7 Elements of a Professional Website

As a business professional, you are always trying to put your best foot forward. Nice business cards, smart phone to keep you organized, polished appearance – but what about your website? Your website is your first impression to your new visitors and potential leads. Here are some elements of successful websites:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, functionality is in the hand of the user. While a great looking design will attract your visitors, it’s the user experience that will keep your bounce rate down. Make sure your navigation is easy to read, your site has cross browser functionality, and your overall design is clean. Always run quality checks in order to ensure all your links and forms work.

Design does count for something though! Try to stay away from dark backgrounds as they are hard on the eye. A light simple background with an attention grabbing call-to-action will be your best bet in encouraging your visitors down the sales funnel. Use fonts that make sense with your industry and company image. Would you call a lawyer who uses Comic Sans Font on their website?

Loading, Loading. If a site takes to long to load, you are going to cause your customers to hit the back button and go to the next item in their search query. Using a free service such as Web Page Analyzer or W3C Markup Validator will clue you in on how your website is performing.

Consistency is the key to your branding. Keeping your website, blogs, online accounts and print material aligned will help create brand recognition. Try to use the same logo, color schemes and design elements as much as possible. If you view my blog, compared to my website, twitter and LinkedIn accounts there is consistency. I use the same image, color scheme, fonts and design elements.

Keep it fresh. An outdated website speaks volumes about how your customers perceive the way you run your business. Just think, if you have a website that was created or last updated in 2007 claiming you’ve been in business for 5 years – well you’re shortchanging yourself since now you’ve been in business for 10 years. I would suggest a redesign on anything from before 2010 and if your serious about your online presence use a CMS system such as Drupal or WordPress to keep your site current.

Blog. Blogging is a an excellent way to keep your website fresh and adding new content is always good for search engine results. Another bonus about blogging is that it opens up an avenue for your customers to get to know your brand and build trust. According to HubSpot, 57% of businesses acquire a new customer through their blog. I believe this, this is after all how I originally heard of HubSpot.

Hire a professional. Never cheap out on your website. Your high school cousin might know how HTML, but he or she probably doesn’t know marketing essentials needed to create traffic. Hire a professional or agency that know Web Design and SEO. You wouldn’t rely on WebMD to accurately diagnose that pain in your chest would you?

A well-rounded marketing plan means keeping your print and web promotions current. Since print material doesn’t need to be updated, it is the easier medium to keep up with. With 93% of online experiences beginning with a search, it’s important that your website is optimized, engaging and is easy on the eyes. If you need help with your online presence, contact me today for a free marketing consultation.


I certainly didn't cover every element - feel free to comment any tips and ideas not covered!

2012 Resolutions to maximize your personal brand

2012 is already looking good! Time to start new, new goals for your business and old habits to break.  Here are some resolutions to keep you on track for an awesome 2012.

1.) Network more. Get yourself offline and out there! Attend industry events as well as general events – you never know just who you will meet and how you can benefit. A good place to check out events in your area is on eventbrite.

2.) Learn a new skill. I really hate that statement Jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I agree with making sure to master something in your industry really well. I also think knowing and learning as much as you can in all aspects makes you an asset. This is especially helpful if you’re feeling the burn of a stagnant career.

3.) Stop wasting time on social media. Notice that I didn’t say stop using just stop wasting time. Don’t get bogged down looking at crazy status updates or dramatic tweets of your friends, instead try to spend more time on your business page than your personal page.  Keep your focus on being positive and leveraging social media to maximize your return on investment.

4.) Get rid of dead weight.  This sounds a bit harsh but it can work wonders for your business and for your own health. I call dead weight “psychic vampires”.  They drain your time, your energy and your funds.  They can be in the form of that customer you bend over backwards for but can never please or that employee who feels like you are always out to get them and drags your team down. I say fire that customer and that employee – it’s a bold move but it will pay off in the end.

5.) Find or be a mentor. Mentors and mentoring are one the most valuable business relationships your brand can have. If you’re an industry leader, try mentoring and spreading your knowledge to help future founders succeed and grow.  If you’re just starting out, find that industry leader and connect with him or her. A good place to find out more about finding or becoming a mentor is SCORE.

