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1. What’s on your first screen?

When new visitors open your homepage, what do they see? If your corporate logo or marketing tagline is taking up valuable space, it’s time to rethink your priorities. After all, people don’t care about your logo. They care about what you have to offer them.

Try to place important information on the first screen. If visitors don’t find what they need within seconds, you can lose them forever. Instead, focus on the unique benefits you have to offer. Think about what your customers want and how you can fulfill their needs.

According to Julie Dalton, senior product manager marketplace and directory services for Network Solutions, http://www.networksolutions.com/, it is critical that your first, Web page provide important and relevant information. “You have a small window of opportunity to make your site compelling enough for a person to stay on it so it is incredibly important to make it as simple as possible for someone to find and read the messages that you want to get across,” says Dalton. “The more a person has to click on a site to find what they are looking for, the less likely they stay and become a customer.”

2. Is your site boring?

Do you use a lot of big words and “corporate speak” to tell visitors all about your mission statement, history and news? This may be the standard on many sites, but it does nothing to help boost sales or create a relationship with customers.

Instead, try to know your customers and relate to them on a personal level. Take some time to conduct research. Survey current customers and look at the sites and media venues that they like and dislike.

What are your competitors offering? Figure out important trends and issues for your target market. How can you solve their problems with your products and services? Based on your research, help customers solve their unique problems quickly and easily. And always try to provide answers with the utmost honesty and integrity.

The more you know about your customers, the better you will be able to connect with them using the right writing style and tone. And since most people make purchases based on emotion, your new copy will help increase sales and repeat customers.

3. What are you trying to say?

To communicate clear and specific information, try to focus on a single message for each Web page. And to keep content flowing, write brief sentences and paragraphs. Remove unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and descriptions. Get to the point with your message and keep momentum going.

“Whether the visitor is a user or a search engine that’s crawling your site, it’s important to keep the content simple and on-topic,” says Rhea Drysdale, online marketing director for Less Everything, http://lesseverything.com. “By introducing several concepts on one page, users get overwhelmed and search engines have a difficult time assessing what the page is about, which can negatively impact rankings and reduce exposure to new users.”

4. Is your site scannable?

Many site visitors will simply scan your website. To help them move through your copy and comprehend your message fast, add headlines, sub-headlines and bullet points. And these succinct lines are most effective if they convey positive, useful and specific benefits unique to your customers’ needs.

This way, site visitors will know what you have to offer and how you can help them with a simple page glance.

5. Are you talking about things that happened in the past?

Is your online copy written in the present tense? If not, you can add instant energy and flow to your site by replacing all of the verbs written in the past-tense with verbs and phrases written in the present tense.

6. How long is your copy?

There are numerous debates about a good length for website copy. While you want to keep paragraphs and sentences succinct and reader-friendly, it’s also important to provide all of the necessary information.

After all, if potential customers don’t get the right data about your products and services, or have unanswered questions, they may leave and head straight to your competitors’ sites! 

According to Ashley Berman Hale, head of SEO audits and consulting business, Six Turn Seven, http://www.sixturnseven.com, it’s important to be realistic about the length of your copy. “People don’t read as much as we think they do,” she says. “Make it as lean, but as valuable as possible for people and break it up visually with images, bullets, etc. Each page should be specific and all text should stay on topic. If one page is getting too long, break it up into two more specific pages.”

To make things simple, try to write as much as necessary to sell your products and services. And usually, the more expensive the item you are selling, the more copy you need to sell it.

You can start working on these activities now, and I’ll reveal six more quick tips next week!

In the meantime, feel free to write to me here or at www.rembrandtwrites.com if you need more information about your SEO strategy and public relations.

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First off, it’s been a banner year for us. By December 31, 2009, we will have served over 9,800,000 pages of content in the year gone by. That’s leaps and bounds above anything we’ve ever achieved before. Incredibly exciting and trending very positively, by the way. 

We achieved this as a result of great efforts on the part of team members Brian, Tom, Joel and Oleg with contributions from various additional contractors.

