Successful Blog

It’s All “About Us”

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By Myrna Vaca

The “About Us” page on your website provides a great way to give your potential customers the lowdown on why they should be doing business with you and to remind your current customers why they are purchasing your products and services. Unfortunately, some companies pass up this golden opportunity to tell the world how great they are.

Other than your home page, “About Us” is probably the most widely read section of your website. Visitors go there to find out more about your company and to decide if they want to continue searching your website for additional information. Don’t disappoint them.

Tell Your Tale

Your initial goal in creating your “About Us” page should be to grab the visitors’ attention and encourage them to stay a while. The story you tell should be interesting and well-written; if you’re not a writer, consider hiring one to turn your thoughts into a literary masterpiece – or at least into an engaging narrative.

Here are some ways to give people some insight into who you are and why they should trust you enough to do business with you. This is especially important for online stores because your customers don’t see you face-to-face.

  • Include a short bio about your background, education, experience and credentials, along with a photograph of yourself. If you have employees, include information and photos to introduce them to your potential customers as well.
  • Offer information concerning the products and services you provide.
  • Put together a statement that tells your potential customers what sets you apart from your competition.
  • Explain how and why you started the business.
  • If there’s an interesting story about the products you sell, tell it. And don’t be afraid or too humble to tell people about what motivates you. Tell them why you can’t wait to wake up every morning and get to work.
  • Do you have a vision for your business? If you do, tell your potential customers about your dreams and where you’d like the company to be in a decade or so.

Spreading the Word

There should be other important information on your “About Us” page besides your personal story and the story of your business. Here are some other important details for you to include.

  • Testimonials – These will help you establish credibility. Your satisfied customers are your best advertising.
  • Awards – If you’ve been cited by a professional or community organization, tell people about it.
  • Media coverage – If the local newspaper or an online magazine has published a story about you or your business, provide a link on your “About Us” page.
  • Press releases – If you aren’t a writer, hire one to put together press releases about your business. You can send them to print and online publications, and you should have them available on your site as well.
  • Newsletter – If you don’t have a newsletter that you send to customers and potential customers on a regular basis, maybe you should consider establishing one. The “About Us” page is a good place for a link that allows visitors to sign up for the newsletter.
  • Blogs – If you or your employees are blogging about your products or services, it’s a good idea to provide a link from your “About Us” page.
  • Social media – Make it easy for people to interact with you with links to your Facebook page and other social media platforms.
  • Picture this – Photos are great, but only if they are of real people and places.

Consider Your Customers

Now that you’ve put together all the important information about you and your business, you should dedicate some of the space on the “About Us” page to your customers and those that you hope will someday be your customers.

  • Facts are important – Boast about it if you know that your products are shipped on time 100 percent of the time and that you ship the right product 99.5 percent of the time.
  • But don’t make stuff up – If you don’t have statistics that make your business look reliable, don’t fabricate them. Instead, explain what your goals are and how you intend to meet them.
  • Congratulate yourself – Tell your potential customers about the important certifications you’ve earned and awards you’ve won. You’ll have to decide which ones are important and which ones aren’t.

Your “About Us” page can serve as a great marketing tool, but just because you’re happy with the page you create today doesn’t mean you should be satisfied with it tomorrow. You should continually update the page, especially when you enhance your education or experience, obtain major customers or gain a foothold in new markets.

Author’s Bio: Myrna Vaca is the Head of Marketing and Communications at Lyoness America, where she directs media relations, branding, advertising and website development. Lyoness is an international shopping community and loyalty rewards program, where businesses and consumers benefit with free membership and money back with every purchase. Check out Lyoness on Twitter.

Standing Out Of the Crowd – How to Design A Successful Portfolio Website

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Portfolio websites are usually considered something meant only for graphic designers, web developers, design studios, artists, photographers, and the likes. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go for a portfolio website to get more clients or job opportunities, regardless of your job or profession, as long as you’ve got something to write home about.

