Customer testimonials build instant credibility. Testimonials work because they help build up trust. Praise from your satisfied customers is much more effective than anything you can say about yourself or your products. They should be placed on your website’s home page and on product pages.

Testimonials are important to customers because they lower the risk of doing business with an unknown company. They are telling your visitors that they had a positive experience with your products and company. Testimonials tell visitors that you value your customer opinions and it offers an unbiased recommendation for your product

What makes a really good testimonial?

1. Specific: To work, they need to be specific. Vague testimonials are weak. A really good testimonial includes specific benefits and specific results gained from using your product or service.
2. Don’t edit: Testimonials are powerful because they are written by others. Keep your testimonials in their original form including grammatical errors.
3. Add a link: Provide contact details for the people giving the testimonial. A link back to their website allows visitors to see who made the comment and it rewards your customer with a valuable link back to their website.
4. Ask for them: At the end of each project or when you ship product, ask for feedback and ask for permission to publish their comments. If the feedback isn’t good, use this as a tool to identify and fix problems. Build up a pool of testimonials and add the best ones to your website.

Testimonials overcome skepticism: A good testimonial has the power to convince even your “tough sell” visitors that your product or service really made a difference in your customer’s life — and can help them, too.

It often takes 7 or more ad exposures before a prospect is ready to buy. So, on a website, how do you get a chance to reach a prospect multiple times?  In one word: autoresponders. An autoresponder is an automated email program that replies to your website visitor with a message or sequential series of emails written by you. This is a highly effective Internet marketing strategy for businesses.

This is a form of permission based, direct marketing. When a visitor is interested in more information on a topic, they can request that you send this to them, usually from a capture form on your web page. The best email autoreponder systems are double opt-in. This means that after request info, your visitor needs to verify they really want the information by responding to an email.

So now you have a prospect that not only requested information, they gave you permission to send them messages.

Autoresponder systems allow you to prepare 7-10 sequential email messages around a specific topic that interests your visitor. They send out these emails sequentially at pre-defined time intervals. These emails can guide prospects thru your sales cycle presenting information, building trust and supplying links to purchase.

They work best when they include valuable information that will help your visitor so they are looking forward to receiving your emails.

Tips to improve results

1. Send 7-10 sequential emails over a 3-4 week period.
2. Write in the first person as you would in a normal conversation.
3. Personalize your responses by including subscriber’s first name in the subject line.
4. Supply helpful information or something of value on a regular basis to build trust.
5. Include a call to action including a purchase link.

A really effective business website is one that gives your visitor exactly what they want. Business web design starts with the customer. It answers their need. It’s not complicated, your visitor came looking for something, so what was it?

A Business Website needs to:

1. Build trust: Start with a clean design and useful information and make sure there are no misspellings or broken links. Clearly show your phone number and address. Include a guarantee, a privacy policy and a returns policy.
2. Offer value: Help your visitor solve a problem and reach their goal. Make their life better in some way.
3. Be clear: Avoid confusing your visitor. Keep the design, navigation and information clear and to the point. Understand what a visitor wants to accomplish and help them reach their goal.
4. Take action: Each page should be designed with a clear action designed in. This could be the next step in your sales process, request a quote, buy now of call now. Avoid making the user think and decide their next step.
5. Your image: Make your business look professional by having an organized, well thought out website. You have 3-5 seconds to interest a visitor or lose them in a click.
6. AIDA: Your website should guide take visitors thru the selling sequence of Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

A truly great business website genuinely sets out to help people.

Visitors come looking for a solution to their problem. If you understand their need and show them how to solve their problem, you have their attention. If you can show that your product or service is the best solution, you have a sale.

The mobile web is a wide open field in web design. It is the cutting edge for web marketing and businesses are quickly converting their websites to be mobile web compatible to take advantage of this growing market.

Text vs. graphics: Should your mobile website be text only or should it include graphics too? The smallest screens are only 128 x 160 and these work best with text only. The trend is toward larger screen sizes. Not only do mobile web sites have to fit a small screen, they have to work with several sizes of small screens. Graphics work well on medium and larger screen sizes. Graphics must be small in size and be able to load quickly.

Size: What size screen should designers design for? This really depends on what mobile phone your target market is using.

1. Feature phones such as the RAZR V3 has a smaller screen with a size of 176 x 220 pixels. Today these are the most popular mobile devices for accessing the Internet.
2. Smart phones such as the Apple iPhone, have a larger screen size of 480x 320. Smart phones are the fastest growing segment of the cell phone market.

If you are going after a blended market (mix of feature phone users and smart phone users), a maximum size of 200 x 250 pixels is recommended.

