Is Your Website Suffering From Website Wilt?

I’ve written several times before about the importance of keeping your website fresh and up-to-date.  Recently I came across a term that sums up websites with out-of-date content and a tired design, “Website Wilt”.

So what is website wilt?  Well it’s when your website is looking tired or your content is out-of-date.  Some signs of website wilt are:

• Your most recent newsletter, blog post or content update is more than six months old.

• You don’t even have some kind of newsletter or blog.

• Your copyright notice still says © 2009… or earlier.

• Your website design is outdated and old fashioned.

• Your links within the website point to pages that no longer exist.

With people being so time poor these days, and so much information available at our finger tips the dangers of website wilt are great.  Some of the dangers you could face are:

• It could look as if you’re no longer in business.

• Potential customers might think you don’t care about your business.

• Potential customers pass you by and go to your competitors who do have a fresh and up-to-date website.

• You’re not seen as an expert in your field.

• You could be losing business.

This all might sound a little scary, but the cure of website wilt isn’t hard.  Here are some handy hints to avoid and recover from website wilt:

• Update your website content (regularly) with compelling and persuasive wording.

• Think about a blog or newsletter.

• Use Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

• Get objective opinions about your website.

• Ask a web copywriter to evaluate your copy.

• Make it a regular task to review and update your copy – even if you put it in your diary as a monthly task.

• Treat your website as a valuable asset, show it some TLC!

So if you don’t think about your website every week, and don’t update our content regularly then beware! Website Wilt will creep in.

Hootsuite Your Social Media

Hootsuite! What’s Hootsuite?  Well simply it’s the must have tool for all your social networking.

We’re all busy running our businesses and the last thing you want is your social media to take up too much time.  You’ve got Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to contend with.  This is where Hootsuite comes to the rescue.

Basically what Hootsuite does is link all of your social networks together into one interface, removing the need to post on Facebook, then post on Twitter, then post on LinkedIn.  You simply post it using Hootsuite and it’s sent to all your social networks.

It gets better.  Not only does it save you having to replicate your posts, but you can schedule them to go out when you want.  One day you might find a bit more time and schedule your social network posts to go out over the next week – just like magic.

But wait.  It gets even better.  If you have a blog on your website Hootsuite can check your blog at set intervals for new posts, and when it finds one it will automatically post it to your social networks. That’s what happened with this post.

How easy does that sound?  We’ve just slashed the time you need to spend on your social networking, leaving more time for running your business.

Check out Hootsuite at www.hootsuite.com. Did I say it’s Free? Well it is!

If it’s still all to daunting contact us and we can get you started.

A Foray Into Facebook Advertising

Recently I started to work on a little side project and part of this project was to setup a Facebook Fan Page to start building a community.

Now Facebook Fan Pages are nothing new and they are a great way to promote your business to the 500 million people who are registered Facebook users, but something I hadn’t dabbled in before was Facebook Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

So what is Facebook PPC?  Well you at some stage have probably heard about Google AdWords, and if not you would have seen the “Sponsored Links” that appear on the right hand side of your Google search results.  Well Facebook PPC is the same concept.  If you have a Facebook account next time you’re on take note of the ads that appear on the right side of the screen.

At the time of writing this my Facebook Fan Page has been up for 10 days.  In the first 4 days fans started “liking” the page, but 98% of those that did were friends of mine – i.e. people that I actually know.

Eight days ago I decided to try out the Facebook PPC service.  Initially I setup 1 ad to appear to people in a certain age group who lived within 15km of a particular suburb.  Almost instantly I started seeing click and actions appearing in the statistics – an action is recorded when someone clicks on the ad and then “likes” the page.

A couple of days later I decided to add a second ad with different copy to see what would happen.  The results are interesting.  The second ad was performing better. Any copywriter would tell you that having a series of ads with different copy is the best way to attract more people.

So what are the stats?  Keep in mind this is not a business, it’s a “pet project”.

Length of campaign to date: 8 days (Ad 1: 8 days, Ad 2: 6 days)

Number of Ad variations: 2

Total number of impressions: 49,887
(the number of times the ad has been shown)

Ad 1 Impressions: 26,016

Ad 2 Impressions: 23,871

Number of clicks: 123 (Ad  1: 55, Ad 2: 68)

Number of Actions: Ad 1: 7, Ad 2: 17

Cost of campaign to date: $25.69

Now although we only recorded 17 actions we had almost 100 people during that time like the page.  The reason is, with social networking you see what your friends are up to and what they like so while 1 person clicked on an ad and liked the page several of their friends may have seen that and also liked it – from one click, many results.

So why am I sharing this information?  Well think about it in the context of your business.  Do you think you could get more customers by investing some time in setting up and using a Facebook Fan Page, or take it to the next level and run a Facebook Advertising campaign?

Food for thought!

P.S.  Just because you setup Facebook for your business it doesn’t mean you need to use it for personal stuff.  Think of it as a business too and a very cheap way of marketing your business.

Look After Your Domain Name

Your domain name is your address on the Internet, and without it potential customers won’t be able to find you.

When you register your domain name, or it is registered by your web designer you will receive confirmation of the registration.  Along with this confirmation you will also receive a username and password that allows you or your web designer to make changes to the domain name that will make your website work.  When you receive these details you should keep them filed in a safe place, as getting them later on, typically when you need them in a hurray, can be difficult and time consuming.

Recently I’ve had a couple of instances where I’ve needed domain name details for a client to put their website live and it’s taken weeks to get the account details, delaying the site launch, and the loss of customers.

Another thing to be aware of when someone else is registering your domain name is to make sure they register the domain in YOUR name and use YOUR business details (including ABN).  Unless the correct name and business details are associated to the domain name you are not the owner of it and should things go wrong you’re up for a long battle and money to have things changed.

My third and final piece of advise regarding your domain name is to make sure your email address details are up-to-date because if you don’t receive your renewal notifications and the registration lapses you may be unlucky and find that someone else has snapped it up.

Do You Know Who is Visiting Your Website?

So you’ve got this great website sharing with the world details about your business and your products or services, but do you know who is visiting your website, what pages they are viewing and how long they are spending on your website?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to find out all this information? Well good news, there is! Google provide a services called Google Analytics which captures information about visitors to your site such as:

• Where they came from – e.g. did they type in your URL directly, did they click on a link on another website or did they search for you, and if they did what search term did they use;
• What pages of your site are the most popular;
• Where are your visitors located – down to the city;
• How long on average do visitors spend on your site;
• New vs. Returning visitors.
• And a whole lot more.

So why would this information be useful? Well you can use this information to guide you in updating your website content to work better for you. If there are pages on your site that aren’t being viewed then it might be time to look at updating them. If you find your visitors aren’t coming from your target location, why? If you have links to your site on other websites which ones are feeding more visitors to you.

There is a vast amount of information that Google Analytics can provide you about your site – far too much to talk about here. Google Analytics can be setup for any website so why not sign up and start collecting valuable data about your website visitors and their habits.