Attract More Visitors

In Part I we started looking at ways of evaluating and changing your website (or blog) to improve it. Today I'm giving you 10 Quick Questions to help with this process:

10 Quick Questions for Evaluating/Improving your Website




1. Does your website look nice and inviting? (Does it make your visitors "feel" nice, like the landscape on the right?)




2. Is it a site that you'd feel like staying at if you just happened to land on it? (Where you feel like you could lie down in the meadow, enjoy the blue sky, and watch the  clouds - in other words: hang out for awhile, check out the info/resources, and engage at the site.)




3. Can visitors find your "Buy" button? (so they can take the desired action easily, e.g., Buy, Join, Subscribe, Register, etc.).




4. Can prospective buyers (visitors) find what they need easily (information, prices, reviews/testimonials, etc.)?




5. Is it easy and intuitive to navigate around your site? (Or is it a virtual maze or an impossibly dense mishmash of text or links pretending to be organized)?




6. Is it easy to use/access your site? (Are there so many fonts and colors that the content is difficult to see, especially for visually impaired individuals)?




7. Does your site rank highly in search engine results (particularly Google's)?




8. Is your site's search engine result (Title and Description) enticing enough that you'd click on it (versus all of the others)?




9. If you click on your site's search engine result, are you taken to the site you'd expect from the Title and Description?




10. Now loop back to #1 (above) and quickly run through this list again with "fresh" eyes (based on how your site might be found by potential visitors searching the internet).

Bottom Line

IMPORTANT: Please note that "potential visitors" aren't visitors until they visit and "potential buyers" aren't buyers until they buy.

Your task is to re-design your site to create the environment that entices searchers to visit and visitors to buy. This may involve using some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as some E-Marketing techniques and strategy (list building, E-Newsletters, Social Media/Networking, etc.) to promote your site and attract people to it.

If you'd like more ways to evaluate and improve your website (or blog) you might enjoy our free 77 Great Tips of Internet Marketing (at top-right of web page) for a more complete checklist.

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Have any questions, comments, or tips of your own for evaluating websites? If so, please leave a comment...

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Next post (Part III): 11 Quick Questions for Podcasts
Prior post (Part I): How's Your Website Doing? -- Part I - Opportunities for Change Looking Forward

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With a New Year and a sense of there being a new outlook in the world, it's a good time to think how your website/blog/podcast is doing. While the Presidential Inaugural parade was today in Washington DC, we can also look at the recent Rose Parade on New Year's day in Pasadena for some guidance on website design and strategy.

Design, Planning, Functionality, and Theme

Looking at the before and after pictures of NAMM's* "Musical Extravaganza" float which was designed to coincide with the Rose Parade's "Hats Off to Entertainment" theme you can see that a lot of work and planning goes into creating a pleasing yet functional float. And it must have been pleasing because it won the President's Trophy.
* National Association of Music Merchants

Before and After

This wasn't just random - the float was entirely conceptualized and planned out before it was built (structurally) and the flowers were glued on. You can see the scaffolding used to build the structure in the Before photo (on the left) and the final flower-decorated float in the After photo (on the right).

Blind Evolution versus a single Objective

But many websites have grown-up (evolved?) from initial ideas/concepts into something which might be quite different from what they originally began as.  These websites (yours?) weren't tightly themed, planned, and constructed with a sole purpose for a particular effect or goal (e.g., winning the President's Trophy).

"Now" is the Time to Step-Back and Evaluate your Site

No matter how your website got to where it is, now is a great time to step-back and evaluate it (or re-evaluate it). One way not to do this is to let your body go all limp, squint your eyes, and stare at your website for x minutes (like a "magic picture").

Ways to Evaluate (and Improve) your Site

Ok, so if that isn't the way to evaluate your site, then what is? One way would be to find a handful of brutally-honest friends and ask them what they think. A variation on this would be to find a handful of strangers and ask them what they think. The difference being that you'd have to reward the strangers in some way (free ____, pay them, etc.). Or you could simply evaluate it yourself by answering some questions or using a checklist.

See my next post for "10 Quick Questions for Evaluating your Website", or see free 77 Tip Checklist (77 Great Tips of Internet Marketing) (at top-right of web page) for a more complete checklist.

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Have any questions, comments, or tips of your own for evaluating websites? If so, please leave a comment...

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Next Post: Part II: 10 Quick Questions for Evaluating your Website
Next Next Post: Part III: Quick Questions for Podcasts

There's a great trick for shortening web addresses (URLs) in your Twitter posts (and no, it's *not* TinyURL!).

But first, what is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blog where you post 140 character updates simply answering the question "What are you doing? These short one-way posts, known as tweets, are shown on your Twitter profile page. These updates can also be received on Facebook, your mobile phone, your blog, etc. For more info see the Twitter Wikipedia article.

