Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Your Website Has Lots of Room - And Why That's Great

Have you ever tried to write a 30-word promotion for your business? And to cover absolutely everything that you need to in that tiny bit of space?

Unless you've been in business for a while, and working on your messages, this is probably a pretty difficult proposition.

It's often harder to write a paragraph to promote your business - while making sure that it's effective - than it would be to write a page on the same topic. Your copy has to do several things:

1. Be easy to understand. Keep in mind that your prospects often won't know a lot about your field of expertise. Don't use too much industry-specific jargon, and be sure to fully and simply explain 

2. Be compelling. Talk about your target market's problems, and how you can help solve them.

3. Answers the prospect's basic questions so that your prospect gets comfortable with the idea of your product or service. Also, this can help stop your phone from ringing constantly with the same questions - and enable you to get more done.

4. Makes your offer - with all of the associated details. Things like price, how your service or product works, what the prospect will need to provide you with, etc. should all ideally be covered. Hard to do in just a few words.

5. Leaves the prospect wanting more information (or, to make a purchase). And, tells them how to go about doing that.

This is a lot of information - and it's even a lot to fit into a postcard or a brochure. With a website, you can create different pages, the pages can scroll down to accommodate more information, and you can even add new pages to the site to help explain new offerings or special offers. You'll have more space to expand, to test new things, and to grow.

Why Start With Your Website Copy?

If it is appropriate for a small business to have a website (and it often is, unless your target audience just doesn't use the web), then I often recommend starting your marketing writing with your website.

Why?

Because a website does not have the permanence or production costs of printed materials. You can write the copy for your website, post it, and then edit the copy as you get feedback from your clients and prospects. You can even get your designer to set up your website on a content editing program like Adobe InContext Editing and then you'll be able to get into the text and make those edits yourself. You'll be able to change out headlines to improve their effectiveness, add frequently asked questions, or just edit the text for more clarification.

Writing copy for your website, and then editing it, is much less scary and much more effective than designing and printing several hundred brochures. And, you have more opportunities to get feedback with a website and make changes as needed. Edits cost much less on the web (because you're not paying for printing as well). 

Once you've gotten your messages organized online, and fine-tuned, then consider moving on to creating printed materials to promote your business.

Writing your website copy

Many small businesses are afraid to write their own website (or even brochure) copy.

However, I highly recommend that an entrepreneur write their own text, for several reasons:

1. The copy you write will sound more like "you" than anything that anyone else could create. It's important for a small business owner to write their text in their own voice, so that your website copy can start to build the relationship with your customers from the first time they read your marketing materials. 

2. Your voice will also remain consistent throughout the marketing, sales and service process - you'll have written the text, you'll answer the phone to talk to the prospect, and you'll be the one providing the service to the customer. Consistency in all of these aspects will help to build trust with the client.

3. Writing your copy gives you a chance to work out your offerings. Creating text will allow you to scope out your services, decide how your process works, and craft your offers to your customers. If you give the writing process over to someone else, they might make these decisions for you - and you might find that you can't work with or live with the results.

That said, I do highly recommend that after writing up your content, you get it edited by a professional copyeditor - to make sure it makes sense and that all your commas are in the right place. 

Get More Leads From Your Website

Here are a few quick ideas in that area:

• Including more calls to action and making them relevant to each page/offer.
• Putting your newsletter sign-up box on every website page (all your clients won't come in through the home page), and possibly improving that offer to make it more appealing (do you have a free sample you could give away?)
• Distributing your articles online with links back to your website to improve your search engine results and to get a wider audience base.

Follow Up To Yesterday's Post: Landing Pages

I was thinking more about yesterday's post about Following Your Print Pieces With A Website.

I think I should have been more specific. Instead of just following your printed pieces with just a link to your home page, you should create a customized page as a follow-on to your specific offer for the most impact. This is called a landing page.

A landing page allows you to talk exactly about the offer you're making. Instead of referring your new client to the vastness of your website, and making them look around for something that they're interested in, you can make sure that you send them to the precise page that you want them to land on and then give them more information about your offer.

A Fair Exchange

When you ask for someone's info on a website, you have to make the prize you're offering them more valuable than the info they're providing. So the free report, MP3 download, teleclass, etc. has to be more valuable than the personal information you're asking for in return.

