Of far greater interest, it turns out, is talk about them! Specifically, what they do, what they want to do, and how they can do it better.

But how do you figure out WHAT your readers want from your website? That is, without spending thousands on market research? Good news, it’s already been done for you!

Three Fun and EZ Research Tips:

• Look at Magazine Headlines and Table of Contents. Health, women’s issues, sports, decorating – you name it, there’s a magazine for it. You want to go for the high-production value – Cosmo, Prevention, House and Garden – they hire writers just to do titles. That’s millions of dollars of research, development, and targeting for free.

• Look at your High-Ranking Competitors. What are they doing with content, layout, design, SEO, color, graphics, audio, video, and offers? They’re doing something right to rank highly, so study and implement.

• Watch the News. Any news event can be relevant to your market. I don’t care what it is. Let’s take the very recent example of a certain Congressman asked to resign for sending inappropriate tweets…

Your Market…The (sometimes inappropriate) Reframe

Health…How Mr. C got the abs to land so many hotties!

Women’s Issues…Mr. C’s secrets of attracting women, and how your hubbie can learn from him.

Sports…How to fit a grueling training regimen into a 14-hour workday.

Decorating…When Harry met Sally – How does The Bachelor adapt to a new wife’s decorating whims?

You get the idea.

Bottom Line: Do your research. It doesn’t have to be a drag, it can even be fun, and in about 3 hours you can find out exactly what your market likes and what they’re responding to.

Asking for testimonials can be tough, like asking for a favor. But it might help to remember that your client is actually getting something out of it as well:

1) If they’ve liked you, they’ll feel good about writing a recommendation.

2) It encourages them to review the value they got from your help, possibly inspiring more gains.

3) Testimonials with a live link to their site can promote their business.

So don’t fool yourself – testimonials benefit both parties.

MOST TESTIMONIALS ARE USELESS

But let’s face it, most testimonials are not that effective. They’re kind of generic…

“Jane was great to work with, I’m so happy we met!”

“Tom really helped our company a lot. He really knows his stuff.”

Though well meaning, this type of testimonial is too general to inspire the reader to contact you.

Of more help would be a results-oriented testimonial:

Jane helped us increase our ROI 33% in 2 weeks!

Tom helped us bring in 12 new clients!

Definitely better. These provide specific results that readers can identify with.

“Increased ROI” and ”new clients” are common objectives. But these kind of testimonials still seem vague, and almost fake. Like something you’d see in a cheesy advertisement.

Why don’t we get more specific?

5-STAR TESTIMONIALS

We were opening up a new division of our business, and after 14 years of being the greatest widget maker in Middletown, we figured we were ready to sell to the Korean market. Not a chance. Jane showed us how to market to different cultures, and helped us increase ROI 33% in 2 weeks.

After 8 years at Company X, I felt stuck and was dreading going to work. Tom was able to help me realize my passion, and within 6 months I quit my job and I’m now making just as much money with a lot less stress.

Even though these are very specific they present scenarios that most clients can relate to. But they have to be real – that level of specificity is easy to disprove. Also, they’re not easy to get. It’s hard enough to ask for a testimonial without providing a list of guidelines.

So, how to get them? One idea is to follow up with your clients regularly, like every three months or so. See how they’re doing, get an idea of what results they’ve achieved, and offer them something they’d be interested in, like a new product you’ve developed, a discount, or a sample. Your clients will keep you top of mind, you’ll improve the results you help them achieve, and you’ll get some kick-ass testimonials.

So many sites are guilty of this infraction, that I decided to write a quick post about it, and more importantly, how to fix it.

I’m going to outline a simple home page structure for above-the-fold.

Above-the-fold is what your visitor sees upon landing – it’s the screen right in front of them.

They’ll spend only a few seconds there before deciding if they want to scroll further, so it needs to be quite engaging.

Here’s the E-Z formula:

First, you’ll probably have some kind of banner or logo at the top. That’s fine – just make sure it’s pretty.

Next, probably below the navigation bar, you’ll put your headline. Your banner is not your headline – it’s your branding and no one cares that much about it so you’ll need a headline.

What kind of headline?

Not “Welcome!”

Not “Hi, my name’s Jane and I’m a copywriter.”

Not a reiteration of your banner.

One of the most interesting kinds of headlines is a question. People read questions, and then they try to answer them.

“Would you like to learn how to effortlessly save 10% of your income, starting with your next paycheck?” Sure!

Questions engage readers. Then they read on to see if you’re really the one to solve their problem, or even, just maybe, this time, the answer is in the copy.

So try asking a question for your headline.

Next include a short paragraph, not more than four lines, explaining who you work with and what problem your typical client has. Why so short? Visually, short paragraphs are less intimidating. If you’re asking a prospect for a time commitment, make it as easy as possible for them to comply.

Lastly, add a few bullet points. Visually, they’re fun to read. And they communicate the benefits you offer concisely and clearly.

Pretty good bullet points aren’t difficult to write, by the way. Great bullet points take years to master. If you want some resources on the greatest bullet point writers in copywriters, just ask me below.

As for the rest of the Home page, keep it simple and clean. The most important tip I can give you is…

Well, first let me ask you a question. What makes the most sales for you?

Your copy? Sadly for me, no.

Your website? No.

You? Unfortunately not.

Your offer? No again.

It’s your prospect. Whatever persuasion, assurance, convincing, or even coercion you perform, ultimately they’re the ones that make the sale. And they can be damn good salespeople if you let them.

