What’s your website doing right now?
Is it doing a bang-up job of attracting new fans, promoting your creative brilliance and selling your services?
Or is it just sitting there, looking pretty and virtually filing its nails?
If your website isn’t the most valuable member of your sales and promotion team, it may be time to say “You’re fired!” and hire yourself a new one. Yes, I know you’re attached to your website. You’ve already invested so much time, thought and money into its existence, right?
So, let’s not fire it just yet. Let’s give it a stern warning, and send it to Marketing and Communications Boot Camp!
As a creative artist or entrepreneur, your website is your home online. It is your online stage, gallery, and storefront, as well as your publicity agent and your sales and marketing team. While you may find fans and build relationships through social media, your website is where you want those fans to congregate, get the scoop and buy whatever you’re selling. So, it needs to do more than look good and load quickly. It needs to be generating buzz, business, money and fans!
For the next few weeks, we’re going to give your website a marketing makeover. We’ll start today with 4 of 7 Active Ingredients your website must have to be a top-producing marketing machine. Then, in the upcoming weeks, we’ll dive into each one of these “Active Ingredients” so you’ll know how to transform your website into one that works hard for you!
The (First) 4 Active Ingredients Your Website Must Have:
1. Captivate and Communicate!
When someone lands on your website, are they immediately captivated by what they find there? Does the message grab their interest, pull them in deeper and resonate with what they need, want and care about?
You’ve got about 2.7 seconds to capture the attention of your website visitor before they lose interest, click away and land on someone else’s website, which may or may not hold their attention. People’s attention is the most precious commodity these days, and the competition is stiff!
This doesn’t mean you should soup-up your website with loud colors and flash videos. This means you have to know your potential fans. You need to know their needs, dreams, desires, goals, interests and fantasies, so you can speak to what they want, what they are looking for.
It may sound odd, but when people come to your site, they are looking for themselves. They are looking for something that is all about them! Their needs, desires and interests, or their troubles, problems and heartaches. In many ways, they are looking for their own reflection. We’ll talk more about this in the upcoming weeks.
2. Engage & Inspire to Action
In the olden days, websites were nothing more than a virtual brochure, a place to post information for people could read. But those days are gone, baby!
With Web 2.0, the name of the game is ENGAGEMENT! Participation. Conversation. Action! While we still use the Web to get information, we also use it to interact, converse, argue, agree, connect and play! Passive receptivity is out, participation is IN!
How can you engage your visitors? How can you invite them to be part of the conversation? How can your website be a place where something is happening rather than a lot of words on wallpaper?
If you don’t have a blog or a membership site, you may want to invest some strategic thought into how you can engage your fans and visitors. But the simplest way is to ask them to DO something that will immediately benefit or amuse them in some way. Make it so juicy, fun, mysterious or provocative that your fans and visitors can’t resist! It should be free and it should allow you to build your email list!
3. Build Your List!
As an artist and entrepreneur, your email list is your pot of gold. It is your most powerful Internet marketing tool, and it will always give you the most bang for your buck when it comes to promoting and selling what you do… if you know how to use it properly.
So, if your website isn’t consistently and significantly building your email list by inspiring your visitors to “opt-in,” then it is failing at its most important job.
The best way to inspire your visitors to give you their email address is to give them something exclusive and valuable in exchange. A fair swap, or as those in the Internet marketing world call it, an ethical bribe. You’ve probably engaged in these kinds of exchanges yourself. Someone’s website offers you something you want for free, and all you have to do is enter your name and email.
This kind of ethical bribe has become the norm now, and so far, no one’s come up with a better way to build an email list.
Be sure your free and fabulous offer is on every page of your website, because you never know which page people will land on. It can be in the right column or even in the header of your website.
4. Attraction Power!
How do people find your website? From your business card? Your email signature? Your Facebook or Twitter page? The wall of a public restroom? While these outside links are critical (okay, with the exception of the public restroom), you also want your website to rank highly when someone searches for your specialty or expertise on Google. So you need to be sure that every page of your website is keyword-rich!
To be honest, the importance given to keywords and SEO (search engine optimization) is, to me, a tad overblown. I would rather people find your website through social media, email, blogs and articles because then your first-time visitors are more likely to be “qualified leads,” meaning they were referred by something or someone they already trust and know, and they most likely already know a little something about you.
Nevertheless, it is still wise to make proper use of the keywords that can attract those who are searching for someone exactly like you! HOW do you determine what keywords are right for your website… and what do you do with them once you know? Good question! For now, I’ll refer you to this article that talks about keywords relative to article marketing, but it can be applied to your website as well. Then, in the upcoming weeks, I’ll give you more tips about keywords.
Oh, the best is yet to come! Later this week, I’ll give you 3 more Active Ingredients. But for now, right now, sit down with your website. Pretend you are your ideal fan and you just landed on your site. What do you think? How is your website doing relative to all of the above? What needs tweaking and what needs a major overhaul?
If you have questions, be sure to leave them here in the comments section. Or you can post them on my Facebook Page. I’ll be sure to answer you promptly!
And you won’t want to miss the next juicy installment of “A Website That Works Wonders” series, so subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for my free eBook over there on the right hand column, and I’ll make sure you won’t miss a thing!