A portfolio website can serve as a resume that will help you stand out of the crowd. A job applicant with his personal website will surely make a much better impression, as compared to someone presenting a typical CV, which are a dime a dozen. Having a portfolio website is one of the most effective ways of presenting and sharing your work samples, skills, and accomplishments. All you need is to share your website with prospective clients and let the website do the job. Not only that, but it will also help you brand yourself and find a better job opportunity.

And if you are thinking that a portfolio website is only for the well-established, veteran professionals then you are quite wide off the mark. Creating a portfolio website and working on your online presence via social networks like LinkedIn is equally important for fresh graduates looking for their first job.

Here’s how to make the most of your portfolio website …

The Appearance:

Appearance includes everything from logo to banner, and the overall design to colors and typography of your website. While it’s great to be a little creative and come up with an original design, however, trying to be overly creative at the expense of the usability, accessibility, or the readability of your website is not going to cut it. For example, creating a website without a header or navigation menu might be a novel idea but your potential employers might not appreciate the time or effort required in navigating through the website, so you should leave such novel ideas for graphic designers.

Talking of graphic designers, if you are looking for some inspiration, you can search for portfolio websites by some of those web designers; no wonder some of the most catchy and impressive looking portfolio websites are by web designers themselves. If you are short on budget, you can create a website yourself while using some of those freely available CMS. If you can invest a little, you can hire some freelance web designer, or simply use one of those premium templates (e.g. MotoCMS Templates).

The Content:

Content is the “meat and potatoes” of a website, be it a portfolio or any other kind of website. For a portfolio website, the main content is of course your qualification, work history, work samples, achievements, and accomplishments. Not to forget the testimonials. For a fresh graduate, it might be difficult to come up with all those achievements or testimonials to impress potential employers, but you can get some endorsements from your teachers. Regardless of the nature or type of your job, you should only present the best of your work, instead of focusing on the quantity, because usually the employers don’t have the time to go through more than 3 – 4 samples.

The Social Aspects:

Talking of the content, it is important to keep your website updated and for that, there’s nothing better than a blog. You don’t necessarily need to produce highest quality content on regular basis. All you need to do is to mix good quality posts on a relevant topic to some personal experiences and day to day activities. Not only the blog will serve as a tool to continuously update your portfolio website, but it will also help you add some social aspect to your website. You can share the good ones at social networks for some free promotion.

The Marketing:

Once you’ve a fully functional website with some content, it’s now time to market or promote your website. You don’t really need to invest your time and resources on conventional marketing techniques like SE optimization, link building, or PPC marketing. However, you should be focusing on social networking and outreach, and for that you will need to produce good quality content. Simply create a profile and spend some time at professional social networks like LinkedIn or Quora, not only you will learn a lot by Interacting with other professionals at these networks, but you will also find a lot of contacts and job opportunities from referrals.

5 Tips On How To Choose The Right Layout & Design For Your New Blog

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By Reena Cruz

Everyone has a reason for starting a blog: passion, hobby, business, information sharing, you name it. Whatever compels you to the blogging dashboard, you’ll find yourself wondering how your blog layout and design can best attract your target niche.

Different themes and layouts will work well with certain goals, for example, and some won’t. Thus, you need to decide on the best blog design that will work with and emphasize your main goal. It may sound easy, but any veteran blogger can tell you that it isn’t.

Visually and technically planning out your blog’s design requires a lot of testing and refining. So to help ease the process for budding bloggers, we offer some basic advice to help you start achieving your blogging goals effectively.

Blogs Focusing On Sales & Ads

For most, blogging will be considered a business first and foremost. Or your blog could be a business, itself, selling services and information. As such, affiliate links, sponsorship ads, Adwords and advertising are all things you’ll be aiming to fit onto your pages. Though many people are turned off by these, if you’re discreet and highly selective, you can work these into your layout.