6.) Stay positive. Seems so obvious, right!? However it is hard to remain positive in a tight situation. Rely on your networks, family, and your mentor(s) to help get you through tough situations. Think about what is so great about you and your brand instead of thinking about how bad things are going.  

Following the above, I see nothing but good things for 20102.  I wish everyone the best of luck this year!

Holiday inbound marketing ideas to boost your end of year revenue

Tis’ the season to drive in revenue!  That year end sprint is a driving force for every business. If you own a business that sells products or services to consumers, here’s how to drive holiday traffic to your store with discounts, free gifts and contests using:

Check In Deals

Offer customers that “check in” to your store/restaurant via foursquare, Facebook or other location based social networks to enhance your special promotion.  Not only will this drive traffic into your business; this will also increase your reach beyond your followers, as friends of your fans will see status updates at your location.
Bonus: Point out on your Facebook page and/or twitter account who took advantage of your offer, make sure to use the @ symbol, so your follower gets highlighted and the post will go on their page as well.

Facebook Landing Pages

That’s right, use Facebook as a Landing Page! Not only will you gain more “Likes”; you can offer a holiday gift and at the same time collect information from your customers, which will enable you to segment market better.  The page will be a tab found on the right side, make it your main page when someone comes to your page and let the holiday cheer come in!
Bonus: By gathering information on your customers, you can find out who your buyer persona is and keep them engaged via email deals and newsletters that are more suited to their needs.

QR Codes

A fun way to fun ways to keep your customers interested in your products or services is using a QR Code. The possibilities for what you can place a QR Code on and what you can do offer with them are endless - Place them on your holiday signage as a “secret discount”, send your customers an email blast holiday card that has a QR code with your holiday promotion, create a business card size holiday tag with a code and place the card in your customers shopping bags with discounts on their next purchase.
Bonus: For more great QR code ideas check out Create and Tracks, “Top 5 things to do with QR Codes this Holiday Season”.

Send a Holiday Greeting

Use your email list to send out a Holiday Greeting to everyone on your email list.  Make sure to send emails to you vendors as well as your customers.  Since not every customer or vendor is the same, experiment with different offers based on information you have collected in your CRM software.  Experiment with different subject lines as well based on to maximize the amount of customer who open your email.
Bonus: Give a discount for your customers Friends and Family.

Update your Google Place

Did you know you can update you Google place advertisement to offer special deals? Simply go to your Google places account and and click the offers tab an place your holiday deals!
Bonus: You can set an expiration date on your offer.

Hope these tips help you have a successful end of year!

Happy Holidays!

6 Companies every entrepreneur can be thankful for

With the stress of Thanksgiving planning and cooking finally being over; I took the time to think about businesses that have made my life as a freelancer easier, with either their products or blogs and I hope sharing them can make yours as well!

Hubspot 
Hubspot is a marketing software company based out of Cambridge, MA.  With 3 different levels of their software, they can work seamlessly with any size company. What makes them so awesome is their commitment to their customers. They don’t just build an awesome product; they provide training and support via their passionate inbound marketers. Outside of their normal trainings, they offer hubspot.tv, webinars, an awesome blog full of top tips, quarterly meetups and their inbound marketing university. Hubspot offers a free 30 day trial of their software – why not test it out today and see why they are worth bragging over!


Grasshopper 

Another Massachusetts company, Grasshopper is a company that offers virtual phone systems geared towards entrepreneurs.  Some of Grasshopper’s features include: 800 numbers, call forwarding, call screening, unlimited extensions, email to voicemail, onhold music.  What you can be thankful for is their low monthly price and their commitment to entrepreneurs. Point in case, Co-fouder Siamak Taghaddos is a Founding supporter of National Entrepreneurs' Day.  Also worth checking out is Grasshopper's blog, which is a great resource for entrepreneurs.


BizLaunch 

Canada’s, BizLaunch provides training and education to entrepreneurs. BizLaunch is excellent resource proving plenty of webinars, excellent advice and tools such as business plans, break even analysis reports, balance sheets and plenty more. The best part about BizLaunch is that all of their resources are free! Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or you’re just starting out and don’t know where to begin, BizLaunch has the resources for you.


