Online lead generation steps 1 and 2 are included in part 1 of this series and steps 3 and 4 are included in part 2.

There’s one more step in our 5-stage process to get more online leads and no surprise here, it’s…

5. Marketing

This is easily the most neglected piece of the puzzle. If you want to generate leads online, your budget for marketing should be 5X greater than the amount you are willing to spend on design. You might hear people discussing the merits of social media as “free marketing” but the truth is you are either going to spend a ton of time, or a ton of money trying to generate relevant traffic to your site and, chances are, it will be a mix of both.

The Internet is a crowded place and Internet users are a tough audience to capture. You are competing with well over a million other people who are vying for your target customers click and how many links are they actually clicking in a day? 100, maybe 150? And most of those clicks are probably pages they’ve been to before. Exploring new pages and sites makes up the minority of our daily web surfing so if you are trying to get people to your site, it’s going to be hard.

If you have time:

• Dive into social media, go to meetups, speak at events, and network like crazy.
• Optimize your site content for search engines, learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Create videos on YouTube or Vimeo and post them to your site.
• Repurpose your blogs into an e-newsletter. Build a mailing list.

If you have money:

• Create a pay-per-click campaign in AdWords.
• Hire an SEO company.
• Consider offline advertising like sponsorships.

Remember that in order to generate leads, you need traffic. Even an extremely successful web initiative might not convert more than 3% of visitors into leads and big traffic is not likely to appear out of thin air. The Field of Dreams marketing strategy, i.e., “If you build it, they will come” is not in any way viable or realistic.

But if you focus on marketing and follow the other advice we’ve laid out in this series you’ll be in good shape for success.

Sometimes you CAN judge a book by it’s cover. Like if the book has an airbrushed picture of Fabio on a stallion, it probably isn’t going to read like Faulkner. After you have bought your web properties and installed the right CMS, you can start to hone in on the look and feel of your website.

3. User Friendly Design

Much like nipples, everyone has an opinion when it comes to website design. Before you let all of your individual biases into the equation, take a step back. First and foremost, ask yourself, “Self, what is the purpose of this site?” It’s OK to have a few, but prioritize them. List them in order of importance and focus on those goals throughout the entire process. And when I say “order of importance” I mean it — no “ties.” Each goal should have a unique place in your hierarchy.

Then ask yourself, “Self, what should the navigation look like?” If your answer has more than five options in the top menu, go back and try again. If you need to add a small “utility navigation” which might typically include items like Home, About and Contact, that’s fine. But you can only have one main navigation and it should not contain a lot of options.

Finally, on a piece of paper, create blocks and circles where you think everything should go on the site. Generally, your top level navigation should end up somewhere near the top of the page or on the left. There are some loose guides for color and imagery (don’t clutter), but as long as someone can figure out what you are about quickly and navigate easily, your site will function well enough. Start small and launch with the bare minimum. Build from there. Keep organization in mind as you go because if your site is nebulous and poorly organized on day one, imagine what it will look like in six months.

4. Maintenance

Have you noticed that we have five items on this list but only ONE of them discusses design? Most people drain all of their energy and resources into site design when it should actually only occupy a small percentage of your mindshare when it comes to any online marketing activity. As long as your site is friendly and easy to use, site maintenance will play a much larger role in overall performance.

Let’s say you owned a retail location on the busiest street in your town. Can you imagine a reality where you would own that kind of business and never clean your shop? Never rearrange the merchandise or refresh your product mix? Can you imagine hiring a salesperson to walk the floor but neglecting to train them on your products? Of course not. Retail space is expensive and if you want to be successful you need to be prepared to welcome your customers — the regulars, referrals and window shoppers alike — and meet their needs.

Your website should do the same thing. To attract new customers you can:

• Have an online chat operator staff your website to answer questions and help visitors find what they need
• Create blog posts that offer insight into who you are as a person and a business
• Take pictures and videos of your work, of happy customers, or just for entertainment purposes

The possibilities are endless, but the primary goal is to keep updating your site with new stuff. And prioritize your blog and editorial content over pure sales content like product/service pages: sales content is boring and EVERYONE has it. Blog content is friendlier, more personal and — from a traffic perspective — usually outperforms sales content.

