If you’ve been on the web awhile, you already know where the action is today.  But in case you don’t or need a refresher course, or want this information in a format you can share, here it is.

This YouTube video sets out the dynamics of what makes up the best, most effective and far reaching marketing today: the triumvirate of Facebook, Twitter and your Blog.  Plus many other 0utlets like YouTube.  Social Media also has the capability of being as hyper-local or one to one as you want it so it’s almost infinitely customizable to meet your goals:

If any of this is a challenge to you and you think you need some help, just contact us, and we’ll get right back to you.

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I’m a big believer in automating as many tasks as possible on a website. Given the enormous commitment of time and energy it takes to maintain an interesting and robust website or blog , I’ll take all the sophisticated, tech-savvy help I can get. That’s why many webmasters use  WordPress to deploy attractive websites loaded with plug ins and widgets to enable those little automated pieces of software to do heavy lifting on their own, with occasional but diligent monitoring and supervision by the person in charge.

That’s what plugins and widgets are for: to free you up for the big thoughts, the hot trends, the strategic processes.  You need to be focusing your energies on doing the things a piece of software can’t do: like talking to clients, understanding their needs, overcoming their objections and developing strategy.  Here are a few handy recommendations to put to work for your site:

• Google XML Sitemaps, using the Sitemap protocol , helps you get listed in search engines as they are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.  They  provide  additional data about each page (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other pages/URLs in the site.)  They also notify Ask.com, Google, Bing and YAHOO about changes via ping always keeping your site’s fresh content in front of the search engine audience.
• All in One SEO Effective SEO, search engine optimization, strategy is critical in getting your website business in front of the right prospects. Well executed SEO  is a cornerstone of your online business which will dramatically increase your free, targeted traffic.

There are many, many more. Look for any plug in which will allow you to put that aspect of your business on autopilot.  Then use your time to grow your business.

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Today, one of the best ways to gather the demographic you are targeting for your website is through social media.

Users or Net denizens naturally gather into communities of interest.  You can easily mine this information by tracking where your desired audience spends its time and shares content. You can do this by using social media monitoring sites like WebTrends or searching Twitter for hashtags with the subject matter of your website.  Since this is your website and presumably your interest as well, you can turn to all the Twitterati whom you follow and see who they follow and soon you will have stumbled onto a community with like interests matching that of your website.

The next step is to make a game plan to market your content, which will ultimately result in establishing your credibility in the field and making you the go to guy or gal for a particular product or service.  As Lee Oddenm CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor at Online Marketing Blog points out in his article and graphic, Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success:

“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:”

You will select specific sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to start driving traffic to your content and building relationships for your brand.

Ultimately, by creating this depth of community, sparking interaction and increasing user generated content, in the form of comments and feedback, you are enriching your users’ experience and delivering more value to your target market as potential customers.  So, overall, using this strategy is a win- win for all, both for you and the community you are reaching out to through social media.

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That’s the wrong question.

There is an almost limitless choice of websites online and in the blogosphere .  You can get a free website produced on just about any kind of template, from professional to soccer team to classroom to project management.  You can even get free hosting and some of the bells and whistles.  For about five bucks a month, Intuit offers a 5 page customizable web site, easy to set up and manage with no  programming required. Most of these programs offer a variety of standard industry templates and stock photos. Using any of these programs you can produce a website.  But then what?  A website has got to work hard to earn its keep and how do you go about that?  Throwing a website, particularly a cookie-cutter, website up on the Net is only the first step.

The right question is:  how much will a website cost which will enable me to maximize the potential revenues from my business?

With a cookie cutter website, what you’ll have is…… well, a cookie cutter website.  At some point, what you will need is a person who thoroughly understands the web business – not just web coding or even web design but the business dynamics of the web and how to apply them to your business goals. Ideally, what you will want from your developer, is not just the ability to produce a website, but someone who has the experience and capacity to understand your business and your vision,  who will understand how to best reach out to and capture your core market on the web.  He or she will then know, from deep experience, how to convert those prospects into customers on your website.

