It works like this:

We set up a blog or an RSS feed enabled website for you. We also set up an email broadcast system to capture that RSS feed information, format it for emailing, and send automatically to anyone that has given you an email address. Once the system is set up, all you have to do is go to your site twice or three times a month, write a relevant article on your industry, and your message will be emailed to everyone on the list. The email will have a link to your website and a synopsis of your article. Your customers will click the link and come back to your site, every week. If your messages and offers are compelling, your customers will buy from you over and over again.

If you’d like to profit from this kind of automated emailing system, give us a call. 801 979 7277.

Let’s take these on one at a time…

Bad designers exist. I, myself, am a good designer. I don’t consider myself a great designer, but I would give myself a good rating. My sites are clean, up to date, and are easy to manage and update. Some of my best work has been sites I have created from start to finish, including logos. The bottom line is: there is no excuse for using a bad designer. If you don’t know if someone is good or bad, find a friend or three and ask them what they think of the designer’s portfolio. If your friends don’t like the designs, don’t use the designer.

If you have a good designer who has done good logo work and good marketing work for you, keep them! They are not that easy to find. The only issue is this: they aren’t web designers, they are graphic designers. Occasionally you can find one person that is both, but generally a good graphic designer can do a website, but they aren’t really a web programmer. My suggestion in this case is keep your designer and find a programmer to compliment the designs and make you a good looking, functional, search engine friendly web site.

Next, let’s talk about whether or not design matters. My sarcastic remark is that web design doesn’t matter - in 1992. Anytime after 1992, design matters. In 1992 you could put up anything and it was marvelous, mostly because at the time there just wasn’t that much graphic content on the World Wide Web. If you live in the world of 2008, you need a smartly designed website. Why? Because it matters to your customers if your site is good looking or not.

What are your web surfing habits? How much credibility do you give to a web site that looks bad or is poorly designed? Do you want to buy products from sites that look terrible? How impressed are you at a professional that has a site that looks like this one: http://www.lanyardsupply.com

Lastly, the biggest myth is that it only matters what the search engines think about your website. Let’s just look at the logic behind that…

If you get 10 million individual visitors every day to your website and it is poorly designed, loads slowly, has irrelevant content, but mostly looks ugly, how many people do you think you’ll convert to customers? 1%? 2%? That is still really good conversion…Ok, so you convert 100,000 a day. Who gets those kind of numbers? No one.

Reality is that if your site is ugly, you won’t even convert 1%. And how much traffic does your site really have? 100 unique visitors a day? Maybe a thousand? If you can’t convert even 1% of those visitors, why do you have a web site? Even if your page is the number one ranking in Google for your specific key words, who cares if you can’t convert those clicks to customers?

At a minimum level you need to have a visually pleasing site. You should have a compelling offer so you can gather the name and email of your potential customers. You should have contact information on every page. But mostly, you need a site that is visually pleasing to at least half of the people that come to your site.

I asked, “Are you capturing your visitor’s information?”

“No,” was the answer.

Now allow me to rant. One of the most simple and easy things you can do to boost the revenue of your site is to start capturing the name and email address of as many people as you can get your little hands on. In today’s world of internet and online marketing, the best asset you can have is a huge database of people that you can easily communicate with and sell things to (think email).

I realize that this is Internet 101, but there are so many sites I go to that don’t even attempt to entice me with any kind of offer, even if it is as simple as receiving a free newsletter. I sign up for some of those, and I’m an internet guy…

If you have a website and you aren’t collecting data (read email addresses) from as many people as you can, you are missing the boat and your site isn’t performing as well as it could for you.

What can you do with an email database of 250,000 people? I will leave that to your mind to figure out, or if you’d like to partner on a solution, I have a long list of them I’d love to share with you for a piece of the pie…

Until next time, happy collections!

Let me give you an example. This afternoon I really wanted to see what is happening with the Utah Jazz so I did a Google search for Utah Jazz. The first couple of pages to return were the local news outlets; the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune. I read a couple of articles and then I wanted to find a schedule of upcoming games so I went straight to UtahJazz.com. I know they have a great front page schedule so I don’t have to sift through pages to find the information that I want.

To recap, I went to three different sites to get the information I wanted, and paged through at least 8 pages to get to it. And I knew what I was looking for…

The web is huge, and your website will get lost if you don’t have relevant content. Once you have relevant content there are a couple of ways you get traffic from the web, the biggest being search engine links. As far as my understanding goes, search engines look for three things when looking at your site to see if it is worth putting in their pages: content, links out, and links in. That’s it. That’s the big secret of SEO. Now you know everything you need to know to get your page to number one in the search engines….

