Blue Wave Concept's Blog

Google+ has opened the doors for business and brand pages.
In this article I show you how to set up your Google+ page and provide examples.
If you haven’t already created a personal Google+ profile for yourself, you’ll need to do that first (you cannot simply sign up a business page from the main Google+ signup screen).
Check out the How to Get Started With Google+ for more on personal Google+ profiles.
If you do have a personal profile, here’s how to create a page for your business.
Visit Create a Page on Google+ to begin, and follow the steps below to get started with Google+ pages.
The first step in getting started creating your Google+ page is to choose from the following five main categories.

#1: Local Business or Place
Local Business or Place includes any local business—hotels, restaurants, places, stores or services. If you choose this category, you will be asked for the country in which your business is located and the primary phone number.
If Google finds a matching result in Google Places with your phone number, it will use this information for your Google+ profile. If not, you can add your business info to Google and continue.

#2: Product or Brand
Examples given by Google+ of pages that would fit under Product or Brand include apparel, cars, electronics and financial services.
Here, you would enter your page name and website, and choose an applicable category which includes anything from Aerospace and Defense to a Website, or you can simply choose Brand, Other, Product or Service.

#3: Company, Institution or Organization
The next category, Company, Institution or Organization includes pages for companies, institutions, organizations and non-profits or similar entities. Here you also enter your page name and website, and choose an applicable category with the same options as a Product or Brand page, or you can simply choose Company, Institution, Organization or Other.

#4: Arts, Entertainment or Sports
Pages for movies, TV, music, books, sports and shows are considered a good fit for the Arts, Entertainment or Sports section. Again, you will enter your page name and website, and choose an applicable category—this time with options ranging from Album to Website, or you can simply choose Entertainment, Other or Sports.

#5: Other
If you don’t feel your page fits in any of the above-mentioned categories, you can simply select Other, where you can enter your page name and website without any additional narrowing of category selection.
For pages in any category, you must also choose whether your page’s content is suitable for any Google+ user, users 18 or older, users 21 or older or specifically note that the content will be alcohol-related. Then you will tick boxes to opt-in to updates for Google+ pages and agree to terms and conditions to continue.

Be sure to actually check out the Google+ Additional Terms of Service to see their notes on Authority, Access, Content, Data, Contests and Suspension & Termination.
Customize Your Page’s Public Profile

Once you’ve selected your page’s category, you can start customizing your page’s public profile.

#1: Add Your Profile Photo and Tagline
First, you will be asked to add your tagline (the 10 words that best describe your page) and your page’s profile photo.

After you have added these items and clicked on Continue, you will be asked to spread the word about your new page through your personal Google+ profile. If you’re not ready yet (which you probably aren’t, since you haven’t completed your profile), click on Finish to be taken to your new page.

#2: Editing Your Page Information
Once you’ve perused your page’s welcome screen, you will want to edit your page’s information. Go to your page’s profile by clicking on the Profile icon at the top, left of the Search Google+ box. Then go to your About tab and Edit Profile.

Here you will be able to click on everything from your page name to your links to enter relevant information about your page within Introduction, Hours (for local businesses or places), Website and Contact Info (phone, email, Skype, etc.). Also be sure to enter additional links to your page in the Introduction section using the Link button and under Recommended Links to link to your other social profiles, blog, blog posts and so on.

#3: Adding Your Photostrip
Last but not least when it comes to your Google+ page design is filling in your photostrip. These five photos will be displayed underneath your page’s name and tagline.

It’s similar to the five photos you can have on your Facebook page. While editing your profile, click on the photo area where it says “add photos here” and upload a photo in each of the five photo spots. You can use different photos that represent your business or creatively cut one photo into five pieces and spread it across the area.

Congratulations! Your Google+ Page Is Ready.
Once your profile is ready, you can start posting to your profile by adding status updates, links, photos and videos just like you do on your personal Google+ profile. I would suggest writing a post or two before you use the “Spread the word” option in your right sidebar to announce your page to your personal profile connections.

