Incorporate Mobile from the Start

Whether you adopt a responsive website design or a simple, separate, landing page for mobile users, at least have a plan. With browsing statistics consistently showing growth in mobile users, any new website design needs to have a home for this user-base. Because a website is always evolving, even after it goes live, a website often becomes more difficult over time to overhaul. Consider the cost of overhauling a huge site into being mobile friendly, as oppose to the cost of designing one from the start—the pay-off to start things right becomes clear.

Takeaway: Mobile devices are everywhere, be ready for them from the start.

In business, first impressions are everything. You know that, but it’s especially true on the Web, where attention spans are short and a universe of links are vying for your already-distracted potential customers’ attention. With that in mind, how does your landing page stack up? Here are some things to keep in mind for designing a great homepage.

Make an impression, fast.

The easiest thing a user can do is click away. Most research shows that your page has about 7 to 10 seconds to capture and hold the viewer’s interest before they navigate to another website. A splash page – with a clever animation or captivating photo – can be one way to grab a customer’s attention, but it needs to be good enough to compel them to click through.

A safer bet is a well-designed logo and one or two dominant images that quickly convey the theme and message that your business is attempting to get across.

Takeaway: Ask yourself, how much can you convey about your business in a single glance?

Keep things simple.

Avoid large blocks of dull, grey text. They’re not only boring to look at, but homepage visitors probably won’t read them. Other parts of the site can be used for more complex information. If visitors spend time browsing your website, you’ve already won their interest. A logo, a few carefully selected images and other multimedia, plus basic information are a good place to start. Also, don’t forget to use white space.

Takeaway: Design with an eye toward simplicity. If it’s not absolutely necessary, think about cutting it.

Don’t be annoying.

Use common sense. Clashing, garish colors, music or videos that play automatically, flashing text and other Web 1.0 gimmicks should be strictly avoided. Solicit feedback whenever possible. There are a number of sites that offer feedback via live user tests. Seek them out.

Takeaway: Be nice to your visitors.

Focus on your goals.

A good homepage is designed with your site’s purpose in mind. If your goal is to sell products online, a product showcase with the week’s hottest items might be a good front-page feature. If it’s to drive referrals, a contact form or another way of capturing sales leads should be front and center. Make it easy to do what you want your customers to do.

Takeaway: Always be thinking about what you want to accomplish through your website.

The post How to Make a Great Website Homepage appeared first on Incubate.com Blog.

Bloggers, journalists and other writers cultivate their own followings. For all the talk of the decline of journalism, many have adapted quite well to the digital age. And as such, they are still worth pitching. Of course, the Web has imposed new efficiencies on how businesses connect to the media. There are a number of Web-friendly strategies and services out there that facilitate with writers.

Here are some tools and ideas for reaching out to the media.

Help a Reporter Out 

Cold pitching a journalist doesn’t always work, and it’s not always your fault. They’re busy people. But catch them on a deadline – with information they need – and they can become your best friend. Help a Reporter Out – or HARO – makes this happen. Reporters submit specific queries for stories they are working on or the kind of source they are looking for to HARO’s network of subject experts. Users submit their answers in return.

The HARO network includes about 30,000 working journalists, so the odds that you’ll know something at least one them is looking for are good. Story placements are a great way to boost your business’ visibility and drive traffic to your website. ProfNet, by PRNewswire, offers a similar set of services.

Online Press Releases

Yes, the press release is still a thing. It’s by no means a sure thing, but a surprising number of journalists – and more importantly, editors – still use them to pick up ideas for features and other posts. Services like PRWeb and PRNewswire can help your business cast a wide net, although when pitching to such a general audience, it helps to have some kind of national angle for your business.

The key to press releases is making them concise and well written. Journalists are pressed for time. They want you to get to the point, and the point needs to be compelling.

Twitter and LinkedIn

A lot of journalists skip services like HARO and PRWeb altogether and appeal to their own followers with questions to crowdsource their stories. If nothing else, be sure to follow bloggers, reporters and other media members in your area, or in your industry.

Something to avoid: spamming reporters with unwanted or irrelevant pitches. Always do your homework before reaching out.

The post How to Publicize your Online Business appeared first on Incubate.com Blog.

