Peak Small Business Newsletter
July 13,
2003
Year 2003, Issue 22
In this issue:
Opening Remarks
Quote of the Week
Featured Resource -
MyFonts.com
Featured Article - Make Your Web Site
Work More So You Can Work Less
Resources We Recommend
Unsubscribe Information
Opening Remarks
I hope all of you have had a profitable and safe week.
Welcome to our new subscribers!
Major Announcement:
Just six months ago we changed the format and
content of our newsletters and told you something new was coming.
Well, it's almost here! We are changing our newsletters to a monthly
magazine that will contain more information covering more topics, more
resources, extended how-to information, and much more. The magazine
will be available to read online or you will have the option of downloading
it in ebook format. We will notify you of the publishing of each new
edition either via email or through NewsMon, your choice.
We are making these changes because we feel
newsletters are becoming somewhat passé and overworked. People are inundated with
information in their email boxes and few have the time to read everything
they receive. It is our goal to provide you with an expanded
publication that will be well worth your time to read and save for future
reference.
While we believe our magazine will represent a
better resource for you, it will also help us. By expanding the
newsletter to magazine size online, we will also be adding content to our
website which should help us in the search engines and allow us to provide
more updated content more frequently to our visitors. Additionally, we
have been moving toward less and less reliance on email and want to continue
moving in that direction.
Our launch date for the new magazine is
currently scheduled for the first week of August. Since I am
personally very busy getting the magazine ready for launch, I will not be
writing articles for this newsletter this week or two weeks from now.
Instead, I have chosen some excellent articles from guest authors to fill
in.
In case you have not had a chance to do so, check out the
NewsMon option for receiving our newsletter. As stated above, NewsMon
will be an option for receiving notifications that the monthly magazine has
been published. The URL to read about it is:
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/newsmon.htm
The page is a little graphics intense, so give it a moment to
load.
As usual, if you prefer to view this newsletter online, the
URL is:
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/newsletters/sbnl_jul1303.htm
(Or, download and use NewsMon)!
Cary Christian
mailto:cary@peakconsultinginc.com
Quote of the Week
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands,
but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
- Maxim Gorky
Featured Resource
MyFonts.com
Have you ever needed to match a font in a document you were
working on or wanted to use a particular font you saw somewhere on your site
or with your word processing software but had no clue what the font was
called? Here's a site that can identify it for you. You upload a
sample of the font and the online tool will give you the name. The
site also contains a searchable database of fonts and information about
where you can find them.
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Featured Article
Make Your Web Site
Work More So You Can Work Less
C.J. Hayden, MCC
Do you know how your web site fits into
the overall marketing strategy for your business? Do you have a strategy for
your web site as a marketing tool? If you're like many entrepreneurs I speak
with, you probably don't.
All over the world, small business owners are spending thousands of dollars
on building and maintaining web sites without being able to answer one big
question: What do you want your web site to do?
Creating a web site without a marketing strategy can be an expensive and
time-consuming mistake. Here's an illustration from the more familiar world
of paper and postage. Imagine that you hired a graphic designer, printed
5000 four-color tri-fold brochures, and when the boxes arrived, you asked
yourself, "Gee, what shall I do with these?"
That scenario may sound a bit embarrassing as it stands, but let's take it
further. Suppose the first idea that occurs to you is mailing your new
brochure to a list of 500 names you collected by exhibiting at a trade show.
But then you realize that you didn't design the brochure as a self- mailer
-- all 6 panels are filled with graphics and copy.
To mail your brochure, you will now need 500 envelopes. Of course you want
to use the ones printed with your address and logo, but how much do those
cost a piece? And do you have 500 in stock? What will be the cost in money
or time to get envelopes printed, addressed, and stuffed? How long will all
this take? Was any of this in your budget when you had the brochures
printed?
The brochure example can tell us much about what goes wrong in creating web
sites. Many sites are constructed to be simply electronic brochures.
Entrepreneurs often get their sites designed by sending their printed
brochure to a web designer, and saying, "Put this on the Web."
So here's what is wrong with that. If you want your web site to attract
traffic, your web site must be DESIGNED to attract traffic.
You have a choice in designing your site and integrating it with your
overall marketing strategy. You can choose to make your site an electronic
brochure with no consideration of how to attract visitors built into the
design. If you do this, it means that you must direct traffic to your site
by other means -- advertise, promote, exhibit, speak, write, network,
prospect, mail, call, etc.
Unfortunately, most small business owners find this out after the fact. They
put up the site and then slowly realize that no one is seeing it. So they
start spending time and money on banner ads, on-line malls, classifieds,
postcards, bulk email, posting articles, exchanging links, and more.
The alternative is to design your site to attract traffic in the first
place. If you're going to spend all the time and money to build a web site,
doesn't it make more sense to have the site bring you customers rather than
you having to bring customers to the site?
To create a high-traffic web site, it must be search-engine friendly. 85-90%
of all web site traffic comes from search engines. When a customer types in
a keyword phrase you hope will bring them to you, your site needs to be one
of the top 10-30 results shown or that customer will never get to you. To
earn top positions in the major search engines, you or your web designer
must know the guidelines each engine uses to create its rankings, and mold
your site to meet them.
Some of these guidelines relate to the content of your site, and how it is
organized. Others have to do with the technical details of how your site is
constructed. If you don't want to know these specifics, you'd better hire
someone who does. That's the problem with letting just anyone who calls
themselves a web designer create a site for you.
Looking at a designer's portfolio of completed sites will tell you only a
small part of what you need to know about their abilities. Who wrote the
content for those sites? Who designed the page layout and navigation? Where
did the graphics come from? And here's the most important question: What did
the designer do to make those sites search-engine friendly?
It's a rare person who possesses the four-way combination of design ability,
technical expertise, marketing know-how, and search engine savvy to create
an attractive, useful web site that will attract traffic AND generate
paying customers. You know which of these capabilities you already have, and
what new skills you're willing to learn. Make sure you hire people who have
the rest.
See you at the top of the rankings,
C.J. Hayden, MCC
-----------------------------
C.J. Hayden is the author of Get Clients NOW! Since 1992, C.J. has been
teaching business owners and salespeople to make more money with less
effort. She is a Master Certified Coach and leads workshops internationally.
Read more of her articles at
www.getclientsnow.com
Resources We Recommend
Our new, dynamic resource directory! This directory
will be growing constantly. Check back frequently for updates. -
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/internet-resources.htm
Unsubscribe Information
You are receiving this newsletter because you
requested it on our website or through an advertising link on the Internet.
If you want to cancel your subscription to this newsletter, simply click the
following link -
unsubscribe@peakconsultinginc.com
|