Location: Mobile websites can be located on a separate domain (.mobi for mobile websites only) or as a sub-domain on your current website. Web sites can automatically detect what platform a visitor is accessing the site through and automatically direct them to the appropriately sized website.

Keep it simple: Mobile website design requires sites to be narrower, have less functionality, simpler navigation and smaller images. In mobile web design, less is more. Allow visitors to reach the content in as few steps as possible.

Future: What does the future hold for mobile marketing? People will be trading in their cell phones for smart phones at ever increasing rates. This will drive mobile web to become mainstream in 2009. By the end of 2009, most major companies will have mobile compatible websites. Within the next 3 years, most businesses will have mobile versions of their website to take advantage of this trend.

Would you eat at a restaurant that was filthy and had piles of dirty dishes on the tables? Would you buy a car from a car lot that had wrecked cars parked between the cars that are for sale? Well I wouldn’t and you shouldn’t either.

What does your website tell a visitor about your company? Does it tell them that you are a seasoned professional that knows exactly what to do? Your website is a direct reflection on the quality of products and services that you can provide. A good business web design will make or break a sale. A poorly designed website will send visitors fleeing away before they see your message.

1. Curb Appeal: Does it give the proper impression based on who your customer is? The website needs to look clean, organized and inviting. Look at the website from the eyes of your customer.
2. Web Traffic: A steady flow of traffic creates opportunities for leads and sales. Should your traffic come from organic search results (SEO), paid sponsor listings (PPC) or referral traffic? Choose your strategy before you design your website because the best search engine optimization (SEO) results are designed in.
3. Call to Action: Is there a clear path to action? This could be call now, buy online, request a quote or download this eBook. Is the navigation arranged in a logical selling process?
4. Trust: Everything about your website should be designed to build trust. It should be fast loading, well organized, have clear navigation, be user friendly and work in all major browsers.
5. Easy: Make it easy for people to use, easy to find information and easy to find the buy now button. Think like your customer and make every step of the purchase easy.

Apple iPhones are part of a class of cell phones called smart phones. They have tremendous power, including the ability to surf the Internet while you are on the move. Their screen is relatively small at only 480×320 pixels. With most websites today being designed for 1024×768 (and larger) monitors, what will happen if someone with an iPhone goes to your website?

The Apple iPhone was introduced thru ATT&T in June 2007. T-Mobile is now introducing their answer to the iPhone, the G1 Android Phone. In November, Verizon is introducing the Blackberry Storm 9530.

Mobile search accounts for 1-2% of all Internet searches today. This number is expected to quickly grow over the next couple of years. Nielsen estimates that at least 50 million US mobile subscribers now do search using their phone.

Today, mobile search tends to mean local search. This means if yours is a local business that depends on local customers, you need to be concerned with making your website mobile ready. So what does this mean?

1. Redesign the mobile version of your website to be narrower, have less functionality, simpler navigation and smaller images.
2. The mobile website area should be coded in XHTML-MP / CSS to be compatible with mobile devices.
3. Place the smaller simplified version of your website on a sub-domain on your website. This is typically done on http://m.yourdomain.com where m=mobile.
4. Set your website to automatically redirect requests from mobile browsers to the appropriate mobile site. Mobile browsers identify themselves through a user agent string.
5. Mobile design means streamlining not only your offering but carefully planning the mobile user experience. Think thru the chain of events and how each keystroke represents precious time.

To get the best search engine optimization results, a business website should be designed for SEO. But what happens if you already have a good website that converts interested visitors into paying customers? What are common website problems that will keep your website from being ranked on page 1 of the Google Results? What can you do about it?

1. All Flash websites: These are websites built entirely in Flash. They are cool looking and visually vibrant. Search engines have limited ability to index Flash content. The best solution is to provide additional HTML pages that search engines and visitors can look at.
2. Splash Pages: This is a graphic entry page where often the only text present is the word “Enter.” Search engines give more value to the home page than any other page on the website. Splash pages are a complete waste of the most valuable real estate on the entire website and should be removed if search rankings are important.
3. Frames: This is an extension to HTML that allows several web pages to appear in a single web browser window. These pages are held together with a “Frameset” command. Frames create severe problems with search engines being able to “crawl” your website. Frames websites should be recoded into HTML or better yet, into XHTML / CSS formats.
4. Online carts: Online stores come in many forms and many have excellent functionality and “instant” ability to easily have an online store. Many do not allow FTP access so there may be very limited SEO Potential. To these carts add as much keyword rich content as possible and launch an aggressive link popularity campaign.
5. Website builders: These are websites designed and maintained with a CMS. They have no FTP access and are marketed under names like: Websites Tonight, Websmartz and EZ Generator. This includes many special purpose websites such as Real Estate, mortgage and insurance agent websites. These usually have no FTP access and you will be limited to adding keyword rich text and an aggressive link popularity campaign such as blog marketing.
6. Dynamic URLs: These are the database queries that have a “?” in them. Replace long query strings and session ID’s with static URLs. This will greatly improve the crawlability of a large dynamic database type website.
7. Invalid Code: Check your website at http://validator.w3.org and if the number of code errors exceeds 25 per page, go in and fix the errors. This website validator will tell you the nature and the location of the problem. You do not need 100% valid code to get #1 rankings, but large numbers of code errors does hurt rankings.