If you aren’t spending at least one to two hours a week on maintenance, your website will get that stale, old attic smell really quick.

Continue on to part 3 of this series where we discuss marketing.

Online lead generation is a lot like the produce department at your local grocery store: we all check fruit and veggies for slight bruising and color, but normally these factors don’t relate to the quality of the fruit. As a result, farmers compost millions of pounds of perfectly good food every year just because it’s unattractive. We’ve heard the phrase don’t judge a book by it’s cover since childhood, but we don’t have the time to read every book either. Luckily, you don’t need to read a book to learn whats important about generating leads online. You just need to read this blog.

*Yes, I’m aware that this post contains only 2 steps, but the other 3 will be coming in follow-up posts, I promise!

1. Own Your Web Property

The problem: It sounds pretty basic, but creative companies and digital agencies often host websites that they build for you. Since they host your website on their servers, the website is technically their property and you don’t have full control. Even worse, if they bought your domain name, you risk losing your web page’s address if you decide to switch services.

The solution: Most importantly, buy a domain name, do it yourself and don’t allow anyone else to purchase it on your behalf. Super Bowl commercials and ill-advised hijinks have made GoDaddy.com famous, but I’d rather take my $10/year to a firm that doesn’t make me cringe every time I see them mentioned in the news. I buy/manage my domains at NameCheap.com and there are a myriad of other good providers in this market. And, despite my personal preferences, we won’t judge you if you buy your domains at GoDaddy But while it’s OK to keep your domains at GoDaddy, I promise you, you’ll be sorry if you use GoDaddy to host your site. Their online management tools are terrible and their customer support is the worst in the business.

Rule of thumb? Don’t buy hosting from any company whose primary business is domain registration. You can (and many people prefer to) keep their domains with one provider and their hosting with another, but you might also consider deals like the one at HostGator.com. HostGator will allow you to buy a domain name WITH your web hosting in one easy package and for a very low rate.

What about the designer who wants to do everything for you? Obviously hiring the designer/agency to build your site is a best practice. But insist on using your own hosting/domain registration services. 

2. Use WordPress

There is the front-end of a website, the nicely designed part that visitors see when they come to your page and there is the back-end where you login to edit and update a website. Combined, these are called a content management system (CMS). The front-end designs are built on top of the underlying back-end. No website in 2012 should be built without a CMS, but because it can be difficult or impossible to transfer a site design from one CMS to another, you need to choose your CMS wisely.

The problem: There are two basic categories of CMS: closed-source and open-source. Closed-source CMS’s are either sold on a licensing model like desktop software or they are proprietary platforms that are created by the companies who design your website. For specialized solutions and enterprise needs, these custom platforms are sometimes a necessity, but for the majority of small businesses who just need a simple website, they are an enormous burden. Like buying a customized car, you can’t just take your site into any mechanic or developer in this case. With custom CMS’s, you are forced into an ongoing service model with your agency and it’s difficult to leave that relationship without having to rebuild everything from scratch.

The solution: The best-adopted and most widely recommended open-source CMS is WordPress. Sites built on WordPress can be redesigned, upgraded, and maintained by any of a myriad of digital agencies that use it. It’s the most popular CMS platform in the United States and for good reason: WordPress performs well in search engines, it’s easy to install, and easy to use.

Click here for a video demonstration of the easy 1-click WordPress installation on HostGator.

Next week we’re going to cover basics of design and maintenance and in the following post, marketing. Stay tuned!

For many business owners, maintaining good ratings and positive reviews on sites like Yelp, Kudzu and Angie’s List is a “necessary evil” of doing business. And it’s not difficult to see why these services make business owners uncomfortable: they are hard to influence and impossible to control in any kind of meaningful way.

I have three tips though that can help business owners get those great reviews they want.

