The Wizard Times

"If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, ''Here comes number seventy-one!" "

-- Richard M. DeVos

10 Steps to a Better Website continued
by Clay Campbell

2. Plan your content

What is the purpose of your website? What do you want to achieve with your site? You need to establish your goals and priorities up front.

Do you want information about your company, products, and services? Or do you want to actually sell your products online? Or maybe influence and motivate potential customers to visit your store or do you want them to just call your phone number? Do you want to brand your company and refine its image? Provide great customer service? Or do you want some combination of all the above? How you answer these questions will guide the design and development of your site.

You don't need an elaborate plan. Just sit down with a pencil and a legal pad and answer some of the questions above plus these.

How many pages do I need?
Do I have the content already? (* Note-the best investment in your website is to hire a good writer)
What would be the titles of those pages?
Find three or four websites you like and tell the Webmaster designing your site that you want something like that. That will help with colors and layout
Look at several sites that your potential Webmaster has built. If you don't like the others he/she built, you won't like yours when it's finished
The content will attract or turn away the visitor quickly, and will also play a large part where you rank in the search engines. (Yahoo Google etc)
Make very sure your text content is not an exact duplicate of another site.

3. Establish a Budget

This series of 10 steps to a better website is intended for the novice. For people not very savvy to "Internet stuff", it just gives a little help on things that I needed help on when I first decided we needed a website.

The cost of creating a website depends on a lot of things. Many I covered in earlier posts. Cost will be determined in large part on the purpose of the site and how many pages. (Decide up front how much you should spend.) The other key factors are high quality and high performance. There is no point spending any amount of money on a website that presents an amateurish image and does not function properly. Although a general rule may be that the larger your investment, the better your result.

I had lady in my office and she was asking for help with her website. She said friend of hers did her a favor and built her a website for "just a few bucks." I told her it would take less time to build a new one than to fix all the problems with here current one. She complained about spending money on the old site and now spending more for a new site. Probably all small businesses have had this same thing happen in some fashion or another.

If you want a professional looking website be prepared for it to not be cheap. I do advise people get the best bang for their buck, but I learned from bitter past experience that hiring the lowest bidder to build a website or anything else is also running the risk of maybe having to do it all over again and paying for it twice. Creating a website can be less expensive if you do it yourself, but only if you have the time, inclination, and tools to do a good job. Otherwise, get several bids from highly recommended designers and developers.

Clearly define your goals, style, and expectations for these Webmasters. As I suggested in another post and it's worth repeating here, "Look at several sites that your potential Webmaster has built. If you don't like the others he/she built, you probably won't like yours when it's finished."

After you have what you feel is an acceptable bid, add in promotion and advertising expenses. As your company grows, you can expand your site, spreading your investment over time. Buying advertising on Yahoo and Google to get more visitors to your site can get very expensive quickly. Decide on a monthly budget. Money spent on good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a wise investment. Good SEO work can bring your website up in the search engines to the first page and many times in the top three.

It's been my experience and that of my clients too, that if you've had good SEO work done on your site up front and your website is in the top three or four for your chosen key words, and then you also have an ad from Google or Yahoo right above it, or right beside it, you will get fewer clicks on your ad. Because people are becoming savvy to the fact that those sponsored results are ads. Attracting customers for very specific ad words on search result pages where you are not in the top three is a good idea if the adwords are not too general.

For tips on getting the best use of your ad dollars in all your advertising, read 12 steps to More Bang for Your Marketing Buck. My new book came out this week titled Get Big Results From Your Small Ad Budget. It has some very good tips making your advertising dollars go farther. You can order it through Wizard Academy Press in Austin Texas.

Perhaps now would be a good time to have a complimentary meeting with a Wizard of Ads Partner. Links to their websites and blogs are listed down the right side of The Wizard Times. Hundreds of their articles with free insightful advice can been seen at www.americansmallbusiness.com 2009 would be a great year to attend a class at the Wizard Academy 21st Century Business School in Austin Texas. What is the Wizard Academy?

See you next week.

Clay Campbell
Wizard of Ads

PS. Need help to attract more customers and grow your business?