Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

September 7, 2009
· Martin Kelley

A poten­tial client recent­ly came to me with an exist­ing site. It cer­tain­ly was slick: the home­page fea­tured a Flash ani­ma­tion of telegenic young pro­fes­sion­als culled from a stock pho­to ser­vice, psuedo-jazz tech­no music, and words sweep­ing in from all sides sell­ing you the com­pa­ny’s ser­vice. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the page had no use­ful con­tent, no call-to-action and no Google PageR­ank. It was an expen­sive design, but I did­n’t need to look at the track­ing stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynam­ic, some­thing that will attract cus­tomers and inter­act with them. Here’s five tips for build­ing a self-marketing website!

One: Use­ful Con­tent for your Tar­get Audience
Give vis­i­tors a rea­son to come to the site. Text-rich, chang­ing con­tent is essen­tial. In prac­ti­cal­i­ty, this means installing a blog and writ­ing posts every few weeks. You’ll see mea­sures like “key­word rel­e­van­cy” increase instant­ly as excerpt­ed text shows up on the home­page. Add videos and pho­tos if your com­pa­ny or team has that exper­tise, but remem­ber: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away some­thing valu­able or useful
Many smart mar­ket­ing sites fea­ture some free give­away right on the home­page: a use­ful quiz, pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis, a PDF how-to guide­book. A builder I worked with went to the trou­ble of post­ing dozens of floor plans & pic­tures to their web­site and com­pil­ing them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your con­tact infor­ma­tion to get it. Once the free mate­r­i­al has been com­piled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask your­self the Three User Questions!
It’s amaz­ing how focused the mind gets when you actu­al­ly sit down to define goals. Just about every web­site can ben­e­fit from this three-step exercise:

  1. Who is the tar­get audience?
  2. What would draw them to the site? 
  3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group togeth­er to through your web­site page by page these ques­tions. Brain­storm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quan­tifi­able actions do you want vis­i­tors to take? It might well just be the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of a con­tact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small busi­ness­es now get a lot of their cus­tomers from their web­sites. Your web­site is an essen­tial piece of your mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­i­ty and you need to be smart about it. Com­pile togeth­er your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alter­nate designs incor­po­rat­ing the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Web­site Opti­miz­er to put the alter­na­tives through their paces. Which one “con­verts” bet­ter, i.e., which design gets you high­er per­cent­ages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve fin­ished a test, move on to the next brain­storm­ing idea and imple­ment it. Always be testing!

An exten­sive series of tests of one site I worked on dou­bled it’s con­ver­sion rate: imag­ine your com­pa­ny dou­bling its inter­net sales? It is com­plete­ly worth spend­ing the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Pro­fes­sion­al Help
If you need to hire a pro­fes­sion­al to help you through this process you’ll almost cer­tain­ly get your mon­ey’s worth! A recent projects cost the cus­tomer $6000 but I was able to doc­u­ment sav­ings of $100,000 per year in his pub­lic­i­ty costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Con­sul­tants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a hon­est and com­pe­tent pro­fes­sion­al web pub­lic­i­ty consultant.

Elisabeth Olver, Artist & Painter

September 4, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Elisabeth Olver ArtistElis­a­beth is a painter and artist who spe­cial­izes in orig­i­nal acrylic paint­ings and giclee prints of nature and South Jer­sey beach scenes. Her exist­ing site was attrac­tive, but it did­n’t have online order­ing and she was­n’t able to update it herself.

We put togeth­er a fea­tures list and then went through a round of con­cept screen­shots which I built in Adobe Fire­works and Pho­to­shop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a cus­tomized Mov­able Type site. A spe­cial­ized tem­plate allows her to enter infor­ma­tion about the each piece: medi­um, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are host­ed on Flickr). Mov­able Type pulls these togeth­er into var­i­ous cat­e­go­ry and indi­vid­ual art pages, with automatically-generated Pay­pal “Buy” but­tons for avail­able pieces. We stressed search-engine vis­i­bil­i­ty so there are many cat­e­gories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Vis­it: Elis­a­beth Olver

Hanging with the high schoolers

August 26, 2009
· Martin Kelley

At the PYM High School Friends retreat, Fall 2009Had a good time with Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing high school Friends yes­ter­day, two mini-session on the tes­ti­monies in the mid­dle of their end-of-summer gath­er­ing. The sec­ond ses­sion was an attempt at a write-your-own tes­ti­monies exer­cise, fueled by my testimonies-as-wiki idea and ground­ed by pas­sages from an 1843 Book of Dis­ci­pline and Thomas Clark­son’s “Por­trai­ture”. My hope was that by reverse-engineering the old tes­ti­monies we might get an appre­ci­a­tion for their spir­i­tu­al focus. The exer­cise needs a bit of tweak­ing but I’ll try to fix it up and write it out in case oth­ers want to try it with local Friends.

The invite came when the pro­gram coor­di­na­tor googled “quak­er tes­ti­monies” and found the video below (loose tran­script is here):

Cleaning Services Guide, E‑Book

August 22, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Office Managers Guide to Best Cleaning ServiceA local client from Taber­na­cle in Burling­ton Coun­ty came to me with an inter­est­ing project. He’s owned a com­mer­cial clean­ing com­pa­ny for a num­ber of years and has heard his share of hor­ror sto­ries about the clean­ing ser­vices clients hired before find­ing him! This expe­ri­ence led him to write a PDF e‑book about how to hire the right clean­ing ser­vice. What a great idea and a what a use­ful book this is for small busi­ness own­ers.