1. ASK! Seriously. Why wait around for others to pick up the ball on this? Your customers aren’t mind-readers and many would be very happy to take five minutes to pay you a small kindness online. But unless they are dedicated Yelp addicts, your customers probably aren’t proactively thinking about how many stars and how much praise you deserve every time they leave your place of business. The next time someone tells you what a great experience they had, ask them to take five minutes and review you online. You’ll be surprised how many would be more than happy to help.

2. Make it easy. Use graphics in your facility to remind customers to review you online and consider providing links or, even better, QR codes to make it simple for customers to find your page on review sites. You can also easily include links in your email newsletters to make the process completely seamless for customers engaging with you online. If people tell you they don’t know how to leave reviews, consider creating a quick step-by-step video explaining the process and reminding them again why online reviews are so important to you.

3. Never try to “game” the system. Maybe your customers need a little push and so you decide to offer a gift or discount incentive to people who post positive reviews. That would help, right? This is a bad idea and something that a frequent reviewer will almost certainly call you out on, damaging the credibility of your business and of every positive review you’ve received. Don’t try to buy or manufacture good reviews, it’s not likely to work. But when someone does give you a good review, there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging it on your Twitter account or Facebook page to thank the individual. This will also serve as a reminder to your other followers/fans that you value this kind of input from customers. If this person is on your mailing list, send them a nice thank you email. But don’t go over the top and don’t send gifts.

Good luck building up those good reviews!

1) What keywords are driving your traffic?

Everyone with a website should, first and foremost, have Google Analytics installed on the site. It’s easy to setup and free to run. Yes, there are other premium and specialty analytics tools available but even if you’re using another service you might consider running Google Analytics as well.

Once you have generated more than 1,000 visitors to your site, you should have enough data to start picking out trends. When it comes to SEO, the most important trend is seeing what people are “Googling” to find your site. Within Analytics, you will need to click:

1. Standard Reporting tab at the top
2. Traffic Sources on the left
3. Sources in the dropdown
4. Search in the submenu
5. Organic below that

While this metric is crucial, it is also a bit tucked away. To make the organic search metric even more effective, you should eliminate any keywords that directly reference the name of your company.

1. Click edit next to the search box below the graph
2. Make sure you remember to click the dropdown menu to Exclude
3. Make the metric Keyword
4. Fill in any self referential terms, like the name of your CEO or company
5. Repeat the process until all self referential terms are excluded
6. Apply

What you should be left with is keywords that relate to your products or services, but don’t reference your company directly. The remaining keywords are searches that generated traffic to your site instead of going to a competitors website. Remember that good SEO will not only improve your site traffic but will hopefully also take clicks away from competitive firms. This metric will clearly show you if those strategies are effective or not. If the keywords your SEO campaign is targeting aren’t in those top spots, you should know why. Reasonable explanations are:

1. The keywords selected for optimization aren’t searched in as high of a quantity as the leading keywords
2. The keywords selected for optimization provide higher value than the other more commonly searched keywords.

Either way, you should know the distinction. If there isn’t an explanation, there is one more piece of the puzzle you need to examine before you blame your SEO person for not doing their job. The next step is to check if there is some other disconnect between your SEO efforts and real world results, like your website.

2.) What is happening to the traffic generated by search results when they arrive at your site?

The visitor flow is a new data visualization within Google Analytics. It is extremely effective at showing visitor behavior to your website. In particular, we want to know more about visitors who are arriving at our website through organic search results and also didn’t reference our company directly.

To do this:

1. Click Audience on the left.
2. Visitors Flow is at the bottom of the submenu.
3. Just below the Standard Reporting tab, click Default dropdown and Non-paid Search Traffic.
4. In the colored box below that, click Traffic Sources and Keyword in the submenu.
5. Click the gear icon to the right.
6. Within the dialogue box, list the top 5 – 10 keywords that showed up in step 1 and click apply.

