It looks fabulous. 99% of people would look at it and say it was great. It was developed by a friend of mine whose work I admire greatly.

But it’s wrong. I’m working on the SEO for the site and … it’s never going to successfully find potential new customers and generate new enquiries. It’s always going to waste time and money while the client desperately tries to generate traffic.

Why?

The website is about the client, not about the customer.

What’s the first thing you think about when you want to develop a website? What to put on it.

What do you put on your website? Your products, your services, about me, prices, delivery, testimonials.

Then what?

It has to look nice.

And there you have it. A site that looks nice, and is about you. 99% of websites are like this.

Instead, here’s how you SHOULD build websites. Here’s how JayBee Journo staff do it.

First: Write about what people search for

Find out what people are searching for online that we can profitably help with.

Google handles many hundred millions of searches every day. That’s a powerful river of customer demand you should ride… or… there will be ten results on the first page of every query. So if it’s not you – it will be your competitors.

That search data is easily available, and the gathering of that information and making decisions about what to prioritise for your business is called Keyphrase Analysis. It looks at what people are searching for online in your market, creates core keyphrase clusters, analyses the strength of the competition, and merges that with information about your profitability and strategy to come up with a priority list. Those become the pages on your website.

In other words, write pages about the things people search for.

Second: create customer pathways

Make sure people who arrive to our home page having used those target search phrases can easily find pages that satisfy and convert them into enquirers.

That’s about customer journeys, navigation, usability and persuasion.

Third: get out more

It’s no longer about your website. It’s about your entire online presence.

In your heart you know this, it’s just, few people know how to make it real. The time when you could build a website, tick it off your to do list and move on are definitely gone forever.

To start with, there’s social media. That blurs the boundaries between what’s yours and what’s your customers. Now, you have an online presence that includes your website along with whatever you are doing on the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, forums, your blog, and eBay. You are big or small accordingly.

Then there are various tools for monitoring and managing how your customers interact with those online properties, but mainly your website. In other words, you can use your customers to tell you what’s good and what’s bad about your website. In other words, it doesn’t actually matter what we think looks good, reads well, or ‘works’ according to research. What matters is managing your website and improving it based on their behaviour, and we do this with tests where some customers see (for instance) one photograph, others see another, we monitor conversions and when the experiment is over we choose the best photograph and test something else. This isn’t small: this is hugely powerful.

Putting up a website is OK, but you have to go where the people are and tempt them to come and see it. It makes the social media cloud your introductory space, and your website your conversion machine.

Whenever you are in public, you are in character as your brand. Would your brand be on MySpace? Would it be on Facebook? What would it do on Twitter?

What you end up with is not a brochure that happens to be on the web. You get an online marketing system that:

• listens as much as it talks
• engages with your customers wherever they are online
• naturally generates free traffic
• lives your brand values online
• naturally converts visitors into a flow of free enquiries
• builds and develops as we observe customer behaviour and interactions

That’s a big difference.

My thanks go to my friend and fellow website professional John Allsopp who has made me much better at website development and developing an online presence than I could ever have been without him

In addition to that, a lot of researchers consider that a top-rated video on YouTube will be seen by at least 40% more people than an ad on a nationwide TV station. Therefore, obviously, if you do not market on YouTube you are undoubtedly missing the boat. The method of marketing on YouTube is comparable to marketing anywhere else. You want to stand out from your competition. You want to create a testimonial and have people keep you in mind. This may be accomplished if you pursue a few easy steps.

Make certain that your video is not just an obvious ad. The majority of people that look at videos on YouTube are not looking for a sales pitch. Instead, they are almost always looking for information. Although you shouldn’t try just to twist your video into an ad, it is still significant that people appreciate what product your stand for. You should not turn it into a mystery. Engage the services of a professional writer to ensure you get a well written, persuasive script that portrays your business well.

Make certain that your video is not too dark. Dark videos are not so pleasant to view, so consider a well lit room when filming. Make certain that the audio function in your video is capable of being heard. You want people to take notice of what you are saying. Do not wait for perfection. Your videos will never be perfect and you should not expect them to be so. YouTube is definitely not about excellence. Actually, most people find that several quibbles and quirks will provide your video with a less staged emotion that will appeal to more people as being genuine.

