inside the office

I was looking through the directory tonight for a professional organization, and was struck by how many people have multiple service angles that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. The case that sticks out most in my head is the builder, remodeler, Certified Green building specialist and Quickbooks consultant – really?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for finding your professional passion and running with it. However, when offering different service bases that are so far removed from one another, is it really advisable to offer them through one business, or might it not be better to set up a secondary business for the second set of services. Personally, when I see someone offering such different services, I wonder about their commitment level to maintaining skill level and current knowledge of that service area.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

• Services/Products- Don’t just list them; describe them! Tell your customers how each product or service is going to help them, what they’re going to gain from purchasing it, and why they should buy it from you, specifically. What about your product or service is different, better or more effective?
• Solutions - Now that you’ve described all of your fabulous products and services, give your visitors some concrete examples of how these services have helped other customers. Sometimes this page could be called Case Studies , or Portfolio for designers. Whatever you call it, this is your opportunity to showcase the ways that you can help your potential customers with your products or services.
• Testimonials: You’ve described your products and services. You’ve given your visitors practical examples of how these same products and services have helped others. What’s next? Testimonials! Direct quotes from your happy customers that hopefully include some detail about how you helped them and how or why you are the right choice for the visitor.  People want to do business with people that they know, like and trust. Seeing happy results from other customers helps potential clients trust your abilities better. There are many easy ways to collect testimonials and comments from your customers, if you don’t already have them. Stay tuned for a Bonus post with some tips to help you.
• Call to Action – Okay, so this isn’t really a page. It’s more an element that should be on most, if not all, pages on your site. It should be simple, easy to understand and eye-catching. It tells the visitor what you want them to do. Some common examples are:
  • Request More Information
  • Schedule Consultation
  • Submit Order
  • Sign-up for Newsletter or White Paper
  • Connect on one (or more) social network(s)

  No matter what your Call to Action, the overall objective is to get visitors to contact you, and the get them to give you, at the very least, their name and email address, that you can add to your “house list” for marketing purposes. Stay tuned for more information on how to market to your house list.

• Confirmation page: You’ve described your fabulous products or services. You’ve gien your visitors concrete examples of how your products or services can help them. You’ve enticed them to sign up or request information with a compelling Call to Action. Now they need a confirmation page.  Your visitors want to know that their request/submission/sign-up/etc. was successful. Redirecting a visitor to a confirmation page after successful form submission, or adding a “Success” type of message to their existing page, gives the visitor a higher sense of trust with your website and the process and, therefore, in you.
  A cofirmation page is also a great place to offer free information or additional resources, such as a white paper, e-book, or information article.

One of the most comment questions that I get from new web development clients is about what kind of information to include on their brand-new website. Specifically, they want to know what pages and information their visitors will expect to be able to find. Here’s the top 5 pages or information areas that I recommend to new clients:

• Contact info:  Your web site should include an easily accessible, comprehensive contact page with a real address and phone number, not just an email address. If you operate your business out of your home and don’t want to give out a home address, obtain a PO box from your local post office, or other places that offer these types of services, such as the UPS Store. Similarly, there are many services where you can obtain a secondary or alternate phone number for your business without the traditional expense of installing a second line in your home of office. (Stay tuned for a post about these services next week.)
• An ‘about us’ page:  You hope that your index page does a good job of explaining your site, but sometimes consumers want to know what ELSE you do.  An about us page gives you a chance to let your visitors know about you and your company, as well as an opportunity to show off additional services and products that may not be relevant to the website if the site is directed to a very targeted audience.
• Security/privacy policy page:  Are you collecting visitor data on your website? Do you have a newsletter sign-up form, or some way for interested visitors to request more information? What about site statistics – do you have a script that tracks information about your visitors, such as location, type of browser, operating system used, and monitor resolution? I’m guessing that the answer to at least one of these is yes.  So, if you’re collecting any sort of consumer data, people want to know how you use it.  Even if they only skim, just the presence of a privacy policy can go a long way towards building trust with your clients.
• FAQ:  Do you find that your visitors and potential clients ask you the same questions over and over? To save your time, and offer better customer service, you should have a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) page on your site.  Does it have to be called “FAQ”? Well, that’s debatable. If you can address the primary questions, for instance, on your home page, and then link to a page called “Customer Support” or “More Information,” you can win the same customer service points without the sometimes ill-fitting title of FAQ. Don’t forget to update your FAQ (or whatever you call it) if you find you are getting repeated questions from potential customers that aren’t already addressed in this area.
• Site map:  In a perfect world, visitors would have no trouble navigating your site, and will always know exactly which page contains the information they want, and how to click their way there. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. A Site map is a page which lists all of the pages of your site with direct links to access them. Additionally, a well-done, XML-based site map can be submitted to Google for optimal indexing, which can help increase your search engine results. (Look for more information about this in an upcoming post.

“Social” has become a bit of a buzz word over recent times. Social networking. Social media. Social bookmarking. Social marketing. Social responsibility. And the latest that I’ve heard – Social shipping.

Social shipping is a term I first came across on the Smashing Magazine website on the post about their upcoming book. Here’s how they put it:

We want to make the book affordable to everyone and therefore are subsidizing shipment of the book worldwide. However, shipping costs are extremely high to some parts of the world. Please help us minimize these shipping costs for folks who are worse off by voluntarily paying more for the shipping of your copy. This is what we call “social shipping.”

Cool idea, huh? What do you think?

How many times have you downloaded a report, white paper, or other “freebie” from a website and when the PDF is saved on your computer, the file name that comes with it is something like “SEO White Paper,” that doesn’t tell you, at first glance, where the file came from? Sure, one could rename the file as it’s being saved on their computer but, fact of the matter is, most people don’t. Why are you not giving yourself the credit that you deserve?

If you are offering a download from your website, especially as a way to increase traffic or newsletter sign-ups, make sure the filename includes your business or website name in it. So, instead of “SEO White Paper, ” you have “SEO White Paper from beyond the office”. That way, the subject of the download is still the first part of the file name, but it also serves as a reminder to the reader of where they downloaded it from or, if they’ve downloaded oodles of SEO white papers from many different sites, that this particular file came from you and you care enough to want them to be able to get in touch with you quickly if they want more information.

One of my clients is a smaller college, and I always make sure that the PDF application or viewbook that I am uploading onto the server has the college’s name at the beginning, so that high school students that have downloaded dozens of PDF applications can tell quickly which one is for my client.

Not to mention that if the user does happen to download a similar report from another website that is inconveniently titled the same as yours, your file will not get inadvertently overwritten because it has the same file name.

And if someone is managing your website and isn’t doing this for you, well, shame on them.