#1 “Will it Blend?” (2006) This is our top pick for the best viral marketing campaign. Started with a $50 budget that created a highly popular Internet sensation that resulted in a large increase in their product sales. Blendtec’s “will it blend?” video series shows Tom Dickson, the Blendtec founder, testing if various household items will blend in their super-powerful blender.

Creative: According to a WSJ article, in 2006, Blendtec hired George Wright, their first Director of Marketing. Tom noticed that there was sawdust on the floor in their product demonstration room. They were testing their commercial blenders by blending 2-by-2s. This sparked the idea of the “Will it blend?” videos. According to Wright, “We wanted to make sure we had was something that I would look at and think it was funny, and I would forward to my friends. We put on a lab coat and safety glasses to give it the real test thing like Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Diet Coke / Mentos guys.”

Marketing objectives: This was about creating brand awareness. This was a company with less than $40 million in annual revenue that didn’t even have a marketing department before 2006. They wanted to expand their customer base beyond the commercial market and drive increased revenues.

Results: Starting with a $50 budget for the initial video production, they used Chief Executive Tom Dickson to star in the videos. Within a week, the “Will It Blend?” videos hit it big on video-sharing site YouTube.com. According to e-consultancy, more than 8 million YouTube visitors have watched the videos. Traffic to the company’s website has increased by 650% since the introduction of the videos, while Blendtec’s online sales have increased five-fold.

#2 Hotmail (1996) Hotmail is the classic example of a viral campaign used to build a business.  This was the first viral product of the internet age. Hotmail launched their free email service in July 1996. Within 18 months they had grown to 12,000,000 registered users. Every single email sent by Hotmail user included a small ad that promoted the service in the footer.

Creative: On July 4, 1996 Hotmail founders Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched a , free web based email service. They started with just $300,000 in venture capital funding. They gave away free e-mail addresses and email services. Attached to the footer of each outgoing email they attached a signature file that read:  “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” They stood back and let the people using their network spread their offer to friends and associates.

Marketing Objective: How does a free email service make money? They make their revenue from the advertising on the website where users login. To be successful they need lots of traffic. In the first 18 months, Hotmail spent just $500K on branding, marketing, advertising and promotion with their viral marketing approach. Compare this to $20 million spent by Juno, Hotmail’s closest competitor who ended up with just a fraction of the number of users.

Results: By spending $500K in the first 18 months of operations, Hotmail recruited 12,000,000 users. By 2004 this grew to 65 million. Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft for $400 million and became part of its MSN network.

#3 Stolen Nascar (TaxBrain.com) (2006). TaxBrain.com, the online tax preparation service, hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and made it look real, so real that it was picked up and inadvertently aired as a real news story, the subsequent fall-out created a tidal wave of publicity valued at well over 1 million dollars.

Creative: Promoting a tax preparation website can be pretty boring. Marketers behind this stunt wanted to grab attention with something that had never been done before. Their research showed that a NASCAR race car had never been stolen by a racing fan and taxbrain.com did sponsor a NASCAR race car. So using actors, models and stuntmen, they did just that, the winning vehicle was stolen right from the winners circle.

Marketing Objective: The goal was to create off-season brand awareness for TaxBrain.com in a market dominated by two the industry giants: Intuit and H&R Block. They wanted to target the main demographic which is young male and female adults 18-25. This demographic is very at home online, so a viral video was selected as a way to reach this segment. TaxBrain.com hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and make it look real

Results: The story looked so real that San Francisco’s KGO-TV aired this as a real news item. ESPN then picked this up and played it over and over. This was then replayed on all the major networks and the then-16-year-old driver was asked to appear on “Good Morning America”. It is estimated that they received more than $1.8 million in TV time. This spilled over to high website visitor traffic and YouTube viewings.

Although TaxBrain.com produced this viral video exclusively for user-generated video sites such as YouTube.com, the accidental airing as a real news story catapulted this video into one of the great viral marketing successes.