Following and Engaging With Your Fans
So what’s the difference between a Google+ page and a Facebook page? The big one I’ve noticed so far is the fact that you can follow your page’s fans back and add them to Circles.
To find out who has added your page to their Circle, you can check your Notifications under Stream in the left sidebar. You can also look under your Circles > People who’ve added you area by clicking on the Circles icon.

Do you own a small business? Are you tired of hearing how big businesses are succeeding with social media?
If so, Social Media Examiner has some exciting news…
But first, much has been said about big companies such as Red Bull and Cisco, and how they harness social media to drive massive traffic to their sites and generate enormous sales.
But when small business owners are asked about social media, many have no idea how to use it in a practical way that can impact their business goals.
And frankly it’s hard for small businesses to get ideas from the big guys that seem to have unlimited resources.
Small Businesses Thriving With Social Media
Not knowing “how” to leverage social media is a huge problem for small businesses, because they typically get most of their customers through word-of-mouth referrals.
Savvy entrepreneurs are tapping the power of social media marketing.
Take Curtis Kimball, for example. In the Mission district of San Francisco where he’s known as the Crème Brûlée Man, Curtis uses Twitter to advertise his daily specials, “secret menus” and specific locations where his cart will be parked.
Curtis, who says he has no marketing budget, currently has more than 20,000 followers, many of whom literally follow him around from neighborhood to neighborhood to get a taste of his delicious custard treats.
And then there’s the story of Alex Morrissey. He leveraged Facebook to garner 500,000 fans and a very successful business called JamaicansMusic.com.
Responding to his social media experience, Morrissey said, “It’s better than traditional media or even advertising.”
What about you? Has your small business really tapped into the massive opportunities presented by social media marketing?
Small Business Social Media Stats
Here’s evidence of the opportunity for small businesses:
Mass consumer adoption of social media: There are more than 800 million active Facebook users, 80% of all Americans use a social network and Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other U.S. website (Nielsen). Your customers are there.
Small businesses see big results with social media: A significant 61% of small businesses are landing new customers through social media activities (CrowdSPRING). Plus, more than 70% of small businesses using social media see increased traffic and more than 60% improve search rankings (2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report).
Smaller businesses find social media costs very low: Nearly 60% of small- and mid-sized businesses spend less than $100 to market via social media (Marketing in a Digital World, Zoomerang).

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.

“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).

“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”

Search Engines Adapt to Survive

Since the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.

Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.

The spammers have done well for themselves. Over the last few years, searchers have increasingly complained about the number of irrelevant or spammy results returned in searches.

The battle to the top of search keeps search engines on their toes. Every so often Google, makes an abrupt change in its algorithm, like the “Panda Update” of early 2011 that wiped out a significant number of content farm results. Periodically, new search engines launch to try to outdo Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has climbed to 30% market share since its launch in 2009. Blekko, an “anti-spam” search engine, has climbed to a million searches a day since its launch in 2007.

And now, social media is factoring in to make results even better.

Social Media Changes The Game

Social networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends.

Today, people share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook and over 5 billion tweets — about a quarter of which contain links to content — per month.

In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out — and taken to heart — a delightfully simple mantra: If people share your content, it’s probably pretty good.

In a white paper called New Signals To Search Engines, Search Engine Strategies Advisory Board chair Mike Grehan says, “End users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don’t rely on the elitism of one website owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.”

We’re already seeing proof of search engines taking social data into account when serving results.

Social Data Is Personalizing Results

Last year, Bing started incorporating Facebook like data into its search results. Results for pages that a searcher’s own friends had liked show up more prominently.

And more recently, Bing announced better results through Facebook data and “collective IQ,” meaning that things popular throughout Facebook (not just among your friends) rank more prominently.

“Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people,” writes the Bing team in a blog post.

Google answered back to the Bing-Facebook deal with its own +1 button, and subsequently Google+. When searching as a logged-in Google user, you now see this social data personalizing your results.

