There are several aspects that must go into creating a successful website and they include the design and graphics of the website, the sales page presented on it, the customer tracking or follow-up capabilities, and finally the use of other types of technology on your website to encourage sales and grab attention.
Website design-if you've spent any amount of time at all searching on the Internet you've probably seen some pretty flashy websites. Some of the blinking lights and flashing designs that jump out at you almost make you think you're visiting the strip on Vegas. All too often, people assume that they must make their website as bold and graphically intense as possible but this just isn't necessary. Your website is designed to do one thing and one thing only: convert visitors into buyers. There is no specific rule that states that you must have a ridiculous amount of loud graphics in which to do this and oftentimes a simple website will work even better than one that is flashy. Having said that, you don't want a website that contains nothing but words either because your visitor will quickly become bored and click away. A good combination of attractive graphics that are specific to your product as well as a decent amount of content designed to help sell it is what is required. You'll certainly want to have a logo of some sort and may choose to incorporate this in a header, which is a graphical bar that will go across the top of your website. In addition, pictures of the product you are selling as well as any other pictures that pertain to the product are often helpful. Don't be too concerned with graphics at this point because if you are a complete beginner there are plenty of graphic and website creation services available that can handle the process from start to finish for very reasonable fees.
Creating your sales page-when someone hits your website it is your job to make sure that the message offered is compelling enough to encourage them to purchase the product. This is done through the use of the sales page.
Basically, the content, at least on the front page of your website, will be a part of the makeup of the sales page. You'll want to include all of the features and benefits concerning your product as well as testimonials from satisfied customers. Creating a sales page that really does an effective job of converting website visitors to purchasers is somewhat of an art form. Many successful copywriters charge thousands of dollars to create such sales letters but there are much cheaper alternatives available for you. One way is simply to create the sales letter yourself. If you take the time to include the compelling reasons of why someone would be interested in purchasing your product you can have great success doing this on your own without spending any money at all. If you choose to go it alone there are some great resources on the web to help you out, just search for how to write a sales letter on the Internet to get a hold of all of the free information you need to help you on your journey to completing your first sales letter. In addition, there are some web and software applications that will help you with this process.
Customer Tracking and follow up-once you get to the point where people are actually visiting your website you want to make sure that you capture some of their information because if they don't buy the very first visit, you have no way to follow up with them if they leave. The best way to do this is through the use of an auto-responder. An auto-responder is simply a type of software that will allow you to load prewritten messages into it and send them out to your potential prospects at regular intervals. You can encourage the visitors to submit their name and e-mail address in a small form located on your front page by enticing them with free offers if they do so. The free offers associated are the follow-up messages you will send using the auto-responder that are in the form of tips and valuable information pertaining to the subject of the product you're selling. These follow-up messages won't be necessarily sales messages, but they will allow you to stay on the mind of the prospect and remind them that your product is available. Offering any helpful tips and information pertaining to the subject they're interested in is often valued by the prospects and they may stay on your mailing list for some time and eventually buy the product you are selling when they signed up, or maybe choose to purchase something else you begin selling at a later date.
Taking Payments - Your website must have the ability to process customer's payments in order to deliver the product they wish to purchase. There are two main ways to do this, one being a traditional merchant account, and the other being online payment processors like PayPal. In order to make the most money from your website you want as many payment options as possible so choosing both of these options is the best way to do this. If you're brand new to the world of making money online, using a PayPal account provides an extremely easy option to get started.
With PayPal, you simply have to register and add your bank account information and have it verified. Once you've set up your account, you can install a buy now button directly on your website that once clicked allows the customer to make a payment that will be sent directly to your PayPal account.
Showing posts with label Content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Content. Show all posts
5 Steps to Creating Data-Driven Content
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In a perfect world it’s easy to relay data in a way that is relatable to your audience and easy to interpret. In that same world, your audience is always the same people with a predictable taste in content, right? I wish it were true. It would make many marketers’ lives easier and we could all sit on Reddit for a few more hours every day.
Thanks to the constantly growing bank of content available on the Internet, we’re living in a data democracy. You no longer have to be a journalist or professional researcher to find data and use it to strengthen your content.
Whether you’re creating infographics or data-heavy articles, below are a few methods and tools to help you dig up valuable data that will make your content shine.