When you look at a web developer’s credentials you should ask yourself, not just what his websites look like, but how well they have performed and what kind of results they’ve achieved for the website owner.  It’s the same principle as looking at a gorgeous sports car on the showroom floor.  It may  be gorgeous but, if there’s nothing under the hood and it can’t get you from Point A to Point B, where you want to go, it has no value to you.

As mentioned in Outsourcing Overseas : “There really is no substitute for experience. You probably wouldn’t hire an overseas architect at $15 an hour to design your home, and if your website is going to be your main business portal then it’s just as important! On the other hand, if you just needed a storage shed in your backyard, there probably isn’t much point in paying an expert architect $10,000 to design it when you could outsource the project for $1000. ”

So what a website should cost depends on your needs and your goals.  If you are  a classroom teacher who wants to put up a simple website to teach your students a lesson, then a free template might be all you require.  If you are just exploring the concept of starting your own business, while holding down your day job, an inexpensive template might be a way to “test the water” and gain a little experience, before putting much actual cash and effort into the project. But, if you’re a serious business person with a serious business that you’ve invested time and money in,  it may be well worth it for you to make a sufficient investment in your web development to get it right, from the start.  Since most successful website owners eventually have to make that kind of investment, it may be better to do it in the beginning to take full advantage of those enhancements, right off the bat.

Here are some resources to help you make an informed decision on website pricing:

Go to How Much Does A Website Cost ? for a thorough discussion of the four common types of web design pricing used in the industry today.

• Hourly Rate
• Project Price
• Package Rates
• Per Page Cost

If you wish to input specifics about your planned website to get a general estimate of what it should cost, go to Web Design Cost Pricing Calculator .  Or from the same source, here is a general guide to website pricing:

Web Design Pricing Calculator

Clearly, you don’t want your website to just be pretty.  You want it to work hard for your business, too.

In order for that to happen, you’ve got to install automated functions into your website for it to perform.  And you have to tell your website visitor how they should interact with you, if they are interested in your product or service.

Peter Drucker, management guru, pointed out that effectiveness is a habit, a practice of doing things, one step at a time, in a well thought out, systematic way. If you put more structure into your organization, put as many small, routine tasks as possible on autopilot,  then you will be freed up for the big moment, the huge contracts, the momentous decisions. Using your website to automate routine tasks enables you to accomplish the greatest amount of work with the least wasted motion. The fewer people you need to hire,  the more effective and profitable your business will be.

Let’s start with a couple of simple tasks.

How will your customer get in contact with you?

Don’t  just give an email address.  And certainly don’t give an email address that your friends may find cute but your customers may perceive as unprofessional, like snugglybunny@yahoo.com or bigbadbear@hotmail.com.  Better to use a contact form where you receive a standardized heading in your inbox, have a some control over what information is given and you can use a captcha device to filter out spam.  There are plenty of free contact forms out there.  One I particularly like is Fast Secure Contact form, a free, super customizable Word Press plugin with a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Once installed, it’s a hands-free automated process which will really get the conversation between you and your potential customer off and running.

Standardize your prices

Ideally, you should have firm prices in advance, so each time you have a prospect, you don’t have to go through the draining process of  facing a whole new set of decisions to establish a price for that particular item. In order  to set firm prices,  you will have to “systematize” your business; that is, sit down and think through every step that goes into producing the final product or service, how much it costs, then add in your profit margin. Then you can set firm prices on each item you sell.  That will allow you to spend your energy figuring out the system not dealing with improvised solutions to moment by moment issues or problems.

Next Step: link those firm prices to online payment functions

This is simple enough.  If you don’t already have one, then go to  Paypal.com to set up an account so you can take online payments through major credit or debit cards or electronic checks.  The small transaction fee is well worth enabling the buyer to act now, online ,  with whatever method best suits him.  You can go into Paypal.com‘s merchant tools and set up a badge to install on your website that allows a user to choose any of the products or services at the prices you’ve inputted and also has an option to track your inventory or profit, if you choose, another automated time saver.

