Welcome to our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed the steps in this tutorial, you now have a professional looking website with effective copy and powerful calls to actions to get business from your website. You’ve added a blog and started writing content and have clear idea on how to promote your content. Today, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of adding a forum to your website.

SEO + Automated Content Generation

Forums = automatically generated content. The content generated by your users in a forum helps your site rank better for what is called ‘long tail searches’. A research report from Google astonishingly revealed that about 50% of all searches are completely new, never seen before. A forum, having essentially randomly created content, is one way of catching these ‘long tail searches’ that you simply can’t plan for.

Another benefit is that we don’t always know the vocabulary of our demographics. Forums can catch this vocabulary, since the content is used by the target demographic.

Visitor Loyalty

If your forum is high quality and truly provides useful content, visitors can get very focused on it, checking in every day to learn more, ask new questions that arose and connect with their virtual friends.

Market Research

Being in direct contact with your target group allows you to be better informed about their needs, wants, questions and general culture. It is a great research tool.

Community Building

Forums are ideal to provide your community with a way to connect to each other. It is a fantastic tool to swap ideas, create meaningful relationships within overlapping industries and create a sense of belonging.

The challenges of building a forum

The many benefits that come with building a forum doesn’t mean it is a walk in the park. When considering building a forum, ask yourself the following questions in order to assess that you can meet the demands put on yourself:

Kick Starting Your Forum

It can be very difficult to attract visitors to your forum. An empty forum basically has no hope of attracting people that participate. People need to see content, need to be able to explore topics. Creating all this content can be a lot of work. I spend a lot of time trying to share my expertise on our Online Marketing Forum and providing the visitor with answers to questions they posted. I am lucky to have a small community who provide so much useful content besides the posts that I submit.

As with everything in life, you need to ask yourself if you have the time to put into making your forum a success.

Managing Your Forum

Even a popular forum cannot be left alone. True, forums generate automated content, but still require a moderator who makes sure that the forum stays on topic and that valuable content is added everyday. Especially when you run a successful forum, this can become a full-time job. One way of coping with the volume of work is recruiting volunteers to moderate your forum. I am always surprised how many people want to contribute free time to develop a forum that discusses ideas that they are passionate about. From a sociological and psychological point of view, this can be explained by the fact that some forum members would have contributed content anyway, and enjoy the added status of being selected to become a VIP, a Forum Manager.

Spam Wars

Forums are a target for spam bots that leave all types of nonsense on your forum. Here at Online Design Bureau we upgrade our forum every month to deal with the ever growing sophistication of spam bots to take advantage of a sites capability to accept user generated content. The benefit of these upgrades is that forum managers don’t have to worry about spam, as the spam bots are outsmarted each time they find a new way to bypass all the security.

Is a forum right for your website?

You need to assess whether:

• you have enough visitors to make a forum viable
• Whether they would appreciate having a forum made available to them
• Whether you have the time (or the money) to generate the initial content that a forum requires to become successful.
• Whether you or your web design agency has the technical know-how to set up and run a forum.

If the answers to the questions above is an resounding YES, you can reap the many benefits of owning a forum, which include repeat visits and visitor loyalty, the early beginnings to create a community around your brand, the benefits of having automated content generated and the SEO boost this brings by ranking better in the search engines for search terms you aren’t even planning for.

This blog post is part of our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed our advise, then by now you have a website up and running that looks great, has great sales copy and can gain the trust of your visitors. It also has powerful calls to action that tell your visitors what to do once they land on your site, meaning that you can capture leads and start a permission based marketing campaign (because your users signed up for this!). Today, we’ll be looking at how you can make your site even more successful.

With 92,000 websites being created every day, competition online can be fierce.

That means, you have to give your site that little extra in order to win the sale from your competitors.

In this blog post, we aim to give you the 10 ways in which you can achieve this.

1. Have a Unique Selling Proposition

People never visit just one site to buy a product. They compare prices and features. Being the cheapest option isn’t necessarily the best solution, people also want ’service’ or a sense of cool or just greater usability. The iPhone isn’t at all the cheapest solution on the market and Apple’s service can leave a lot to be desired, but it has the add-on value of being ‘cool’ and extremely versatile.

