What a novel question! When designing or redesigning a website do you stop and ask yourself what makes a good website? Or ask what is it that your customers want or need instead of what you want?

Hopefully you ask these questions, but there are many websites out there that beg for this question to be asked.

Here’s a little scenario that happened to me just this week:

My daughter graduated from high school this week on a day where the temperatures rose quite high. We wanted to have good seats for the evening graduation ceremony so I made a deal with her boyfriend. If he saved us seats (3 hours ahead of time in the direct sun, with scorching temps) I would buy him 2 water park tickets for the following week. He agreed and saved us the seats--great seats mind you, and enough for the whole extended family.

Do you believe social media matters for your business? A lot of you don’t. How do I know this? Just two days ago I heard a dear friend who is an accomplished business woman refer to social media as “that place where people tell me what they are having for dinner….and I don’t want to know!” She went on to say that she saw very little value in social media for business, with the possible exception of LinkedIn for building a personal resume. While I agree that social media has been used for a lot of personal revelations that I would rather avoid, I absolutely disagree with this assessment. If you don’t know the answer to the question “why is social media important” for your business, I would like to help you take a step forward in answering this.

If you haven’t heard of this before, I really recommend that you go out and purchase a copy of a book called Pendulum by Roy H. Williams and Michael Drew, which was published late last year. Pendulum outlines an 80 year cycle over the last 3000 years in western civilization swinging back and forth between what they call a “Me” generation, and a “We” generation.

One of the goals of our weekly internet marketing tips is to keep you up to date about what you need to know in the world of internet marketing. There is always something happening. Which means something is always trying to get your attention. Most of us are aware of this because we can’t ignore the constant buzzing or vibrating from that little device in our pockets that gives us unlimited access to the latest information from our social media accounts, emails, text messages and maybe even an actual phone call. Our mobile devices are powerful.

If I were to say, you could increase website conversion, would you know what I meant? 

Do you know what happens on your website when a conversion happens?  Some people do but most of the time the answer is a hesitant “yes” while defining the term with the word “conversion” included. This would have been a sure fire way to get a red mark on your paper if you were still in high school.  (Which my daughter just graduated from so I speak with some assurance).  So here is what I want to do.  I want to give you a short clarification of what people mean when they say, increase website conversion, so you can be prepared for the conversation and maybe I can even help you improve your website conversion.  It’s good stuff, let me show you.

Do you hate blogging? It might be because your blog platform sucks! A blog platform should be easy to use, easy to navigate, easy to publish and easy to integrate your SEO techniques into. If you’re complaining about blogging because you hate to write, then you’re about to love blogging even more. These blogging platforms have beautiful structures that just make you want to write something on their empty canvas of endless creativity. Why blog? Blogging is a crucial piece of your internet marketing strategy so it should be taken serious.

Social media has become increasingly important in 2013. There have been a number of updates to the way sites are ranked in Google search results. Google has increased the weight and value of credible, relevant, rich content on websites. The days of paying for links has come to an end, and we are on the rise of content creation. 

If you are like me, you get a ton of emails every day that you simply delete without ever opening. You wish they never made it past your spam filter if you're honest.  I get about five emails a day from folks who are offering to redesign my website for me, make my website show up on page one of Google, or provide email marketing consultant services.  Thanks, but I’ve got that taken care of! It is clear that they have never bothered to look at who we are and what we do, so their credibility is shot from the beginning with me. Delete.

If you are reading this, you probably already realize that using online public relations as part of your overall internet marketing strategy is good for business, or maybe you are just curious about it. Either way, good for you!  Online public relations is a valuable internet marketing tool and can help drive traffic to your website which ultimately can bring you more customers. 

If someone asked you to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious could you? I couldn’t. I had to look it up for this blog. But that’s okay for hard words that you rarely use. What about the everyday kind of words that we should know how to use and spell from learning them in our elementary school classes? 

Alright all you fancy pants website designers and graphic artists, today is website design boot camp! We are going to tackle the question, what makes a good website suck. Your website looks like a million bucks but converts $0 a month. You can have a beautiful website but without these standard website regulations you might as well count your website as dead - which doesn't help your internet marketing strategy any!