This might be the most important advice we can give any business owner in 2013 that relies on the internet for revenue, specifically on all forms of search engine marketing (SEO, PPC, Product Ads, Contextual Marketplace). Google is making two massive moves this year that will affect you if you do not have a mobile (adaptive or responsive) website. (We get into how to decide between responsive/mobile below)

Let’s start with the two big changes Google will be rolling out over the next 12 months

GOOGLE PPC CHANGE

This is confirmed for some time in June. Google will now start lowering your campaign quality scores if you do not either filter out mobile traffic (via Google Enhanced Feature) or have a mobile optimized website. Check out your analytics, you probably get at least 25% of your traffic from mobile and you do not want to lose it all. If Google lowers your quality score you will in turn be paying much more for the traffic you do get. A lower quality score does not only raise bids, but your frequency and chances of displaying are much less.

GOOGLE SEO CHANGE

Your SEO campaign will be hurt considerably. Google is no doubt working on perfecting the user experience for mobile users. If someone from a mobile phone uses Google and predominantly finds non-mobile optimized sites, they are going to go elsewhere. Google has no choice but to filter organic results for mobile users if you do not have an optimized site. Summary, if you do not have an optimized mobile site you will lose rankings, not only in mobile results but probably main results too.

USERS AND THE CONVERSION EFFECT

If I haven’t convinced you, or you don’t care about Google traffic, then let’s talk conversions. Have you ever been on a website that was not optimized for your phone? You might start out okay with it because you don’t know any better. It is sort of akin to dial-up bandwidth speed. 10 years ago, you simply waited for a site to take 3 minutes to load; it was part of the internet. As bandwidth sped up, your tolerance for downloads went down, now the same thing is happening with mobile. User’s tolerance for non-mobile sites will all but vanish. As that happens, your already low mobile conversion numbers will plummet further.

Simply put, you have no choice but to have a mobile website. So how do you go about it?

There is one primary decision you need to make to decide on how you are going to move forward:

1. Responsive Mobile

2. Adaptive Mobile

Responsive mobile is recommended 95% of the time. A responsive mobile framework is when you build your site’s code around a framework that ‘responds’ to different screen resolutions. An easy way to see if something is responsive or adaptive is if the site has a separate URL for their mobile version. If you see something like “http://mobile.domain.com“, then likely it is NOT a responsive site. A responsive site’s URL does not change based off of the device you come in on. This is also why I think that 95% of the time it is a better experience. No redirects into incorrect pages or user let down.

Adaptive mobile is when a totally separate site is built for the mobile experience. Unlike Responsive mobile, your user will be redirected to a mobile URL, like “http://mobile.domain.com“. If you are limited on budget there are several site builders that can create these for you. However, usually the user experience is massively disrupted. Have you ever been on a mobile device, found the content you wanted to read, only to be redirected to the home page of the mobile version of the site? This is really frustrating. My advice is to always go responsive if you can (technologically and budget-wise). Google likes responsive better as well.

If you have made it this far, maybe I have convinced you. If you want any help on how you can get a mobile site done, please ask your contact in Incubate. We do offer mobile development services if you are on WordPress, Magento or Drupal. If you are not, we have a huge database of great contacts and vendors that would be happy to help as well.

The post Google mandating a mobile experience for users appeared first on Incubate.com Blog.

Here’s a great way to start a fight in a group of digital marketers: Ask them how to measure return on investment from social media. Odds are if you have 10 different marketers, you’ll get 10 different answers and no shortage of strong opinions.

But the question will still remain: Is it really possible to measure ROI from social media?

It’s pretty obvious that the reason this is such a bone of contention in the Web world is that there is no simple answer. Sure, you can squeeze plenty of insight out of social analytics, but then you face the not-so-easy task of parsing that data and using it in the real world. And even then, there are plenty of intangibles.

So, the answer is probably yes and no. This is terribly unsatisfying, but the fact is that if anybody knew how to do this easily, they would be very, very rich. But here are four things to think about – including what to avoid – when it comes to measuring social media ROI.

First, decide what matters.

This may be the biggest problem when it comes to social media takeaways: what exactly are you looking for? Any business needs to decide early on what it is trying to accomplish on the social Web. Is it clicks? Is it referrals? Is it warm leads? Or is it simply a tool for gathering information?

Collect the data.