The location of ads is crucial to a user’s reading experience. It’s everything. Take a look at the home page of TechCrunch.com for instance. Their blog contains ads and sponsored links, but only features them in five visible places and in two spots on the side bar. No more.

In the posts themselves, ads are located in secondary places (the header above the title and below the article before the comments section). These locations don’t interrupt your reading and actually catch your eye in logical places as it naturally moves across the page. So carefully consider where you should put your ads or sponsors and how many you should have in direct visible competition with your written content.

Blogs On Design, Graphics & Images

The design and image oriented blogger should consider a clean, minimalistic approach to put more emphasis on the visual content and eye-catching artwork. After all, if you’re showcasing graphic design work and high-res images, you don’t want to bury it in text or have it compete with other content elements.

For this, try picking themes that are highly customizable and allow for easy image viewing, like ones that offer the ability to add image sliders or ones where you can specify the size of posts on your home page. Keep content on the sidebars to a minimum, as well. And don’t forget the social media sharing buttons to popular image sharing networks like Flickr or Pinterest. Check out sites like Abduzeedo and Colossal, popular design blogs that put these tips into practice.

Social Media Oriented Blogs

Social media blogs are all about sharing, networking, interacting with multi-media, and spotting the latest viral post. You can get the same interaction on your blog, but with a few careful decisions.

We know that you want all the social media extras, but select ones that effectively serve a purpose for your readers. For instance, you may want to include social sharing widgets that indicate the virality of the post, allowing users to easily fish out popular posts. Or, to spark some social interaction, choose commenting systems that include ranking, pingback, and replying features.

Social media and pop culture blogs like Mashable.com or The Verge are great examples. Notice that their sharing options are carefully chosen to include one-click sharing to certain social networks—not every single one out there. In addition, their content is laid out Pinterest-style, encouraging users to visually pick out what they want to read. How your content attracts the user’s eye and lets them interact with it will play a big role in your blog’s design.

Professional Company Blogs

These kinds of blogs are great as they can act as a built-in platform for customer interaction, sharing helpful information, and promoting services. As such, you want to keep your blog professional looking.

Eliminate ad elements like Google ads or sponsored links, that is, unless your company is in partnership with some of them. Keep social media buttons available for easy sharing. To convey a sense of professionalism, your blog’s theme should work with the same layout and colour palette as your company’s website. Also, consider adding subscription buttons to update your customers automatically.

In short, be sure that your blog is in line with your company’s overall message and goal. Companies like Intuit and Hubspot have blogs that are good examples of this. They’re businesses with blogs that tie in professionalism, social sharing, and related content (both in posts and sidebars). In short, each blog element works to tie in the company’s brand and services.

Blogs Geared Towards News Sharing

It’s common for bloggers to want to share the latest news in their niche. For this, you may want to consider adding a feature that keeps buzz worthy news stories highlighted. Related ads to quality services will also be a good element to add if your readers welcome the resources. Interaction with posts via comments is also a necessity. And make good use of your web real estate by keeping it organized.

Big tech news blogs like Macrumors.com and GigaOM take different approaches. In both cases, each has some of the same elements. They highlight recent articles and have trending content in the sidebar. For comments, Macrumors uses a forum community for lengthy discussions; GigaOM gives users the ability to share their comments on social networks. Lastly, because news can cover so many topics, each blog breaks the content down into different categories. So decide how you want to handle the never-ending onslaught of daily news, first. Then you can decide on the easiest way your community can consume it and form discussions around it.

Conclusion

It’s ultimately up to you to decide which layout and design works out best. No matter which direction you choose for your blog, ensure that its theme is practical for presenting content, interacting with it, and achieving your main goal.

As bloggers and blog readers, what advice do you have?

Author’s Bio: Reena Cruz writes for the Investintech.com blog, where she shares tips about PDF converter technology and software in general. As a tech-geek, she enjoys learning about new tech trends and sharing productivity tool tips online. You can find her on Google Plus.

