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How Can I Get More Buyers to My E-Commerce Site?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Dear Rich,

I have a website and many [handmade apparel items] and some traffic but no buyers. How can I get a buyer?

Handy in Harrison

Dear Handy,

Probably one buyer isn’t going to help; you need a regular stream of buyers if you want to turn your skill into a business. I took a quick peek at your site and here’s some feedback:

You need more traffic. Your site is almost invisible to the search engines, so you’ll need to invest some time and money in search engine optimization (SEO). You’ll need to perform a keyword analysis so you know what your prospective buyers are looking for when they’re at Google. The name you give your product may not be the same as what your prospects call it. You’ll need to rewrite the copy throughout the site, concentrating on title-tags, headers, body copy and intra-site links. Also, check out Nicki Hicks’ Maine SEO Blog for plenty of good tips.
Your website could be more…um…professional looking. Ouch, I know. But if you’re selling things that have an aesthetic quality, whether they’re [handmade apparel items] or plastic surgery, you need an aesthetic website.
Your product photography is um…poor? OK, now I’m just being cruel. But it’s true: if you want to sell something, you should invest in some professional level photography. If you can’t afford it, maybe you could barter with a local photographer who needs a [handmade apparel item.]
You need to make it easier to buy from you. I had trouble finding the product page; you should make it easy to buy products from you. Put products on the home page, and write more enticing descriptions of your product. Be persuasive.

If you can’t afford all those services–SEO, photography, copywriting and web design can add up–you might want to take a look at a site like Etsy or Shopify that will get you up and running in no time.

And good luck!

Rich Brooks
Cruel to Be Kind

Photo Credit: antwerpenR

Tags: E-Commerce, etsy, search enginen optimization, SEO, shopify, traffic
Posted in Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 3 Comments »

Contact Form vs. Email Link: Which is Better?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Dear Rich,

Do I need a contact form on my website or can I get by with just an email link for people to contact me? What are the benefits of a contact form?

Wondering in Windham

Dear Wondering,

A contact form is the right tool for online lead generation. There are a number of advantages that a contact form gives you over a simple email link:

Better contact information capture: with an email link you’re at the mercy of the sender to share the pertinent information you need to evaluate the lead. With a contact form you can encourage or even require the visitor to provide the information you need, from name and phone number to the time frame for a buying decision.
Better conversion tracking: when someone completes your contact form they are directed to a thank you or landing page. If you’re measuring conversion rates on your website (as you should be), this makes it easy to track when a visitor becomes a prospect on your website, and helps you track where your best traffic is coming from…Google, an ad campaign, your blog, etc.
Easier data entry to a contact database: At flyte we have our website contact forms automatically populate our online contact database, saving time and reducing errors that occur when you have to copy and paste new leads into your contact database.
Reduced spam: When you put your email address on your website, you attract email harvesters–programs that scrape email addresses off the web for spammers to use. The best way to reduce the spam you get is to make sure your email address never gets put on your website, either visibly or hidden in the code of the page.

And maybe this is just web developer snobbery, but personally I find that a contact form is more professional than an email link on a website…maybe because I know it’s slightly more complex to add a contact form to a site. (Yeah, that’s probably just snobbery.)

Rich Brooks
Maine Web Developer

Tags: contact form, contact us form, html contact form, php contact form
Posted in Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 7 Comments »

What Are The Goals of Your Website Visitors?

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

“What do your website visitors want to accomplish?” is a question I ask almost every business owner as part of some initial information gathering during our meetings.

“They want to learn more about my products.”
“They want to see what I have to offer.”
“They want to learn about my company.”

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

The goal of your website visitor is not to help you out, but to help themselves out. Learning more about your products or services is only a byproduct of their need to accomplish a goal, overcome an obstacle or fulfill a need.

Seeing what you have to offer comes only after they’ve been directed to your site by a search engine that’s already visited your site and (hopefully) returned relevant results. And nobody but people looking for a job or a new customer care anything about your business.

As you ask yourself the question, “what do visitors to my website want to accomplish?” put down the mirror and pick up a pair of their shoes. This isn’t about you…your website isn’t about you. It’s about getting into the head of your website visitor and understanding their problems.

By doing that, you can better understand what their goals are at your website, and build your site around that. Create paths that help your visitors get to where they need to go as efficiently as possible. Those paths become your most effective sales funnels.

