4 Steps to a Magnetic Web Presence!

4 Steps to a Magnetic Web Presence!

If you are a self employed service professional or entrepreneur, one of the most important investments you can make is in your own online presence. The medium is without doubt the least expensive and most powerful way to promote your business today.

But how do you actually make this medium to start working for you more effectively? Here are a couple of things worth considering…

(1) Define the strategic purpose of your website.

When you begin to plan or review your online presence, the first thing you need to be fully aware of is the ‘strategic purpose’ of your website. If you do not understand the purpose of your website you have absolutely no chance of critically evaluating whether it has been effective or not.

Possible strategic purposes of your website include

(a) To sell a specific product or service
(b) To generate advertising income
(c) To work as an online brochure
(d) To funnel traffic to other websites
(e) To build relationships
(f) To generate sales leads

(2) Design a user friendly website

Once you understand your websites strategic purpose, it is now time to start considering how design can actually support you in achieving your strategic purpose.

The best starting place is to do some research in your market place by finding the three competitor websites you like the most. Make notes of what you like about each of them and start thinking about how you could combine your favourite elements of these sites to create the look and feel that you want.

The second thing you need to do is actually give some thought to the colours that you would like to use on your site. Your choice of colour will have a dramatic impact on the users experience of your site. Use a colour wheel to help you with this process. This will help you to ensure that the colour combinations that you use are complimentary. See the following link.

http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme/index-en.html

(Once you have chosen your colours, type ‘colour psychology’ into Google just to be aware of how you colour selection will ‘psychologically’ impact your users!)

Once you have an understanding of the design you like as well as the colours, you are now in a position to create a brief that explains exactly what you want to a web designer or alternatively if you have the skills you can build the site yourself.

(3) Generating web traffic

Many people think that all you need is well designed website and then bang you’ll have a money making machine. This is definitely not the case! With so many websites vying for the attention of your potential customers and clients you really have to grasp how to not only drive traffic to your website, but to actually make your site sticky enough to get people to keep coming back!

Possible strategies to consider include;

(a) Search engine optimisation
(b) Article writing
(c) Link exchanges
(d) Pay per click campaigns
(e) Public Relations Campaigns

(4) Convert your traffic

Now there is no point of having a high traffic web site if you have no strategy in place to actually convert some of that traffic into subscribers, customers and clients.

Most people will only ever go to small business website once. Your challenge is to actually develop ways to get people to express their interest in your business (generally by getting them to subscribe to a newsletter) and then build that relationship with your subscribers over time.

Magnetise Yourself!

So there you have it, four simple steps to increase your level of magnetism on the web!

One of the biggest challenges facing most small business owners, particularly service professionals, is trying to do too much. We all have limited time available to us and more often than not, our time is best focused upon doing the things that we know best.

If any of this is confusing you should definitely enlist the help of both a skilled web designer and an online marketing coach to help guide you on your journey. You’ll be very glad that you did!