You should also have some fun with your YouTube marketing! You need to smile and look like you are having a very good time at the moment you shoot your video. Try to add some force to your tone and a spring to your step.

Even though it’s very important to present a pleasant image, don’t be too anxious about how you look. In fact, most of the time, people are able to relate better to people who are just normal persons in YouTube videos. So be confident and everything will be just fine for your business marketing at YouTube.

There are a number of techniques that do this, although some are better than others are. When you learn how to get traffic from articles, you are setting yourself up for
success.

Articles work on a number of levels. The best way to increase the traffic you are getting is from appearing higher on a search engine ranking. This is because, when
people enter terms into a search engine, that engine will find all of the results that are relevant based on those words. When your website has those words, you are deemed to
be relevant.

If you put those words into your articles, you are learning how to get traffic from articles that you write. As you start to have more articles with those words included, your
website will raise higher and higher on the search engine rankings. This will bring more traffic to your site because people will find you faster.

The articles will also work to bring more traffic to your site because once people visit your site; they will see that you are full of useful information.

If your articles are well written and informative, then people will feel like visiting your site was not a waste of time. You provided them with free knowledge and made them
much more likely to visit again. That is why a lot of companies employ professional copywriters like JayBee Journo for their article writing services.

Strong articles also make people more likely to recommend your website to their friends. This will increase traffic because you will be showing up higher on search engine
lists, people will like your site and visit again, and they will recommend you to friends as well. All of this will happen because you used articles to increase the traffic
you get.

First and foremost, e-books are generally less expensive, and also faster to produce, than traditional books. Secondly, e-books can focus on specific topics, in detail, that are related to a company and its products or services. Often a company can find itself able to produce several e-books, all relating in some way to its promotion. No wonder JayBee Journo is asked to write so many e-books!

E-books can also demonstrate the expertise a company has within a market niche.Never underestimate the power of appearing to be an expert in your field; after all, would YOU buy something from someone you thought didn’t know what they were talking about?

For example,

a company specializing in exercise coaching or equipment could put out an e-book on exercises that are beneficial to pregnant woman. This same company can then possibly write another e-book about exercises for the elderly. Examples like these can promote the expertise of an exercise coaching or equipment company.

All companies look for ways to strengthen their relationship with their customer base. E-books can be very helpful in showing how important the customer is to a company. A company could possibly market their e-book as a ‘freebie’ to their established and loyal customers, perhaps even as a gift for large purchases.

However, e-book writing is an involved and specialised process that begins with an outline. The outline is a map of the topics that should be followed, from beginning to end, in a sensible order. Also, the length of an e-book can vary from several pages to over a hundred, depending on its purpose and goal.

Because of the process involved in writing an e-book many businesses hire professional writing companies like JayBee Journo. Our writing staff will collaborate with you in developing a well thought out outline and write content that is interesting, informative, and educational to your readership.

1. Discover what people are buying

Use a keyword tool like Overture or Google Adwords Keyword Tool to discover keyword rankings and numbers of people searching for a particular keyword, which is helpful in choosing keywords to drive more traffic to your website.

2. Do an organic keyword search

In addition to using keyword tracking software packages, do your own organic keyword research. List five or six keywords phrases that you think people will use to search for your goods or services. Search for each of these terms in a search engine like Google. Ignore the paid adverts at the top and side of the search engine listings. Take a look at the most popular websites in your niche according to search engine results and what keywords they are targeting.

3. Make sure your keywords are relevant

Many words in the English language have multiple meanings. Ensure you’re optimizing your website for exactly what your business is about, e.g. if you are building a website about how to get more website conversions, you won’t achieve very high targeted traffic by optimizing for conversion’; you’re more likely to get people looking for metric conversion, religious conversion etc. That won’t help your conversion rate.

4. Use keyword phrases

More keyword conversions come from more highly targeted traffic. Build a longer phrase for your keyword optimization, so instead of optimizing a website for conversion’, optimize it for a phrase like improve website conversion’ and people will know exactly what the website is about and they will only go there if they want that service. They are already warmed up and more likely to buy from you.

