You’ve probably seen the boxy, black-and-white images in advertisements, on paper cups of coffee, on the sides of buses and elsewhere; they are an established marketing tool for large, national businesses. For example, a QR code on a Starbucks cup of coffee might bring smartphone users to the company’s website for a special coupon.

Can QR codes be used effectively by small businesses?

Since QR codes are perfect at bridging the offline with the online, they can be used anywhere it makes sense to link a print marketing piece with expanded information, a video, a calculating tool, or anything else that lives on your website.

For example, a real estate agent could include a QR code on a for sale sign that takes people to a video of a walkthrough of the property. A graphics design firm could place QR codes on employees’ business cards, making it easy for people to connect with them on multiple social networks. A store that runs an ad in a weekly circular can include a QR code that links to in-depth product information, exclusive content, and deals.

QR codes are a great way to educate. Last summer, the city of New York wanted to inform and update residents on recycling. Recycling trucks displayed QR codes on them that linked to an educational video about recycling.

You can put a QR code on anything you can print on, from business cards, flyers, brochures, and even t-shirts. Shrink them down to the size of your little fingernail, or fill up a billboard with one. As long as there is the right distance between the QR code and the phone, so that the square fits in the screen, it can be read.

And, as needs change, the material that the QR code links to can also be changed. This keeps the QR code useful over the long term and keeps print costs way down.

How can you create QR codes?

There are plenty of sites that will allow you to create QR codes for free. You just need to provide the URL you want to send people to, the message you want to share, or whatever other information you’d like to put into the QR code.

What QR code “mistakes” should you avoid?

Some businesses are missing the point of QR codes by using them to lead to content that is really just expanded advertising. QR codes should enrich the customer experience, not annoy customers by luring them in only to present them with a harder sell. They also shouldn’t be used purely for the “cool” factor.

It also doesn’t make a lot of sense to use a QR code in a website, email newsletter or other online content. A simple hyperlink is more user-friendly and accomplishes the same thing.

As with any marketing or advertising, a QR code is only as good as the thought and creativity that goes into it.

1. Provide relevant content. Your web pages and blog posts should deal with topics that genuinely affect your readers. Everything you add to your site, whether a new feature, a blog post or a free download, should add value for your visitors. Does it help them do their job better? Does it entertain or bring enjoyment? Does it provide knowledge?
2. Keep your content fresh. As your business or market changes, your readers will have new concerns, develop new goals, and need new information. Stay in tune with what your readers need today, and make sure that your content meets their needs.
3. Keep it simple. Try to say what you need to say in as few words as possible. When writing for your site, highlight things of importance. You can use bulleted lists, short paragraphs, bolded and underlined text. Keep sign up forms for special offers or free white papers brief and easy to fill out.
4. Respond to reader comments. Your blog is not a one-way street - it’s a means to develop a dialogue with your readers. Show them that their insights and opinions matter by responding to their comments. Write a blog post based on a previous reader comment; this shows your visitors that you’re paying attention… and it’s a great way to touch on the issues that they care about the most.
5. Post polls on your website or blog. Readers want to know that you care what they think. Plus, they’ll be interested in finding out how other readers respond to your poll questions.
6. Ask readers what they want to read about. By using their answers, you can tailor your content to meet their needs.
7. Use video to supplement your written content. Video is really popular on the web… visitors will spend more time on your site if you provide video content to educate and entertain them.
8. Provide links to other valuable resources. You might hesitate to do this, because you’re afraid you’ll lose their visitors to another site. Giving your visitors a variety of resources actually builds your authority.
9. Don’t overuse keywords. It’s tempting to build your content to appeal to search engines, rather than to real people. This can give web content a very unnatural feel. Keywords should not comprise more than about 2% of your content.

Our clients are very concerned with what their website will look like. They often show us examples of other websites that they like and things they don’t like. They might have a specific color scheme in mind and ideas for graphics. We go back and forth a few times with mockups before a design is settled on.

Likewise, our clients are usually aware that their website should be correctly optimized for search engines. They often know something about keywords and are prepared to do a lot of thinking about them.

What our clients are less prepared for is giving a good amount of thought to the content that will form the actual meat of their site. The result is that the content is usually hastily cobbled together at the last minute. The website launch is often delayed while the content is frantically worked on.

Don’t make this mistake. Site design and search engine optimization are vital, yes, but mainly as tools whose purpose is to bring people to and showcase the all-important site content. The site content is what will convince people to buy your product or service and call or email you. (You might not realize this, but your site content is also a critical part of your site optimization. Your content is a lot more important to Google than metatags or other SEO techniques; your content is what really determines your ranking on Google.)