Understand that your product, service and company will be compared to others. Therefore, you need to show why you are different, and why people should choose your product over others.

2. Content is King

Good content does several things. First of all, it informs your clients about your product. Second of all, it helps them to explore all the different facets of your business. They might arrive looking for one thing on your website and discover another product or service they weren’t aware of. And content helps you to be found in the search engines. Google and Yahoo really do nothing else but analyze content on the web and then try to match people’s searches with the content that is the most informative and useful to the searcher.

If you want to learn more about content for your website, visit our article on creating effective content.

3. Have a Powerful Call to Action

It is not enough that a user finds what he or she is looking for on your site and wants the product. The user must know what to do next. And it needs to be right there and easy to use. If you prominently feature buying options in your content, you will promote more impulse purchases, if you prominently feature contact details in your content, you will see an increase in people contacting you. Learn more about Calls to Action and creating a marketing funnel for your website.

4. Accessibility

Make your website compatible with all the different operating systems and web browsers available. Somebody visiting your website in FireFox or the Opera browser should still see your website correctly. People who use a Mac instead of a PC must see your website the proper way. Many website owners visit their website only on their PC with the Internet Explorer browser and aren’t aware that people who use a different browser or system might not be seeing their website correctly, or might find that certain menus don’t work.

People with disabilities make up a large percentage of the population. You can increase your sales by that percentage by making your site more accessible to people who may have an issue that make it hard for them to buy your product. A visitor might be visually impaired and require your website to display correctly in their special software. Deaf people who want to view your video content will need an option to turn on subtitles.

5. Test, test, test

Faults might be hidden in pages buried deep in your website. That page might however be the page that people land on first via a search in Google. Therefore it is important that you adequately test every page and make sure it displays and works correctly.

6. Communicate

Make sure your website offers capabilities and reasons for users to leave their email address or other contact details. It is important that you can send out communication materials to your customers from time to time to keep your company ‘front of mind’, to keep reminding them of your existence until the day comes that they need your services again.

A great way of doing this is by offering subscriptions to a newsletter, or a blog, or automatic updates on your latest special offers.

7. Know what your customers do on your site.

Use an analytics package that shows you how visitors found you, what they do once on your site and that keeps track of how many visitors eventually do what you want them to do: buy your product, contact you or subscribe to a service such as a newsletter. Knowing what makes visitors convert to a lead or sale and what turns them off is the most important knowledge you can accrue in order to learn how you can tweak your site to increase sales and lead generation.

8. Optimize your site for the search engines

SEO is the art of having your site come up in the search engines when your target audience types in keywords relating to your products and services. In fact, the search engines are the most likely way that you have found this page.

Understand what keywords your customers use and then use these words on your site to improve your visibility in the search engines. If you need help with this, you can always contact us or learn about our SEO services.

9. Advertise your site

Clearly feature your website on all your sales materials, from business cards to billboards. If your target audience sees your ad but needs more information before they buy your product, then your website can be a great information tool.

Also make sure you offer search as an option on your site, so that those people who type in your website address but are looking for a specific product or service, can easily conduct a search for that item.

10. Have a professional looking website

Looks do matter. Professional design builds trust. People will project the feeling they get from your website onto your company. If your website looks good, they will have a better feeling about doing business with you. This in turn will increase the number of visitors that convert to customers. in an earlier article we discussed how to choose a web designer.

Welcome to our series on how to build an effective business website. If you’ve gone through our previous articles, then by now you have a professional looking website, created great content that is based on what you know interests your target audience and implemented valuable techniques to gain trust in your website. Today, we’ll take it a step further and discuss creating a marketing funnel for your website to convert your visitors into customers.

You Design a Website To Sell Your Product / Service

That is your ultimate goal, so you should always keep it in mind. So why is it that so many websites are so inept at selling? Because they forget the two main functions of a website:

1. Lead Generation
2. Converting Visitors to Customers

This isn’t just done by having a website. You need to have a website intelligent enough to actually make the sale.