5. Optimize your website

Your website should be search engine optimized for keywords that yield most hot prospects that is, people looking specifically for what you have to offer. Be sure that you are optimizing your website for exactly what people want to buy.

6. Create several keyword permutations

Having advised you to be specific in using keyword terms, also bear in mind that website visitors may want slightly different things within a niche. Using several slightly different keyword phrases in different parts of a website will catch as much targeted traffic as possible and result in higher conversions.

7. Split test keyword phrases

When testing the market of potential buyers, try split tests where some of your website pages are optimized for slightly different keyword phrases. That way, the tightest, most useful keyword phrases can be identified, which give you most conversions.

8. Keep tracking

Assign each keyword phrase a unique ID and use good keyword tracker software on all pages of your website. That will very clearly show you what keywords are bringing you website traffic, and from where.

9. Check out the competition

Copying the keywords used by a competitor is not advisable but it is a way to get ideas on some successful keywords to use. Take a good look at some of your competitors’ websites. Use the View Page Source’ facility in your browser and look at the keywords that are used. Don’t just look at the visible content of the page but also study its Title, Heading, Meta
keywords and Meta description tags. Do this for three or four of the top websites in your niche. This should hone done the best keywords to get conversions.

10. Lead trends

Become an expert in your niche and follow blogs, trade journals and news feeds etc to find out what people want in your niche. That way you can give it to them. Loyalty counts for a lot in business and if you can lead trends and be among the first to provide a particular thing to customers, they will stay with you unless you give them a reason to take their business elsewhere.

Implementing the steps above, especially with the help of a professional writing company,  should enable you to get ahead of the competition and find keywords that really drive conversions, making a success of your business.

Luckily, it’s not necessary to spend  lots of money on your site for good internet marketing; this plan will wean you off of the pay-per-click schemes promoted by Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search marketing (just to name a few of the better known ones).

would probably be surprised how inexpensively you can hire a professional business writer to do this work for you, especially when you consider how much of your own time you’d waste in attempting to write sub-standard internet marketing materials for yourself. You have the best people working in your business. Why wouldn’t you want the best people marketing your business?

Undoubtably, pay-per-click advertising campaigns do work for internet marketing. They will rapidly build traffic and attract eyeballs to your site, but keeping your site up in the higher rankings of the various search engines and further increasing traffic to your site requires you to take some active steps such as the ones below.

You must keep your website fresh and up-to-date. Nothing hurts a website more than missing or broken links. Keeping your site current and interesting will bring you good reviews, drive traffic to your website and get those all important repeat viewers who will put in the good word for you.

Second, is PR. Public Relations is not some arcane art that’s only practiced by people wearing designer suits. It can be as simple as writing a short article and then posting it on article directories, with a link at the end back to your site. An excellent method of internet marketing is posting to forums or blogs relevant to your website. A simple search engine trawl will produce thousands of potential hits for you to choose from. Luckily for you, you can get a professional writer to do all this at a reasonable cost.

Once you find a forum or blog that matches your needs, it’s time to indulge in a little viral marketing. First, is to create an interesting signature, be sure to include your website’s address in your signature. Second is to make sure your posts are useful and informative. By doing this on a regular basis you will earn the trust of the members, create back links to your site and encourage them to visit your site. As you become popular, the members will spread the word about you and your site. In short, your internet marketing will go viral. Again, you don’t even have to do it yourself; you can leave it to professional writers to market your business as effectively as possible.

The third internet marketing method is blogging and being active in groups, social networking sites and online clubs and organizations.

Creating a blog of your own is an effective method of internet marketing. Posting on other people’s blogs is also good; this creates activity that is picked up by search engines like Google and Yahoo. Remember, in any signature that you use, add your website’s address. In this way as the blog rises in ranking your site will also rise.

The fourth method of internet marketing requires a little detective work. Check out online directories and free advertising sites you can find useful resources such as URLs and free software to increase your internet marketing. Caution is suggested here as some of the sites may get little or no traffic or the software may be of little or no use to you.