The site’s on a bit of a bud­get so it’s a sim­ple design, with col­ors and gen­er­al look-and-feel bor­rowed from a site the client likes. Sim­ple edit­ing comes via Cushy­CMS. When cus­tomers click to buy, they are sent to Pay­pal for the actu­al trans­ac­tion and then for­ward­ed to E‑Junkie, which pro­vides the auto­mat­ed and inte­grat­ed PDF down­load.

Vis­it the site: Office Man­ager’s Guide to Hir­ing the Best Clean­ing Service

Free as in Friend

July 31, 2009
· Martin Kelley

In Chris Ander­son­’s new book Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price, he looks into the mean­ing of the word free. The word has two mean­ings: free as in “free­dom” and free as in “price.” Most of the romance lan­guages divide these mean­ings into two dif­fer­ent words, derived from liber and grati­is. Our double-duty Eng­lish word comes from Old Eng­lish fre­on or fre­ogan, mean­ing “to free, love.” In addi­tion to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Ander­son quotes ety­mol­o­gist Dou­glas Harper:

The pri­ma­ry sense seems to have been “beloved, friend”; which in some lan­guages (notably Ger­man­ic and Celtic) devel­oped a sense of “free,” per­haps from the terms “beloved” or “friend” being applied to the free mem­bers of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)

This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the per­fect word for the ear­ly trans­la­tors of the Eng­lish bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:

Hence­forth I call you not ser­vants; for the ser­vant knoweth not what
his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I
have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not
cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that
what­so­ev­er ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I com­mand you, that ye love one another.

This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spir­i­tu­al trouble-makers in Eng­land in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they start­ed call­ing one anoth­er Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, new­ly freed of the tyrants of their age by their per­son­al expe­ri­ence of Christ as friend, spread­ing the good news that we were all free and all com­mand­ed to love one another.

Cornerstone Fellowship

July 28, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Cornerstone FellowshipCor­ner­stone is a rel­a­tive­ly new church plant in Smithville, Atlantic Coun­ty, New Jer­sey. They’re site is a sim­ple design built in Mov­able Type using off-the-shelf tem­plates to keep the bud­get down. The most excit­ing part of the site is the pod­cast ser­mons and the abil­i­ty to ask Bible ques­tions and make prayer requests from the home­page. I’m most hap­py to see the church using the site and updat­ing it regularly!

Pas­tor Fred Schwenger also has a new local con­nec­tion: he and a part­ner have just opened Supe­ri­or Auto­mo­tive here in Ham­mon­ton at 880 S White Horse Pike! 

Vis­it: Cor​ner​stone​Fel​low​shipOn​line​.com

Alliance Cemetery

July 28, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Alliance CemeteryI was hired to redesign the web­site of a ceme­tery that rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of South Jer­sey his­to­ry. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russ­ian pogroms, came to Amer­i­ca and start­ed a “return to the soil” move­ment that led to the estab­lish­ment of an agri­cul­tur­al colony in the small Salem Coun­ty cross­roads of Nor­ma, New Jer­sey. Before long they estab­lished Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance web­site high­lights the entrance gate. The ceme­tery has hired a sur­vey­ing com­pa­ny to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes avail­able. A detailed his­to­ry and pho­tos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is prob­a­bly the most taste­ful design of my port­fo­lio. The pages them­selves are editable by the client using Cushy­CMS and the Direc­tions page has an inte­grat­ed Google Map.

Vis­it: Alliance​Ceme​tery​.com

Google Voice’s cavalcade of ringing phones

July 17, 2009
· Martin Kelley

I once read an insight­ful obser­va­tion about the geo-location rev­o­lu­tion that came about with the pop­u­lar­l­iza­tion of cell phones: In the old days of POTS (your land­line, lit­er­al­ly “plain old tele­phone ser­vice”), when you dialed a num­ber you knew where you were call­ing but you did­n’t know who was going to pick up. With cell phones this is reversed: you know who you are call­ing but you have no idea where they are.

Only, this isn’t quite true. To find some­one you have to call their house, their work­place, their cell­phone. What you are real­ly call­ing isn’t the per­son but one of their phones. Much of the time you end up with voicemail.

Well, the promise of the geolo­ca­tion rev­o­lu­tion has been tak­en to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion. I’ve final­ly got­ten my invi­ta­tion to Google Voice, for­mer­ly Grand Cen­tral, the per­son­al­ized tele­phone switch­ing ser­vice that the big‑G is open­ing up to U.S. cus­tomers this sum­mer. It’s free and it gives you the ulti­mate in vir­tu­al­i­ty: a phone num­ber that is not con­nect­ed to any phone. When peo­ple call your Google Voice num­ber, any num­ber of phones start ring­ing. Which one you answer depends on your geog­ra­phy and convenience.

I have three phones set to ring on Google Voice calls depend­ing on the type of call: my cell phone, my home phone and my com­put­er (a Skype plan with it’s own incom­ing phone num­ber). If I’m dis­sat­is­fied with the phone I’m on I can press the star key to have all my phones ring anew and trans­fer the call seam­less­ly (a very addic­tive past-time).  It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing evo­lu­tion of the phone into a vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion device.

Intrigued? You can sign up for a Google Voice invite from its site. It’s not a per­fect sys­tem. To use it most effec­tive­ly requires chang­ing your phon­ing habits and mak­ing a very seri­ous switch. I sug­gest Life­hack­er’s guide “How to Ease Your Tran­si­tion to Google Voice” as a good place to start.