1. Create a blog about something you are passionate about.
2. Design it well. First impressions matter on the web.
3. Develop your personal brand e.g. ‘the marketeer who guarantees return on investment’, ‘the chef who tells you what really happens in kitchens’, ‘the merciless burger connoisseur of DFW’ (burger joint review site), etc.
4. Clearly profile your target audience
5. Try to blog in audio, video and of course, written word. Make sure you do it well. If one of these methods just isn’t you, drop it.
6. Create social media pages: Facebook Fan page, Twitter account, YouTube, etc. Update them in one sweep with Ping.fm and TubeMogul.
7. Create your call to actions for your blog: Facebook connect, Facebook Fan page, Follow on Twitter, Social bookmarking, email to friend option, contact us info, provide a RSS feed for your blog and publish a newsletter with subscription, etc. Capture leads and use every medium to keep your audience engaged with your brand
8. Post content to all these channels
9. Create community: use blogsearch.google.com and find relevant blogs, engage through valuable comments and blog post exchanges. Search for topics on Twitter and communicate. Join topically relevant forums and engage. Join Facebook Groups and fan pages and network with the audience you find there.
10. Keep doing this, day after day: write one blog post, network in social networking sites and forums, interact with bloggers, it will build awareness of your blog.
11. Once you have plenty of content and some following, offer yourself up for speaking engagements. Come up with an original theme, offer to speak for free to begin with until you are known in the circuit.
12. Approach magazines online and offline and offer to write articles.
13. Leverage all the attention you get: start creating seminars and teach people. A seminar of 10 people works for now. You’ll get big soon enough.
14. Now that you are building some worthwhile traffic, start adding affiliate programs to your blog: Commission Junction, Amazon, local businesses, etc. Now you’re making some money.
15. Write a book. This will get you more exposure, more speaking engagements, more seminars and some TV and radio gigs.

Now your website should be attracting lots of traffic. Start reaching out directly to advertisers who share your target audience and begin raking in the money.

Remember that as with everything in life, it is all about a combination of hard and smart work. Blogs and books about online marketing tap into the 80’s yuppie culture of making big bugs fast without much effort. For most of us, this is a dream. Some of us do win the lottery.

But you can slug it out for 18 months, creating a blog post every day, raising awareness of your blog daily using the methods we suggested in our 15 step program, and you will start seeing results. Make it easy for yourself and do work with offshore workers, virtual PA’s, etc. You’ll get more done and it doesn’t cost all that much.

Don’t get fooled, this isn’t about making astounding fortunes. Your blog, providing it has valuable content, you communicate with a carefully selected audience in the social networks they hang out in and treat them with respect, will provide you with a steady income. The ammount of income will be dictated by your negotion skills with advertisers and the amount of traffic your site gets.

This blog entry aims to be a checklist to help you all formulate a clear idea about what direction you want to take your new website into:

Step 1: Towards a general look and feel

Determine your House Style

Knowing your House Style is important if you want to have a consistent look across all your marketing channels. Your website will need to reflect your identity on all other marketing materials, so that people can easily recognize your brand.

Gather information on the following:

• Corporate colors – colors set the mood of your site (a pink site says something different than a blue site).

• Corporate font – a font can make you strong and solid or gentle and sophisticated.

• Corporate logo – usually you expect your website to feature your logo in the top left corner.

• Corporate slogan – usually featured close to the slogan

Your graphic designer should have supplied your firm with a 'Brand Bible' (or at least an addition to your brand bible in how to handle visual identity) that outlines the above in great detail.

In case you have not been supplied with a bible, ask your graphic designer or marketing department what the house style is.

Determine the goal of the website

The look, navigation and functionality of the site are ultimately driven by what you want to achieve.

Examples of potential goals your website needs to fulfill:

• Offer services to customers

• Attract new customers

• Present a corporate front to the world

• Keep relationships with the press and drive your message

When setting goals, also find out why clients use your site. You will then learn how to meet their goals and make the site more 'user-friendly'.

Evaluate your existing site

• What do customers like?

• What do they dislike?