Here's the hierarchy of things you can ask for:

• Email (this is expected so that you can email the new contact their prize)
• First Name
• Website
• Last Name
• Business Name
• Location/ Time Zone
• Phone Number
• Address
• Income Level or other private information

How To Design a Website

This is a big, big topic. But, in the interest of posting and not taking all night typing, do think about these areas when you're working on it. 1. Design: The basics of how the page is laid out, color palette, how the look of the site reflects your company's brand, how it will look to a prospect, and how the information on the site is presented (navigation, text, printability, etc.). How each of these factors comes into play is determined by your company's brand, services/products, target audience, online goals, online lead generation strategy, and probably a bunch of other factors that I'm not thinking of at this second. 2. Content: Everything from page names to headlines, and the actual text of your site to SEO. The content is a very very important part of your website - so make sure you don't overlook it in the frenzy of designing and coding your site. 3. Functionality: What's your site's job? If you had to choose one or two things for your site to do for you beyond the very basics of getting found on the search engines and giving basic information to your customers and prospects, what would that job be? Growing a mailing list? Selling a product? Selling services? Getting media attention? Something else entirely? I suggest that a business just starting their website not drive themselves up the wall by trying to split their focus and concentrate on too many website functions at once - build the site to do the basics, then add on a functionality or two at a time in rounds of revision. That way, you'll have realistic amounts of work to do to get your site up and live - and then you can come back and tweak it over time. And once you see how it's actually working for you, and once you get customer feedback. 4. Managability: You want your site to be something that you can work on and with over the years. Ideally, your design, content and functionality will all be coded and set up in a way that you can get in there and mess around with it. This is really important for testing/ modifying the site over time as well as for SEO, and just for the general purpose of keeping the site updated and current. Whether you build the site in Wordpress, or even just code an HTML site and pick some easy-to-use website updating program like Adobe Contribute - it doesn't really matter - as long as you can get in there and edit your site.

"The Top 10 Tricks To Easily Refresh Your Website" Teleclass Recording

Learn how you can easily update your small business's website - not only what to update on the site, but how you can do it yourself as well. http://www.elf-design.com/teleclass-Web-Update.html

Use an autoresponder to allow your website to have a conversation

You can improve the effectiveness of your website by making it more interactive, and by making sure that you're not having a one-sided conversation with your customers.

But, most small businesses don't have the time to answer tons of email while delivering their product or service. Or, you at least want to be able to take evenings and weekends off while still having your website make basic contact with potential clients who visit.

The answer is to use an autoresponder, which is a little program that automatically sends a response email when a website visitor submits their email on your site.

You've seen autoresponders in action when people use them to send out their vacation auto-replys (you know, "I'm out of the office and won't return until next Tuesday...")

On your website, you can program an autoresponder to give your clients more information - to send them an article, information about your pricing, a link to an MP3 recording or video clip - there are tons of possibilities.

Why put this in an autoresponder instead of on your site? Because if it's in an autoresponder, people will have to give you their email address in order to get the information. And then you'll have their information, and you'll know how to follow up with them to keep the conversation going later on. 

Or, you can subscribe them to your email list to keep in touch (just let them know that they're signing up for your email list when they give you their email address.)

Speaking Engagement Announcement

10 Tricks to Easily Refresh Your Website

Women in Consulting, South Bay Luncheon

March 9, 11:30 am - 1 pm

At the Los Gatos Lodge in Los Gatos, CA

Register at this link

Are you embarrassed to hand out your business cards, because new contacts might notice your website address at the bottom of the card and actually go there? Are you tired of apologizing for the inaccurate information and has-been graphics on your business's website?

Clients look to your website to provide the basis for their evaluation of your brand's credibility. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is successful and current on industry issues. 

Keeping your website current and fresh-looking doesn't have to be a chore. In this talk, you'll learn 10 easy, inexpensive tricks of the trade that you can use to take that not-so-fresh website and bring it up to date. We'll focus on the three major components of a website – the design, the copy and the functionality of the website. We'll discuss many different aspects of these components that could be the culprit that's sabotaging your website. And, we'll talk about how to fix each problem.

You'll walk away with specific ways to diagnose the issues on your own website, how to prioritize those issues, and how to actually get the changes made in an affordable, fast, and simple way.