Pretend you are opening a store in a busy shopping mall. As a savvy business owner you will budget for the monthly rent, utilities, security, signage, advertising, marketing, fixtures and inventory. Will you expect to begin making money the minute your doors are open for business?
As a website owner, let’s use the retail store analogy – you invest money in the building of the website or the retail storefront. Next, you open your doors for business or your website goes “live”. The thinking is that once the website is built, the search engines should find you immediately and the cash register will start ringing. Is this realistic? Why are online expectations so drastically unrealistic from offline expectations?
1. Easy – Let the visitor know it is easy to do business with you. Easy to order, easy to buy, easy to subscribe, easy to phone, easy, easy, easy. Don’t we all want everything to be easy? This is a buzzword for sure.
I read and process about 150 business emails on a daily basis and look at over 80 websites. Adding any social media activities to this already heavily multitasking type schedule is overwhelming. I feel first and foremost I need to be responding to clients and scheduling projects with our team. I tried delegating this social media aspect to my assistant and that just didn’t work. I think social media is something one personally needs to do. It’s kind of like sending my assistant to a networking meeting – it’s not the same as me being there in person.
2. Listen to me. Can you hear me now? Are they really listening to what you want/need? OR immediately writing out a prescription like a bad doctor based upon what they think you need. If it is the latter – run-Forest-run.
Whenever I do a workshop or speaking engagement I ask the audience, “What search engine do you use for finding sites and information?” I’m often surprised at the responses and almost always learn about one or two search engines that I’ve never heard of before. Google, MSN & Yahoo remain in the top three so I’ll summarize some of the data for those.
I often hear from weary website owners that they just don’t have the time to market their websites. Thinking about doing this in large chunks of time can be overwhelming. Just the thought of it may discourage you from taking any action at all. So here’s a challenge for each of you. Do you have 5 minutes? Here’s what you can do in 5 minutes:
