If your small business sells tiddlywinks, it may be easy to assume everyone in the world knows a lot about tiddlywinks as well.

This may come to a shock to you…but they don’t!

It’s easy when we live and breathe an industry that we just assume the consumers know what we know. The brand of tiddlywinks all the professionals use and the different air resistance factors that can affect a match.

But people don’t. So you need to teach them. And if you take a pre-emptive strike and answer all their questions before they’re asked…well you might just be on your way to building a relationship.

Why

In the physical world it’s easier to explain to a client why they should choose this product over that product. And if the client trusts you they will usually take your recommendation. If you say that X brand of tiddlywinks (really I just like using the word) is going to splinter and give you nasty thumb injuries, they’ll believe you.

The same needs to apply with your website. You need to educate your visitors so they can make an informed decision with your products. They need to walk away from the experience feeling they got the absolute best result for their time and money.

And if your products aren’t suitable for them, let them know! Nothing will impress a potential client more and gain more loyalty than pointing them in the direction of a different solution that will give a better result. Because the next time they need something from your industry…who do you think they’ll come to?

How

Write guides on how to select the best product for their needs. Teach them everything they need to know about the products they’re looking at. Those that want the information can go over it in great detail, while the rest can just get what they need and make the purchase.

Have solution assessment flowcharts, have product demonstration videos. Collect questions and make the responses into a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Homework

Choose a problem your visitors face and write a guide to help them find the best solution.

There is one main way you communicate with your audience on the Internet. I’ll give you three guesses what it is…

No, it’s not using a message in a bottle.
Nope, not paper cups and string either.
Yes! Well Done! It’s the content that you provide your visitor.

So you really need to get your content right for your website to succeed.

Why

Your content delivers your message to your visitor. If you want your visitor to understand your message and choose your business, you need to get it right.

That’s why so many small business websites fail. Their content simply consists of information about THEIR business and THEIR products. It doesn’t draw the visitor in and the visitor doesn’t get any benefit from it.

How

You really need to get into the mind of your visitor and work out what they want. What they find useful information and how they want it presented. Remember, it’s all about the visitor.

It’s easy to work out what visitors would find useful and start creating it. An article or blog post may be all it takes. There’s nothing difficult about it, but so many small businesses fail to do it.

Homework

Write at least one article that would help your visitors and post it on your website.

Getting someones attention is hard these days. Just keeping up with friends that live in the same city is difficult, let alone the ones all over the world. If we didn’t have Facebook I’d be screwed!

So the trick is once you have their attention to lock them in. Make sure they can’t leave without knowing more. My friend Mary (who I make fun of because I know she’s reading this) has been a great example of this over the last few months.

By having ‘guy dramas’ in her life, she had me completely locked in. We were seeing each other at least once a week to get the latest stories and debate the next course of action. But now the guy dramas have finished and my own dramas have taken precedence again.

Luckily she’s a lovely person so she doesn’t always have to resort to drama to get us to hang out…because no one likes a drama queen.

So how does this relate to your website? Make it gripping, make it fascinating, and tell a great story to keep visitors hooked.

Why

I really don’t think I need to point out why you should have interesting content on your website that keeps peoples attention. I’m sure we all realise that…but are we doing it?

How

The easiest way is to make sure there’s always something to come back for. Promises of more great content and a consistency around your distribution can help that. You should think about this as you create content. If you create X, what is the logical Y that people would come back for.

I’ve done this with my 7 Steps for Website Success. It was pretty obvious that more steps were coming and so people were actively checking the Members Only Area for it. (BTW I’ve finally finished them all! On to the next project mwhuaa.)

I’m now attempting the same thing with my blog posts. By logically ordering them and making that clear with the numbering I’m trying to show that there’s more useful content coming. I also try to do one every day so you know it’s here to read.

So what content can you use to suck visitors in and release it in just the right fashion to make visitors come back for more. And do you have enough quality content on your website so visitors are already browsing for hours when they first arrive?