Here are 10 strategies that worked (plus a bonus strategy):

1. Using best practices in site usability design, such as our global navigation (also called, “persistant navigation”), which is available on any page and quickly gets users from one place in the site to another.
2. Search engine optimizing the site so Google loves us and gives us first page results in many small business-related searches.
3. Keeping the content constantly refreshed at the site, many times offering content that’s part of a series, not just stand-alone, and offering insights from really smart bloggers.
4. Running and publishing highly engaging contests (like our Home-Based 100 and Leading Moms in Business rankings) and offering voting widgets to contestants for them to use in their marketing.
5. Developing ever more extensive relationships with publishing partners who carry our best content (like Yahoo Small Business and MSN).
6. Using Twitter to announce the latest and greatest epiphanies, resources and events here at StartupNation.
7. Issuing press releases with strong, topical news-oriented angles instead of simply announcing a new product or service or feature set that is just part of the “noise” media deal with daily.
8. Parlaying every media opportunity (whether TV, print, radio, online or at events) into a bigger idea, a next appearance, a series of appearances, or entirely new opportunities.
9. Giving our active members introductions to our media contacts to make StartupNation ever more useful in our members’ efforts to build successful businesses, which in turn stirred up lots of great new visitors via positive word of mouth.
10. Launching Groups that can be public or private and allow people to convene around themes, interests, geographic locations, etc.
11. (BONUS) Using email marketing on a permission basis enabled us to “stay in front” of our community and remind them to utilize our great resources and offers. (If you aren’t signed up for our newsletters, use this link to sign up.)

During this year, Facebook loomed large, accounting for 10.44% of our traffic – the single largest referring site (other than the search engine, Google).

StumbleUpon accounted for  6.4% of our traffic.

Twitter accounted for 2.82% of our traffic.

These might seem like smaller percentages, but our traffic comes from a very “long tail” (a great book, by the way), meaning lots of smaller sites contributing smaller amounts of visitors. At the time of authoring this post, according to Yahoo Site Explorer, 112,313 is the number of in-bound links to our site from various sites, each one driving a little traffic our way and adding up to our banner year. 

Next year we hope to serve significantly more pages of content, providing ever more value to people who want to pursue a dream, start and grow their business, and live a more fulfilling life being their own boss and controlling their own income.

Again, we are very appreciative of your activity at our site and we hope you spread the word so millions more pages of helpful content can be transformational to people near and far.

We wish you success and a warm, refreshing holiday!

Rich (and StartupNation team)

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I finally learned how to lose weight by remembering something that an old boss told me years ago. At the time, I was living in Chicago and working for CBS in national outdoor sales – billboards, bus advertising, train advertising, etc.  My first year there, I was given a goal of bringing in $1.5 million in sales.  I really just couldn’t wrap my brain around how much that was.  That was a HUGE number – it sounded crazy! How could I possibly hit a number that large?  It was such a big number, in fact, that it just shut me down.  I was going to give up before I even started.

My boss could sense my frustration, and one day he called me down to his office.  “Can you go on 2 sales calls a day?”, he asked me.

“Sounds simple enough,” I replied.

“Then you will hit your goal,” he responded.   He went on to explain that It took X sales calls to generate Y sales and produce Z revenue in a year.  So, if you start with Z, and work backwards, you could break down a giant task into relatively easy smaller goals.  Simply hit the short term goals, and the long term goals take care of themselves.

That worked for me.  I stopped worrying about the ridiculous sales number and started focusing on setting 2-3 sales appointments a day, because that was a simple, attainable goal. And bada bing! – you can guess the result.  I also used this tactic to beat the pants off of that same boss in a weight loss competition – the student had become the master!

In February of this year, I weighed 383 pounds.   I was once again faced with a BIG number – I needed to lose at least 150 pounds to get myself back into the world of human beings.  150 pounds! Doesn’t that just sound crazy?  I mean, who in their right mind would attempt something that nutso?

I have attempted to lose weight many times over the years, and all of them ended in not just failure but an even higher weight for me.   What on Earth made me think that I could succeed now where I had failed so many times before?

So here’s what I did:

1.  I hired a personal trainer.  Cost: a lot.   Holding me accountable and making me work out even on days I don’t want to:  priceless

2.  I stopped thinking about needing to lose 150 pounds, period.  I never think about it.

3.  I used the old sales technique I had learned and combined it with some good old Buddhist philosophy.  I focus only on today.   Yesterday is gone. The failures or successes of the past are over. Tomorrow is not guaranteed.  All I can really do is focus on today.  Today, I will eat right (that’s a whole separate upcoming post), and I will probably exercise as well.

4.  The scale is not my boss.   I weigh in once a week to measure progress – weighing daily is absolutely pointless because of fluctuations in water weight, and weighing monthly isn’t enough for me.   My trainer and I also measure other things, such as inches lost and % of body fat.   I also have a fairly set cardio routine, where I can measure progress (speed, incline, level, etc) as I go.

So, if I can accomplish my daily goal of eating well and exercising, then there is always progress in weight loss, inches lost, fitness level, or body fat %, and sometimes all of the above.

