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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 25:
Be Almost Painfully Obvious with Your Call to Action

Imagine this scenario. You’re interested in buying a new flat-screen television, so you go to your favorite store that sells them, which is having a sale with cheap places and is located close to your house. They even have free delivery, so you figure this will be a painless trip.

As you’re wandering around the store, you see all kinds of information about the television that you can read. You see charts with price comparisons, and way at the back of the store are places where you can even sign up to have the catalog sent to your house, although you have to hunt for it, and ask several of the sales people where to find it.

You’re starting to get annoyed, when finally you find the area where there are actually TVs on display. You pick out the one you want, and start looking around for the check out area.

Only you can’t find it. You look everywhere you can think of, and finally ask one of the sales associates about it on the way out. He stares at you blankly and scratches his head, and after much consultation with other associates, directs you to a tiny closet on the far right wall of the store, near the bathrooms.

By this time, it’s been almost an hour and a half, and you’re so freaked out, you just take all the research you’ve put together and go to your second-favorite store. In this one, the TVs on sale are well displayed, and the cash registered are right at the front of the store, the way they are in most department stores. You buy your flat-screen television set and go home happy in about fifteen minutes. You vow never to waste another second in the first store again.

What’s the moral of this story? There are three.

Make your call to action almost painfully obvious – though not obtrusive. No one can buy your products if they don’t know that you’re selling them.
Make the buying process as simple as possible.
Don’t be bashful about selling your products or services. If you are, there’s someone else who won’t be.

Many new webmasters are nervous about the fact that their site sells something, but they shouldn’t be – if your prospects are interested, they may become clients. Indeed, if they are targeted visitors, they may Want to become clients.

And since, on the internet, a person can arrive at just about any part of your site other than the home page, you should have your call to action – whether it is to subscribe or to buy – on every single page of your site, in a prominent, consistent location.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 24 : Freshness is Key

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You’ve heard, hundreds of times probably, that people come to the internet for information. But what we often overlook is that you and I come to the internet for fresh, updated information. The very nature of the internet implies that the latest thing is available at any hour of the day.

So do so few site owners update their sites on an on-going basis?

Not only should you be updating the content on your individual pages from time to time, you also want to keep adding new pages and sections to your site. The internet is quickly moving to a more dynamic nature.

Leading internet brands such as Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Amazon and Ebay, are all tending towards an internet that is constantly moving into the era of a web that changes on the fly. It is one of the reasons that updating web technology is so popular.

Blogs, content management systems, RSS and any other technology that makes it easier to update portions of your site appeal to this new trend of the web, and it is no accident that frequently changing sites are at the top of the search engines.

Static web pages and sites are becoming a thing of the past. If you don’t want your site to be a dinosaur, join the era of the dynamic web and update your site.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 23 :
Master the correct tone of copy for your audience

You will want to match the tone of your copy to the audience that is coming to your site. The vast majority of the time you’ll want a business casual voice that is conversational – the exception would be circumstances where your audience does not speak in a conversational, business casual tone. Very few commercial sites are going to fit this bill, but it’s not entirely unheard of.

For example, if you had invented a social software such as an instant messenger, while your company might be commercial, your audience speaks in a casual voice, and so should your copy.

Part of having a conversational voice is writing copy that imitates the way you would speak to your future client if there were some way for you to see them step into your virtual store. You will want to be friendly, but not overly intimate. You should use the same short sentences that you would when speaking aloud.

A good way to test your copy for a conversational tone is to open up a best-selling novel and look at a page of dialogue. Instead of actually reading the page, just glance at the layout and look at your site.

When comparing the two, you won’t be looking for an exact match to white space and use of pronouns. Rather, you’ll want to see that the layout of the page looks similiar. If you find too many blocks of text on your page or have copy that reads like an instruction manual than a letter to an aquaintance, you’ll want to have a web site designer or copywriting expert look at your page and give you some pointers.

Sometimes departures from conversational copy will be necessary – but if these are the norm at your site, it’s worth having someone give it a second look.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 22:
Learn the Attributes of Effective Web Copy

Effective web copy has a sole function, and that is to convert prospects into buyers. Your online copy needs to be persuasive in getting the visitor to register, subscribe, qualify as leads, and ultimately, buy from your web site.

Remember you are trying to get someone you can’t see and have never met take a step towards building a relationship with you or your company. Since statistics tell us that over 80% of all buying decisions are emotional, that means that you must make an appeal to the logic to get your visitor to see that they have a need for the product or service, but one that is heavily supported by emotion, to appeal to their wants as well.

You can read more about effective copy writing and web site design in our article section, including nine tips for effective copywriting.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 21:
Pay attention to how copy is displayed

Visitors don’t like to see long lines of text because they want information to be concise and quick. They want easy-to-read material. Use short, punchy sentences. Break up large chunks of text into short paragraphs or use bulleted lists.

