Stressed yet? Don’t be. I haven’t even mentioned Tumblr or Pinterest, StumbleUpon or LinkedIn, Google+ or link building. Now  you should be getting a little stressed. You could start drinking early but you’d probably miss the next craze, rage and must-do.

Beware The Marketing Riptide

If this all sounds a little crazy and mind-boggling, it is. Let’s not kid ourselves and think that there’s an easy solution or that things are going to slow down, calm down and let us catch up. Long gone are the days when a business owner or marketer could package a SWOT analysis into a 90 day plan and call it a day. Lately, unless your marketing plan is measured in 90 minute increments, you’ve probably missed something.

But until technology invents the 400 hour day or the magically replenishing budget, you’re never going to be able to do it all.

And while it’s wonderful to have so many ways to reach our customers, so many options and avenues at our disposal, so many exciting opportunities and new things to try, unless you’re focused on what works and what doesn’t, you’re going to get caught in the endless riptide of a rapidly evolving marketplace, fighting to stay on top of every little change, and eventually you’re just going to drown.

Stop. And Breathe.

I want you to step off the ledge, put down the martini and listen to what I’m about to say.

You don’t need a Facebook page.

Stop wasting your time on Twitter.

QR codes are stupid.

Step away from the Pinterest board.

Whatever shiny object has your attention at the moment, whatever you’ve read/heard/been convinced that you need if you want to run a successful business, I want you to forget about it and think about this instead: what’s making you money?

If this doesn’t apply to you – if you’ve got all the time and all the budget in the world to throw at new ideas, fads and opportunities just to see what sticks and what doesn’t, you can stop reading right now and go pin that picture of a cute cat to your “My Favorite Things” board in an attempt at personal branding.

But if you’re like most of us, bombarded daily by a stack of gurus and know-it-alls who want you to get rich now, fast, simply by applying their three secret tips… if the word “engage” can still make you cringe…  if you just never understood the benefit of speaking in 140 character snippets… if the thought of setting up a Google+ profile gives you a little twitch in your left eye… stick around and let me tell you why you shouldn’t be doing all those things.

Before I get too comfortable telling you what not to do, here’s a quick mea culpa: as a marketer, I can get just as swept up in the fascination of a new idea or new opportunity. Start throwing statistics around like “Pinterest increased traffic to my site by 25% in one week!” and I’m quickly adjusting marketing programs to include 30 minutes of pinning every morning.

But what if that doesn’t work for you? What if, instead of increasing traffic by 25%, you’re just decreasing the time you have to invest in other marketing by 25%? That’s why it’s crucial that you recognize what works – and what’s just another shiny object that’s being passed around by self-proclaimed experts as the next crown jewel in your marketing arsenal.

Why “Ooooh, Shiny” Moments Are Bad News For Your Jewelry, Your Person, And Your Marketing

The animal kingdom is full of examples about attraction to shiny objects. Ostriches will peck curiously at shiny objects on the ground. Crows will abscond with your jewelry or coins if you leave them in an accessible place (sunbathers beware!) If you’re not careful, you might be mistaken for lunch if you dive while wearing a watch in barracuda infested waters.

The very idea has given birth to a plethora of “shiny object marketing” strategies that will tell you how to capitalize on this phenomenon by turning your product or service into the shiny object that other people want.

But when it comes to marketing your business, getting distracted by the hottest, newest, shiniest trend can end up costing you time and money without measurable return. That’s why, before you get overwhelmed by options and feel pressured to jump on the next bandwagon, I want you to stop, take a breath, and proceed with care, caution and purpose.

The Importance Of Staying Focused In An Increasingly Shiny World

True story. I have a client who was ready to jump on the social media bandwagon and pay me a lot of money to help them do it. They wanted a Facebook page and a Twitter account, email campaigns and blog posts, plus whatever other bells and whistles I could throw on. They had heard that social media was super important, that all their competitors had a social media presence and they knew it was time for them to do it, too.

I thought of all the shiny objects that their budget would help me buy… and then I asked them who their customers are. Where their customers are. What their customers want.

The answers were “a very specific market segment”, “I don’t know”, and “I don’t know”, respectively.

So we sat down and did an analysis of their existing customer base and through a series of interviews and surveys we discovered that exactly zero percent used Twitter, a marginal amount used Facebook and only for catching up with their grandmothers, but over 90% of them used LinkedIn regularly. Along with other useful information, I was able to talk my client off the social media ledge and save them a lot of wasted time and money on marketing that was not likely to hit any  target, let alone theirs. Instead, we refocused both time and budget on channels and options that had a lot more potential.

I want you to take this to heart. It’s a lot smarter to sit down and evaluate the merits of a particular strategy than it is to spend time and money doing it and then repenting later. As you plan to expand your marketing into the next best and greatest thing, take some time to think about whether it can be beneficial to your business. I don’t care how many articles you read about engaging with your customers, providing great service or being the “face” of the company. If it doesn’t make sense for your industry, your business and your goals – stop and walk away.

PS: I looked up all my client’s competitors and they did indeed have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. The most popular of which maxed out at 14 fans and was used approximately 3 months ago. Guess who had followed the shiny object down the rabbit hole?

How To Tell if You’re Trying A New Idea Or Just Getting Distracted

“That’s all well and good!” you may be thinking. “But how the heck do I know what to try and what not to try?”

If marketing were that easy there would be no shiny objects… but here are some questions you can ask yourself before you add another fad into your repertoire.

Has my marketing flatlined and left me wondering, “Now what?” If you’re stuck and are looking for a little jolt, the latest hot thing might be just what the doctor ordered. So go ahead and give Twitter a try. Pin a couple of photos. You never know what might hit. In a nutshell, something new could inject your marketing with the little extra boost it needs.

Do I have enough time to invest in implementing, testing and measuring the results of a new idea? Even if you think a new idea would be great for your business, you have to be realistic about whether you can implement it. You can’t toss a Facebook page into the world and expect it to generate a return. You need to nurture it, test it out, analyze the results – all while keeping in mind that results aren’t immediate. No Facebook page at all is better than one that’s been abandoned or underutilized.

Do I have the money to invest in doing it right? You may really want a gorgeous Facebook landing page but can you afford it? Before you throw together a bit of clipart because you heard landing pages increase conversions by 45%, consider what this says about your business and your brand and whether a partial effort will get the full results you expect.

What’s my goal? Getting on Twitter, much like my client wanted to do, “because all my competitors are doing it” isn’t a goal. It’s simply a reaction. Be honest about what you expect to get out of your efforts. Increase sales? Improve customer service? Promote your brand? Even if you’re just trying something new out of desperation (see question number one), you still need a goal. Otherwise you’ll just be chasing down desperate options without ever knowing what’s working.