Designing a Marketing Funnel For Your Website

With Marketing Funnel we mean the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. The funnel is the instrument with which we guide them in this process. This process could look like this:

• Prospect becomes aware of need
• Prospect becomes aware of the brand that offers the solution
• Prospect visits brand website
• Prospect leaves contact details
• Communication between sales staff and prospect
• Prospect buys product / service.

Not all funnels will look exactly like this, and some steps in the funnel might be skipped. It is perfectly possible that your prospect visits your site and buys your product straight away. Other’s will need some convincing.

The important part is that you have a strategy in place for all contingencies, and a way to capture vital information along the way.

Coaching Visitors To Leads and Leads To Customers

Design your website with a few simple marketing strategies in mind to achieve higher sales.

Generating Visitors

It is imperative that you have an SEO strategy in place to attract visitors to your websites. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the art of creating a website that ranks well in the search engines for searches related to your brand, product or service. This is the most common way to attract visitors.

Other very effective methods include: PPC advertising (advertising via Google Adwords for instance), or any type of marketing that mentions your website. Always push your website in all collateral, from business card to thank you slip to brochures. If your collateral is missing material, your website can offer a living breathing brochure of information, updated with the latest information, easy to navigate and searchable. A website is the easiest way for customers to find information relevant to their need – and I am not just saying that because we create websites!

Converting Website Visitors To Leads

Okay, so you got the prospect to visit your website. Now, you need to convert him or her to a customer.

The prospect will either immediately buy your product, or you need to somehow capture their contact details and permission to market to them, so that you can maintain a meaningful relationship that keeps your brand front of mind until the prospect is ready to purchase your product or service.

Calls To Action That Lead To the Sale

Make sure that your phone number is prominent. Have a prominent link to your contact page and where possible offer a free chat opportunity, where the prospect can ask the questions that he or she has relating to your offers.

Capturing Contact Details of the Lead and Get Permission To Market

The following information will focus primarily on collecting email addresses. It is important that your prominently feature your Privacy Policy and if applicable, your Terms & Conditions, in diminish any anxiety of your more discerning subscriber.

Make sure that important landing pages feature at least some of the following:

Blog subscription

When you have a blog, clearly show subscription options to RSS and Email. If the prospect finds your blog interesting, he or she will sign up for future updates. The trick is that you keep your blog interesting and occasionally promote your services. Try to offer your blog content in three forms: textual, video and audio. That way you cater to all profiles, from the jogger who likes to learn from Podcast, to the visually oriented person who needs to see a video to keep their attention going to the avid reader.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to our blog, this is where you can do it:

Promote email subscriptions to a newsletter.

Make sure the prospect can preview the latest issue.

Make some content only available to registered users.

It is a great way to capture email addresses and offer the registrant alternative subscriptions that he or she might not be aware of.

Other reasons to leave contact details:

Offer an ezine, ecourse, special report or ebook that requires signing up for periodic updates by leaving an email address.

Offer subscription to channels other than your site, where people might prefer to follow you: allow people to become a fan of your Facebook page with the click of a button (you can then push relevant info to them via Facebook), offer a Twitter link, Google FriendConnect and any other social network that is relevant to your audience.

Incentivise Word Of Mouth

And what if you have a visitor who knows somebody who needs your product? You want to make it easy for that visitor to spread the word!

In order to accomplish this, offer a “Tell a Friend” option that forwards the page via email to a friend, with a personal message from the sender. Offer “Social Bookmarking Buttons” so that visitors can share the article with their community and followers. Some sites might even benefit from offering a ‘bookmark this page’ button.

Your Site Is As Good As You Market It

Web Design is not just the art of making your site look good. It is the art of making your site an effective sales tool. Using some of the aforementioned tips will definitely help you to boost conversion.

Over To You

Do you have other ideas on how to effectively promote your website? Leave us a comment!

If you need a Professional Web Design focused on maximizing visitors and leads, feel free to contact us.

Welcome to the next in our series on how to create a successful business website. So far you have defined your target audience, bought a domain name, hired a web designer and started creating effective web content or sales copy.

