Design tips to attract visitors to a website
Website design should always keep millennials engaged on your web page. How to get people to stay longer and keep coming to your website should always be the ultimate aim of any webmaster. The first step is to ensure that the client is happy with the way your website looks, but attracting visitors to your website is only one of the few things you must do.
It is important to note that once you have designed the website and it is up and running, it is competing against hundreds of others in the search engine. So, you need to find ways of encouraging your visitors to stay longer in your site and keep coming back.
However, no one said that creating an engaging site is a simple process. In fact, it is one of the most difficult aspects of user experience to design for because it does not only require high quality content, the content should be delivered in the most exciting way. Moreover, sites which deliver content in a variety of forms such as video, text, images and audio normally experience better customer retention than those that only use text. If you think that your website is feeling a little lifeless, here are some tips you can use to revive it.
- Turn scrolling into engagement
It is possible to get as much as 70% more engagement from one single change in the form of parallax scrolling. Simply stated, parallax scrolling is a trend that is sweeping the web design industry because it provides an eye-catching way of visually delivering a message. With parallax scrolling, several elements are moved as you scroll down the page. This results in a dynamic experience for the user. Modern web design technology means that you can now design an amazing parallax website with pixel perfect accuracy
- Iconography and symbols
This is another great way of designing an interactive web site. Designers actually have the difficult task of presenting text in the most impacting ways. So, the use of icons can assist your visitors to find what they are searching for as quick as possible. The icons and symbols play the role of helping the visitor move from place to place. In other words, they, act like signposts. If you can get a way of using icons to support your text, your sites will become more enjoyable to read.
- Vector images for responsive visuals
Providing your visitors with text only content blocks is obviously not going to help. You must integrate images as well are you are going to create an engaging content. Typically, most images are in the form of PNG, JPEG and GIF. However, the problem with such bitmap images is that their images sizes are fixed; hence, they cannot stretch or contract to fit a new layout size or resolutions. Also, using more images in your site will have a negative impact in terms of loading times of your site.
So, the solution is to use vector graphics which are designed to render dynamic imagery. Vector images can easily be scaled to sizes depending on the screen size and resolution.
Effectively build a successful online business
Search Engine Optimization is evolving very fast from a traditional SEO that overly focuses on keywords and links into one that is more holistic and integrated. In other words, SEO is not just optimizing your page for search engine ranking, but also optimizing everything from the user experience, keyword research, link building, and content marketing to social media. I like to compare SEO to building a house that will last for decades if not centuries. You need to build your SEO on a firm foundation that will last the test of time—one that will not be shaken by any form search engine algorithm changes in future.
If you fail to build your SEO campaigns on these key pillars, your business will greatly suffer as a result of low visibility in search engines and competition. Of course, SEO is still going to change drastically over the coming days, but if you focus on building your house on long-term foundation stones, you can expect to dominate your niche for many years to come. Without much further ado, here are six key areas to focus your SEO campaign.
- Good Quality Content
What is quality content?
You have definitely heard the phrase “content is king” for umpteen times. However, if you were to ask any random marketer what quality content is, you would get varied answers. For some, quality content is one that has x number of words where x can be anything like 400, 500, 700, 1000, 1500, 2000 or 5000 words. For others, quality content is relevance. But what really is quality content?
Quality content is simply content that is evergreen. It should be useful to the users who will in turn keep coming back for more. It should stand the test of time. A website with great content will always be ahead of the competition when it comes to search engine rankings. In order to produce top-notch content, follow the guidelines below.
- Understand what makes your followers tick
There is a reason why some marketers struggle to market their products. The best marketers know whom they are marketing to. They know what makes their audience tick. Therefore, they speak the language of their audience. Writing something that your audience does not care about is a waste of time. Do a proper research before creating content for your website. This will ensure that your content will resonate with your audience and persuade them to buy from you.
- Get feedback
Once you have produced the content, encourage your readers to make comments, react, as questions, add on the content, or even disapprove of the content. Some marketers make the mistake of turning off commenting.