Will this new idea add to or detract from my current efforts? Time and budget are finite. If adding a new marketing channel is going to take time and budget away from your other efforts, you should have a reasonable expectation that your efforts will be worth it. In the absence of a crystal ball, how are you supposed to know that? Try asking…

What do my customers want and need? Take a lesson from my client and go ask your customers where they are and what they want. Are they on Facebook? Do they know what Foursquare is? When you say QR do they correct you and insist it’s QVC? If your competitors are doing it, are their customers responding or are they wasting effort pulling teeth for fourteen “fans”? Start by putting your efforts into things that promise the most bang for your buck. Experiment when you have the time and budget.

Now That You’re Calm… Figure Out What Your  Business Needs

Maybe you would be well served by a slew of social media accounts and all sorts of diverse marketing tactics. Or maybe you’re better off focusing on a specific channel or handful of channels. The important thing is that you’ve given some thought to what your approach should be and how it can benefit you instead of just jumping headfirst into the latest and greatest fad.

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with a fad if it works. And who knows, one day we may all be chuckling over that martini and reminiscing about the good old days when Facebook was a fad, telling each other how so very 2012 that was. In the meantime, take advantage of the opportunities that work and tell the gurus and experts and get-rich-quick-in-three-easy-steps people to take their musts, shoulds and have-tos and stick them… well, in a less shiny place.

So What’s The Difference?

Optimization is the technique involved in making sure that your website meets search engine guidelines and standards, is ready and available for crawling and indexing, and doesn’t put up any barriers that could prevent it from being crawled and indexed. Optimization, done right, is as close to a one-time-deal as you can get. Yes, things change, and your site will need upkeep, but that’s true of your site as a whole and not just its “optimization”. A good website is an optimized website, by the standards of its time.

No magic, no pixies and fairy dust, no secret sauce. No incessant tweaking of your title tag or the size of your H1s. No $19.99 a month fee for vague but enticing SEO services.

Marketing, however, is where a little of the magic comes in. Marketing is always about the magic – finding customers, meeting them on solid ground, appealing to their needs and desires and ultimately making the sale, whether it’s a product or your service that you’re selling. Marketing is volatile. It depends on so many factors, from the competition to the whims of your customers to the latest social network fad.

Good marketers use a little bit of their own secret sauce to test, fail, test, and try again. Good marketing is less about knowing textbook guidelines and more about intuiting the needs and the direction of a market.

Why Does It Matter?

Optimization and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. They may exist independently but when you combine them they are much more delicious.

You can optimize without marketing, but that will only get you so far. Imagine that you’re doing pretty well in the search engines, getting a good amount of qualified traffic because your site is listed well. Now imagine how much better you could be doing if you tried; if you promoted your website via ads, content marketing or social channels.

You can market without optimizing, but you’ll be limiting your potential reach. You could pay for ads all day long but wouldn’t you rather get some of the traffic and exposure for “free” in organic search results?

In a nutshell, SEO is a relatively fixed set of techniques that makes your site friendly for search engines and improves its chance of getting listed well in search results, and SEM is about taking an optimized site and getting a return on it. If you do these two things together you’ll have a much better chance of getting in front of prospects and customers.

That’s Nice, But How Do I Do All That?

First, optimize your website. That means doing all the tried-and-true, search-engine-endorsed things that go into optimization.

• Do your research. Find the important keywords related to your products or services.
• Optimize your content. Get those keywords into the page copy and make it sound good.
• Make those keywords work. We talked about what to do with keywords before. Now it’s time to put it into practice.
• Check your technology. Make sure there’s nothing that could block a search engine’s access, like Flash.
• Check your links. It’s important to have a good navigational structure and hierarchy because when we talk about search engines “crawling” what we really mean is “following all those links on your site from one page to the next”. It’s best not to bury pages several clicks down the hierarchy.
• Clean up your code. Best practices are best practices. If your code is messy, bloated and non-standards-compliant you could be setting yourself up for trouble. The easiest way to avoid this is to run your site through the HTML and CSS validator at the W3C.
• Improve your speed. One of the things Google takes into account is how fast your site loads. If it’s slow, due to bad code or poorly optimized images, fix it now.
• Make sure you have a sitemap.xml file. You can “feed” this to search engines to let them know which pages are ready for crawling and indexing.
• Get advanced. If you’re serious about optimization, talk to your developer about things like 301 redirects and canonical URLs.  Some of these are outside the scope of this article but I want you to be aware that there’s more to an optimized site than throwing a few keywords around.

Awesome, now that you have an optimized site, it’s time to market it!

• Promote it on social channels. Get out there and do some social networking. Not only can you drive people back to your site, but your social sites can also appear in search engines, building your presence in search results and giving your site more authority. (Need I remind you to put your web address on all your properties so everything links back to your site?)
• Advertise it. You can do some relatively inexpensive advertising through Google AdWords or similar programs. Pick a budget and try it. It’s an awful lot like optimization. If you pick the right keywords, you’ve got a better chance of showing up in front of the right audience at the right time.
• Get some inbound links. This is sometimes referred to “off-page SEO” but personally, I feel that this is more about marketing. Getting other (quality, relevant) sites to link to yours is a real search booster.

The Beautiful Nexus Of SEO And SEM

Are you ready for a mind-bending, universe-splitting conclusion? Here’s how you tie optimization and marketing together with a pretty bow: content marketing.

Content marketing is all about getting your content out there into search engines so that not only do you have a home page and an about page and maybe a few service pages floating out there, but you’ve got dozens… nay, hundreds!… of content pages that search engines can list and that you can use to hook prospects and customers.

Great content draws people. Provide informative, entertaining or otherwise valuable content and you’re marketing your business by demonstrating your expertise and professional prowess.

And how do you market your content? By optimizing it. It’s the Mobius strip of marketing. If you write a bit of great content, optimize the page, include great keywords and send it out into search engines, you’ve just closed the loop between the O and the M.

If it sounds like work, it is. But one way or another, you’re going to work. Wouldn’t you rather get the biggest bang for your buck when you do?

This time “they” had really done it. They had built a website that defied all logic and made it impossible for her to decide on a gift and therefore make a purchase. But now she was talking my language. “They” do build some pretty horrible websites, and if my mother had been unable to make a purchase, chances are that other mothers everywhere were also unable.

I share this with you now because my mother could have been your customer.

Mother Says: “I Want To See What I’m Buying”

“Do you know what’s very extremely annoying?” My mother asks.

I grab my pen and notebook. We’ve been down this road before, my mother and I.

Here. (Where she gets annoyed by page numbers)

And here. (Where she gets bored)

And even here. (Where she teaches us a thing or two about customer service)

“I hate when they tell you to click on a picture to enlarge it, and it opens in another window and it’s STILL THE SAME SIZE!!”

My mother is personally affronted by this, and I completely understand. Popups can be annoying, but useless popups are definitely annoying. It’s as if the website owner knew he was wasting our time and just didn’t care.

“I mean, really. If you give a person an option it should do something. If you’re going to spend money on something, you want to see it.”

She is absolutely right on both counts.

1. If you (the website owner) give a person an option, it should do something. “Click here to enlarge” is something, and it should do what it promises.
2. If you (the shopper) are going to buy something, you probably want to see it. Squinting at a tiny, (often fuzzy) photo is not really anyone’s version of seeing.

