Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Archive for the ‘Content’ Category

Creating local content needs
to fit in with your business to make the site relevant.

I read recently that you should consider whose website you are developing. Does it belong to you or to your customers? I found this statement as a good guiding principle to keep in mind when working on a site. I may have a vision for the site, but the users (my customers) will have their own reasons for coming to my site, and if I want them to come back, I need to meet their needs, not my desires. This thought came as I was going over my top landing pages to see how I can improve my bounce rate. Moreover, I had been reading some advice on creating local content to focus your audience to a group who may be my potential clients. It caused me to examine some business sites which I felt were missing the mark, making a mistake that I have made myself.

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Building trust with the user begins by explaining what you are doing with data you collect.

I did not think about a Privacy Policy page till I began to make money with advertising on my site. By specifying what data I collected, how that data was used, and what my intentions were for that data, I built trust with the search engines, who saw this as a step towards honesty with my clients. I realized that even if I was not selling advertising on my site that a Privacy policy was a key step in building a relationship with the visitors on the site. They may never read that policy, but they will see that it is there, and they can find out what I am doing with the facts that I am collecting.

Wether you realize it or not, you are collecting data on people by setting up a website. The analytics software which tells you how many people came to your site, their IP address, which region the came from, which pages were visited, and all of the other metrics that indicate your site’s performance come from data collected from your visitors. What this software has not collected is a specific name, phone number, and address. This data can be collected by the website’s computers leaving a cookie on the visitor’s computer. Whenever you visit a site, and you find a message saying that it sees that you are new here, the site’s server recognizes that you do not have a cookie from that site on your computer.

If you operate a blog, you are collecting a name and an email when a visitor comments. You could also be collecting that same information when they fill out a form or send you an email. For some sites, this is an opportunity to send messages to those visitors. Better sites ask permission first. However, you may not be looking at or storing those names and emails. If you are collecting them, your visitors should know and agree to how you will be using them. For example, business associations sell the data they collect to marketers. I belong to one association which is very aggressive about finding people to sell my data to, and I hate that fact, but I have to be a member for my profession.

Collecting data is necessary, and your visitors will probably understand that fact, but they should understand what you are doing with collected data. Offering them the chance to look over your intentions helps them to understand you and your site, which leads to the all important trust factor.

Should your privacy policy be written by a lawyer? If you are a small business that collects a great deal of information on a client (which could be done through a website or shared with the client through a website), you will want a lawyer involved in the creation of this document. In that case it is complex, and you need to be careful not to violate anyone’s rights. For the vast majority of small businesses, you will need a simple document going over what you collect, how you collect it, and why it is collected. Refer to the Privacy Policy page on this site to give you an outline. You will notice that my statement is a bit light-hearted. Casual statements are fine as long as they touch upon the proper points. You may want to write something more formal. Take a look at other websites that you visit to see what they may include and how they approach this page. Do not copy a privacy statement, unless you have permission to do so. You do have permission to copy mine (it would be nice to place a link back to this site to say this is where you obtained it from). You will notice that I include some information about advertising on this page, yet I have an Advertising Policy too. By including certain types of advertising on your site, you have begun to collect data on the visitor (or maybe the advertiser has). I wanted that fact to be known on that page, because it is relevant.

How does a Privacy Page help with advertising? You are not required at the time of this writing to have policy statements on your site. I think any small business should be concerned about its clientele before having concerns for any other entity. That is why I added an advertising policy to my sites after I learned the value of a privacy policy for advertising. I wanted to be open with my visitors to earn their trust. As blogs are growing, and more ordinary people are earning income from them, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating this sphere. We will have to wait to see what regulations that they will put into place, but it is wise to be ahead of the game when it comes to regulations. The other entity that comes into play would be the advertisers. They want to advertise on quality sites. In fact, they will pay more for that privilege. The simplest means to advertise on your site would be through the Google Adsense program (this is a topic for another post). I will not claim to fully understand how Google determines if you are running a quality site, but by showing them that you take privacy seriously is a first step.

Iwas trying to rack my brain to come up with a reason why you could ignore this page on your site, or what may be a bad reason for having a privacy statement on the site. I could not come up with one for a legitimate small business. It is a wise decision.

You have to work and making changes to discover the best form for a Contact page

The internet has changed many things about how we do business. Many potential customers do not want to contact us by phone. They would rather email us or fill out a form on our site. I believed that I had to find a way to lure the prospect to call me, so I could try to make the sale. The problem lies with the fact that the internet makes it easier for a user to window shop, and such an expectation includes wanting to know the price of things.

There are users who do not want to email, fill in a form, or read the information on the contact page. On this site, I make it easy for them. Look at the header. You have my name, a brief description of what I am offering/do, and my phone number. Adding the phone number not only lets the prospect have a means to contact me, it adds a level of trust to the site. Trust on the internet is a big deal, because anyone could put up a site. Part of optimizing your site for a search engine is finding ways to show that a user can trust you. For another example of this kind of contact information, go to my home inspection site and look at the top of the sidebar on the right. There you will find a mission statement and various means to contact me. I may place a similar paragraph on this site.

