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.

Promoting one’s business or group is one of the most important things to do to become successful. Unfortunately, this task usually takes a back seat to other priorities. I don’t care if you are the local high school hockey team or a multinational corporate company; there are avenues that every group should be taking to expand its viability, reach and influence in the world. If customers don’t know about your business or group, than they can’t join or purchase your merchandise. Here are five simple things you can easily do on the Internet to spread the word.

1. Start a group on LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the business version of Facebook and having an individual page is great but it doesn’t fully promote the company. Creating a group page on LinkedIn helps individuals or groups find your company. With a LinkdIn group, you can easily distribute news and other information to the public in one localized place.
2. Start a business page on Facebook: Facebook right now is the number one social networking website out there. While it is not as formal as LinkedIn, Facebook has a bigger and wider net it can toss to attract more people to your business. Also when a person joins your group on Facebook, Facebook does you the favor of promoting your business to all of that person’s friends on Facebook.
3. Create a Digg account to promote your eNews: Digg.com is a news website where the articles are submitted by the users. Users recommend news they have read on other sites to all the other Digg users. If you have been including your newsletters as part of your website this is a great tool to promote your news to new people who have not heard of your group or company.
4. Participate as a group: Recently I participated in a charity bike ride and to register you need to use a website called getmeregistered.com. With this site there are many features that people rarely use. One such feature is that you can organize a business group or organization to participate in the event. A group can be 1 person or 100 people, but the benefit is you are putting your company or group name out there for the world to see. While promoting a good cause you are also promoting your business to a new group of people.
5. Submit your website to DMOZ.org: DMOZ.org is a free online directory that you can submit your website to be listed. DMOZ.org is used by people looking for specific companies to fulfill their needs. The secondary benefit of DMOZ.org is yahoo.com, google.com, and other search engines will follow that link to your website. Thus creating a free external link back to your site, which is great for your search engine optimization.

The greatest thing about the World Wide Web is the way it levels the playing field for the little man. The web puts small businesses and Indie bands in direct competition with their larger counterparts. The bonus is that unlike TV ads or a traditional print ad, you don’t have to break the bank to compete.

Scott Terry, the lead singer of Red Wanting Blue, was talking about this subject in a recent interview. Terry commented on how bands utilize the web as a promotional tool. In the beginning everyone had their own website and would stencil it on everything from t-shirts to equipment boxes. Then with the success of people like Colbie Caillat making it big with MySpace, everyone switched from their own website to their own MySpace page and began plastering that address all over their equipment and shirts. Finally he expressed wonder of where all the self-promoting on the web would go next.

Right now we are starting to see the next phase of this self-promotion and brand identity cycle shake out with other social media options taking center stage. With all of the options out there where do you begin?

No matter what your company or group does on the web, if it is going to succeed you have to build your web identity on a solid foundation. That foundation is your website because you have complete control over the design, features, and content. This is the one place that is 100% your company. Social media sites like Facebook & MySpace are no substitute for a custom website. Social media sites only give the illusion of control, not real access to all facets of the site.

After you have laid the foundation of a great website, you should next integrate the features like a blog, online store and discussion forums. The days of hosting your blog, online store, or forum with a third party site (i.e. yoursite.blogspot.com) is over. There are too many full featured, easily customizable options out there to use a third party site. The URL for your blog, forum, or store should be yoursite.com/blog, anything else and you are really promoting the blog company and not your site.

Then there are the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. What do you do about those sites? To put it simply, use them to your advantage. In my opinion every company should have a Twitter account, it’s too easy of a promotional option not to. When choosing social media outlets, choose wisely. If you can’t do it well, you shouldn’t do it at all. A forgotten or poorly utilized Twitter or Facebook page is quickly giving potential clients a bad taste in their mouths. Always be on the lookout for the next trend that fits your company and helps you reach your goals.

Finally, know that a positive web identity that pays its dividends isn’t something that happens on accident. It’s something you build and cultivate over time. To start, be sure to build on the solid foundation of a great website and grow from there.

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.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the tweaking of your web site that takes it from being listed as #350 on a google search to the top 20. What is the point of having a web site if no one can find it? Search engines like google.com and yahoo.com are always changing how they rank web sites, so you must constantly be working on your web site to bring it closer to the top of the list. Follow these 5 tips to help improve your ranking.

