Web Design, Development & Online Marketing - Serving the Central and North Texas Markets

Is Your Website Missing the Grocery Bags?

This may be a nit picky thing from an A-type personality, but it drives me nuts at the grocery store when I have to search for bags in the produce department.  It spoils the joy of my grocery shopping experience (those who know me will laugh at that comment) when I have selected the perfect handful of apples and can’t find the darn bag dispenser anywhere close by.   Close by to me means, within 1 step.  The level of frustration is enhanced because I’m normally in a hurry.  But, isn’t everybody?

When you’ve invested in building website traffic, you want them to turn into leads and customers.  If a visitor is interested in taking the next step with your business, you don’t want to frustrate them or make it hard for them to know what to do next.   They are probably in a hurry and if the site is confusion or there are too many steps, they are likely to just jump to another website that is easier to understand.

Internet Conversion – keeping the bag within 1 step

There are a lot of factors to consider when implementing a good visitor to conversion strategy for your website.  But for simplicity here, once the visitor is persuaded and interested, you’ll want to clearly offer next step guidance so your visitor will flow easily toward your next step call-to-action.  Don’t make them search for “the bag”.  Of course this is obviously important for e-commerce sites, but it is just as important for all business and service websites who may want to build an email database or encourage a phone call inquiry in pursuit of lead acquisition.

Adjust, Measure, Repeat - for more successful conversion rates

Our recent white paper on Conversion Architecture goes into detail on experimenting and testing for conversion improvements.  But some of the on-page factors that influence flow toward action which can be critiqued include:

Depending on your business, you may want to get an Internet Consultant to interpret your analytics and make recommendations.  But don’t discount opinions of a few valued customers who may be willing to offer onsite ease of use suggestions.

With improved conversion fundamentals in place for your website, success is in the bag!

WSIwebSMART.com reveals the 5 pillars of successful website marketing that are often overlooked by even the biggest agency “experts”.  The new website allows small and medium sized businesses to tap into the global expertise of top  Internet Consultants and get help applying current best practices of Digital Marketing, Internet Advertising and website development.   http://www.WSIwebSMART.com

Dallas, TX   July 26, 2010 -  Patricia Jordan-Hinojos, a Dallas internet marketing expert says, “It’s time businesses, large and small, have a simple way to think more strategically about their websites and online marketing.  When S.M.A.R.T. principals are applied, significant money can be saved and results are achieved faster. We’re launching this site and other interactive resources to make this an affordable reality for small business.”

WSI Web SMART helps businesses, large and small, consider five areas when deciding on Internet marketing options, choosing an Internet Consultant or investing in website enhancements. These are easily remembered by the acronym S.M.A.R.T.

Valuable whitepapers are available for free download off the new website on some of the hottest topics in “S.M.A.R.T.” Internet marketing and website development.  These are written in layman’s terms so the tactics can be adopted easily.  New white papers are added monthly. For a direct access to these, go to White Papers and Webinar page at http://wsiwebsmart.com/White-Papers.html

Patricia Jordan-Hinojos has been helping small and medium businesses with their online marketing and web presence since opening the Dallas area (Plano, TX) office location in 2003.   In 2009, her peers recognized Patricia as a top 25 revenue consultant world wide and top ten in the USA.  Patricia has been a featured speaker at WSI’s Global Excellence & Innovation conference in Las Vegas speaking on how to leverage the WSI resources for better profitability.  

See examples, case studies, and videos of successes with local and national companies and get more information   at www.WSIwebSMART.com  or contact us at 972-208-0926.

Contact:

Patricia Jordan-Hinojos
972-208-0926

Shortened URLs have become very common place online these days, and have become even better tools for internet marketing.  Most people have seen shortened URLs on Facebook and Twitter (especially due to 140 character limit) such as: bit.ly, ow.ly, and many many others. (example: http://bit.ly/bsAOhH)

From an internet marketing standpoint these are fantastic, because they help track and analyze where your traffic and links are coming from.  Now some are probably saying well “that’s what analytics is for.” But! What if you are running a banner campaign on 10 different websites and several advertising suppliers?  Are you going to dig through analytics for hours trying to analyze all the referring sites? You can, but I’d suggest not to.

The great thing about bit.ly is being able to track and see where the clicks are coming from (Facebook, Twitter, Banners, etc.)  The drawback however is bit.ly doesn’t like to create more than one shortened link for a given URL (in fact it just won’t let you)  However, using an effective anchor tag as your tracking link will generate as many tracking URLs as you need.

Example:

You want to create several tracking links for www.myawesomesite.com/Cool-Page.html

The thing to do is create a separate tracking URL such as:

…and so on for as many as you need.

Paste your links and click "shorten" and bit.ly will create a unique tracking link for each and let you use a separate link for each campaign, and let you easily see in your dashboard how many clicks and traffic sources.  This should help you from having to log into several different websites and track statistics from numerous places. It doesn’t allow for ‘grouping’ links by campaigns or anything yet, but I’m sure they will come up with something in the future or possibly be an addition to their Bit.ly Pro service? We can only hope.