But doing all these things aren’t your only concerns. If you want your visitors to interact with you, buy products or services or make donations, one essential component is gaining their trust. How you gain that trust on a website is the crux of this discussion.

Look as Professional as You Are

Looks do matter. Most visitors will click away from your site if it doesn’t look well designed. This is especially true in markets that are more mature. You need to make sure that you look better than your competitor, and preferably look as good as any other respectable business.

Stand By Your Product / Service

Offer Guarantees

Offering Risk Free Guarantees helps to reduce worries about what happens if the product / service isn’t as portrayed on the site. You know that your brand delivers quality, but people who learn about you for the first time have no idea whether you are trustworthy and deliver as you say you will. That is only to be expected, and you can address this worry straight away by offering a list of guarantees.

This way you can close the door on “what if something is not right” type of reasoning and brings your visitor one step closer to buying from your company.

Offer Social Proof

Social proof is what others say about you. Because it is a 3rd party that makes the statement, it is some of the strongest trust-winning arguments your site can offer.

Awards

Granted, qualifying for an award can be an expensive business, as many associations require a ‘contribution’ before they even start considering you. But beyond the politics and the up front cost, winning an award still shows skill and professionalism.

Customer Testimonials

Testimonials can really help build trust in your brand, especially if they are from well-known local names or ubiquitous corporations. The most helpful testimonials briefly describe a problem, how you solved it and what made your service special. It is also helpful if somehow you can make the person who delivers the testimonial more real. For example, on our testimonials, where possible, we like to link out to the LinkedIn page of the person who gave us a positive review. Or you could link to the corporate profile page of the person in question.

Case Studies

Case Studies can give your visitors a picture of how you will work for them, how well you have performed in the past and demonstrate the longevity of your brand. They are at their most powerful when combined with testimonials.

Press Mentions

They can be a lot of work to come by, but here in the US, the press tends to be very helpful when it comes to reviewing businesses. In everything you do, keep the press in mind and keep relevant industry and local magazines updated about your progress.

You and Your Staff

Staff qualifications, past employment and previous achievements are all important indicators of how well your company will perform when engaging with it.

Another positive effect of introducing your staff or yourself via your website is that you put a human face on your company. If your visitors can see the real faces that drive your company, they can identify with your brand a bit better.

Office Address and Company Registration

Nothing tells visitors you are serious more than clearly showing your company information. Yet many relatively unknown brands forget to do this. As a result, they lose sales, many of them from customers who want to buy a product or service from someone in their locality.

Security

Customers do worry about passing along information to you, from being spammed when giving out their email address to being defrauded when entering their credit card details. That is why it is important that you tell your customers how you keep their information secure.

Transparency

Allowing your customers to interact with your website and to leave content is the ultimate show about how confident you are about your brand. You will come across the occasional ‘crazies’, but people know people and can see beyond that. If the bigger picture is positive, people will trust your brand.

Allow Users To Create Content / Products

A simple 5 star rating system where appropriate can give indicators about the public mood about the content / product the visitor is considering. It can also give you an indication which products fail expectations and should be axed. Once you axe a product, negative ratings don’t matter, because it is no longer shown on your website.

Allow Users To Comment

Again, this shows that you are confident about your product / service, and can also be an interesting survey tool.

Offer a Forum

Some brands can benefit and in fact reach out to their users by implementing a Forum on the site, where users can freely discuss things they value in their daily lives and want to exchange thoughts about. Of course, the forum should remain relevant to your product / service.

Offer Useful Tools

The tools you offer to help to facilitate the decision can help your visitor to choose your brand and give a feeling of professionalism. Tools you can use are:

• Interactive forms that assess the best product for you
• Interactive questionnaires
• Client login for project review
• Online appointment setting service
• Auto responders when visitor contacts you (e.g. ‘We received your email and someone will follow up your enquiry within the hour’)
• Etc.

Trust in Your Brand = Higher Revenue

Creating trust in your brand is paramount, and it is worth the effort. If you want to learn more about how you can improve how your website generates trust, feel free to contact us.

Over To You

I am sure there are many things we have left out. We’d love to hear your ideas, so leave us a comment!