Tactical Execution

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Hello and welcome to Tactical Execution, an information series exploring innovative marketing and strategic business positioning for entrepreneurs and small businesses in an increasingly competitive world.  My name is Patrick and I’m your host.  You can find written versions of these podcasts at TacticalExecution.com and I encourage your candid feedback at the same location.  Today, we’ll be looking at building an effective website presence so let’s get started.

Being in business without a website these days is all but impossible.  There was a time when it was optional and the equivalent of a simple online brochure was more than sufficient but those days are long gone.  Regardless what you do, a website supporting your business is essential and in many fields, more important than a physical street address or storefront.  So, the question is: how can you create an effective online presence with the least amount of cash and time required?

In the next chapter, we’ll look at search engine optimization and how that affects the design of a website but today, we’ll focus on the initial challenge of getting a website up and running, quickly and cheaply.

First things first; you need a domain name.  You might already be ahead of me on this but it’s worth spending a minute reviewing it.  Obviously, with millions of websites already out there, most of the short catchy domain names are long since taken but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good ones left.  A lot of the domain registration services will bring up similar domains when you search for one that turns out to be unavailable.  In other words, if you search for money.com as an example, it’s obviously taken but they’ll suggest other available domains that are still available.

I use Aplus.net for all my domain registrations and I always search FIRST for a domain I KNOW is already taken.  I’ll put in just a SINGLE keyword – a word like “money” – knowing it’ll be unavailable.  But doing so will display other related domain names that might work for my purposes.  As of this recording, it offered options including hipmoney.com, robustmoney.com, thingsmoney.com and newmoneyinc.com.  I think all of those are pretty effective domains, depending on your business.

Let’s look at another example.  When I entered “marketing”, it came back with options including marketinggun.com, pigmarketing.com and get this: halmarketing.com – which I think is pretty clever.  I’ve had a lot of success with my own domains including Box 14, Beyond the Rate, Tactical Execution, Fluid Occasions, Financial Audio, Deliberate Curiosity, Target Echo, My Card Helper and, of course, Patrick Schwerdtfeger so there are definitely plenty of good domains out there.  You just need to do a bit or research, that’s all.

Spend a little time and register a good domain name and it’s worth noting, by the way, that search engines DO give preference to websites that include keywords in the domain name.  We’ll talk more about that in the next chapter.  Lastly, regarding domain names, I suggest registering them for 5 years at a time.  There isn’t usually any significant price advantage, if any, but 1 or 2 years goes by quickly and I almost lost a domain once because it expired on me before I could renew it.  On Aplus.net, the cost for 5 years is about $40, $8 per year.

You’ll have to host the site somewhere and there are tons of options available.  Obviously, some are better than others so check around to compare prices and service options.  Most hosting services range from $8/month to about $20/month for basic hosting but they usually also provide a variety of extra services for additional monthly fees.  Some of these are well worth the cost.  For example, a number of the large hosting companies offer sophisticated backend platforms including a menu of front-end templates.  In other words, you can choose a template and build your own website.

To me, that’s spectacular!  What a great innovation in today’s internet world.  That means you can go in and add or edit content any time you like.  It means you can go on and instantaneously change something or make an adjustment.  You can update newsflashes or add blog entries.  This is an excellent service and I highly recommend it.  Bottom line, getting a website custom built by a developer can cost you some real money and adjusting content thereafter can quickly become an endless money pit.  I think these template-driven platforms are generally a great deal.

Incidentally, if you plan to have your website custom made, I recommend you visit TemplateMonster.com to see the designs they have available.  There are literally thousands of them, broken down in different categories.  Scroll through and see if you find something you like.  You can then direct your web developer to the template you like and he or she can emulate the design in your own custom site.

Personally, I maintain so many different websites, I need a different type of serviced but I’m really happy with the solution I found.  I use 1websitesolution.com and pay $12/month for 100 gigs of memory space.  The beauty is I can host as many websites as I can fit within that server space so I’ve got about a dozen different websites all running for just $12 each month.  For me, it’s the perfect scenario.

I also use Joomla to build most of my websites.  For those of you who don’t know, Joomla is an open source Content Management System with a sophisticated Web Application Framework.  Basically, it’s a huge website template platform that’s been created by developers all around the world and is FREE for anyone to use, including you and me.  Just put Joomla – that’s JOOMLA – into a Google search and do a little reading.  You’ll be blown away!

I remember when I first found out about Joomla.  I could hardly believe it.  Here, I’d been spending hard-earned money developing websites when I could’ve just as easily downloaded the Joomla framework and installed it onto my hosting account, allowing me to create and customize all my own websites manually.  That’s when I started buying all these domain names because it was finally cost effective for me to build all the websites I wanted to build.  As an example, I built TacticalExecution.com with the Joomla Web Application Framework.

The best part about Joomla is that the list of available extensions is virtually endless.  If you want to add Google Analytics to your website, just do a search for Joomla Google Analytics and you’ll find the extension to install.  If you want to add forms, you can install a forms extension.  If you want to include a user-maintained business directory, you can install an extension to handle it.  Almost anything you want to add to your website, chances are someone else has wanted to do the same thing and an extension’s been built to fill the need.