While you can just pump keywords into a search engine and pray you’re shown the perfect link that tells you everything you’ve ever want to know, it isn’t always that simple.
Hans Rosling’s project, Gapminder, is a great way to collect data from around the world. There are simply too many statistics available to dive into this resource without some notion of what you’re looking for, so use this once you have a clear idea of what you’re focusing on.
Instead of trying to outdo or replicate some of the most labor-intensive content out there, use others’ brilliant data visualizations as a way to generate your own ideas. A great example is the project FilmStrips. Creating something like this handy interactive infographic looks like it would be quite an undertaking if you had a deadline of one day, right? Instead, you could narrow your topic to one focused aspect of the movie industry and use data from FilmStrips as a source.
Is there enough data to execute your idea? Before picking a topic, you’ll need to research what data is available. The last thing you want is to start a project only to discover you can’t finish it due to inadequate information.
Check out the following data sources when testing the viability of your topic:
Public records and government data. Governments collect a wealth of data and most of it is available to the public. Divorce rates, number of houses sold, or average pay of certain jobs, and unemployment rates are just a few of the statistics you can collect from government sites. Within the U.S., here is a great start to federal databases and state databases.General research. Use this list from the Journalist’s Toolbox to find databases on the Internet.Website demographics and traffic. Go to the Google DoubleClick Ad Planner and enter the target URL. Below is an example of the demographics for Wikipedia’s main page.
Knowing which types of data are even available is half the battle, but this will become second nature once you have more practice collecting data.
How reliable is the data you’re holding? Consider the following as a hierarchy of online sources, from most authoritative to least:
Academic journalsStudies and research reportsGovernment sitesUniversity sitesNewspapers and magazinesAuthoritative blogs
Many people are skeptical about the reliability of data that represents an entire population when only 1,000 or more people were surveyed. Believe it or not, when a survey has at least 1,000 people it has a margin of error of under 3 percent. At this point, you shouldn’t be concerned about the reliability of the info you find from surveys.
And while it may be extremely tempting to pull content from a site that may not be entirely legitimate, you shouldn’t take the easy way out. Assume your audience will comb through your content like it’s their job to look for mistakes. Keep that in mind when you’re considering taking shortcuts.
The data journalists over at the Seattle Times recommend that you allow your viewers to have the data you used. This adds a level of transparency and permits people to see how a conclusion was drawn using the info provided. If nothing else, always provide the source that you obtained your content from, if for nothing else than to give credit to the website from which the info was pulled.
If you’re struggling with data visualizations and need a kick start, here are a few options:
All of these options serve a purpose and while you shouldn’t spend a great deal of time on multiple items if they don’t work for you, you should at least consider all your options before delving into your projects.
There are three types of viewers: occasional users, data miners and active users.
Occasional users are simply interested in seeing the data visualized and not necessarily the actual numbers. While these viewers are great for your metrics, you might want to consider how active users are viewing the info…Active users are members of the audience who take what you present, share it with their friends, and give feedback on your piece so that you can further improve your process of content creation.Data miners only want your data to use for other purposes. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, you’re learning that your content has credibility and value to researchers.
With the ever-growing collection of data available on the Internet, anyone can use data to beef up their content with a lot less “fluff” and a lot more information. Using the above resources, you can find and collect data you can then build your content around.
How do you use data to strengthen your content? What are some great examples of data journalism you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments below.
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How to Breathe New Life Into Your Marketing With Visual Content
Visual content is awesome. It grabs your audience's attention, it's quick to consume, it's shareable, and for those for whom writing is a bigger nightmare than those dreams where you're late for school and don't have any pants on, visual content is a nice alternative to keep your content creation machine chugging.
Most people don't have any trouble coming up with ways to integrate visual content into, say, their social strategy (or maybe they do, which is why we're covering it in this post for good measure). But you should be thinking about the role visual content plays in all of your marketing channels -- from social media, to organic search, to your email marketing. Ready to learn how to integrate visual content in your marketing channels? Let's get started!
Alright, we're going to ease you into this visual content integration stuff by starting with social media -- I mean there are social networks that were built exclusively around visual content (I'm looking at you, Pinterest)! So this should come pretty naturally to you.
