Technology Toolkit

Everyone wishes they had seen Bruce Springsteen at The Main Point in Philadelphia or Elton John at the Troubadour in Los Angeles or Norah Jones at The Bitter End in New York City when they were just starting out. The fact is you have to be at the right place at the right time and if you live in a smaller market, you’re probably out of luck. That’s no longer true thanks to the many independent and mainstream online music video sites available today. The audience for online music videos is huge.

How large is that audience? Online music video sites get half a million visitors per minute worldwide. Young men are the most frequent online video viewers, but US Internet users of all ages are getting into the act.

Many online videos sites also offer lots of special features, such as social networking tools where visitors, musicians, singer-songwriters, bands and fans will create their own profile pages, upload photos, bios and video clips. They will make friends, create groups and forums, and interact with like-minded artists and fans worldwide. The social networking aspects of the online video communities bring users back day after day, with many visitors belonging to multiple sites, word of mouth pushes users’ from music site to music site looking for their next favorite song of video.

The best sites who offer online music videos offer a reliable place to go where the tools are easy to use and the sites’ content is updated on a regular basis by other users or the dedicated site owner. Some sites even offer artist interview segments which are rotated regularly.

All of this online video consumption naturally lends itself to exposure to online video advertisements. In fact, the OPA found that 80% of online video viewers have seen online video ads, and that overall, 52% took some kind of action after seeing an ad.

Actions included checking out the company Web site, searching for more information about the product featured in the advertisement, clicking the banner ad that accompanied the video, chatting up family and friends about the product and making a purchase. In other words, the OPA study would suggest that online video ads drive three primary types of actions — searching for more information, spreading word-of-mouth (online or in person) and purchasing.

Online advertisers have certainly figured out how to draw a crowd and then market their products and services directly through the same screen which provide the entertainment, which sounds a lot like TV. It seems that the behaviors associated with watching television also apply to the internet. If the content is good enough, they just might site through the commercials.

If you see your website as an extension of your business, simply online, then you’re on the right track. Otherwise, you are probably throwing money away each month to host a website which only a drains your financial resources.

Many companies in early 2000 rushed to develop an online presence. Basically, companies reproduced their printed brochure with content and placed it in an online format. For most companies, their brochures and direct mailers was the number one marketing tool used to solicit new business and maintain current relationships, so it made sense to create their online presence out of this material. Webmasters and agencies across the country launched websites for their respective companies and clients and waited to see the results … many are still waiting to see them.

Most companies launched an official website, but didn’t create an official web presence. A website contains information about your company. It has information that may or may not be current and is somewhat stagnate related to content. You and your close associates know about your website, no one else does. A web presence is a living entity, a marketing tool, which interacts with your potential and current clients 24/7, 365.

What turns a website into a web presence?

Effective Search Engine Optimization
Potential clients can’t find your website unless you tell them. The best way to get the message out that you exist and can fulfill their need for a particular product or service is to get ranked on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Ranking on the major (and minor) search engines is strategic process which can take anywhere from 12 weeks to eight months. There are a lot of factors involved. If anyone tries to tell you they can get your site ranked at the top of Google in six weeks, it’s a scam.

Search Engine Marketing
Take your product or service directly to the top of the search engines, in the form of sponsored links. This is by far the easiest way to rank high on the search engines, but there is a “cost per click” for each potential customer. Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines offer a paid listing on their engines. Although it is easy to sign-up for the paid listings, there is a strategy behind the development of the actual text or image ad, how much to pay for each click and which keywords and key phrases to use. You also need to have a marketing budget in mind.
Now that your audience knows you exist and where to find you, you can begin utilizing the full potential of your website.

Add Ecommerce
Now that you have reached a new market; sell them your product or service. Selling online has not only become commonplace, but quite inexpensive. If you take credit cards at your physical location, you can easily accept them online through your website.

Collect Information
Offer your audience a free report or some other small gift in return for their email address and contact information. This data will come in handy when you want to reach a large audience with an announcement about a new product or service available at your website.