If it were really that easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing the same thing?

Well, not necessarily. Are you writing original content for your website? Chances are your competition isn’t either. If you did, what would happen to your ranking in the search engines? It would go up…

I used to own a barter business and I had a website that no longer exists. On the site I had been hosting news about what was available to barter for my members, for at least a year and a half before I got the idea of doing a weekly podcast about barter. Before I did my podcast, my page rank was 0. Google didn’t even have my site in their pages. Three weeks after producing my podcast and putting it on about a dozen different podcasting sites, my page rank was a three. That’s a pretty wild jump for a site in three weeks. What happened? What changed? I had created relevant content.

Google went in and saw that I was updating my information, and since I was providing written transcripts of the show it was seen by Google as relevant content.

Three weeks is all it took. Relevant content was the key. What happened?

For the next year any time you went to any of the search engines and put in barter trade utah or oregon or any combination of two or more, my site or links to my site were the first two entire pages of links. Two pages of links to my content.

How much more business could you get if your website or links to your content were the first two pages of Googles search content? That’s what this is about…getting you more business via your website.

If you are in a niche business like bartering you can capitalize on the complete lack of relevant content on the net by starting a blog, a podcast, or a video podcast, and broadcasting your message with the use of RSS Feeds. I’m not going to go in to the technical aspects of these things in this post, but if you want more info call us and we will fill you in on what all of this means. 801 979 7277

We are experts at taking you and your message and making it in to relevant content for the search engines, and ultimately your customers, the top of the game.

Flash is now completely indexable in all of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. That means all holds are off for those of you that love to use Flash in your web designs. Click the link above if you want to see the whole article.

I have a good friend that is probably the best Flash programmer I have ever met. He may not be the best at animating in Flash, but he isn’t trying to be either. He built a website entirely in Flash that converted 87% of the visitors to customers. Think about that…87% of the people that went to his site became cash paying customers. His secret? Discreet use of Flash. I’m not going to say anything more about his secrets because he would probably come over and kick me in the shins or something, but the important thing is that you don’t have to be afraid to use Flash in your website anymore or be afraid to build your ENTIRE site in Flash.

So, have fun creation your next new Flash website…

Here’s a quick flash header I did for one client:

http://team2power.com/tableofinfluence/ 

or here

http://www.onestopcdshop.com 

Firstly, I think a good use of video is to present yourself. If you are an expert, not just a professional, a video can tell your audience much more than words typed on a website or pictures of your work. Video is a magical medium. Let’s call it the Oprah factor. How many millions of women watch Oprah on a daily basis? According to one website I visited, the number is 8 million every day. How many of those millions feel like they are Oprah’s best friend? Probably more than would admit.

If Oprah can create the feeling of being best friends with everyone that watches her show, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that you can do the same thing, on a more basic level, with some of the people that visit your website, if you have video to support it?

One of our Utah clients owns referral/networking groups. We designed a web site for him and maintain it, but one of the solutions we had for his business was to produce a weekly video message to his members. His problem was that he was just one man versus eight groups of ten or more business owners all wanting face time with him every week. One man in too many places equals chaos and no new revenue being generated. We thought that a weekly video message available on his site would help those that needed some face time feel better without it, he would retain more members, and have a few less problems do deal with. I am proud to announce that one year later, more or less, these video messages are doing just that. His clients feel like they talk to him weekly, even if they don’t.

Now let’s consider another angle of this video idea…

An expert is the source. Experts are those people you do business with, but they are also the source of knowledge you need concerning particular industries. I consult regularly with experts on many of the projects I undertake. Then there are professionals. Professionals are people you would trust to do right by you in their industry, but not necessarily the source for all of your answers. Experts garner not just business, but followings. Professionals garner business, but not followings. Experts make millions. Professionals may make good money, but they rarely sell themselves or have packages of information that establish them as experts.

Consider that a well placed, well produced video can establish you as an expert more than anything you can do on your website. The imagery of a good video will imprint your message in to the brains of your clients much more effectively than all of the writing or still photos you can create.

Let’s take this one step further and consider that a video series on your industry not only produces good will and traffic for your site, but also further entrenches the idea that you are an expert on your subject, not just a professional. We do a weekly podcast on this site about things I like to talk about, and shortly we will be doing a bi-weekly video podcast called the Good, the Bad, and Ugly of the web. We need to practice what we preach here at They Research. On it we will show you the secrets that good sites use, what not to do, and what to avoid completely.