Here’s our advice for addressing your web content:

1. Make it a priority. As soon as you decide you want a website, or you want to redesign your website, start thinking about what this website will say and which pages will be needed to say it effectively.
2. A useful technique for writing web copy is to come up with a description of your typical customer, then write the site text as if you’re talking directly to them. Focus on their concerns. Think about what they want to know, and provide that information. Remember that people are skeptical of content published online because there is so much garbage and so many hoaxes. They are outright allergic to sales pitches! So write using unbiased language and build your credibility through case studies and/or testimonials.
3. Don’t just take text from existing brochures and other printed material and copy and paste it into your website. Writing for the web has key differences from writing for print. On the web it is important to get to the point quickly and keep your message short and sweet. Use brief paragraphs, bulleted and numbered lists, headings and enough white space.
4. Think about hiring a professional copywriter if you’re struggling too much, you don’t like the way the words are turning out, or if the process is holding up the launch of your website. A good web copywriter will make it easy for you by interviewing you about your business and then creating web-friendly copy.
5. Remember that writing content for your website is not a once and done. Things change in your company and also in your competitive environment; this should be reflected in your website. Your content should be an ever-evolving body of information which needs ongoing care and feeding.

In order for your business to take advantage of this trend, you have to be sure you have a solid presence in local search results. Here are four things you can do to establish this presence:

Use location words on your web site. Put your address in the footer of every page, for example, and refer to your location in your description of what you do. Integrate location words into your title and meta tags as well.

Sign up for Google Places to get your business found on local search results on both Google Search and Google Maps. Also add your business to the Bing Local Listing Center and the Yahoo Local Directory.

Get links from the web sites of other local businesses: Links from other reputable businesses in your area are gold in the eyes of search engines. All else being equal, a web site that has more links from local and relevant websites will gain more visibility in local search results.

Look for opportunities for citations: Citations are mentions of your business name and address on other web sites, even if there is no link to your web site. Listings in Yelp or in Superpages, Yellowpages, or YellowBook are examples. Other useful possibilities are mentions in a Chamber of Commerce or other local business association web site, or a listing on a social network such as Facebook. You can use a free service such as GetListed.org to quickly show you how your business fares in local search and help you make moves to improve.

An informational blog can be used to:

Share knowledge or expertise

Write blog posts that educate your readers about important topics in your field. This is helpful to your clients and it can attract potential new clients who are searching for the type of information you are writing about.

Predict or critique trends

Do you have opinions about where your industry is headed? Share these opinions with your readers and also welcome their comments. You can get a very lively discussion going this way.

Provide tutorials or product demonstrations

If you sell a product, you can create screenshot tutorials or videos that demonstrate your product’s features and how to get the most out of the purchase.

Answer questions

If clients ask you certain questions regularly, then answers to these questions can become a very informative series of blog posts.

Ask questions

Pose a question on your blog and invite readers to answer it by leaving their comments. You can write a follow up post that summarizes the responses. You can also use this type of post to ask your readers what they’d like to see featured on your blog.

Spotlight your clients

Ask some of your best clients if they would be interested in answering questions about the work you’re doing for them. This is a great way to illustrate the type of work you do and is an interesting variation on the traditional “Case Study.”

Invite others to blog

Your blog will gain interest from having other voices besides yours. Ask your employees to participate by writing about their areas of expertise. From time to time, invite an industry expert from outside your company to write a guest post.

Offer reviews

As an expert in your field, you have the knowledge to evaluate products and services that are related to this field. This is a very helpful service that your readers will appreciate.

Announce what’s coming

You can use your blog to generate interest before the fact in any new products or services your company is planning to introduce.

Because business blogs typically contain so many keywords that are relevant to your industry, they can be a major source of new traffic from search engines and social media. Your blog posts will often be the first thing a potential customer sees about your company. For this reason, it is important to be sure your blog is closely connected to your company web site. Having the blog as an actual part of your web site is ideal.

WordPress, however, is not ready to go “out of the box.”

Despite its many virtues, it still needs to be set up and configured for your particular needs. One of the major things your WordPress website will need is a “theme.” A WordPress theme is a way to “skin” your website to make it look, and also work, a certain way. It is a collection of files that act together to control the way your website is displayed (without touching the underlying WordPress code).

If you search the web for “WordPress themes,” you will find that there are many to choose from, in different price ranges. There are even quite a few that are free to download. So, take a little while to look through the pretty designs, pick one you like, and you’ll be all set to go, right?

Probably not.