Sullivan recounts how automaker Ford rose in his Google results after he added Ford to his Google+ account. “Ford gets into the top results for cars not because of links, not because of the content on its page, but because I was ‘friends’ with it,” Sullivan says.

Shared Content Now Ranks Higher in Organic Search

Both Google and Bing have added real-time results to their searches, meaning Twitter (and now Google+) results show up prominently above other content.

In addition, several experiments have shown that sharing stories on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ can dramatically affect regular search results as well.

In July this year, Rand Fishkin of search engine authority SEOmoz.org performed a series of experiments to see if 1) social shares affected Google search results, and 2) how quickly those results appeared. (Find the full details on the experiment here.)

Spoiler Alert: In every test Fishkin performed, tweets and Google+ shares dramatically affected the rank of new, previously unindexed content. The results in most cases were nearly instant.

“We’re experimenting with clicks on +1 buttons as just one of the hundreds of signals that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results,” says a Google spokesperson (who wished to remain anonymous), via email. “As with any new ranking signal, for +1’s and other social ranking signals, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.”

A Microsoft spokesperson (who also requested anonymity), says via email that tweets and Facebook Likes do indeed positively affect a URL’s ranking in search results on Bing. “To be candid,” she says, “we are experimenting with placements in order to strike a balance between this new social signal and the other signals we have honed to determine relevance.”

“Social signals that say quality are pretty straight forward,” says the Microsoft spokesperson. “Look to things such as likes, re-tweets, shares, etc. Beyond that, watch for the sentiment surrounding the action. Are people sharing your content via Twitter yet flagging it with #fail? If so, it’s a clue they’re displeased.”

When we go to a search engine, we want to find what we’re looking for, immediately and hassle-free. It’s clear that social media is helping search engines deliver more immediacy and more relevant results. In the long run, this will help SEO-directed businesses focus on what they should be doing: creating content people love.

Difficult economic times mean that there are less dollars being spent. This means that as a business owner or business marketer, it’s critical to be sure that your market share is increasing. How can an effective website and Internet marketing strategy help to increase market share?

1. Be found when your prospects are looking.

2. Engage with your customers on an ongoing basis.

3. Maintain your relationship with your customers and provide excellent customer service.

An effective website can help with the first tip and position your business to be found when customers are looking. Unfortunately, many websites that were build in the last few years were created for beauty and not for function. The first thing that an effective website must do is to be found on the Internet by search engines such as Google.

One way to test whether your site is going to be shown when someone researches your services is to do a simple search yourself. Keep in mind, the more general your terms, the larger the field of players would be. A realistic search would be to use a phrase. For example, if I were searching for something that I offer, I would include a phrase such as “hubspot certified partner philadelphia” instead of “hubspot”. Using the latter would yield results are more likely helpful for Hubspot, than WebMarCom as a Hubspot Certified Partner. This is the way you should think about searches… not in the broadest context, but in a more specific context.

If you have identified that you are not coming up in the searches, then there are things that can be done starting with the architecture of the site. If you are a marketing manager or a business owner, it would be more efficient and effective to reach out to someone who works in the field to fix your site. You can also use the hubspot WebSiteGrader to get an idea of things that should be the focus of the person you contract with.

Contracting with someone and the scope of what you hire them for will depend upon how extensive your site is. The skills that you will be looking for include Seach Engine Optimization, website design, marketing experience, and inbound marketing. If the person truly understands your business, they will be a tremendous resource and aid in positioning your site, not just for search engines but also for lead generation.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that it’s not just about traffic. A website that gets a lot of traffic is only as effective as the leads it generates. So, the website should also generate conversions.

If you are not getting leads and conversions currently, you are missing the opportunity to increase your market share. Many businesses and consumers turn to the Internet to find resources. Having a Facebook Page or a Linkedin Profile are great because they are both discoverable in a Google Search. The question is whether they are keyword savvy and work to help your company be discovered. A great Internet marketing company will take a look at all of the social media marketing opportunities and help wordcraft your bio, and suggest social media accounts that can position your company as a market or industry leader and knowledge resource.

