Your Business Website is NOT a Magazine

I see it everyday… business websites that are as static and boring as a tattered brochure.

When visitors arrive at your business website are they seeing a non-interactive magazine-type layout on the screen or an interactive interface that is personalized and takes advantage of all the reasons a computer website is better than a magazine or brochure?

A business website is so much more than a magazine or brochure and yet some business owners still treat their websites as such. There are so many advantages the business website has over traditional printed publications. Here are some…

• Color. Unless you have the best printing in the world your brochure will not look anything like a website photo and graphics can look. Aesthetically the color is brighter and more intense due to it being lighted from within. Whereas ambient lighting affects every image you look at in printed matter.
• Length of medium. Space. You have an unlimited amount of space to play with. A web page has no limit for how long it can be… or how wide it can be… you can make a webpage as big as Manhattan literally if you wanted to do that to your visitors. The sheer volume of space you have to play with by adding different pages, posts, photos, and everything else is staggering. You’re not limited with the computer. Take advantage of that.
• Branding, contact information, personalization on every page. Blogs have been great for businesses for a lot of reasons, one of them is the standardization of the template they bring to a business site. If the site is formatted as 3 columns, usually it remains 3 columns across the business’ index page, posts and pages. In those columns and the header can be all the personalization and contact information you can fit. Every single page should give users easy to reach key information about your business. With a magazine or brochure you have a header and footer – but, you’re trying to conserve so much space that you might not use them.
• Multimedia. Sound. Images. Animated GIFs. Video. 3-D Video. Video is really taking off and your website should have some video on it. Video helps visitors feel more comfortable not only with the staff and owners of the site, but also helps to build credibility and professionalism. Use video liberally and not just for sales talks, but for introducing yourself and what the site is all about. Introduce staff, and do a quick run through your company having staff say hello. Video is probably the most powerful way to craft a message to your business website visitors – use it!
• Interactivity. Everyone uses comments nowadays on their business websites and most take them for granted. Some don’t monitor their comments closely and end up with junk that degrades their site. Your business site is your life… your career. You must keep it clean and presenting the ultimate image of your business you worked hard to grow. Polls are very easy to implement within a WordPress site, there are a number of excellent poll plugins that add the functionality easily and professionally. Use them to gain very valuable feedback from your visitors. Polls are probably the most underutilized and most powerful way to interact with your customers.
• Control the path. You can control precisely what information a visitor to your business website views and in what order. You can use “funnels” to funnel visitors toward a goal you have.
• Lead generation. A magazine can collect leads indirectly – and required a reader to call the business and then give their contact information if it made sense to them. On your business website there are multiple ways to collect leads. The website can do it for you – as an automated process. In fact, you might not do anything to the system once you set it up – just day after day it sends you leads in your email that you can contact by email, phone, or snail mail.
• Updates and new content. Magazines get updated once a month. With your business site you can update every couple of minutes or hours if you have something of value to add at that rate. Search engines love to see new content – so getting into a regular groove of adding content at least once per week is a great idea for the longevity of your business.
• A world of resources. You can bring into your business website resources from all over the internet. You can share a Google spreadsheet, link to a YouTube video, show Flickr.com photos, and even direct visitors to a free online training demo you set up to give a taste of what you offer. You have the option to bring any of millions of bits of content into your site and share them with your visitors. How powerful is that?!

Are you treating your business website like a magazine or are you “being all you can be” online?

Website Hosting and Starting a Business

As you begin to plan the design of your website you’re going to start seeing the phrase, “website hosting” come up a lot.

What is web hosting and why is it necessary for your new business website?

Web hosting is the hosting of all the pages and code for your business website on a web server (computer) at a hosting company usually. The computer you’re using at home could be turned into a web server if you had the right software and a decent connection to the internet. A website server simply receives requests from browsers across the globe and serves them pages from your website. If all the files for your business website were sitting on your home computer and your connection was fast and stable you could host your website on your home computer. Many people do that. Technically it’s not that difficult. Keeping your connection fast and not crashing the server is a trick that most people choose to leave to a hosting company.

You might wonder how the pages and code, all the pages and necessary files get put on the server that might be half-way around the planet. FTP, File Transfer Protocol, is used to move files from one computer over to a computer server that is hosting your website. Similarly, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) takes your email to wherever you’re sending it.

FTP programs almost always take the form of 2 windows side by side. One shows the directory of the computer you’re sitting at (usually left side) and the other shows the directory for the website server that will hold all your website’s files. (usually right side)

FTP programs are not difficult to master for the business website owner – but the whole process is something that takes a little instruction. Once you’re logged into your website server you could do a lot of damage if you deleted or copied over the wrong files or folders. It would be quite a bummer to delete something your business website needs and crash your whole website – yes?

Soon we’ll be offering you a short elearning course about web hosting and how to go about FTP’ing up files to your website server so you can learn all about the process.

Web hosting is offered by hundreds of companies in the USA alone. We use, and have used for 11 years, “Godaddy.com” for all of our domain name purchases and web hosting. We have 34 hosting accounts with them currently and we’re very happy with them overall. Know that you will never find the perfect hosting company – but, finding one you trust enough to let them control your business website is crucial to the success of your new business.

Give Godaddy a try and I think you’ll be pretty pleased.

If you have any questions, just write: Flincorporation@gmail.com.

Running Ads on Your Business Website: Smart or Not?

Google’s Adsense program is an amazingly easy way to begin making some money with your business website if you have some traffic. Well, actually there are a few variables that go into it and I’ll cover those in a few minutes.

Running ads for other companies on your business website might not be such a great idea. You’ve got to make a decision about whether to run other ads on your business site at all – or, try hard to convert each of your visitors into either customers, regular visitors, or as email list members that you can keep a conversation going with.

Ads running on your site that are from a business in direct competition with yours probably isn’t a good idea. I wouldn’t run any other business incorporation site ads on my site because there’s a good chance I’m going to lose customers that way – sometimes for just pennies. Not a good idea.

I might run ads for businesses that are similar to mine but that don’t offer the same products and services – they’re in a niche related to this one – but, not identical.

If you do decide to run Google Adsense ads on your business site these are the factors that you’ll need to optimize in order to make it work. Make it work is long way to say “make cash”.

The 5 variables leading to success using Google Adsense or some other Pay Per Click Advertising scheme on your site are:

1. Number of visitors to your business website – Roughly you’ll get somewhere between 1/4 of 1% up to 2% of visitors clicking ads you have on-site. There’s a BIG difference between these percentages and they can be the difference between making it or not.
2. Placement of Ads on your business site – Ads placed “above the fold” do well. Ads placed in-line with a readers flow of reading do well. Ads that blend in to the context that surrounds them usually do better than highly contrasty ads – unless those ads are at the edges of the site and away from flow of reading.
3. Ad Design – blending is usually better. Font type, size, and general matching with site content is usually best.
4. Relevancy (between reader intent, the content and the ads) – have too much relevancy and your competition will be stealing your customers. Place ads for related niche businesses on your website and you’ll have the right idea.
5. How much are ads paying – some ads pay $3 per click, and some 10 cents. Some niches are very competitive and the advertisers are desperate to find customers. They bid high on the keywords and you’ll make more money than low-competition niches.

Review:
Running advertisements on your business site may or may not be a smart idea. Test it and see how it goes. One primary concern is that you don’t want to give your customers away to another company that’s in the same exact niche as your business. The other concern, if you decide to run ads on your business website – is how to bring enough traffic to your site and optimize site / ad design to capitalize on your site traffic. It’s basically a numbers game – more people = more sales, but it’s also an optimization game.