Websites That Work Beautifully: Clearing a Path for Customer Action

I got an email from Marketing Profs for a seminar entitled “Demolish the Roadblocks on Your Website: Clearing a Path for Customer Action, Sales and Loyalty“. I’m not here to sell this seminar, I just found the lead-in couple of paragraphs selling the seminar a great post all on its own.

"Too many people create websites that look beautiful. But what we really need are websites that WORK beautifully. It’s not enough to put some content up. It’s not enough to launch and leave an application or a new website design. If you want a website that makes money you must continuously improve the completion times of your customers’ top tasks. The most important thing you need to manage on your website is your customers’ time."

This is Coolaid that we drink all day every day; it is more important to be found, answer questions, generate a lead, than it is to look the prettiest. Of course the website can’t be a junker either, or that becomes a barrier (lack of credibility) all in itself. Just don’t spend all your money on the design, save 75% of your budget for promoting the website and answering your customers questions with webinars (and downloads of recorded ones), case studies, and white papers.

Author: Yves Matson

Webinar Recording - How to use Social Media in B2B Marketing

Social media is becoming a popular avenue for businesses by creating a voice for their business and attracting prospective leads by distributing details, free offers and news about their product & services. For a long time, social media was looked upon as a personal communication channel, where you could provide your opinion about personal things. Since that time Social Media has greatly evolved into a channel for businesses that want to leverage social networks to share their respective experiences and how others can benefit from their offering.

Many have seen Social Media as a distribution channel, a value add asset for potential leads, and a means to offer promotions that will in turn entice people to follow them and be their customer.

Join Yves Matson, Director of Business Development at FoundPages as he shares emerging best practices that effectively integrate Social Media into online marketing.

Webinar Title: How to use Social Media in B2B Marketing

Click on the link below to access the webinar recording:
http://www.foundpages.com/social-media-webinar.html

Topics included:

* Utilizing newsletters, blogging, case study publishing, and webinars for social media marketing
* Using Social Media as a distribution channel for blog, newsletter, or website content
* Case Study: How ActiveConversion uses Social Media Marketing for B2B marketing and how they measure ROI using marketing automation.

Web Marketing Tools - Website Comparison

One of the most popular free search engine marketing tools is the one providing Website Comparisons. The tool allows you to see how your website ranks, and compares your site against others such as your competitors. Here are a few key benchmarks of search engine marketing you should know about from the tool.

Alexa Rank - gives you a general measure of the traffic your website is receiving. The lower the score the better. It's very useful to compare the traffic trend to that of your competitors for example. If you do any social media marketing, it will play a part in how much traffic you receive from your marketing effort. The SiteInfo of Alexa will also tell you a lot about a particular website, like Traffic Stats, Contact Info, Related Links, Keywords, Clickstream and Demographics.

Google PageRank - is a numeric value between 0-10 that represents how important a page is on the web. It is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be.

Indexed Pages - reports how many pages of your website can be found on Google. More indexed pages usually indicates your website is search engine friendly and is ultimately beneficial to your ranking. As an example, we've seen a large DVD rental website that initially had about 100 pages indexed by Google due to search engine barriers on the site. With some effort and minor optimization of the website, it went from 100 to over 50,000 indexed pages in less than a month.

Inbound Links - reports how many websites directly link back to your site. Having a good number of credible links to your website will also boost your Google Page-Rank and improve the importance of your website within Google. It allows Google and other search engines to position your website higher in their search results. Of course, the content needs to be related to the search terms.

The Website Comparison tool is just one tool and a start for your online marketing efforts. You can also try the Keyword Suggestion Tool to see what search terms people are using to find your website and Webpage Analyzer to get a technical breakdown of key components of a webpage relevant to the search engines.