EduCyber Presents
Growing Your Business on the Internet Series:
March 26^th "Converting Visitors to Customers"

One of the first and continuing challenges a business is likely to face is the task of converting site visitors to paying customers. Conversion is the key to your business success online. What happens when visitors finally come to your site? Are they buying your products? Are they opting to receive your newsletter?

Finding a way to get qualified prospects to come to your site is one thing; making them do what you want them to do is another. Getting traffic is meaningless if you are not able to keep your visitors and turn them into buyers. In this interactive and informative seminar, attendees will learn proven techniques on how to convert these visitors into customers.

Signup for this March 26^th Seminar (8:00 - 9:30 AM) at www.educyber.biz

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Upcoming Events >>>

EduCyber Presents Growing Your Business on the Internet Series:
April 23^rd
"Social Media Marketing 101"
Click Here To Sign Up >>>

As Twitter and other social media services evolve, they are becoming a key part of search engine optimization strategies. You spend time on traditional SEO because you know you need to be at the top of the results when potential customers search for your products on Google.

Location:
EduCyber, Inc.
4251 Kipling St.
Wheat Ridge, CO 80033
(2nd Floor Conference Room)

Time:
11:30 - 1:00 pm.

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Web Site Usability

Once you have established your site on the Internet and have traffic coming to your site, what do you do? Your site must be usable.

First question to ask yourself: What do I want people to do? Put another way, the question can be "What are the expected outcomes?" It isn't always "more sales" but that might be your answer. It might also be more newsletter subscribers or perhaps more blog comments or even more requests for information.

Once you have determined the desired outcome, you can begin to plan around it. Each page should have one desired outcome for maximum usability. The next step is then to determine how all the pages fit together into one cohesive site. For example, if you are a realtor selling homes, you probably want to move one group of people towards the buyer's information pages and another group of people to the seller's information. Once a prospective home seller is in the right section (the expected outcome of the home page was to move buyers to buyers' info and sellers to sellers' info) the goal of one page might be to request an evaluation of the home's value. Another page might be intentioned to show ranges of prices for homes in an area and then ask them to call for a detailed analysis.

The next step, the one that is often skipped, is to test it. If you are indeed a realtor, get some sellers to go through your site while you watch. Find out if they can indeed accomplish what you want them to. Then get a buyer to go through your site. Give them a specific task to accomplish. See if they can do it. If the testing has good results, pat yourself on the back and launch. If the results aren't so good, you probably need to go back and repeat steps 1 and 2 until you get the desired results.

Just because you "hit it" with your site and get the results you want, don't stop looking at how you can make it even better.

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Web Design 101: 3 Basics

We get a lot of clients coming to us when the original designer disappears or the in house designer gets so busy with their real job that the company decides to outsource. When we take on a new client, there are three essentials for a business web site that we go over with them:

1. Look. Too many people stop with just this basic tenet of web design: having a nice look. What does it mean to have a nice look? The elements of the site need to flow together. There should be a cohesive look to the site with a logo and color scheme that build and reinforce the brand. A clean, simple site is more attractive and more likely to engage your web visitors. Take your logo (or create one if need be) and use the colors and font to determine other key elements. When choosing colors and images or photos, consider your target market and what they are attracted to.
2. Usability. We've seen way too many sites that look fantastic but aren't user-friendly. If you want to build a site that actually helps your business, it needs to be usable. Building a user-friendly site means the first question you need to ask yourself is, what do you want people to do? If the goal is to get the visitor to make a purchase, the navigation and purchasing experience need to be very easy to accomplish and should make it clear how to add something to your cart, how to proceed to check out, etc. If the goal is to get someone to call you, make sure you have the phone number as the call to action. I often tell the story of the customer who said his goal was to educate the consumer... "well ultimately I want them to call me", he said. "Where's your phone number?" I replied.
3. Search-Friendliness. Having a nicely designed, usable site gets you no where unless you also have a search friendly site. Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing task that can become quite expensive. But every web site and every page on a web site should be search-friendly. This simply means to keep in mind your key words as you write the content, name images, and create meta-tags. The Internet is not a field of dreams. If you build it, you also have to market it and provide ways for people to know what you're about. If you use your key words in your site properly, you'll have a search-friendly site that will help to drive more people to it.

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5 People I Follow on Twitter and Why

1. PublicityHound (twitter.com/PublicityHound)
   Joan Stewart is the queen of getting publicity and has developed quite a following. For any business looking to get more and better publicity, Joan provides a lot of free and low cost tips. On Twitter she mostly stays on task-focusing on Publicity, with just enough personal info to make life interesting.
2. Mashable (twitter.com/mashable)
   Pete Cashmore is so on top of what’s happening in Social Media and Social Networking that you’d be crazy to follow him on Twitter.
3. Copyblogger (twitter.com/copyblogger)
   Brian Clark is seriously into social networking but he also posts great quotes like this recent one "I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."
   From Albert Einstein.
4. Schwarzenegger (twitter.com/schwarzenegger)
   The Governator actually has harnessed the power of twitter for good - using it to disseminate information and links useful to Californians. While not a Californian myself, I'd like to see more elected officials make the attempt to use new technologies to help them better communicate and stay in touch. I guess twitter.com/govritter should get mention as well since I live in Colorado.
5. MattCutts (twitter.com/mattcutts)
   I've been a fan of Google since they started at Stanford - for real. Matt is a great public face for Google on Twitter. He lets you know what Google is up to and provides some really cool information such as how to link to a specific point in a YouTube video.

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