5 Ways to Differentiate Your Business Online
By George Meszaros
Most businesses struggle to differentiate themselves for the
competition. Why not use your website to stand out. A great
website can help you establish yourself as the leader of your
market. Any business can have, regardless of their revenue, a
Fortune 500 web presence. With over 100 million domains
registered you must do more than put any website online, you
have to have an online strategy.
There is no successful online strategy without the following:
Content – Good website content doesn’t end with an “About Us”
or a “Contact Us” page. You must have great content. Not some
boring sales pitch that people never really believed. Content
must be unique and useful information to your target market.
Don’t be afraid of giving information away. Even if you are a
lawyer that charges by the hour for your expertise, you will
have a better website when you include expert advice. Your
website is NOT an online brochure. It is a source of valuable
information.
Update – Have an outdated website? Don’t think that people that
look at your website don’t know that it is out of date. An out
of date website show your market that you are too busy. If you
are too busy you don’t want any more business. Your website has
to be updated frequently. Frequent means several times each
month, not several times per year. The best websites are updated
several time per day. Your website should be built with a CMS
(Content Management System) that enables you to edit each page
of your website without any programming skills. Your website
should include information about what is happening at your
company such as new products/services, management changes, trade
shows and other trade events, press releases, how to’s, anything
and everything that would be of value to your market.
Expert – Your website makes you an expert. The great content
you include in your website will position you above others,
elevating you to expert level. Your prospects would rather buy
from an expert than from a sales person. We tend to trust
experts more than sales people. Your website should do more to
position you as an expert instead of trying to be your online
sales person. Include, expert advice, white papers, research
results, awards, accomplishments, accolades, everything that
will tell the world that you are an expert at what you do.
SEO – Search engine optimization is often misunderstood. Some
people think it is about manipulating the search engines. They
are wrong. SEO is about optimizing your website and always
adding new and unique content to your website. SEO is more about
great content than anything else. SEO also involves getting
other websites link to your website. When you have great content
it is a lot easier to get others to link to you than a website
with boring content. Your content should include relevant
keywords. As you develop your content keep in mind what keywords
you are targeting.
Easy – The old way of updating your website is contacting your
webmaster and ask her to make the changes. It a slow and
inefficient way to update website. That is the reason most
website are out of date and contain old information. A CMS
website empowers you to update your website as frequently as you
would like. When updating is easy it is much more likely to
happen than updating the old fashioned way. If you want 100%
control over your website content, you must have a CMS website.
About the Author: George Meszaros is the co-founder of Webene
(http://www.webene.com), a web development and marketing
company, based in San Diego, CA. He has taught e-commerce
courses at the college level and wrote a book titled “Triumph On
The Web.”
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