Jack Werner’s Blog

This tip will work equally well on your Website, in brochures, in your promotional videos, or anywhere you are marketing or advertising.

Write your message to appeal to your audience, not you. People don’t want to hear you brag about yourself, or how great your product is. People want you to help them solve their problem.

For instance, a pipe bursts in your house at 2:00 AM, and you’re frantically searching online or in the Yellow Pages for a plumber.
You come across two candidates.

One site boasts about his 25 years experience, his fleet of trucks, and all his satisfied customers. All good things to know, but…

The next site has similar copy, just further down the page.
His heading, in big bold letters reads…
Need a plumber fast? We’re available 24/7. Call us right now, we can be on our way in under 5 minutes, day or night.
By the way, we have 25 years experience, a fleet of trucks, and lots of satisfied customers.

I don’t know about you, but plumber number 2 certainly got my attention.
He provided an immediate solution to my problem.

This is used in successful advertising all the time, benefits sell your product, features justify the buying decision.

This process works equally well even if people are searching for good things.

When someone is planning a world cruise, and looking for a travel agent, their “problem” is making sure they get the best deals.
You need to position yourself as the agent that will solve this problem for them.

So design your Website to help your visitor, not brag about yourself.
Remember, its all about them, not you.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…

How much do you know about the people who are visiting your site?
Do you know what operating system they are using?
How about their browser…Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox?
More importantly, how did they get to your site?
What search terms did they use?
What pages did they click on, and how much time did they spend on each page?
Did they go to a certain page more than once?

All this is valuable information that you can use to improve not only the effectiveness of your site, but this is also be a great marketing research tool. By analyzing data such as search terms used, you can change you web copy to match exactly the most popular search terms used. Your visitors will think you made the site just for them.

And all this information is free. It comes to you through a program called Google Analytics. Once you sign up, you copy and paste a small piece of code they give you onto the pages on your site where this data would be valuable. Then, within a couple of weeks, all the information is available to you in a variety of reports generated by the system.
All free, and courtesy of Google.
Go to www.Google.com/analytics to learn more.

Free marketing data, it doesn’t get better than that.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…

Here’s a tip for getting more traffic to your site… use external links.
These are links back to your site from other sites.

A large part of Google’s ranking is based on how many of these links you have.
So, how can you generate these links? Two ways.

One is to visit other sites similar to yours, and request a link exchange. For this to be effective, the sites you talk to should be in the same general interest area as your site. You obviously wouldn’t request a link exchange with your competition, but what about with your suppliers, or even some of your customers, or perhaps trade associations.

A second way to generate external links is to visit blogs, forums, or websites, again in your field, and leave pertinent comments. These comments must be of value to the discussions taking place.

It is essential that you don’t advertise or blatantly promote yourself in your comments! This is considered SPAM, and you will be kicked out.

What is allowed however is a tag line and a link back to your site in your signature. Two good things happen here, one, if your comments offer value to the reader they may just click on your link to find out more about you, and two, even if nobody clicks, you have still generated an external link, and Google will take note of that fact.

If you can add just one or two of these links a week, you will see your rankings steadily improve.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…

As I’ve said before, for high search result rankings, you have to please the Google gods.

So, if you sell widgets, you must make sure the phrase “widget” is used in the copy throughout your site, especially on the home page.
But there’s more to it than simply using the phrase “widget”.

Put yourself in the mind of your visitor.
What search term would they use if they are looking for your product?
Would they search simply for widgets, or maybe for industrial strength widgets, or environmental friendly widgets, or even for custom made widgets.

Research is showing that people use 2, 3, and even 4 word search phrases.
You have to think about all the possibilities they may try when searching for your product, and you have to incorporate those different phrases into your web copy.

Doing this will make Google very happy, and you will be rewarded with qualified visitors to your site.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…

Let’s talk about getting traffic to your site.

You may have the greatest looking site, with amazing functionality, but if no one is visiting you, it’s not helping at all.
You have to get the search engines like Google, and Yahoo placing you high up in their page rankings.

There are lots of ways to do this, and we’ll talk more about Search Engine Optimization in future episodes, but for now, let’s talk about one of the major factors Google considers when ranking your site… content.

Google wants its users to experience accurate search results, with high quality information, not a blatant sales pitch.
So if you’re a widget manufacturer, and your site offers lots of information on the history of widgets, and a white paper on European widgets vs North American widgets, and a blog all about widgets,  you will rank a lot higher with the search engines than your competitor who’s home page screams buy our widgets today.

Offering all this information will also build trust with your visitors.
It not only establishes you as an expert, but lowers your visitor’s sales resistance when you ask for the order.

Remember, content is king for both search engines and human visitors.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about web site creation.

The very first question we ask our clients when they hire us to build their site is…
What do you want your site to do? Do you want it to…

Sell a product or service?
Capture visitor’s contact information?
Show people you’re an expert in your field?
Do you want to talk about your people?
Are you trying to get a visitor to bookmark your site so they come back again?

In many cases, you want to accomplish all of these, and that’s fine, but you have to establish an order of priority. Too many sites we see try to do it all right on the home page. This will just confuse your visitor, and they are likely to move on to another site before you can convey your message. So, the very first question you must answer is…
“If I can accomplish only one objective when someone visits my site, it is to…”

This exercise is a lot harder than you think, but finding the right order of priorities is the key to a successful web site.

For more information about Cattails please visit Cattails.ca.
To see more video powerpoint presentation tips please visit CattailsTV.

See you soon, Jack…