Looking with fresh eyes at your online presence

Website marketing for virtual assistants – on page effectiveness!

Seth Godin’s break through book was called “The Big Red Fez” – this was perhaps the first of thousands (possibly millions by now?) of online marketing books, but the lesson it teaches is one of such simplicity that it remains a universal truth.  The premise is that you imagine a monkey in a red fez hat is reading your website and you want to wave appropriate bananas at him to get him to do what you want…

So here’s a guide to the most powerful areas of your website:

• Top right should always be reserved for “BUY” – it’s the most prominent area of your site, and I’d suggest having at least a “Contact Us” link here, if not your autoresponder sign up box.
• The top half of the page will be the most read, try not to have too much content “below the line” meaning your prospects have to scroll to read it, you want to catch their attention with the good stuff in the first few paragraphs.
• Make it easy for people to contact you – have your telephone number and email on all pages of your site in the same location.
• The end of each article or page should have a “call to action” – in other words, what should they do next?  Click on a link?  Call you?  Send an email?  Make it obvious – put it in bold, colour it pink, have a big blue arrow… You’ll find your own way of doing this, but make sure you do!
• Got a logo on the site?  Make it easy for people to get back to the homepage and hyperlink it to the front page of the site.
• Contact us – how do you want people to contact you?  List your social media accounts here, put a landline on there (use www.voipfone.co.uk to get one if you don’t have one – would you do business with someone with just a mobile number?).
• How much text? People read websites in a different way to printed text – you want banners, bullets, short sentences (yeah, I am aware of the irony in including this tip in a long web article!!)
• List your address – By law you should have this on here if you’re running a UK business – it can be a mail forwarding address, but there should be a correspondence address on there.
• How much personality is in your site?  One of the most powerful ways of increasing your web conversion rates is by putting a picture of yourself on there – people buy from people.  They want to see who they are doing business with.
• Who is linking to your site? One of Google’s most time-served tactics is to see who else is referencing you on the web.  It looks at backlinks.  Check out who is referring traffic to your site: Try https://www.digbacklink.com/

So let’s look at your website with fresh eyes – in fact, even better, recruit some family and friends to look for you.  A quick email is all it takes to do this kind of straw poll survey, but the results are often quite revealing:

Dear XXX, I’d really love it if you helped me reviewing my website – please can you visit www.domain.com and answer the following questions:

• Did it load okay?  How did it look on your browser?  (And which browser was it?)
• What do you notice first?
• If you wanted to contact me, how easy was it?
• Did it have all the information you’d want to ask a virtual assistant that you were considering working with?

So what are the “bananas” you can use?  Well, you might have a free ebook, an email newsletter, a free trial hour or a free virtual consultation which they get in return for giving you their contact details.

Surprised by your results?  Did you have a moment of clarity where the blooming obvious jumped out at you?  Tell us about them!