Get Feedback
Want to know what your audience thinks about your product or service? Collect the information online. This data can be valuable in several ways. Number one, you can use this information to contact potential customers at a later date. Number two, you can use this to create a testimonials section for your website. Potential clients always want to know what other customers thought about your product or service and will use this information in their decision process.

Add Interactive Elements: Flash Video
Create an experience for your customers by providing an introduction to your company or demonstrate a product or service.

Update your Content
If your content doesn’t change on a routine basis, you won’t receive return visits to your website. Search engines also keep an eye on content and rank sites accordingly.

Use a Reliable Host
Don’t waste money on “fly-by-night” hosting companies. Most cheap hosting companies who offer 99% uptime with their hosting package know you don’t check and you wouldn’t know if your website was down. Use a company that provides uptime reports or a company that you can trust to monitor your site. If your audience can’t find your site because it is down, you have wasted marketing dollars.

The Next Step
There are literally hundreds of ways you can interact with your customers online and the few above should help you get other ideas rolling your way. The next logical step is to review your own website. Is it providing a source of revenue, or is your site simply a bill you pay every month? If the latter is true, you may want to rethink your current online marketing strategy.

Doing business in the 21st century will eventually require every company to have a website in one form or another. Whether your site is interactive or simply informational, there are steps you can take to ensure you’re on the right track to creating a successful web presence, seven to be exact (at least from our humble perspective). While following these steps will not guarantee a successful website, it is certainly an intelligent place to start.

1. Perform a Business Analysis. What is a business analysis? Simply put, review your business requirements and your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? How does your website fit into your overall business plan? What … no business plan? Develop a business plan first before you go any further into the process. Your business plan will be your roadmap to success, so make sure the objective of your website fits into your overall business plan. I’ll say it again, BUSINESS PLAN, don’t have one? GET ONE!

2. Perform some research, also known as, the Research phase. Research your competition and industry sites. See what kind of competition is out there. What kind of marketing does your competition engage in? Don’t look to “reinvent the wheel”, take a look at how the current market works; develop a list of pros and cons about your competition and then make your web presence work better.

3. Develop a concept and a design. Finally time for the creative and fun stuff! This involves the selection of specific content, the layout of the site structure and navigation and the overall “look and feel” of your website. Remember to pay special attention to your navigational structure!!! If visitors can’t navigate your website or feel lost when doing so, your “pretty” site will have been a waste of time; don’t go there, keep the navigation simple and for SEO purposes, make sure your navigation is text based. Although Flash driven websites look cool, they are not SEO friendly and can create more problems than the “coolness” factor they express (we’ll discuss Flash sites in another article).

4. Develop your website. When considering which technology to develop your website, think cutting edge technology, not bleeding edge. Make sure the technology you use, such as ASP, PHP, HTML, CSS, will be useful for the next three to five years. Database driven website are ultimately the easiest to maintain through the use of a content management system, but make sure the CMS you use is SEO friendly. An SEO friendly CMS will utilize real URLs, not strange looking query strings with lots of strange characters and question marks. Search engines despise query strings and rank these site accordingly.

5. Choose a host provider and implement your website. When deciding on a host provider, make sure the host is not only reputable, but has been in business long enough that you can be sure they will be in business next year. Also, ask about site uptime. If your site is down for any reason, this will not only affect your potential and current customers, but the search engines as well. If the search engines decide on a given day to spider your site and it is unavailable, it could cost you your rank.

6. Promote and market your website. Register your site with the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Initiate other marketing activities such as an email blasts to prospective customers. Consider Pay per Click advertising with the major search engines and don’t forget about a long term SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to your site.

7. Finally, maintain your website. Probably the most important long term step is continuing to provide current and relevant information on your website. Keep your site content current to encourage return visitors and give them something to return for! Related to SEO, search engines just LOVE sites which provide new content on a regular basis and rank such websites accordingly.

Overall, remember, your website is not just a marketing tool, it’s a business tool, and it should be generating a revenue stream for your business.