What Does Your Website Do For You?

Something I hear often, in fact, I heard it again last week from a potential client (who will remain anonymous, names have been changed to protect the innocent yadda yadda yadda) is that their website isn’t “doing anything” for them.  Naturally, my next question would be, “Well, what do you want it to do for you?”

A website must have a reason, a purpose for being.  Without one, it just becomes something that floats in cyberspace hoping…praying that a visitor will happen along by fluke.  Unfortunately, the internet doesn’t work that way.  If you have a website that doesn’t serve any purpose other than an informational source, then how do you know that your investment was a sound one? 

There’s this little thing in the Marketing world called a “conversion”.  A conversion means that a customer has decided to take action on your message in a way that is desirable to you.  This could be a sale, a sign up for a newsletter, or any number of different actions available on your website.  A thousand visitors to your website, heck, even a million, won’t do you any good unless they actually engage and subsequently convert.

A book seller for example might put out a newsletter with a particular product highlighted and put on a discount only for the subscribers of the newsletter.  Let’s say they send out 3000 emails.  Now, let’s say that 2% or 60 people decided to click on the ad in the email.  That’s 60 people who have come to the website looking for a specific product that was highlighted in the newsletter so instantly you already have 60 visitors to your website that day.   The page they land on now takes the torch and runs with it to try and sell as many of those 60 visitors as possible. 

The point of this example was to illustrate how a website can “do” something for you.  If the same company did a mail blast with no conversion goals such as a sale, newsletter sign up, or lead, then they would essentially be throwing their money away.  Why?  Because they’ve diverted 60 visitors to a website which does nothing but…well…show and tell.  Go back a little further to the email itself and if there was no promo, why would a person reading it even bother to click on a link that says “Click here to visit our website”  Why?  What benefit would it bring me?  There wouldn’t be 60 people clicking on such a pointless link. 

Think of ways that your website could generate return for you.  You can model it after your offline business if you have one.  If you’re a footwear company, your goals could be shoe sales, shoe accessory add-on sales, and newsletter sign-ups.  If you’re a book seller and you sell books online, your goals here could be book sales and newsletter sign ups. 

Virtually any popular business model that exists can be duplicated or simulated on the web to double, even triple your sales volume.  Don’t underestimate the power of the web.  It works even when you’re asleep.  With a website that ”does nothing” for your business, it’s like paying an employee to sleep on the job. 

For more information on how conversion points on your website, check out my article called “Growing Websites Need Measurable Goals”

http://www.thewebshop.ca/story;story,2;Growing-Websites-Need-Measurable-Goals 

Until next time,

Michael Dela Cruz, Internet Marketing Specialist
Canada’s Web Shop
http://www.thewebshop.ca

Email Marketing Information – Soliciting Emails at Point of Sale, Information for Canadian Businesses

Hi again!  It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I figured it was about time.  Things have been exceptionally busy around here taking on several new clients and doing preliminary work on projects.  One of the clients had expressed a desire to start collecting emails at their cash counters and this article which I wrote a little while ago came in very handy explaining the things that everyone should know when collecting emails.  The full article is on our company website.  Go check it out! 

Michael

How many times have you been to a store and been asked for your personal information and/or your email address? Have you ever filled out a small ballot form for a draw and noticed a field at the very bottom for email? Do you notice that some registration and application forms for things like credit cards and loyalty programs now have a space where you can write your email address?

[ Full Article ] 

Google Goes Offline

Relax. Don’t panic. By offline I mean that Google has a feature which allows you to place advertising offline audio ads and print ads in your choice of over 200 major newspapers and 1600 AM and FM Stations all across the United States. I’m not sure how long this feature has been around but it looks like it could be a really good way to advertise your business outside of the web and it looks pretty easy although I haven’t tried it myself because our focus is on customers within our local and surrounding area.

To make things simple for the average advertiser to understand, Google has created a simple video demo for audio ads as well as a video demo for print ads.

The main advantage for this new way to advertise through Google is that it allows people who don’t have experience in media buying to access radio and print advertising easily. They’ll also be able to centralize their radio and print advertising under one umbrella for tracking and organization purposes; something that traditionally even larger, more experienced corporations spent big bucks to do.

Bravo Google!

If anyone has any experience with Google Print or Audio ads I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to share your experience here.

What Pages Got Indexed Last Week on My Site?

Recently, Google has introduced a new search feature for searchers which allows you to add a date parameter to your search queries. 

This means that you can now specify a freshness factor to your searches.  For example, if there was an event that happened several years ago that has recently had an update…say within the last 10 days, such as a re-opened criminal case then you can specify a paramater on the search to return only pages found by Google within the last 10 days.  This way, you return only the most relevent information that is known by Google right now without returning the pages that were relevant for that topic years ago. 

You can do this by typing into your address bar the following address:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=search_term&as_qdr=d10

Note: replace search_term with what you’re looking for such as Internet Marketing Information or Email Marketing Information for example and then replace the 10 with the number of days you want to go back.  This search for example would return all known documents for “pet care” within the last 10 days. 

http://www.google.ca/search?q=pet care&as_qdr=d10

The screen below shows the screen once the results have returned.  You can now change the date by changing the value in the “past 10 days” drop down box to whatever you choose.

 

So how does this help you if you’re a web site owner? 

Have you ever wondered what pages Google has found and indexed on your website in the last X number of days?  A HAH!  I can see the lights coming on now.  This new tool will let you find out which pages you added to your website in a particular period have been found and indexed by Google.  Previously accomplished by going to google and typing the full web page address to see if a result comes back.  If not, the page wasn’t indexed yet.

 So now if you replace search term with site:www.yourdomain.com then you’ll return all indexed pages on your website within the last 10 days or whatever period you specified. 

So now your query looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.yourdomain.com&as_qdr=d10

replace www.yourdomain.com with your own domain to see the results for your specific domain. 

So there you have it.  A much easier way to find out which pages on your website Google has indexed within a certain time period.

The Internet Marketing Journal – Week 1

I decided to create The Internet Marketing Journal as a way to chronicle important events, articles, and other Internet Marketing related material in one centralized place. I do this with the hope that business owners will realize that the web has changed considerably in the past few years alone and “giving this web thing a shot” doesn’t cut it anymore in today’s business world.

I’ll document here my experiences with clients, conversations in the office about Internet Marketing, articles I’ve found of interest or that may help you with your own efforts, and virtually anything that has to do with the world of Internet Marketing.

I hope you’ll have as much fun reading this blog as I have had writing it.

Cheers,

Michael