ARTICLES
& Reports
e-Business: Making Your Website Work So You Don't Have To
e-Business and e-Commerce are all the buzz these days, but what really works? Well, Innovation Network's website is ranked in the top 3% of the Web's Most Linked Sites, so we've learned a few tricks for getting attention in this space. Following are a couple easy things you can do:
Write articles
and offer content people need. Seems obvious, but it's that old value
proposition again. The more information you post publicly so that people
can find you, the more often they'll come back to you. "Stickiness" is
the web term for getting people to hang out longer on your site (and not
because they're waiting for your graphics to download--see below). Deciding
what to make public and what is truly proprietary requires looking deeply
at your core competency as an organization. Then, if it's not a core competency,
give it away. For more on this topic, see this August 2000 Fast Company
magazine article on "Unleash
Your Ideavirus" by Seth Godin (author of
"Permission Marketing") or check out "The
Cluetrain Manifesto," in which the authors give away the first chapter
of their book.
Want to see how your
website ranks? Click here
to go to WebsMostLinked.com.
Make your site load
faster by using the free tools at Website
Garage.
Think about how you
can automate sales. How could you make repeated contact with potential
customers without having to pick up the phone? You may want to have an
autoresponder set up for particular pieces of information, as we have
for our Innovation University program. Click here for a sample of the
Autoresponse System. This autoresponder will also automatically add you
to our free email lists if you are not already a member. If you tell Databack.com
that Innovation Network sent you, you'll receive one free month of
service. An integrated solution for e-Business comes from Webcontactpro.
Webcontactpro
incorporates email lists, autoresponders, ad tracking, secure shopping
carts and affiliate programs into one simple interface that requires no
programming. We are testing this service to manage our online sales, create
automatic email responses and distribute our Heads Up newsletter list.
So far, it seems absolutely terrific. You can try it out free for 30 days
here: www.webcontactpro.com
Once you've got some
informative articles and an interactive activity or two, check out your
meta tags by going to "View Page Source" in Netscape or "View Source"
in Internet Explorer. In fact you can do it with this page right now.
See the part after title, that's where you want to put in all the keywords
you can think of for what you're offering. The reason for it becomes clear
in the next tip.
One secret to good
placement in search engines is having meta tags that get picked up by
the "spider" services that weave a web of information through search engines
to direct people to particular content on your site. For example, many
people find their way to thinksmart.com because they use a search engine
to locate a well-known author on innovation or creativity. It would take
too long for a human to link each page into the hundreds or thousands
of search engines, but there a couple automated services that do it for
you. One that has worked well for Innovation Network is Site Solutions.
Site Solutions offers a free website analysis to ensure better search
engine placement. The $160 annual fee for monthly submissions to search
engines is well worth it. And, yes, we get a commission when you click
over and buy.
If you want to find
out who's going to your site, which pages they're reading and how long
they're staying, HitBox is a great, free program offered by Websidestory.com.
Using the free service means you put an icon like the one at the bottom
of this page on the pages you want analyzed.
Click
here for more tips from veterans who've recently built and re-built
their sites.