Table of Contents

Since this is long post, please see the clickable Table of Contents* (below/right) -->
* How was this Table of Contents created?  See Bonus Trick #5 below.

PART I: Best Short URL Tool & Trick

Problem

Web addresses (URLs) are long. Clearly with only 140 characters for an update message in Twitter, the less characters (letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces) you use, the better.

Solution

Shortening the URL using free web services like SnipURL or TinyURL which take long URLs and make them shorter.

--> Note: This is also great for PowerPoint presentations as well as Email messages, where long URLs can break-up if they're longer than one line (e.g., a huge link to a Mapquest map - yikes!).

These are great solutions, but SnipURL's "snipped" URLs can be shortened even more.

With all of the people using TinyURL in Twitter (about 2.5 million uses as of when this was posted), it's too bad they don't know about SnipURL and the trick for making their URLs even shorter. And of the 90,000+ uses of  SnipURL in Twitter, only half used the trick.

Examples

For these examples, we'll use this "long" URL: http://attractmorevisitorsblog.com/about/

SnipURL Example

Copying and pasting the long URL above into SnipURL.com you get this shortened URL:

http://snipurl.com/3n4l1

TinyURL Example

Copying and pasting the long URL above into TinyURL.com you get this shortened URL:

http://tinyurl.com/5s6o8n

Comparison of Short URLs

http://snipurl.com/3n4l1 - SnipURL - 24 characters

http://tinyurl.com/5s6o8n - TinyURL - 25 characters

http://attractmorevisitorsblog.com/about/ - Original - 41 characters

Both short URLs have far less characters then the original URL.
This savings would be even greater if you started with a longer web address.

Note that the domain names are 7 characters for both of the URLs (excluding the ".com"):

• snipurl (7 characters)
• tinyurl (7 characters)

The number of characters after the ".com/" can vary, but there are usually 4 to 6 characters.
From what I've seen, SnipURL's algorithm seems to create less characters at the end than TinyURL.
- Definitely a case of "less is more".  This might be because TinyURL has been used more than SnipURL.

For the example above the characters following the domain names are bolded below:

http://snipurl.com/3n4l1 (5 characters at the end)

http://tinyurl.com/5s6o8n (6 characters at the end)

Trick: Using SnipURL

With SnipURL, you can shorten the URL even more, by using any of SnipURL's shorter domain names: snurl.com or snipr.com. For the example above, any of these URLs will lead to the same web address:

http://snipurl.com/3n4l1 - Original Shortened URL (24 characters)

http://snurl.com/3n4l1 - URL using snurl (22 characters)

http://snipr.com/3n4l1 - URL using snipr (22 characters)

Compare these with TinyURL which had 25 characters:
http://tinyurl.com/5s6o8n

--> So by using "snurl" and "snipr" you can save a few characters.

How to Use the Trick

Simply "Snip" the long URL to get the shortened SnipURL, e.g:
http://snipurl.com/3n4l1
- How: By cutting and pasting the long URL into the box on SnipURL.com's home page.

Then delete the "ip" in the middle of the SnipURL above to get:
http://snurl.com/3n4l1 ,

Or delete the "u" and "l" in the SnipURL above to get:
http://snipr.com/3n4l1

Now you're probably thinking, "Can I make the URLs even shorter by deleting the leading "http://" characters too?"
- Answer: Yes, but then the URL won't be clickable in Twitter (Yikes!).
- See the deleting the "http://" test in Twitter.

If the description of the Trick above doesn't make any sense, just view the Video below...

Video: How to Use the Trick

Why You Need This Trick

You might be thinking, "This is completely ridiculous - You're only saving a few characters at most with this stupid trick."

Answer: Yes, but with only 140 characters allowed for a post, the prime Twitter real estate (space available) is very valuable and you need to save every character you can...especially if you are trying to squeeze several URLs into a post as in the next example:

Real-life Example

Twitter Tweet & SnipURL Example:

See this Twitter post as an example:

Wordpress Tags comment on Marketing Over Coffee: http://snurl.com/3htvy.
How-to link: http://snurl.com/3htwu. WP: http://snurl.com/3htxg.
01:56 PM August 19, 2008 from web

Now you're probably wondering, "Why would you want to post such a cryptic message?  Are you a spy or something?" (Answer: "No!").

Well, here's the situation: I had just posted a comment to the blog page of one of my favorite podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee.  Unfortunately MoC's software/settings for Comments had stripped the helpful links from the comment I'd made.

As a workaround to this dilemma I posted the tweet above so someone searching on the keywords might find the links. (Ok, I cheated and used my first name in the search to limit the number of search results...but you get the idea, right?).

