Let’s face it – if you’re a small business, you’re a specialty store to some degree – whether you practice law or sell twinsets.

Due to scale, you simply can’t afford to be everything to everyone. The resources just aren’t there.

We know this to be true, which is why we don’t even try to go head-to-head with some of the giant online marketing firms out there.

If we dilute our offerings too much we lose our essential Rowboat-ness, which includes our unique blend of irreverence, gravitas, and very personal service.

Losing customers by trying to be everything to everyone

I came across this article on the venerable women’s clothing store Talbot’s and how they have nearly run themselves out of business by making the same mistake – and when numbers are down, it’s a very easy mistake to make.

Lazard Capital’s Davis says Talbots may need to decide whether it is targeting mothers in twill or their daughters in animal prints before it can return to profitability. “If a specialty store tries to please everyone,” she says, “they alienate everyone.”

Whether you’re offering blazers or bankruptcy filings, the same wisdom holds true – if you can’t picture your specific client in your head, you’re about to be wandering in the big dark forest wearing a red hoodie and carrying meat sandwiches.

By contrast, Ann Taylor, another retailer known for its conservative women’s clothing, decided to give themselves a complete overhaul, go after a completely different customer, and they pulled it off beautifully. How?

Commitment.

Instead of hedging their bets and trying to keep their old customers because they were afraid it wouldn’t work to go after the new demographic, they committed 100% by changing everything about their stores, their product line, from end-to-end. It was very expensive and risky – yet less risky than trying to straddle the fence.

Result: Profits rose 21% in one year, right in the middle of this here recession.

Who do you specialize in helping? Who do you WANT to be helping?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are mutually exclusive – which means you’re in the same boat as Ann Taylor and need to make a 100% course correction. Other times, they’re consistent – but are your marketing and your offerings consistent with the answer?

Take a look at your online presence.

Does the tone and quality of your content speak to that person? (Yes – think of this client as a single individual).

What questions do they have that you’re not answering? What objections are you not overcoming?

Does the look and feel of your website appeal to that person? Is it easy for them to take the desired action – the one that puts money in your pocket?

Are they likely to view your website on a mobile device? Have YOU viewed your website on a mobile device lately?

Are you having to admit to yourself that the results of this internal audit aren’t pretty?

We can help YOU help them.

Just call us Jerry Maguire.

Here are some of the ways we can help you bring your marketing in line with the clients you want to have – with total commitment.

Go forth and prosper.

Photo Credit: Vitor Sá via Compfight

That’s actually a trick title, as the two aren’t necessarily related – but people think they are – and in the spirit of “if you keep emailing out the same information over and over again, that’s CONTENT” that I wrote about in How to create a 100 page website without breaking a sweat, here’s the answer.

Common scenario:

We receive an email from a design prospect wanting to know what WE were going to do to get them to page 1 of Google, and providing a link to a competitor with high rankings. The prospect also implies that they are considering using the web studio that competitor used for that reason.

The answer:

No designer has the magical ability to create a website that is, by virtue of its design, catnip to Google. Google has zero taste whatsoever and does not care what your website looks like.

What it DOES care about is what is ON your website – that dreaded word again – content. If your competitor has lots of deep, relative content and you’ve got four thin pages, he wins – regardless of how garish his color scheme is.

Other than creating relevant content, the way a designer can help you with SEO is by creating an architecture that does the following:

• Presents your content in such a way that users can easily navigate through it to find the information they need, which means they stay on your site longer (time on site is a statistic Google tracks)
• Creates an appealing design that helps visitors realize they are in the right place, so they don’t click away immediately due to a lack of trust engendered by an ugly, outdated, slow-loading dinosaur of a website (this reduces bounce rate – the number of people who click your site and then bounce right out).
• Makes it easy for you to update your website yourself, so that you have no barriers to creating and posting more and more relevant content more and more often.
• Contains an inherently search robot-friendly chassis, like WordPress – which basically means that the structure STAYS OUT OF THE WAY and makes it fast and easy for the robot to index the content. Every static HTML website has a different structure, which slows the crawler down. Don’t even get me started about Flash websites, which hide all the content from the robots and provide their hapless owners with an unintended cloak of invisibility.
• Includes SEO fields you can edit for each and every page – the title and description that Google uses are extremely important. Quality frameworks like Thesis and Genesis include these built in – if you’re using a free theme, you may need to add them with a plugin.
• Includes built-in blogging capability, so that you can blog on your professional website and take advantage of the SEO boost this provides. Often your blog posts can end up outranking your static content – but if they lead visitors to the same website, you win.

