1. Research takes time, and there isn’t always something tangible to show for it. When we scope something for a client project, it might take five hours just to work out that it can’t actually be done in the way the project was envisaged, or with the existing technology platform. Correction – it can’t be done cost-effectively – as they say in the business, anything can be done if you throw enough time and money at it.

2. That when we ask for feedback, information or content from them, the faster they respond with the information we require, the faster and more cost-effectively their project will get done. Dragging the chain in responding may mean you miss the window of time booked in for you, and when the person working on it comes back to it, they will require a bit of additional time to get into the swing of the work again. Allowing them to continue focusing on the project by responding quickly means everyone will be happier.

3. Understand that not everything has to be absolutely perfect to go live. This is not a print run of 5,000 copies that can’t be changed, this is the internet, which means many things can be updated quickly and easily. (Note: On the other side of this coin is the client is who incredibly vague about everything because they think they have forever to get it right … then when the project is finally nearly ready to go live, they sit down and seriously review it and request major functionality, design or structural changes that effectively are the equivalent of rebuilding the entire site.)

4. That we are not mind-readers. The clearer and more detailed a client’s brief, the more closely the outcome will match their expectations.

5. That saying they want their new site to look like Amazon.com or Zappos.com or Apple.com – but they have a budget of less than $20,000 … means we will never meet their expectations. If you really want your site to look like or have that level of functionality, ask us to give you an estimate of what it might have cost to design, build and populate – then decide what your budget is. We are not just making numbers up when we give you a quote, honestly.

6. That if they trust that we have their best interests at heart, we really will try and do the best job possible, within the realms of time and budget. And if we make additional recommendations or ask for variations on the contract, that’s because we think those things will more closely meet your expectations and objectives – not because we are cold-heartedly trying to extract more cash from you.

What do you think? Do these points ring true with you? If you are a client, does this help you understand what might help your project run more smoothly?

• Are all your social media icons up to date? Do you have all the necessary “follow us on” buttons, and do you also have all the up dated sharing tools on your blog posts. If not, you can add the individual buttons, or if you are running a blog, you may wish to update or find a new social media sharing plugin.
• If you run a hospitality business like a restaurant, cafe, bar or accommodation provider, you may wish to explore the new “save to foursquare” button, which enables people who like the sound of your place to add it to their To Do list on Foursquare. This also great for sites or blogs that regularly publish reviews or articles about locations and different establishments. Once the location has been added to a Foursquare To Do list, that person will get “buzzed” by Foursquare when they are in the neighbourhood, making it easy to keep track of all those places you were meaning to check out.
• Go through your site and ensure any relevant date references are updated and accurate. For example, if your About Us says your company has been in business for 12 years, update to 13 years, to keep it fresh and current.
• Review your whole site as objectively as you can – does it show all your current products and services, for example? And are there any pages that could do with some new images or a bit of a design overhaul?
• Have a look at your Google Analytics to determine the most popular pages and ensure the content on these is absolutely up to date, as well as being a good fit with your current business objectives.
• Do the same for your Social Media accounts – do you need to install a fresh Facebook landing page? Time for a new custom Twitter or YouTube Channel background? Time to customise your company LinkedIn profile perhaps if you haven’t already got that in place?
• Once you have reviewed, refreshed and updated your site and your other online channels, you are ready to face the year confident that your site and your content can be easily shared, helping to maintain and build your business reputation and supporting your marketing objectives.

Go for it!!

And the effect of a truly controversial stance?

Traffic.

Traffic to the news sites that cover the controversial story, traffic to the blogs or forums where people can comment and put their own point of view, email traffic to the source of the story, and even old fashioned snail mail correspondence if people feel strongly enough about it.

As a very current example, witness the explosion of traffic that has resulted from erstwhile and former TV presenter Paul Henry’s most recent outbreak of ‘foot in mouth’ disease. Seems that this five year old masquerading as a grown up has gone too far this time, but who can blame him, given the limp wristed slap with a wet bus ticket he has been given for past behaviour along similar lines.

