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Web Success TipsIn today's culture, a great website design is the first step toward having a successful business, whether that website is merely meant to bring customers to your brick and mortar store or is a full-fledged online business. Once you have a website that offers efficient access to information and that is correct and updated. You will want to draw potential customers/clients to your site through a fantastic internet marketing campaign. Once you have all of this, it is crucial to keep on top of your game by keeping your website well-maintained and by keeping your website competitive. So, how do you do all this? Take a look at the tips below for some ideas. Web Success Tips:
Enable Word of Mouth on Your Website
Enable Word of Mouth on Your Website Social Media is a great free resource for sharing the word about your business. ShareThis now offers a free tool to enable your website visitors to easily share your webpage with their friends/colleagues on their terms: http://sharethis.com/. You take the code they provide and paste it into your webpage code. Simple, easy and a great, free way to increase your exposure. Creating a Privacy Policy If you are list building or even have a contact form on your website, you need to have a Privacy Policy on your website. For a simple, free Privacy Policy Generator check out this site: http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml. If your needs are more complicated, you will probably need to contact a lawyer to draft it.
Track Customer Responses to Email Campaigns Tracking customer responses to your campaigns is key to determining the successfulness of the individual campaigns. VerticalResponse.com is an online email marketing system that allows you to do this. You can create/maintain/buy customer lists, create web forms that integrate with their list features, create emails from templates (they have a lot of templates and they're customizable) or use your own HTML, and see which emails get opened and which didn't. Emails are customized to each recipient. Make sure you include calls to action and links to special landing pages on your website, so that when you view your website statistics you know which campaign the user clicked through. If you're not getting traffic or the emails aren't even getting opened, you need to analyze your campaign and adjust accordingly. Most times it's a just a little tweaking that takes a campaign from okay to great.
Use Professional Images It is important to use good quality images on your website. Images that look professional will add to your perceived credibility. Credibility adds to the users trust of how professional you run the rest of your website. There are numerous websites that allow you to buy quality, professional images on the cheap (some as little as $1). iStockPhoto is one such website that I trust with all my client projects. Click the link below to check them out.
Use a Quality Web Hosting Service The choice of who hosts your site may not seem too important at first. But once you realize the restrictions and hidden charges some web hosting companies have in place, you will know that it makes a huge difference. I've found that a lot of web hosting companies charge for everything (domain, server, etc.) separately, which makes their fees really rack up fast. Also, flexibility in programming languages is very important. Some hosting services do not support some of the most common web programming languages, such as PHP. This means that in the future, should you need programming on your site, you won't have the ability. I've used at least 5 different web hosting services for my clients (1and1.com, godaddy.com, homestead.com, freewebs.com, ixwebhosting.com). I've found IX Web Hosting (click the image below to check out their services) to be the most affordable, most flexible (they support: cgi, php, coldfusion, asp, javascript, sql databases), most trustworthy and the easiest to use. Plus they have a lot of different tools available to help your site (free eCommerce engine, blog integration, forum integration, etc). For the past 4 years, I've used IX Web Hosting for my web hosting service, as well as for a number of clients, and I've had very few problems with service. If I do have problems, I use their 24/7 online customer service chat feature and my issue is resolved quickly. I highly recommend using them.
Do Your Homework One way to increase sales is to evaluate your website against the current Internet and technology trends. To stay competitive, you need to know who your users are and you need to know the current trends. If you haven't looked at your target market in a while, you might be missing the target. There are great websites out there that provide trend data and related articles. Here are a couple of quality sites to get you started.
5 Design Pitfalls to Avoid
Create a user retention strategy Your first questions for internet marketing were "How do I get customers?" Once you have those users, the next question is "How do you plan to keep your users?" By creating a user retention strategy, you are focusing on creating loyal users who will come to your site time and time again. It's the loyal users who really make your site float. So ask yourself: "What more can I do to please my customers?", "Where is my customer service weakest right now?", "What are my competitors doing now that I'm not?". By focusing on keeping you users excited about your site, you will not only create loyal users, you will also draw more business to your site through word of mouth.
Personalizing the experience can mean that users log-in and then see products that meet their needs, which would mean less wasted time searching your site for the products or information they're looking for. It could also be showing users what they've purchased in the past and allowing them to re-order those products. By personalizing the user's experience, you are showing that you appreciate and respect their time. Sites that are easy to work with are sites that users will come back to time after time.
Site efficiency has many connotations. It can be broken down into: technical efficiency, navigation efficiency and process efficiency.
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