Easy SEO wins you can get from a redesign:

Convert from a static HTML site to a WordPress-based website. As long as your designer/developer pays attention to making sure old HTML links are redirected to the new links, you can see a long-term boost just due to this change in architecture.

Add the extra content you’ve been wanting to add, but didn’t – because updating a website without a good content management system (CMS) is annoying and risky. If you want your redesign to REALLY pay off, though, keep adding more relevant content.

In the process, pay close attention to your metadata – your previous designer might have let you launch with a silly meta title, which Google still indexes. Ask them to review this for you. Your competitor might be kicking your butt due to this one thing alone.

Content again

Ultimately, it all comes down to content. We have a client with a 100 page HTML site who is dominating despite her crazy architecture (no page is structured just like any other page), because – hello – 100 pages of good content? Even she, however, is converting to WordPress, which is like sticking a rocket onto an already fast Thoroughbred.

Confused, overwhelmed, need help?

We can help with content. We can help with blogging. And if you need one-on-one consulting to figure out exactly where to begin, consider our coaching packages.

Go forth and prosper!

The blank slate. The tabula rasa.

Don’t we all cower before its implacability? As a matter of fact, I’m cowering right now – so much I want to say on this subject, but oh, the whiteness of this cursed WordPress Edit Post window!

However, I soldier on entirely for you, dear readers. ::gag::

In my many weekly conversations with clients and potential clients, the biggest stumbling block to getting a new website going – or breathing new life into an old, stagnant one – is content. We’d all rather discuss pretty colors, typefaces, and arranging deck chairs on the Titanic graphic elements, but ultimately it comes down to having something to say.

Not only must you have something to say, that something must serve the readers visiting your website looking for information, and ultimately serve you by nudging those readers into becoming people who pay you money.

So – seasoned business owners and professionals ask me – “what should be on my website?”

Start with 7-10 pages

First, the basics.

You need a home page. This is the one that stumps most people the hardest because it’s the most important. Odds are, readers will land there first and you have 2.5 seconds to convince them, both with words and your design, that you’re trustworthy and eminently hireable. Therefore, this should be the LAST of your initial 7-10 pages that gets written – it will serve to provide a summary of the rest of the information, possibly link to the interior pages you’ve created, and draw the reader further in. You can’t see the forest for the trees at this point, so write the rest of the pages first and circle back around to the home page.

You don’t need to write a novel. We find that most topics can be covered in about 350-500 words, tops. If it gets longer than that, consider creating another page. To put that into perspective, the end of this sentence is word 326.

Keep separate topics separate. If you are a lawyer, and you practice personal injury law, you know there are many types of personal injury. Automobile accidents, medical malpractice, brain injury, pedestrian injury – each one gets a page. You can create a master page that links to the specific pages, but don’t waste the opportunity to create a separate page for each one. This gives you that many more opportunities for specifically targeted SEO – if I’m searching for brain injury, don’t make me read about all that other stuff. Our client Spraggs & Co. has done a great job of this.

Notice how your page count is already growing?

Tell people about YOU. Seriously. The “About Us” page on every website is usually the page with the second or third highest traffic. People want to know who they’re dealing with – whether they’re filing for bankruptcy or buying a dress. Try VERY hard not to hide behind third person pomposity on this page – so you went to Dartmouth – yay – but so did a lot of people.