My mother never did make a purchase on that site, because tiny photo after tiny photo with mockingly inadequate “enlarge” functions drove her away. But the next site, the one with nice, clear, large photos? That one got her money.

If You Make Her A Promise, You’d Better Deliver

There are many reasons that an online sale falls through. Maybe the price was too high or the shipping too expensive. Maybe the delivery time was too long or the “Add to Cart” button was too slow. Maybe the baby cried or the phone rang and your shopper got distracted. There are so many ways to lose a sale without trying that it’s critical to turn the odds in your favor where you can. Offering someone an option and then failing to deliver is something you can avoid and improve your odds of making the sale.

Missing, broken and too-small photos are unfortunately common problems on ecommerce and other product-centric sites. But it’s pretty inexcusable in a time when there are zoom, rotate and enlarge functions that can be used to great effect with minimal effort. If you want to sell something or showcase something then you need good photography. No excuses, no exceptions.

Sometimes, business owners simply don’t have the photography. You’d be surprised by the number of people I speak with who can’t find/don’t have/never had good, quality digital photos of their products. Do you know what I have to say about that? Get some! If you can’t hire a photographer, at a very minimum get yourself a decent digital camera and take some decent high-resolution photos. Keep those decent high resolution photos because you will need them for your photo zooms and enlargements. Downsize as needed but never, and I mean never, overwrite or delete the originals.

Sometimes, someone just messed up the website code. So when you “click to enlarge” you actually get a smaller version. Yes, I’ve seen this, too. Lucky for me, my mom hasn’t yet, or that’s another half hour on the phone. Do you know what I have to say about that? Fix it! There are no excuses for a broken website image. No exceptions. Not if you want to sell something.

If you want to make a sale on your site, you’ll need to invest in designing and developing a site that works. Nobody said developing a good ecommerce store was cheap or fast and no, a good photographer isn’t free, either. But if you want to run a profitable online business then you need to pay attention to the details. Because my mother will.

Lesson Learned: If She Can See Your Products, She Will Buy

If I were you, I’d take a look at my website right now and pretend you’re my mother, ready to spend some money on a gift. Are your photos up to snuff? Do they show the detail necessary for someone to identify and appreciate your product?

Nobody has ever lost a sale because their photos were just too good. Show your products up close. Show your products from multiple angles. Show them in multiple colors. Shopping online takes a measure of trust that the item you see is the item you’ll receive. It’s going to be hard to develop that trust if someone can’t see your product in the first place.

It may seem like a small detail and a nitpicky complaint from one shopper. But the fact is that details are everything. There’s a lot of competition out there and it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to click away from your site and move on. The smallest gripe, grievance or inconvenience can send a potential customer off to a competitor. Why take that chance? When so many unforeseen and uncontrollable things can go wrong, it would behoove you to seize every opportunity at your fingertips to make the shopping experience on your site productive, enjoyable and repeatable. Pay attention to your photos – and to all the details of your site. If you do, my mother just may become your next new customer.

At the top of The Rumson Country Day School website is the phrase, “Educating the whole child, one at a time.”  Can you explain this philosophy?

Educating the whole child is sometimes a misrepresented term in education. What we mean by the whole child is the affective aspect as well as the academic aspect. We have four core values that we talk about on a regular basis – be kind, be honest, be respectful, be responsible. That’s the affective side of things.

We want kids to not only be strong in academics – we have a challenging academic program – but we also have physical education four or five times per week and a strong “no-cut” athletic program in our middle school. We have a family-style lunch so kids can converse with each other. We have assigned tables so there might be fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders and a teacher at a table, so there’s always good conversation and nobody is excluded.

We’re a small school of 450 students from three-year-olds through eighth grade. I know every kid’s name. We know their families.  We know each child individually so nobody falls through the cracks.

The Rumson Country Day School offers a very unique program called “School Within A School.”  What is this program designed to do?

This program was started for kids who have reading difficulties, reading processing problems or dyslexia. They otherwise are wonderful in school. They’re good athletes, they do well with science and history, but they struggle with reading. I hate to see any child struggle. This program gets kids into classes of maybe four for reading, math and modern language, and it really makes a difference. I think all American education should be doing what our school is doing. It’s very child-centered with small classes taught by people who are trained in special education, especially in reading, and the children get so much support.

To tell you the truth, some kids get out of it in sixth or seventh grade and when they graduate from eighth grade, they go to the same types of high schools that all of our kids go to. They’re ready for the world. I’ve seen kids who used to be discouraged because school was so challenging and now they walk around with their heads held high. It really works.

What challenges do you face, and what do you do to overcome these challenges?

Pricing and affordability are always a struggle because you want to be able to pay your teachers a good, fair salary with good benefits.  Health insurance is killing us like any industry. That’s just a soaring price. We do give about $600,000 in financial aid every year and it’s need based, not scholarship. In this turbulent economy, we’ve introduced what we call “bottom line tuition.” Beginning in the next school year, we’ll no longer have ancillary fees. We’re going to offer tuition as one charge for the entire year. They don’t have to pay extra for lunch, books or anything else. Everything will be included in tuition.

How do you market the school’s academic and extracurricular programs and special events?

That’s a tough one. Our marketing is not the primary function of The Rumson Country Day School because we obviously prefer to direct those dollars to our classrooms and our students. We rely heavily on the word-of-mouth of our current parents and students, from the soccer fields to the pools. They consistently share their experiences with their peers. Newspaper ads and things like that just aren’t as powerful and real as one parent talking to another or one kid talking to another. We always ask how people found out about The Rumson Country Day School and more often than not, it’s because someone knew someone or had a conversation over dinner.

We also use social media to remind families, friends and local communities about school events, and it’s great for keeping in touch with alumni. Social media makes it easier to maintain and strengthen relationships that begin as young children and continue for life.

Working in education can be an extremely rewarding experience.  What has been most rewarding for you?

One of the most gratifying things for me is the number of people – even when they’re 40, 50, 60 years old – whose best friends came from the Rumson Country Day School, no matter where their lives took them. Some are here, some are in California. It’s amazing to me how their best friends are from their elementary school years. Normally, friendships dissipate when kids go to different high schools and colleges, but it doesn’t dissipate here. I speak through three of my own children who went to The Rumson Country Day School. Their best friends are from here. This is always a place of real comfort and friendship for our students, and that means a lot to me.

To learn more about programs and special events, visit The Rumson Country Day School website.

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The 30 second pitch is an essential marketing tool. Also known as “the elevator pitch,” the idea is to explain who you are and what you do in the short amount of time it takes to ride an elevator from the ground floor to the top floor.  The way we do business today has evolved so while you may never actually use your 30 second pitch in the proverbial “elevator”, there are plenty of places where you will use it; both expected and unexpected places. Every person you meet is a potential client. Whether you’re at a tradeshow, getting a latte or at your daughter’s soccer game,  a business opportunity can present itself anywhere. Be prepared with your 30 second pitch.

