Take This “Internet Sales” Test For Your Site

Take a look at your website, now pretend that each word on the homepage is being said to one of your prospective customers after they said “I might want to buy from you”. Would what was being said to them be relevant?

When was the last time you thought that spending money on Internet Marketing such as Pay-per-Click or SEO was going to increase sales?  It will if the people are sold, but getting them to a bad website that is not relevant to their needs (think of a sales guy babbling on  while you want him off the phone so you can work again, thats a bad website.)

A great sales person has an elevator pitch, knows how to summarize his solutions, he listens to peoples needs, he handles objections and helps people (even if they are not ready to buy at that moment).  A company website needs to be a great sales guy, not a great marketing guy (he did his job already by getting people to the site).

Kill the Brochure Site

I cut my “Internet Business” teeth in an “old school” manufacturing company. It was an $8 Billion company and at 1st did not look to the Internet to do anything more than have brochure materials online.   As the person in charge of the company’s Internet strategies and initiatives,  I knew I had to lead the company in the paradigm shift that was happening in driving B2B lead generation (people were going online 74% of the time to source a new supplier etc), and I knew this meant speaking the “old school language”.  A website had to be more than the digital equivalent of a brochure holder.  It had to be a digital sales person.

Emulate the Sales Group Online

My internal clients at this big old company were in “Marketing”.  I soon realized that the information I was missing the most was from Sales.   Each division of the company had a “Sales & Marketing” group, however I was only ever speaking to 1/2 of my client. Each of 300 or so sales people for the company knew how to present the company’s value to a prospect in less than 1 minute, they had the relevant materials with them to present and knew when someone was a qualified buyer.

In the end, I created a B2B website that acted like a Sales person, qualifying a person as a lead before closing it (the sales people still closed the sale, and made me feel like a hero every time I met them).

The company had a very strong brand in its industry, and the website got some decent traffic, but proportionately few leads were driven from it.  Marketing people spent lots of time with excellent interactive marketing agencies running Internet marketing campaigns that drove online leads, however the company’s website was left largely untouched by Marketing as a lead generation tool.  That was till I spoke to Sales.

Websites are Internet Sales, not Internet Marketing.

Websites perform the same job as a sales person. Think about it.  Marketing is generating traffic to sales, and sales is converting that traffic.

The Internet is so new that people have not realized the two functions are still there, its just the medium that has changed.  Companies today need to step back to traditional marketing and ask if something is a Sales or Marketing function, then approach it as such. Here are some typical “Internet Marketing” mainstays.  Lets look at them and classify them as they really are.

1. PPC – Marketing
2. SEO – Marketing
3. Websites – Sales
4. Social Networks- Both
5. eMail Campaign- Marketing

You can see that I’m calling Websites “Sales” and not Marketing.  I firmly believe this and there is a company with $350K/month in additional sales to prove it.  A website recieves traffic to to from Marketing which generates it online or off.  It is now the websites job to receive people looking for information and answers and convert them into buying customers.  Sounds like sales to me.

Lets Talk Resources

I love marketing people, but they are not normally sales people.  I have also seen sales people come back to “corporate” and fail in marketing.  The reason is the two functions are separate and involve separate strengths and talents.  The Internet is new, so if ou have not figured it out yet, let me be clear.  It is the same online as offline. When you have someone great at producing traffic for your website, don’t put them in charge of converting leads or online purchases.  If you have someone great at increasing conversion rates on your site/s, don’t assume that they can manage Google Adwords or Banner Ad campaigns.  Some people can do both, just don’t assume.

Another factor is specialization.  There is a lot to profiting online.  No one person can be at the top of their game in both Sales & Marketing skills and techniques.  PPC is a full time specialty now, as is SEO, as is web design etc and so forth.

Social Media in Sales & Marketing

I’m not saying that there is not some cross-over.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive r.  Social media is a place where a company can both drive traffic and build relationships that “Sell”.  I’m just pointing out there is a distinction and the sooner a company stops expecting a sales tool or person to do marketing and a marketing tool or person to so sales, the better we are.

80% of websites have adequate traffic to achieve their goals, they just don’t handle it well.