Now you should see a long list of keywords on the left that looks like this:

This data visualization will clearly show you what keywords are generating traffic and what sites those users are visiting when they arrive. The red waterfall effect on the right of the boxes indicates visitors who exited the site. The goal of your site is to minimize these drop-offs in traffic and convert that web traffic into real life customers. So if you notice that very few of your visitors are clicking through to other pages, there could be any number of reasons other than SEO failure:

• The site might not be engaging enough
• The marketing campaigns are generating irrelevant visitors (they aren’t looking for your stuff)
• The site didn’t answer their question
• There wasn’t a clear call to action, so they didn’t know what to do next

The list goes on and on, but most importantly, it will show you if there is a disconnect between good SEO results and poor results in the real world. So while you are spending all of this time, effort, and money on getting better rankings in search results, maybe your site is dropping the ball.

This post was contributed by our colleague Greg Bond.

Small businesspeople who struggle with online marketing need not fear… Just about anyone can be successful promoting their business over the Internet with the right approach and the right attitude. Here are four tips to help you find success in 2012:

1. Dedicate Yourself

If you aren’t being successful in your online marketing efforts today, be prepared to break those losing habits and quickly. Consider changes to your website, think hard about what you can do every week to help yourself and schedule the time to get it done. If you can’t make that sort of commitment, set aside the budget to bring in some outside help. Getting things done always requires some combination of time and money and there aren’t many alternatives. “Hope” is not a currency that carries much weight when it comes to building a business.

2. Start Blogging

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: blogging is the begininning of everything good that happens in online marketing. Blogging helps you develop meaningful content that helps in your sales process, benefits your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and creates tools that benefit other online marketing initiatives.

3. Work Smarter, NOT Harder

Let’s say you ran a barbecue restaurant. You have a full menu of items that your kitchen turns out including pork, chicken and ribs. But you d0n’t make a different batch of sauce to go with each meat, nor do you make different side items. The day’s supply of meats, sauce, sides and seasonings can be  combined to create a variety of meals. Between blogging, email marketing, social media, white papers, search engine marketing and the rest, your online marketing initiatives give you a LOT of meals to make. So why make them all from scratch? Having themes, content and ideas that you can use throughout your marketing efforts in any given month makes the job easier and more manageable.

4. Be Consistent

Don’t start doing anything that you’re not prepared to continue doing every week and every month. It’s better to postpone starting a new initiative like starting a Twitter account or a Facebook page or an email newsletter than to start and then give up on it. The more consistent you are with marketing the more successful you will be.

Good landing pages can be the lifeblood of online marketing — a well constructed landing page can vastly improve the performance of Search Engine Marketing or Pay-Per -Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, social media, direct mail or email campaigns.

Here are five easy tips for creating winning landing pages that will improve conversion rates:

1. Less is more: Be concise and be specific — remember that oftentimes when a visitor arrives at a landing page it’s because they were responding to a particular campaign. Resist the urge to highlight multiple products or talk in broad terms about everything your firm does, everything your firm is capable of doing or your mission to change the marketplace. Provide only what your visitor needs to know to take action regarding a particular product/service/offer. That will usually consist of the following elements:

• A short but attention-grabbing main headline
• A strong visual
• A secondary headline if needed
• 2-3 short paragraphs and possibly a short bullet list
• A STRONG call to action
• A testimonial or other trust statement if a testimonial is unavailable
• A link to a short list of frequently asked questions

That’s it. Your landing page doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t even have to be terribly pretty. But your landing page does need to get quickly to the point and you need to resist the natural urge to clutter it up with a lot of unnecessary information.

2. Have a STRONG and CLEAR call to action: The call To action is marketing-speak for, “What happens next?” Now that you have a qualified prospect sitting on this website, what do you want them to do? Contact you for more information? Download an eBook or white paper? Join your email list? Buy your product/service online?

Your visitor should instantly understand what the next step in the process is. The call to action should be the most visible, eye-catching element on the page (not your brand or your fancy stock photos) and should be large and bright in color — think red, orange or gold.