The coolest side effect of this is that I am more PRESENT now.  I live in the moment a lot more than I used to.  Things become more enjoyable, people more interesting, and family more fulfilling.

I wonder what you could do if you made your big goals into little hills?

-Kevin

Twitter: imadness  follow me!

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With this in mind, here are a few tips to have a G-R-E-A-T holiday:

G: Give Back To The Community.

Volunteer to help a local charity. Donate your used clothing and other items to a worthy cause, or write a check of any size to your favorite non-profit organization. You’ll be able to help others and get a small tax deduction at the same time.

R: Relax.

Stop thinking about your business for a little while and do something just for you. Read your favorite book, cozy up to the fire with a loved one, rent a movie you haven’t had time to see, get a massage, or take a walk.

The possibilities are endless for recharging your batteries for the year ahead!

E: Eat, Drink And Be Merry!

It’s time to have some fun!

Party with friends and family members. Take a break from your diet and indulge in your favorite holiday food. Let go of the stresses of being an entrepreneur and count your blessings.

A: Add Some Excitement To Your Life!

Learn a new skill. Get inspired! Join a class, book club or group that focuses on a new hobby. Try something new. You’ll get your creative juices flowing and meet new people.

Who knows? Your new activities may help you break out of a rut and pursue completely different business opportunities in the year ahead.

T: Take Time to Set Goals.

Now is the perfect time to create your success plan for 2010. What do you want to accomplish, and where do you want to be next year at this time? Write it down.

After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to get there?
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These are just a few quick tips to help you have a great holiday break. And at this time, I’d like to thank you for reading my blog entries this year and providing your insights, comments and questions. I look forward to sharing more with you in the brand new year ahead!

Do you need help with your SEO marketing and public relations activities for 2010? Please write to me here or at www.rembrandtwrites.com. I’m here to help!

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I love a new year. It’s a fresh start, an opportunity to refocus my goals, a chance to try something new. And there’s party hats!

But there’s not a lot to poke fun at. You can use the number of the year, but that obviously has an extremely short shelf life. There’s the ball dropping in New York, but drawing a big crowd is no fun. So, you’re pretty much left with resolutions.

After some thought it occurred to me that a New Year’s resolution is very much like a contract. It’s a promise to either do or not do something. But it’s just with yourself, so it usually doesn’t last long.

So I thought maybe inserting it into some legal paperwork might be fun, and I came up with the above cartoon.

Happy New Year everyone!

From Small Business Trends

Make a Contract with Yourself for New Year’s Resolutions

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Though 46 percent of small business owners still don’t even have a ‘traditional’ Web site, it’s becoming more important to think about not only creating a mobile Web site, but creating an optimized one for users.

Who cares about mobile?

For one thing, your customers do.

I’ll be mentioning this a bit more in an upcoming SmallBizTrends post, but according to a recent Nielsen study, the number of people using their mobile phones to access the Web is up 34 percent from last yearm, bringing it to 56.9 million people. Now that’s enough of a reason by itself, but consider along with it that most of those searchers are people who are on the move or looking for information related to things in their neighborhood. That’s targeted traffic. And if you’re not taking the steps to make sure your Web site is mobile-accessible so that these people can find you AND access your site, you’re throwing it all away.

There was an interesting article on Read Write Web that showed just how frustrated consumers are with the state of mobile Web sites today. According to the survey quoted in the article, 58 percent of mobile users expect a site to load ‘almost/just as quickly or faster’ than the PC version. Even worse, if the site doesn’t load quickly enough, sixty-one percent said it’s unlikely that they would ever visit that site again from their mobile device. Still not bad enough? Forty percent said they would seek out a competitor’s site that provided a similar service. Ouch!

What should a mobile site contain?

It should contain only the information that would be most vital to someone looking up your site on the go.

Mobile searchers are typically people on a mission. They’re looking for an address or a phone number because they’re lost. They want a menu. They want hours or need a map to see which points of interest you’re near. Your mobile site should be set up to immediately address these questions so that you can take advantage of these targeted searchers.

There are lots of ways to create a quick mobile version of your Web site. WordPress plugins like the one from Alex King can help you create a mobile-friendly edition. You can also find paid converters like MoFuse and MOBIFY (I recommend them in that order), to help you optimize your site for a smaller browser and offer a condensed version of your site instead of the entire kitchen sink.

How do I know what my site looks like?

If you’re not sure how your site performs or renders on a mobile device, your first step is find out. Most phone and PDA brands offer emulators that SMB owners can use to test their site. The Opera Web browser will also let you test by selecting the Small Screen viewing option. Using these emulators will give you a good idea as to how your site will load and operate on different handsets. Outside of the free emulators, BrowserCam is a paid service that will help you determine how pages are loading, whether certain functionality is disabled, where it’s hanging up, etc.