Next, find a way to collect the data you think matters. This might be through a fairly simple link-shortening service that measures click-throughs or a full-service social media analytics company. There are a number of free and paid options that attempt to measure social reach and influence. Shop carefully and make sure that these services measure what you’re interested in.

Track your own effort.

Social media services tend to be free, but the effort that it takes to create good content isn’t. Track your time – and know what it’s worth – before sinking any of it into a social media strategy. Knowing the exact amount of company effort spent on social media is a major part of the equation

What are the intangibles?

Finally, not every benefit from social comes down to easily measurable statistics, such as clicks. Ask yourself what else your business is getting from social media. Some of the benefits aren’t always immediately obvious. For example, if your company has a large Twitter feed, that may be a way to communicate with customers if something goes wrong, such as an unexpected power outage or other emergency. Or maybe you use social to keep up on what competitors and partners are doing.

The post Is It Possible to Measure ROI on Social Media? appeared first on Incubate.com Blog.

4 Unique Ways to Bring Traffic to Conversion Pages

You’re doing everything you can to increase your site’s traffic: running an online ad campaign, participating in email marketing, and optimizing your site’s keywords for SEO.

Yet, if the traditional traffic-boosting techniques aren’t working for you, it’s time to determine what you could be doing to improve your credit card transaction rates and amount of traffic. While there are a number of ways to optimize your efforts, consider utilizing these additional tactics to make use of often-ignored elements of your conversion pages.

Optimize Your Alt Tags

The images you use on your conversion pages are an important element in the conversion process. Once your customers have reached your page, images can entice your viewers and sell your product for you by providing important visual information, and direct attention to your call-to-action.

Unfortunately, images themselves are not yet capable of being crawled by search engine bots. But that doesn’t mean they can’t provide data for search engines that can help bring traffic to your page. Experts at ResourceNation.com report, “By simply adding alt tags to your images and naming them strategically, the search engines will index them accordingly.”

But, where do you start?

· Use your alt tags to provide a description of the image that uses your site’s keywords, but is still compelling, accurate, and to the point.  This is about quality not quantity.

SEO-Focused Product Descriptions

You may be selling hundreds or even thousands of products on your website. This means that you have hundreds or thousands of opportunities to improve your site’s overall search engine rankings, as well as drive traffic to specific conversion pages. This will ultimately, improve the conversion rate of each individual page. You can accomplish this this by writing SEO-focused product descriptions.

Many ecommerce websites present a picture of their product, the name of the product, and the price. Imagine what would happen if you included 300 words of detailed, keyword-rich content on each page? Suddenly, the search engine bots have more text to crawl, better content to parse, and more reason to up your rankings.

All because you replaced “Wood chair, $150” with “Solid maple Victorian-style accent chair with brass details and green velvet upholstery, as seen in Better Homes & Gardens Magazine.”

Marketing Videos

Many ecommerce retailers utilize videos on their conversion pages, and for good reason. Video is now the 6^th most popular content marketing tactic.  You can use video to bring traffic to your conversion pages in two ways.

First, you can create marketing videos showcasing your product and post them to YouTube, Vimeo, and your business’s social networks. 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video, according to Eloqua. Driving traffic to your conversion pages from videos posted elsewhere is an effective tool for increasing conversions.

Video Sitemaps

Your other option for using videos is to post them directly on your conversion pages. Again, just like images, search engine bots are not able to crawl videos; according to BrainShark.com, “Video optimization is a bit different from your standard practices. To make the most impact in video, you have to build a proper sitemap.” Some basic tips include:

· Be sure to fill in all the appropriate keywords for your video – and your business – in your sitemap. These include the title tag, description tag, thumbnail_loc, and video tag. If the video can only be played in a few specific countries, include that information as well.

· You can submit your sitemap to Google through the same process as submitting your website. It’s fast and easy once you have created your sitemap; check Google for specific instructions for submitting your sitemap.

These unique techniques, in conjunction  with traditional traffic-boosting tactics, can help bring in more traffic for your site’s conversion pages. Be sure to use targeted, branded keywords and well-written content in order to make these techniques more effective in bringing traffic to your site and your individual pages.

Megan Webb-Morgan writes about business software and marketing for ResourceNation.com, B2B lead generation resource. See them tweeting @ResourceNation and find them on Google+, too!

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