Fifth, use Search Engine Optimization for your internet marketing. Optimization is usually done by adding targeted keywords that are based on research, usually done by specialist companies, as to viewer behaviour and how, where, when and why they visited your site.

Making a mailing list is easier than you think. For the individual who may not want to spend valuable time developing and creating the structure of a mailing list, there are numerous companies who actually do produce online business packages, to include mailing lists. JayBee Journo is one such company.

Your mailing list is built from your guestbook. Your guestbook is what people sign into, after receiving your free newsletter, or other incentive, for example. The goal here, for internet marketing, is to get your potential customers to enter their name and email address into your guestbook. You may need to get a little creative to accomplish this, but there are many ways you can get people to sign into your guestbook. This information is then transferred to your mailing list.

Competitions are great ways to get people to sign into your guestbook, because to be a part of the contest they must enrol into it with the information you need from them. Whatever strategy you use for internet marketing, it is your guestbook that feeds your mailing list.

Here’s an important note regarding using email for internet marketing. When people receive email that they have not requested that is considered “spamming”. However, when customers receive the information as a result of signing into your guestbook they can not accuse of spamming because, by signing into your guestbook, they are asking you to send them the information related to your services and/or products.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are a very popular internet marketing tool used by many online businesses. What an autoresponder basically does is runs your internet marketing and a large part of your business for you without you having to do anything, except for the initial set-up, and for the initial set-up and writing of the autoresponder, you can enlist the services of a professional writing company.

Autorsponders automatically accept orders from your customers, for your services and/or products, sends order confirmations, handles order cancellations, and distributes receipts, to mention a few options, and can operate twenty-four hours a day, with or without your presence. This saves you time, money and resources. Autoresponders are adaptable to practically any online business need and there are various types available, some are even free of charge.

With your mailing list assembled you are now ready to start internet marketing of your services, products, special events and sales, or even How-To newsletters. Make full use of the opportunities your mailing list can provide to increase your business profits. If you have information such as your customer’s birthday, for example, sending that customer a special offer just for them is great for internet marketing. People like to feel special and when a business makes its customers feel good about doing business with them they will certainly be back to buy more. Moreover, these happy customers have family and friends who will hear about you and will want to buy from you too. That’s great internet marketing.

We are asked to do a lot of direct mail marketing campaigns at JayBee Journo so we have picked up a we tips along the way. Here are just some of the things learned for producing effective drect mail marketing campaigns in the real estate sector.

Direct mail marketing is a very good way to market your real estate business because the target group can be narrowed down. With direct mail, guidance is needed otherwise you may write mail to many sellers but not get any that are motivated enough to want to sell their property to you. One has to be really motivated for the efforts to turn to profits since not all mail get a response. It takes a lot of money and time, but this has to be looked at as an investment for the direct mail marketing campaign to become an essential part of a business.  A few principles should be followed when using direct mail marketing such as:

Define Your Target Group

As a real estate investor, you have a vision of what you are looking for. The work is now to find a motivated seller. This means that your mail should directly speak to a particular group. The message should hit the point home, depending on what the sellers what to hear, so as to appeal to them. Mailing an entire residential area may not work because some of them are unmotivated, and part of your skill is to note which ones are good prospects.

Get Quality Sources

Your source of information should be reliable and you should test it before you commit yourself to a binding contract. This is to remove the possibility of guesswork. Testing can be done by the number of responses one gets. If your source of information is reputable, then they will not have a problem with sending you a list of test data.

Be Persistent

Don’t give up after sending one mail. Most people do not respond after the initial mail and a follow up mail has to be done. Some owners are absentees, and probably live out of state and will consider someone who is persistent to be more serious and respond. Other times the fist mail can be misplaced, and it is usually easier to remember a name you have seen several times.

Pre-Screen Sellers By Your Letters And Systems

Some sellers are uncooperative and not motivated enough to sell and end up wasting your time, which is a very precious commodity in any business. Your mailing should indicate that you are not willing to work with inflexible sellers. The objective should be to get quality sellers, not just a high quantity of ones who may bring you no business.