- Provide real value
The best way you can differentiate yourself from the competition is by providing real value to your audience. When users come to your website, they expect to find unique, original, actionable and resourceful content.
- Provide easy-to-read content
Did you know that Google hates content that isn’t easy to read? People have way too many things to do and if your content isn’t easy to read, they won’t read it. Do not create content that looks like it belongs to a scientific journal. If it isn’t easy for a 5th grader, then your content needs to be redone. Follow the following simple rules to increase readability of your articles.
- Ensure your sentences are short. Paragraphs should also be short.
- Break up content into headers, sub-headers and bolding.
- Font size should not be too small or too big. I prefer size 16.
- Include images, charts, videos and other graphics that act as visual aid
- Create lists (like this one)
It does not matter how great and valuable your content is. If it is not readable, you will get high bounce rates. Make it as easy as possible for your readers to find the information they are looking for.
Content with titles that grab readers’ attention result in more shares and are read more. Your title is what sells your content. Certainly, titles act as your content’s sales representative in social media, search engine and in email campaigns. So it is no surprise that titles tell half of the story.
- Linking Strategy
Links act like streets in the search engine universe. They give search engine bots clues on how content is interrelated within pages. Although links aren’t everything in SEO, they are very important because they not only determine the popularity index of a website, they also determine metrics like spam, trust and authority. You can also compare links to votes. If you are getting links from trustworthy sites, it is a good sign even to the search engines that your site is also trustworthy. It is imperative that you get your link building right if you want to build a Google-proof link network.
Here are five quick tips to ensure that your link building strategy is right
- Avoid low quality guest posting. Google is harsh on thin, rehashed or unauthentic content that does not give value. Cookie-cutter guest post still fall in the category of scraped content as far as Google is concerned
- Avoid scarping content from popular website. There is nothing wrong with using content from other well-established and authority website so long as you modify it to suit your audience such as including relevant stats, views, opinions or data. So, do not just copy paste everything including links.
- Concentrate on link quality instead of link quantity. If you were sick, an advice from one qualified doctor is better than 100 advices from 100 random individuals. The same applies to link building in SEO. It is better to have one or two links from relevant, high authority website than having thousands from irrelevant sources. If your website is about dog nutrition, a link from the National Dog Health Association would carry more weight and relevance than one from a blog about fashion.
- The more quality links you have the better. It is a great thing if you are or can get many links from different quality website.
- Beware of link anchor text. The link anchor text says a lot about what you are good at. The text link tells the search engines what your website is all about. Most importantly, make your anchor text relevant to your content. For example, if you are talking about child toys, a link text like “horse racing” will send wrong signals to both users and search engines
- Responsive web design
Responsive web design has become an integral part of search engine optimization. With more people using their tablets and smartphones to access the internet, it is very important for marketers to create websites that can be access across multiple channels. Therefore, responsible web design (RED) means that website pages are able to render seamlessly depending on which devices they are being displayed on. This means that irrespective of whether you are accessing the website from a desktop, tablet or smartphone, the website will remain user-friendly.
Google loves RWD
Google is the divine being in the web universe that makes commandments. What Google wants is what you give it. Google favors responsive websites when it comes to search engine ranking. As a matter of fact, mobile-friendly sites, all factors held constant, generally rank higher than non-responsive sites. What this means is that Google is effectively penalizing sites that are not responsive.
- Passion for the brand
It is difficult do anything without passion. This is one item that many business owners do not take into consideration, yet it is the most important one by a mile. You must have a passion for your brand; otherwise, you will soon burn out. Before you jump into keyword research, content and web design, first make an assessment of how passionate you are with the niche. Are you willing to go an extra mile to create an extraordinary business? Are you willing to learn? Start with passion and you will build a very successful online business.
Importance of Website Mobile Responsiveness to Search Engine Ranking
According to Pew internet report, more than 31% of Americans own a tablet computer. Further, the USA phone market represents about 58% of smartphones owned.
Mobile search will surpass desktop search by 2020
It has also been established that users are surfing the internet several times a day using their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Here is the big one! If the current trends are anything to go by, it is predicted that by the year 2020, there will be more internet searches through mobile devices than through laptop or desktop computers.