In fact, one might even suspect he has a clause encouraging, or at very least enabling this kind of ‘no internal censor’ verbiage in his employment contract with TVNZ. As one of their most highly paid employees, Henry’s style has continually been rewarded, and no doubt is one of the only reasons that many watch the show – whether they love him or love to hate him.

His juvenile sense of humour and inane giggling make for a sometimes entertaining start to the day. In my household he was a favourite of my 18 year old son, for sheer entertainment factor and the car crash nature of his unpredictability.

His resignation after insulting the queen’s representative in New Zealand and the Indian minister in charge of the Delhi Commonwealth Games has resulted in thousands of letters of support for him – and I am sure has boosted traffic of all other kinds to TVNZ and their website. Videos of Paul cackling away uncontrollably are getting more views on YouTube than ever before, and his actually very clever acceptance speech at the recent Qantas media awards will no doubt also be doing the rounds again.

So, what is the moral of this story from a web content perspective?

If you want to drive traffic to your website, don’t be afraid to express yourself. Be controversial if you actually have a position on something and are prepared to stand up for it.

But be prepared. By the very nature of controversy, some will love you for your stance and others will berate you for it. So this is not something for the weak of heart or an overly sensitive nature.

And perhaps most importantly, once the  &*^% has hit the fan, be objective enough to be able to stand back and laugh. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is take yourself too seriously!

Hmmmm …

This is a question that has been on my mind lately – how to eliminate, or at least scare off, those pesky green caterpillars that like to munch on my brassicas!

I am not one to sprinkle liberally with derris dust or spray with anything that requires time to be left before the food can be safely eaten, so what to do, what to do?

Funnily enough, I was checking out a new service offered by yellow.co.nz, called How To guides, and thought I would throw in the universal gardening question.

Sure enough, I came up with a great post from a guy who coincidentally happens to be a client of ours – David Brittain from Kiwicare.

And they have a great organic option for getting rid of the little blighters, which works on a bacterial organism that the caterpillars really don’t like.

So, all I need to do is purchase some of this magical elixir, spray it on every few weeks and my kale plants should soon be bug free.

Woohoo!

By the way, if any of my readers are experts in a particular area, and keen to write their own How To guide, here is the link for submissions … http://howto.yellow.co.nz/

Great opportunity to get some links back to your own website and put some valuable content out onto the interwebs.

Till next time,

Karen

I would also like to make the point that if one of the reasons your site is not being regularly updated is because you have to get your web company to do it for you, or your staff find it difficult to use the CMS behind your site – then it is time for a change.

Get training for your staff

or

Have your site shifted to a user friendly CMS (Joomla is one good option to check out).

Don’t let the construction of your site stop you from keeping it fresh.

Ten more reasons to update your website content.

Some reasons to add to the existing list.

1. A good website should be dynamic. And that means plenty of new stuff, and plenty of interaction – make this a place readers WANT to return to.
2. Your site content, perhaps especially your home page, should always look fresh and relevant. Dated material is obvious to readers very quickly.
3. Good intentions are not enough! Starting off adding new material (with dates on it, like press releases or newsletters) is only a good idea if you keep it going. Seeing a site with the most recent release or newsletter dating back to the previous year, or even earlier is NOT a good look.
4. Your products and services are constantly changing, and your site needs to reflect that. Even when you are super busy, make sure it is someone’s role in the company to be updating what’s new on your site.
5. Relevant social media “conversations”. Fresh, interesting content on your site gives you something to talk about in the world of Facebook (business and fan pages), Twitter, LinkedIn and anywhere else you and your audiences like to hang out and share.
6. Keep your business on its toes. If you don’t have new and interesting things to share with the world via your website – why not? Have you stopped growing, researching, developing, responding, innovating? Is your business in a rut – or does it just look that way?
7. The world around you is changing – fast, even if you’re not. Make sure you regularly check the language on your site to make sure it is still relevant to your audiences. Perhaps your audience has changed, but the jargon or terminology on your site hasn’t. Running a regular check for your key audiences is a great way to help ensure you stay in touch.
8. Communication is a constantly evolving process. And that’s what your website is – a primary communication tool. Don’t forget that.
9. Refresh your window display. If you were a retailer, how often would you change your window display? Once a week, once a month, every season? Change your site frontage just as often. Show the passers-by that this shop window is loved and attended to.
10. Reflect your marketing activities. If you are actively marketing online, make sure your site is perfectly tuned to your marketing campaigns. Create special landing pages for your adwords to get the flow going with potential customers who are interested enough to click through to your site – reward their interest by taking the time to give them what they are looking for. Don’t assume that what is already on the page is enough.

