Is your website working effectively for you?

It’s your 24/7 sales person – is it representing you well?

Does it reflect the very best of your products and/or services?

Before you invest time & money promoting your site, SHAPE IT UP!

The #1 Question You Need to Answer:  What is the purpose of your website?

Why do you have a website? What’s the goal? What should it be accomplishing for you?

Here are some possible goals for a website:

• to develop a list of targeted prospects
• to sell products or services
• to encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail
• to provide product information and/or price lists to customers
• to provide product information and/or price lists to distributors
• to provide customer service (how to use/wash/care for items, etc)
• to provide information to a particular niche or target market
• to strengthen brand recognition

Your website may have more than one goal, and several goals may work together. For example, if your main goal is to sell products or services, then developing a list of targeted prospects who are interested in and need the products or services you offer should be a goal also.

As you “shape up” your website, you want to keep in mind the actions that you want to focus on. If your goal is to sell your products, then everything needs to be centered on that goal and making it as easy as possible for customers to purchase.  Use large, easy to find “add to cart” buttons.  Make it easy to find the answer to questions about policies, payments, and shipping.

If you are focused on building a list, you want to make it easy for customers to subscribe to that list and would take actions such as:

• Create an easy to use subscribe form
• Put the subscribe form in the top area of your site & doesn’t require scrolling
• Put that form on every page of your website
• Request only the essential information you need (name and email) and not name, address, phone, etc
• Offer customers a free gift, download, coupon, etc if they sign up
• Consider designing an image to represent what the visitor gets when they sign up
• Add a privacy statement such as: We will not share your information.

If building a list of prospects is your only goal, then you may even consider having a one-page squeeze type site where the only option a visitor has is to subscribe to your list. Keep it simple!

But if you have a dual goal of selling products/services and building a list of prospects, then don’t hide your store behind a squeeze page.

Whatever your goals are, you’ll find ways to make that easier for customers to do. It should require as few clicks as possible, be as easy to find/do as possible, etc. Don’t make your customers think hard or search around for how to buy or how to contact you. The easier you make it, the more visitors will take that action.

This article is an excerpt from “Shape Up Your Website” — click here for more ways to get your website in shape!

Want to keep up with my articles?  Looking for free content you can reprint on your blog or website, or in your newsletter?  Check out my new articles website at http://articlesbymichelleshaeffer.com

Subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll be the first to know when I post new articles.

Do you write articles for marketing your business?  It’s a great way to share what you know and promote your business at the same time.

Want your own ArticlesByYou.com website?  Here are the steps I took to create mine:

1) Register a domain.

2) Set up hosting (if you’ve got a website hosting package already you can probably setup an add on domain at no additional monthly cost).

3) Install Wordpress.  I did this through Fantastico in my cPanel, takes just a couple of minutes.

4) Add and activate your theme.  I used Revolution 2’s Office theme and hacked it just a bit to make it work nicely for my articles.

5) Set up categories and post your articles.

And that’s it.  :)

You’ve only got seconds to grab a visitors attention and get them to stick around and browse your website. What can you do to help keep them there? Here are two easy ways to add an element of professional fun to your website.

1) Slideshow of Your Products or Portfolio

There are several options for creating a slideshow of images. Here are four (the easiest is last and takes very little technical know-how, if you’ve got pictures and can follow directions, you’re all set).

** Animated gif — combine several images into an animated gif using software like Adobe Image Ready, Jasc Animation Shop or Banner Maker Pro.

** Flash — make a flash video with the images using Adobe Flash or similar program. Some swfs allow you to control them with an XML file, which is easier.

** Java Applet — there are some java applets you can use to do a slideshow. That’s more technical though as far as the coding and requires that you have a hosting account or somewhere to host the java applet file. If you outsource your website design your designer/programmer can probably handle this for you.

** Easy Option! Put all your images in www.photobucket.com or www.slide.com and make one there.

You can see a slide.com slideshow in action at www.zoombabygear.com or a photobucket.com slideshow in action at my design portfolio page.

2) Add a Real “Hello” to Greet Your Visitors

You’ve probably seen the websites where the owner greets you with a recorded message — “Hi, and thanks for stopping by my website…”

You can add this to your website, too! I’ll share the free way, and then the easy way.

If your computer comes with a built in microphone, or you can plug one in, you can download the free program Audacity to record an audio file with and convert it to MP3. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Or you may already have a program on your computer for sound. I use GarageBand on my MacBook.

Next, upload it to your website and you can either link to it or use a flash file like this one to play it: http://www.macloo.com/examples/audio_player/

See it in action on the top of my webpage at www.themusesguide.com

If you want to avoid recording programs and flash code, the easier way to do this is with Audio Acrobat. You can sign up for an account, then just call a special phone number and record your message by phone. They’ll provide you with copy and paste code to add it to your website. www.audioacrobat.com