Developing A Social Media Identity
I've recently had new clients express both interest and anxiety about integrating social media with their website. They were concerned about not having enough new content from their website to post about on a regular basis.
To Comment or Not to Comment?
There are many areas of your site where you might want to consider enabling user commenting. The question is, though, should you allow comments at all? For most sites, there is no wrong answer, but when it comes to the agency website, the answer is yes, you should. I have mentioned a few times now that one of the jobs of your site is to thoroughly convey the personality and thoughts of the firm. Your site should engender trust with your visiting prospects, and the best way to do that is to give the site as human a touch as possible. One way to do this is by showing your employees’ faces on the site and making the pictures big enough for viewers to actually see each person’s eyes.
Another way to build trust is to have short and diverse conversations throughout the site. The best way to do that is by allowing comments on key content. Key content might include all of your content strategy elements, although allowing commenting on the portfolio could instigate interesting dialogue, too.
In addition to inviting site visitors to comment on your content, also invite your employees to freely take part in the commenting, both on each other’s writings and replying to outside commenters, regardless of if they wrote the original article or not.
Commenting is something you have the opportunity to get comfortable with and develop over time. You are unlikely to be deluged with thousands of comments the moment you allow site commenting—quite the opposite, in fact.
Unlike a forum, which is dead without a profusion of activity, a newsletter with comment functionality but without any comments is not a black eye. This is a good thing, too, because it may take some time before people start commenting on any of your content. Do not despair, though; you are not writing for the sake of the comments. If you continue to execute a strong content strategy, you will build up a fan base, and fans are likely to comment. The way in which you handle these comments will have a significant effect on the growth of your comment content over time.
When you receive a derogatory comment, delete it. Most commenting tools that you can install or build have notification options. Since you will not be dealing with thousands of comments, I believe it is best to allow comments to be immediately published to the site, instead of being placed into an unpublished review queue. You can set up an email notification that lets the author know anytime someone comments on her post. If anyone makes derogatory comments, she can immediately delete them.
Derogatory means insulting, it does not mean disagreeing. A challenging comment can be a great opportunity because it allows you to convey more of your perspective than was articulated through the original piece of content in question. Always give your fans the benefit of the doubt, assume the best, keep your cool, and be as gracious and edifying as possible. At Newfangled, we have been writing educational newsletters for over ten years now, and we only started receiving comments a few years ago. Today, it is not uncommon for the comment content on a given newsletter to exceed the word count of the newsletter itself. Comment content is just as attractive to Google as any other content on your site. I view all comments as free content that helps our site visitors get a better sense of who we are as people. To me, that is a win-win.
This post is an excerpt from my book, "A Website That Works."
#macro:blognav,24178,24186#
Conversions: The Only Meaningful Form of Measurement
Often, the agencies I speak with are too focused on site traffic. Unless you are selling ad space on the site you are building, traffic is most likely a poor indicator of true performance. Using traffic numbers to judge the strength of your site, its pages, and the value of the marketing tools you use to drive prospects to the site will quickly lead you to make bad decisions and will make you susceptible to the innumerable SEO/SEM snake oil practitioners out there.
Content Styling Tips: Using Newfangled’s CMS Formatter Tool
This fourth installment of "Content Styling Tips" will focus on the formatter toolbar, an important part of Newfangled's content magagement system which allows our clients to style their site's text and images. I've created some tutorial videos that will show you how to preserve the design of your site by formatting your content correctly.
Website Lead Generation
A number of years ago, I read an article that said if the only call to action you have on your website is a link to your “contact us” page, then you have a website without any calls to action. That was one of those simple ideas that had an immediate and memorable effect on me. I realized at the time that my company’s website was guilty as charged. We did what so many sites, and agency sites in particular, still do today. We successfully attracted the right people to our site and informed and inspired them through our site content and case studies, but we left it at that, and, therefore, we missed out on the most important part of the process: engaging our visitors.
Within a few weeks of reading that article, Newfangled took drastic action. We added our three calls to action at the time (Subscribe to Our Newsletter, Register for Our Next Webinar, Get in Touch With Us) to the sidebar of every page of our site. That is all we changed. We did not add content; we did not tweak the SEO on the site; we did not drive any new people to our site through new marketing activities. Instead, we simply placed clear calls to action on every page of our site. This one change had a greater affect on our site’s lead-generation efficacy than any other single change we have ever made. Before the change, we received, on average, ten or so form signups per week, but afterwards, the signups jumped to an average of fifty to one hundred per week. With such a dramatic response, I finally understood the importance of calls to action.