Tips to Effectively Optimize Your Website with Multivariate Testing

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By Ruben Corbo

If you follow the branding convention adopted by most large companies, you’d note a uniform application of key branding elements, such as logo, slogan and trademarks across all their corporate websites. Big business also optimizes all forms of online interaction, be they blog, social media profiles or corporate portals. To optimize your website, you also can implement tactics that larger players use, provided you adopt a few essential tips and perform multivariate testing thoroughly.

Basics of Multivariate Testing

In multivariate testing, you select specific attributes of your website and test them simultaneously. This technique is also called “multi-variable testing” or “multi-variable assessment,” and the variables here refer to the website’s attributes. These include user-friendliness, design, layout, compatibility with smart phones, and browsing requirements—say, browser type and security level, depending on the page a user is reading. Unlike multivariate testing, A/B testing only focuses on two operational scenarios and assesses a single attribute.

Website Optimization 101

Also known as portal enhancement, website optimization covers the mishmash of things—say, esthetic, programming and security—that a company does to elevate the stature of its website in search engine rankings, increase conversion rates and generate cash in the long term. To perform website optimization, adopt a tactic that fits your budget and operational model. You either do it yourself or use online tools to help you convert traffic to online sales. You also can hire an SEO specialist to analyze your content and search ranks, track conversion rates, and rummage in the website’s data to understand what’s going on from an optimization standpoint.

Running Effective Multivariate Tests

To run an effective multivariate test, you should understand not only the fundamentals of the test but also things like usage requirements and testing steps.

Usage Requirements

You typically would need multivariate testing if you operate a highly trafficked, complex website with stringent coding requirements and security layers. This type of testing is also suitable if you want to improve the “look and feel” of the portal, an element that becomes as important as ever for a site that experiences heaving readership on a daily basis. For a modest-traffic portal, such as blog or personal website, I recommend A/B testing instead.

Testing Steps

Follow these steps to run an effective and efficient multivariate test, but remember again that you can use online tools or hire an expert if you run a complex operation or simply need to have a specialist coordinate the assessment.

  1. Evaluate your website to determine what must be fixed.
  2. Set the way you want to test batches, specifying such attributes as user-friendliness, security, information and “look and feel.”
  3. Choose test variations.
  4. Run the multivariate test.
  5. Analyze results and decide whether a new test is needed to confirm the results.
  6. Implement the results on your website—that is, fix or improve it according to the results.

Take-Away

Believe it or not, your website says a lot about your company, how seriously you take online commerce, and the operational importance you ascribe to the comfort of readers, shoppers and your existing customers. So adopt effective measures to optimize your corporate portal. In a digital era in which the first impression invariably counts, it is in your company’s economic interests to design and deploy an attractive yet informative website. Multivariate testing can help in this process, but make sure you do your homework in advance, apply specific steps, and glean relevant information from specialized portals.

Author’s Bio: Ruben Corbo is a freelance writer that writes about technology, gaming, music, and online marketing especially topics about A/B Testing and multivariate testing. Ruben has written several online marketing articles related to the topic of converting traffic to sales which you can find out more novice information on Maxymiser. When Ruben is not writing he is composing and producing music for short films and other visual arts.

How to Enhance the Usability of Your E-Commerce Site

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By Charles Mburugu

Usability is a very important factor for the success of any website. When designing your ecommerce site, your aim should not just be to have an online store which looks good on the eye. Instead, work at building a site that makes it easy for customers to find information and complete the checkout process. If visitors have a hard time finding what they are looking for, they will simply leave and go elsewhere.

Here are some tips that will help you make your ecommerce site more user-friendly.

1. Offer contact information

Besides enhancing sales, an ecommerce site can be a very powerful tool for attracting new leads and building new bonds with customers. It is therefore very important to have a dedicated page in your site that contains your contact information. In addition, these details should appear clearly on all your site’s pages. Besides the usual email address, include links to your social media profiles. This will enable visitors to reach you through the medium that suits them best. If possible, you could also offer telephone contacts.

