Internet Marketing Advantage Blog

So how can you satisfy your visitors’ needs and increase the frequency of visits from the same visitors? There is no magic formula or secret java scripting that will do it. However, laying the foundation of your site by answering five basic questions prior to building your site will allow you to develop an online presence that meets your business goals and encourages visitors to return to your site time after time. The five questions to be answered are: 1) Who is your target audience, 2) What are the objectives of your website, 3) What does a visitor expect from your site, 4) What do you want the visitor to leave with, and 5) Why should a visitor return to your site?

Defining the Target Audience

The web gives people access to, and control of, information at their convenience. Knowing who your target audience is a crucial step that needs to be clearly defined prior to developing site content or design. By knowing who your audience is you can answer the five questions that lay the foundation for your website with greater accuracy. In fact, the better you know who your audience is and what they expect to get from a visit to your site, the more relevant you can make your site.

Many websites are designed to cater to the needs of a nondescript mass audience. Take a quick look at most websites and you will find the standard out-of-the-box website package with six pages – including “Who we are,” What we do,” and “Our favorite links.” In order to satisfy the dramatically different needs of a wide variety of people, web developers create a generic site that provides no real value for the visitor or the company. The visitor does not find relevant information, and decides that the website is not adequate for his needs. No bookmarks are made and the visitor never returns. The company (site owner) gets some level of activity as measured by hits and page views, but never builds any loyalty to the site so nearly all visitors are first-time, last-time surfers.

Who is your target audience?

Defining the target audience and their needs is an important first step in building your website and a critical element to increasing the loyalty on your site. Who are the people that will use your website? Engineers that require technical data or students looking for specific information for a term paper project? How do they like to receive and use the information they collect on the Internet? Is the visual impact more important or less important to effectively delivering your message? How can your site help satisfy the needs of your target audience? You can see that knowing your target audience is much more than figuring out the demographics like gender, age, education level and income. Knowing your audience is the only true way to provide relevant content the way your audience wants to receive it. Define your target audience and get to know them better than your competitors. After all, the only sustainable competitive advantage is the understanding you have of your customers that your competitors do not have.

What are the objectives of your website?

Is it already obvious to you why you need a website? For many companies it is not so much a clear strategy as it is wanting to keep up with the Jones’. “Our biggest competitor has a website and we don’t want to seem like they can do something we can’t.” If this is your reasoning for embarking on an e-commerce initiative, you need to take a step back and consider what a website could offer your customers that is of true value – rather than to forge ahead with no direction.

There are many reasons for building an online presence that compliments or enhances your existing offline presence. For many companies, the primary justification for launching a website is because everybody else has one. Although this thinking is somewhat myopic and inward looking, because everyone else does have a website may mean that without a web presence your company is led out to pasture in the future.

One of the most basic reasons for building an online presence is that a website serves as one more tool for communicating with your internal and external audiences cost-effectively and conveniently. Cost-effective in the sense that the Internet has allowed small, capital-limited businesses the chance to look a lot bigger than they really are – opening the door to an expanded marketplace. Small businesses are no longer restricted by their location and ability to touch the customer personally. Now, with an online presence that delivers targeted communications you can drive in traffic and connect with customers that would have been cost-prohibitive to reach using traditional marketing tools.

There are many reasons why your company should have a presence on the web. However, the only ones that matter are those that are customer-focused. This alternative channel of communication saves time for the visitor and permits her to access the information at her convenience. It also provides the ability for your company to capture information on your site visitors to build customer profiles and better serve your customers.

What does a visitor expect from your site?

If you have already developed a visceral understanding of your target audience, realizing the expectations of your site visitors becomes second nature. However, it is important to take the customer’s perspective to adequately define what your visitors expect from your site. Most Internet users will expect ease-of-use (referring to the navigation ease) of your site as well as relevant information that makes their lives easier. These expectations go hand-in-hand with the assumption that your site will download quickly. The average Internet user will wait no more than eight seconds before jumping to another page or stopping the transmission if the page is too slow to open.

Beyond this, depending on your business and target audience, some users will want to be entertained and be dissatisfied if the entertainment value does not meet their expectations. Others will look for ordering information, pre-sales services, and company information. The expectations will vary from person to person, but if you have defined your target audience into the smallest homogenous segment possible (with the goal of a market segment of one), you will be able to meet your visitors’ expectations in both content and design of your website.

What do you want the visitor to leave with?

Once you have a solid understanding of what your site visitors expect from your site, you need to determine what it is that you want the visitor to leave with after visiting your website. Are you attempting to reduce the sales cycle time and want to ensure that your customer’s questions about your product’s performance and specifications are answered? Or are you looking to improve your brand image and need to find ways to enhance your offline brand online? Depending on your goals, you will want to develop different strategies for different goals.