My last post was about the Internet Strategy Checklist my firm uses to “cover all the bases” with clients when brainstorming their Internet Strategies (albeit a useless list if I don’t already know the client’s audience, objectives and opportunities).  The list is arranged with the most important Internet marketing strategy components first, from the perspective of priority and hierarchy of what needs to be done 1st.  The 1st category on the list is Website Optimization.

Don’t Throw Money at a Bad Site

Without a website that can handle traffic, there is no sense of giving it any.  So often companies get caught in the idea that sending more traffic to a site will result in more sales, and they are normally right, but not normally making profiting off of it the way they could be. The 1st thing we do for clients is audit their incoming traffic.  If they are paying for clicks, we figure out the return on investment and estimate how they can better convert these “paid for” visitors once on the site.  This is a minor step in the big scheme of things, but it does “stop the bleeding” so we can get to the point of getting sites on a path towards optimal health.

You Know Where to Find the Yogurt.

A good website is like a grocery store. People coming in have a sense of where items they want might be located and easily follow directions and conventions to getting what they want.  This is no accident.  Retail Strategists lay out stores be easy to navigate and promote.  Sound familiar?

Website Optimization is getting the most out of people visiting an online property.  This might be apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc.  If your web presence is not handling visitors well, then paying to sending qualified traffic to it in large part a waste of money.

Good website optimization often starts with the website homepage strategy and how site visitors handle people once they arrive at it.  I wrote a post on this a while back, click here to read it.  The best place to start is to look at your website analytics and see were the top “landing pages” are (what pages people are entering your site) and then optimizing your landing pages (another previous post).

Keep Your Promises

When I look at a site for the 1st time, I look at its “Promises”.  What is the site promising the site visitor?  Then, is the site delivering on its promises.  This starts from the ad or search result that got the user to the site.  Do they arrive on a page that fulfills the promise of the search engine (This shows why SEO without strategy is worthless, as it can just create “broken promises”.  If you have a decent landing page and are getting more than a 20% bounce rate on it, it is likely caused by “broken promises”.  I don’t want this to be an SEO post, but having an integrated SEO strategy is part of Website Optimizing (sending qualified traffic in any way is part of it).

Focus on Website Optimization

Focus on website optimization as your primary web focus.  This starts off by making sure the site is simple and well organized from the user’s perspective.  Then it goes further into “giving people what they want”, when they want it and how they want it.  It also means spending time on statistics and testing out different things (check out

Achieve your Customer’s Goals, Forget Your Own

Your customers have their own goals when they are your site (forget about your site’s goals for a minute).  Once your site is organized from your site audience’s perspective, you need to set up analytic goals and track the “Goal Funnel” to see where visitors are falling off in trying to achieve THEIR goals.  Once see where they are dropping off, you can critically look and very likely see why.  Then you can fix it.

Now lets talk about your company’s and its site’s goals.  These are really just the goals of the site visitor.  If you achieve their goals, you will achieve yours.  (This needs to become your mantra.  Design it from your visitor’s perspective, give them what they want and help them achieve their objectives, you’ll profit from it, have faith).

Try User Testing

It is so easy these days to get user testing (See Get Tested) there is no excuse not to watch people trying to achieve their goals on your site on a regular basis.  This is the catalyst to website optimization because after watching your target audience trying and failing at core basic stuff, you will be compelled to do something about it.

Measure Progress

Your site needs “Core Metrics”. These are what you need to measure.  These metrics need to be from analytics, sales (or leads) figures, feedback data, and anything else that you could measure that would show that website optimization is working.

A Website Core Metrics Example

Website Optimization Summary

Give people what they want, do it from their perspective, make it easy and test test test. You likely have an SEO program.  Now you need a Website Optimization program.  They two have a lot in common.  Neither give immediate results, seem simple but are not, and require a strategy and lots of work.  There are there are website optimizing companies that provide such services, and even pair them with an SEO company.  I suggest getting  website optimization services before sending paid clicks at your site.  So many companies build something and leave it.  In reality, you can often get 100% better performance out of a page or navigational path through optimization.

Outsource Development

So I just had my 1st experience with outsourcing a freelance job. I have outsourced before, but that was always for larger projects that spanned several months. This was the 1st time I tried sending out a small job, the kind of job a small business would have. I’ve been reading a lot about outsourcing through online services and decided this was a good opportunity to try it.  My client was happy to do so as instead of paying $120/hour for 8 hours work, they only paid $12. I actually sent the job out twice because it needed to be done quickly and well, and I figured since it was so cheap, I might as well hire 2 developers and take the best one’s work. So let me share and rank my experience with you, considering the positive and negative.