Your call to action should also use very clear and simple language like “Click here to get started” or “Download our free eBook today” or “Purchase today to save 20%.” Avoid branded tag-line type of statements in your calls to action as they may confuse the message.

3. Show, don’t tell: In the first of these tips, I said you shouldn’t have much more than 2-3 short paragraphs of text on your landing page. But for many of us, that’s not enough content to tell a meaningful product story. So rather than add a whole lot of extra written content, use a short video or SlideShare presentation instead. These can be great ways to show your audience what’s great about your product/service in an engaging way and without taking up a lot of space on the page.

4. Fewer options = more conversions: One of the big learnings from the incredible book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath was that the more choices we give someone, the less likely they are to move forward with any of the choices. We have just a few seconds to make an impression on any visitor coming to our landing page and we can increase our changes of a successful conversion by making the decision as easy as possible for them. Your landing page should focus on only ONE product, service or offer and there should be very few links or options outside of your main call to action.

5. Track EVERYTHING: The ability to measure success is crucial — otherwise how do you know what efforts in particular are making you successful? Make sure you are tracking traffic with Google Analytics which is a free and extremely powerful tool, that you have a mechanism for tracking any email contacts coming from your landing page (as opposed to emails received from your main website) and that you have a means to track phone calls coming from the landing page. Getting an extra phone number is cheap and easy, many are available for under $20/month, and you can usually have these set up to ring your main phone —the important thing is the ability to log in and look at a call report to see how many people call the number.  The ability to track your leads back to specific campaigns and landing pages is invaluable business intelligence and cheap/easy to implement.

At my favorite coffee shop this week I ended up chatting with a business owner about consistency. He said he wanted to do more marketing, especially online, but has never been able to get into a good rhythm with it.

“My business seems to come in big peaks and valleys,” he said. “We go through months where we’re really busy and all I have time for is work. But then we get slow for a little while and I think about doing more marketing.”

Sound familiar?

Why do we wait for business to slow down to worry about marketing? Wouldn’t our marketing perform better if we worked on it all the time? Absolutely. Newton told us that objects in motion tend to stay in motion and the same principle applies in most aspects of our businesses. It is always easier to continue an ongoing effort than it is to start a new one.

But many small business owners say, “I’m too busy to do all this extra work, I can’t keep up with it.”

I’m going to challenge that. In my experience business owners will usually find time for the things that are either A) most important to them, B) that they believe that they have a strong aptitude for, or C) that they enjoy most. When marketing doesn’t get done on a regular basis it’s usually not because the entrepreneur is too busy; most often it’s because marketing is not important/easy/enjoyable enough.

I’m pretty busy myself but this is the 60th time I’ve posted to this website in 2011 and I do other things as well to keep my marketing machine running like email newsletters, public speaking, networking, social meda and more. It didn’t happen because I have less on my plate than you do, but because maintaining all this stuff is really important to me and I care a lot about getting it done.

But if sheer willpower (or UWTB for my fellow Kurt Vonnegut fans) isn’t enough to get your marketing done, I have three tips for you:

1. Make a schedule for yourself. Whether it’s putting recurring appointments on your calendar, setting email reminders or whatever process makes sense (I make sure that “blog post” shows up in my Teux Deux every week). If you make it a visible priority in your day/week and set deadlines for yourself you’ll find more success than if you just schedule it for “whenever.”

2. If you really can’t find much time during “busy times” to work on marketing, do more when you’re slow. Some businesses get really covered up during some portions of the year and no amount of willpower or scheduling will solve that. Think about what happens to accountants during tax season, for example. We took on an CPA firm in our Bloggernaut program earlier this year and they expressed that exact concern: they said they didn’t want to start anything that they couldn’t maintain during tax season. We helped solve that problem by doing extra work this fall, work that we won’t actually be released until spring. If you give your machine enough fuel at the beginning of a trip, you won’t have to fill the tank again for a while.