What do you really CARE about? What makes you leap out of bed every day, eager to serve your clients? Get personal – prospects love it. If you’re reading this post, odds are you’re not running a Fortune 500 company – yet – so YOU are really your hottest commodity. Don’t sell it short.

Make it easy to get in touch. Don’t forget the all-important Contact page. Also in the top 3 for traffic. Any web designer worth a plug nickel won’t let you forget this, but it can be another opportunity to let people know the best way to work with you.

Pages 11-100

So you got the basics done and you got that website launched so you could start getting indexed by Google and feeling real as the Velveteen Rabbit. Now what? How do you keep it fresh and stay ahead of the competition?

Keep writing. You can do this with static pages or you can do this with your blog – your choice, but keep writing.

But how, you cry plaintively? How can I possibly come up with more to say after breaking my brain over the first 10 pages?

Your prospects and existing clients/customers will write the rest of them for you.

We’ve all seen those lame Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages that clearly don’t answer any REAL questions – they’re just another self-serving marketing piece. However, if you are doing any kind of business at all and interacting with people, you’re answering questions every day.

You’re answering them via email, you’re answering them over the phone, you’re answering them across your desk. Hundreds of them. Odds are, about 90% of them are the same from interaction to interaction.

Don’t waste all that beautiful content! 

When you find yourself writing an email to a client explaining how something works, before you send the email – cut and paste the info into your WordPress Dashboard and save it as a draft – it takes less than a minute. Then go back to work. I’ve got stuff like that sitting in my Dashboard that has been in there for months, just waiting for me to polish and post.

When you hear yourself giving the same speech across your desk to a client, jot down the talking points as you go.

While you’te talking on the phone, instead of doodling yet another balding alien, record what you’re saying instead of just what they’re saying.

Don’t be afraid to be very specific. Even though the information you imparted might be extremely specific to a situation, go ahead and post it. It’s an SEO goldmine because its very specificity means you won’t have a lot of competition – and a prospect who finds you due to that specific keyphrase is just as yummy as any other. Our client Howard Levy has done a brilliant job at this with his IRS law website and blog.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Don’t forget to polish up your keywords with a tool like Scribe and the information contained in our e-book, 7 Common Sense SEO Tips for YOUR WordPress Website. You can grab a free copy right at the bottom of this post.

Before you know it, you’ll have a website that’s the envy of all your competitors – and they’ll know about you because they keep seeing YOU at the top of the search results every time they Google themselves!

Does all this still make you feel tired and sweaty?

Get a leg up with our content writing service.

Affordable, professional-looking websites – launched in about a week.*

Don’t we all get stuck in a rut sometimes? Here at Rowboat Media we sure do.

While we love our work, and our clients (thankfully) love us, sometimes the process of putting together a 100%, fully custom website from scratch can just drag on.

A lot of clients don’t realize how much they are responsible for, even with a full-service studio like ours – like writing their content or hiring someone to do it (and managing that process), and providing actionable feedback on our design presentations, etc., and as a result, they can get caught up in running their own businesses (shocking, we know) and take weeks – sometimes months – to get back to us so we can launch a shiny new website and crow to the world about it.

We understand how this happens, but it doesn’t make life very much fun for us creative types who like to see our work going out into the world in the service of joy and commerce.

Therefore, we developed ExpressLaunch^TM – an affordable website program two years in the making, finally made possible by the incredible selection of Genesis child themes over at StudioPress.

ExpressLaunch helps us get websites out into the world, where they belong – instead of stuck on our development servers waiting for content or feedback.

We get to create, which makes us happy, and you get fast websites with less management, time, and money invested. (Yes, I just used an Oxford comma there.)

What’s the catch?

Due to the extreme affordability of these websites, we can only take 10 clients at a time.

We have to honor our commitments to our fully custom clients, and we want to make sure we also keep our promises to ExpressLaunch clients in terms of turnaround.

Therefore, once we have 10 ExpressLaunch clients on the boards, we will close the program until our schedule clears up enough to accept another 10.

Find out what ExpressLaunch is all about, and discover the meaning of asterisks.