Lastly, consider the value of viral marketing. If you have a great video, it can market your products or services thousands of times over with little or no work. My favorite example of this is the video series put out on YouTube by BlendTec. They are a Utah based commercial blender company who used their CEO as the spokesperson for a video series called Will It Blend. From the cheesy music to the outrageous things they blend, these videos are perfect for the web. They demonstrate every strength of their product in a fun and wild way. They are short and to the point. The editing is basic but well done. They use two cameras to mix up the view. Each of their videos on YouTube have seen hundreds of thousands of views and some of them have been played upwards of 7 million times. Here is a sample of Will It Blend.

How would you like your message played 7 million times?

A good friend of mine just called and had an idea for short, web-style videos that we are going to put on his site. I think the idea is amazing and we are going to partner on the project…as soon as we have something, we’ll be sure to present it to you. In the mean time, what are you doing to make sure your web site has the ability to present YOU as an EXPERT and not just a professional?

Ask yourself…

Are you a professional?

Are you not just a professional, but an expert?

If I went to your website today, would your site tell me that you are an expert or a professional?

I have to admit, I’m guilty of not paying too much attention to my own website. At the end of a long day of programming I don’t really want to spend much time on my own work. The problem is…I’m an expert. I’m not just a professional web designer.

Did you know that the first thing someone does after they meet you and find out about your business is go look at your website? It’s true…

Then they go to Google and do a search about you to see if there is any more information there that wasn’t included on your website.

Here’s a dare for you. Go to Google and type Tyler Seamons and see what happens.

I just did it and the 22 links in the first three pages of search results will take you either to my websites or to sites I have contributed to.

What happens if you put your name in Google? What are people going to see if they do?

Wouldn’t you like to be able to control what people are going to see when they put your name in Google? That is what a website can do for you.

Not only that, but your website can effectively present your message to everyone that comes to check you out to see if they want to do business with you. Your website can be your best asset in your marketing profile, if carefully crafted and attention is paid to detail.

Creative use of audio, video, and text can capture the attention of your target audience for much longer than anything else you do. Think YouTube. How much time can you waste on YouTube watching stupid videos? What if your website could be a place for people to browse your messages, your video, your audio recordings, spending time getting to understand your ideas and your business sense? How much easier would it be to close a deal if your prospect already knew about you and how you do business based on your site?

That is one of our missions: make your site tell people you are an expert, not just a professional.

Here are my top ten reasons why you need a website:

1. Credibility - as of right now if you do not at least have one page on the web, you are not in a credible business. If you don’t have a site, you aren’t considered a real business. No one takes a company serious that doesn’t at least embrace, even at an arm’s length, the internet.
2. Branding - the internet is a magical place where people seek out your business, but if your site doesn’t reflect the image of the business, the core brand, you might as well throw all that money you spent on your website in the trash. If your site does reflect your brand, you get the advantage of having your message reinforced in your customer’s mind over and over again.
3. Communication - the new version of the internet demands that you change the content of your website regularly. If you want to keep the attention of your audience, you need new content at least monthly, if not weekly. Your website can communicate in ways you never will be able to, with an audience that you can’t get to any other way. If you have a great site, your communication can extend to realms it has never been before.
4. Establish Your Expertise - don’t you like to be considered an expert? Your website should present you and your company as the best and the most expert in your field. If it doesn’t, someone else is getting the credit for being the expert.
5. Viral Marketing - if you can create something interesting, for example a video, that people enjoy or can laugh at, it will get passed in to millions of hands.
6. Make More Money - my favorite reason for having a website is making more money. If your site doesn’t generate more dollars for you, it isn’t worth putting money in to.
7. Automation - with all of the easy to implement technology that is available within a couple of clicks, you should be able to automate much of your communication to your customers.
8. Generate Leads - your site can do much in the way of generating leads for your business. The key is to have a good call to action…
9. Connect People - if your website can connect people to resources, you can make more money from creating affiliate resources…and provide useful services to the people who matter - your customers.
10. Build Your Business - overall, if your site isn’t actively building your business for you, it is worthless and you should spend your money somewhere else…

We at They Research are dedicated to having your site make you more money, generate more business, and establish you as the leader in your field. We are so dedicated to this idea that we have created a free course on how to do this for yourself. Click here to find out more about it.

If you feel like we could help you take your site to the level you’d like, we’d love to talk to you. Give us a call at 801 979 7277 or email us at info@theyresearch.com.