Ask yourself what it is that you want your visitors to leave with and then consider whether you can address those needs with a focus on content or on design of the site. Most likely you will want to provide a combination of rich content that helps satisfy customer needs complemented by a good website design that allows the user to find the information or conduct the transaction quickly and easily.

Why should someone return to your site?

Is there any good reason that a visitor should bookmark your site so that he will return again? If not, what needs to be improved within your site plan that will encourage repeat visits? Although this question is last in this article, it is equally important to targeting the right audience. Whatever the objectives and reasons are for creating an online presence for your company, if you are not driving people back to your site, your website efforts are in vain. After all, why spend the time and money on developing a site if its only purpose is to keep your competition up to speed on what you are doing and how you market your business?

By asking yourself, “Why should someone return to my site?” you are forcing yourself to take a hard look at your website initiative and the justification for the investment. Developing loyalty from your customers through your online activities will be seen in your offline revenues and profits. Providing relevant information, making it easier for your customer to do her job, and creating a compelling site are some basic tactics that will encourage people to return to your website. Determining what it is that is of value to your target audience will be the cornerstone of your web activities.

Five Questions, Five Answers

There are many excellent books, magazines, and e-zines available that describe in great detail the points presented in this article. However, for those of you who are considering building a website, the questions posed here will help to layout the roadmap for your site. Laying the foundation of your site by answering these five basic questions prior to building your site will allow you to develop an online presence that meets your business goals and encourages visitors to return to your site. The key to getting off on the right foot is to complete your homework prior to launching your web initiatives. Because the Internet is in a constant state of change, those of you who have already created your site can easily take a step back and apply these five areas to your existing site strategy to ensure a solid foundation that meets your customers’ expectations.
Copyright © 2002 Martz Marketing Group, LLC

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.

A lot of online business owners start with no money. They have to do everything themselves — the preparation of a product, the development of a marketing strategy, the actual building of a website to cater to their product’s marketing needs. As their business expands over time, they will find that their simple “homemade” site might not be enough to cover everything, and they will have to take a day or two away to simply dedicate that to the website expansion.

Sounds familiar? Chances are, you’re someone who started everything with no money too, so you’re pretty skeptical when it comes to giving away your money in exchange for something that you could have done yourself. However, there is a lot more to hiring a designer than just finishing up a job that you don’t want to do.

When you hire a web designer to do your job for you, you are doing more than just handing over the “dirty job” to someone else. In fact, by paying a little money, you can let the designer worry about the little annoyances that always evade the main picture and only come haunting when you’re halfway through the job. That way, you will be more focused and have more time to spend on your actual business strategy.

On the other hand, the designers you hire a professionals so they are good at what they do. By outsourcing your web design jobs to them, you won’t have to worry when problems surface because you can always get them to fix it for you. Again, they will be able to pin point the problem and fix it faster than you probably will be able to.

Also, the work you pay for will turn out more professional than what you can achieve because the designers have been doing it longer than you have. After all, they do it for a living so they have to be good!

So, remember to not just work your business, but grow your business too!

Creating a website is not so much a feat, if we compare it to the education of other technical skills. Most people tend to give up and pack their bags as soon as they hear the word ìprogrammingî and ìtechnicalî. They think it`s too much of a hassle to actually learn a whole computer ìlanguageî. HTML, the most basic computer language in building websites, is actually pretty simple to understand, as long as we have the interest in learning new things.

What is HTML?

HTML is the acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. For learning purposes, just think of it as a language that the computer understands. For example, as humans, we were taught different languages; i.e. HTML as a language, is mostly and specifically used to create a website. The web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, will then decipher and interpret the code or rather, language(HTML), and display it in a way we can understand it, just like in a basic webpage.

Coding.

Coding the HTML language might be a bit tough for some people, so we can actually purchase programmes, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, or even Microsoft Frontpage. These programmes are solely created to help individuals in designing professional webpages/websites.

Furthermore, one could also gain access to online web-builders, website builders that are inbuilt and can be directly controlled from the net. There are many different and specific builders online.

Books and magazines contain guides that can help in offering tutorials and ways to put up our own websites. Even online tutorials are credible, as in the modern world, information technology is the best and most cost efficient way in retaining knowledge, especially in this particular field.

So, you could start and build one right away. If you enjoy coding, it might even become a favourable past-time.

Introduction

Importance of the latter :

One of the primary implications of a well-organized / good website, is to keep your visitors in the website. A website is definitely created for a purpose, unless intended for personal use, which is the minority. For example, a portfolio website would want to be visited and itís content viewed. For companies and internet businesses, your website certainly aims to provide product information, to make sales, or somewhat similar. However, most individuals undoubtly prefer visually captivating designs, so on and so forth. It is undeniable that this causes no harm, but one must put himself/herself in other peopleís shoes, as to understand how a visitor to the website might think, do and react.

1 )  Navigation

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned  in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about > products > product image > etcÖ[a few more clicks] > product information ).

Analysis : In both situations, wouldnít a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crËme de la crËme of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.