All websites need content and that is a fact.
But writing that content can be a daunting or seen as difficult task for even the keenest business owner, but that need not be the case.
The thing you need to do is focus on what you want your website visitor to DO on your website. Whether that is to contact you regarding a sales lead, sign up to a newsletter, buy something or just to provide information about the company, all these will help highlight what you will need to write.
If you are attempting to get your website traffic to convert to sales or leads, you need to use persuasive copy and know enough about the customers to know what converts them into sales.
Avoid listing the features of the service or products, but simply state the benefits of your service to your customers – if you must list features, list them after the benefits. For example, most customers don’t care that your vacuum cleaner is produces 1,700 watts of power and is only really useful when comparing two models/makes of vacuum cleaner. Indeed, if a customer is looking for a vacuum cleaner, then unless they are looking at several, then the actual suction power is of little value (they just need to know that the vacuum will clean their floors!).
That isn’t to stay listing the technical specs of your products isn’t something you should list somewhere on your site, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you put in your product descriptions (and the actual product specs should be put on a different page where they can be found for those discerning customers).
If the main purpose of the website is to generate leads, then having a content form on your site is a must and this must be one of the most prominent things on your website page(s).
The copy should be there to compliment the form and not distract from the form. The copy should answer most of the common questions you are likely to be asked (it is always useful to answer actual common questions you’ve gotten). Again, list your benefits and not simply the features of your service.
These are little more difficult to write for, but obvious content include contact details, a small form for contact and maybe a little about the company (on a separate page preferably so that if the visitor is interested, they can get that information).
The text on your website will invariably be indexed by the search engines (usually within a week), so anything you put up live on a website will be visible for the search engine spiders to see and index. This is a double edged sword as you want to write content for your website in a concise manner but include enough content so that it is useful for your human visitors.
Write short, concise sentences. Most people don’t read every single word on the web so keep things short and sweet.
To break up longer pieces and give the user some measure of “scannability”.
Using formatting to add emphasis to those things that really matter and to highlight key points.
Images are worth a thousand words they say. Use them sparing and to good effect when they are tied into the content.
Get someone else to spell check and proof read your work. If that is not possible, leave it a day or so and re-read it yourself and correct those mistakes.
Expecting a website designer to create a great website design first time is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This is because they have to consider several things:
All these things play a role in the eventual website design and can have many effects in the final design.
There are also design conventions to consider, such as having the main navigation at the top, below the header, placing contact details in the footer (and maybe also in the header).
Good web designers take the time to consider all these questions and come up with a design that takes into account all these factors and many more. They work hard to provide you with designs that work not only for your but your customers as well.
A few things to consider when you get a website concept:
Only when you know the answers to these questions will you be able to see the pitfalls of any potential design. And remember you are not designing the website for YOU, your designing it for your CUSTOMERS.
When it comes to professional printing, it is important that you have a something called a bleed and that all your important content are within the safe zone.
This comes about because of the nature of the printing process itself.
Commercial printers often print on massive runs (hence why printing 250 business cards costs relatively so little compared to doing it yourself – especially when you factor in time spent, printer ink, cost of the paper etc).
Due to the fact that printing right to the edge of the paper is extremely difficult (mainly due to the fact the getting the paper positioned accurately in the printer is difficult). To get around this, commercial printers will print business cards (and other business stationery) on larger paper than necessary and will print each card/stationery item 6mm larger than the final product will be when finished.
The cards/stationery are then cut down after the print run is complete on large cutting presses down the proper size of 85mm by 55mm (for cards that is, letterheads etc are cropped to their proper dimension).
So the Bleed is merely there to ensure that the design stretches all the way across the edge and to give the cutting machine a tiny margin of error.
Commercial printers often emphasis a safe zone of 3mm. Due to the nature of the cropping machines, they may “drift” a little during the print run which means that the artwork may not be perfectly centred in the cutter when the cut is made. The 3mm safe zone is to safeguard against this and ensure that all the important details (such as your contact details) aren’t cut or cropped.
Without the 3mm safe zone, the card details could be cut off, leaving you with a potentially useless card.
Are you thinking of starting a business around your new idea, or perhaps turning a hobby into it’s own business venture, then you’ll want to take heed of the following steps:
Identify potential customers and talk to them and find out if your idea is meeting a real need in the market.
Test your product and service with real customers, make changes, and test it again. Keep going until you know your service is meeting all the needs of your clients and exceeding expectations.
Every business needs suppliers, even virtual online business needs suppliers for supply them with the hosting for their website but you’ll not only need to know the costs involved, but also what level of support they are willing to offer – when the server crashes, will your host leave you to sort it out yourself or will they offer a hand or even take over and restore the website for you?
Do your research into the types of business available and find out which structure is right for your business? Is your business potentially risky and you need the personal protection of a Limited Company can provide, or will going into a partnership help you to raise the capital investment required?
Explore different avenues of business finance, from bank loans to government backed schemes through to searching for this illusive business angels.
Also research your “expected” revenue streams so you can see if your business is viable or not in the long term.
The main reason for this is simply because of the way commercial printers work – they work on a colour model called CYMK (also known as Cyan, Yellow, Magenta & Key – Black).
Our monitors work on a colour model called RG (or Red, Green & Blue) and these two colour models work on separate ideas.