The Job

I had a great design created through Crowdsourcing an needed a developer to translate the web site design into HTML & CSS (Often the best designer do not know how to “code” their designs, and often the best web developers are weak at implementing a design, so this middle step is needed). So the job was simple enough, and easy to deliver in that it could be done by providing the developer with the Photoshop design file, and they could deliver the HTML, CSS and Image files.

Selecting the Developers

It was very easy to find developers to outsource to. I went to oDesk first, as that is the service I heard the most good things about, and looked there.  There are other services like eLance.com , GetAFreelancer.com , GetACodder.com , Guru.com and several others, but to me oDesk was the one to start off with.

Creating the Job

Creating the Job with oDesk was simple enough.  I just went to the little link “Post your Job” under the “Search for Providers” button on the homepage.  I did 1st search for providers to see the level of talent in the area of work I needed, in this case, creating CSS Style Sheets and HTML.

Specify Job Candidates

oDesk really lets you specify the type of resource you want.  They let you specify qualities that you did not even know you could specify.  You end up say, I want the person who is a “GOD” in this subject, and the cool thing is, GOD talks to you and applies for the job!

Interviewing Candidates

Once you have posted the job, you should soon receive several, if not a dozen or so, applicants who want to work for you.  Look at who has the most experience, the best reviews and a bit of their portfolios if applicable to your job.  oDesk does a great job of making review of candidates easy.  Once you see what you think is the strongest candidate, request an interview, exchange some emails and get started.

Hire (Warning , Be Patient).

Next you hire a candidate .  If you have used oDesk before, it is simple.  If it is your 1st time and you try to hire someone the same day you create an oDesk account, then be patient.  Its going to take a while.

This is the biggest draw back I had with oDesk. You have to wait 4 business days to hire someone because oDesk, as part of setting up your account, requires that you provide the amounts of two small deposits made into your credit card account as a form a verification that you are the owner of the card you are using to pay with.

Communicate

Even the after 10 years in Internet development, there is an urge to think “this guy is an expert, he knows what to do.”  WRONG.  The developer knows what you tell him, so communicate everything.  Treat the professional like a professional and not like someone who costs 1/5 as much as the person down the street who calls themselves a professional and has the local sports outfitter as their marquee client.  Just so you know, some of the people you hire will have had a lot bigger clients with a lot better known brands.

Keep Communicating

I can’t remember the last time I threw something over the fence and not have it come back a couple of times before it was done by this or that specialist.  This is true of outsourcing to a freelancer as well.  I knew this going in and know it is part of the game, but imagine a lot of people, especially those not familiar with web development expect it to go out and come back.

Here’s hint, the developers, designer etc, who come back for clarification are the good ones , be thankful for questions.  If you don’t get questions, check in, cause it likely won’t come back how you want it based on your requirements only, unless your are a Biz Analyst demi-god.

Delivery

Don’t pay till you have the goods.  Once you are happy with the work, then pay.

Rate your Hire

You will be given the chance to rate and review the freelance you outsourced to.  Be hohnest!  If you are not, others will not know what to expect, or worse, the great developer you hired will not get what they deserve, more work.  The work will end up going to the guy you gave a far too pilot review and rating to.  This is literally taking food out of one mouth and putting it in another.  The system only works with trust and honesty of the community.

Summary

I hope this helps you get an idea about outsourcing to freelancers, and how to proceed.  I suggest just checking out some of the profiles in areas you need a freelancer.  If you have issues with outsourcing to another country, let me give you some perspective; I have worked in the Internet industry for 10 years and can contest that a lot of companies can only afford to exist because of outsourcing.  Also, I too have  been ioutsourced to (while here in the USA) from another countries. If the rest of the world was worried about outsourcing expertise or technology to the US, we’d be in bigger trouble right now than having a few forclosures.

People Don’t Read Your Website… They Scan it.

Make it Easy to Scan your Information, and They’ll consume it.

Anyone writing copy for web needs to understand how to write web copy. The reason is that copy writing for the web determines how and what of what your write actually gets read.  If you write to have your copy scanned, then you are writing good web copy!

