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Maki & Brian
DeLaet
EduCyber founders
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In this Issue we continue examining the top 10 essential questions to answer when you are ready to take your site to the next level with questions three and four. In addition, there is an article on Service Pack Timing.
OK, once you've got a plan (the goals for your web site) and you have a marketing plan (what will drive people to your site?) its time to figure out what you want people to do when they get to your site. This is a pretty basic concept and yet one that is often overlooked.
There are various actions that you, as a web site owner, may want your visitors to do on any given page or process of pages. These actions will make the most sense if we start with: "I want the visitor to"
- call for a quote or appointment
- fill out a form requesting more information
- join my newsletter
- buy something from my online store
- create a profile on my blog
- contribute their expertise on my forum
- tell three friends about my site
This is by no means a complete list but hopefully helps you think about what you want to accomplish with your site. Once you understand WHAT you want people to do, you can begin to figure out HOW they should do it.
Once I asked a client whose ad campaign we were managing what he wanted the visitor who clicked through to a particular page to do. He replied "I want to educate them." I waited a few seconds and finally he came out with "Eventually I want them to call me." That made my next question very easy - "Where is your phone number?" I asked. "Oh."
The next day he had not only put his phone number very prominently on the page, he had also created a page that let visitors ask for more information online. The point of the story is that once you have determined what you want people to do on your page, make sure it is easy for them to do it.
Understanding clearly what it is that you offer, and who's buying it, can help you take your business to the next level. If you offer a service for example - say you trim trees for homeowners - then you have an obvious niche that you serve. If you're based in Wheat Ridge (like we are) you can say you serve the Denver Metro Area. You don't want someone from New Jersey contacting you about trimming their trees and they don't want to waste their time either. So you can focus on your immediate area.
Continuing on the localization theme, why not target the key phrase "Wheat Ridge" or "Wheat Ridge tree trimmer"? Sure there many only be a handful of people who search for that each year. But wouldn't you want those people to be your customers? So localization is one way of determining your niche.
But there are others. The constant message I hammer is Define Your Target. Some of my customers get hung up on the fact that "well my target is here but I also have customers over in this category". Don't think about that! Define your ideal target customer. Then develop all of your marketing, including your web site marketing strategies, around that target. When you're playing darts, you never hit the bullseye with every dart. But the more you practice aiming straight for the bullseye, the better you get at hitting it. And some of your darts will inevitably end up missing the target all together. Same with your clients. Some will not be anything like your target. And that's OK. But the more you aim for your target, the more customers you'll get that are in close to your idea.
Other examples of defining your niche or target:
Deal in Real Estate? Residential or Commercial? New homes or existing homes? Sell alot of ranch homes? A lot of tudor homes?
Selling stick dolls online? Who has been buying them? What do you know about them? Mostly female? Mostly in their 30's? Single? Married? Buying for themselves? Buying as a gift?
Once you've defined your niche, make sure that you're targeting keywords that fit that niche. Also if you have identified a certain demographic, use tools such as Claritas or Mark Kassof (focuses on Radio but a lot of carryover to the web) to help you understand how to target that niche that you have defined.
We haven't given an update on Microsoft Service Packs in a while but here it is:
Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 was released a while back. It includes several security upgrades, the most important of which makes it much more difficult for Office files with malicious coding embedded in them to do any harm when you open them. Instead the software essentially converts the file to the latest version (2007) of the document which strips out the malicious code.
As with any service pack there are lots of other fixes and updates and the Service Pack also consolidates several other security updates that have been released separately. There are also several tweaks intended to improve performance and stability.
If you're still using Office XP or earlier or Windows 2000 or earlier, shame on you. Those programs are so outdated you're losing functionality and productivity. You should upgrade immediately to a newer version.
Which brings us to Office 2007. No service pack has been released yet. I think 2007 is worth upgrading to already but it is a memory hog. Make sure you have plenty of CPU and RAM. And speaking of needing a lot of CPU and RAM, what about Vista? Still no service pack on it either, though Microsoft says it will be out in the first quarter of '08. They have released the beta version to testers so that's a good sign. I do NOT recommend upgrading to Vista until the SP is ready. If you're buying a new computer though, give it some serious thought.
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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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