In short, CYMK works on 4 different colours, whereas RGB works on 3 colours. The reason for this is that your monitor has tiny dots of colour colour pixels, which are individually made up for 3 different coloured dots which are, you guessed it, red, green & blue.
CYMK on the other hand is based on the four different colours which are printed onto the paper which can make most colours easily (although not ALL colours are possible with CYMK that are possible with RGB).
RGB is known as the additive model because it works on the assumption that you are you working from black to white – this is why when you have 0% red, 0% green & 0% blue you get black and on the flip-side 100% red, green & blue you get white.
This came out because the screens are naturally black and the pixels expel light in the relative wavelengths our eyes can see.
CYMK on the other hand is known as the subtractive model because it works from white through to white (with 0% of all the four elements of CYMK being pure white). As you can see, this is completely opposite of RGB as you start to add colours, you get darker and darker colours, eventually leading to black.
This is due to the fact that printers work on white paper stock, and the inks are added to the surface which reflect different wave lengths based on which ink(s) are present and in what saturation.
This is due to the fact that converting from one colour model to the other may not produce an exact match. In fact, this is partly because the RGB colour model can theoretically produce more hues and colours than the CYMK model, so producing an exact match is virtually impossible.
In fact, the RGB model can produce up to 16,777,216 different colour hues and shades (although distinguishing between two closely related shades with the naked eye is fairly hard if not impossible) whereas the CMYK model can only produce around 10,000,000 different shades.
Business websites are built for one thing – to get you, the business owner, the sale or leads. Anything else is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
By following our simple tips below, you can increase your conversion rates dramatically.
Make sure your title has importance of its own and describes the benefit of your service to your visitors. Include your unique selling point to really drive home the message.
A call to action is simply an inducement to take action then and there. All the information above and around the Call to Action should be geared to getting the client ready to hit that button which moves them along the conversion funnel toward a sale.
Make sure you include enough information prior to the call to action to give the user a reason to buy your product or service.0020
Don’t just write the first Call to Action that comes to mind – you have to spend a little time crafting the perfect Call to Action for your website.
Ideally, it should be:
Avoid clutter along the visitors path to conversion. Give them less options rather than more and you’ll drive more sales through your website. If you absolutely must include multiple options, limit it to around 3 and make it clear what the benefits of each package and what makes them different.
Make sure the messages you do deliver are clear and concise – readers will scan before reading the page and if you can impart to them to key facts
To emphasis why they need to act now, you need to create a sense of urgency in the mind of the customer. Good calls to action will include copy which reads to the effect that they have to act now to reap the full rewards of your service or that make the client think that the offer is time-limited.
Displaying testimonials and other social proof can allay the fears of even the most skeptical customers and help them along the way to making the buying decision to make the buying decision with
you.
Speedy websites are powerful selling tools as the customer gets an exciting and effective experience. We can help you get the most our your website speed.
Make sure your website conveys a sense of trust and that you include things that will offer them a sense that you are completely trust worthy and they are safe in your hands.
Many new business owners starting on the path to getting a website built want everything on their website – including the latest and greatest features they see on other websites.
Before jetting off to get a quote, you need to think a little about what you are actually asking for.
Before you even consider asking for those “must have” features, consider the following:
If you can answer “NO” to any of those questions, then you seriously need to consider the return on investment you are looking to get from the feature.
For an example, will having an online booking feature really mean you can convert your visitors to actionable sales?
Will you make enough sales through the system to justify the development time and the cost of the feature? Including such a feature in your quote can often inflate the price quoted by web design agencies (unless they have built a system previously and can re-use that system with some modifications).
You will have to also look at how they affect your business in other ways. For example, taking the booking feature above, you will need to remember to update the appointments you take in person and add them to the system , will you remember each and every time – and you need to consider which ones takes precedent in such a case. Will you honour the in person booking and attempt to reschedule the website booking?
You will also need to consider the time spent updating the system and checking the system as well and how will it integrate with what you are currently doing.
If you can clearly justify a feature for your website and the corresponding price, then you’ve certainly made a good business case for the feature and can justify the expense so by all means. You will also be better prepared when you start to flesh out what you want from the new feature – which will in turn help whomever you get the do the work generate an accurate quote.
These days, having a website blog is essential to any modern business, but why is this the case?
The reasons for this are many fold, but the mains are listed below.
Having great blog posts on areas directly related to your business not only improves your search engine relevance, but also provides you visitors with additional content. If your website widely promotes well written content, then visitors will be impressed with your proven depth of knowledge in the subject matter.
Visitors looking for specific content may end up coming to your site from a search engine and having blog posts not only increases which keywords you can target, but also each blog page should be a piece of content in its own right – attracting targeted traffic from search engines which, with careful planning – you can convert to sales.
Having regular updates via a blog also means your website is regularly updated, which is a good signal for search engines that your website is still alive and well and you’ll see increased search engine uptake for your blog.
If you promote your blog posts on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc, you can increase your readership and hopefully increase your sales.
You can actively encourage interaction between your customer base and your company by offering the customers the chance to post comments, “Like” their favourite posts and perhaps have them re-tweet about your posts, helping spread the word about your products or services.
If you get frequent sales questions, then consider writing a blog post around them – that way you can simply answer the question as comprehensively as you can in your blog post and then send clients a link to the post – this not only saves YOU time but having it on the website in the first place may other customers who are in the process of making a buying decision and may find your blog post which finally solves that question they were thinking about which may have put them of ordering.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to comment below.