At the moment, laptop/desktop computers and mobile devices share the searches equally, that is, 50-50. What does this tell us? It simply means that mobile-friendly websites are increasingly becoming popular and if you are a marketer, you should ensure that your web site is mobile responsive. For now, let us focus on why it is important for marketers and small business owners to focus a lot of their efforts in developing mobile responsive site.
What is the rave about mobile optimized sites?
Clearly, the issue of having a mobile responsive site is no longer a choice, but a necessity. If your web site is not mobile optimized yet, the question therefore should be, “when are you going to do it?” Rather than, “are you going to do it?”
Mobile optimization improves navigation across multiple devices:
With a true mobile optimized website, a person accessing the website using either a tablet or a mobile phone will be able to view and navigate the web site easily because the web site will load as it was meant to be seen on that particular mobile device. Thus, you’ll not see skewed pages that don’t fit on a page, for example. Please note that if your mobile visitors are not able to scroll and navigate through the pages as smooth as they would like, they will swiftly go to your competitor.
Mobile optimization improves the overall design of your website across multiple devices:
Apart from the fact that a mobile responsive site is easy to browse on a mobile device, it also makes your site look great. This in turn ensures that users are having great time browsing the site since the content and images do not get distorted. Because a mobile site is designed to load and respond within the small screen boundaries of a mobile device, it makes it easier for contents to maintain their design within the boundaries of a mobile screen.
Mobile Optimization is ultimately a big factor when it comes to search engine rankings:
Consequently, you’d experience lower bounce rates if visitors are coming to your mobile optimized site using their mobile devices than if they were to visit a site that is not mobile optimized. So, what does this tell you? It means that a mobile optimized web site will have better search engine rankings than a corresponding site that is not mobile optimized.
Remember that high bounce rates negatively affect your search engine performance. Also, if you lock out traffic from mobile phones, then you are digging your own grave in the online world. Visitors like convenience; they prefer to have a site that they can browse anywhere without difficulty. Therefore, a mobile responsive site is very critical if you want to reach as many people as possible.
How to increase YouTube traffic
YouTube is an incredible social media platform that marketers can use to advertise their companies. Now, there are almost 100 hours of videos that are uploaded every minute to the site, meaning that video marketing has become popular. However, the only problem is that the competition is stiff. That being said, it is simple for your animated video to get lost in the gigantic video galaxy in YouTube. But I got news for you: there are some pretty simple but effective organic traffic generation tips to keep in mind.
- Make good first impression
Most people do not know how important those video thumbnails can be. Thumbnails are the first thing people will see whenever they come across your video. So, never underestimate their power. In that regard, the thumbnail should be click worthy. YouTube will automatically create the thumbnail for you and give you three options. You need to include something catchier. Feel free to customize the thumbnail and upload. I recommend trying them out, all of them, one at a time to see which one will perform better.
- Mind your title and video description
Your title and video descriptions are important, very important. They can help in improving your search research results. The first term should be relevant. It is always suggested to include a keyword in your descriptions. The title should also be clear and precise. The video description is where you can tell the audience what the video is about and how it going to solve their problems.
- Background image
You can complement your video content by accompanying them with a clearly designed background image. Apart from color and theme options, YouTube helps users to upload their own background images to stand out from the crowd.
- Feature your best video
Not all videos are the same. Some videos will be more popular than others will. Therefore, you ought to use your best videos to attract traffic for the new or less popular ones. Sometimes it is better to select another video to occupy the space left by the featured video.
- Add tags
It is important to tag your videos with keywords so that you can bring the viewers to yourself. To find these settings options, go to your channel.
- Take care of the comments
Many people make lousy mistakes that cost them thousands of loyal viewers: they fail to respond to the comments left by viewers. Although this might not look important, it is a serious offence when it comes to attracting and retaining viewers. However, you should be wary of spam comments because they are equally toxic to your content.
- Be active
Recent activities shown on your channel help your customers to know that you are active. Video owners who have liked other channels are also more likely to drive more traffic to their sites.