The Key Components

The core elements of your 30 second pitch are simple:

1. The “Who”.  The name of your company. Just the name. Not the tagline. Taglines have their place and it’s not in your 30 second pitch.
2. The “What”.  What products or services does you company provide? Keep focused. You cannot be all things to all people.
3. The “What’s in it for me?” or your USP (unique selling proposition). What sets you apart from your competition? For example: Can you help me make more money?  Do you sell a product I need for less cost? Do you solve a specific problem?  Describe yourself in terms of the benefits you provide “me”, your prospective client.

Crafting Your Pitch

Thirty seconds of speaking translates into about 125-150 words. You may be tempted to go over that. Don’t. Research proves that people can form a lasting impression in as little as three seconds, and the average attention span starts to wane after 15-20 seconds. Basically, if you haven’t made your point in 30 seconds (or less) your audience has lost interest and you’ve missed your opportunity.

Craft your pitch by writing down what you want to say and refining it until it answers the questions above. If you remember nothing else, remember this… focusing on the “What’s in it for me” is the difference between making a personal connection with your prospect  and boring them to tears.  Do not write only about you, your products or services. Always make it applicable to your prospects. Speak in terms of why they need YOU over anyone else.

Do not use buzzwords or industry jargon. As tempting as it may be to throw in a few catchphrases, avoid them. Don’t “help anyone help themselves”, allow them to “leverage” anything or offer a “turnkey solution”. And don’t make them think too hard. Be succinct and sincere about your products and services.

Delivering Your Pitch

Once written, don’t just memorize your pitch. An unnatural robotic delivery can sabotage even the best of 30 second pitches. You want it to come to you naturally and sound conversational.

Practice. Even the most seasoned salespeople benefit from practice. Say your 30 second pitch in front of the mirror, in front of your cat, at the breakfast table, on the phone with your mother, in front of the Fed-Ex guy or anyone else who will listen. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will be.

Continually improve. As you give your pitch to more and more prospects, you will hear different questions and reactions. Listen to the response and use that feedback to make your pitch stronger. Remember nothing is constant.

Be confident. Visual cues are just as important as the words you are saying. Remember even though your pitch is 30 seconds, people can form their opinion in as little as three seconds. Stand up tall, make eye contact. Your words and body language work together to make your 30 second pitch as effective as possible. When done successfully, you’ll know you made the most of every opportunity.

Custom websites and apps provide many benefits, including customer service functionality and business management capabilities; they can help reduce human resource time spent on recurring and repetitive tasks; they can offer a service to your customer base that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to provide; in short, a custom app can help your business grow and establish your brand as a leader in your industry.

Making the transition to a web-based app is easy for some and difficult for others. It depends in part on your resources, goals and budget, but there are ways to avoid spending loads of cash on specialized labor to end up with a web product that does not yield a return on your investment.

Start With Planning

I build web applications. Some of them are small, some of them are big, but they all have one thing in common; they always start with a project specification. Whenever I engage in a new project, I begin by documenting the needs and goals of the project to the last detail.

The specification can take many forms depending on the scale and complexity of the website or app, but at its simplest, it provides a roadmap for my client to know what they are investing in.

This is also the first place where the wheels can come off a project. If goals and expectations are not managed, the project can scale to a size that is cost-prohibitive and useless to the organization.

Enter The MVP

My solution to this is to let the MVP drive the process. No, not the Most Valuable Player; the Minimum Viable Product. Every project has a goal, but without knowing what the bare minimum requirements are to meet that goal, it will be difficult to achieve. For instance, you can build a house with many different products and materials, but no matter what you build with, you still need a foundation. Your project’s foundation is the set of features that are essential to your business and to your customers – and no more.

All of the apps I develop have another thing in common; they are all iterative. That means that they launched in one form, but evolved over time into another. Small improvements applied strategically make a good product better over time and allow end users to offer praise, critiques or complaints that can be measured and converted to actionable initiatives.

You can – and most likely will – scale from there, but at that point you are adding value, not meeting essential requirements. Adding value isn’t a bad thing, but value means labor and labor is gonna cost ya. If you have an unlimited budget, adding value may not be an issue, but nowadays small and medium sized businesses do not operate with unlimited budgets.

Remember, The Only Good Feature Is One That Your Customers Use

There are other advantages to an MVP. Many organizations have built web products only to find that their customers only use a fraction of the features. If those features go unused, then your money has been wasted. By releasing an MVP you can measure and track feedback and build features based on demand.

Some may not like this approach because it is reactive instead of proactive, but consider the feedback you get from customers after launch as an opportunity. If they tell you that your product is lacking in some way, build in the features your customers have asked for. In this scenario, you’ve saved yourself the expense of creating unnecessary features, while creating the perception that your organization is adapting to the emerging needs of your customers. It’s a financial win as well as a public relations win. Ideally, that cycle – analyzing your users’ needs and making improvements – should go on for the lifetime of the product.

Of course, even without user interaction, there should always be iterative improvements. Security alone is a moving target. Creating a web product and leaving it untouched for months and months is only asking for trouble. And as technology and hardware improves, you may find that there may be hardware solutions emerging to meet your software needs and visa versa.

Every website, web app or even social media endeavor should be considered cyclical. First, you establish goals; then an MVP specification is designed to meet those goals. From there you build, test and deploy and then the cycle starts over again. Your customers and technology will evolve and so should your web presence.

Here are a few things to consider when developing your MVP:

1.  What features are crucial to your customers?
2. What features are crucial to your business?
3. What features are tied to revenue or conversely to expenses?
4. Do you have a roadmap for your MVP and future iterations of your site or app?
5. Do you have a mechanism for your customers to offer feedback?

A good developer will tell you that planning is important above all else. Without proper planning and discussions there can be no efficient development. When you engage a developer, ask questions and then ask more. Make sure that he knows what your business needs are so that he can architect technical needs around them. Avoid “feature bloat” at all costs; this is when unnecessary features are added to the specification because they are “cool” or for some other vague reason that does not align with your business needs and MVP.

And Did I Mention Planning?

The most important rule upon developing a comprehensive MVP is to make sure everyone is on the same page. Literally. Make sure the specifications for the MVP are in writing and that everyone has the same perspective on production. It helps no one for a developer to build one thing when the client expects another.

Finally, ask “why?” Why are you adding a particular feature? Why are you omitting another? Question everything about the project and make sure that there are solid, unambiguous answers to all of them. This will lead to a smooth development process and a smooth launch.

Technology is imperfect and there will be bugs along the way. Better to avoid whatever pitfalls you can because software development is not cheap or easy.

If you have a project you are working on that does not have an MVP or has created a little internal horror story for your organization, let me know. I’d love to hear your stories.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free newsletter for more insightful articles like this one. And before you go, follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

I’ve saved this tip for last because if you’ve gotten this far it means you care about your business and are willing to do what it takes to make it great. It’s not for the faint-of-heart. It’s not for the lazy, the unmotivated or anyone who just wants the paycheck and the ability to go home afterwards. It’s for those of you who – like me – take personal responsibility for and pride in making your businesses succeed.