What did I do with the extra characters saved with the SnipURL Trick?
- Inserted the phrase: "How-to" to describe the link
(which actually gives the solution many people might be searching for).

6 Bonus Tricks

Bonus Trick #1:
- How do you know where you're being sent before you click on a shortened link?

For SnipURL: You can check where a Snipurl.com URL leads by adding a "peek." to the URL:
E.g., "http://peek.snipurl.com/whatever"

For our example above, try this link: http://peek.snipurl.com/3n4l1

For TinyURL: You can preview where a TinyURL.com URL leads either in your short link or on your computer:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/5s6o8n - In your short link (example).
http://tinyurl.com/preview.php - On your computer (settings).

Bonus Trick #2:
- How do you get SnipURL's (Snip!) into your Browser Links or Bookmarks toolbar?

Go to SnipURL and "simply" drag the Snip! button to your Links or Bookmarks toolbar.

While this usually works fine for Firefox, in many cases it doesn't work for Internet Explorer.
--> Trick for IE: Right-click on the Snip! button, choose "Add to Favorites", then click the down-arrow next to Create, scroll down to the Links folder, and click Add.  Easy, right?

Bonus Trick #3:
- How do you get your Twitter posts to be displayed in the right column of your blog?

Use the Twitter Tools Wordpress Plugin which can also be found at the Wordpress Plugins page on Alex King's website.

Bonus Trick #4:
- How do you get your Blog posts to be displayed on Twitter?

Use the Twitter updater w/ TinyURL Wordpress Plugin which can also be found at the Fireside Media Development Blog site.

Bonus Trick #5:
- How did you create the Table of Contents on the right side of your post?

By using the "Table of Contents Generator" Wordpress plugin which can be found at Scott Yang's Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin web page.

Bonus Trick #6:
- How can I use SnipURL for Market Research and Trend Spotting or Trend Watching?

Just go to SnipURL's site and Browse and/or Search for what you're interested in:

http://snipurl.com/site/browse

And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to their "Snips" e-Newsletter, which sends you an email of interesting snippings every week - definitely a guilty pleasure(!), but you can get a read on hot trends and popular culture too.

What do you think?

Do you have a better way to do this? If so, please leave a Comment below...

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PART II: Attracting Visitors and Internet Marketing Techniques

What does the blog post above have to do with Attracting More Visitors to your website or blog?
- How can these Internet Marketing techniques help promote your site?

• Twitter is a great way to attract potential visitors to your blog or website.
  • Set up a Profile, link to your website, blog, etc., start writing tweets, follow others on Twitter and be followed.  For a great write-up of how to do this see this eBook by Joel Comm: "Twitter Secrets: How Short Messages Can Make A Big Difference To Your Business".

• Intriguing/interesting Titles attract people to your blog posts, articles, or emails.
  • Using carefully selected keywords is very effective and critical to the success of your Titles.

• Delivering on what your Title promises is very important.
  • Just in case someone wanted something other than what they found here, bonus tricks were included.
  • Did you find what you were looking for?
    • If yes, then more value was provided.
    • If not, hopefully you found something that was helpful (a trick, resource, or link).
      • Since "Twitter Tools" is a very popular search and "Twitter Tools" is also a Wordpress plugin, content was provided for those searchers finding this post as well:
        • Bonus Trick #2 and other info "Twitter Tools" searcher might find interesting/helpful.
        • Ditto for those searching for "short URLs".
      • People love Bonuses.
      • Bottom Line: You can never lose by adding value.

• Uploading a video to YouTube has several advantages:
  • The video can be searched/found on YouTube or search engines.
  • Linking a YouTube video back to your blog or website both in the video description and within the video can be very powerful.
    • Of course with any Social Media community, try to be sensitive to what they consider to be blatant marketing (bad) vs. subtle markerting (may be ok, depending on the community).
  • Any video has the potential to become viral and be passed around exponentially.

• Use Examples
  • People like examples as they show "how to".
  • People love Stories...and Examples can tell a story and make cold data/info personal.

• Asking your readers to do something is a "Call to Action". (e.g., Tell A Friend)
  • Sometimes all you have to do is ask and people will respond favorably.

• "Always be Testing"
  • The Twitter Test "deleting the "http://" test" (above) is a tiny testing example in homage to what Bryan Eisenberg says: "Always be Testing" (in his book titled: Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer):

• Navigation/Usability: If a web page or blog post is long, make them easy to Navigate (e.g., the Table of Contents)
  • If the post was broken up into several posts, then it would appear in reverse order and lose its scanability, effectiveness, and flow. Instead of doing this give your readers an easy way to navigate (links, Table of Contents, etc.).

What do you Think...now?

If you liked this post you might also enjoy receiving our 77 Great Tips of Internet Marketing to help you Attract More Visitors and Create More Customers(SM).