Notes From the Desk

There is an animated gif out there from the late 90’s that I ran into while looking at a local church’s website. It is an animated gif with 3 bowing monks and below the monks it simply states “Eternally Under Construction”. The website was trying to make a small religious pun, but the underlying statement of a website being eternally under construction is how every company needs to view their website and it’s function within their business.

The brochure mindset is an idea that dominates business owners’ perceptions of what a website should be. A brochure is usually a tri-fold piece of paper that states some facts about the company and probably won’t be updated for a few years. While brochures are extremely useful and their place in marketing will never disappear, applying the same rules and thought process to your website is applying old school rules to a brand new beast and it just doesn’t work.

When starting out on the development of your website, you need to come in with the mind set that your website will be a living, breathing marketing tool that must grow and evolve over time. A website is not something you can build and forget about. Companies that take this approach to their website will quickly see their numbers dwindle.

Here are some quick tips on how to keep your site growing and evolving through time.

1. Publish press releases or news articles on your website. Have a section on your home page for a link to the article so it is at your site visitors’ finger tips.
2. If you can’t afford to redesign your website, alter the color scheme. Just like a room in your house, a fresh coat of paint can visually transform your website.
3. Swap out your main home image once a month. This image is usually the first thing that catches a viewer’s eye.

The goal of these changes or others is to give visual clues to your site visitors that your site is up-to-date and evolving as your business or area of business evolves. If your site appears stale or stagnant, than people will think your company is stale or stagnant.

Recently a former coworker of mine was telling me about her experience teaching an older colleague how to use Twitter and Facebook. Basically the lesson ended when my former coworker discovered the older gentleman didn’t care to learn. Not every businessman or woman is like this, but integrating new technology with old-world business styles is a problem many companies are going to face in the coming years.

The problem isn’t that the two business styles clash and cannot co-exist. The real problem is the presentation of the ideas. Too many young up-and-coming professionals paint their way as the only way to do business and the dinosaurs of days past need to step aside. On the flip-side, seasoned businessmen and women create an air of superiority over their new and younger counterparts. From the start, this attitude creates a rift that prevents one style of business from learning from the other.

The difference between old and new business practices is this: In the past, if you didn’t meet with a client and make the perfect presentation you didn’t get that client’s business. However, today people can create that bond through LinkdIn or Twitter and garner a client’s business without ever meeting face-to-face.

I’m not going to sit here and preach to you that one way is better than the other. Nor am I going to explain the ins and outs of both styles down to the last detail. I’ll run out of writing space and you’ll be bored to death. Instead I’ll offer a quick insight and a good example of a hybrid of these business styles (I won’t make a quasi-trendy name like Fusion  or Synergy Business either).

As I hinted at before I believe a hybrid of these two styles is what is going to help you succeed and get you the furthest in the business world. While the face-to-face meeting with every client can eat up a lot of your time, a non face-to-face relationship through Twitter or LinkdIn is easy to sever because the client is not invested in you. The perfect example of the hybrid business solution succeeding is the Obama Campaign last year. I don’t care if you voted for him or not (I didn’t). Barack Obama and his campaign infused new ideas with old ideas and created a great blend that is hard to beat. The campaign used Twitter and YouTube to reach people outside of the box and direct them to traditional meet-and-greet events. They also invited people on YouTube to submit questions and the Obama staff is still using this hybrid method today to get policy ideas supported by the public.

To wrap it up into a nice little package for everyone, just remember this: if you are too stubborn to learn, you will be a stubborn fool trying to chisel a wheel while everyone else is flying their jetpacks to work.

Just like the rest of the business world, company newsletters need to evolve and change. No longer can you send out a monthly snail mail newsletter or email blast to get people’s attention. Snail mail newsletters take too long to build and are either thrown out by the person receiving it or already out of date. And junk filters catch email blasts more often than not. There is a smarter way. Switch to a blog that is hosted on your website.

As I mentioned before, junk mail is trashed right away while email blasts are caught by spam filters. The great thing about blogs is they are usually accompanied with RSS feeds. When a user signs up for your blog’s RSS feed, it will automatically update whenever a new article/entry is posted. Also, the users want to receive the information this way so you don’t have to worry about the spam filter blocking you or being trashed.

A blog also breaks the mold of the once-a-month mentality of a newsletter. When you send out a newsletter, you have about one week to capitalize on the momentum the newsletter has generated with potential clients or the opportunity is lost. With a blog you should be adding articles weekly or even daily. This creates a constant buzz about your business or product.

Building your newsletter into a blog has great benefits for your website, especially with SEO. As a blog, search engines will index your articles (Yahoo, Google, Ask) and they will see your site growing with more relevant information. This is a good building block to help crack that top 20 for search results. Remember, the majority of people searching for products or services never get past the first 20 results, so this can be huge in helping you reach that goal.

The last great thing about using a blog to replace your traditional newsletter is it can be a conversation starter with potential clients. Potential clients can leave comments on your site about a recent article, opening up the chance for a dialog. With that, a relationship can be formed to create a customer for life.

While traditional newsletters are by no means dead, their role has changed. Not everyone uses the web for all his or her information. So if you still need to produce a traditional newsletter, use it in conjunction with your blog. A possibility is to continually post your articles in the blog and instead of sending out a paper newsletter monthly send it out quarterly highlighting the most popular entries in the blog. The same can be done with email blasts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process to get your website to appear within the top 20 of a search engine’s results (i.e. google.com, yahoo.com, ask.com). When a potential patron of yours is using one of these search engines, they want the right answer to appear immediately and seldom dig past that to find their answer.

SEO should be a concern of every business, in addition to simply having a website. But a website alone is not enough. You have to stand out from the crowd and SEO is  one of the keys to help make that happen.

SEO is not some magic wand you can wave to magically have your website appear at the top of the list. Instead, SEO success is the result of utilizing content, keywords and more. When more people search google for a phone number than those who use their local yellow pages, the right answer needs to be at their finger tips.