Having a website was a good first step (in 1997).  By the mid 2000’s your web site actually had to have interesting information on it and look more attractive than your competitors’.  You may even rank well in the search engines for keywords you have chosen as important ones for your business.  If you’re at that point, congratulations!  But wouldn’t it be nice if your website was actually generating business for your company on a regular basis?  Well it can.  You just need to call it to action!

This is not as difficult as it sounds, but it will take some effort and regular attention to what is happening with your web site, your clients and in the world of social media. At ForeSite we have been following the methods below for our own business and saw a 10x increase in lead generation in the first month.

To begin you need to create some compelling offers for your site visitors.  Unfortunately an information request form is NOT a compelling offer.  There must be a reason for the visitor to take their time to fill out a simple form to get what is behind it so you have their information.  We have found that numbered lists work very well such as “10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website“.  For more tips on compelling calls to action, download 6 Best Practices for an Effective Call to Action.

Once you have a call to action for people to download, you need to create a landing page for them to download it from.  This page should have some information about what they are getting for their time as well as a SIMPLE form for them to fill out.  Collect only the information you need to get in touch with them.  Long forms are far more often abandoned than simple ones.

Now that you have a place to send people, you need to send them there.  You must PROMOTE your new content to get people to download it.  This is best done using the powers of social media and taking advantage of the connections you have and the connections those people have.

Lastly, get ready to collect your leads and work your sales magic to convert them into new business.  We’d love to hear how this works for other people using these methods as they have been working very well for ForeSite.  Ready, Set, Sell!

As a business owner, it’s sometimes difficult to think about upgrading things that seem to be “working”, especially in tough economic times.  The question is, “are they really working as hard as they can be for your business?”.  A great example of this is your company’s website.  While it was OK 5 years ago to have someone take your brochure and turn it into a website so you could put it on your business cards, that’s just not the way the web is working today for businesses who are taking full advantage of it.

Today, the first thing most people do when they are looking for a product or service, even if it was referred to them, is Google it.  The first few seconds form a large part of the impression the visitor will have of the target business forever (remember what your mom always said about first impressions).  Below are a few key things that people react to  - whether they know it or not.  You should keep them in mind as you look at your own web site, even if you think it doesn’t matter for your business (because it does).

1. Is the design attractive and does it look “current”?  A design that was nice 5 years ago does not always stand the test of time.  Compare how your site looks to others in your industry, or even other sites you feel project the type of image you want for your company.  You might be surprised.
2. Is your date specific content up to date?  If the last newsletter or news item you posted was in 2006, you should probably pull that section of the web site out.  Its hurting you more than helping you.
3. Is your site cross browser compatible?  While the world used to only view the web through the eyes of Internet Explorer, other browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have come a long way in gaining market share.  Make sure your web site looks the same (or at least presentable) in all of the major browsers available today.

These are just a few items that can make a good first impression.  But once people decide they are “OK” with you, you need to keep talking.  There has to be enough valuable information on your website to make the visitor (prospect) contact you instead of the next person on the search list.  Keep it interesting.  Add content regularly and give people reasons to come back.  If they browsed by but weren’t ready to buy the first time, impress them with fresh content and ideas the next time they “stop by”.  People want to get to know you by visiting your web site and be comfortable that you can take care of them.  You have to work to keep that conversation going, especially when you sometimes don’t even know that the conversation is happening (we’ll talk about how to know exactly when someone is on your web site in a future post).  One of ForeSite’s web site experts wrote a paper on “10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website“.  Check it out if you are interested in how to upgrade your web presence.

In general, think of your web site as your ultimate marketing tool which if used properly will bring leads (and ultimately new business) to you so you don’t have to go searching for it yourself.  View your site through the eyes of your prospects.  And if you are having difficulty doing that, ask some of your current customers to do it for you.  Make sure that the conversation prospects are having with your web site is the same one they would have with you if you were in front of them.

Download 10 Tips for Developing an Effective Website

A writing project from successful-blog.com:

Use social media to contribute something of value, or make new connections with people who can provide ideas or opportunities.  Don’t be passive!

I’m about halfway through the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.   The gist of the book is that if you can find a new way to provide goods or services or a whole new market, then you can make the competition irrelevant and be a unique provider in a calm blue ocean of marketplace.  No longer will you be stuck in the churning bloodbath or “red ocean” of competition with others who all provide the same products or services and are forced to compete by price-cutting or other sales tactics with no hope of taking over meaningful market share.

To make your competition irrelevant, you have to take an in-depth look at what you and your competitors all do:

• Determine what truly has value to the customer (to do more of this)
• Uncover what the customer doesn’t care about (to reduce or eliminate)
• Look outside of your existing marketplace to see if there is untapped potential for creating a new service or product to address needs of people who do not do business with you today (untapped potential customers)

The hardest part is to put aside your preconceived ideas of your industry and open your mind to think of new ways to solve your customer’s needs.  I’ve been in the technology field for over 20 years, so this has been easier said than done, but it’s a great mental exercise.

Think about your own business.  Do you do things because “that’s the way it’s done”?  What could you eliminate or reduce without hurting the customer experience?  What could you increase or create to enhance the customer experience and set yourself apart from the competition - possibly even creating something never offered before?  What if you could recapture past clients that you had lost, new clients who chose a competitor, and potential clients with demands that are not being met in your marketplace?

If you have ideas for us to consider for what you’d like to see if anything was possible for technology support or web sites, or if you would like to brainstorm about your business to get an outside perspective, I’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on the blog or email me at tlf@foresitetech.com.

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

In this frenzy of online marketing and social media, people have come to expect more and more of those who get involved in blogging, FaceBook, Linkedin  and now Twitter.  Its not enough to have an account or accept a few friend requests anymore, people are looking for constant updates on what you are doing and how you are doing it.  I’ll be honest, I really didn’t think I was all that interesting, but believe it or not, fellow “tweeters” are even following me.

So what is this “tweeting’ all about?  Twitter is made up “micro-blogs” in which you need to say whatever meaningful tidbit you want to share in 140 characters or less (you can see mine at http://Twitter.com/SMBCEO).  I’m no expert -yet- but as far as I can tell, if you have anything going on that you think you would share with a colleague or friend, it is fair game on Twitter.

I struggled at first to find content to Tweet about as I didn’t want anyone to think I was an idiot, but I am finding it easier and easier as I do it more regularly and see what others are sharing.  There are folks who spend all day telling you things you probably don’t care about, but by finding the right people to follow I have gained some nuggets of information that I have found pretty useful and probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

So what are you waiting for?  Starting is easy!  Go to Twitter, sign up for a free account, and follow me! Once you do that, I found that using a 3rd party application like TweetDeck made it much easier to find new people to follow as well as manage my tweets.  There are a bunch of different applications like TweetDeck out there and most that I have seen still have bugs as they are all so new, but if you find one that works for you, it will definitely help.  Once you have your management application installed, you can save searches which watch for content that you are interested in.  I have a search that looks for the phrase “Business Strategy”.  When new tweets containing that phrase show up, I can quickly look to see the profiles of the people posting them and determine if I want to follow them.  Once you start following people and tweeting regularly, people will start following you.  Its pretty cool actually!

One caveat however, decide how much time you want to devote to this.  It could absorb your entire day of you let it!

Happy Tweeting!