You are a business. I am a business owner. When I think back to the early years of my business when I first began to experiment with internet marketing, I have to laugh - or cry. I invested, and lost countless dollars on my internet marketing campaigns and poor designed websites. Here, I will painfully resurrect for you what I did to lose money from my internet marketing campaigns, and through trial, error and testing, how I regained it.
Creating a website is very personal. If you've created your own website like I did, your website can be somewhat of a reflection of who you are. The colors and fonts that you choose can say alot about the tone of your website. If your website is that of a serious nature, you don't want to use a "Bazooka" or any one of the "Comic" fonts. When I was just starting out, I tested many different fonts for my website. The ones that I thought were cute or original only caused my website to look cheap and unprofessional. Your website must evoke professionalism and be easy to navigate, or you will lose customers.
Here's my first secret - it's not really a secret at all, but you might be surprised by it. When building your website for your internet marketing endeavors, make sure to keep it simple. Don't overdo flash and animation. It causes your website to load very slowly. Your potential customers will get tired of waiting for your website to load, and they will move on. Just as people don't like to wait in long lines, they don't like to wait for your graphics and animations to load either. I was so proud of my newly created website. I am in the food business - the Italian food business to be exact. My first website had so much flash and animation, it seemed like forever before it loaded. You could even hear Italian music playing in the background. I asked friends and colleagues to test the website before I launched my internet marketing campaign and all but one suggested that the website was not user friendly. I didn't care because it was so pretty and I loved the music. Here's were it gets better. After removing the flash, animation and yes, my beloved music, the website loaded faster and according to my web logs, my customers stayed on the website longer and my response rate took off. Let's review - for successful website internet marketing, it's important that you keep your website looking simple and ditch too much flash and animation.
My next tip is to make sure to get your website indexed by search engines. This is vital in your internet marketing endeavors. Believe it or not, I did not know you had to do this in order for customers to find my website. I don't even like to admit that for months, my website was not indexed. I honestly thought that after I created my website (with simple website creator software), and hit the "publish" button, that my website would instantly get indexed by search engines, and if I waited long enough, it would appear on the first page of Google. I had not realized how my internet marketing campaign could be so influenced by keywords, search engine optimization or indexing. Manually submit your website to search engines. Submission software did not work as well for me. It's a time consuming process and you will not see results of your submission for weeks or even months, but they will start to appear in the search engines.
Pay attention to the following tip when pondering your internet marketing strategies. Make sure you choose the right keywords. Again, do not make the same mistake I did when choosing keywords. My keyword internet marketing strategy consisted on too many irrelevant keywords. Like I state earlier, I am in the Italian food business. Italian catering to be exact. Now when I launched my internet marketing campaign, I took great care in choosing popular keywords. When you submit your website to search engines, they ask you what keywords you want to use. Mind you I am in the Italian food catering business here in Illinois. Here are some of the keywords I chose: Italian, catering, food, Italian food, and catering business. Not only are these keywords and phrases highly competitive, some are not highly relevant to my website. Some better choices would have been, Italian food catering in the city of Chicago, Italian specialty food catering in Chicago, and Italian food catering business in Chicago. The more detailed the better. By choosing irrelevant keywords, you won't get targeted visitors and when your keywords are too competitive, you have a lessor chance of attaining a high page rank. Unless your website appears in the top 3 search pages of a particular website, it probably won't get viewed too often. A successful internet marketing campaign depends on carefully chosen, relevant keywords. After tweaking my keywords, my website hit counter took off and sales took off.
I have revamped my website countless times and tested, tested, tested. The following tip made a huge difference in sales. Soon after I added pictures to my website, the phone calls, inquiries and sales rose significantly. Now mind you, I didn't over do the graphics. (remember you want your website to load quickly), but I did add some colorful images of our catering fare and popular dishes. People tend to eat with their eyes first, so in my case, as a food business owner, pictures of delicious food on my website was enticing to my customers.
Here's a good tip that will gain trust and credibility from your website visitors. Try, whenever you can, to include a few testimonials on your website. People are sometimes reluctant to buy from an online company. You can claim on your website that your product or service is the best, or that your restaurant has the best food. Why would anyone believe you? But when somebody else touts your product or services, it changes everything. Testimonials increase business credibility and trust. Use testimonials in your internet marketing endeavors.
Finally, if you don't follow this very important tip in your internet marketing campaign, you will be losing out. Always include on your website a strong "call to action." Again, a successful internet marketing campaign will depend on this as well. A "call to action" is something you are trying to get your prospective customer to do such as Call Now, Act Now or Order Now. Often times, you have to actually tell people what to do sometimes, and your "call to action" will accomplish this. By tell your prospective customers to "call now" or "order now" you can increase your response rate. I tested this extensively as I didn't want to appear pushy on my website, so I tested it with a "call to action" on it and without. The website with the "call to action" on it always performed better.
By following these simple yet important tips, you can improve your internet marketing campaign just like I did.