What you will fairly quickly find out is that pre-designed WordPress themes may look beautiful when you see their live demos, but when you actually un-zip the files and begin to work with the theme, things can get a lot more complicated than they seemed. There’s a good chance you’ll need help with the installation and set up. Unless you have sophisticated graphics software and a fair amount of know-how, you’ll also need help with customization of the text and images. So, you will need to spend a fair amount of time (and you need to possess certain skills), to turn a downloaded WordPress theme into a professional-looking website that reflects your company brand.

How we help our clients theme their WordPress websites

We recognize that our customers need a website with a unique look that is tailored to their business, but that they also have a very real need to keep their web design costs as low as possible. What we have begun to do is to offer the best of both worlds: we design our WordPress websites using a theme “framework,” and then apply a completely custom design on top of it.

A WordPress theme “framework” is a skeleton theme that provides a basic layout so that the designer doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. A framework is extremely plain; it’s really just a series of gray boxes and unstyled text. A skilled designer, though, can work magic with a framework, using his or her creative imagination to turn the framework into a polished web site that can help a business to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

Take a look at just a few of the WordPress sites we have built using a theme framework.

Take a look at your site and see how it measures up to customer-centric ideals:

Is your home page clear and concise?  According to MarketingExperiments, there are three essential questions a home page must answer:
Where Am I?
What Can I Do Here?
Why Should I Do It?

Does your overall content emphasize the customer? Customer-focused content is based on “you” statements, exploring various customer concerns and explaining how your products and/or services will address these concerns. By contrast, many business websites focus more on the company, using a lot of “we” statements to describe the company, what it offers, its principles and vision. “You” statements on your website should outnumber “we” statements by at least three to one.

Is your site super simple to navigate? If your web visitors have one thing to say to you, it is, “My time is precious!” People won’t wade through a confusing maze of information, or remember where they last saw a link to some other part of your site. Organize your pages into plainly-named categories, provide links to every category on every page, and place those links in consistent locations.

Is your contact information always just one click away? Don’t make visitors work too hard to reach you. (They won’t.)

Do you provide a way for clients to give you feedback on products, services, or the site itself? Give your visitors forms to use and allow comments on blog entries. Consider periodically posting surveys to elicit feedback on a particular topic.

Do you regularly offer fresh news and information? Is this new content easy to find? A stale website, or a website where new content is hidden is hidden deep in the site, wastes visitors’ time.

Does your site allow for personalization? For example, if your company offers a range of services or products, construct your contact forms so that your visitors can choose what they are interested in and then send them updates and information based on their choices.

Does your site make it easy for customers to get support online? A customer-centric site will give customers, at minimum, an email address or phone number where they can reach you. In-depth, well-written FAQs help customers feel in control by providing answers to the most common questions. When appropriate, provide FAQs in video form, such as for a product demonstration.

Have you remembered your mobile audience? The use of the Internet on mobile devices will only continue to grow. It’s important that your site look good and function well on the mobile web.

Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) allows you to set up automated emails that are delivered whenever something is published online about you or your firm. The alerts will include stories from blogs and web pages as well as traditional media. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web feed or displayed on your iGoogle page.

Google Advanced Search (google.com/advanced_search). Type your name or business name, or any other words you want to search on. (You can exclude certain words, too.) Use “past 24 hours” for the date to find the most recent web pages, blog posts, forum threads, etc.

Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a free service that lets you create Alerts: email updates of the latest relevant social media results (blog, microblog, etc.) based on your choice of search phrase.

Twitter Advanced Search (search.twitter.com/advanced). By using the advanced features in Twitter’s search tool, you can use simple Boolean logic (true or false conditions) to perform powerful searches. Once you set up your search, you can save the query as an RSS feed so you can keep up to date on the latest news.

Back Tweets (backtweets.com) allows you to see how many people mention your web site on Twitter. Type your domain name and it will show you all messages on Twitter that include a link to your web site. You can pay for an upgraded service that shows a full history of tweets, counts, impressions and reach.

Back Type (backtype.com). Unlike blog search engines that only index blog posts, Back Type indexes the comments left by other users on blog and other social sites including FriendFeed and Digg. Type the name of your company, product or service in the search box, choose “all,” and it will help you find relevant comments and/or discussions on the web. They have a basic free service and also offer paid upgrades.

Yext Rep (yext.com/rep) provides a fully integrated feed that lets you monitor and respond to comments and reviews left across the web, on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, as well as customer reviews on Yelp and Citysearch. It’s free.

Viral Heat (viralheat.com) offers analytics covering all corners of the social web, including Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, Real-time web and YouTube. Their plans range from $9.99 to $89.99/month.

Trackur (trackur.com) is a social media monitoring tool that monitors mainstream media and social media such as blogs, social networks, Twitter, Facebook, forums, images and video. Their free service doesn’t include Facebook or forums. Paid plans begin at $18/month.