Note That Direct Mail Marketing Is An Investment, Not An Expense

The initial ground work takes a lot of time and money. An investor should be ready for this so as to accomplish the goals set.  Persistence will bring about success but the mailings should be of high quality so as to get repeat sellers and also gain others through word of mouth. With direct mail, you cannot afford to change your mail half way through because the loss will be too much.

In summary, direct mail marketing is a good way to find good deals but an investor should be organized and focused if they want to get profitable results.

In spite of the poor economic climate and recent recession, there has been a sharp increase in the number of women starting up their own businesses in the UK. The British Library set up a Business and IP Centre in 2006 to provide resources to assist the UK business community.  At the time of its launch, the Centre found that women were only half as likely as men to set up their own business; but now, female start-ups are beginning to outnumber the males. British insurance company Liverpool Victoria predicts that within two decades, female entrepreneurship will control six-tenths of the UK’s wealth.

So, what influences a woman to set up her own company? For many, it is simply the necessity of earning a living while still being there for their children. Working from home offers the flexibility of working hours that can be arranged around family responsibilities, as well as contributing to the household income.  These are merely the practical aspects of being self-employed, however: in addition, the woman gains independence and personal, as well as financial, rewards.

The most popular types of business amongst female owners are children’s clothing, baby foods, consultancies, wedding organisers and beauty therapies, but as you can see from JayBee Journo, writing is up there, too!

Female entrepreneurship is not a brand new concept.  Laura Ashley might have seemed an unlikely candidate for successful business-woman when she was born in a quiet area of Wales in 1925. She and husband Bernard designed and silk-screen printed their own fabrics on the kitchen table of their London flat in the 1950s, with Laura’s pretty florals being inspired by Victorian country manor living. Two major London stores – Heal’s and Liberty – agreed to sell their fabrics, and they proved so popular that by 1960, the couple had opened their own shop. By the time of Laura’s death in 1985, there were 200 Laura Ashley stores around the world, selling fabrics, clothing and household furnishings.

Anita Roddick was world-famous as the brain behind the hugely successful Body Shop. She trained as a teacher, but on marrying, the couple opened a small hotel and restaurant. Anita later worked for the United Nations, travelling the world, but by 1976, she had two small daughters and her husband was trekking around America, so she needed to find a way of earning an income to support them. She had picked up a lot about using natural products for beauty therapy on her travels, and drew on this knowledge to launch her range of toiletries.  She was a pioneer in the area of eco-retailing, with all organic ingredients, refillable containers and fair trade practices. One small shop with only fifteen different product lines grew into a global phenomenon, with almost 2,000 stores worldwide. Anita was knighted for her achievements in 2003, but sadly died of a brain hemorrhage in 2007.

Rachel Elnaugh, formerly one of the ‘dragons’ from TV series “Dragon’s Den”, now works full time as a business mentor for female would-be entrepreneurs, and has advised the government on enterprise and small business development issues.  She is a former entrepreneur herself, having started up the Red Letter Days experiences company at the age of only 24. Although the company ended up going into receivership in 2005 after over-expanding, Rachel’s account of her experiences – “Business Nightmares” – has become a handbook for entrepreneurs struggling in the current economic downturn.

Some other notable British female entrepreneurs include Dee Wright, who founded The Hairforce, which is a prize-winning enterprise that offers a nit and hair lice removal service; and Laura Tenison, the founder of hugely successful clothing company JoJo Maman Bébé.

The British Library’s Business and IP Centre says that this spirit of entrepreneurship is ‘helping to drive innovation and economic revival in the UK’.  If you have a great idea for starting your own business, but are not sure where to start, have a look on the Internet, and you will find lots of sources of help and advice, including how to make a business plan, available grants and loans and your legal responsibilities. JayBee Journo can then help you with your effective relationship marketing and branding, to make your busines as successful as it can be.

See http://www.best-webmaster-tools.info/partner/jaybeejourno.com/ for the review. (It’s short but very sweet!) We are particularly pleased with the award as recognition by industry peers is always good, and our company is quite unusual in offering both content AND website design for our clients. We must be doing something right!