If you don’t truly understand the goals of your website visitors you can’t provide the answer they seek, and they’ll look elsewhere.

Rich Brooks
Those Aren’t My Sneakers

Photo Credit: Pink Sherbert Photography

Tags: sales funnel, small business, UI, website
Posted in Web Copywriting, Web Design & Development | 1 Comment »

7 Requirements for an Effective Website

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

If you’re looking for effective website strategies to build your business, here’s a start:

Immediately address the needs or problems of the site visitor, whether it’s a problem with sales, lawn care or hair loss. If they don’t feel that you’re listening, they’ll go elsewhere. Likewise, if you don’t show that you understand what they’re going through, they won’t believe you have the solution.
Explain how your company has the solution to their problem. This doesn’t mean a big sales push, but it may mean talking about how your products or services match up with the problems they’re going through.
Show examples of how you’ve solved similar problems for other people. If you’re a designer, show your portfolio. If you help solve complex problems, write case studies. If you want to demonstrate social proof, use testimonials. BTW, video testimonials can have a huge impact if you can get them.
Educate a portion of your audience and make them better consumers. (Which should help you, if you’re as good as you think you are.) Very often people aren’t looking for a business to solve their problems, they’re just trying to get educated. By educating this section of your audience, you’ve established yourself as the expert in the field, meaning that you can charge more than your competition.
Lead visitors gently down the sales funnel. This means clear calls-to-action that a visitor can understand. Don’t assume your site visitor knows the appropriate next step to take, and certainly don’t make them scroll up to the top of a very long page to see your 800 number again.
Provide compelling reasons for visitors to leave their contact information. No one needs yet another email newsletter, so you’ll need to come up with a compelling reason why a visitor should sign up for yours. Maybe it’s a giveaway, or a white paper, or discounts in the company store. Likewise, to get them to fill out your contact form you should entice them with a free consult, or whatever makes sense for your business.
Be visible and shareable. Most of your online leads will come from strangers who never heard of your company before they Googled “organic beef jerky,” “HR outsourcing,” or “VoIP business services.” Your content, from the title tags to the body content to the intrasite links, needs to be optimized for the search engines. Likewise, once people find your resource center, or trove of archived email newsletter articles, or blog, you need to make it easy for them to share this with other people to extend your reach even further.

That’s just the first seven things I could come up with on just over one cup of coffee this cold morning in Maine. Would love to hear what you feel is essential for an effective website, so please leave a comment!

Rich Brooks
I’m Just Riffing

Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

Tags: Calls-to-Action, effective website, email newsletter, SEO, website, website strategies
Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 10 Comments »

Affordable Websites for Startups and Entrepreneurs

Monday, January 24th, 2011

There’s a big difference between an affordable website for small businesses and a cheap one. Cheap websites are about not spending a lot of money; affordable websites are about getting a good return on your investment at a price you can afford.

If you’re looking for a cheap website just Google it. You’ll find plenty of options.

If you’re looking for an affordable website that you can use to build your business, take a look at our ProSites. They’re perfect for the startup as well as a growing business that wants to allocate more of their web budget to online marketing campaigns that include search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging and social media.

These pre-designed websites are build on WordPress so that you can handle all the updates yourself without any expensive software…all you’ll need is a web browser. They’re built rock solid and can grow with your business. Add a blog, add an email newsletter, integrate it with your social media marketing.

We’ve just introduced a new ProSite design called Panoramas that has five different color schemes. It can even be tailored to match your own brand’s colors.

If you’re ready to graduate from the website your brother-in-law/neighbor’s kid/niece build for you, and still have money left over for raise your online visibility, drive more qualified traffic to your site and turn that traffic into leads and sales, than the ProSites might be the perfect fit for you.

Rich Brooks
Web Design for Small Business

Tags: affordable websites, CMS, entrepreneur, ProSites, small business, startup, websites, WordPress
Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Design & Development, Web Site Launches | 1 Comment »

Magnetic SEO: What Electromagnets Can Teach Us About SEO

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

SEO is Child's Play, Really..

If you want to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) and attract more prospects to your web site, you’d do well to study the electromagnet.

Wait! Don’t click away! This isn’t some über-geek post meant to complicate the situation. Building your own electromagnet requires only a long nail, a thin wire and a battery. In other words, DO try this at home.

