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Maki & Brian
DeLaet
EduCyber founders
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Call it the case of "the shoemaker's children going barefoot." I'm a marketing consultant for self-published authors and have only recently started building a "real" website that wasn't a Yahoo template. Still to finish: my press kit. I suppose my excuse could be that I'm shy and hate to brag.
Shy or no, every business website should have a press kit. I'm no exception. Here's why we both should have one:
You should have information on your website for the press and others to learn about you and your business. Consider these questions:
- Do you ever try to get free publicity for your business or services? (If you don't, well, that's an entirely different article.)
- Do you get involved in your community, and do good things that the world should know about?
- If there was a problem or a wonderful event that would cause a reporter to come calling, do you have well-written basic information that they could use in a news story?
- Would you rather a reporter's use your information about your business or find it elsewhere and risk having that information be wrong?
An press kit is basically a resource area on your website for reporters to learn about your business, products, and you. Here's what could be found there:
- Current press releases
- Short history of your company
- Your biography and other key members' bios
- Sample interview questions
- Quotes from you and other
- Link to company ezine
- Pictures of you, and others in your org, pictures of your products
- List of other media appearances/links to video
- Contact info
Once you've got this page done, keep it updated. Don't be caught unprepared when the press comes calling!
Mary Walewski is the owner of Buy The Book Marketing LLC, specializing in online promotion for self-published authors. Her website (in progress, including the press kit) is www.buythebookmarketing.com .
We do a lot of web site redesigns. Often the goal is to spiffen up the image of the site with engaging colors and graphics. But we also end up making the site more usable as well. And it is amazing how many of us (yes, we've made some of these mistakes as well) don't design usable sites. Here are a few tips to make your site usable (easy for your visitors to use):
Keep all information within 3 clicks - 1 click away is even better. Our newsletter used to be buried down a few clicks to actually see the current newsletter. Guess what? We didn't get too many people looking at our newsletter. Since we made the newsletter accessible from every menu, readership has gone up dramatically. And that is a priority for us.
Tell your visitors what they get, not what you do. Instead of a "We've been in business for over 10 years serving this region. We strive to serve our customers with the best service." the first page should tell visitors how they will benefit from your goods or services like this "Need more customers? Need a web site that sells your goods? Would you like to spend less time on the phone and more time in front of your customers? EduCyber can help." The goal is to phrase your offerings as benefit statements - how will your customers benefit from what you're offering?
Include a call to action on EVERY PAGE. Simple yes. But take a look at your existing web site. Does every page have some kind of call to action? One of the first questions I ask is what do you want people to do on this page? Frequently the answer is "I want them to call me." "So where's your phone number?" I ask. Don't make your visitor have to look for ways to contact you. Provide your phone number or email address or, if you're in retail, an address with a link to a map.
Adhere to the KIS principal (Keep It Simple) by avoiding technical terms or, if you must use them, providing definitions or explanations. The world of web site design and marketing for example, is filled with terms like SEO and Meta-tags and cpanels but we avoid those terms or explain that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process used to get your site ranked high in search engines like Google.
So if you have questions or would like more information on how to make your web site more usable, contact Brian at 720-275-4646 or at info@educyber.com .
How do you stay in touch with your clients? Using email newsletters is a great way to do that. Many of the articles in this blog end up becoming a part of our monthly newsletter. There are a wide variety of newsletter programs out there that allow you to do this kind of "touching" of your customers.
EduCyber uses and hosts phpList for our business customers. We are also planning to implement another program in the coming months and will have more information as we get closer. Both allow us to customize the interface for our customers and tie them seamlessly into the web site.
Some of our colleagues use the Constant Contact program and like the way you can manage your list and send out to people without a lot of hassle or need for technical knowledge. It starts out at $15 / month but when you get to over 500 people the cost goes up to $30 / month. That seems a bit pricey but if you are reaching your customers and you have 501 people on your list, that works out to $0.167 per person that you send (and that's if its just once a month that you're sending a message, do it twice a month and the cost is just over 8 cents per person which isn't bad).
Another colleague just strongly recommended Aweber . If you sign up for this service for a year, the cost is only $179.40 which is $14.95 / month and you get unlimited users and messages. The reason he liked it so well is the auto responder feature which lets him set up automatic messages to go out at set intervals after someone signs up.
What other newsletter management or email marketing services or programs are out there? Let us know about what you're using.
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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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