What I’m about to tell you to do may seem counterintuitive to the very idea of running a business but if you’ve got the passion, dedication and expertise, it can be the fastest path to winning loyal customers.

Tip #14: Give It Away

Yes, give it away. Take your best, your brightest, your most valuable thoughts and ideas and give them away. No strings attached. I’m not talking about doing pro bono work, I’m talking about giving away something for free to anyone and everyone who asks.

There are two kinds of freebies; the self-serving and the selfless. I’ll walk you through both so you can decide how to make these ideas work for you.

The “Self-Serving” Freebie: Consultations And Partial Offers

This is the most common type of “deal” you see people giving away. I like to think of it as a teaser because it’s something that costs you little to nothing, something you may do anyway that you’ve simply packaged in marketing-ese, or something that has the explicit goal of enticing someone to pay you for something additional later.

These types of freebies have their place and can act as an incentive for a prospect who is on the fence. The most common offer in this category is the “free consultation”. If you’re in the service industry you already know that most people don’t think they should pay you to “think”. Selling consultation time is tough because there generally isn’t  a tangible deliverable and your customer won’t have a pretty, shiny object to look at fondly to remind him of money well-spent.

Lots of people offer free consultations; landscapers, contractors, financial planners, that guy who wants to sell you a full-house water filtration unit (you know the one, he shows up with a bunch of fancy-sounding chemicals to prove how nasty your water is and how clean it could be if you buy his product).

These offers are designed to sell you something but lead you to it gently. Once the landscaper sits with you for an hour to talk petunias and waterfalls, you’re already invested. He’s got something his competition doesn’t and that’s your attention.

You can offer a free consultation as part of your business process, too. When properly designed and executed, you can give your prospect just enough information to set the lure and make it a little harder for her to say, “no” later.

Free consultations are a friendly, soft-sell way to demonstrate expertise and gain trust. They can push your prospect off the fence and give you the extra edge you need to make the sale.

But there is an inherent flaw in this model; can you see it? The problem is – who isn’t offering a free consultation these days? I know I do! So you almost have to offer one just to keep up with the competition, not necessarily to stand out.

A good idea, and I’d still advise you to consider how you can make it work for you, but there’s more. Before we get to the “more”, let’s talk about the other type of self-serving freebie – the partial offer.

Many service providers do this. Authors do it to great advantage. The trick is to give your prospect just enough to whet her whistle but not enough to be satisfied. In the author’s case, she gives you the first chapter, or maybe the first six. But never the last. So you read, you become interested, and now you must know what happens so you’re far more willing to spend money on the book than if you’d simply read a great review.

It works. I know because I’ve bought many of those books! But ultimately, is it really free? You can offer someone a bite of your death-by-chocolate-cake, but that doesn’t make dessert free.

So while these are both great ideas for enticing prospects, there’s another option that’s not meant to entice, but is even more enticing because of it.

The Selfless Freebie: Giving Your Best Away In Exchange For… Nothing at All

Here’s where I start to sound like a crazy person, but I can tell you it works. It’s worked for my business. It’s worked for the businesses of colleagues. It’s worked for many businesses that I admire and respect (it’s the reason I admire and respect them), and it can work for you.

Here’s what you do: create something that has value to your audience and give it to them. That’s it.

The form your freebie takes will depend on your business, but many times it comes in the form of some type of educational material; an eBook (or a real book), a video tutorial, a webinar. Something you’d otherwise expect to get paid for, except this time you’re giving it away.

You are not allowed to expect anything in return. This is a “kindness of the heart” gesture just because you love your customer base that much.

The key is that is has to be something of superior quality, and something of true value to your audience; not a mere three chapters but the whole book.

Sounds crazy, right? It’s not. When you offer something of value with no expectation of return, you’re not being altruistic, you’re being a smart business person. You’re investing in trust-building. You’re cultivating relationships. You’re engendering loyalty. You’re demonstrating expertise. You’re offering something that will literally make people wonder, “If that’s what I got for free, imagine what I’ll get if I pay for it!”

To do this successfully you need to know your audience and what they want. Then you need to produce something that they’ll flock to. How many email lists have you joined that promised a free “How To Do Everything And Get It Perfect In No Time For Free” video in exchange for your email address? Same premise, taken to the next level. I want your content to be so great that your competition will wonder how you can afford to give away the thing they’ve been trying so hard to pretend is so complex that nobody but they could possibly do it (and for a hefty price tag).

And that, my friends, is what will pay dividends. While your competition is still trying to figure out how to convince, persuade, lure and when all else fails baffle prospects into working with them, you’ll be the industry leader that everyone rallies around.

It’s not feel-good fluff. This stuff has been proven to work time and again, for businesses that went from “surviving” to “million dollar”. Overnight? Not especially. Easily? Not really. But that wasn’t what I promised!

Now it’s up to you to decide what you can create that will make people turn around and pay attention.

What can you create that will give people a reason to look to you as the authority in your area of expertise? If you want ideas, tell me what business you’re in and I’ll brainstorm with you – for free!

Read More In The “Make The Sale” Series

• Tip 1: Qualify Your Leads
• Tip 2: Dress The Way You Want To Be Perceived
• Tip 3: Set Expectations
• Tip 4: Know Your S#*@
• Tip 5: Believe In Yourself
• Tip 6: Have A Personality
• Tip 7: Have Good Collateral Materials
• Tip 8: Don’t Sell Your Services
• Tip 9: Talk (And Learn) About Your Prospect
• Tip 10: Be Genuine
• Tip 11: Have A Good Website
• Tip 12: Follow Up
• Tip 13: Define Your “Je Ne Sais Quoi”
• Tip 14:  Give It Away

While that’s good news for searchers, it’s often cause for angst and hand-wringing if you’re the one trying to get your site into their search results. But as horribly complex and difficult as SEO can seem, there’s nothing dark and magical about it. It’s quite practical and it’s all about feeding search engines what they want. And there’s nothing a search engine loves to munch on more than keywords.

If you read my last article about how to choose keywords for SEO, you should have a stack of keywords just sitting around waiting to be used. In this article, I’m going to tell you how to use them. And you won’t even need a magic wand to do it.

Where To Put Keywords If You Want To Hook A Search Engine

Let’s start with a very basic fact: search engines will not list your site for a keyword unless the keyword is, in fact, on your site. No matter how much you may wish and hope and pray for a search listing, it’s simply not going to happen without that keyword.

Think of a search engine as a hungry fish and your website as a hook. What dumb fish is going to chomp on your hook without good bait? (Well, there are probably a few dumb fish out there and a few sites that get lucky…)

Your keywords are the bait. You need good bait first, and then you need to load the bait up properly. If you went fishing and threw some bait in a tree and hid a bit under some rocks, how successful do you think that fishing trip would be? You’ve got to get the bait on the hook and that, my friends, is what we’re going to learn to do today.