2. Make your navigation clear

Most ecommerce sites have many pages with lots of information about a wide range of products. As a result, visitors are likely to lose their way. This is why a good navigation system is absolutely essential. At any one time, visitors should know exactly where they are, where they have come from and where they can go. A breadcrumb navigation system is very helpful. In addition, make sure your pages have clear headings and subheadings which show the subject of the page.

3. Add a search feature

A native search feature makes it possible for visitors to find what they are looking for without having to go through numerous pages. Make sure the search bar appears prominently on your pages in a place where visitors can easily find it. You could place it on the top of the page or on the right sidebar. Whatever the case, make sure it is ‘above the fold’ (can be viewed without scrolling). To make the search function more effective, you could break it down into filters such as color, size, price, availability and type. This search filter will offer your visitors a more pleasant user experience.

4. Show related products

When designing your product pages, place related products in a common group. When a customer purchases a particular product, you could suggest a different product in the same group. This enhances the likelihood of the customer buying another product, even if they had not planned to.

5. Add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section

When visitors land on your pages and read the content, they might still be left with a wide range of questions. It is therefore vital to have a dedicated FAQ page on your site which seeks to answer some of the concerns customers are likely to raise. However, allow your customers to contact you in case they need further clarification on anything.

6. Make registration optional

If you require visitors to sign up before accessing your site, they are likely to get put off and simply go away. Therefore, I recommend that you make registration optional. Allow customers to shop even if they are not registered. This will attract more people to your ecommerce site and ultimately enhance customer loyalty.

Author’s Bio: Charles Mburugu is a HubSpot-certified content writer/marketer for B2B, B2C and SaaS companies. He has worked with brands such as GetResponse, Neil Patel, Shopify, 99 Designs, Oberlo, Salesforce and Condor. Check out his portfolio and connect on LinkedIn.

Intention Counts

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By James Ellis

A website can be and do just about anything. It can be a brochure, a greeting card, a catalog, a conversation space, an announcement, a research tool, a library, a photo gallery, a way to spark ideas, build connections, engage people and speak about your corner of the world.

But it can’t really do all those things (unless you are Google or maybe Facebook, in which case, “hi!”). It can do one or two of those things well. It can do three or four of those things well with an exponential increase in resources, but that’s it.

So instead of spending millions on a legion of developers, creative directors, content managers and the staff to populate their respective armies, maybe you should focus your intention down to one thing.

What is your website supposed to be or do? Boil it down to a phrase a five-year-old could understand.

Amazon was a bookstore. Now it is an everything store. Google is a search engine. Those are easy, mostly because they have smart marketers and leadership who knows that you need to excel at one thing before you expand to something else.

But what about the website for your favorite coffee shop? It could be a brochure: hours and location with a pic of a cute barista. It could be a branding peice: pictures and animations that are warm and inviting about the idea of coffee and scones. It could be a business development peice: Get you excited about the idea of hand-roasted select gourmet coffee and how it will make your life better. It could be a store: place your coffee order and schedule a pick-up time or delivery. It could be a research tool: Everything you could want to know about coffee from different regions of the world, how it should be roasted, what the types of roasting levels mean and how they affect taste.

One coffee shop, four intentions. Each intention shapes the nature of the website, who uses it and why. Intention therefore determines the site’s success

For example, will more people come to your coffee shop because they know more about all the different coffee varieties? If your goal is to sell more coffee, then maybe that intention doesn’t align with that objective. If you spend 3,000 words talking about thirty different coffee varieties, and you only sell two, what was the good in that? You may have just gotten them excited to go to another coffee shop.

Nailing down the intention of your site, especially in relation to your total marketing strategy and your business strategy, increases your likelihood of success. Now I’m going to go drink some coffee.

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is the Director of Digital Strategy at FLIRT Communications. His latest book, Google Analytics for Small Business is currently in beta. He’s giving away discounted copies if you are willing to help make it even better.