- Create a playlist
Users like playlist and creating one will be a big boost to your channel. Especially if you have a series of videos that have a sequence, it saves your customers the headache of scavenging through the heap.
Ensuring that You Achieve Online Reputation Management
Prudent Online reputation management for your business is very vital for the growth of your business. Your reputation is everything when it comes to growing your business online.
Online reputation management refers to a set of approaches and techniques that are aimed at improving and increasing a particular company’s online reputation. If the online reputation management is handled well, it can make a company successful; otherwise, it can break a company’s chance of further progress and success if it is mismanaged. The thing is that you are not going to leave your brand, business, or personality to chance. Apart from the products, good reputation is what the business really has.
Why Reputation Management is Important
Online Reputation management is very important to individuals and business. Professional reputation is vital, and need to be maintained at all times in order to achieve better results in search engines. The products of good reputation include receiving favorable customer testimonials for your goods and services as well as having high market ratings, compared to your peers. Suppose that your company receives too many negative comments concerning the products you sell, what would be the repercussion? Of course there is no need to go into that, but there is only one thing you will be sure to face-stagnation or decline of your business performance. From the customer perspective, a company what people say about a company is a very significant means of making a purchase decision.
Business entities and individuals should approach their online reputation management from a proactive angle. In other words, they have to actively control how their brand, product and company’s image is painted to the outside world. It involves actively removing negativity by substituting it with positive feedbacks to ensure that the business achieves longevity.
How Can Companies and Individuals Effectively Manage their Online Reputation?
One of the most popular approaches to achieving good reputation is by hiring an online reputation expert, whose work will be to specialize in managing online reputation. This will also include repairing negativity and introducing measures that will ensure that the company’s online reputation is well taken care of. A good example is where you can find a dissatisfied customer or a rogue competitor generating several articles in forums and blogs discrediting your product or services. In such a case, it is the work of the online reputation expert to counter such claims through the most effective means. Figuratively speaking, a good online reputation management involves preventing fires of negativity from being lit, as well as putting off those fires if they have already been lit, through feedback.
Normally, online reputation experts would monitor social sites, forums and blogs to scavenge for any information go around about the company. Generation quality, informative and promotional content is one way of enhancing a reputation of a company. The company should also integrate its website to social sites like Facebook, Linkedln, twitter, and YouTube, among others. A great emphasis should be put on the positive customer testimonials, product reviews and feedback. However, this doesn’t mean that negative feedback from customers should be ignored.
Traditional methods of maintain a company’s reputation or brand can still be utilized. Such methods may include billboards, fliers, mass media, press releases, and promotional campaigns.
How to convert your cold leads into hot prospects
No doubt, you have worked hard to get the leads. But the difference between successful marketers and the average is that the successful ones will convert their leads into prospects while the mediocre ones will leave their leads undecided.
However, there is a general misconception among business persons that they should convert every prospect they get caught in the trap of thinking they can while in the real sense, they end up wasting a lot of valuable time in trying to do the impossible. Here are some suggestions on how to turn those cold into hot prospects
Create an email list and add your new lists into your periodic campaigns
If you run a monthly email campaign, you can use it to follow-up on those prospects that have not made up their minds. Some people will be temporarily distracted while others will have their situations change, and the best thing to keep them on track is your periodic email updates.
Simply stay in touch
With so many things happening, your name is more likely to be forgotten as soon as you speak to your lead. Therefore, you must keep in touch to keep your name in their minds. One moment they could think they don’t need to join your business but their situation could change and change their minds. Keep in touch through newsletters, postcards, letters and articles, among other things.
Approach their business executive assistants and learn about their personality
Making use of Executive assistant is important as this will help you to know the person you are dealing with and the best approach to take. They might also be able to give you the reason why you were not successful in making the sale so that you can approach the person differently in the future.
How important is the sale? 
The thing you should ask yourself is how important the sale is going to be. If the sale is important, you need to determine other approaches or actions you are willing to take to make the sale happen. You need to find creative ways of convincing the lead(s) to buy supposing the sale was the most important thing in your career.