We’ve reached a point where it’s not good enough for SMB owners to simply be targeting people on the PC Web. As the social media craze has taught us, we have to attract customers where they are. And more and more that means hitting them on their mobile phones. Search Engine Land recently offered up 10 reasons your Web site should go mobile that are very on point, as well.

From Small Business Trends

Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly For The New Year

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Consider that:

• There are four times the number of cellphones in the world versus PCs (4Bn vs. 1Bn) and 20% of all U.S. households are now “mobile-only”
• Over 130 Billion texts are sent each month, up from practically nothing in 2000
• Gen Yers (18-29) say their phone is the most important device they own
• According to multiple analysts, Mobile Marketing and Advertising will explode from just a couple hundred million dollars in revenues in 2008 to $3 – 5 Billion by 2012.

What may be less apparent, though, is how various mobile technologies are ready to leap off the inventor’s table and into your marketing toolkit as a small business owner. If, like many other small businesses, your greatest fear is “not marketing effectively” and your greatest pain is “poor sales” then check out these five top mobile marketing trends you can latch on to today to grow your business.

1) Text message marketing goes mainstream

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, text message marketing is already the most widely-used form of mobile marketing, but you would be hard pressed to find it in use on Mainstreet U.S.A. That’s going to change in 2010, but first an explanation.

Think of text message marketing as you do email marketing, except instead of collecting an email address you collect a mobile phone number. Like email marketing, you create campaigns at a website and only send them to customers who have opted-in to receive your message. But unlike email, you don’t need fancy graphics, just up to 160 characters of plain ‘ol text. So even the most non-technical and non-marketing savvy small business owner can pick it up in just a couple of minutes. Your customers will instantly read your message 97% of the time.

Text message marketing for business use has been around for several years now, especially at youth-friendly establishments like fast food joints, hip clothing stores, and the nightclub scene. Already, a Comscore study shows that 25% of mobile phone users participate in at least one (and up to 10) SMS marketing program monthly.

But I expect 2010 to see far greater adoption due to:

• Adoption of Texting across generations – Texting is now engrained in our way of communicating, with the average American sending/receiving almost twice as many texts than phone calls
• Acceptance of mobile coupons – A recession-weary public hungering for discounts is latching on to mobile coupons as the ‘killer mobile app’ due to their convenience. More consumer-packaged goods companies, restaurants, and grocers are launching mobile coupons each month.
• Proven ROI – Texting is proving its chops versus email and social media. On average, texting gets seven times the response rate versus email (7% vs 1%) and reaches twenty five times the number of users as does Twitter.
• More small biz friendly offerings – Owners need easy-to-use and affordable texting providers if they are to be successful. Thankfully, providers are recognizing it’s not always about catering to the Fortune 500 and are starting to offer price points as low as $10 or $15 per month.

The uses of texting are as varied as those of a swiss army knife: promotions, coupons, alerts, staff messages, sweepstakes, trivia, and voting. Whether you’re a barber shop, video store, or yoga studio, see what texting can do for you in 2010.

2) Texting will be offered by local media (e.g., newspapers)

With newspapers and magazines rapidly declining in circulation, it was only a matter of time until they sought to add new marketing techniques such as Mobile to their offerings. Money Mailer, which traditionally direct-mailed packets of coupons to households, is selling a mobile coupon that gets placed into their iPhone application.

Local print publishers are also getting in the game. For example Metro U.S., a local magazine publisher in cities across the U.S. is using text messaging to enable its “readers to instantly interact with the print.”

And in 2010 some of the largest media brands in the world such as Conde Nast will be teaming up to create mobile versions of their content in order to generate more advertising revenues.

3) Retailers will move beyond mobile marketing to enhance the overall shopping experience – raising consumers’ expectations of what they can do with their phones.

After several years of experimentation, big brands are poised to make mobile a significant – and permanent – part of their spend in 2010.

In 2008 and 2009 fast food joints like Wendy’s, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Chipotle launched texting programs, mobile sites, and iPhone apps that enable a consumer to order food for pick-up.

Big box retailers Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sears, J.C. Penney and Target began sending holiday text alerts and built mobile sites and iPhone apps every bit as powerful as their online cousins. These applications have allowed consumers to order products, read reviews, send gift hints to friends, text early wake-up calls, and conduct a slew of other services typically only available online.