Connect the ends of the wire to the positive and negative ends of the battery and wrap the wire around the nail. The longer the nail, the stronger the magnet. The more times the wire is wrapped around the nail, the stronger the magnet.

Your SEO works just like an electromagnet.

To build a search engine optimized site you’ll want to create keyword-rich pages for each of your services or offerings. These act like the nails in the electomagnet. Just as iron nails work better than aluminum nails in this project, quality content that informs, engages and persuades will be more attractive to your audience.

Your blog posts act like the wire in the electromagnet. You should create blog posts that wrap around the content on your web pages. If you have a page on your house painting services, you should create blog posts on:

Home Painting Tips for the Do-It-Yourselfer
How to Choose the Perfect Exterior Paint
Why White is the Wrong Color to Paint Your Bathrooms
10 Questions to Ask Your Painter Before The Job Starts
and so on.

Each one of these should include keyword-rich links back to the page on your site that talks about your house painting services.

The more blog posts you have “wrapped” around your core service pages, the more electromagnetic juice you have flowing to your web site, and the more attractive your site becomes.

What’s the battery in this metaphor? Hmmm…not sure. Maybe it’s the desire of your prospects to find the solution to their problems or needs? Or maybe it’s the passion you bring with your content creation? Or maybe it’s the power of the Interwebs? Or maybe I’m just trying too hard to extend the metaphor.

I just finished writing an article that goes into more detail about creating an effective web presence for service professionals, albeit without the electromagnet metaphor.

Rich Brooks
Maine SEO

Photo Credit: steve_lodefink

Tags: blogging, electromagnet, electromagnetic, SEM, SEO
Posted in Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Copywriting, Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 4 Comments »

Web Marketing Articles – A Year in Review

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

2010 was a challenging year for a lot of businesses, but for those who “marketed through it” fared better than those who put their head in the sand and tried to wait it out.

Social media became legitimized for a lot of businesses who were attracted by the apparent low-cost…forget that it takes serious resources to write compelling blog posts, update your Facebook fan page, create videos, engage in LinkedIn Groups and tweet–just to name a few activities that successful social media marketers delved into in 2010.

We also saw more focus on mobile marketing, which will continue to grow in 2011, with mobile-friendly web sites, smart phone apps, location-based apps, and QR codes to name a few. I expect this will continue as well, as more people upgrade to smart phones…especially if there’s a Verizon iPhone released this year.

As always, I feel that the best approach is an integrated one, where your create a strong content strategy and deliver your message over multiple channels, that may include your web site, blog, online video, and social networking sites. Depending on your audience it might include podcasts, in-game advertising, traditional advertising, in-person networking events and more.

For all of you who take web marketing seriously, and get passionate about growing your business, here’s a quick roundup of the articles we published in flyte log, our email newsletter this year:

Here at flyte we’ve got some kick-ass things we’ll be rolling out this year to help you grow your business so that it works for you. We’ve been testing them on ourselves and on some clients and we feel that they will help you round out your offerings to your customers, clients and members.

Here’s hoping 2011 will be your most profitable year yet!

Rich Brooks
Entrepreneur

Tags: flyte new media, internet marketing, online marketing, Web Marketing
Posted in Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 2 Comments »

Company Logos: 4 Keys to Great Logo Design

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Ryan Goan can design with his eyes closed.

This is a guest post from flyte’s Creative Director, Ryan Goan. I also recorded an interview I did with Ryan around the same material called Logo Design: What Makes for a Good Company Logo? You can watch it at YouTube or down below.

Logos are everywhere, they are on everything from food and clothing to cars and buildings but we rarely give them any thought. What is a logo? Why are logos so important? What makes a great logo? These questions can be the source of some debate but one thing is certain, all great logos share 4 similar characteristics. Before we get to these characteristics let’s discuss the basics.

What is a logo?

A logo is a visual symbol used to identify a business, a product or service.

Why is the logo so important?

A logo is the cornerstone of a company’s communication, it’s on everything a company does. In it’s simplest form, it’s how we distinguish one company from another. Ultimately, a logo represents the brand, not simply for recognition but also to reflect the trust, quality and good will of the company.

What makes a great logo?

All great logos share these 4 characteristics:

1. Simple
“Less is more” is a phrase I use all the time when talking about good design but it’s never more true than when referring to a logo. The simplicity of a logo allows for it to be instantly recognizable, memorable, and powerful. Take for example the Nike logo. It’s made up of one single element, the “swoosh”. So simple, yet immediately recognizable.

