What do you want your website to do for your business? No really, it’s not as obvious a question as it might at first appear.
I’ve been working with executive coaches and consultants for ten years now, helping them improve how they show up on the Web. In those 10 years, I’ve seen a number of changes to the way websites look and function. It doesn’t matter if you use a traditional website, or a blog, or a blog as a website, the principles are the same.
Yet many professionals aren’t clear about the goals for their online content marketing. I made some notes for one client and thought I’d share them with you here. I came up with 5 goals your site should strive to accomplish in the first minute or two. One of them is a big challenge…
- Impress visitors and showcase your business expertise: Within the first 5 seconds, your site’s professionalism must convince visitors that you are a legitimate business worthy of consideration. There are too many amateurs with junky sites cluttering up the Web. Your site must pass the “blink” test.
- Engage, educate, entertain & persuade visitors to short-list you: Within the next minute, your site needs to present easy-to-find information to engage visitors and show you’ve got much more to offer if they stay or subscribe to read more.
- Capture interest and convert visitors into leads: If you want to get more than just visitors from your site, you must ask them to do something: take a survey, vote, download a report, sign up for your newsletter, blog or e-course. This builds a marketing database of people interested enough to leave their email with you.
- Generate new business from current clients: There are effective ways to use your website to engage your client base, generate more free traffic and encourage referrals and repeat business. This is one of the most overlooked functions of professional websites and blogs, yet it is one of the most financially rewarding.
- Attract visitors from search engines: Well-executed search engine optimization (SEO) can be an effective way to get your site highly ranked and generating a steady stream of new traffic.
The first four goals on this list are met by writing compelling, relevant content that solves the problems of your target audience. These are the goals of content marketing, whether with a website or a blog.
Let’s talk about #5, attracting new visitors from search engines. Here’s where the question marks start jumping out from your head like Medussa’s snakes.
The Big Challenge: Attracting Search Engines
Ah the mysteries of SEO (search engine optimization)…
There are literally thousands of cheap and even free tools, guides and best practices. Furthermore, there are hundreds of high-end consultancies eager to optimize if you want to spend $10,000 or more. However, there are very few companies that do SEO well for small businesses, at an affordable price.
To make matters worse, some of them work over 4-6 months, so you can imagine that it’s expensive.
There are those who say “forget SEO, just write a lot of content for the people who’s problems you can solve.” The search engines will catalog your keywords and you’ll rank high based on “organic search.”
This can be true to a certain extent. I am living proof of that. This blog has been blessed with quality traffic and ranking and search results based on a long history of publishing plenty of content using a few keywords.
But at some point, you may realize that your efforts could and should be paying off more than they are. Time to find out what you don’t know, what else you need to do to improve your website visibility and results.
Here I go again… with the teleseminar promotion. I know, I know. I’m like a dog who won’t let go of a bone.
Search Engines Are Stupid, You’re Smart
I don’t want to be a nag, but I’m going to repeat myself from here until Wednesday: search engines are stupid, so if you’re a smart professional, you can learn how to attract search traffic to your blog and web pages. Forget throwing money at the problem. This is something you can and should be doing yourself.
Fortunately, it’s not rocket surgery. Here’s how you can learn how to attract search engines and how to get more blog traffic. (And I mean that in the broad sense of the term…i.e. web traffic.)
The Ultimate Traffic Formula with Michael Martine
of Remarkablogger
How to Avoid Business Blog Oblivion
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 4 p.m. ET (recorded)
Phone, webcast, your choice
Tutorials, videos, handouts, bonuses
I am so convinced this will help you, that I’m giving away a program I was going to start selling, to the first 25 people who register for the workshop: Time Saving Tips for Smart Blogging, a $39 value, audio recording, transcript, & 23 pages of worksheets and resources. There are still a few left.
I hope you’ll join me as a grill Michael Martine, of Remarkablogger. He’s written more than one authoritative book on traffic and search engine secrets and is an expert highly qualified to teach in plain English. He makes this easy to understand.
For information and registration, go here: Get More Blog & Web Traffic
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