There are also a huge number of templates available so you can customize the look of your website.  Better yet, you can install a series of templates you like and change them from time to time, giving your site a fresh new look.  Seriously.  Joomla is absolutely free.  If you’re planning to build a website, you need to look at the options Joomla provides.  Do some research and give it a try.

Incidentally, since I mentioned it a second ago, we should spend a minute on Google Analytics.  There are, of course, a variety of platforms that can give you traffic statistics for your website: how many people came to your site and how long they stayed and so on.  But much of the traffic on the internet is actually comprised of robots called spiders, sent out by search engines and a variety of other companies, harvesting information of one kind or another.  These spiders crawl through the internet’s endless network of links 24 hours a day, doing whatever they’re programmed to do.  The point is these spiders can significantly distort your traffic statistics.

Google Analytics is a free service provided to track the true human traffic on your website.  Just put Google Analytics in a search and it’ll come up right away.  Once you setup an account, it’ll give you a small bit of code to include in the footer of each of your web pages, allowing the platform to start tracking your website.  Well, using Joomla, as I alluded to earlier, you can simply install a small extension so you only have to include that code in one place and it will automatically include it in the correct place on each page.  Brilliant.  And the statistics you will then have access to are second to none.

When I first switched over from my legacy statistics platform to Google Analytics, my beyondtherate.com website was supposedly getting between 50 and 60 unique visitors per day.  After I switched over, it turned out only about 8 to 12 were actual humans.  The rest – over 80% – were robots.  So hopefully, you can see how important this is.  The wrong platform can end up giving you highly distorted statistics and that can motivate poor business decisions.  I’d recommend Google Analytics to anyone.  It’s a great service.

In the first two chapters, we talked about making yourself valuable to your target market and THAT should drive the development of your website.  Your audience should arrive at your website and immediately see something that can benefit them.  Think about this and come up with something that would be valuable to your audience, and then place a prominent link on your homepage or, if possible, the actual resource right there for them to see and use.

The idea is to make your website “sticky”.  People visit websites all the time but they usually don’t stay very long.  The goal is to keep your visitors on your website as long as possible.  They need to see value right away.  They need to see things that will encourage them to browse around.  They need to see things that give them value and inspire curiosity.  You can do that with graphics, text links from within your regular copy and teasers within each page to direct visitors to related pages.  There’s no silver bullet on this so get creative.  Think about your audience.  If you were them, what would you be curious about?  Put THAT on the site.  Give them what they’re looking for.

Here are a few other basic tips to keep in mind when you’re designing your website and how to organize and present the information.  First, don’t hide what you sell.  People who visit your site are most likely looking for exactly what you sell.  That’s why they’re there.  So show them where your products and services are as soon as they arrive.  People get frustrated on the internet quickly.  They want to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, you need to make your site easy to navigate.  One of the easiest things you can do in this regard is build a standard navigation bar on the left-hand side or across the top that remains consistent on every page.  That way, visitors can navigate to any major part of your site from whatever page they’re on.  And anything else you can do to streamline layout and minimize clicks will make your site cleaner and more user-friendly.

That leads naturally to the next tip.  Build a professional looking site.  There was a time when an ugly website would suffice but no longer.  Try to keep your site clean and professional, not cluttered and disorganized.  Make sure different graphics and pieces of content line up on the screen.  The cleaner, the better.  Your website is like your business card.  It represents you and your business.  Make sure it fills the role.

You also want to ensure you have a contact page readily available from anywhere on the site.  Encouraging contact and feedback is a great way to initiate communication and interaction between you and your website visitors.  Now, if they actually take the time to send you an email, you’d better make sure you respond to it in a timely manner.  If you don’t respond to visitor emails, the whole effort is pointless.  Believe me; getting your visitors to communicate with you is an accomplishment in itself.  Honor it by responding promptly.

If your site has a shopping card, make sure you provide different ordering choices.  Although most people are pretty comfortable completing purchase transactions online, some are still hesitant.  Be sure to include a small logo to indicate the SSL encryption or the secure network being used.  Also, make sure you provide a phone or fax number so they can place their orders manually or ask additional questions.

There’s also a significant opportunity in suggesting related products once a customer is in the checkout process.  You’ll notice this type of stuff on many of the large online retailers like Amazon.  When you enter the checkout section, they’ll suggest other products purchased by others who purchased the product you’ve chosen.  This can be a great way to keep your customers browsing even after they’ve made their purchase decision.

In the end, you want your website to be a resource.  You want visitors to see it as a useful place to go.  Ideally, you want to find some piece of current information you can keep updated on your website; something visitors enjoy having easy access to; something that will keep them coming back.  That’s the motivation behind having current horoscopes, interest rates, stock quotes or blogs posted on sites all over the internet.  They’re all designed to keep visitors coming back.

The other more obvious strategy is having a content RICH site.  Having lots of great content on your site is the single best way to build an effective online presence.  It’s also a great way to improve your search engine rankings and we’ll be talking a lot more about that in the next chapter.

Please visit TacticalExecution.com to get an itemized list of things you can do TODAY to start getting results.  It’s a FREE 1-page PDF file in the members-only section so you have to register and log in, and then you’ll find it under the “Resources” tab.

You can also view upcoming topics by clicking the Marketing tab under Podcast Chapters.  If you have a suggestion for future topics, please use the Contact form to let us know.  And finally, all the websites referenced on this podcast have been included on the Links page.

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