Headlines

A page’s headline needs to interrupt and be relevant. It does not need to be descriptive, explain or introduce anything.  It just needs to stop people and get them to the Sub-Header.

Sub-Headers

A Sub-Header needs to engage a website visitor while expanding on the headline and its relevance to what the subject of the web content.

Image Captions

Following reading the headline and Sub-Header of a page, people will turn briefly to images and then read the image caption. This is why it is so important to write the best image captions possible, as this is what people are reading to determine if going further is going to be a waste of time or not.

Bullets

Write in bullet form;

• As much as possible.
• When appropriate.
• When a paragraph is going to be too large.
• When you want it read.

Paragraphs – short and start bold

Keep your paragraphs short.  I suggest 6 lines or less. It really helps to bold the first part of your paragraph (no more than 1/2 of it), and place the most “to the point” copy there.

Use your Colours

Use your website colours as the colours for your headline and Sub-Headers. You don’t have to use the exact colours, but doing this will help your copy stand out a little.

Calls to Action

Calls to Action (what you want people to click on to fill out a form, become a sale or go further in the sales or lead process) should not be copy unless it is also accompanied with button that repeats or expands on the text link.

Perfect Example

Just look at those image captions! This comes from www.eightbyeight.com , the website of an excellent eCommerce optimization company.  I have met Amy Africa who is a partner at Eight by Eight and knew I would fine the best practices she and I both advocate.

I hope this helps!

Lets step back from the site objectives and underlying need for business profit for a minute.  Lets talk about website architecture design and how to structure information in a way that it will get found and consumed by its intended audience.

Internal Perspective vs. Customer Perspective

For a lot of years (and still today), web professionals and website owners have organized websites as they saw their business , that is from their Internal Perspective .  For those same # of years, months, days and hours, visitors to those sites have had trouble finding what they were looking for.  This is because customers were looking for information from their external Customer Perspective .

So, website information architecture is often ignored or undervalued. Why does it matter?  Well, lets step ahead again. When it comes to the way information is organized, which perspective, Internal or Customer, do you think ultimately leads to achieving more site objectives and more profit?  I’ll give you a wild guess.

The problem with organizing information from an Internal perspective, or what a business feels is the  “logical” organization of the business they know so well , is that customers don’t know the business that way. Customers only know their needs, and at the end of the day, they won’t put much effort into learning more than that, they’ll just leave the site.

9 /10 People Search Out Of Frustration, Not Interest.

Nine out of Ten people will not search until they have failed trying to navigate a site and have failed to find what they’re looking for.  Therefore, search can be viewed as an indicator of customer frustration, more so than customer interest.

The top search results for a site are far more likely terms of things that can’t be found, not popular terms. I had to be responsible for leads worth a million dollars each month before I drove to the bottom of that fact!  In the end, after reorganizing the site with the theory I advocate in this post, the search results really were for the most popular items, as the 1 in 10 people who searched as a preference rose to the top.  But this only happened after the majority of users found what they wanted, they way they wanted (site navigation).

The result :  The company expanded the sales force.

Streaming Visitors, The Best Architecture For Websites

A website needs to present content from the user’s perspective, then offer complete clarity how to get to the information they seek. The problem is, most sites have more than one type of audience and each audience likely has more than one perspective. This is a lot to handle on a site, in particular  while designing a website homepage .

So how to you organize a site to handle multiple audiences with multiple perspectives.  Enter Streaming.

Most sites have these 3 Streams.

1. Audience
2. Products & Services
3. Markets

Audience Streaming

If you know that your site has 3 types of visitors, you can “call out” each type of audience and lead them to what they are interested in. It is important to determine your Primary audience.  They may not represent the most visits, but should represent either your greatest revenue stream or opportunity.

Products & Service Streaming

Lead people by the product categories and product types they are interested in . This approach works great for product everyone knows, but if your customers are not REALLY familiar with your product and service offerings, then they are not going to know how to get to what they want, or even what they want.  Product & Service categories are most often a useful way to present information on a site for some customers, so by all means offer it, but don’t organize your entire site around it.

In some cases, when the product is unfamiliar to customers, but the products are key to organizing content, it makes sense to lead the product stream through a wizard to help users figure out what they need.