Eventbrite 

As an entrepreneur, you want to get name out there as much as possible, and that means networking and throwing your own events. Eventbrite is a website that you can place your own events in their database and search for events going.  What’s great about Eventbright is the search feature, you can search in your local area, date of event, price (from free to expensive), category and you can further narrow down the events to which town they are in. Most of the networking events I go to, I have found on Eventbright.  If you’re thiking about hosting an event, you can take secure payments through Eventbright via their own processing system, pay-pal, authorize.net or Google checkout. 



Salesforce 

The ultimate CRM Cloud software, Salesforce offers a variety of SaaS and PaaS solutions to help you reach out to your customers and analyze your customer’s behavoirs. Salesforce not only offers sales and marketing data software, it also offers great products and apps such as chatter, radian6, force.com, database.com and Heroku.  Like Hubspot, Salesforce pricing ranges per how big your business is and salesforce also offers free trials.


Bonnie Gibson

Ok ok, I know this part is a bit of a stretch/shameless plug! However, I enjoy offering marketing advice and sharing knowledge of print/web design, content writing and SEO via my blog and twitter. Feel free to find me on linkedin, twitter or google+ and follow me. If you need some marketing advice, I offer a free marketing consultation, just drop me an email.

Enjoy the rest of your Holiday Season and 6 cheers to the companies mentioned above!

Why content is online marketing's best friend

When it comes to driving traffic and creating leads, a nice design might be eye catching, but it’s your content and how your content engages your visitors that’s going to make your site a success. Consider your content to be your marketing budget’s best friend.

What makes content so important?  I seriously cannot stress enough the importance of great content.  Content is how your visitors will find out about your brand and what solutions you can offer to their lives easier. Content is what gives your company credibility and will set you apart from your competition. In this economy you need to transparency in your brand and gain trust in order to make it, and your content is just the thing that will help you do so.

What makes great content you ask?  Great content is finding ways to reach out and engage your customers by offering ways to make their lives easier.  Content isn’t only limited to images and text on a website, content can be blogs, podcasts, webinairs, white papers, ebook, etc. The point is to be as useful as you can to your visitor.  Once you are useful to your visitor, you can start turning your visitor into a prospect.

How can you create content that engages your audience? 
Compelling content is created when you take the time to understand your buyer’s persona.  Who exactly are you trying to reach? Write for them first and then the search engines.  Start by specifically thinking about who would buy your product or service. For me I am talking to you, the business owner who needs help with their online marketing.  That’s why my blogs are filled with tips to help you become more marketing savvy.  My website, my blog and my twitter account have you in mind.  If you are having trouble thinking of what to write? Read this ebook by hubspot to give you some great content ideas.

But what about ranking in the search engines? Now that you’ve got your reader engaged, time to make sure you content is optimized for the search engines. The key to optimization is in long tail keywords. Creating a keyphrase will help you gather your leads attention in search engines and weed out the traffic you don’t want.  The more specific your keyphrases are, the better chance you will have of driving the type of traffic you would want to your website. For example, when I moved back to New Hampshire from Rhode Island I was looking for a salon.  Since my favorite hair color brand is Goldwell, I searched “Goldwell Color Salons in Southern New Hampshire”.  Do you see how specific I got?  I knew I needed a salon but I only wanted one that offered the Goldwell hair color line.  The more specific you get in your keyphrases the more quality traffic you will drive to your site. Remember to use analytic tools such as Concentrate to track and measure your success.

While an esthetically pleasing website is great to look at as a visitor, what will make or break your business is your content.  What will help you rank in the search engines is your content. What will create sales is your content.  Consider your content your businesses best friend.

