When I open the discussion of website content with my clients, often they tell me all the great things they love about their company, but not why their clients come to them specifically. Try as I may to steer my clients away from giving me brochure-type content for their websites, sometimes they are too afraid to deviate from their comfort zone of telling their clients who they are, instead of offering their clients solutions to their problems.

Please remember this one thing, if only this one thing about web content: The goal of your website content is to get your visitor to take action.

You want your website visitor to say yes to something on your site. Clicking forward on something on your website is the web version of saying yes.

In order to engage your visitor with your content you have to be able to tell them what’s in it for T H E M. Once you’ve hooked them by telling them how you solve their problem, you then tell them where to click, or how to contact you immediately. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that reading a computer screen tires our eyes. People read 25% more slowly on the web than they read print material. So your problem-solving web content has to be 50% shorter than print.

Let’s break this down -

Page Title: This should include the major keyword you want to be known for – not “home”, “welcome”, or “hello”. The title should not be any longer than 70 characters, including spaces.

Your USP: Your USP is the very essence of what you are offering to your potential customers and website visitors. Your Unique Selling Proposition needs to be so compelling that it can be used as a headline that sells your product or service on its own.

Product or Service Description: This should be benefit-focused. You should also understand your clients personality and what they feel comfortable with because you will want to write content that appeals to their personalities.

This is where you think like your customer and write content that answers: What do your customers want from you? What are your customers worried about? Why won’t potential customers buy from you?

Benefit-focused content is all about the customer and should answer the question for them, “What will this do for me?” or “Why should I buy from you?” Features-focused content are about your product (which can be your services) and answer the question for them, “How does your product or service operate?” You must always take your features-focused content and turn it into a benefit for your customer.

Start each paragraph with a bang. Use words like “Careful”, “Warning”, “Caution” – something that grabs the readers attention. Keep your paragraphs short – no more than three sentences per paragraph and use font sizes that your target customer can read. A simple list of three to five bullets or a set of headings works great fro targeted content – it’s easy for your customer to read and they are more likely to pay attention to what you have written.

Contact information: This should include telephone and electronic contact information – address and a map if you want people to visit your location.

Call To Action: Every page on your website should have a call to action – something you want your visitor to do.  Do you want them to call you?  Buy a product from you?  Sign up for your monthly newsletter?  Then tell your potential customer “What’s included” if they do what you want them to do.  Make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Use testimonials: Always have testimonials.  Always.

And remember -

1. Jargon is sin – don’t use it.
2. No “tech-speak”.
3. Don’t use humor unless your product or service is humor.
4. Offer a guarantee.
5. Keep it short and simple.
6. Images don’t sell unless you are a travel site.

Be sure that everything you do with your website content is geared towards achieving one thing:  increasing your business.

Writing effective web content that engages your visitors may seem difficult at first, but as you work with us on the creation of your web content, it becomes easier. If you don’t understand how to successfully write effective content for your website, then we can help you by writing the content for you.

Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you decide what type of web content will bring customers to you and your business.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

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What is affiliate marketing?

Here’s a great video explaining affiliate marketing in easy detail -

Ask Joel says that affiliate marketing is S O P S.

Selling

Other

Peoples

Stuff

E-commerce product sites should consider offering an affiliate program for the purpose of extending their online presence and building link popularity. By allowing other web site owners to affiliate with your website, there is the potential for more sales of your eCommerce products and higher visibility of your brand. As an e-commerce site, you have the option of outsourcing your affiliate program or managing it with specific affiliate software.

Programs like Commission Junction handle affiliate programs for large companies. By partnering with such a company, you allow them to handle all affiliate issues, from creative to payment. Some companies require setup fees, a percentage of sales, while others have specific requirements for joining. You don’t have to do it all yourself.

Effective affiliate marketing may seem difficult at first, but as you work with programs that support your affiliate marketing efforts, it becomes easier. If you don’t understand how to successfully apply an affiliate marketing program to your website, then we can help you apply a basic strategy to your website.

Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you determine how effective your affiliate marketing would be for your product, service or website.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. In order to rank high in the search engines, your website needs to follow some basic SEO rules to make sure your website turns visitors that want to find you. Below are some of the most common ways to make sure your website appears for the keywords your clients will be searching to find you.

Here is Forward Motion Studios web design basic SEO tips -

• Start with your website Title and Description tags. It is effective to use similar text in the “title” and “description” tags, and to place keywords prominently in these tags. Do not use “sitename.com”, “New Page 1″, or “Welcome to my site” in the “title” tag, because they should be named a particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as “and”, “or”, or “the” in these tags.




• Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site’s ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as “keyword stuffing” and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.




• Place your navigational links at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines “read” your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what’s important on your page.




• Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot “read” pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page’s keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt=”put your keyword phrase here.” Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.




• Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn’t really make much sense for them to do so.




• Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term “dog food”, then the search engine concludes your site is about “dog food”. This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as “Click Here” or “yoursite.com”




• Also, if you’re running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to “naturally occurring” links, and less to “reciprocal link exchange campaigns”. Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website’s keyword ranking. If you don’t understand how to successfully apply these strategies, then your customers will go to your competitors instead. We can help you apply a basic SEO strategy to your website.

Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you determine how effective your SEO is on your website.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

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• 10 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website
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In the following video, Sean Nelson of SONARconnects gives 5 solid ways you should be using LinkedIn to grow your business -

Sean offers 5 ways to thrive on LinkedIn -

1. You have to have a purpose for being on LinkedIn and define it.
2. Make sure to create an optimized profile.
3. Expand your LinkedIn reach through groups.
4. Build credibility by answering questions.
5. Communicate your message.

If you are not getting the results from your social media efforts to grow your business, or you are not sure if LinkedIn is right for your business, we can help. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you determine how effective social media can be for your business.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

They cover the following tips that any business owner can use when working with a designer on their website -

1.  Make your website work quickly
Focus on latency. Users should get immediate feedback if they do something. Mozilla optimized their download page by 2.2 seconds and saw their download conversions improved by 15.4%. Speed is important to Google. www.webpagetest.org offers free web page testing. It’s OK that part of the aesthetic does not load quickly, as long as the content loads quickly. Visitors don’t care about how hard it is for your website to work, they just care that it works fast.

2.  Make your users fast too
Provide shortcuts – small things add up over time and make the experience frustrating for your users. Focus on the first field in any sign up form. Saves 1/2 a second, saves a click.

3.  Be Yourself
Make sure engaging with you on your website is fun for the visitors. Don’t have to be all corporate about it.

4.  Engage in conversations with your visitors
They see you as being on their side and are more likely to forgive you if something goes wrong. Listen to what people are saying about your product/company/brand. Monitor blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to see what people are saying about you. When you respond, do it with honesty and humility.

5.  Surprise your visitors
Use “schwag” wisely. It’s a great way to build your brand. Provide your own support: It’s a good way to see what’s going wrong and to fix it immediately.

6.  Be willing to give up control
Listen to what your visitors want and share free advice, white papers, learning tools.

7.  Be polite
Be friendly to visitors, try to understand how your website might annoy visitors.

8.  Be reliable
This brings the talk full circle. Speed and reliability are both critical. Stakes are higher for certain websites (banking) and an unreliable site can affect your brand.
Commit as a team to making your service as reliable as possible.

If you are not getting the results from your website, or you are not sure your website is providing the right experience for your visitors, we can help. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and we can help you determine how effective your website is to your visitors, and your business.

Our continued success to you,

About Forward Motion Studios -
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion and connect with them on Facebook at facebook.com/forwardmotionstudios.

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• 10 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website
• How To Recognize Crappy Web Content
• How To Write Website Content: Know Your Target Market

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