Markets Streaming

If your company’s audience or products and services span across markets, you need to lead people by the market they consider themselves to be in.  Lets say you were a cleaning contract company.  You could span the corporations, schools, hospitals, small business etc etc.  Each market you service could have specific preferences (i.e. Government wants cleaners with security clearance).  By streaming by market, you get to present your “pitch” to each market individually, so they know everything you have to offer them.

Navigation & Destination Pages

There are only two types of web pages when it is all said and done.  They are;

1. Navigation Pages
2. Destination Pages

Navigation Pages

Navigation pages are used to get people to where they want to go.  Their purpose is offer information needed to make the decision on where to go next, then offer them a clear path in the direction they need to go.  If you have good navigation pages, your search statistics will go down, the need to search will go down.

The thing most people don’t realize is that people on a mission don’t pay attention to anything except what they are after. Therefore, trying to promote something on these pages is useless, in fact it is a waste of time for you and your customers. Promote and offer “Next Steps” with relevance on the Destination pages AFTER people have found what they are looking for.

Destination Pages

Destination Pages are the final page on the user’s “quest” for information.  These pages are focused on providing the information on the product, service, topic or solution that customer has come to your site in search of.  This is where you deliver what the site visitor needs and organize it from their perspective. This way, they understand it and take the action both you and they want to take.

Destination pages need to “hit the spot” everytime. There is a good chance you will have to have more than one destination page for one product or solution.  This could be due to different audiences wanting the same product or different markets wanting the same solution.  What ever the case, Destination Pages need to speak directly to the people reading it.

Once your site visitors are satisfied , you can lead them to a “next step”, “promotion” or some other “call to action” you want them to take, and more importantly, an action you think they will want to take at that point as well. Keep the offers relevant!

Summary

So by now I hope your understand the need of stream and how they affect your site Architecture.  Handling multiple streams throughout a site, and perhaps resolving each into Destination pages that drive leads and builds your business, requires a lot of thought and planning.  Don’t just spend 20 minutes on a white board with a catalogue and your product manager (pssss, get sales and customer service in there).

I hope this help you think about how others are viewing and using your website, and helps you organize you site better.

…and remember, you can do this!

A lot of people do not understand Internet marketing fundamentals . So, for the local, niche and small business people reading this blog, I think it is vitally important to cover the fundamentals around internet business strategy and make sure they are understood and valued, as successful internet marketing strategies will not happen if each Pillar is not given its due attention.

The 4 Pillars of Internet Marketing Success

When I do internet strategy consulting, developing a client’s best internet marketing strategy, there are 4 Pillars of Internet Marketing Strategy I consider.

#1 – Good Web Design

#2 – Good Website Coding

#3 – Driving Relevant Visits

#4 – Maximizing Conversion Rates

Good Web Design

My 1st Internet profession was as a Developer. After 5 years of programming, I thought I knew something about good web design.  I KNEW NOTHING! It was not until I moved to the business side and was charged with increasing conversions, in that case B2B leads, that I started to really consider what good web design is.

Good web design is not making things look pretty .  Good web design is achieving the objectives of the site or page.  Normally the objective is to drive conversions, and the disconnect is on this point.  Sure, things need to look good and professional or they hurt convertions, but this is only part of the Web Design equation.

Business objectives need to drive the design of a website or landing page. There has to be careful consideration of what information is present where, and how it is presented.  The information that the use wants to know must come first with anything you are trying to sell or tell them being secondary.  Good Web Design can place focus of the user better, but its primary role is to answer the immediate questions, and get them where they and you both want them to go.

Take a look at the following website for a curtain shop in my area of Denver, Co. The design is good as far as look & feel goes. I know EXACTLY what this site does and if I am looking for curtains, I get the all important “ah ha!” a visitor needs to stick around a site more than 8 seconds (its like riding a bull). Not only is the top navigation clear, but so is the sub navigation. I could dig deep and pick on the “scent” of the site due to it not telling me “where I am right now” , or the page title not following the same font style as the top menu, or the menus not changing state when mouse over them. I could, but won’t because the architecture of the site, the layout of the pages, and the presentation of the navigation options make this site better than  80% of other sites right off the bat.

To learn a bit more about Web Design, and the importance of it beyond (or better said, before) “look & feel”, see Nail a Niche with Landing Pages and Homepage Strategy & Tips .