Meltwater Buzz (meltwater.com) is a social media monitoring tool that enables comprehensive tracking and analysis of user-generated content on the web. Plans and pricing are customized to your organization.

StepRep (steprep.com) offers “reputation intelligence for small business.” They offer a 30-day free trial period; after that the service costs $199.99/month.

Radian6 (radian6.com) helps companies listen to what people are saying about them online and engage in those conversations across the social web. Pricing is custom.

1. Check all your web site links (menu and content). Links become broken when they link to pages that have changed in name or disappeared completely from the web. Broken links reflect poorly on your professionalism, and they can prevent Google, Yahoo and Bing from properly indexing your pages.

2. Review your website statistics. Ideally you are checking your statistics on a regular basis, but a review of the full year can reveal very useful patterns. What keywords are people typing to find you? How long are they staying on your site? What pages are they visiting? What pages are they not visiting?

3. Update/add client testimonials. To be useful, client testimonials should include the full name of your client and also identify their company and position. There is no more valuable addition to your web site!

4. Update your web site content. Review the pages of your web site for content that has changed. Identify areas where new content is available and should be added. Keeping content fresh and relevant keeps visitors interested in your web site and also improves your search engine ranking.

5. Keep an eye on your competitors’ web sites. Have you reviewed the web sites of your main competitors lately? It’s a good idea to see where they stand in terms of design and also content since you want to be sure your web site measures up.

6. Review the main purpose of your web site, and make sure that your web site fully supports this purpose. For example, if the purpose of your web site is to generate leads, then make sure you have a landing page with an attractive offer and an easy-to-fill-out form. If the purpose of your web site is to share information, then you might want to add a blog to your site.

7. Review the goals you set for your web site this past year to see if they have been met, then formulate and write down your new goals for 2011. Be sure to write action items for each goals to give you direction for the new year.

Are “hits” the important measurement?
At one time, people talked about “hits” to their web site; you’d even see hit counters on home pages. But “hit” is not a useful statistic, because a single web page may register as tens or even hundreds of hits depending on how complex it is. Each image on the page, for example, counts as a separate hit.

Traffic statistics have become a lot more useful and accurate, so “hits” are no longer tracked.

Visitors are what you’re after.
A lot more useful than hits, this statistic indicates the number of people that visit your web site in a given period. The better statistical tools will also provide you with a measurement of ‘unique visitors’ – the number of different people accessing your web site in a particular period. Looking at these numbers you can see how many people are going to your web site for the first time and how many are coming back for repeat visits.

Page views per visitor/ average time spent on site
Mining these statistics will give you insight into what your visitors are actually doing on your site once they arrive there. You can see how many pages they are viewing and how long they stay on the site. If the great majority of visitors to your site are leaving right away, your site has a high “bounce rate.” Your site could be attracted the wrong visitors, or the right visitors could be confused or frustrated by your site, returning quickly to the search results page for more options. A high bounce rate is something you want to explore further. For advice on how to do this, see What’s Your Bounce Rate?

Most/least requested pages
These statistics are the key to finding out what is most important to your visitors. Which pages are getting the most traffic? If these topics are of great interest to your viewers, you might consider enriching them with even more information. Or you might want to build an AdWords campaign around these topics. Which pages are getting the least traffic? The topics on these pages could be of little interest to your viewers, but also consider whether some of your pages might be unpopular because they’re hard to find. If there is something on a least requested page that you really want your audience to see, it’s time to apply a new strategy to get them to that information.

Top search phrases
Which search phrases are bringing visitors to your web site? Are these visitors staying on your site, indicating they they’ve found what they were looking for? Then these phrases are gold and you may be able to capitalize on them in other online marketing. Are many visitors are arriving at your site via search phrases that are irrelevant to what you actually offer? If so, that might explain why you are not getting the most out of your web traffic. It may be time to look at re-optimizing your site for more strategic keywords. Are visitors searching on your company name? That can indicate that your brand is making a name for itself or that your offline advertising is working well.

Referrers
Referrer statistics tell you where people were directly before they arrived at your site. This is critical to seeing how people are finding you. If visitors are coming from search engines, you can see which ones are bringing you the most traffic and where you rank in those search engines. Maybe you have some online marketing in place. You can see how much traffic that is bringing you. Also you can see how many visitors are coming to your site by directly typing in your URL or from a bookmark.

Act on your findings
View and analyze your web site statistics on a regular basis, and use the knowledge you gain from them to make changes, small or large, to your site. You should be constantly sensitive to what your customers have to say about your web site. Your web site traffic statistics provide another way for you to hear the voices of your customers.