So what’s the big infraction? Too much information. Don’t deluge your website with every detail about you and your business.  Make an elegant and compelling argument why you can provide the solution to your reader’s most pressing problem, and then let your prospect take over.

Typical responses:

“Well, let’s see…we really focus on the client’s needs.”

“Oh, you know, I’ve been doing this for years and…”

“I’m a really good listener. I get right to the client’s problems.”

“We have XYZ process – a proprietary system that targets a company’s weak areas blah blah blah.”

These comments represent about 80% of the answers I get. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with them, except they’re dreadfully dull and generic. After all, who doesn’t focus on client’s needs?

The good news is it may not matter much. I think Unique Positioning Statements are over-rated, because prospects can rarely match the tagline to the business name anyway.

Clever taglines have NEVER caused me to choose one vendor over another. Domino’s Pizza used to promise to deliver hot pizza within 30 minutes or it was free. Great tagline, but far more important to me was the easy phone number…1-800-Dominos. Convenience trumps clever.

Bottom Line: Don’t sweat over clever headlines, mottos or even positioning. The much greater challenge is to prove your worth.

You want to tell your reader EVERYTHING about your business, but that’s no better than telling them nothing. People don’t want to know everything about you and your business. You’re lucky if they stick around for more than 10 seconds.

I was watching a director in rehearsal today. Yelling, screaming, running around flapping his arms…quite a performance. But he wasn’t directing. He was showing, doing, peacocking.

He scared the wits out of me, and the actor was reduced to mimicking.

Do you shadow your housekeeper around telling them how to clean? Would you explain proper snaking technique to your plumber? Do you follow your child around the playground? Or do you leave them alone and let them do their thing?

Let your visitor know how you can help them, and then let them do their thing. Guide them, but do it gently. Allow them to make up their minds about you (and make it really easy).

To find out how to look like the expert sans swagger, join our free webinar this Wednesday, “My Website’s Not Working Hard Enough!”

Details can be found at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/294333190

So as a writer I struggle with the sizzle and razzle dazzle of crazy graphic design. I’ve learned to talk the language and when I work with designers I get my way about 50% of the time. That’s pretty good, since I work closely with someone who designs a lot of stuff and who’s crazy about “image”.

Image Image Image.

Well, I got my comeuppance yesterday. I’m beginning to see that there’s something to be said about pretty packaging. She reworked some PowerPoint slides I’ve prepared for a presentation. They look nice. Maybe they’ll make me look good. I don’t know.

If you want to judge for yourself, and get some really great ideas on how to make your website start paying you back, join us for a webinar entitled “My Website Isn’t Working Hard Enough” on March 16th. It’s free, and there are prizes, special offers, and dazzling content.

One of the simplest tools is the Google Keywords tool, which allows you to enter a search term and compare its popularity to similar terms. For example, if you sell rakes for gardening, Google will tell you that “Gardening Rakes” is a much more commonly searched term that “Garden Rakes”. It may seem like a tiny distinction, but it can dramatically increase the amount of traffic you get.

When you’re compiling your list of keywords, another factor to keep in mind is your competition. You can also find some information here on Google, although it’s a little difficult to interpret.

What you’re looking for is a popular search term with low competition. The trick is that in Google, the competition is a factor of the number of sites that use that key term. This can be misleading. “Gardening”   has a huge popularity number as you can imagine. Millions of people type “Gardening” into their search box.  But it’s also listed as a low-competition site. Why? Because the competition figure is relative to the number of sites using “Gardening” as a keyword.

Another popular free site is KeywordDiscovery.com. In this much simpler site you can get an idea of how many times a keyword has been searched for in the past 12 months. There are many other free keyword analysis sites, most of which are very straightforward. But note that there are also subscription sites which will give you much more sophisticated information.

Bottom Line: Start small with your keywords, and gradually add them to your pages, posts, and articles.

What makes a good AdWords campaign?

AdWords can help you tap into what your prospect really wants. For example, if you’re offering a new book on Puppy Training, you can use AdWords to determine the best title for the book, the best marketing blurb, and the best offer.

A campaign is just multiple ads. This gets a  little tricky, and I suggest developing two ads for every element you want to test. So if you want to figure out the best offer for the puppy ad, run two ads concurrently with each line identical except for the offer line.

For example:

“Free Checklist with every purchase” OR “Free teleclass with every purchase”.  By running the ads at the same time, you can see which resonates with your audience. The more click-throughs an ad gets, the more popular. So if the checklist gets 4 times as many clicks as the teleclass, you know it’s more popular.

You can test different elements of the ad, by simply changing one line at a time. You can tweak to your heart’s content because Google allows for endless experimentation. The caveat…you could lose your shirt. Next week I’ll be discussing how to stay within a budget, but I’d love to hear any success stories or disasters using AdWords. I know I learned the hard way many years ago…

This isn’t bad advice. But I’ve gone down that road before. I used to be on boards and committees, planning events, meeting, greeting and promoting every chance I got. I was the president of my BNI chapter, organizer with Toastmasters, and of course involved with the Chamber and a variety of marketing, women’s, and coaching groups.

Networking can become a full-time job if you’re not careful. And I’m not convinced the payoff is worth it. That may be because I live in a big city, so every event is a new adventure of meeting people I’ve never seen, connecting Jane with Joe, and finding the centers of influence.

I envy small-towners who can rocket to big fish status in a few months.

Of course I’ll keep at it. Networking can be fun. Meeting new people, building rapport, trying out new approaches and elevator speeches…and years ago my first marketing coach told me it was a great way to get a date! Truth is…I have more fun and success making cold calls. But that may just be me.