Good Website Coding

As a former developer, this is the area I mastered early on, but was all I really knew .  Not only do people have a hard time following things like navigation “image maps” (several links in one menu), but so do search engine “bots”.

Another mistake is drop down menus (this is poor web design as well since people can’t “see” the options without having to take an action based on the limited information they get from a main menu title).  Drop down menus are often done with Java Script and search engines don’t read this type of coding and with therefore not follow the navigation.  With the search engines looking at internal links as a factor in ranking a site, sites with image map and java script drop down menus miss out on being more attractive to search engines and the result is less inbound traffic from the search engines. aka, You’re not being found.

Take a look at the site above again. Windows Dressed Up has image navigation. That is killing the site’s search engine rankings. In fact, I was searching for the site, but could not remember its name and tried a few searches like “Window Coverings Denver ” and “Drapes Denver ” and could not find them.  They did not turn up noticeably in the search results.

These searches could have turned up Windows Dressed Up by this business doing 3 things.

1. Make the navigation images into text links.  You could make them look identical with HTML.
2. Optimize the navigation links names  for search.  To learn more about this, see Know Your SEO.
3. Optimize for Local Search .

There are also so other opportunities to improve search engine rankings.

1. The images to the right could be separated into separate images, each with its own ALT tag providing a keyword rich description of what the image is.
2. They could use better page title tags, and add keyword and description tags, focusing on a Local SEO strategy .
3. They may also want to submit to all the Local Search Engines, Directories and Data Providers since currently they don’t have any incoming links to their site, this would at least give them a start, not to mention help being found by those people using those sites to search locally.

Drive Relevant Visits

This is the one Pillar most businesses focus on despite really needing to first handle Good Web Design and Coding first .  Nonetheless, it is a key Pillar when considering strategy and internet, and where I spend a lot of my time as an internet strategy consultant.  Driving people to a site that is converting poorly is a waste of money if the traffic is paid and a waste of effort if the business is engaging in social media or SEO efforts.

Once a site is ready to recieve traffic and can convert well, it needs to start driving relevant traffic to it. To drive relevant traffic, a business needs to know it audience, where they are online and how to best engage them.  For instance, if you know your audience is interested in “home decorating”, are women between the ages of 30 and 60 and reside in the Metro Denver area ( in the case of  Windows Dressed Up ), then you could target them with Pay per Click, Online Advertising, Social Media Ads and a few other tactics that allow you to target by demographics and geography.  You just want to make sure your traffic is relevant and highly targeted, as Internet Marketing is very unforgiving to those who don’t target well.

Maximizing Conversion Rates

To achieve success online, you need more than good Web Design, Good Website Coding and Relevant Traffic. You need to to focus on convertions.  You’re site has at least one objective.  It might be to generate a lead, to make a sale, or have someone donate to your cause.  Whatever the site objective, you need the following to start achieving them;

1. Make it easy – Don’t have too many steps to achieve something.  Registration for example should only collect essential info.
2. Keep it simple – Don’t overwhelm people with too many options.
3. Relevant Offerings – If someone is seeking information about cooking, don’t try to push lawn equipment on them.
4. Good Placement – Make offers
5. Clear Calls To Action – Don’t have a button that says “submit”.  Make the button have meaning like “Book your package today”.
6. If possible, offer things that are unique and valuable, preferably both.
7. Have special or free offer your site audience would really want.  See #6 above.   This is related to nurturing business and something we’ll go into at a later date.

Streaming

Streaming is identifying an audience and taking them through your site in the way you want them to proceed , but more importantly, the way they want to proceed.  Lets say Windows Dressed Up in Denver had Interior designers as an audience.  Calling out to them and leading them into a part of the site that addressed their needs, separately from regular customers would be streaming.  As long as you provided all the information the audience wants, they will be where you can offer them relevant offers and in a place dedicated to your selling to them.  Streaming audience types to areas meant for them will increase conversions.

Test & Tweak

All the best practices in the world will not make the best website.  You need to analyze your site statistics, talk to your customers, learn from it and try new things.  Try a new Headline or image.  Move an offer up.  Take out offers that are not performing.  There is always better results with testing. I think what and how to tweak is a future post as well.

I hope this offers a foundation on Internet Marketing.  It is important to understand the value of each Pillar and approach your web presence from the 1st to the 4th in order to save time and money.