Keywords In Page Titles

A page title is a very specific thing. It’s in the <title> tag in your site code, it appears at the very top of your browser window and it’s the first thing someone will see about your site in search engines. If the title of your “About” page is “About My Company”, that may be accurate but it’s completely useless.

Take the keywords you found in your research and compose them into a sentence that accurately and effectively describes the content of the page. Use the keywords as close to the beginning as you can. When you read the title back, it should be interesting and helpful enough so that you can imagine clicking on it if you’d found it in search results.

Quick Tip: Currently, Google truncates titles after 60 characters. While you can certainly write titles that are longer, searchers won’t get the full effect and may miss out on important information. The key is to be descriptive, but brief.

Keywords In Descriptions

Descriptions don’t show up anywhere on your site but can show up in search results. These are what you’ve probably heard referred to as “meta tags”. A description is just one type of meta tag and you can use it to boost the power of your keywords.

Write a description that contains your keywords but is also an actual description of your page. This is not the place to list keywords or repeat them over and over. A description should be a sentence that, when read, informs and entices someone to click the link and visit your site.

Quick Tip: Google does not automatically show your description in search results. It may choose any snippet of text from your page containing your keywords. Much like titles, descriptions are truncated, after about 130-15o characters. Aim to be direct and brief.

Keywords In Headings

Good websites are written in sematic markup. That means the code gives structural meaning to the content on your page. Structure is just a way to make sense of the page. Headings, subheadings and paragraphs all give structure to your content. If it was all one big gob of text on the page, it would be pretty tough for a human being to read it and a search engine to understand it.

When you visit a web page, do you always start reading at the top and work your way, left to right, until you get to the bottom? Probably not. You probably scan the headings to get an idea of what the page is about and then stop on whatever heading catches your eye.

It’s not so different with search engines. Search engines look for headings, too, and if they find keywords there, they’ll give those words some weight.

There are multiple ways to make content look like a heading to the eye, but for the purposes of search engines, a heading is not the same as a big font. A heading is a specific semantic tag such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on down the chain. As you may guess, <h1> headings have the most weight on the page.

That doesn’t mean it has to be bigger, brighter or bolder. It means that in the context of your page, it gives structure to your content so that either a person or search engine scanning it can stop and know, without question, “Ah, that’s a heading!”

Quick Tip: Don’t get carried away and start packing keywords into every <h> tag on the page. And don’t create <h> tags just for the sake of inserting keywords. Consider the meaning and structure of your page first, then craft the content so it makes sense. If your page has headings, use them to your advantage.

Keywords In Links

This one is easy but a little tricky at first glance. The buzzword is “anchor text”, so if you’ve heard that thrown around and broken into a cold sweat, you can relax now. Anchor text simply refers to words in your content that you turn into a link to another page. At the very beginning of this article, I linked to my previous SEO article. The words “how to choose keywords for SEO” are the link, hence the anchor text.

Here’s the tricky part: those keywords count for the other article. So as you build your site and link from one page to another, consider the page that you want to boost, and use its keywords in the anchor text on another page.

Your phrases don’t have to be exact and they shouldn’t all be the same, so please don’t start adding “keyword keyword keyword” into links all over your site. Google is smarter than this and will suspect you’re up to something – namely trying to shove keyword bait down their little fish throats – and they will swim right off. Your text and links should make perfect sense to the naked human eye without appearing to be anything other than a helpful link. If you can do that, you’ve got a winner.

Quick Tip: Take a look at your site and see where you can replace generic “click here” links with keywords. For example, change click here to buy my beaded necklace to Buy my beaded necklace. Same intention but now you have the double bonus of a good call-to-action and a keyword in your anchor text.

Keywords In Images

You may also have heard of “alt tags” but by now you’ve seen how easy this has been, so no buzzwords should make you sweat. An alt tag is simply a tag that allows text to display in a browser if the image doesn’t. It also sometimes appears if you hover over  an image with your mouse.

The alt tag should describe the image. This is especially great for products because you can simply call the product what it is, which is probably pretty close to your keyword anyway. There’s no rule about how long alt tags should be or whether they should be in full sentences. If you can accurately describe an image and throw in a keyword to do it, it’s just another opportunity.

Quick Tip: You should have an alt tag for every photo, graphic and image on your page. If there’s no reason to describe an image, for example, a background image, you can simply use an “empty” alt tag. An empty tag, rather than no tag at all, is the correct way to tag.

Keywords In Content

Your keywords, phrases and all variations of them should be distributed throughout the readable text on your page. You can put keywords everywhere else that you please but if they’re not in the page content you might as well pack up your tackle box and order pizza for dinner.

Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get different advice for doing this. Some people like to write first, insert keywords later. Some people like to write around the keywords the first time.

Whatever your preference, include the keywords in a variety of ways, using varied phrasing and variations that include –ed, -s and –ing. There’s no need to repeat an exact word or phrase over and over. It reads poorly for people and it’s a red flag for search engines. And distribute the keywords throughout the content. Twelve keywords in the first paragraph and none in the last isn’t as good as scattering them throughout.

Quick Tip: If you do this right, nobody should know there are keywords in your content because it will simply read like a sentence and a paragraph and a page. Make sure it flows so that you’re not obviously stumbling over the same word or phrase every few sentence.

These are all things you should be able to do yourself, without any particular brand of magic. If you don’t have access to your website code or via a content management system and can’t make these changes yourself, you can always document them and pass them along to the gatekeeper. So take some time to put your keyword list to good use and give your SEO a jumpstart.

Just remember this most important tip: if your bait is obvious, the fish is going to be suspicious. Search engines will bite but you need to be careful to use keywords lightly and naturally. Repetition, overuse of exact phrasing and keywords in every conceivable open spot on your site is a no-no.

Now that this all sounds so do-able, get to work! You’ve got a good start and the next time you hear crazy-sounding acronyms or buzzwords that make you go, “huh?” you’ll know it’s probably something you can manage.

But despite the wealth of misleading and inaccurate information at your fingertips, search engines are a doorway to your site that can’t be ignored. And if search engines are the doors, then keywords are – not to sound too corny – the keys that unlock them.

So what does that mean to you?

It means that everyone can and should understand the basic building blocks of a search optimized website. And there is nothing more basic and more important to SEO than the keyword. Keywords are the heart and soul… bread and butter… alpha and omega… of search optimization. It hardly matters how brilliant your site is, how perfectly coded, designed and configured if it uses no keywords – or the wrong keywords. Keywords are the precise way that people find your site in search engines.

But how do you know which keywords to use? How do you begin to guess what people are searching for? And with all the garbled industry mumbo jumbo about things like long-tail keywords, where do you even start?

Breathe deep! The good news is that I’m only asking you to commit five minutes, right now, to finding keywords. And I’m about to make it as easy as drinking your morning coffee. Ready?

Grab your mug and set your timer. We’re going to start by choosing at least one great keyword for your website.