Homework

Assess how much content you have on your website…it’s not enough. Make a commitment to create new, relevant content for your visitors as often as possible. And make sure it’s gripping enough to come back for juicy seconds.

Being different sets us apart, especially in business. To many people are afraid that if they stand out they will lose customers. But if you look at the most successful businesses, they all do things differently.

Go and take a look at the other websites in your industry and your competitors. What strikes you about them? Bingo, they’re all the same. You could argue that they’re the same because that formula works, but I blame a lack of creativity and laziness.

Your website should be different and unique. It should make your customers actually take notice and not just file you away with all your competitors. When all the businesses look the same, people decide on price. You never want to compete on price!

I hear the moans of “But we ARE different! We’re way better than all our competitors!” Guess what, saying it doesn’t make it true. Even if you have great customer service, putting that on your website doesn’t mean anything.

Guess what? All your competitors say they’re “high quality, customer focused, and great value.” So where does that leave you?

The solution? Show them you’re different. If you have great customer service…show them! And you don’t have to wait until they make a purchase, get some testimonials on your website. Make them stand out, have photos and videos of your customers. Tell stories the have examples of great customer service in them.

There are so many ways to stand out and it doesn’t take a great amount of creativity to do it. Look at other websites and see how they do things. Steal great ideas from other websites in other industries.

So, the moral of the story: Be Different. And then work out how to show this through your website.

I talk a lot about getting your website right before trying to drive masses of traffic to it. But one of the problems when improving your website is knowing whether something is really an improvement.

Personally, I can take a small business website and instinctively know how to change the text to draw a visitor in. This is just something that comes with learning how to write good copy. But once you get to that point, how do you take it to the next level?

Remember how I always talk about the importance of measurement…well this area is no different. You can actually measure a webpages results and work out how well it is converting.

I’m not talking about just what sales copy converts visitors to customers, I’m talking about getting truly specific here. Let me explain.

Remember how each webpage has a purpose, a goal that you want the user to reach? Well that means, for every individual webpage, you can measure how many visitors reach that goal. And there’s even a free tool to test what webpage is better.

So go into your free Google adwords account and look at the “Website Optimiser” tool (more information here). This is one very powerful, and very unused tool from Google that your website can’t do without.

With it, you can change the content on a single page, and test what works better. You can change your homepage text to see which copy delivers your “Most Wanted Response (MWR)” from your visitor. You can change pictures, headlines, even complete layouts if you wish.

Can you see how this might be powerful? You can now test different variations until you find the one that keeps visitors on your website. And then test different variations of the best one, until your website is a conversion machine.

So go, have a play and see what you can come up with. Now you can really put your copy writing skills to the test! Good luck!

 

 Article Guide for Search Engines: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Getting your articles to rank well in the search engines is very important for your business. There are a lot of complex techniques that go into search engine optimisation (SEO) but luckily the basics are fairly simple. Here’s my quick and easy guide to writing an article for the search engines.

First up, choose your keywords before you start writing. Every article should focus on one particular keyword phrase. More about choosing those phrases in another article. Our keyword phrase for this article is going to be, obviously, “article guide search engines.”

Also remember, that while we are trying to rank well in the search engines, if a user doesn’t visit our page it makes no difference. You need to make your article stand out in the search engine result pages (SERPs), or else you still have nobody clicking on your result. The best way to do this, surprisingly, is to have the exact information the searcher is looking for.

Now, the way the search engines rank webpages is constantly changing and some tags become more important than others constantly. However, I believe if you stick to this guide your webpages will stand the test of time and outlast the fads that plague the search engine optimisation industry.

Now to the header tags:

Title tag - keep the title short and try to avoid joining words like “and”, “in”, etc. Your keyword phrase should come first and if you want your company name in the title of each page, put it last. This is what the searcher will see when your results come up so make sure it is meaningful and interesting to humans as well.

Meta Description tag - This is the plain language description of what your article is about. Some search engines use this for their results so write a good one that tells the reader exactly what to expect. Most search engines only display a maximum of 160 characters so keep it under that.