Life’s a beach – don’t let the sunset on your marketing

Summer is always fleeting, so I tired to make the most of it.  I went on an awesome family vacation at Lake Winnesquam in New Hampshire, picked up some new clients and got Inbound Marketing Certified.  However there is something big and gaping that I left out as I basked in the summer sun - I stopped blogging. I can even remember the moment I stopped.  I was sitting on the porch of my families vacation home, looking out onto the lake with my third blog post drafted on my laptop and instead of proofing and publishing I got caught up in the moments that made this summer so great. You might be thinking – this girl needs to relax; she took two months off not a big deal. Well, taking time off from any marketing efforts shouldn’t be treated lightly. Here are some reasons why:

Too much time off requires much more effort to come back.  Seriously.  I have thought about this writing this blog for at least a month.  I kept saying to myself, “OK, here is the idea, now tomorrow I will execute it and then proof my other blog.” If you hear that voice ignore it, in fact tell it where to go! Instead, do what you can in that moment, even if you create a skeleton of what you want to do it’s better than nothing and might just get you doing more.

Loss of web traffic.  Creating fresh and relevant content should be a key strategy in turning web traffic into leads.  If your not creating targeted content for your buyer persona, how would you expect to found?  The more keyword rich content you produce, will help you gain better results with the search engines and your audience. In my instance, I kept tweeting (less frequently of course) and made subtle updates to my site but my blog is where I really am creating my rich content so that should have been my main focus.

You disengage your audience. When I see the last time someone wrote a blog was months ago (shame on me!), hasn’t tweeted in weeks, or has a copywrite on their website from 2009 I start to think – this person either doesn’t know what they are doing, gave up or doesn’t care about their personal branding.  Once you start to lose your audience it’s difficult to get them back and I hope for the most part my audience is ready to bear with me and pick up where we last left off.

This blog is as much as a lesson learned, as it is an apology and a begging for forgiveness! The summer was great, but when it comes to branding you need to keep up and keep ahead of the competition. If moments come up when you feel overwhelmed, too busy or having too much fun to keep up with your marketing efforts consider the above.

If your stuck on what to write try thinking of what is going on around you and how you can turn it into a story worth sharing with your audience, this should keep you blogging without an extended absence. Now that I have gotten through this blog I must say it’s good to be back!

How to choose your the right social media for your business

In the wonderful world of social media marketing it is easy to get lost. You will hear from people, “You need to be on every social media platform.” Every social media platform? Good luck keeping up with that!It's better to use social media platforms you understand and that help you create conversations with your audience.  I use Twitter, LinkedIn, Coroflot and this blog you are reading now to reach my professional network. I prefer to stay away from Facebook, as I have used the application since it was only available to college students and I view it as my personal networking that I like to keep to just friends. Marketing strategist and Public Speaker, David Meerman Scott gives an excellent reasoning himself as to why he doesn’t use LinkedIn.

What social media is right for your brand? Here are some considerations:

Know your audience and what social media they use. Is your audience on Facebook? Are they tweeting or checking in via foursquare? Do they like to read blogs full of industry tips? Do they watch how to videos or enjoy a good viral video in general? Find out where they are and speak to them. You’re using social media to engage your audience, so make sure you are choosing relevant places to make a connection.

Figure out how much time and effort you want to spend on social media. Are you prepared to commit to a blog if you start one? Will you keep up Facebook posting or answer to people writing on your wall? Social media is not a set it and forget it type of marketing solution. Creating a social media presence and not keeping up with it is just as disengaging as not having a presence at all. Scope out the time you will need to put into your social media, if it is too much consider hiring someone to work on and build your social media brand.

Don’t use social media as a channel to just talk about your products and services. Social Media Marketing is about reaching out to your audience and having conversations with your customers. By having constantly inundating your network with a one-way conversation about your products and services you will lose your audience. Smart marketers and business people know that no one cares about your products and services but you. Sounds harsh, but it is true. What consumers do care about is how your product or service is going to better them. Creating blogs that offer solutions to your customers’ problems, creating polls and/or contests via Facebook and offering specials via twitter to your loyal followers are some great ways to connect and create clientele.

Use social media to create networks. Engaging with customers and moving them along your sales process should be your number one priority, but networking via social media marketing should be another goal taken into consideration. Networking via LinkedIn, Corflot and Twitter has helped me connect with some great designers, marketers and companies that I probably wouldn’t have found on my own.

According to comScore, an average person spends 14% of their time online on social media sites and those number are rising. With that being said it's time to come up with a social media strategy. Where will your brand be found?