When you get into details, make it a hyperlink to a new page around that topic. The “click here” statement should be a hyperlink taking your visitor to another page focused on describing your products or services in more detail. Use teasers. Hyperlinks are used for easy reading. This keeps your content short so visitors remain focused, yet a detailed description is just a click away.

This especially applies to blog posts. Most posts to a weblog should be about a third of the length of a regular article. If you find that your posts are normally longer than this, try putting excerpts on the front page instead of the entire post.
Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 20: Understand What Copy Has to Do With It

The relationship of copywriting to web design is often forgotten when designing a site. However, no matter how beautiful a site is, if the copy is ineffective, all effort is for naught.

Copywriting is writing that sells a product, a service, or even a person. It is basically taking powerful, emotion evoking word pictures and showing the reader that his or her life would be more complete – better, easier, more productive, more profitable, happier, whatever – if the visitor owned your product or service. Copywriting is everywhere – on billboards, newspaper ads, on the net, and in every USP.

And so, should it be on your site. In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about effective copywriting – but first, in a few hours, we’ll look into how it should appear on the page, which is often just as important.
Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 19: WIFM

Those are the four call letters of the only station every human being in the world has tuned into at one time or another, perhaps several times a day, representing the phrase that truly pays: What’s In It For Me?

It’s easy to spot a site that doesn’t meet the WIFM criteria for getting and keeping a visitor.

It talked about what “we” can do, rather than what “you” may want or need.

They refer more to the company than the visitor – if they talk about the visitor at all.

When they do talk about the visitor? It’s all about what the visitor can do for them – not what they do for their visitors.

If you can successfully answer the ultimate visitor question “What’s In It For Me” from the visitor’s perspective, you will have plenty of happy, satisfied customers. It doesn’t matter how flashy your site is – if you don’t give the visitor what they need, they’ll leave.

If your site doesn’t answer this question it is destined to fail because there is no benefit to the visitor to come to the site, or to return another time. Successful websites on the other hand, always exceed the expectations of their visitors with the benefits of coming by.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 18:
Target your audience

Having a target audience should be part of your basic website strategy.

Your site, and the products and services it offers, should be solving a specific problem that is very clear when your visitors arrive. In addiiton, it should be carefully aimed at that specific target audience.

To keep yourself on target, you should constantly be asking yourself these questions:

Do you have a target audience?
What are their wants?
What problem does your product or services solve for them?
Is it very clear that your product or service is for them?
Is is very clear what they should do to get to your product or service within three clicks from any page?

Don’t make your target audience the entire population of the world. It should be a targeted area called a niche market. If you’ve got a product that says “for coaches and trainers”, guess what. You’ll get the attention of coaches and trainers because you will be directly addressing their needs.

Knowing where you’re going is important. But, knowing who you’re going after is even more important!

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 17 :
Search Engines aren’t the only – or always the best – way to promote your site

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of legitimate techniques you can use to get possible buyers to your site. In fact, for some really specialized areas, it’s best not to rely on search engine traffic alone. There may not be enough prospects looking for you in the search engnes, or the area you want to concentrate on may be too competitive for you to find good keywords without an expert’s help.

Even if that is not your circumstance, you will want to look to areas where other companies do not, to find prospects that are probably neglected by your competitors. In some cases, you will have them all to yourself if you target properly.

Here are just a few ways you can promote your site:

• Article marketing
• Ezine marketing
• Inexpensive ezine advertising
• Host free or inexpensive teleseminars
• Get links from other sites that already have traffic.
• Give free samples or free reports
• Send press releases

You’ll find more suggestions in this article.

Nina
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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 16:
Updates, pay per click and patience are the ingredients for best search engine results.

To have a major advantage in the search engines, you can simply update more often. If you have a static site that doesn’t have many changes to make, instead of changing each page, add a new page each day and get a new link to your site each day. This is enough for most sites. You can update a page with on-going news to do this, or start a blog.

If your area is more competitive, you’ll probably want to lean more towards solutions that include blogging, RSS, or any other technology that allows you to incorporate changes in more than one part of your site at a time. Sometimes you can edge out a competitor in the search engines just by having more than one page updating on the fly more than once a day.

In the meantime, while you’re waiting the 90 – 120 days it normally takes for good search engine results to take hold, you don’t have to wait for traffic. Use the pay per click feature that the major search engines have to help you get more traffic to your web sites. Just be careful to set a definite budget.

The last ingredient for best results in the search engines is to learn to be patient. It takes some time for your site to reach the top of the charts in the search engines, and most site never get there. This doesn’t have to be the fate of your site. Better planning, consulting with a proven expert, and following the general rules of search engine placement can get you great results over the long term.

The most brutal mistake when waiting for search engine traffic is to change the entire site around in the first 90 days, thinking that the search engnes aren’t recognizing your site. You don’t want to resort to that until that time period has passed.

Nina

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