So let's start with Pinterest, the social sharing platform through which one can share images by pinning them to a pinboard that others can then share, or 'repin,' to help get that visual content spreading. If you're a business who creates visually stimulating products or offers services that yield something beautiful, I bet this seems pretty intuitive to you -- hairdressers pin pictures of amazing hair 'dos, clothing resellers pin pictures of hip ensembles, etc.
But what about B2B organizations? Or companies that do something kinda, well, boring? Take a cue from companies like GE and even us here at HubSpot. GE uses Pinterest to tell a visual story of their history, pinning pictures of how their products have evolved through the years and even getting users involved, running a #GEInspiredMe campaign that drives user-generated content. And HubSpot? That company that sells marketing software (yawn)? We pin a mix of marketing-related content -- data visualizations, infographics, and ebook covers -- along with pins that represent our brand in an out-of-the-box way, like you might find on our boards "Fun Orange Things," and "Things With Spots."
So no matter your organization, you can find a way to leverage Pinterest for your business -- just be sure to include links on all of your pins that lead back to a product or landing page of some sort so all of that Pinterest traffic can actually turn into leads and transactions on your website!
When it comes to Facebook, this year's Timeline update for business pages proved that Facebook intends to take its product in a more visual direction. Marketers have an opportunity to show their visual content chops right away with the new (much larger) cover photo -- and if you're looking for some inspiration, we've rounded up the best Facebook Timeline cover photos out there.
But the new layout provided more opportunity for visual content creators than just an expanded cover photo. With the ability to 'Star' and 'Pin' content, you can actually expand posts of visual content so it takes up more space on your page Timeline.
And according to an internal Facebook study, that's something you might want to do; page posts that include a photo album or picture can generate 2X more engagement than other post types. And more engagement means Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm will feature you more prominently in your fans' news feeds, further expanding your Facebook reach. So get creative! Post memes, cartoons, infographics -- even pull from your Pinterest account -- to keep your Facebook page chock full of the visual content your fans love.
If you're trying to find an opportunity to integrate visual content into your Twitter marketing, you may be thinking ... post twitpics! Well yes, you certainly can (and should!) upload pictures to your tweets, but the thing is, they don't display in streams unless a user actually clicks through to view the picture. So the biggest bang for your Twitter buck is using the customizable elements on your Twitter page to make your Twitter presence more visually-driven.
In addition to letting you upload a super cool user picture, Twitter allows for the customization of your page's background. For those followers who make it to your page, you can greet them with an aesthetically pleasing, branded, and even lead-generating background image. In fact, we've compiled our favorite examples of backgrounds on Twitter to help you get your creative juices flowing. And if you're not sure how to customize your Twitter background, well, we've got a post for that, too!
Still, given that most tweets are simply read out of individual users' feeds, it's important to focus on integrating visual content into your tweets themselves. This technique goes hand-in-hand with another extremely visual social network ...
Instagram is a mobile application for iPhone and Android that offers easy editing and social sharing of camera phone photographs. Since tweets are comprised entirely of text, linking to Instagram photos provides some refreshing visual content to break up the monotony. Check out the screenshot below of the HubSpot Unicorn's Instagram feed, which tells more of a story about the HubSpot brand than words ever could.
And since Instagram was recently acquired by Facebook, don't forget to apply those cool sepia-toned filters to some of your Facebook images, too. Think about it -- you're on the road filming a case study, you snap a picture of you and one of your favorite customers with the Instagram app, and upload the photo to your Timeline with a quote from your customer that shows how awesome she thinks your company is. Not some bad, on the fly visual content, eh?
Of course, we can't complete our discussion of visual social networks until we talk YouTube. Yes, visual content includes video, too! YouTube let's you create a mix of educational, how-to type content, entertaining content, and even slightly promotional content that addresses what your leads need at any stage of the sales cycle. We do it all the time -- we have YouTube videos on our HubSpot channel that teach you about marketing, silly music videos that make you laugh, and case study videos that highlight our customers' successes with HubSpot software.
The beautiful thing about YouTube videos is that, in addition to being easily shareable over just about any other social network you can think of, they're also easily embeddable into other channels (hello, blog content)! In fact, let's get into how visual content can be integrated into your blog right now.
Your blog and offer content are likely two of the biggest lead generators you have working for you. And since both will frequently find their way into your other channels -- email marketing, paid media, organic search -- taking them visual is key to making them even more intriguing than they already are.
