Before you start worrying about marketing your website on the
internet it always pays dividends to look at the website itself
and get the fundamentals right before looking to shout about it
from the virtual mountain-tops.
You may already have thought about the following 3 ways and some
of you may already have them in place on your website. If so –
congratulations – you’re well on the way to having a website
that will bring you more business. So here they are then – the 3
Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website..
1. You’re Fishing For Visitors – You’ll Need This To Hook Them.
Ever been surfing on a website that held your attention and then
the phone rings? You take the call, take some notes, get
distracted, visit another website and before you know it you’ve
forgotten all about the website you were viewing. It happens all
the time and if you don’t have a Bookmarking tool on your
website it will be happening with the people that come to your
website. A Bookmarking tool is just a simple link or logo that
your visitors can click on in order to bookmark your website or
add it to their favourites. It is best to have the button
located on the homepage but an even better option is to have a
bookmarking button on every page so a visitor can actually
bookmark each specific page of your website for safe-keeping.
Look to the left of this article and you will see the
bookmarking button we use – click on it to see how it adds this
specific page to your favourites – nifty eh?
2. ‘X’ Marks The Spot.
Visitors come to your website and if you’re lucky – they like it
and click beyond the homepage. Excellent. But they can’t find
what they’re looking for. Uh oh, you could be in trouble.
There’s a lot of information on your website and Mr. Visitor
doesn’t have time to sift through it all to find what he’s
looking for. You’d better hope that he’s either very patient or
that you’ve provided him with a simple map to help him get to
the ‘treasure’ he is looking for. A Site Map is an essential
item – particularly on larger websites.
There is nothing more frustrating than hunting around for
something and wasting time when just a simple one pager that
presents a summary of all the information on your website could
be used. A Site Map should be reachable from all pages of your
website in just one click and should have clickable links on it
so that a visitor can zoom straight through to their desired
location without having to hunt around. If you don’t give them a
map your visitors may become frustrated searching around for
that desired piece of information and they may leave your
website never to return.
3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You
If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your
website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that
is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address
on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they
click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do
you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to
read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email
from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A
form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive
and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in
touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email
address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.
Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only
reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can
get some information back from each person that fills in the
form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which
other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything!
Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more
about who they are and more about what will make them buy from
you. You think they would tell you all this if they were
creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t!
That’s why you need a form.
About the author:
Michael Cheney is a successful entrepreneur and owner of
magnet4web.com - one of the UK's leading website marketing
companies. You can read more of his articles and download your
FREE website marketing guide "How To Turn Your Website Into A
Customer Magnet" at www.magnet4web.com