A business today has a lot of options in building a website site, and they all cost less, and do more than they did just a few years ago.  If you have not figured out how to put together and host your own site in the last 3 months, then this article is for you.

I should mention that we are about to cover the best way to make a non-eCommerce website for a typical small business today.  If you plan to sell online, or have "special" needs like advanced catalogues, than this is not the best solution for you.  This is the solution for a company that need to create a good website that they can administer themselves and they don’t want another SBA loan to get it.

The solution is simple, complete and cheap compared to building a custom site.

First I want to make sure everyone understands.  A small business today does not need a custom site built for them.  Having web design done is a great idea, and we’ll cover that, but having a web developer do more than "connect the dots" for you today is likely unnecessary.

Introducing WordPress 2.7

You might have heard of WordPress .  It traditionally has been Blogging software, and still does a fantastic job at it.  But recently, and especially since the January release of version 2.7, it is highly regarded as a tool for small business website content management.  Basically, this changes everything .  You can now have a site set up quickly that allows you to manage it yourself, and oh yeah, its free.

If you are not a tech savvy person, you will still need one to create your site, but it will take a 1/2 hour to set up and another 1 or 2 to configure, so not a big deal.

Getting Started

Let’s get started with the Step-By-Step run down of how to create an awesome Small Business website for 10% of what it would have cost to get the same thing 4 years ago.

1. Register a Domain. There are lots of domain registrars.  For the sake of keeping it simple, I suggest registering the domain with your hosting company.  The two hosts I recommend below include a domain in your hosting costs anyways so you can relax there.
2. Find a Web Host – This site will need to be hosted somewhere, and since we are talking about having a WordPress CMS, you will have to select a web host that can host WordPress installations.   I can recommend the two web hosts I use, Start Logic (for beginners) and Dream Host (for the techies).  Just sign up for the basic hosting packs and keep your log-in handy, if your not technical, you’ll need to share it with the resource who assembles your site.
3. Get the Site Designed – The best way to do this is covered in Crowdsourcing Web Design .  Just make sure you specify the site will be a WordPress Blog.  It will save you additional money if you can find a free theme that you like.  It takes some searching, but if you find a free theme, than you really just need a header image to be designed.  The place to start is 413 best free WordPress themes of 2008 from Elite Freelancing.
4. Get the Site Configured - Notice I did not say developed?  Basically you will need WordPress installed at your host.  That takes 15 min.  You’ll need to find a developer that is familiar with WordPress as well. If you have a developer who does not work with WordPress (yet), find a new one.  After WordPress is installed, instruct the developer to install the theme you have selected and to configure the site according to how you want it (you will have to have decided the layout of your site first).  The theme will take 5 minutes to install.  Configuration of the site (so the pages you need to work with are there) will take about an hour if routine.
5. Create Content – This is adding copy and images to your page.  The theme you use should keep the site nice and clean for you.  If you don’t like something about the look of the site after you start adding content, enlist a developer to "tweek" the site to your liking.

That’s the nutshell.

I believe this would suit about 90% of "brick & Mortor" small business website needs .  If you need more for your website solution, the next "step up" is Joomla .  If you need to get really serious content management, you will want to look at Drupal .  Anything more serious than that will involve custom development (if you go that route, stay with development within a couple of time zones of where you are, trust me, Newfoundland is about as offshore as you want to get for web development).

I hope that helps.  This is not "Secret Stuff", in fact, once you start digging, you will see there is a complete WordPress world out there ready to make your web world an easier one.

Crowdsourcing Web Design Changes Everything

It used to be that designing for a site meant selecting a web designer and being limited to the talents, ideas and inspiration of that web designer. Then came crowdsourcing . According to Wikipedia.com , crowdsourcing is taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an “open call”.

This works great for web design! You can also use it for Logos, Stationary, and even T-Shirt designs!