Thank you to Jeff Sarris for turning me on to this insanely gorgeous – while also being correct and useful – Manual Photography Cheat Sheet by Miguel Yatco. He’s made it available as a print poster, and I have to say I am mightily tempted.

Given that our Deborah Wolfe has been a commercial photographer for over 20 years, and not too long ago we were dodging and burning in the darkroom, the content is beautiful to us in a way that is deeply emotional.

Content aside, the beautiful vintage fonts, the faded paper effect as if it’s already spent a bit too much time in the sun – the whole package has me attempting to reach inside my computer screen and touch it.

Eighteen year old Miguel has amazing talent. Whippersnapper.

While speaking with some prospective clients, they pointed me to a video they thought “struck just the right tone for an introductory video.” I went to watch it, and couldn’t agree more.

The video is by Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies.

Things Tad did right:

Casual approach with attention to detail

Tad dressed casually, to put his target audience at ease. However, he paid close attention to the background of his video and what was in front of him. Was his phone there just in case he got an important call while he was making his video? No – it sent a subtle signal that he’s technologically connected.

The coffee mug, just like for your favorite morning show host, subliminally invites you into his “digital living room.”

Finally, the background is clean and neat – nothing to distract the viewer from focusing on Tad and his message.

Tell the viewers what they can expect to find

Tad mentioned his free stuff first, then moved on to his blog. In describing the blog, he set expectations for how often he would update it and the type of content that would be on it.

Last (the position of most importance), he mentions his e-book and explains what it covers.

Sandwiched in with his ebook pitch, he lets the viewer know what sort of follow-up emails they can expect if they go for the “ethical bribe” that is the e-book.

Use titles judiciously

When Tad is talking about the most important thing – the item that builds his list – a title shows up at the bottom of the video reinforcing what he is saying and instructing the viewer in the action they need to take to get the e-book. Because he doesn’t use titles throughout the video, it makes that one judicious use particularly eye-grabbing.

MOVE your body

Talking head videos can get static and boring in a nanosecond, so Tad behaves as if he really is IN his website – he looks up and around at the different content as he speaks about it, points over at the e-book opt-in, etc.

While this does require knowing how your video will be sited in your design, it’s worth doing and paying attention to.

Throw in some personality

While his entire video is full of personality, at the end of the scripted portion of the video, Tad cut in a montage of himself being…himself, or at least the version of himself he wants to present in his business, which is casual, concerned, appealing, and wacky. If you’re not hiring a talented video editor to help you out, this part can be skipped without hurting the value of the rest of the video.

So many of us provide services that are similar to those of our competitors – it’s important to leverage our personal uniqueness.

Keep it snappy

Tad managed to do ALL that, and throw in some groan-worthy hippie jokes at the end, in a mere 110 seconds. Once your video stretches over 2 minutes long, unless it’s a class or tutorial on something, you’re losing pretty much all of the audience.

I tried to find some data that was fresher than this, since online behavior is morphing daily, but this study is still being quoted: “Most videos steadily lose viewers once “play” is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.”

The formula is pretty simple – but simple and easy are two different things, and Tad Hargrave made it look effortless.

January 31, 2012 – we’ve found the culprit – the W3 Total Cache plugin. As of this writing, it’s still not playing well with 3.3 or 3.3.1, and hasn’t been updated since last August. So if you’re NOT running that plugin, you should be able to upgrade safely. However – the caution in upgrading WordPress the MINUTE it comes out remains – give your hard-working plugin developers a couple of weeks to catch up. The more plugins you run, the more likely there is to be a problem.

Hi folks, you may have gotten an email today (Monday, December 12) about the shiny new features in WordPress 3.3.

Don’t hit that upgrade button just yet!

One of my top clients, who shall remain nameless (seriously), got all excited and hit that link and bad things happened. HostGator chuckled and said, “yep, that version appears to be buggy.” And downgraded my client so his site worked again. I love HostGator tech support. I owe them all a pitcher of beer.