Finally, put a customer intake form on your website

You’ve used your website to broadcast your credentials and your wares,  been successful in attracting a customer, then used your website for the actual online payment transaction. Now, you can have the same Paypal.com badge, when completed, direct your customer back to a customer intake form. You can use the same Fast Secure Contact form, with it’s multi-form feature, to create an intake form where the customer will fill in all the preliminary information you need from him to begin fulfilling his order.  For example, if you are selling sofa slip covers, you would want to know the dimensions of his sofa, the type of fabric he wants, the color and styling and other details.  Just figure out all the details you need to save time collecting them from the customer each time you get an order.

At this point you’re ready to start the process of fulfillment. That’s a lot of heavy lifting, completed automatically by your savvy and hardworking website, which, if used to its capacity, will become one of the most prized members of your virtual “staff”.

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by Gretchen Glasscock

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to walk clients through this concept:  it’s not just a website, it’s a business.  Your website is a reflection of your business.  If you don’t have a viable business model –  a way to produce income sufficient to sustain and grow your business — then you can put up an attractive website and hit all the marks, even bring in a ton of traffic and it still won’t achieve your goals. To produce a sustainable revenue stream from your website you have to know what business you’re in.   You have to know who your clients or customers are and how to converse with them on the web.  Then you have to get someone who knows what they are doing to embed your business processes and methods into your website.  Those are the hooks that will make you money.

Before you launch your website, think through, in advance, what your sources of revenue will be. If you’ve already launched and aren’t seeing the results you were hoping for, stop, take a deep breath. and start thinking seriously about your business model and your revenue stream(s).  If you need help figuring this out , ask for it. Even if you’re a nonprofit, you still will need revenue.  Analyze if there are any foundations that might be likely to support you.  Ask yourself if you site will attract advertising, which, on its own, is not likely to sustain you.

This is really a threshold question, as you can’t plan, launch and operate a business with no money.  You can probably get it launched, but there are still associated costs.  You can devote 100% of your time to it and get by on very minimal costs for awhile, but, eventually, you have to make a living.  You can hold down a daytime job and work on this in the evenings and week ends, but still, eventually, your business-website has to sustain itself, so this is a question you should face and resolve sooner rather than later.

If you are still trying to puzzle this out, what direction to take developing a viable business model on the web, contact me , I’ll be happy to brainstorm with you.

Related articles

• 7 Tips for Creating a Sustainable Biz Model (environmentalleader.com)
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Welcome to GGWebGroup.

I am Gretchen Glasscock, President and CEO of GGWebGroup. My websites have won the Lycos Top 5% Award, Dow Jones Award, Beatrice-Yahoo Top Site, and WWWomen Best of Net, one is listed in Femina as a top women’s career site- featured in Elle, Self, Women and Success, and Fast Company magazines, Access and Business Class magazines, and the Business Journal.

If you’re a decision maker in a business or organization, I can either build a website for you or show you how to adapt your present site to make your web site work smarter, not harder, and accomplish your goals in an effective, systematic way.

Website Strategy

We can help you identify and prioritize the strategies and tools that will best attract and provide value for your audience and your organization. We then will work with you to fuse smart strategic business processes with powerful new Net platforms and cutting edge technology that will positively impact your bottom line.

Marketing & Media

We will work with you to build online marketing and social media programs designed to create a “sticky” website, increase communication and interactivity with your users, and drive traffic, user acquisition and profitability.

Value We Add To Your Organization

We’ve created websites and done website work for national organizations, universities, green businesses, European software companies and political organizations. One recent website went live in January 2009, had this result approximately 6 weeks later:

Website traffic stats from Alexa.com:
% of users who visit this site: up 1400%
Traffic rank up 6,519,680
Page views up 440%

So, can I help you with your website? I absolutely can. And I would love to work with you.

Contact me if I can help you with your website.