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Maki & Brian
DeLaet
EduCyber founders
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For more than a year we have been offering the 10 essential questions to answer when you are ready to take your site to the next level . The response to this has been so good that we are going to take a deeper look at each question.
The first question is "What are the goals for my web site?" While the question seems simple enough, a lot of people struggle with this one. Too frequently the complete answer we get is "Because everyone else has a site." Putting aside the parental instinct to reply "if everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you?" we sit down and talk about what reasonable goals people can set for their web site.
If you are selling goods or services via your web site, you will want to set a goal some kind of sales goals. If the site already exists, perhaps your goal will be to increase sales 50% over the course of the next year with a redesigned web site. If the site is brand new, you can set a dollar goal for numbers of sales.
Even if you aren't selling anything on your site, you should still set goals. We track where every new customer comes from. So we know when we get a new customer through our web site as opposed to getting it through word of mouth. If your goal is to get 5 new customers through your web site each quarter, this will help you plan out your site. I had one client who had an existing site and he stated that his goal was to educate customers. I said he must be doing a very good job because the page we were looking at had 100s of visitors but almost no conversion to customers.
He looked at me for a moment and then said, "Well ultimately I'd like them to call." I gently asked him where his phone number was on the page and suddenly a great big light bulb went off inside his head. Now that he had a goal - get people to call - he could evaluate his site and make changes as needed.
Tune in next time for "How do I expect people to find my site?"
As we continue to examine the top 10 questions each business owner needs to consider when taking their site to the next level, we look at question 2: How do I expect people to find my site?
The Kevin Costner approach in Field of Dreams does not work. I can't tell you the number of times I've spoken with people who honestly believe "If I build it, they will come." But it just isnt' so. If you want to get people to come to visit your site, you have to have a plan to market that site.
Here's a quick list of ways you can plan for traffic to your site:
- Make sure every piece of paper and email you generate lists your web address
- Run a Pay Per Click campaign in one or more of the search engines
- Provide an incentive for current or past clients to come and visit - include that in your newsletter
- Get others to link to your site (this can be as easy as picking up the phone and making a call or as easy as offering the right partner a small amount to link to you)
- Ensure that your site is optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live
- Get involved in social bookmarking and bookmark relevant pages in your site
- Highlight your site in any print advertising you do
- Create a blog on your site and post to it regularly so that people have a reason to come back
These ideas are just intended to help you get the creative juices flowing. The important thing is that you have a plan for your site and then you go about implementing that plan.
If you are on the web at all (and you wouldn't be reading this if you weren't), you've probably come across some kind of wiki. Know what a wiki is? Almost sounds like it has something to do with witchcraft but it doesn't.
A wiki is a web site that allows lots of different people to contribute to the content. Apparently the name comes from the Hawaiian "wiki wiki" which means quick. Probably the most well-known wiki can be found at www.wikipedia.org , the online "encyclopedia" of our times. You can learn quite a lot about the world at wikipedia because literally 1000s of folks have contributed articles and updates to articles on the site. They've got more than 2 million articles in English and a couple of million more in other languages.
Wikipedia, though, is not perfect. There are constant minor scandals about how bios of political candidates have been hacked and just today there was an article in the www.pennlive.com web site about how wikipedia falsely reported that the 2012 G8 summit would be held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I would disagree however with the Harrisburg spokesman who said "You can't believe anything you see on Wikipedia".
There are some tremendous resources on history, geography, science, math and more to be found on Wikipedia. My recommendation is if you're quoting wikipedia on anything that could be remotely controversial, that you make sure you have other sources that also back up what you're saying.
Other wikis to check out include www.memoryarchive.org , en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page (open source books), www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia (wikis on just about anything).
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© 2007 EduCyber, Inc. This newsletter is brought to you by EduCyber, Inc. EduNotes can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week online at http://www.educyber.com/edunotes/ . Visit us on the web at http://www.educyber.com or call us at (720) 275-4646. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute all or part of this newsletter as long as this entire copyright message is included
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