It is an excellent idea to build a website that is interactive and successful. Why build one if your goal isn’t to gain attention from viewers, other media and to get feedback from your audience? Follow these five steps to help find your website success!
Create Your Content Plan
The fastest way to a popular website is to provide content that helps your targeted audience solve their problems. For example, if a website were dedicated to marketing, a good Content Plan would be to help your visitor identify their problem, provide a few free resources to help them solve their problem. While realizing that they probably can’t resolve it on their own, create a flow that will help them connect the dots as to why your services are what they need!
Once you have your Content Plan, actually keeping your visitors on your page and getting it all right is another story! Keep your readers engaged by asking questions, using metaphors and analogies, being funny and telling them stories. Writing For The Web is an excellent resource for getting it all right regarding web copy and common mistakes.
Develop Your Design
Website design consists of branding, a design theme and a way to interact with your visitors.
Branding - Creating logo and graphics has historically been expensive but with so many Web 2.0 tools today - it is pretty much a cinch for anyone! A great resource for a logo design is LogoTournament.com. I’ve used this before and had a blast! Pixlr and PicMonkey are both great Photo Editor tools. In my opinion, Pixlr is a bit more advanced while PicMonkey is better for beginners.
Design Theme - Creating a consistent theme across each of your webpages is simple today as well with tools such as Word Press or Webstarts.
Interaction - To encourage interaction, set up a forum or blog where people can chat about their thoughts. Another idea would be to set up a poll in which people could vote and cast their opinions. Trivia about a certain product would be an excellent way to educate viewers about something that you'd like people to endorse. Links to news articles are a way to keep people informed about what goes on in the world.
Clarify Your Call-To-Action
A Call-to-action encourages people to respond to your webpage, Tweet, Facebook Post, Bog Post, etc. Simply asking your visitors to comment or leave a post is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. But don’t forget to stay in the game! As the one asking your audience to rate, comment, subscribe or make a response - your visitors will have more incentive to express their opinions when you are actively involved in the conversation.
Using inspirational quotes from famous entrepreneurs is a good way to give opinions and inspire conversations. To get an audiences attention, try reaching out and ask them to vote on upcoming changes to a product or service or ask their opinion in what the changes should include! Allowing input from your visitors and customers is a great way to help a business become better!
Supplementing Social Media Into Your Site
Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is a great way to promote your business, attract more consumers, earn increased traffic and create a positive affinity between you and your viewers.
Julie Blakley of Postano.com says that “Harnessing the power of Social Media and bringing it back to your website can not only drive higher time on site, higher rates of engagement, and hopefully better conversion rates, but it can also allow brands to fully connect their online presence into a cohesive online strategy.”
There are things you need to consider when using social media on a website. First, where should each discussion be happening? Second, a good social strategy must be taken into consideration. Finally, the constant monitoring of social conversations is key to making your website very handy-dandy.
Optimize with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There are several items of interest that drive SEO such as Blogs, Key Words and Link Building.
Blogs - Brandignity says it well... a blog provides the opportunity for Internal Linking, External Linking and One Way Links. Internally Linking together like minded blog posts by following other bloggers will pass power between pieces of content. External Linking gives you a well rounded SEO approach by linking to sources within your copy that expand upon it, provide credit from another source or validate your statement with statistics or research. When your content is good your community will provide One Way Links by sharing it or interacting with comments.
Key Words - A great tool to help you determine the best keywords for your site is Google AdWords. To leverage key words include them as tags or meta-tags for each web page and then repeat those key words throughout your copy. Also remember to include this practice within your blog posts!
Link Building - This occurs by building back links to your site and/or by earning reactions and responses to your Social Media messages. Back Linking has traditionally been time consuming and expensive and does not address the ‘relationship quality’ that is so vital to today’s business. In response to this, Search Engines have begun to show a higher interest in reactions and responses within Social Media Networks for stronger organic rankings. This helps to give a huge search advantage over competing websites.
Building a website that proves to be popular is very beneficial in expanding your exposure and helping your business to make profits. Please share your thoughts and opinions... Do you think that these ideas will work for your website? What has worked for you that we’ve left out? Be sure to comment and rate the article.
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Elynn Fish is the Founder and President of The Fish Firm of which specializes in using New Media To Turn Modern Marketing Into Money by helping small business owners and entrepreneurs increase online sales and attract new business.
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