Would love your own comments about why you think a site should – or should not, be updated.

Till next time

Karen

Yes, once again I am talking about doing what it takes to make your site stand out and connect with your target audiences. And even better, create the kind of content that is different enough and edgy enough to make readers send their friends and colleagues to read it for themselves – or email/share your site links.

All too often we get scared when it comes to doing something cool with our site content. The pressure to be polite, politically correct, grammatically correct, and really, kinda boring … is very strong.

But …

If your target audience is not corporate, if being PC doesn’t serve you, and if people really appreciate a genuine, authentic voice on your site, then why not do it?

We talked to a client today who has a product that is very “retro” … which is one way of saying it hasn’t changed or been upgraded in decades. And the customers really like it that way. So the new owners have no intention of changing its essence, and our job is to represent that authentically through their new website.

Fun job!!

So I would encourage you – if that is the position you are in, not to get hooked up on making everything so vanilla and inoffensive that no-one really wants to read your content (cos why would they?)

ciao for now

Karen

1. Put your audience first – what will they be looking for on your site? What will turn them on, and keep them there to read all the good stuff and maybe even purchase your products or services … and what will scream out at them to just click right off the site.
2. Use the tools at your disposal. There are many free tools to analyse how people are interacting with your website and most of them are free. Make sure you install Google analytics at the very least, and learn how to use it. This is powerful information that too many people ignore.
3. Keep your sentences short and sweet. People will be scanning the page, so they need to get the sense of what you are saying quickly. Avoid long, complex sentences – attention will be quickly lost. 
4. Review your site content as if you had ADHD. Flick your eyes over the page. Do your main messages stand out? Are your calls to action obvious and compelling? Do you immediately understand what the page is about and what you are expected to do from here?
5. Make things clickable. People expect everything on a web page to be clickable – headings, pictures, anything that5 looks like a button, logos. So don’t disappoint. Make them clickable, link them to relevant places, AND, use alt text so when they mouse over your links, they can see what they are.
6. On that note, avoid using Flash. Sure Flash animations can look great, but they are pretty much invisible to the search bots.
7. Keep your best stuff above the fold. All the user research shows that many people will not scroll down the page. So never put your most important calls to action at the bottom, below the fold. Never.
8. Make sure you use some keywords on the page. Don’t “stuff” unnecessary keywords into the headings and text, but DO make sure there are sufficient relevant words on the page to be recognised by a search engine. You would be surprised by the number of sites that just have something like a product name and product photograph on the page – and no searchable text.
9. Make sure text is text, not an image. Don’t make the mistake of using a graphic designer who puts all the fancy fonts etc into an image – which looks great on the page, but can’t be reviewed by the search engines. You may have to sacrifice a little of the designer-ness, to help your site be found. And after all, there is no point having a fancy looking site if no-one but you ever sees it, right?
10. Get second, third and fourth opinions. Test your site for usability and to see if your messages are getting across. Don’t just ask people who will say that it is great, even if it’s not. Ask your target audience, your customers, for their opinions, and be prepared to make changes if what they say makes sense.

There you go, a great little guide to awesome web content. If you do all of those ten things, you are way ahead of about 60 – 70% of the sites currently out there. Of course there are plenty more things you can do once you get all of this right, but this list is a great place to start.

Karen

When you are creating a website you want people to come back to over and over again … and a site you want people to recommend to others, it is important that it has depth and  flavour.

The interwebs are full of vanilla sites that are little more than online brochures, they have no depth, no personality – no real reason for people to want to come back again.

Talking to a client today, I was suggesting that to really build loyal followers and increase visitors to their site, it needs to have more personality, and more insider information than something as relatively flavourless as a wikipedia page.

Sure wiki is a great resource, but how often do you refer to the same wikipedia page more than once?