The 5-Minute Do-It-Now Guide

First I want you to think of one keyword or phrase that is important to your business. I use the term “keyword” but think of it more as a phrase. The best keywords are really keyphrases that specifically define your product or service.

If you’re a jewelry retailer, you may choose “beaded necklace”. If you’re a plumber you may choose “sink repair”.

I want you to be aware of a few things as you brainstorm your keywords:

• You’ll almost certainly be optimizing different pages of your site for different keywords. Start with one. Get a feel for it and go from there.
• If you’re a local business, consider phrases that include your location. In the example of the plumber, your customer pool is limited to those people who live within a reasonable driving distance of your business. Optimizing for “sink repair” may not be as beneficial to you as optimizing for “Brooklyn sink repair”.
• The more specific you can get, the more likely you’ll be able to optimize successfully for your chosen phrase. Let’s use the jewelry example. Choosing the keyword “necklace” is probably too broad. If you specialize in silver, beads or seashells then qualify your keywords by turning them into phrases; for example “sterling silver necklaces”.

Next I want you to go to this keyword tool provided by Google.

Bookmark it and repeat after me: the keyword tool is my best friend. You can use other tools, but this one is free and it gives you enough information to take informed action.

Enter your chosen keyword to get a list of more keyword ideas. Here’s a quick search that I ran for the keyword “necklace”:

It’s a goldmine of information.

First, you can see how many searches are performed for your chosen keyword. Then there is a long list of related keywords – and not just any old keywords, but keywords that people are actually searching for. One of the biggest SEO mistakes is **thinking** you know what keywords people are using but not actually knowing. Never assume you know what your potential customers are looking for. Even after years practicing SEO, I can still be surprised by keyword research.

Not only does this tool tell you what people are searching for, but it should give you a stack of ideas for keywords that you can use to represent your products or services.

Second, it tells you, relatively speaking, what the competition is for your keyword. Notice in this example the competition is “high” on every variation.

Finally, it tells you how many actual searches were performed on each keyword, both globally and locally. Remember the plumber? This is where local searches become more important.

As you can see from my search above, there are a lot of people looking for necklaces! But there’s also a lot of competition. It’s always harder to get attention for your site if it’s merely one among many. Choosing a highly competitive keyword may not be the best way to go because it can take a lot of time and effort to get in front of a huge pack of competitors.

Let’s keep going.

As you peruse your list of keyword ideas, I want you to define a more specific phrase, something that more precisely represents your product or service. Instead of “necklace”, I tried “beaded necklace”. Here are the results:

Fewer searches, but more qualified if you are, indeed, selling beaded necklaces instead of sterling silver. You can also get a glimpse into the minds of your potential customers this way. Perhaps it would surprise you to learn that people are also looking for “chunky” necklaces and “long” necklaces. These ideas should get your gears spinning about phrases you can use on your site.

Unfortunately the competition is still pretty stiff for necklaces of any type. That doesn’t mean you should give up. Some niches are simply more competitive. You ought to try optimizing for “search engine optimization services”!

If you’ve bookmarked this keyword tool and didn’t stop to check your Facebook page in between searches, you should still have 4 minutes on the clock.

I want you to keep refining your keyword down to something more and more specific. And counter-intuitively, “refining” your keyword sometimes means “adding more keywords”. We went from necklace, to beaded necklace, and perhaps your next search could be “handmade beaded necklace”.

For those of you selling beaded necklaces, this could be tough! As it turns out there’s a whole lot of competition. It isn’t until I got way down to the bottom of my fourth search that I started to see some potential. The keywords below have relatively less competition which could make your job a little easier.

Here, you can see that “etsy handmade jewelry” has far fewer searches, but is also less competitive and much more highly targeted. So if you’re selling handmade jewelry on etsy, looks like you’ve got an option!

I’ll admit this much: as soon as I started searching for keyword examples to use in this article, I immediately regretted choosing one so darn difficult. I was about to change course and pick a less competitive term to illustrate these points, but then decided to stick with it, because in the real world you don’t get to choose a completely different product or service if yours is competitive. You’ve got to work with what you have, and if it’s a touch niche, then you’ve got to work a little harder.

So all you beaded-necklace people, take heart. You’ve still got options. Take “homemade jewelry”. Let’s start with the fact that it never would have occurred to me to search for “homemade” jewelry. Handmade maybe. But that’s the beauty of keyword research.

Now that you’ve searched, refined, searched again and found a few keywords with potential, you should still have a good 2 minutes on the clock.

Here’s what you do next: compare keywords. Do you see “handmade lampwork bead jewelry”? That’s a great term if that’s what you’re selling. And it’s also middle-of-the-road in the competition column. But look at how many global searches: 73. Compare that to “homemade jewelry” with similar relative competition at 18,100 searches, and which one do you think gives you a better bang for your buck? All things being equal, you’ve got a broader audience for the second than for the first, even though the first is a bit more specific.

As you compare your possible keywords, I want you to consider three things:

1. How relevant is it to my business?
2. How stiff is the competition?
3. How big is my potential audience?

Depending on your keywords and niche, if you can find a relevant keyword with a decent audience and low competition, you’ve struck gold.

Overall it’s wiser to target a low-competition keyword with a smaller audience than a high-competition keyword with a big audience, especially if you’re just starting out (and you only have five minutes). I don’t want to deter you from going for the highly competitive terms, but if you can help it, aim for a smaller, more highly targeted audience with the least competition.

Now that you have one minute left and counting down, this is the last thing I want you to do: write down the top three keywords that you’ve found, along with their competition and search counts. (For the super-efficient, it wouldn’t hurt to open up a spreadsheet and add these to a permanent document that you can use to track your keywords today, tomorrow and every day that you can spare five minutes for SEO.)

I said top three because these are the three keywords that you’re going to use on your site. Now, if you’re a jewelry retailer and you just did a search for necklaces, you’re probably wondering, “But what about the bracelets!?” Alas, that’s your five minutes tomorrow. Each and every page of your site is an opportunity to optimize for specific, relevant and unique keywords. And now you have three.

Write your top three down because those are the keywords you’re going to use to kickstart your website optimization. And it’s only taken five minutes out of your day.

The trick, if there is one, to optimization is that you don’t need to sit down and beat your head against your computer monitor all day. Instead, you need to carve up small bits of time to tackle one thing at a time. Today we found keywords that are going to work for your business, your niche, and your site.

Let’s review…

1. Think: What keywords are important to your business? What do you want to be found for?

2. Search: Plug your keywords into the keyword tool and see what comes up. What keywords are other people looking for?

3. Refine: Repeat your search with a more specific keyphrase or a variation. Does anything surprise you or intrigue you? Pick out the potentials.

4. Compare: Look at the relative competition and the number of searches performed for several relevant keywords and phrases.

5. Record: Make a list of the top three keywords that have the most potential to bring you targeted traffic with the least competition.

And you’re on your way to becoming a keyword Ninja!

At this point you may be wondering what the heck to do with your three keywords. Guess you’ll have to come back for the next article. Until then, spend five minutes a day defining the keywords that mean the most to your business and have the greatest potential for driving qualified traffic to your site.

