1.  Identify your goals and track them

About 95% of the people that I speak with say that the purpose of their website is to gain more customers. Makes sense, isn’t that the point of any marketing effort? You need to define what that means in terms of your website. Does it mean lead generation or online sales?  What goals do you need to set for your website that will directly earn you more money? Example – If your goal is to get a customer to submit a service quote, make sure that the form is easily accessible from everywhere on your site. Also, make sure that your content funnels to that quote form.

Now that you have defined specific goals for your website, you must make sure that you are tracking your results. How many people made it to your online quote form? How did they get there? Did they finish your form? These questions and so many more can be tracked by Google Analytics.  Google analytics is a powerful tool that you must use to track your websites success. Once you are aware of your sites successes and failures your can start to build and improve upon what is already there.  You can even take that a step further Google Website Optimizer gives you the ability to try different versions of  pages to see which is giving you the best goal conversion rate. Start using these tools immediately.

2. Don’t be Anti-Social – Be Everywhere

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Digg, Stumbleupon, YouTube. It can all seem so overwhelming. Many business’s  fear how open the web is becoming with the avalanche of social media. They also fear the commitment that it might take.   the bottom line is this:  So many people and business’s are using social media to communicate and converse with each other. As a website owner, you can choose to become a part of that conversation or not.  If you fear it or choose not to participate in any fashion then you will lose out on the millions of people who prefer their network of choice.  If someone feels most comfortable learning about your business on Facebook, You have to be there. If someone is an avid linkedin user, you have to be there. In the late 70′s their were only 2 mainstream ways to pay for goods and services – cash or cheque. If business’s did not evolve and offer the multiple payment methods available today, they would lose a substantial amount of customers because of it. Make it as easy as possible for your customers and potential customers to keep in touch with you. The more places you you are, the more likely people are going to see you.

3 . Get Around More. Be Mobile

In the first quarter of 2010 there  were an estimated 54.7 million phones shipped. There are  5.2 million smartphone users in Canada. In the US there are  roughly 60 million smartphone users. These users have increased so fast and are still rising each and every day at an astounding rate. It is estimated that by the end of 2011 there will be 82.8 million new smart phone users. One of the features that users love is the ability to browse the interwebs. With the huge increase of people using the internet on their different devices, you must make sure that your website displays properly in the mobilesphere.

4. Online Media – Content is King

Blogs, Podcasts, Online Videos .  Potential customers have so many reasons to come back and read, listen to or watch your daily, weekly, or monthly content updates. When I ask my clients “have you ever thought of doing “Insert Online Media here“. The answer is alway either “I don’t have the equipment” or “I don’t have the time”.   The time involved can be pretty exhaustive or very minimal depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Media can be added very easily to your website. You can either get one of your employees to take on the responsibilities or do one short weekly blurb. The equipment involved in running a podcast or creating online videos is also very minimal and inexpensive these days. You would be silly to let this opportunity by. Go beyond and give your customers  or colleagues the content how they prefer it. A good way to get started is to do a poll. See which medium your customers would prefer most and start there.  Promote it to your customers and measure your success.

Conclusion

Customers are getting used to having more options on the web and you need to provide them. To keep up with all of these new innovations you need to invest a little more time in to your web presence, You absolutely need to be able to update your website on your own and you need to make sure that you can do all this with out falling behind again in 2012  . We suggest you use WordPress. It is the easiest and most expansive Blog/CMS software available today .  WordPress 3.0 has been downloaded over 28 million times. It is used by some of the biggest companies in the world. It is free and licensed under GPL (General Public License).

Once you have a WordPress website installed with a few free plugins,  you can easily configure google analytics, make your website a social beast and have a mobile version of your content instantly.From there, you can easily start blogging, podcasting, and  launching online videos. Done and done.

To read more about WordPress Click here

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