Try Googling yourself and keep note of the results. If you are not coming up when you try a search, you are missing the opportunity to increase your market share!

Setting the Tone

There are two key points to determine before defining the appropriate tone for your website.
Who is your target audience?

What is their age group?
Where are they located: urban or rural, domestic or international?
What sort of values do they hold: conservative, ethical, cautious, impulsive or economical?
More importantly, what do they want from you?

What does your website want to achieve?

Is it an e-commerce site designed to generate sales?
Is it a portfolio of your work?
Is it educational?
Does it offer an online community for users to engage with?
Is it meant to draw in new consumers, support existing ones, or both?

These are both points that should have guided the visual design of a website and, equally, they should be the force behind its content.

Forgetting the target audience or the ultimate purpose of the website sounds like an unimaginable faux pas, but it happens surprisingly frequently.

Developing Tonal Guidelines

Once you’ve determined your audience and your site’s purpose, you’re halfway to deciding on tone of voice. It may be helpful to consider the personality of an employee you’d want to represent your brand at this point.

For example, if you’re advertising housing for students, you want someone friendly, open and fun. If you’re selling organic fruit on the Web: you want your representative to sound healthy and ethical. If you’re describing services at a care home: you want someone kind, professional and understanding. You get the idea.

These adjectives are a good start, but they’re all subjective. The next step is to start defining what these adjectives mean and don’t mean.

Things to Watch Out For

Watch out for other basic inconsistencies that will blemish your hard work on tone. No matter how seamlessly professional your tone is, a typo or misplaced punctuation mark will make you look foolish.

Here are two tips:

A proofreader is not optional. Of course, the writer should proofread the first draft, but there is no substitute for a fresh perspective.
Edit without mercy. Cut, cut, cut. If you can identify unnecessary words, then remove them and get to the point.

Summary

To briefly outline the points we’ve covered:
- Tone of voice, used well, will strengthen brand loyalty and set businesses apart from competitors.
- Tone can be adapted according to the audience and platform, but ensure that the voice remains constant.
- The key considerations in choosing a tone of voice for your website are 1) the target audience and 2) the type of interaction you intend them to have with your site.
- Producing a tonal guideline sheet (example shown above) will help establish and maintain a distinctive tone of voice. Used as a reference by copywriters, it will yield consistent results, especially where multiple authors are involved.

1. Have a Mobile Version of Your Website

With mobile device usage skyrocketing, a mobile-friendly web site is practically essential. A mobile site means your customers can access information on the go, wherever they may be. It also means they’ll be more likely to share your site with friends, since they’ll be able to pull it up and show it to others, even when not at a computer.

As an added bonus, mobile sites can often be more accessible to those with visual impairments, or who may have difficulties using a mouse, but find touch displays easier to manipulate.

If you can’t afford to go all out and have a separate version of your site for mobile users, then at least speak with your developer and make sure they are aware that you want the web site as functional and legible as possible on mobile devices.

2. Provide Supplemental Information

Your users are looking for information. Period. Even if they’ve come to your site to make a purchase, they’ll first want to research their options and check out the details of what it is they’re buying. Consider making this task easier by providing supplemental information that complements your site’s primary content.

Take the time to provide your customers with information such as product manuals, warranty information, manufacturer contact details, sizing charts and troubleshooting guides. This not only says “We care about you,” but it also makes your site an invaluable resource that visitors will keep coming back to again and again for the life the product or service they purchase.

3. Use AJAX for Simple Tasks — But Don’t Overdo It

Implementing AJAX functionality (using JavaScript to load content into portions of your page without reloading the entire web page) can go a long way toward making your visitor’s experience on your site enjoyable. AJAX can make retrieving and browsing information faster and more intuitive, and it also creates a more seamless experience for the user. Be careful, though — too much JavaScript can slow things down and make interactions confusing, causing more harm than good. (It can also make bookmarking or sharing portions of your page more difficult for users.)