Only when your site starts generating many high-quality form conversions does it truly begin working for you. At that point, it transforms from a brochure into a real marketing tool.
Let’s consider two different site experiences your prospect might have with your site, one with clear calls to action and one without.
Say a potential prospect searches for services like yours one day, and you have been writing newsletters for years on topics in which they are interested. Because of all the valuable content on your site, Google lists you on the first half of the first page for many competitive search terms related to your expertise, and your prospect clicks through one of those listings to your site. So far, so good, but here is where the paths diverge. In scenario A, your site has plenty of useful content, but the calls to action are buried and ineffective. In scenario B, you still have all that content, but each page also has relevant calls to action listed in the sidebar.
Scenario A
A prospect finds your site, reads through a few newsletters, and is inspired and impressed. They know they will be reviewing their agency website in six months, and they make a mental note to remember you and your valuable content at that time. Unfortunately, after those six months pass, they remember only that they saw a site that had some strong content on it, although they can no longer recall what the articles were specifically about or what the site address was. They even go so far as to go back to Google to search for what they remember of the content that so interested them, but, you never end up hearing from them.
Scenario B
The prospect goes through similar motions. They arrive at your site, read the article Google initially referred them to, and end up reading portions of a few more articles. After the third or fourth page view on your site, they notice a call to action that seems to be speaking to them directly. It reads “Subscribe to Our Free Monthly Newsletter.” Beneath that headline is a list of the topics of the past three months’ newsletters, each one more interesting to them than the last. Below that is a simple two-field form that asks only for their name and email.
The prospect first began to trust you when Google referred them to your site. After reading one article, they are impressed. After the second or third article, they start to think that this is content they cannot live without (or at least cannot do their jobs as well as they would like to without it). By the time they notice your clear, concise, and compelling calls to action, they are chomping at the bit to sign up.
This is just the beginning. From that point forward, you continually remind them of your expertise through a monthly email. So, at the very least, they think of you once a month. They might click through and read all or some of your articles, and they may skip some, too. Either way is all right. What matters is the impression. Once they sign up for your newsletter, you can personally contact them once a month to remind them that your firm exists specifically to help people like them with their marketing problems. When that agency’s review comes up in six months, your firm’s name will be at the top of the prospect’s mind, and you will have spent the past six months developing an expertise-based relationship with them without ever speaking to them.
Without calls to action, your content strategy is relatively useless. Without a content strategy, your site is a brochure. When both of these plans are in place and working on your site, you have a formidable and tireless marketing machine working for you 24/7.
Calls to Action
Discovering your site’s calls to action is easy once you go through the exercises of creating your personas and planning your content strategy. Calls to action are simply points of engagement on your site where your visitors can give you a little bit of their information in exchange for something you are offering. “Subscribe to Our Newsletter,” “Register for Our Next Webinar,” and “Contact Us” forms are all common calls to action found on marketing websites.
This post is an excerpt from my book, "A Website That Works."
#macro:blognav,24174,24178#
Let YouTube Help You with Video
Our clients are becoming more and more enthusiastic about using video on their websites. In the past, implementing video was a whole lot trickier than it is today. In fact, thanks to tools like YouTube, just about everything that used to be difficult about working with video has become much simpler...
Preparing for a Salesforce Web-to-Lead Integration
So you're thinking of integrating your web leads with Salesforce? Great call! In this blog post, I'll be outlining how to prepare for a basic web-to-lead integration, and making some simple recommendations to ensure it goes smoothly.
What Do You Want From Your Audience?
It would be great if prospects decided to hire you within a few minutes of first landing on your site, but that is not how these sorts of decisions are made. The modern marketing website is built around attracting prospects who are in the researching stage of the buying cycle, bringing them into your lead-nurturing system, and keeping in close but unobtrusive contact with them until they approach you with an intent to buy.
Is DNT Self-Regulation DOA?
On May 31, Microsoft announced that Do Not Track (DNT) will be set as a default option in the new Internet Explorer 10 (IE10). This default setting will require consumers to opt-in in order to receive targeted advertising. If the industry has vowed to take the lead on DNT before the feds do, and Microsoft is being proactive, why are tech and ad companies on a tear about IE10?
Three Common Content Strategy Platforms
This post is a look at the three most typical content strategy platforms for marketing firms: The newsletter, the blog, and the webinar.