Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

You have your website all set up now, and everything seems to be working fine but still users do not reach your goal. In this article I will be discussing some of the common mistakes made on websites that keep users’ from reaching their goals.

Your design

One of the most common mistakes made is in the design of your website. Users can easily be put-off by the lack of good design and development which will result in a high bounce rate. If a design contains too many images the webpage will take a very long time to load and might result in users clicking on the back button of their internet browser to find better results somewhere else. This however doesn’t mean you have to banish images entirely. If you decide to use images they should be web optimized and designed correctly according to internet standards to optimize the loading speed of your web pages.

Forms

In many cases a website’s goal is to get the visitor to submit a form either to register, fill in a contact me request or to submit information for an e-quote. Users don’t like lengthy hard to understand forms as they don’t want to spend too much time on them. Forms should be easy to understand and should not consume too much time to complete.

Call to action

People that visit your website do not want to spend hours looking for information that they want thus your call to action should be clear for users to easily read and understand. Many times users land on a website and they do not know where to go from there to find the information they want. This causes users to leave your website and continue on to find a website that is more organized and easy to understand.

Website copy

Copy according to me is probably the most important factor of your website. It doesn’t only play a role in optimizing your website for search engines but also explains what your website and so your business is all about. Poorly written copy, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors will portray your company as unprofessional or in some cases cause a visitor to immediately leave your website

Finally – I want to stress how important the little things are on your website. Pay attention to detail even if you think it’s not that important because someone else visiting your website might think: “they should have paid attention to that” or “that looks wrong”. Little mistakes are often the reason why visitors to your website do not reach the goals you have set up.

You may have probably read our previous blog articles that stress the importance of having your own website to efficiently market your business and get your brand out there; at the risk of sounding repetitive I am going to write about the necessity of having your own website once again, you see this was inspired by a personal and very frustrating experience I had recently, let me elaborate further.

I decided to take a short holiday last weekend and wanted to find an appropriate resort that would allow me to relax and de-stress and God knows we all need that at some point or the other, I had a recommendation regarding a resort from a friend, however when I tried to search for the resort online to have a look at what they offer, and what activities and facilities they have I was sorely disappointed, the resort in question did not have a website, I started getting  frustrated as I couldn’t even find decent images of the place

The only information I could find concerning them was on other accommodation sites and the information I got on there was very limited. All these directory sites where you can list your website can help to get good exposure, but are very limited when it comes to what information you give your potential clients.

By having your own website you can you can give the customer a better feel of what you have to offer, you also don’t have limited space to provide them with the necessary details. Your whole website’s look and feel will add to the experience when people actually visit your resort. The nice thing about having your own website is that it will strengthen your brand a lot. You will never grow a very strong brand by just appearing on these other websites. When users find that you own your own website they tend to trust you more than your competitor which they can’t look up online. This means that you immediately gain an edge above your competitor which is always useful when your selling your services.

If you are in the same situation that Chris was in, in his article being your own travel agent you want to get the right information and as detailed as possible when you need it. If your website is easy to find and informative you will definitely reap the rewards. If someone needs to plan a holiday in a short time and can only use the internet, they will choose the company that gives them the best information in the easiest, quickest way.

So you have built a website but have you given any thought as to how functional your website is when it comes to changing content and updating products? It is imperative in an ever changing environment to be ready to change your websites content to reflect what is happening in the world such as holidays and sporting events or to simply update product information. There are three aspects you should be mindful of when building a website, they are as follows:

Content
Your website should be easily changeable to keep your content fresh – which will in turn give you a higher page rank and inspire your visitors to visit your website again.

The best way to achieve this is by building your website in a CMS (Content Management System). Having a database driven website makes it easy to update information and to implement functionality with extensions e.g. a photo gallery.

By using most content management systems you can display the latest content on the front page automatically this will keep your homepage looking fresh.

Products
If you have a large array of products the best way to publish them is by building your product website in an e-commerce system. An e-commerce system lets you quickly and easily update product information such as prices, descriptions etc. Usually featuring specific products or latest products can be done with a few clicks of the mouse via the administration.

You can also integrate some e-commerce systems with content management systems which will provide a solution for both easily managing content and publishing products.

Look & Feel
Changing the look of your website can easily be done by first developing your website using external style sheets then changing the look by editing the style sheets. When using global style sheets you are able to change the entire website instead of a single page.

Content Management Systems are usually template driven, this allows you to create different looks for your website and choose between them via an administrator panel.

If your website is easy to modify it can save you a lot of time so giving you more time to spend on other aspects of your business.

In the past – if you wanted user activity on your website, you needed to add a sign up process with complicated authentication code just to create an account for the user on your system.

Often visitors are unwilling to register for a new account on a site they do not know – because they simply don’t trust the website with their personal information such as emails and passwords.

To attract more visitors, make it easy for them to join and participate on your website by integrating Facebook Connect / other similar authentication methods.

For the purpose of this article I will discuss in short Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect allows users with Facebook accounts to login to third party websites (your website) by simply clicking on a button and filling in their Facebook login information.

Facebook returns a user id of the user that successfully logged-in, which allows you to identify that specific person.

This doesn’t only allow you to display the user’s profile picture, a link to their Facebook profile and allow them to comment on your content but also allows you to update their feed dynamically which is seen by their friends and many more.

Here are a few reasons why Facebook Connect could work for your website:

• Trusted Authentication
  Simplified login – the user has total control over permissions granted.
• Real People
  Facebook users commonly use their real name and real identities.
• Share your information
  With Facebook connect users can share your content/products/services with their Facebook friends. This can generate more traffic to your website.
• Friends
  Visitors that are connected to your website can see which of their friends are also using your website.
• Dynamic Privacy settings
  With Facebook connect a Facebook user brings their privacy settings with them to your site. This builds trust for your website which means users are more likely to return to your site in future.

In conclusion: I expect a lot of websites, especially news and social websites, to implement Facebook connect/similar authentication methods in 2010. Implementing it on your website will give you the edge in 2010 by giving your customers the opportunity to give you feedback and share your product/ service/content with their friends online.