Finding the right balance varies based on the type of site you have and the products or services you offer, so it’s best to work out the details with your developer. Some examples of good AJAX usage include: loading and switching between product images and checking for and reporting errors in order forms or updating shopping carts.

4. Make It Easy To Get Help

Sometimes, no matter how much supplemental information or details about your product or service you provide, it’s just not going to be enough. Some of your customers are just going to need more help. Make it easy for them by providing answers to frequently asked questions (include links to additional resources) and by placing your company’s contact information (or help desk information) prominently on your website.

Your users should be able to find a way to contact you from every page, be it an email address in the footer, a phone number in the header or a button or link within the content prompting them to inquire for more information.

5. Keep it Simple and Keep it Organized

We’ve talked a lot about providing additional information, using AJAX to build a responsive website and prominently displaying contact and support information. With all of that in mind, it may seem like your website could quickly get out of hand, and without proper attention to detail, it certainly could. You don’t want your site to look cluttered or give your users a case of information overload, so it’s key to keep your site clean and well-organized. Work with your designer to develop ways to keep information accessible, yet unobtrusive.

If you’re building your own site, a good rule of thumb is to look at the design you’ve chosen and then ask yourself, “What can I remove to make this easier to use?” It could be an entire block of text or simply a background color or border. Once you start de-cluttering, you’ll be able to see if items should be shifted to other places in the layout, different pages or removed entirely. Keep revising until you have a site that’s clean, well organized and easy to navigate.

Finally! It’s Friday afternoon. You’ve put in a lot of hours this week—including some late nights—but it looks like your extra work has paid off—you’ll be able to enjoy a real meal tonight, maybe spend some time with friends and most of all just kick back and chill out. You spontaneously smile at your computer screen and start to feel the tension begin to drain from your back.

Then comes a ping—an e-mail from someone you’ve been following up with for months. They just posted a new message in the Elance Workroom that they want you to move ahead on a project and deliver it Monday.

Your smile deflates into a resigned sigh as you turn your attention to the details of the request, and your dreams of rest flicker and fade away like an iPhone run out of battery life. “Looks like it will be a late night,” you mutter to yourself.

Yet another Friday has gone from fantastic to frustrating. You wonder, “Is there any other way? Can I really manage a freelance career without constantly getting pushed around by others’ time demands?”

My answer is yes!

As the CEO and founder of Real Life E®, a company that provides time coaching and training services that empower people to accomplish more with peace and confidence, I’ve found that overcoming the cycle of stress often comes down to setting reasonable expectations with clients. Here’s some of my expert time coaching advice on simple techniques you can use to take back control of your time.

Why is setting time expectations so important?

The challenge for freelancers is that if you don’t set reasonable expectations up front, you’ll end up stressed and your client will end up frustrated. Elance provides excellent online collaboration tools for project planning, including the ability to make milestones, give weekly status reports and to share files in progress. But this virtual office technology doesn’t “think” for itself—it is a tool for documenting and tracking a well-thought out project plan. To plan and estimate effectively, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of the details of the project and consider the variables. (Here’s an Elance post with more specific tips on making better estimates–Right On Time: How to Estimate Project Time Effectively) Make sure both parties communicate any reservations about milestones and projects before terms are finalized with Workroom messages.

What’s one of the biggest problem areas?

Communication is by far one of the biggest issues. It’s essential that you’re responsive to your clients, but it’s OK to set limits on when you will be accessible. If you struggle with setting boundaries, consider establishing “office hours” to contact each other or meeting times when you can chat about your progress in the Workroom. Also try not to set the expectation that you will answer all communication immediately. If you consistently answer e-mail and voicemail in about 24 hours, as opposed to 20 minutes, customers won’t be upset if they don’t hear from you right away. (For more info on this topic, check out my blog post on How to Set E-mail Expectations.)

What about when you don’t hear back from clients?

When clients don’t communicate a decision until right before a deadline, it can wreak havoc on your workflow. To ensure that you protect yourself for such a scenario, try to establish milestones for your projects that include information in the notes section about what you will need from the client. This helps you clarify up front what clients need to provide for you to move forward.