With these experiments having proved successful, look in 2010 for these pioneers to keep blazing trails with:

• Bar Coded Coupons – 200 7-Eleven stores in San Diego are testing scannable bar codes on consumers’ phones to get up to one free drink per day. Indeed, in the next two years Juniper Research projects three billion mobile coupons will be issued to phones.
• Pay by phone – Starbucks is testing Starbucks Card Mobile, which allows customers to pay for coffee in the shop with their phone. Initial tests saw a 60% redemption rate of the coupon component.
• Integration with real-time data – Ace Hardware is combining weather forecasts with text alerts to hawk more shovels.
• Building out their profiles in localized smartphone apps – Gap Outlet, Sports Authority, and REI are experimenting with the new crop of local smartphone apps, such as Yowza and FourSquare (see next.)

4) Inventive smartphone applications will dazzle with new ways to engage customers – but ultimately disappoint in 2010

Each month it seems a new crop of mobile applications let consumers check for nearby deals and receive news and promotions to their phone from local businesses. These apps use a phone’s GPS to figure out where the consumer is and serve up your business’ information if he/she is nearby.

Some of these new apps, with colorful names such as Booyah, Whrrl, and Gowalla, even create a game-like environment where consumers ‘check-in’ and otherwise express their affiliation for the merchant in return for discounts. Other applications, such as MobiQpons, Yowza, and Google’s just launched QR codes, ditch the fun and games for a serious focus on mobile coupons.

A bit down the road, ‘augmented reality’ applications like the Sekei Camera iPhone application let a consumer point his phone at any real-world store or object and receive an overlay of rich data about the image. Clearly, not your dad’s rotary telephone!

But before you go rushing to build out your profile on the latest smartphone application, consider that smartphones made up only 25% of all new phone shipments in the U.S. in Q3 2009 and only about the same percentage of subscribers say they surf the mobile web at least weekly. So these hot new applications are attracting the mobile jet-set and Gen Yers but in 2010 will miss the mark if you are looking to reach anyone other than a small fraction of your total customer base.

5) In 2010, you’ll have it any way you want

If you don’t want to participate in another companies’ mobile application than why not have your own in 2010? In fact, about half of business’ mobile campaigns will send consumers directly to a mobile website and less than half to a smartphone application.

Price has something to do with this adoption. In 2009 and earlier, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars for a mobile-optimized website or smartphone application. But these days mobile website tools like Instant Mobilizer and MoFuse offer do-it-yourself tools costing anywhere from free on up to $100 per month or more depending on your needs.

There’s even an emerging crop of companies that let you build your own iPhone or smartphone application, albeit using a template-driven approach. Car dealerships, realtors, small hotel chains and other firms seem to be attracted to companies like MobileAppLoader for the easy set-up, low cost, branding, and potential for better customer servicing these more sophisticated applications offer.

Bonus Trend:  Big and successful Internet companies will increasingly bake mobile into their offerings

Whether you like it or not, your company is going to be on the mobile phone in 2010 – it just may not be under your control. In 2009 many big players began rolling out mobile versions of their successful local, online directories. Expect that trend to accelerate in 2010.

In December, CitySearch rolled out its directory on Google’s Android platform, adding to its iPhone, Blackberry, and mobile web offerings already. OpenTable just announced its mobile offerings surpassed a cool one million reservations. Twitter now allows you to broadcast your location along with your tweets. And Yelp, best known for its polarizing – and highly successful – online ratings of local businesses, is already on Version 2.0 of its iPhone application that’s a hugely popular hit with its mostly urbanized crowd.

One of the more interesting emerging concepts is Google’s recent use of bar code stickers. The 800 lb Gorilla just mailed 190,000 of its most prominent local merchant’s fancy bar codes they can stick on their front windows. When scanned by a phone with a bar code scanning application, the bar code calls up that business’ Google Place Pages listing – which can incorporate a mobile coupon.

These mobile offerings typically use GPS to find nearby stores and restaurants, help consumers make real-time reservations, post mobile coupons, share feedback with friends, and submit reviews. What they won’t do is give your business maximum control over your brand and marketing since it’s someone else’s site. However you cut it though, these mega-sites are here to stay and are becoming a must-have for on-the-go savvy consumers.

2010 promises to be a breakout year for how small businesses use mobile marketing technologies. With the proliferation of low-cost, powerful smartphones, ubiquitous and fast high-speed connections, the exploding use of the mobile web, and the ubiquitous nature of texting, you now have many choices to be in the pocket of your customers. Perhaps the biggest question is where to start?

From Small Business Trends

Five Can’t-Miss Mobile Marketing Trends For 2010

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