As already mentioned there is nothing you can do if your lead suddenly turns cold and proves difficult to convert to prospect despite doing everything possible to convince them. Rather than live in denial, you should gather courage and move on. Remember you need to focus your energy on other opportunities. It is important to bear in mind that you only have a limited time to do your business and you cannot spend long periods on one prospect. Actually knowing when to quit and move on is one of the key strength of entrepreneurs.
Spinning your wheels trying to convince unmotivated prospect to change their mind is a self-defeating approach. Even if you succeed in converting them, you will not get much value from them. Simple question to ask is: “what is the best use of my time right now?” dropping a potential lead may be difficult but it is worth it.
6 Blogging Myths Debunked
6 Blogging Myths Debunked
On the subject of blogging and making money from blogging, there are tons of opinions out there, and many of them are myths that are not only floating around, but persistently being told. Now they seem like truth which in the real sense they aren’t. I wanted to debunk the 6a common blogging myths that have consistently caught my attention.
If any of these myths have been holding you back, now you have the opportunity to know the truth and do the right thing.
Myth #1: If You Build it They Will Come
No, that is not true. Setting up a blog and posting content is only a small part of what you need to do to attract people to your blog. There are many more things you need to do such as sharing on social media, commenting on other people’s blogs, guest posting and adopting a solid marketing strategy. There are millions of blogs being written every day. So if you just post and sit back, no one is going to notice your blog.
Myth #2: You Can’t Make Money Blogging
Although the majority of blogs that are online are personal blogs where the bloggers have no intentions of monetizing them, many more are making money. You may think that it is not possible to make money through blogging, but that is not the case. You may even have started one with the sole purpose of monetizing it but reached a dead end when you realized that your AdSense is not making you a single cent. Instead of giving up, you should find out why your blog is not making money and improve it. AdSense and Ad Sales are the most common ways of making money through blogging. Others are affiliate programs, sponsored content and selling own products.
Myth #3: A Simple Blog with Plain Background is Boring
Many people think that your blog has to be designed with fancy colors with many plugins. Have you heard people say blogs with white backgrounds are boring? I have heard it many times and I think this is the greatest lie of them all.
If you look at a blog like SeoHour, you will be surprised at its immense simplicity, yet hundreds of thousands of people visit his blog. The first time I visited the blog I was very impressed. Unlike other blogs where you feel overwhelmed with plugins, colors, gadgets and ads, I felt relaxed and easy. Perhaps you need to rethink your design. If your blog is overwhelming its readers with colors, gadgets and ads, you are most probably experiencing high bounce rates. Remember, readers come to your blog for information, not to see how fantastic your designer was.
The first think your reader should notice shouldn’t be your background or gadgets, but your headline and the body. Your design should focus on functionality, not aesthetics.
Myth #4: You Have to be a Great Writer to Blog
This is one of the commonest misconceptions about blogging. People think that only good writers should be bloggers. Writing blog posts doesn’t require exceptional writing skills like those required for formal journals. Blogging is all about sharing information in a conversational manner. I have seen bloggers with average writing skills running very successful blogs. A Good Example is ShoutMeLoud. The blogger doesn’t write in perfect English, yet he has an almost fanatical following. Likewise, I have seen many bloggers with perfect writing skills who have failed as bloggers. Of course you have to strive to write blogs with perfect English, but if English is not your first language then you just have to begin with what you have as you learn. I don’t subscribe to those who say that blog posts must be written in perfect grammar. So long as you write very useful content and format your posts properly, you will become successful as a blogger. However, I am not saying that you should be careless with your grammar. All I am saying is that you should do your best, but you don’t have to be perfect.
Myth #5: Readers Have a Very Short Attention Span so Short Content is Key
Running a successful blog involves publishing useful, evergreen content. Most of the content is in the region of 700-5,000. Most blog posts that have done very well are long, evergreen posts.
Myth #6: Blogging is for passive income
If you were to make any money blogging, you should blog consistently. Most bloggers who make money blogging are full time bloggers. If you think that blogging is something you are going to do for 2 hours a week and expect to reap big, you are wrong. There is considerable amount of time and effort you need to invest before you even begin seeing results.