No personality resides there, and you really don’t expect much in the way of fresh information to be added on a regular basis.

For your site to really draw the traffic, make sure it is fresh and flavourful, with plenty of zing to it!

(Next post, how to add some zing.)

Enjoy!

Karen

(or Batman and Superman)

Right?

Well that seems to be the trend, as things get tougher out there for the traditional marketing media of print, television and radio, internet spending is increasing, and the expectations of what the net can deliver are getting higher.

Thing is, what we instinctively know is that while people might be cutting back on their subscriptions to magazines, pay television and newspapers, and consciously avoiding the advertisements that are the bread and butter of those media, they are spending more time online – in the world of free entertainment and connectivity that only the internet can deliver.

So how are you making the most of that for your business?

Are you ensuring that your website is delivering both content of value, and entertainment? Is it providing a chance for people to connect with your product, service and staff in a meaningful way, and with each other through your site?

What we are finding in our daily business of helping clients develop new sites, rebuild existing sites or optimise their existing sites, is that they need to understand the importance of developing two things:

1) Valuable content that is regularly updated and that people will return for, and link back to

and

2) Interactivity – the chance for your customers, readers and potential customers to talk to and see each other, to ask questions, discuss your products and services and bigger issues in your field. Provide them with a platform or a forum to connect in a meaningful way.

The challenge with both of the above is that there are no shortcuts to doing this in a meaningful and genuine way. There are no bots or algorithms that will replace the role of intelligent human beings thinking about and creating content and interfaces that other human beings will find of value.

Only you can do this.

So starting thinking about how you will add value to your internet presence and make the most of having those extra eyeballs looking for ways to be entertained and engaged.

Till next time,

Karen

Yeah, so it’s the season to head into the wilds for a spot of fishing … the whitebait are running and I am guessing their bigger cousins, the salmon are probably out there feeling frisky too.

So what do you need for a good day out on the water?

First thing is to get your bait sorted.

And that’s a very round about way to getting to my topic for this post – developing “link bait” - otherwise known as “content so awesome that other sites will fall over themselves to link to it and recommend to their friends”.

Developing material that makes people want to link to you is really what the success of the internet and virtually all forms of social media is built on – the very human desire to share cool stuff with our friends. Because what’s the point of coming across something amazing, or ROFL hilarious, or inspiring, or just downright useful – if you can’t then share it with someone else. Half the pleasure lies in being able to talk about those discoveries with your friends – argue about them sometimes, send them on to others to share as well so you can all talk about it and have a laugh or whatever response is most appropriate (or inappropriate in some cases).

We have all seen those YouTube videos that go viral (if you haven’t then you need to be better connected) … and we have all been the recipients (and sometimes the senders on) of those emails that demand to be sent on, in order that you either receive great blessings, or avoid great calamity.

In their own ways, these are the same things as link bait, except somewhere out there in the world of SEO, someone coined a phrase that is less than flattering – but still pretty apt.

So … keep in mind when you are developing content that you really hope will draw people into your site – not only does it have to be really “share worthy” in its own right, not appear to be spam if people choose to pass it on, and ideally be original – you also may need to invest a little time in sharing the love yourself, to make sure it gets the attention you think it deserves.

Don’t be afraid to put it out there – first and foremost, test it in the communities you hang out in and see what they think … if the response is positive, then start spreading the love.

Use your social media networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, delicious, YouTube and anywhere else you hang out, invite people to have a look and cross your fingers that they like it enough to pass it on or link to it from their blogs and websites. The more compelling it is, the most likely this is to happen.

So spend most of your time thinking and making it great, before you invest in spreading the word.

Then of course, if you get a good result, the hardest thing is coming up with a sequel that matches its success, or even better, outstrips it! Of course, if your first effort is already out there working for you, your second can piggyback on that groundwork to some extent … if you have a hit YouTube video, chances are that any other videos you post to your channel will also get some attention.

But don’t rest on your laurels – make sure you keep the standards high, and reward the people who were interested enough to come and have a look.

Before you know it, you and your creations could be an “overnight success” – we’ve all seen it happen, so we know it’s possible.

Good luck and happy fishing!

Karen