Clients and friends of nicomedia,
As many of you know, I started the website and digital media design company nicomedia to specialize in cultivating an internet presence for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals. I work with a range of clients, from scholars and artists to doctors and lobbyists. In keeping with both my philosophy of making information as accessible as possible and with the transformative power of the Internet, this newsletter series is designed to empower you to manage your online presence as effectively as you can.
You have a new or newly refreshed website. How do you get people to look at it?
In this inaugural issue, I suggest four ways that you can attract new viewers to your website. More traffic to your site often leads to new donors for your non-profit, new customers for your store, or new clients for your business.
Search Engines
Chances are, most of the visitors to your website come from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Making sure that search engines know about your website and can read your website, then, is critically important to the success of your website. Designing a site so that search engines can easily access the keywords they need to connect the right people with the right website is a process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). All websites that I design (or redesign) employ the best practices SEO design. Once the site is up and running, the primary tool we have for further leveraging useful information from the site is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is code, which you can embed in a website, that helps us track how the website is being used. Who links to your site? When someone lands on your site from Google, what keywords were they searching? How many people look at your site per day, per month, per year? All of these questions and more can be answered through Google Analytics. If I designed or redesigned your website, then Google Analytics is already installed. I use this to track how your site is being used and how to better optimize it. If you would like to receive a free, automatically-generated monthly report on your website’s traffic, just send me an email.
Social Networking
Social Networking can do more than keep you up-to-date with your friends. Premised on the idea that personal connections and advice matter as much as (if not more than) the vetted authority of a high Google ranking, social networking sites are the fastest growing segments of the Internet today. A recent WIRED magazine article noted that “over the past year, Facebook has… become one of the most popular online destinations. More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts.” LinkedIn, the most popular professional networking site claims “more than 45 million users representing 150 industries around the world.”
Because of their popularity, don’t underestimate their power to drive new traffic to your website. It is both simple and free to create accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn. As each website walks you through the process of creating your profile, be sure to add the url of your website in the appropriate place. It will be obvious.
Both Facebook and LinkedIn walk you through the process of creating your profile, but if you run into problems or have questions along the way, give me a call. I am happy to guide you through.
Once you create your profiles, be sure to add me as a Friend (Facebook) or add me to your Network (LinkedIn).
Business Directories
Ever wonder how businesses show up in Google Maps? You can make sure that your business shows up by adding yourself to Google’s Local Business Center. Visit http://www.google.com/local/add and
follow the instructions on the site to make sure that the address and contact information for your business is correct. Now you’ll show up when someone’s searching within Google Maps using a keyword related to your business.
Email Signature
Perhaps the simplest thing you can do (and you can do it right now) is make sure that your email signature has all of the contact information a future client, customer, or donor would need to contact you. If you add the url of your website to the bottom of your email signature, most email programs will automatically recognize the url as a hyperlink. And there you go, it’s that much easier for recipients of your emails to check out your website.
I hope you find something in this email useful to you. Feel free to pass this email along if you know of someone else who could use one of these tips. If you would like to sign up to receive this newsletter by email, you can do so here.
For the palette, I knew I wanted to use a spectrum of shades of red. I found inspiration on the bedside table.
