What makes a video go viral?
It’s the question that internet marketers are asking, and trying to come up with the right answer has proven fruitless for most. It would be great if it were predictable, A + B = C; if you follow this formula, then your video or blog post will be seen and liked by millions, resulting in sales, hits or ad revenue, whatever your goal… As scientific as marketing is, a successful viral campaign rarely follows that elusive formula.
Check out this article at The Daily Dot, regarding a video which unintentionally received more than 3.4 million views on YouTube.
What Makes A Website: What The Other Guys Are Doing
Whether you are starting your website from scratch or doing a redesign or upgrade, an important element to consider is what the other guys are doing. Yes, that’s right… your competition. It’s important to know what you are up against when you enter or re-enter the playing field.
First, start with the obvious… the aesthetics of the website. Take off your company hat for a moment and pretend you are a prospective customer. Looking at your competitor’s website through that lens will give you perspective on what works and how you can do it your way… and possibly better.
Okay, put your company hat back on and look at the overall digital presence of your competitors. How they use video, blogs, and social media to spread their marketing message. We mentioned a few posts ago about a handy little tool from our friends at Hubspot called Marketing Grader that will allow you to analyze how your website presence stacks up to the others in your marketplace.
As you are browsing through the websites of your competitors you will most likely see a lot of things you like and want to implement. But DO NOT copy! That’s the worst thing you can do! As I said above, do it your way… but do it better. That will make you stand out above the rest.
How does your website measure up to the competition? Is it time for an upgrade? Let us help!
What Makes A Website: Analyzing Analytics
Okay, so you’ve got this website, right? You heard somewhere that you should have that “Analytics” thingy on it so it can track the traffic to your site. So, you (or the person who designed your website) installed it and now you’re all good. Right? Well, sort of. Yes, it’s great that you have analytics embedded into your website and it is steady tracking away, but you really should pay close attention to the data it is gathering. If you don’t, you could be missing out on very valuable adjustments that you could be making to increase the efficiency of your website. Analyzing your analytics can help shape your business goals and marketing efforts. Let’s look at what analytics measure and why they are important to you…
Visitors - It’s pretty common knowledge that analytics tracks the number of visitors to your site, but more importantly, it shows how many unique visitors stop by. Unique visitors are the NEW people that check you out. You are able to see and distinguish between new and repeat visitors and monitor how your site is performing from that perspective.
Traffic Sources - Want to know where all of your visitors come from? Analytics will show you! You can see if they came to you directly… that is, they actually typed in your URL or they found you some other way, such as a link from another website or a search engine. You can also see what browsers these visitors are using. This all is very valuable information because you can place focus on these entities in your business and marketing strategies.
Keywords - Piggy-backing on traffic sources, you can also see which keywords visitors used to bring them to your site. This is EXTREMELY important! The ones that work are the ones you need to make sure are infused into your content and messaging.
Page Views - Which pages are getting the most attention? Your page views will tell you. Now you’ll know what information is most important to the people visiting your site.
Time Spent - Analytics also shows how much time (on average) a visitor spends on your website. The longer they hang out with you, the more engaged they are with your business and content.
So, you see… analytics are not just some website thingy left to run in the background. They should be checked and checked often so that you employ the best practices for optimal website and business performance.
The Best Time To Be Sociable
We’ve spoken extensively about social networks with regards to creating strategies to build and connect with your audience. As a part of your planning you may be wondering when are the best times to engage with your audience. Do peak times vary for different platforms?
The lovely folks over at Social Caffeine have created this handy-dandy infographic to let you know when you should (and should not) post on your social media sites.
What Makes A Website: The Backup Plan
Imagine you woke up this morning and your website was gone. Like literally gone. Disappeared. Vanished into thin air. POOF! Flatlined. Yes, that can actually happen. How? Well, there are a ton of reasons… your web hosting company went belly-up or they got hacked or somebody just pressed the wrong button… who knows. In any case, you need to back that thing up! Ahem… your website, that is.
Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT your hosting company’s responsibility to create and maintain a backup copy of your website, it’s YOURS. Some hosting companies do backup sites for their own protection but rarely make the copies available to their clients so it’s best that you do it yourself for your own peace of mind.
Here are a few tips for your backup plan…
Choose the Right Backup Method: There are many different ways to backup your site. It’s best to choose a method that works for your budget and schedule
- Manual backups in which you download your website to a file on your computer.
- Panel-based backups where you use your website’s control panel to save your files.
- Cloud backups allow you to save to services like Amazon S3 or Dropbox and you can access your files from any computer.
- Special backup software and/or automated solutions that you can pay for to have the ease of scheduled backups.
Determine a Backup Schedule: Whether it’s once a day or once a week, the idea is to backup as often as your website changes…or more. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Check Up On Your Backups: This is a step that is often forgotten. You may think that if you are backing up your site, that’s all you need to do. Every once in a while, it’s good to check your files just to be sure they are all there and there is no corrupt data or any weirdness going on. You just never know.
With a good backup plan you can ensure that if anything ever goes wrong, your site will return to its full, uninterrupted glory in a matter of minutes.
What’s your backup plan? Let us know how you are maintaining the safety of your website!
What Makes A Website: The Good, The Fast, and The Cheap
Now it’s time to give you something straight… no chaser! It’s about the quality and cost of a good and functional website, and you may or may not like it… but you need to know it, and you definitely need to know it before you hire a website designer/developer. You want your website to be good. You want it fast and you want it cheap. Here’s the thing… you can only have two. Having all three is impossible in this realm of existence.
Here’s an awesome little illustration that clearly illustrates how having the divine trifecta is a pipe dream. Yes, it says graphic design but the concept applies to your website as well.