Before you start Crowdsourcing Web Design

1. Decide which design crowdsourcing site to use. The choices right now are 99Designs.com or CrowdSpring.com . Browse through each site, checkout the categories you will be listing in and see where you think you can get the best value for what you are looking to get.
2. Be ready to go public. This is a public process. 99Designs.com allows you to set up a private contest, but it costs more. Ask yourself if your competitors really have nothing better to do than find your contest, and if they don’t, will they actually do anything about it after they see it?
3. Have a clear vision of what you want your design to convey. You should also be clear the objective of what online presence. The key here is for you to be clear on what you what to convey through the design.
4. Make sure you have the time to write a good design brief. The design crowdsourcing site you use will walk you through this, you just need to make sure you take the time to fill it out thoroughly. Remember, designers will only give you what they think you want, so that is what you need to communicate to them. If you have a Marketing Summary already, use it!
5. Research how much you should spend. Take a look at contests similar to the one you will be creating. How much are they offering to the designer. You will notice that the greater the reward, the better the contest entries. This is already the “cheap” way to go, don’t be cheaper!
6. Know there will be additional “middle man” charges of around 20% on top of what your set the contest for. You need to factor this cost in when you set the amount the design contest winner receives.

Create a Design Contest

Now let’s walk through the design crowdsourcing process I used to get the eMarketing Matador web logo and header image you see in the header area of this site. For just over $200, I got 7 very talented designers to submit 27 designs, and compete to win the design contest.

In this case, for the logo/header contest, I used 99Designs.com . At the time, I was more impressed with the logo/header designs I saw on 99Designs.com , and they appeared to be going for about $50 cheaper.

In submitting my contest, I did not select a lot of the options available, which all cost extra. Some of these make sense, such as promoting the contest in the forum area of the site, especially if you are in a hurry and want the attention of the best talent. For me, I give the design period about 5 days, ensuring me time to work with the designers through feedback etc. You can also highlight the contest etc and make it stand out. All these things might work, but how much more than just throwing the additional costs into the contest reward is debatable. I personally would rather see the extra money go to the Designer.

Here is my Design Brief for the eMarketing Matador Web Logo/Header

In the Design Brief , there was 4 key points I wanted to make;

#1 – I gave the address of the site so they could see where the logo/header image would live.

#2 – I “sweetened” the pot by offering to recognize the designer and link to their site. You can see this in the footer of this site.

#3 – I wanted the design or part of it, to have good icon appeal. If you look at the address bar, you will see the icon for this site.

#4 – I pre-paid the prize money. This showed I was serious and that someone was going to win.

Once published, a Design Brief looks like this to prospective designers

You can see that the summary is just that. I used it to give the basic and vital information, as well as provide the incentive related information of what I was going to do above and beyond just the contest.

Below are the different entries I received.

You can see I got a lot of variety to select from. It is amazing what 7 different designers will come up. Each has their own style and interpretation of your design brief. This is where crowdsourcing design excels. With a single designer, you get one set of “vision” and “talent”. A single designer also does not have brainstorming access with other designers trying to achieve the same task. Let one talented designer see anothers work, and the clients feedback to that work, the quality and direction of their own work will end up being more targeted and what you want. This is where you win!

Tips to Getting the Best out of Design Crowdsourcing

1. Give Timely Feedback – I try to check my contests at least twice a day and provide feedback for each design. I rate the ones I don’t like and the ones I do like, I let them know. If I see something with potential, or going in a direction I like, I let the designers in the contest know so they can all go down the right path together. Design feedback is crucial.
2. Get a good start – If you don’t see at least 5 designs submitted after a couple of days, review other contests and see what the bids are there. You might need increase your bid a bit. For this contest, I raised the bid by $20 once and saw better results after.
3. Build a relationships – If you see someone with talent, keep in touch. You may want to go direct to them in the future, cutting out the competition and middle man. Going direct to the designer will easily cut costs by 2/3′s. Worse case, you can let the designers know of your next competition and have them “raise the bar” a bit.

The Winner

In the end, the winner of the contest was UaLz, a university senior taking time out of studying for finals to made some much needed money to pay rent etc. If you’d like to use him, his email address is

To visit the contest I hosted for the eMarketing Matador logo/header image, simply visit 99designs.com here.

Related Article on Landing Pages

I recently wrote a post on Landing Pages, which are perfect for Crowdsourcing. One page, simple goal. Its a good place to start!

Listen to Seth

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. He’s a great Marketing author, blogger and Entrepreneur. He wrote an article “How to live happily with a great designer” that captures the essence of working with a designer, web or not, crowdsourcing or not. I recommend reading it before working on any Web Design Brief to any Web Designer.

Remember: You can do this!