5 Steps to growing your business on the web

We’re exhibiting at the Growing Gloucestershire Conference at Gloucestershire University.

This is our ‘web growth’ schtick - we thought we’d share it with a wider audience.

STEP 1 – PREPARING THE GROUND

-    Researching your market – how are people using the search engines to find businesses like yours? What problems are they seeking to solve? Who are your competitors?

-    Identifying keywords – we can identify the keywords you need in your content and links to attract the right visitors to your site.

-    Building your site on servers powered 100% by sun, wind and water – build a business and save the planet!

STEP 2 – PLANTING THE SEEDS

-    Developing your content – what are your key benefits and what’s the single most compelling reason to buy?

-    Designing your site – make it easy for visitors to find what they want and to buy or enquire.

-    Installing analytics software – ensure that you can test and measure everything to boost your sales and cut your costs.

-    Optimising for the search engines. Get found in Google but first make sure the site will be found against the right keywords.

STEP 3 – NURTURING THE SITE

-    Get properly indexed by Google – categorise your pages clearly for the Googlebot. Create an XML site map, write specific meta tags for each page and optimise your content.

-    Weed out bugs and broken links – test, test and test again!

-    get listed in the main directories – identify the right directories for your business and submit your site manually.

-    Add social book-marks so that people can file and share your content.

STEP 4 – FERTILISING

-    Launch a paid search campaign to test your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers or enquirers. Refine the campaign over time, testing each element to identify the best combinations of keywords, advertisements and landing pages.

-    Post videos on You Tube, second only to Google for online information. Over 1 billion videos streamed per day.

-    Start a blog. Build your own news channel and allow readers to comment – create dialogue.

-    Syndicate your content by RSS. “Really Simple Syndication” allows people to subscribe to your blog updates and builds relationships.

STEP 5 – HARVESTING

-    Measure how you’re getting sales or enquiries. Check your web stats every day to identify the best sources of conversions and the parts of your marketing that don’t deliver.

-    Invest more in the better sales sources.

Remember “Feed the World”, the Live Aid song? Catchy tune and worthy cause.

How about “Feed America” instead? ‘Sung’, as it were, by Microsoft when you download IE8. For every download of IE8 the company will donate 8 meals to Feeding America, a US charity.

Got your wallet out? Or grabbed your sick bag?

It seems that 1 in 8 Americans struggles to get enough to eat. In the land of the Big Mac, people are starving.

What’s that got to do with Microsoft? Well, Bill Gates is well known for his charitable foundation, so why not help those at the bottom of Uncle Sam’s pile?

Or could there be another motive?

It was announced last week that Windows 7 is to be shipped in Europe without Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft has responded to the EU’s antitrust objections to its bundling of its browser with Windows.

Forgive our cynicism but does this explain the charitable donation? Download IE8 now or the poor guy starves!

No harm done of course - a starving American is as tragic as a starving er, Englishman, Irishman or African - but many Europeans will struggle to understand why they should support a charity to feed people in what is still the world’s wealthiest nation.

If you want IE8  and you’d like to prompt a Microsoft donation, take a look at http://www.browserforthebetter.com. For more information on the Feeding America charity see http;//feedingamerica.org/default.aspx.

Call us callous but we’re sticking to Firefox.

If you’re based in Gloucestershire and you use the web to promote your business, please complete our survey. We’ll enter you into a prize draw to win £250 of Google clicks, which has got to be worth 10 minutes of anyone’s time.

The aim of the survey is to find out how well Glos companies are using the web to increase sales, improve customer service and create greater efficiency.

We’ll be publishing the results of the survey on our website after the Growing Gloucestershire conference on 25th June - the prize draw will be held at the Conference, which is at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham.
From our experience most companies understand the importance of a website and why they need visibility in Google against the right keywords. What suprises us is that they rarely think beyond that, as if Google rankings were an end in themselves.The web offers opportunities to save costs in print, customer service queries, promotion, recruitment and project management to name just a few activities. Yet few companies seem to grasp this.

Or do they? Here’s your chance to tell us what’s really happening. Please click here to complete the survey.