The idea of “email marketing” can seem intimidating, but it can be thought of as a form of direct marketing like traditional mail. Instead of using the postal service, however, it uses email to send your commercial or non-profit messages to an audience. Various marketing email types sent out include email newsletters, quick announcements (also known as postcard emails), catalog emails, and press releases. At its best, email marketing can engage your audience better than a passive website, and at…
Tips and Tricks
Are you stopping visitors from commenting?
Blog comments are something that you should typically encourage because they give readers a chance to participate in the conversation. Comments give readers the opportunity to relate their experiences, offer their point of view, and provide related information. This interaction within the blog can help to expand the original blog post, sometimes giving it a life of its own. If one of your blog’s goals is to encourage commenting, you should try and make the commenting process as simple as…
Does your website have an effective call to action?
A “call to action”, as the name suggests, tells your visitors what they should do. In the case of a website, it’s basically a message that links to a desired action. A successful CTA will help persuade visitors to take your desired action, which you should be able to determine based on your business goals. It can be a short phrase as simple as “Click here!”, but should be something at least a little more specific or sophisticated. In this…
How to read your site’s statistics: 6 tips
As we wrote in a previous post, statistics are necessary to determine if your website is meeting its goals. But it’s hard to know if you’re meeting your site’s goals if you don’t know how to read the multitude of numbers and graphs provided by a service like Google Analytics. In this post, we offer five suggestions on how to read your Analytics statistics beyond simply hits or views to help you determine if your site is attracting the traffic…
Do you own your blog?: Owning your domain
With the wide variety of free blogging platforms, blogging is essentially free. However, to get the impact you’re looking for, it may be worth it to blog using your own domain. In fact, it can be easy to setup and doesn’t have to be terribly expensive to get your blog on a URL that you own. Many blogging platforms allow you to buy a custom domain, including Google’s Blogger platform, and WordPress.com. You can also transfer a domain name you…
Integrating your blog and your website
Having a ‘blog’, featuring news, articles and thought-provoking content, is a great way to help your business gain credibility and enhance its reputation. But in order to make the most impact on both your target market and on search engines, your blog and organization’s website should be well-integrated. There are, however, several different methods of integrating a blog with an existing site, including the use of “iFrames”, rebuilding the site using a blog or CMS platform, creating a new theme…
Hiding your prices – Don’t do it!
Talking about money is hard, even for online business. Many times when you visit a website, it is not easy to find the prices for the offered services. You can go through three or more different windows with trials and special offers but you cannot find how much you will finally have to pay for them. Some weeks ago, Brent went to the WordPress.com website looking for the prices of the premium features offered by the blog platform. He spent…
Don’t wait, start the sharing
In July, we started a blog series on the importance that an updated website has for your business. In our first blog post about website updates, we discussed how regular updates are a great way to legitimize a small business website. We also explained ways to find website content for your visitors and how to do website updates. In our previous blog post, we talked about the power of social networks and how you can help your visitors share the…
You’ve Created Your Content – Now Be Social with It!
Previously on Online Friendly, we told you about some ways to update your website frequently. These days, visitors to your website can do more than just look at your pages. Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are a powerful another way to have your website content put right where many people spend at least some of their day. Not only can you share your website content on the profiles you have on these social networks, but your visitors can…
4 (+1) Ways to Regularly Update Your Website
This week we want to tell you more about updating your website. In our previous posts, we explained why you should keep your website updated. We also listed some ways to discover interesting and useful content for your site. After you have your content, the next step is being able to update your site with it. Here are four ways to keep things up-to-date: Put your blog RSS feed on your homepage If you have an existing blog, you can…