In part 1 of this 2-part article I covered 4 ways to make your website remarkable, namely:
1. Make it pretty
2. Have a goal or a purpose (and track it)
3. Make sure it’s easy to manage and get support
4. Engage your visitors (encourage them to consume, connect and convert)
In this final article I will cover 4 more ways to make your website remarkable.
5- Make it unique
I failed my marketing subject at Uni, but I do remember the first thing we covered and it was all about finding something unique about your business and focusing on it. Some people call it a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It could be anything, perhaps your personal experiences, exclusive rights to sell a product, your policy of giving something back to the community, specific technical skills. Whatever it is, your website is a great place to showcase it.
Potential customers looking at your site will most likely look at a lot of others as well. How are you going to stand out? What can you tell them that is unique about your business that appeals to them or solves their problems.
Once you know what it is, and you have articulated it carefully on your site, it’s time to prove it. If you offer great customer service, include rave review from customers (with photos if possible, video is even better). If you offer the most remarkable software give people a free trial. If you are an award winning agency show your awards. ‘Social proof’ can be useful to prove legitimacy as well, things like numbers of Facebook likes and the new Twitter button also shows how many followers you have.
6 – Be personal, social and authentic
One of the best parts of being in business for yourself is you don’t have to pretend to be someone else. People love it when you are authentic and it’s probably a big part of why people do business with you.
Don’t fill up your site with wanky corporate buzzwords or boring bland content, be personal, use an active voice, use your name and pictures – people will appreciate it.
People also like being part of a community and like to support other small business owners so encourage them to engage (blogs with comments for example) and integrate social networking features to encourage them to share.
Emerson Salon does a great job with this, all of their staff are showcased on the front page of their blog style site, each with blog posts, each with their own Twitter account.
7 – Make it easy for people to find important information
This is an unforgivable mistake that a lot of small business owners make. You need to understand why people visit your site and make sure it’s easy for them to get what they want. A lot of people will visit your site to get your contact details (or opening hours / store locations for retail businesses) – make sure this information is easy to get to. Make it really obvious what your business does and what makes you unique (believe me a lot of people forget to mention this). Make your calls to action clear – if you want people to sign up for your newsletter, or contact you for a free quote, make sure it’s really obvious to them how they can do it (think back to the Xero example – big button, bright colours, white space around it).
8 – Get some traffic
It’s amazing how many people come to me for a website and have either assumed traffic will be automatic or just haven’t really thought about it. Here’s news for anyone who thinks they will automatically get traffic from Google for their new site – they won’t. In fact you won’t get any decent amounts of traffic from anywhere unless you plan for it. So have a traffic plan and in it make sure you include a wide range of traffic sources (offline methods, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, forums, blogs, social networks etc).
Conclusion
Hopefully over this 2-part article, you have picked up a few tips for making your own website more remarkable.
I hope you have enjoyed this post and good luck with your success online.
About the author: Dan Norris
Dan Norris is the owner of A Website Designer, one of Australia’s leading small business web design blogs and founder of Web Circle, a progressive Gold Coast web design agency with a relentless drive to help small business owners connect with real customers online.
