you are going to be keeping the pages up-to-date or at least want to have the option of maintaining the site yourself once it is built.
The real value of these programs is not in the creation of your website. It is the fact that you can change pages or add pages any time you want. It is just like using your word processor. When you are online, you can open up any page on your website, make changes and then save it. If you have new pages that you want to add, you can publish them to your website without having to wait for a webmaster to make changes.
Key Point!
Taking Care of Your Own Site is
Important and Cost Effective!
Once your site is set up, you are in control. You can test, alter, change, add and manage the information that is on your site.
You either create a site or have someone create it for you. Whichever you choose, make sure it is accessible with an HTML editor like FrontPage.
For FrontPage help, visit FrontPageTools. It has templates and training for novices and beginners. www.frontpagetools.com
I ve included links to my Build My First Web Site videos on the following pages. The video course is easy to watch and detailed enough for any of the tasks you will need to include on your site.
To use FrontPage requires that your Internet Service Provider or hosting company supports FrontPage Extensions . I have not run into a company that does not, but it is always a good idea to ask.
Kill Flash and Splash Pages
Adobes Flash is a powerful tool. Used for sophisticated animation and interaction online, it can provide some really entertaining sites. Graphically rich, compelling multimedia presentations are almost always done by web designers using this application. In larger businesses with marketing departments, you hear the cry for a consistent corporate branding.
To make sure the corporate message gets out and the company can be branded, you often find it used on websites as a landing or splash page . A landing page is the animated introduction that plays before you get to the real website you want to visit. It is often the one that takes ages to load and hopefully has a skip intro button.
Key Point!
Do not Waste Time or Money on
Flash or Fancy Graphic Web Tricks!
Because flash provides such a rich multimedia environment that works well on the web, there are more and more websites that are done entirely in flash. This allows the designer to control the graphical look of the site as well as use the interactive features of flash to provide robust site navigation.
If you are a small business owner who wants to sell online, never use flash. It is a colossal waste of time and money.
If you want to entertain your guests for free and win awards for web design, go for it.
There are a number of major reasons you do not want to use Flash.
- As far as the search engines go, your website may not exist or, at best, there is nothing on your main page.
- Try to change your website by yourself. Do you know flash inside and out? If you have an outside graphics designer coding the flash work and graphics, you have now lost total control of your website.
- Big businesses with big budgets and big marketing departments worry about branding. Small Business owners worry about selling. When was the last time you bought a product or service because you were entertained during the presentation?
Bottom line: stay away from Flash
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