3. Consider outside help. I realize this sounds self-serving, the marketing guy suggesting that you hire a consultant to help, but hear me out. If you stopped doing your schoolwork when you were a kid, many of us had people who would set us right: parents, teachers, etc. If want to get in shape, but you’re lazy about getting to the gym, you might consider hiring a personal trainer. Oftentimes we need other people to hold us accountable and regular marketing is no different. Good marketing advisors will do that for their clients and it can be a difference maker.

We’re very happy to announce that Bloggernaut, Zero-G Creative’s managed blogging service has joined WordCamp 2012 Atlanta as a sponsor. WordCamp Atlanta is part of  a nationwide series of conferences that focuses on everything to do with the WordPress platform.

Since Zero-G has been developing on WordPress for more than three years and our Bloggernaut service actually enables WordPress to serve as the hub of an entire online marketing strategy it’s only appropriate that we support this event here in Atlanta.

WordCamp Atlanta will be held on February 3-4 2012 at the Atlanta SCAD campus.

I have been extremely lucky to spend the last 5+ years among great business minds, all of them small business owners and entrepreneurs and I am especially grateful to those who changed my perceptions of what is possible.

Last fall, someone approached me after a seminar I gave entitled Business Blogging 101. He said, “Unfortunately, these people are going to take your advice — they don’t have time to blog. You should help them do it more efficiently and offer it as a service.” At the time I told him I didn’t think it could be done, not by me, not by a small agency and I rattled off several reasons why. I had also dismissed similar ideas in the past. But a couple of months later, we were rolling out our Bloggernaut service to beta clients. Fast-forward one year and we have clients using the service to anchor their entire online marketing approach.

And I owe that success to the fact that one day I changed my mind about what my team and I were capable of.

Many small business owners don’t believe that they are capable of learning what many of us would consider “web basics.” I understand that the concepts of hosting, content management systems, SSL certificates, domain ownership, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click, social media and others come more easily to me than they do to web novices. But that doesn’t mean that you should give up declare yourself incapable of learning.

If you are a small businessperson who considers themselves “web-challenged,” please resolve this year to change that. A little knowledge in this field goes a long way — it will make your business more successful and it will prevent you from being fleeced by one of the many less-than-scrupulous elements in the web and online marketing industries.

The following is a list of transgressions I have encountered just over the last few weeks. All of these are instances where a vendor has used (or attempted to use) a client’s ignorance to their profit (and yes ALL of these are real and I know ALL of these people personally):

1. A web designer asked a client to transfer ownership of their domain to her so that she could put their site live. Yes, they lost their domain and are now trying to get it back.
2. A web firm put a line item in a proposal to a client saying that they would submit the client’s site to Google and suggested that failure to do so would damage their SEO. It has not been necessary or even encouraged to submit sites to Google for quite some time.
3. An SEO firm billed a client more than $1000/month for the better part of a year but there was little evidence of actual work being done on the site. Any vendor should be able to show you what they are doing on your behalf to justify their fee.
4. A small design firm told a client that their hosting solution was better than one offered by a multi-million dollar hosting company with 24x7x365 support. Best practice: don’t host with your web firm.
5. A web designer told a client that he would give her a significant discount on her website, but still charged her twice the market value of the project and then never finished it. Better understanding of fair website pricing and securing her payment via credit card would have saved her lots of heartache and money.
6. A web firm told a client to go with their “software as a service” content management solution, saying that because the platform was proprietary it was more secure than WordPress. A) Never rent your website, always own. And B), the argument that you shouldn’t use WordPress because of security holds as much water as the argument that you shouldn’t buy a PC because it can get viruses. Complete nonsense. Small business websites should be powered by WordPress unless there is a clear business reason to use a different platform.
7. I’ve talked to lots of folks who have used ReachLocal. Using ReachLocal is not the same as hiring an expert. Seriously.

I could go on, but I won’t. The state of the small business online marketing industry deeply saddens and frustrates me… But a little education goes a long way and you do NOT have to find yourself in a bad situation. Resolve to learn web 101 and protect yourself from these charlatans. People will help you. Grab an expert and buy them lunch. ask them questions. You’ll be glad you did and your business will benefit.