Our typical modus operandi here in the Rowboat is to wait about 3 weeks when big new releases come out before upgrading, to give plugin developers and webhosts a chance to catch up and let the REST of the world be the beta testers. So if you’re WebMistress clients, that’s why you see that upgrade link nagging you for a while before our team gets to it. That’s on purpose.

Be careful out there!

So you’ve gone to the trouble to create a video – or seven – to help promote your business. You upload it to YouTube chiefly so you can easily embed it into your website, and go on about your merry way.

WHAT A WASTED OPPORTUNITY!

I can’t tell you how many times a client has sent me a link to embed, and when I visit it on YouTube, the title is something like “myvid01″ and the description is…completely blank.

That’s like spending $25,000 on a booth at the top trade show in your industry but not being listed in the directory…or hanging a sign above the booth…or, for that matter, bringing any brochures.

Google owns YouTube. If you do it right, you can even see your videos outrank your website – and this is not a bad thing, because your video – optimized correctly – will lead visitors RIGHT TO your website.

Optimizing your YouTube video title

What should be in your video title ? KEYWORDS. If you’re an Asheville veterinarian named Jane Smith, titling your video “Jane Smith, DVM” will not help people who are looking for a veterinarian find you. However – if you title it “Asheville veterinarian Jane Smith” – then you look like you know something.

Optimizing your YouTube video description

If you’re using video to help market your website, and thereby your business, what’s the #1 thing that MUST be listed in the YouTube video description? I’ll wait…

If you said, “a link to my website,” then you’re way ahead of the game, believe it or not. If people can’t easily click through to your website from your video, then all 80 takes and sweaty palms were a waste of your time. At the bare minimum, that’s what needs to be there.

Beyond that, you need, once again, the relevant keyword phrases you want to rank for.

So, in her description, she might write,

“Looking for an Asheville veterinarian?

http://janesmithdvm.com

In this video, Dr. Jane Smith demonstrates her unique approach to helping your pet stay calm and comfortable during a veterinary exam. Feel free to stop by the office anytime to meet Dr. Smith and learn more about her experience providing veterinary care to Asheville’s best-loved residents.”

Above, we started with the keyword phrase “Asheville veterinarian”, came right out with the website address, and then provided an appealing description that both included her name and repeated the words veterinary and Asheville later on in the description.

It takes less than five minutes to do and makes your video a vital part of your SEO strategy.

Including a call to action

People won’t do what you want them to do – that thing that puts money in YOUR pocket – unless you tell them how. So, when recording your video, make sure you TELL them what they need to do to engage with you – and then in the description, do the same in words.

Happy video marketing!

We received a notification from Headway that they are getting ready to release Headway 3.0 – and when they do, the license fee is going up (currently $87 for single-use and $164 for developers). Also, they’re moving to an annual subscription model for updates and ongoing support – but if you buy now, before it comes out, you lock in the current flat rate and get lifetime updates and support for FREE.

The teaser video below looks like it’s going to boast more child themes (we wonder if this will be like Genesis currently does), collaboration with other themes, and even more drag-and-drop layout capability.

If you’re on the fence about trying out Headway, now is the time.
 

Matt Cutts, who works for Google, often posts fabulous videos that set the rumor mill straight on what Google’s practices are. In an earlier post, I linked to one of Matt’s videos to disabuse you of the notion that the meta keywords field buys you ANYTHING other than carpal tunnel. (Google ignores meta keywords.)

Today, I came across a video addressing the issue of the Facebook Like button, which many of you may have noticed DOES slow your sites down a bit. A site owner wanted to know if they should remove it because of the so-called almighty speed issue.

Matt addresses the speed vs. user experience issue in an extremely lucid manner, basically stating that Google merely wanted to “start a conversation” about site speeds – NOT cause the obsession with speed above all else that seems to be the result. He points out that if you sacrifice user experience and quality content for a speed score, you’re also hurting yourself with Google.

Bottom line: Keep your social media buttons and keep producing great content.