Category Archives for "Content"

Promoting Your Website Locally

You have a website and you want to promote it.  Simply putting good content up is little use if no-one sees it.

If you are a local group or business, you have a several advantages.  Organisations with a national or global reach are solely dependent upon online techniques to promote their site.

Locally you have a geographically constrained market and so should be able to reach a high proportion of it.

If you serve 20 000 people, your appeal should be to those people.  An email list of 2 000 people should be possible, with focused effort.  If the quality of what you’re offering is high, word of mouth should help you build your list further, that is people will forward information online and talk about it locally.  Even a smaller list might have significant penetration into your community depending on your offer and willingness of your followers to pass on your communications.

Here are some ways to invite people to visit your site.  At every opportunity:

  • Publish your url.  Business cards are always helpful and if you have a base or shop window, use posters and flyers.  These can be left in public places and promoted by partner organisations.
  • Ask for email addresses.  If you hold meetings ask people to leave their email addresses.  You must explain the addresses will be added to an email list.  This is a very effective way of ensuring people hear about your activities.
  • Ask subscribers to forward your emails or pass on your url.  If they like what you’re doing they may still need to be prompted to pass on information.  Often people who can’t support you by taking up your main offer, eg they can’t afford it, are happy to help in some other way.
  • Give stuff away online.  It should be informative and entertaining.  The aim is to build a relationship with your subscribers so they are likely to respond to your requests for support or offers of products and services.  Tie your online offer into your business, eg recipes with a special offer on the ingredients.  The recipe could also be given away in your shop, so people can buy a pack with the ingredients at a special rate.
  • Consider giving real life stuff away.  Invite people to sign up and receive special offers from your business.  For example, if you run a café, offer a free cup of tea with a sandwich.  This will need careful planning.  Be clear exactly what your offer is and how people will qualify to claim it.  You can of course use your list to tell subscribers about offers open to the public.
  • Promote someone else’s business.  If there is another local business and think they have a good offer, consider promoting them on your email list.  So, if you are a hairdresser, you might offer a 10% discount to your list for the local café.  The café would cover the cost of the discount.  You need to be clear whether the discount is for people on your list or your active customers.  Your customers will be grateful for the discount and the café might promote your service to their list in return (if they have one!)

If you are not a business, it may be interesting to find out whether local businesses would be willing to promote your cause.  Would your members support a café that publicised your cause to their customers?  Has anyone tried this?

So, there’s a few ideas.  Have you tried or thought of trying other approaches?  Has anyone got a list that’s large and very local?  How did you do it?

What Makes Content Compelling?

Of the many things you must consider to be successful in your marketplace online, perhaps the most important is good content.  Scratch that – the most important thing is excellent content!  What makes content compelling?

If your content is excellent, you need not worry so much about search engine optimisation (seo) because people will find their way to your site.  OK you may need to do some seo and conversion testing, that depends on what you’re aiming to do but with good content you’re almost there.

That’s the claim and we need to question it!

It’s certainly true if your content is compelling then you have the foundation you need for your site.  People will recommend your site, place links on their site to your site and so help you build your following.  This is a long haul strategy; you may have to post regularly for as long as 2 or 3 years to build up the site authority you need!

So, simply posting good content is unlikely to be enough.  It’s foundational but it’s worth considering what you can do to promote your content.  With some of the following you need to have made a start and have something for people to read.  They are strategies for the long haul but remember every organisation is different and sometimes there are opportunities to do things quicker!

  1. Find out what your market wants and meet their wishes on and off site.
  2. If your site is local then promote your site offline and locally.
  3. Collect contacts’ email addresses and build an email list.
  4. Encourage visitors to your site to join your email list.  Offer some good reasons to join it.
  5. Encourage your subscribers to link to your site and recommend your activities.

In future posts I’ll address each of these in turn.  And I shall write about the content itself in the fullness of time.  Please share your ideas and examples of good content in the comments.

Marketing: The Irresistible Offer

Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest has a lot to answer for.  It seems Darwin supported the idea that competition is totally natural.

Survival of the fittest makes sense if you lust after unaccountable power.  It’s brilliant to be able to suggest the universe runs on your principle of power.  “I’m better at competition, I defeat and wipe out my competitors.  It’s all perfectly natural.”

But survival of the fittest is culturally determined.  I read somewhere the term did not appear in Darwin’s first draft!  You can see the appeal to  people seeking to justify their greed and lust for power.

The fittest is the one who fits best.  And you fit best by collaborating.  Even relationships we might read as violent can be mutual.  Foxes need rabbits yes.  But rabbits also need foxes; without foxes they compete for food and ultimately starve.

Examples of collaboration in the natural world far outweigh examples of violence and use of force.  Nothing works when the bullies take over.  Nothing evolves on its own, punching its way to superiority.  Eco-systems evolve, not individual species.

So, the marketplace is not an arena for competition but for collaboration.  It is where we supply one another’s needs and a place to exchange ideas and support each other.  It is only in relatively modern times that we understand it as a place for competition.  Competition happens when things go wrong, the fittest survive because they know how to collaborate.

We enter the marketplace because we have something to share. When we’re online we’re in the market place: those who go there to scam, bully or otherwise be destructive are ultimately not survivors.

Design for your Market

Web design is barely 20 years old and so it is no surprise designers do not agree about what their job is.  It is an important question, especially where resources are scarce and value for money crucial.  Even if a wealthy business or charity can afford a beautiful site that does no work for their organisation. no serious organisation can be satisfied with this.  The problem is many organisations do not know there is an alternative.

The old model is ‘graphics – words – numbers’.  The message here is the site’s graphics are most important, then the content (often supplied by the client and not of particular interest to the designer) and then numbers – the research to find out what actually works for the client.

The new model reverses this: numbers – words – graphics.  First we do research, then construct excellent content, get it online, more research and as we find out what works introduce and improve the graphics.

I would add two more terms to these series, which I think shows the difference between (traditional) web design and web consultancy.

Web Design

(Designer) – graphics – words – numbers – (Client)

Web Consultancy

(Client) – numbers – words – graphics – (Consultant)

With numbers first, the web consultant can help their client find their place in their market.  Their site design should grow naturally from the client’s understanding of their market.

Market

Do you know your market, their demographics, their level of awareness of what you’re offering and their habits online?

Content

With first-rate content, visitors to your site will understand your offer and its benefits.  It encourages visitors to use your service and they might recommend your site to others?

Structure

How you structure your site, your branding, each page’s appearance, how people land on your site, the links between pages; all contribute to your site’s success.

What is best practice for the various types of pages found on websites?  I shall compare home, about, contact, landing and other page types.  What content is on them?  How can it be improved?

What are the basics for layout of pages?  What works and what doesn’t?  How to bend your CMS to your will!

Management

How do we square the various demands on the site?  These may originate from various priorities within an organisation or else from the competing demands of search engine optimisation, good copy, legal issues, accessibility, etc.

Reviews

Reviews of sites and groups of sites to show what works and what doesn’t.

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