But let’s break it down just a bit further, shall we?
First of all you have to define the “Good.” Good in website terms would basically be having an attractive and fully optimized website that does everything you’ve envisioned. Based upon that vision, you’ve got to determine how your schedule and budget fit into it.
Good and Fast will not be Cheap - To get the website of your dreams in a hurry, will mean that you hire quality designers that can drop everything they are doing to get you on the web, for a nice fee that will allow them to do so. What you want and how quickly you need it will determine the price, and “expensive” is relative. But know this, you will get what you pay for… in a good way.
Good and Cheap will not be Fast - Again, you will hire quality designers who will work within your budget but you will be threaded in with the other demanding clients. Not saying you’ll have to wait a long time or that your project will not be a priority, but the price will not allow them push you to VIP status.
Fast and Cheap will not be Good - Based upon the first two explanations, I think you can deduce that going this route will be a case of “you get what you pay for”… but not in a good way. It won’t be awful, but it won’t ideally be what you wanted for your website or business.
It’s your call. Is effectiveness important? or efficiency? Cost or quality? It’s good to be aware of your objectives and the time and dollar cost required to make those objectives happen.
What Makes A Website: Stick The Landing
Landing pages can be a very important part of your marketing strategy. Essential, even. They are, in essence, what turns a website visitor into a company customer. A landing page is where your potential customer lands after clicking a link from your website, an ad, or an eNewsletter. A landing page is usually dedicated to a specific product or service related to the content the visitor was just reading that caused them to click and find out more. The greatest thing about landing pages is that people arrive there because they wanted to… it was their choice to click the link; so there is a greater chance they really want be there, and do whatever it is you are asking them to do… buy now, request a demo, sign up, register for the event, etc.
Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they’ve converted on. ~Hubspot
Getting them to land is just the first step. From there, you’ve got to make visitors want to take the next step to becoming a customer. So how do we get them to stick the landing?
Here’s a video from Ezine Articles with some great tips on creating effective landing pages…
What Makes A Website: Making the Brand
A company’s brand is visible throughout all types of media. You see it in product packaging, TV commercials, print ads, and in-store decoration or displays. Of course branding also applies to web design. Earlier in this series we briefly touched on branding as it relates to general design, but now let’s dive in a bit deeper and discuss how your website can actually help build and boast your company’s brand from an overall business and marketing perspective.
Color:
We’ve already mentioned how keeping colors consistent on your site is important, but it goes far beyond aesthetics. Colors can trigger emotions and conjure up experiences in humans. We associate colors with particular subjects. What feelings and thoughts and associations do you want to evoke when people visit your website?
Personality:
Does your brand have character? Giving your brand a little personality can help you portray what it stands for. Just like with colors, many people gravitate towards certain products and brands because they identify with them in some way. If your company is about financial stability, does your brand make people feel like they will be safe in your care? If your company is about travel adventures, does your brand make people want to get away from it all? Shape your brand’s character towards something which your audience will like to associate themselves with.
Voice:
We’ve spoken extensively about content, and the way your brand “voice” brings the color and character all the way home. It’s not just about what you say, it’s about how you say it. The language you use on your website needs to reinforce your brand’s personality as well as directly speak to your target audience. The website of a hot new coffee shop may have a more hip, fun, informal tone than say that of a new medical practice specializing in Alzheimer’s care.
Effective branding will help set you apart from the competition and make your site and your business memorable. How do you use your website to make your brand stand out? Let us know!
What Makes A Website: The Need For Speed
Ah…the technology age. The era of “we want what we want when we want it.” And when do we want it? NOW! Hence the beauty of the internet. All the information we want at the speed of light… unless of course you have a slow website. There is nothing more frustrating then waiting for a page to load when you are in a hurry. Gone are the days of being held hostage by a desktop. We are on the move with laptops and mobile devices which makes the need and desire to obtain information quickly all the more urgent. To add insult to injury, Google is now factoring “performance” into its search rankings. With everyone in the need for speed, can your company’s website performance keep up? It starts with that funny little word “optimization.”
Well speaking of Google and optimization, they’ve got a handy little free tool on their developer site to see how your website’s performance measures up as it relates to how your site is optimized.
Fast and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. The PageSpeed family of tools is designed to help you optimize the performance of your website. PageSpeed Insights products will help you identify performance best practices that can be applied to your site, and PageSpeed optimization tools can help you automate the process.
Are you delivering on your visitors’ need for speed? Let us know how your website performs!
Continue Your Education For FREE
It’s back-to-school season! While you’re packing lunches or watching the yellow school busses roll by, you may be giving thought to your own education. Toying with the idea of going back to school to amp up your resume or just to gain more knowledge about a field of study that’s important to your business. You may not necessarily aiming for an advanced degree but you’d like a like a little boost to your brain. As a busy entrepreneur growing a business by your bootstraps, time and tuition can certainly put your scholarly dreams on hold. Well, guess what? We’ve found a solution for you!
Our friends at LifeHacker have created LifeHacker University and the fall semester is in session!
We’ve put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this fall for our third term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Schools like Yale University, MIT, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and many more are all offering free online classes that you can audit and participate in from the comfort of your office chair, couch, or computing chair-of-choice.
There’s something for everyone at LifeHacker U. Courses in technology, math, finance, science, law, and the humanities cover a wide range of interests. There are a good number of courses that business owners can benefit from such as “Information Security and Risk Management” from the University of Washington and “Finding Money to Start a Business” from the University of Pennsylvania.
Whether you’re just brushing up on familiar skills or eager to learn something entirely new, LifeHacker U will quench your thirst for knowledge.