Three… two… one… go!

Why?

Because I’ve seen so many people do it wrong time and again. Because I’ve listened to the heartbreaking stories of people who might have become my clients if they hadn’t wasted their time and budget on a web project that collapsed halfway through or failed to meet business goals. Because I listen to people every day tell me how they’re web developers just because they read “Become A Web Developer in 21 Days”.

But mostly, because you’re not a web expert, and you’re not supposed to be. You’re supposed to be good at what you do and you are fully entitled to expect that the person you hire to build your site is good at what he (or she!) does.

So before you start –  or restart – and repent later, arm yourself with some insight into how you should approach the web development process if you want a site that has marketing value for your business.

Define Business Goals

This bit of advice should precede every single marketing decision you make. Why do you want a Facebook page? Why are you sending an email newsletter? Why are you building a website?

“Because everyone has a website” is not a good reason.

“So I can have a web presence” is not a good reason, either.

You must define the goal and what you want to achieve. A goal has two important components: a specific intention and a measurable result.

“Get more traffic” is a common desire but it’s not a good goal. It is neither specific, nor can it be measured. What’s “more” traffic? One more visitor per day? Ten? Ten thousand?

“Increase traffic by 10% within 6 months” is both specific and can be measured. At the end of six months you will be able to say that you either achieved this goal or did not.

However, increasing traffic is not inherently a good end-goal, because it doesn’t really speak to your business needs. Why does it matter how much traffic you get? Traffic must mean something to you. Do you want traffic because it increases ad revenue, sales or leads? Or just because it makes you happy to look at an upward trend on your analytics graphs?

Every time you think you know what your goal is, ask yourself, Why? Keep asking why, all the way back until you can’t answer why anymore.

I want a website. Why?

To get more traffic. Why?

To get more leads. Why?

To make more money. Ah! That sounds like a business reason. Other good business goals might include decreasing human resource hours spent on specific tasks or reducing costs in specific areas.

There can be mini-goals along the path toward your ultimate goal. A mini-goal may be to increase traffic, but that isn’t your ultimate goal. Make sure you can define each type of goal, both big and small. Before you think about website pages, design or anything else, start by deciding why you want a website and what specific, measurable goals it will help you achieve.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Anyone who sits down and just starts building a website is either naïve or crazy. Without a plan, it’s impossible to know what to build. Even the smallest, simplest website must start with a plan.

Would you say to your contractor, “Build my kitchen”? Well, you could try, but he’d look at you like you’re a crazy person and then ask you what cabinets you’d picked out, where the sink was going, whether you had the proper electrical wiring and a host of other questions. You can apply this analogy to your website. What pages do you want? What content will go onto those pages? What message do you want to convey?

This is an example of a simple sitemap. Yours may be a list or a complex diagram, depending on your website goals.

I always start with a sitemap. It can be as simple as a list of pages or as complex as a series of flowcharts and diagrams. It all depends on your site needs, which will depend on your goals. An ecommerce site with the goal of making online sales will have an entirely different planning need than one that’s meant to generate a newsletter subscriber list. The important thing is to be as specific and detailed as possible.

Once you know what pages you’ll need, you have to decide how to fill them. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to who will say they need an “About My Company” page and then have no clue what to put on it. Or want a footer on the page but then stare blankly at it without an inkling how to fill it. A better approach would be to start with the content and build the site around it; not build the site then try to plug the holes with whatever you can find.

A wireframe can help with this. Sketch out a page and what content you need for that page. Start with broad strokes and global elements. Every page will need navigation, so spec a space for it. You may want your contact information on the footer of every page. Perhaps you know that you want to include a testimonial on each page. Define these very high-level spaces.

Then you can get more granular on a page-by-page basis. If it’s a contact page you’re planning, you probably need an area for a form, perhaps some contact info and maybe an introduction. Your “About” page needs a content area. Will you be including staff bios and photos? A photo of your office building? Whatever content needs to be on the page should be planned ahead of time. It will make the building process much easier and more efficient.

Here's a basic home page wireframe example. Sketch it out first because it's a lot easier to erase than to rebuild a website.

As you plan, consider the practical reality. You may want a testimonial on each page, but do you have a testimonial for each page? Or for any page? You may have visions of a welcome video on your home page but without the actual video you’re going to end up with an empty page and a lot of aggravation.

Part of the planning process includes having a vision for what might change. You may not have a video now, but if you plan to develop one within two months it would be smart to think ahead and make sure your website is flexible enough to accommodate it.

Create And Collect The Content

If you need copy written for your company profile, personal bio, product descriptions, case studies or anything else, it’s time to start writing, before a single page of your site is built. If you’re ready to tackle that video, do it and have it prepared. If you need a headshot, call a photographer. Create whatever content is necessary for your site if you don’t already have it at your disposal.

I’ll go a step further and say it’s not even good enough to simply have the content. You’ve got to collect and organize the content. Otherwise you may find you’re doing a lot of hunting around for things you thought you had, delaying the process and racking up the expenses.

Here’s a common scenario: a client tells me they want a photo gallery of their work. I ask if they have photos. Yes, they have photos, great photos, high-res photos, tons of photos. That is, until I ask for the photos. Then it’s two weeks of, “I thought they were on my computer” and “Our drive crashed” and “The last person in charge of our website lost them”.

Do yourself, your sanity and your budget a favor and collect your assets: photos, video, copy, graphics, whatever. If it’s content that needs to go on your site, gather it, sort it or create it before you start to build the site.

Decide On The Aesthetic

I don’t want you to design the site, but I do want you to think about what you want the design to convey. Corporate? Fun? Edgy? Traditional? Cutting-edge? Warm and fuzzy or starkly modern? Whatever you decide must be in line with your brand and the image that you want to convey to customers.

Colors, typography, and style should reflect your goals and brand. Don't get caught up in what looks great but doesn't work for your business.

It can help to look at other websites to get an idea of what’s happening on the web. Of course, it can also be a double-edged sword because there are so many things happening on the web that it may be distracting and overwhelming. If you do decide to look to other sites for ideas, try not to get too mired in what other people are doing and forget that your site has to be a reflection of your business – not theirs. Looking around can give you ideas you might not have thought of. Maybe you never thought to add a Facebook fan box to your site but once you see it, you realize this could be the perfect engagement tool for yours. But if it’s not a good tool and won’t further your business goals, don’t add it just because it looked great somewhere else.

I’ll leave you with one final consideration about design: the design must support the business goals and meet the business needs. Too many people get hung up on how a site looks but don’t consider how it works. Design is subjective. What one customer may love, another may hate, at least from a visual standpoint. But if the design makes it easy for visitors to find what they need and do what they want, and leads them to your end goal, then it’s fulfilled its business purpose.

Many paragraphs later, you may have noticed we never got around to actually building the website. That’s because building a good website starts long before you actually start building. If you’ve got the vision, goals and plans in place before you start, you’re already halfway there.