2. Unique
Every great logo has something that makes it unique, something that makes it stand out from the crowd. A great logo not only should help differentiate a company from it’s competitors but also be memorable. For example, the Starbucks logo uses color, shape and imagery in a simple, yet unique way to give it that something special.

3. Versatile
Companies do business in a wide variety of mediums so the logo should be designed with this in mind. A good logo should be flexible and consistent in mediums as diverse as newspaper advertising, web sites, and signage. For example, the Apple logo works equally well both small and large, as well as it does in black/white and in color. The Apple logo is a great example of versatility. Whether it’s on the web or on their retail signage it’s always consistent.

4. Enduring
A great logo is one that is timeless, one that is not defined by trends or fads. Because a logo is used to identify the company and represent the brand, a logo should be designed to last the life of the company. Introduced in 1956, the IBM logo has changed very little and is as strong today as it was over 50 years ago.

If you have more questions on designing your logo, please contact us at flyte.

Ryan Goan
Creative Director
flyte new media

Tags: Company Logos, Corporate Logos, Logos, Ryan Goan
Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Design & Development | 4 Comments »

Maine Web Design: Maine Business Web Site Examples

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The other day someone asked me to put together some examples of Maine web design we had done. I’m not sure why it had to be Maine businesses…after all, we’ve designed sites from Maine to Alaska and just about every state in between.

However, I went to the web site launches section of our blog and was surprised to see just how many Maine businesses and non-profits that we had worked with over the years. Not surprising given we’ve got close to 400 or so web sites under our belt, but it got me to thinking there was probably a more interesting way to show this prospect a sample of the sites we’ve designed for Maine businesses. (And like any portfolio, this is just a sample.)

You can watch this Animoto-powered slide show below, or check out Maine Web Design on YouTube.

Rich Brooks
One Day I’d Like to Direct

Tags: Maine, Maine Business, Maine Web Design, Maine Web Site Design, Maine Website Design
Posted in flyte news, Web Design & Development | 4 Comments »

Social Media & Web Marketing Courses in Maine

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Although the leaves aren’t changing yet, they will be soon (sniff!) and that means that classes are getting back in session.

This year I’ll be teaching not one but two classes at the University of Southern Maine:

Web Marketing for Small Business
In this 4 week course you’ll learn how to build an effective web presence for your small business or non-profit. You’ll learn about search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, blogging, social media, e-commerce, traffic reports, and how to build a web site that generates leads and makes sales. (Please be aware, though: this is NOT an HTML course. You’re not learning how to build a web site, but rather how to make a web site that will build your business.)

4 Thursdays, September 30-October 28, 7-9 p.m.
$215 (8 contact hours/ 0.8 CEUs)
Abromson Center, 88 Bedford Street, USM Portland campus

I’m also teaching a brand new course this fall as well:

Social Media Marketing for Businesses (and the People That Run Them)
Sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are certainly popular, but should they be important parts of your marketing strategy? In this two-class course, you’ll learn how these and other popular social media sites can increase the online visibility of your business, and put you in contact with new audiences.

You’ll learn how to setup and optimize profiles on the most popular, influential sites, how to connect with people in the social media sphere, and how to measure your success. You’ll learn the do’s and don’ts of social media, how to build an audience, and how to listen to what people are saying about you and your business.

We’ll talk about social networking, blogging, online video and all the tools your company needs to master this new arena of marketing.

2 Wednesdays, November 10 and 17, 7-9 p.m.
$115 (4 contact hours/ 0.4 CEUs)
USM Library Computer Lab

Hope to see you there!

Rich Brooks
You Can Call Me “Teach”

Photo credit: Lee Nachtigal

Tags: Maine, Social Media Courses, USM, Web Marketing Courses
Posted in Analytics, Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Entrepreneur & Small Business, flyte news, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 6 Comments »

Archive for the ‘Web Design & Development’ Category

How Can I Get More Buyers to My E-Commerce Site?

Contact Form vs. Email Link: Which is Better?

What Are The Goals of Your Website Visitors?

Affordable Websites for Startups and Entrepreneurs

Magnetic SEO: What Electromagnets Can Teach Us About SEO

Company Logos: 4 Keys to Great Logo Design

What is a logo?

Why is the logo so important?

What makes a great logo?

Maine Web Design: Maine Business Web Site Examples

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