Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

I wanted to take a rest from talking about social media within your online business, as I seem to have done for the past few posts, and take it back to some basics about setting up an online presence

With the proliferation of DIY website tools like WordPress, anyone can have a site up and running in less than an hour. I visit a lot of sites every day and read a lot of content, and sometimes there can be a real fashion over function mentality to the design – that is, it might look good, but the usability and functionality are terrible.

This can make people put your information in the too hard basket when it comes to finding what they want, or interacting with it how they want. As an online business owner, how your site looks, feels and most of all functions are key to success. Your content might be great but if it’s too hard to digest, it doesn’t matter.

Whatever way you go about establishing your site, there are some fundamental elements that it should have to entice repeat visitation and customers.

Social Media Sharing and Connecting Options

The old adage of content being king is certainly still true, so you need to make it easy for people to syndicate whatever content you publish on your site. If you have built your site on WordPress, adding a social bookmarking plugin like Sociable, or Share This, instantly adds a multitude of social network touch points to your site, allowing users to send it anywhere they have an account. This can be incredibly powerful to build links and a customer base.

Similarly, you should have all of your social media profiles prominently displayed. Your customer base might come from anywhere, and you need to make it as easy as possible for them to connect with you. You can see in the sidebar of this page where links to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles are.

You should also look to include a link to an RSS feed for your site.

Email Marketing Platform

A lot has been written about email marketing, and how it may or may not have its place in business with the explosion of social media. Ultimately, what you need to think about is your audience. While things like Twitter and Facebook may have taken off, your customer base may be only just getting comfortable with the notion of receiving an email with your information, making an email marketing platform a must have.

The other consideration with email marketing is that this is one of the most powerful ways to build an opted in list of customers. People don’t want to be sold to through social media, but if they have elected to receive information from you by giving you their email address, this creates a very powerful marketing tool for you. I use Aweber for my email marketing platform, however I have also heard good testimonials about Infusionsoft.

Clear Navigation

This might seem like a given, but too many times I see navigation that is anything but. More than anything, you need to make all areas of your site easy to find. Make sure that you don’t label any areas of your site obscurely – using page names that you think are clever may just confuse and frustrate your customers.

Don’t cram all of your pages into the navigation. Use top level pages only, and use a seperate navigation in those pages to go deeper into the content. On the flipside, utlise some form of breadcrumbs – a path that shows the user where they have come from to get where they are and make it easy for them to click back. 

A Blog

I’m a massive advocate for blogging. Sharing your expertise in your field with your visitors is one of the quickest ways to establish yourself as an authority and build trust. It adds a level of personality to your site and means people can talk with you, rather than being talked at. It also provides a great reason for return visitation, with those engaged customers looking for new and fresh content. It doesn’t hurt you in terms of your SEO either.

But what about aesthetics? A bad looking site can be just as much a turn off. If you are building in WordPress, there are so many themes available, and most tend to be laid out and colour matched pretty well. These are more than OK to use and so many have customisation options. I’ve just started building another site utilising the premium Headway theme, which is completely customisable, and I have to say I am finding it a fantastic way to build. There are some great resources available if you are building from scratch though, which I will look to post later this week.

Above all though, with these 4 main functional elements as a minimum, there is a greater chance of customer interaction with your site.

What about you? Anything that you think is a must have for your online business site?

Related posts:

1. How Social Media Can Help (and Hinder) Your Business
2. Bollocks.com.au – Live Site Project Week 1
3. Managing Your Online Business Reputation
4. Three Practical Tips for Traffic Generation
5. Tools For Building A Site From Scratch

Tags: aesthetics, Email Marketing, headway, navigation, site design, Social Bookmarking, Social Media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Best Practice, Content, Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.