When it comes to your blog, the easiest thing you can do is ensure that every single post has at least one relevant image. That first image is critical, because if you're sharing your blog content on social media (you are sharing your blog content on social media, right?), that image will be automatically pulled into the update. And if you read the previous section of this post, you know how important visual content is for driving social engagement!
But you know what? The more the merrier -- images (relevant images, of course) break up the monotony of text, and make it more likely your reader will reach the end of your blog post without feeling bombarded by a cacophony of characters. And if that's where your call-to-action resides, it's even more important to keep your reader's attention until the end. In fact, you can even create entire blog posts around visual content. We do this at HubSpot all the time, featuring infographics, compilations of marketing charts and graphs, and even inbound marketing cartoons as blog posts. In fact, we even indicate that the content within the blog post is visual by using brackets at the end of the post titles, like [Infographic] or [Cartoon] because we know our audience's affinity for visual blog content. I think you'll find periodically incorporating this type of content into your blog will be a welcome break from the text content your readers used to consuming.
If you're creating blog content, you should be creating offer content to go along with it -- you know, that content that lives behind the landing pages your blog visitors convert on? You may be used to creating offers that are more text-based, like ebooks or whitepapers. But these documents don't have to be (nay, shouldn't be!) pages and pages of copy. Use visuals to break up this content and make it more visually palatable for the reader. Take a look at one page from an ebook of ours, An Introduction to Lead Nurturing:
This page only has 150 words on it -- but that's a conscious decision. Because to help illustrate the point being made on the page, a data visualization is incorporated that not only makes the page easier to read, but helps support the claims being made in the copy.
You can also incorporate visual content into your offer content even more deliberately by creating offers that are entirely visually-based. As an example, we recently released an ebook, 55 Brands Rocking Social Media With Visual Content, that is comprised almost entirely of visuals. So although this offer is an ebook, it has actually transformed the ebook into a piece of visual content itself! Alternately, you can simply leverage offer content formats that are inherently visual by nature, like videos, slide shares, and data compilations.
Much like a blog post, including a relevant image within your email helps break up the monotony of text -- but visual content can play a more central role in your email marketing strategy than just eye candy.
The biggest opportunity to leverage visual content in your email marketing is with a visual call-to-action. Your emails should be succinct, doing everything they can do point the reader towards your call-to-action so that email send can generate clicks and conversions; and the fact is, text links within an email only go so far. We've written an entire post that shows you how to create a visually compelling call-to-action, using bright, contrasting colors and fully embracing the bigger is better mentality -- take a look for the nitty gritty details you need to make your email marketing CTAs pop.
But you can take visual content one step further by actually telling a story through visuals -- not copy -- in your emails. Take a look at how UncommonGoods did just that, highlighing for-sale products as they told a story about how those products might play into a customer's life.
We've compiled the best visual content out there to help inspire your visual content and email marketing integration -- just read our post, "Feast Your Eyes on These 9 Examples of Beautiful
Finally, you can even give your video content some extra promotion by featuring it in your email campaigns. While you shouldn't embed emails directly within an email message (not all email clients have the ability to play videos within emails), you can take a screenshot of your video, superimpose the triangular "play" button we all know and love from online video content, and simply link your video to the page on your website on which that video lives!
If you're interested at all in SEO, you're interested in how your content ranks in Google. Well, how your visual content ranks is just as important as how your text-based content ranks! The problem is, search engines don't read images too well. Hmph.
Don't worry! There's recourse for visual content creators! Google's crawlers look for certain attributes of your visual content to be able to "read" it and index it in organic search, accordingly. What you have to do is give Google's crawlers the right information about your image so that can be done. We've written a guide to help you optimize images for Google search that you can read in it's entirety, but here are the highlights:
The only image file types you should use are BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.Your image file names should use words that describe the content of the image.Use image alt text to describe the image.Provide context for the image in the page's surrounding text, if possible.Submit an image sitemap.Use descriptive anchor text when linking to images.
When you follow these steps for, say, an infographic on unicorn feeding habits, you can ensure your infographic is not only indexed in search, but is considered as a result in the SERPs for queries about unicorn feeding habits! And remember, the competition isn't quite as stiff when users are searching in the "Images" part of Google (as opposed to "Web"), so you could be getting even more love from searches of that nature when your visual content is well-optimized.
How do you leverage visual content in your marketing channels?
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