1. Create a standard Site Map and XML sitemap: For those that don’t know, a site map¹ is a page in your web site that lists every page of your web site in a single location. You may ask yourself “Doesn’t my navigation² already do that for me?” Well, not really. For the most part navigation only shows the top landing pages. There could be many other pages inside each of the landing pages. While a spider³ will find those pages eventually, a sitemap is faster and you can guarantee a spider finds every page by using a sitemap, while it may not with just a navigation. Also, if your navigation utilizes flash or java script it is highly likely a search engine spider cannot follow the links in the navigation. I recommend everyone have both a standard HTML sitemap⁴ and a XML sitemap⁵. This covers all your bases. While a search engine like google prefers the XML sitemap, you still leave the possibility of another using the HTML sitemap if need be.
2. Add your web site to relevant directories: For good search engine rankings you have to have inbound links⁶ to your web site, and a good way to start getting those is by submitting your site to relevant directories on the web. Submitting your site to dmoz.org or paying to submit your site to http://dir.yahoo.com creates that inbound link to your site. Don’t go crazy with this and paste your site in any directory or forum out there. If a search engine spider thinks your site isn’t posted in a relevant spot of a directory or forum you could get black listed, which just sets your site back months or years in SEO rankings.
3. Create a unique title for each page: Often each page in a web site has the same title or no title at all. When a search engine lists a page of your site in the search results, it lists the page title with each entry. You don’t want your pages to come up Untitled or with a generic title that doesn’t answer the searchers’ questions. Give each page a unique descriptive title so the searcher knows instantly what they are getting.
4. Add your business to google maps: People frequently use search engines like their local yellow pages. They often do searches like “Cincinnati Hair Salon” or “Sporting Goods Ohio”. When a search is entered in this fashion google will show local results at the top of the page.  To get your business to pop up here create a google account and then add your location to google maps.
5. Let your web site marinate: While you should always be updating and working on your site, there is a limit. Remember it takes at least a month if not longer (up to 3 months) for your site to get indexed by search engines. Tweaking your text every day can be a waste of time. What you need to do is work smarter, not harder. Review your changes before they are made and implement them in bunches. Don’t chicken peck text changes or you won’t see the full results of your work.

¹ Sitemap: Apage within your web site that has a complete list of links to all pages in your web site

² Navigation: The main group of links at the top or to the left of a web site.

³ Spider: A program used by search engines to read the contents of your web site. And they follow the links on web pages to get to the next web page in your site.

⁴ HTML Sitemap: Is the same as an XML sitemap except it is created in the standard web code and is visually friendly for visitors to view on web sites

⁵ XML Sitemap (Extensible Markup Language): Code that allows web site developers to create custom code that displays the sitemap in clean and simple code for Search Engines to understand.

⁶ Inbound Links: Links from other web sites to your web site.

If you jump on google.com and type in “hosting” you will get 429,000,000 entries. It’s too many for one person to look through to find the right hosting company fit for your website. Some hosting companies are good and many are bad. It takes hard work to find a company to trust with hosting your website.

There are local hosting companies and national hosting companies, but really there is no right or wrong choice between these 2 options. You just have to find the option that suits you best.

With local hosting companies you can easily talk to a person instead of getting stuck in phone option hell. On the flip side, local companies might look for more control over your website than you are willing to give. The best way to find a good local hosting company is to get recommendations from other companies or colleagues.

National hosting companies like godaddy.com have a big customer service staff with more resources at their disposal. Also, national companies have more options and give you complete control over your own website. Usually larger companies have forums or blogs about their services where you can read about consumer complaints or concerns.

When setting up a client with hosting, we present them with 2 options. We recommend bluehost.com or dreamhost.com. Both are great-established companies that focus on customer service and consumer friendly prices.

In the end, make sure you do the legwork when deciding on a hosting company. Don’t blindly pick one. Find out how much control over your server space you get, how much downloading and uploading you get per month, what services are extra, and how often their web servers crash? Choose wisely because there are sharks out there looking to make a quick buck and not take care of their customers.