I have written various types of Contact pages. It might seem simple, but the contact page could be the page that makes the sale. You know your sales method best, so you need to see if it can be incorporated into this page. Sometimes a brief bio may help make the sale. A sales pitch could be the opening paragraph. I came to the conclusion that having a description of my services with prices was a wise idea for my home inspections, because many people do not understand what the service entails or what to expect in price. Listing my price was mentally a hard step for me, but this came down to another level of building trust. Internet users frequently want more data when searching for a firm than they would using a phone book. Pricing is one bit of data they may require to make that sale. I found that they still call for a price, even though they saw the price listed on the site. Take some time to study the contact us page of your competitors. If they are doing something, like listing prices, it may be a wise idea for you.

Where to place elements on this page. If you go to look at the contact page for this site, you will notice a spartan page. The opening paragraph states where to find contact information, and how to email me. Notice that I did not write the email in the standard form, but I wrote out the words for the symbols. There are programs harvesting email to send you spam; this is one step to prevent them from discovering your email. To cut down on spam, I use the form method. This does not fully prevent spam, but it helps. There are various plugins for WordPress to help you create a form. It is not to difficult to write out the code for this task, but these plugins do keep up with the latest coding standards, and they are easy to use. My current favorite is “Contact Form 7”. Other plugins can create more involved graphics, but the interface to create a form is easy to use, and installing it on the page could not be simpler. Go to the plugin homepage to download it and to see its features. When you have created a form, this is a bit of script that you copy into your page where you want the form to be placed. I positioned the form underneath the brief opener, because many people want to contact you, but they do not want to wade through the page trying to discover how they can do that. Does the opener have to be so short? No. You could place the form first if you want a longer paragraph, or you could flesh out the paragraph more. Think of it as trying to sell your service in a couple of minutes. What would you say?

I list my services below the opener and the form. The services that you provide can produce a long list, and a user may become impatient, leaving the site. If my services are not too complex listing them below the form is not a bad idea; however there is another solution to presenting data to a potential client while keeping others from leaving a site: creating more pages. WordPress allows you to designate a page as a “parent” then other pages can be connected to it. This is great if you have a multi-stage drop down menu in your navigation. My method deals with what a visitor will see when coming to your contact page. Have your opening paragraph, then you can present links to the pages which go into more detail about part of your service. Below these links you could place the form. Visitors who want that information can see where to find it, while those who do not want to scroll through it can find the contact form quickly.

My best advice is find ways to keep your contact page simple. Too much or too little data can leave the visitor confused. Experiment with different pieces of text. Setting it and forgetting it should not be an option with any page. As your business and the website evolve, so should the pages.

An effective About page can be the first step in building trust.

Iam one of those people who goes to the About page of a website when I found the site compelling. I want to discover more about the author. I frequently take this action before I subscribe to the feed or load it into My Morning Coffee app. It is a trust building measure. I think that this tendency may be more common than website owners imagine.

One of the problems with the internet is the question of identity; the other is the question of privacy. Having a website today is the first step in establishing your online identity, and it is rapidly taking the place of the phone book when trying to find a person or business. Identity is problematic on the web. I know one person who has connected with me using different names to represent his different projects. Has he kept the line from these various personas from blurring? No, you can easily discover that it is the same person when checking him out, but he is not trying to hide that fact. However, in each case, he establishes a profile which mirrors a part of his character to gain his audience’s trust. On the other hand, we have privacy. Considering how quickly we could find information that we supply being mis-used, I am not encouraged to be overly sharing; however, if I do not open up, I loose the trust that I am building.

The balance between trust and privacy comes into greater play with a small business. A large or mid-sized company has many methods to create that trust. Since many small firms have one or two figureheads, those people become the focus of the website’s users attention. They have to be introduced to the public. For the public to trust them, they need to feel that they know them, hence the About page.

How should an About page be constructed? My preference has been to tell a story which will appeal to my audience. Audience is the main factor. If I am creating a profile for a social networking site, like ActiveRain, I know that the primary audience will be the other users on that service. My story is meant for other professionals who I will be making connections with, so I allow for a lighter tone. On my home inspection site, I tell the story of how I came to that profession and the creation of that site. On this site, I chose to create a resume style profile. This is a change of pace for me, but this can be effective way to demonstrate your skills to potential clients. This resume style About page provides the reader a good overview f he is looking to you as a consultant, since they obtain an overview of your abilities.

When telling the story for your About page, find the balance between what brought you to this business and why your business may be the best choice for the potential client. Too often I see small businesses use their About page as a bully pulpit to criticize other firms or for the owner to discuss a passion he has for hobby, which has nothing to do with the business. Write down on a sheet of paper five reasons why you came to start this business. That list will be the basis for the background story for your page. Now, write down the steps a client takes when using your service. For my home inspection business, I would start with the stage when the consumer would begin to plan buying a home. I take that through all of the people who they meet before getting to me. I also include what happens after they use my service. For each step, write how your service is involved in that step, or how does you business add value to the consumer at that stage. Maybe you add nothing at all at each step, but this list becomes the basis for the remainder of your story- why should someone come back to your site or use your service.

Add a photograph. Maybe it is your photo, or it could be of your business location. Photos add a personal touch, but they help establish identity. There is a visual aspect to the web where even a cartoon like gravatar helps connect an image to complete the picture in your user’s mind.

I think that the story version of the About page is best for a small business. I may not know Coca-Cola’s full story, but they are well known, so I do not need to know that they have a passion for their product. I would want to know who is running the firm, where the firm is located, and what their goals may be. The resume idea is one which I have to work on more. Your actual resume would have too much information, and traditional resumes do not work well for a general audience. Editing will be needed. The worst mistake you could make is leaving the example About page up. Who is going to trust a website where the owner cannot take the time to flesh out the site.