Your Website Is Not Enough: You Need an “Engagement Platform”

If you've invested a lot in rebuilding your website, I congratulate you for keeping fresh content published about your business. Congratulations, and may I ask, how's that working out for you? Oh…

May I make a suggestion? Your website is probably great and all, but if you're not getting your visitors engaged, if they're not taking action and participating in some way, then you need more than just a well-designed site. You need an "engagement platform." Let me explain…

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the engagement problem. I love teaching smart professionals about content strategies and how to make good use of business blogging.

But the biggest challenges in teaching are:

Getting their attention
Keeping them engaged long enough to learn
Getting them to take action and apply the learning
Retaining the learning

These are the same challenges you face with marketing to new clients:

How do you get their attention, keep their attention, get them to take action and become loyal clients?

Immediately, what comes to mind for many small business owners is to give them some free content that educates them about their problems, and makes suggestions for solutions. But now days, that's not enough. That is one-way information pushing.

Where's the personal engagement in that?

I'm thinking the best solutions are to get your readers/prospects/new clients to DO something, to interact in some way that involves them thinking, responding, answering, voting, writing, and participating in some way.

A few things you could offer your site visitors to do:

Take a quiz or survey
Join a discussion
Join a social networking platform or page
Join a private member's group
Ask questions
Write their own thoughts and ideas

I was looking around the Web this past month and thinking about ways to get people to interact, when I ran across an interesting site called JournalEngine. While initially they started providing journaling platforms for coaching and counseling professionals, it turns out the software has much broader applications.

In fact, Marc Manieri, President, is calling JournalEngine an "experience platform," since it can solve the problem of getting people engaged. It offers participants a way to express themselves, connect with you, connect with others, and access valuable content.

Here's how it works as a lead generator:

You can get this software branded for your company and offer it for free to all visitors. That way they can sample your services and get access to content that serves to engage them further. After that, you can offer them services for a fee.

Basically it works because it gives visitors who are interested in you and your services a chance to get involved, to get connected.

We had a Webinar last week, but there were some sound difficulties so I'm going to interview Marc again this Tuesday, March 2, at 4 p.m. ET. It will be an open teleconference where you can particpate, get your questions answered, and even join in some healthy debate.

Won't you join us? Register here:

JournalEngine teleconference with Marc Manieri

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

4 p.m. ET