• What would they like to see?

• Does the site grab attention? Do important messages grab attention?

Research competitors

• Web design

• Technology

• Communication concepts

• Keywords (SEO related, this topic is discussed later)

Target audience

Who is your typical customer – it is important to know this, as this will have bearing on your communication strategy.

• How do they think?

• What do they need?

• What are they interested in?

Theme look and feel

• What is the mood or emotion you want to communicate?

Step 2: Content

The two keys of content are that it should be easy to find, and speak in a clear and informative language.

Usability

• Is their a search engine on the site? This can help the visitor find the content he needs from any page.

• Can the visitor find what she needs quickly and easily by using the navigation menu?

• Nothing should be more than two clicks away

• Is it obvious that buttons are clickable?

• What links should always be available to the user?

• Is info divided in logical categories?

• Do you utilize cross promotion? When you know that a user might be interested in one of your related services, are you clearly advertising this related service?

• Interaction

• Is it easy for the visitor to exchange information with you?

• Can the visitor find out how orders are processing?

• Can the visitor get questions answered easily?

• Is their a clear and easy 'contact option'?

• Should your site be more proactive and offer services such as 'chat with a representative' or offer a 'call back' function?

Press page

Important if you want to help shape the conversation about your brand. Be sure to offer:

• PR articles

• Press kit (could include:)

• Backgrounder with historical information on the company

• Fact Sheet listing specific features, statistics, or benefits

• Biographies of key executives, individuals, artists (Bart Forbes), etc.

• Past Press Coverage

• Photos or other images of key executives, logos, products, etc.

• Media contact information (usually of a PR department or spokesperson)

Graphics and animation

• Do pages load quickly?

• Do graphics load quickly?

• Do the graphics communicate a concept?

Trust and credibility

Why should the visitor trust you?

• Company and site security info

• Office address and registration

• Terms & Conditions

• Privacy page

• Social proof:

• List Awards

• List Guarantees

• List Affiliations

• List Testimonials

• Satisfy personal interests – people connect to people.

• Short bio's of employees

• Info on founder

• Who's behind the scenes?

• What do the offices look like?

• Fresh news – it shows that the company is current and 'happening'.

On-Site Marketing

Design your site with generating leads in mind

Lead Generation

SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization ensures that you are found by people performing searches on Google. Make sure your site is optimized for search engines.

Convert visitors to customers through CALLS TO ACTION

Visitors are on your site. What do you want them to do? Usually you want one of two things:

1. Have them contact your sales team. In order to achieve this, every page could prominently offer

• A phone number

• A call back service (at a time of the users preference)

• Possibility to chat with staff straight from the site

• A contact form

2. Or, at the very minimum, you want to capture their contact details so that you can market to them in the future. You can persuade visitors to leave contact details in exchange for:

• Newsletter

• Info on promotions

• Free downloads

• Giveaways

• Contests

• E-course

• Special report

• E-book

• Content that requires to create an account and login first.

Word of mouth promotion

A visitor may land on your site, but not be interested. However, he knows somebody who might be interested. You want to make it as easy as possible for that visitor to inform his friend about you.

Offer where appropriate:

• Tell a friend button (emails the page to a friend)

• Social Bookmarking buttons

Give incentives to subscribe and return visits

• RSS blog

• Newsletter

• Podcast

• Vidcast

I hope this list will help you in making educated decisions about your website design makeover.

Over to you

If you have any questions left, feel free to leave a comment and one of us will be sure to help you. if you want us to contact us in private, you can email us or call us on (214) 302-7631.

If you need practical ideas for your website, feel free to ask your questions in our forum.

We did a survey amongst the readers of our various blogs and that of our clients and realized few of you actually use tags. That makes tags useless as a device to improve visitor experience, yet they are cumbersome to the writer. On top of that they add clutter.

We also noticed they believed tags offered some SEO value. I regret to inform that isn't so.

And don't take our word from it, get it straight from the horse's mouth: Google's Matt Cutts:

We still use tags as we believe it adds value to our readers. It's an easy way to click and read articles about related subjects.