Meta Keywords tag - This is where you can list your targeted keywords. Always put your main keyword phrase first, then a few variations that use the same keywords. No use getting general here, remember that this article is targeting a specific keyword phase and your list of keywords here should reflect that.

Ok, these tags all go in the header tag, right at the very top before any javascript or other crap you have in there. Let’s see our example:

<head>
<title>Article Guide for Search Engines | connexted</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”How to write an article that ranks well in the search engines. All the tags to use while not forgetting your human visitors.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”article guide search engines, search engine article guide, search engine article writing guide, article rank well search engines”>
</head>

Next we start writing the article. My rules for this are quite simple:

1. The keyword phrase goes in the title.
2. The keyword phrase or variation goes in the first sentence.
3. The keyword phrase or variation goes at the end of the article.
4. You don’t force the keyword phrase anywhere else in the article.

Those are the only places I’d definitely focus on putting keywords and it can be done completely naturally. Your introduction to the article, and your conclusion to the article should also mention it.

Since you are writing about a topic, other keyword phrases will fall naturally into the body of the article without you forcing them. Just forget about them completely is my advice, there’s nothing worse than reading an article that was blatantly crammed with keywords.

So what tags are important for the body of the article. All the ones that make complete sense to use when structuring a website.

Header tags - your article title should be in <h1> tags, subheadings in <h2> tags, and so on.

Paragraph tags - use them for the body of the text, they should surround text rather than tables or some other bad design flaws.

Bold tags - These are used to highlight important parts of your article, these can highlight your keyword phrases. Though only use them when appropriate.

Other text formatting tags - Things like underline and italics could have more weight in the future, so don’t be afraid to use them if they’re appropriate. They also make things easier for your reader, like using bullets or numbered points.

Image alt tags - If you have images in your article, make sure you include a description in the alt tags. This makes your webpage more accessible to those with visual problems and are very popular for search engines at the time of writing.

As for other tags, structure it the way html should be structured, and pay attention to tags that make your website more accessible. With this approach you really can’t go wrong.

Now for the example:

<h1>Article guide for search engines</h1>
<p>Getting your articles to rank well in the search engines is very important for your business. There’s a lot… …Here’s my <b>quick and easy guide to writing an article for the search engines</b>.</p>
<img src=”" alt=”Download my article guide for search engines.”>
<p>…rest of body text…</p>
<p>…Remember these points when optimising your articles for search engines and you can’t go wrong.</p>

So there we have it. I’ve given you a complete framework for writing search engines friendly articles. It can be as simple as following these few simple rules to ensure your search engine content is ranking highly for your chosen keywords.

Please let me know if my search engine article guide was useful to you by leaving a comment. Or if you have any more tips, feel free to leave those too.

One of the most important marketing activities for your small business can be it’s web site design and the content you fill it with. A well designed web site with great content can make or break your business on the internet. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get right, but if you do, the benefits will be amazing.

All over the internet you can see substandard small business web sites. As part of the small business person’s ‘do-it-yourself’ mindset, we tend to find a lot of homemade web sites that don’t sell their business. The money they save by doing it themselves can be costing them a 1000 times that in sales. A good web site can seem expensive when you first start out, but it really it’s worth its weight in sales.

Think of it as the sales brochure you have to use with every customer for the next two years! So when you shudder at paying a few thousand euros on a web site, think about how much you spend on a print run.

Now another major stumbling block of small business owners is hiring the right web designer. It’s a minefield out there but with some careful research the right person for the job can be found. However, once you have a web designer to make your web site look pretty, the next step is content. Content makes or breaks your web site and needs to be perfectly written to sell to your visitors.

If small business owners didn’t like paying for the web site design, paying for the content didn’t even cross their mind. The content and flow of your web site is just as important, if not more, than having a professional design. The attention span of your average internet user is about 2 seconds at this point. So get their attention and hold on to it for dear life!

So when it comes to your small business web site, get the design and content right if you want to have sales. A few simple changes can make all the difference to your web site’s performance. I do a free web site analysis and so do a lot of other people, so you really have no excuse not to start on the path of web site success.