Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

If you’re looking for a few simple ideas to help you improve customer experience when people visit your website, try these on for size.

1. Add a sitemap to your website.

It doesn’t really matter how many pages your website has. Unless your navigation structure is perfect, someone is going to get lost when exploring your site. And when they do, a sitemap is a great way to help them find what they’re looking for.

There are basically 2 types of sitemap you should have on your website. Firstly, an XHTML sitemap (the type people can use to navigate your website) is really nothing more than a list of links, in some sort of logical order a person can use to find a page on your website. As an example, you can take a look at my sitemap.

The second type of sitemap is written in XML. If you’ve ever stumbled onto an XML sitemap, you’ll know that they usually look like a load of nonsense. Thanks to a great WordPress plugin, mine doesn’t look that bad, but I’d still prefer to look at the styled XHTML version. Of course, my XML sitemap wasn’t built for me to look at; it was built for search engines.

Search engines understand XML sitemaps perfectly. And just like real people, sometimes search engine spiders need a little help finding their way around your website.

So by adding both an XHTML and an XML sitemap to your site you’ll be keeping people and search engines happy.

2. Re-write your ‘About Us’ page with your customers in mind.

As I’ve mentioned before, nobody cares about your mission statement. But they do care about (a) what your company does that makes you better than your competition, and (b) exactly who they’re going to be dealing with. If you’re looking for a great article to help you write a new About Us page, I can highly recommend this post from Skelliewag.org.

3. Build relevant metatags.

Page title, Description and Keyword metatags are probably the fundamental root of any web page.

• The page title tells search engines in a nutshell what the page is about.
• The Description is the bit of text that appears under your search engine listing.
• Essentially, it entices a prospective visitor to click through to your page to find out more.
• And keywords, while generally ignored by search engines, are a great way to make you remember what you’re actually writing about without getting off-topic.

4. Add a form to your ‘Contact Us’ page.

Apart from the fact that they make a website look more professional, contact forms can also help you get the correct information from respondents.

You can craft your form in such a way as to get certain information from people; information that will help you deal with their enquiry faster and more effectively.

If you aren’t a programmer, you’ll either need to hire someone (hint hint) to build a contact form for your site, or use one of the many subscription based contact form solutions available (you can try Wufoo and Icebrrg for starters).

Of course, the best part about having a contact form is that you won’t have to worry about getting as much spam in your mailbox any more. As you might have guessed, when you display your email address on your website you’re asking for a 1000 emails a month selling Viagra or cheap watches. Thanks to their structure, web forms hide your email address from spambots.

So to make your life easier, remove your email address from your website and put a contact form in place. Of course, if you actually are in the market for a fake Rolex, doing this may work against you…

Why do it?

Working any or all of these 4 elements into your website will make it a better place for people to visit. And a better customer experience can only improve your bottom line.

If you’re not comfortable making these changes to your website yourself, I’m available, and I’m affordable. Just ask.

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Photo by Asplosh

Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours setting up my WordPress blog to be able to publish and deliver email newsletters. You’ll notice a new email newsletter subscription box up on the right hand side of this page.

In order to find space above the fold for this new feature I had to remove my shiny yellow RSS subscription box and relegate it to the bin. Why? Because I truly believe that having people in my target market sign up to receive an email newsletter is a better deal for both parties than a simple RSS subscription.

With an RSS subscription, everyone who uses RSS gets a chance to subscribe to my blog posts. Which is great if those RSS users are people I want as clients. Studies show that RSS users are more likely to be in tech-related industries and are very likely to be skilled Internet users. Hardly seems like the target market for website maintenance and management services, does it?

So I’ve decided to switch to email. Email is accessible to everyone and very few people are scared of using it. I also believe that people will only sign up for an email newsletter if they’re really interested in what you have to say.

Does this mean that I’m going to start spamming you or sell your address as soon as you sign up for my newsletter? No, that would be stupid. Does it mean that I am going to use my mailing list to try to convince you to hire me? Yes, but politely. And, as with any email opt-in, you’re entitled to unsubscribe whenever you like, and it’s easy to do so.

Here’s my suggestion. If you truly believe that you’re the kind of person who (a) could benefit from quality website management information, or (b) might just be interested in hiring me to look after your website for you, why don’t you sign up? I think you’ll be glad you did.

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Photo by dwz

So I’ve given myself the task of finding 20 new clients using online lead generation (If you haven’t yet read my introduction to small business lead generation, I’d suggest you do so before going any further).

But before I jump headfirst into my campaign, I need to answer 4 important questions:

1. Who is my target market?
2. How long will my campaign last?
3. What goals do I want to achieve?
4. Can I afford to buy sales leads?

Step 1 – Identifying my target market.

While you can, and should be running lead generation campaigns for each of your markets, I’m limiting myself to just one at the moment. It’s important not to try targeting everyone at once, because it won’t work. For my campaign, my target customer has the following attributes:

• A small business,
• in the UK,
• selling industrial equipment to other businesses,
• with an existing website,
• that the company wants to improve.

Step 2 – What is the duration of my lead generation campaign?

To avoid a lead generation campaign becoming a money-swallowing black hole, it’s important to set a start and end date. It’s also going to be necessary to evaluate and make adjustments to the campaign periodically.

Based on the current volume of traffic to my website, my pathetic advertising budget and the amount of competition in the market, I’m going to give myself 6 long months to achieve my goals. And because my budget is precious, I’m going to evaluate & modify my approach at the end of each month.

At the end of the campaign, I’ll measure my goals and budget against my new clients and income and decide whether this type of campaign has a worthwhile return on investment. If it does, I’ll try it again. If not, I’ll get a job at McDonalds.

Step 3 – Outlining my lead generation goals

Now that I know who I’m targeting, I need to focus on exactly what I want my lead generation campaign to deliver. To do that, I like to work backwards.

I know that I need to find 20 new clients this year to support my growth plans. So that’s my end point. Using this figure, I can determine how many people I need to get clicking through to my website management sales page each month.

The following figures are partly based on lead generation campaigns I’ve done in the past, and partly on assumption.

I’m going to start off by assuming that 20% of people who are qualified leads will decide to hire me. So, for every 5 people who want to hire me, 1 person will. I therefore need to get 100 interested people onto that page.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that not everyone who visits my site will actually want to hire a website manager. Some people will just be fishing for information, and others may decide that my service doesn’t suit their business objectives or budget. I’ll therefore assume that only 1 in 10 people visiting my website management sales page is qualified; meaning my required number of leads has just jumped to 1000.

Seen as I’m giving myself 6 months to achieve my goals, I therefore need to find a way to attract 167 people to my sales page each month.

Step 4 – Can I afford to buy my leads?

While 167 responses each month doesn’t sound excessively difficult, it’s still outside my advertising budget. A quick look at my Google Adwords account tells me that I can expect to pay anything up to £1.50 per click Google sends my way. At 1000 required clicks, I’m going to be spending £75 to acquire each new client (assuming each client pays me £200 a month).

I’m not really willing to spend more than 4% of my sales turnover on lead generation. So if I assume that I attract 20 new clients each paying me £200 a month, my turnover for 6 months will be £24000. With a 4% advertising spend, my budget is £960, so I’m going to have to come up with a couple of very cheap (or free) methods to supplement my online advertising.

And that’s what I’ll be doing in the next part of this series, so stay tuned.

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