I’ve seen some pretty awful websites. Color combinations that made the text impossible to read. Navigation buttons that change from page to page. Pages that start talking or play music as soon as you open them (with no way to adjust the volume or turn it off!). Distracting flash artwork. Pages crammed full of tiny text (and ads) in wall-to-wall boxes, I could go on, but these are among my pet peeves! Read the rest of this post »

Because the Web is a visual environment, most everybody is quite clear they want an eye-catching site.

But the point of your website is to get visitors to take action.

What people often fail to understand is that it’s vital to have a marriage between your design and your content. Beautiful design and fancy graphics alone can’t do the actual “selling.”

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#1. Clients immediately feel a connection with you.

#2. Clients immediately resonate with your passion.

#3. Clients immediately recognize the value of
your offer.

Are you working too hard in your business? If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably are, especially if you’re in the early stages of your business building. And you’re not alone.

Here’s an example from my own client files:

I was recently working with a client who was a real go-getter, very serious about being in business for herself, and marketing only to a more affluent clientele. She wanted to increase her reach into that market online. And she was considering adding article marketing to her mix.

At this stage in her business, she was already doing quite well. She was close to making 6 figures and charging 5 times as much as her counterparts - and getting it easily. But she wasn’t satisfied. She really wanted to break the $100k mark before the third anniversary of her business, which was coming up in just a few months.

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A question I often ask my target market is, “what’s your biggest challenge with building your business online?” And one answer I get frequently is this:

How do I make my website earn money?

If you’ve got a business online, then it’s likely you have some sort of web presence. Perhaps it’s a one-page ’sign up for my list’ kind of site, or a full-blown brochure site with a menu of choices, or maybe your site is in the form of a blog. Regardless of what kind of site (or sites) you have, if they’re not doing what you want them to - and since we’re in business, ultimately that means making some sort of a profit - then it’s time to make some changes.

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I thought I’d share the results of a recent online marketing survey… No huge surprises, but plenty of confirmation that websites are increasingly vital to any solopreneur marketing efforts.  Also, not much of a shock that online video continues to grow.  Check it out!

Download survey_results.pdf

1. Give your ezine a catchy name. It might be related to your tagline, motto, a clever wordplay on your name, etc. Just something more than “John Doe’s Newsletter”.
2. Add a link to a sample ezine. Now that your newsletter signup box appears on all (or most) of your website pages (right??), it’s easy to add a link to one of your issues, so folks can see what they’ll be getting. At Solo-E.com, we always post the latest newsletter at the same url, and use that as our sample.
3. Ask for the bare minimum info. Asking for folks’ phone numbers, snail mail addresses, and other personal info can turn people off. You can go to the extreme and ask just for the email address, but I recommend also asking for the first name so you can personalize your emails.
4. Optimize your privacy statement. It should be right in the newsletter signup box — a statement that assures folks you aren’t going to sell their addresses, etc. Chris Knight has an excellent tutorial on what words work best — and what to avoid. I also suggest adding a link to your complete privacy statement.
5. Add a graphic. This could be a cover shot for the newsletter itself, a view of the freebie, a photo of you, etc. (Note: If your audience won’t automatically understand that your ezine is electronic and might misinterpret a cover as meaning it is a physical newsletter, you might need to add a disclaimer.)

1. Put a search box on every page. If you have a lot of content on your website that you want users to browse, make it easy for them to find it! Interactive Tools offers an inexpensive search tool, and their customer support is top-rate.
2. Make your navigation consistent across your website. I’ve seen a lot of web pages where the order of the menu items changes, or some disappear and others sprout in their place randomly. This is easy to implement and update by creating one menu and inserting it on each page using server-side includes. Your web designer should know how to do this for you.
3. Use simple, familiar titles for the pages/areas of your site. It’s fun to get creative, but your reader often has no idea what you are talking about, and ^click^ they’re gone! Peruse websites similar to yours and you’ll start to see the patterns of common naming conventions.
4. Put your newsletter signup box on every page. You want people to sign up, right? Make it as easy as possible and they might.
5. Cut 50% of the words on the utility pages of your site. Utility pages are the ones that introduce you, your service, your prices, how to contact you, etc. In other words, anything other than the intellectual-property type of content. Get concise. Use bullets instead of complete sentences. Help the reader pick out the important stuff by using font color, bold, italics, highlighting, etc. — just don’t go overboard!

For more information on improving your website, I recommend Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug.

We noticed some technical problems with one of our cloaked affiliate links the other day. Below, we’ll share a couple of solutions for those with similar problems.

Now, you might ask, why do we “cloak” our affiliate links at all? No, we aren’t trying to fool anyone; we try to provide “non-affiliate” links for anyone who’s not comfortable with us getting compensation for our recommendations. (I used to have misgivings about affiliate links too — but that’s another story.)

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The dilemma:

You know that having a double opt-in* process for your newsletter/ezine list is the “best practice”. Several reasons:

• less chance of being called a spammer by someone who doesn’t remember filling in the form (or because someone else filled out the form with their email address)
• fewer bad email addresses in your list
• some mailing list delivery services require it!

BUT–sometimes your subscribers don’t click that link they receive from you in the confirmation email. And so you lose 10, 20, even 50% of your “subscribers”. Arghh!

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