Lots of medical writers we know spend good money on creating nice looking websites and then expect the poor things to grow and bring in new business all by themselves.
Your website is your baby.
You conceived it. You created it. Once it’s born, you have to
nurture it, exercise it, feed it,
and measure how it’s doing, so it can grow and work for you.
Here are five ingredients you must feed your website to make
it a workhorse for you and keep it that way:
1. Measurement.
All parents are encouraged to take their kids to well baby clinics and pediatric check-ups on a regular basis through the teenage years to assure that growth is happening within normal ranges and to insure against health problems. Your Workhorse Website is no different. Its growth and maturity need to be measured so you know how it’s doing. How many visitors it gets. How many pages are viewed. How many minutes people spend. Where visitors are coming from. What is bringing them there. How many sign up for something. Does your website have an analytics tool embedded in its code, that gives you this information? Google Analytics is no cost, excellent, and popular. If you have analytics, are you looking at what the data is telling you? If you have analytics, what are you doing to improve your results? Do you care about your Workhorse Website?
2. Pain.
Sounds funny doesn’t it. Feed your website pain? What I mean is, you need to understand the pain your website visitor is feeling, what problem they need to solve, what’s keeping them awake at night. You need to express that pain on your website, show you understand it, so your visitor “gets” that you know what they are thinking about and have come to the right place. People are motivated to solve their most pressing problems. If your website can take them from their pain to the vision of relief, escape, an improved life, pleasure, they are motivated to engage with you. Are you demonstrating on your website that you know about peoples’ pain?
3. Offer an Opt-in.
OK. You have them right where they need to be. What do they do next? Do you want them to call? Do you want them to give you their email address? What one thing do you want them to do? Your website is not working for you if a visitor doesn’t do something. Pick that one thing you want them to do and incent them to do it. Where do you put that Opt-In and Offer? Top right, home page. First thing, right away. Capture their interest. Capture their information. Then you can build relationship. Do you have an easy, obvious, enticing way for people to opt-in?
4. Automated Follow-up.
For every person who opts in, you need to follow up immediately. Whether it’s 2am, or Saturday night, or early Monday morning. They’ve just opted in. Whatcha gonna do? You need automation. Automation is like the Navy Seal team. First time, every time. It just happens, and most importantly, without you doing a thing. No follow up failure. No missed opportunity. There are numerous programs on the market. I have my favorites. Web 2.0 is about multi-media and about automation. Automate yourself. Have you automated your follow-up, so that you leverage website activity?
5. Online Marketing Campaign.
Whenever I ask a client if they have an online marketing campaign, they frequently say, “Oh yeah, we do SEO (search engine optimization.) Does your website need to be search engine optimized with the right keywords? Yes, but I’m talking about much more. I’m talking about a consistent, steady stream of activity all over the web (blog, tweet, Facebook, video, articles) all of which point back to your website to create traffic. Put up a website on the internet. What do you have? A website on the internet. “Vox clamantis in deserto.” A voice crying in the wilderness. Your Workhorse Website needs to be fed with traffic driven to it by other posts and multi-media Web 2.0 properties you create. Are you feeding your website with traffic?
So, how many of these five ingredients do you feed to your Workhorse Website?
1. Measurement
2. Pain
3. Offer and Opt-In
4. Automated Follow-Up
5. Online Marketing Campaign
In Part 2, we’ll share with you where and why most website owners fail in feeding these five ingredients to their websites, and then wonder why they don’t have healthy Workhorse Websites.