What if the scope of the project changes?

Despite your best efforts to define the requirements for the project and reasonable milestones, changes can happen. Perhaps a website ends up needing many more updates than you anticipated, or a client comes back from a conference with 10 new ideas for the project. Providing excellent service without major stress once again comes down to communication and setting expectations. For instance, if you’re noticing that a task is taking you much longer than you expected, post a note in the Workroom as soon as possible asking your client how they would like you to proceed. That way, your customer can tell you what to focus on and what’s not a priority so that you stay within your hours. On the other hand, if the client is suggesting that you take on something not already within the scope of the project, you can ask them to create and assign a new Elance job to you.

Are there any other ways freelancers can eliminate deadline stress?

Before you make commitments to a deadline and agree to terms, make sure you have a clear sense of when you can complete the work. Just because a client wants something as soon as possible, doesn’t mean that you should plan to stay up until 2 a.m. trying to finish everything for them. Also other factors such as other pending projects, a vacation you have booked or simply a sick day could affect how quickly you can deliver results. Make sure you have open hours on your calendar and plan ahead before you agree to the Elance project terms.

Do you have any other final time tips?

If there’s any part of your business that’s consistently causing you time stress, ask yourself the question, “Should I be setting my expectations differently for myself or others?” Most of the time, the answer is yes!

If you would like to receive more insight on how to go from feeling guilty, overwhelmed and frustrated to feeling peaceful, confident and accomplished, visit www.ScheduleMakeover.com.

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Websites should lead to conversions, but what can enhance your Lead generation, Website ROI website’s ability to have potential customers voluntarily give you their contact information. We’d all love to think that our product or service is incredible and that potential customers are clamoring to have us contact them. The reality is somewhat different.

Let’s say you did everything right with your search engine optimization. With the SEO done, your keywords and links have placed you number one on Google and Bing and Yahoo, and you are now getting a ton of traffic to your website. What’s wrong with this picture? That’s what you wanted, right?

Without ‘conversions’ the traffic to your site is simply that. Traffic. It’s great to get some of these visitors to ‘convert’ – that is, to share their information so that you can open the dialogue and potentially have them as a client.

SO, why aren’t they sharing their contact information. There are some things that you may be doing wrong, that could discourage conversions. Many web developers simply don’t realize that you could be getting more results, and they ‘follow your direction’ without adding their insights. Try taking a look at your website with fresh eyes, and see whether your website may be ‘guilty’ of some of these common issues:

1. No call to action. Without asking for the contact information, its much less likely that you will receive the contact info. Try adding a ‘call-to-action’ to your website. This can be a button or form that offers something in return for contact information.

2. Ask for too much information. Most people do not want to offer their life history to a website, and in fact, would rather skip filling in the form if you ask for too much information. If your form is complicated or you ask for too much information, you have effectively created a barrier and a disincentive for filling in your form.

3. No reason. If you have a form that doesn’t share a reason for people to fill it in, it’s useless. What’s the motivation? Why should someone give you their information? What are you offering?

4. Reason not compelling. Perhaps you’ve done everything right and now you have a reason for people to give you their contact information. However, the reason is just not interesting to your target audience. This will cause your call-to-action to fail, and have low or no conversions. Test your call-to-action by creating two versions and change just one variable. This will help you create more effective reasons for conversions.

5. You’ve buried the form. If your form is at the bottom of the website evaluation free, evaluate website page, or ‘below the fold’, you’ve essentially hidden the form. Also, if the form tastefully blends in with the rest of the page, your visitors may fail to notice it. Make the form bold, make it a different color, and put it above the fold. This way, it will stand out from the rest of the page and increase the likelihood of being noticed.

A website can be an incredible tool to customers finding you, and then enabling you to reach out to them. Starting with an optimized site, then building in the features that encourage interaction are important for creating a site that will ultimately help your business instead of being an economic drain.