Diamond Website Conversion’s Comments (group member since Mar 18, 2010)

Diamond Website Conversion’s comments from the Conversations on Website Conversion group.

Your goal after reading this chapter should be to write your green mission statement. This statement should make clear the environmental goals of your business. It should be proactive and motivational, lay out an action plan, and not be limited to the very immediate future. After you write this statement you have to critically analyze the “greenness” of your business and see where you need to improve. This chapter advocates conducting an analysis called a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). The first two are an internal analysis of your business, and the last are measures of outside factors that can have an impact on your green potential.

Writing the green mission statement may have to wait until we have finished reading part 2 of the book, where specific aspects of going green are discussed. A SWOT, however, you can start thinking about right now. What internal and external factors are going to impact your efforts in going green? What are your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats?

Chapter two offers a list of fifty things that you can do to make your business more eco-friendly. Many of them are incredibly easy—remembering to turn off lights, making recycling an encouraged option for employees, trying to become a more “paper-free” business—and some will take a little more time.

Having a plan is also something that is stressed. In order to make the most of this, or any, opportunity, you should create a comprehensive plan. You should know what you are going to implement tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Creating specific and measurable goals will increase your ability and likelihood of achieving them.

Think about who is going to be working with you to green your business, and get prepared for a goal-setting meeting.

Which of the items from the list starting on page twenty will you implement tomorrow? This week? This year?

The reading has been divided into 2-3 chapters a week. We’ll be posting our thoughts on each section as we go. If you are reading along, please join the conversation! : )

Week 1: May 10th-16th

Chapter 1-What Does Green Mean?
Chapter 2-Getting Started
Chapter 3-Green Opportunities

Week 2: May 17th-23rd

Chapter 4-Thinking Green
Chapter 5-Developing Your Plan

Week 3: May 24th-30th

Chapter 6-Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.
Chapter 7-Reducing Waste and Recycling

Week 4: May 31st-June 6th

Chapter 8-Energy Management
Chapter 9-Water Conservation
Chapter 10-Green Office Supplies

Week 5: June 7th–June 13th

Chapter 11-Green Human Resources
Chapter 12-Green Transportation and Shipping
Chapter 13-Green Marketing and Communication

Week 6: June 14th-June 20th

Chapter 14-Green Business Travel
Chapter 15-Green Purchasing

In today’s world, being environmentally conscious is increasingly popular both for consumers and businesses. This trend is great because the entire planet will benefit; consumers will benefit, and as a business, you can benefit. By greening your small business, you can appeal to a new demographic, while helping the Earth. Though greening your business may seem like a huge task, breaking it down into small do-able tasks (like changing just one light blub to an LED or fluorescent blub) your business will be green before you know it.

What got you interested in going green?

What goals would you like to accomplish in making your business more environmentally friendly?

This last chapter ends with something of a pep-talk for small companies just starting out with their applications of inbound marketing. These new trends have really leveled the playing field—a big budget doesn’t necessarily translate to big conversion rates or a large customer base. Getting people to find you is the goal on inbound marketing, and we’ve gone through a number of different ways to increase the probability of this throughout the book. Don’t forget to check out the section after chapter 16—it shows a listing of tools, and after that a quick list of tips. Which of these tools have you started using while reading this book? Which tips have you started following?

Since we’ve come to the end, this is a discussion of parting thoughts and ideas. Have you started working with any of the inbound marketing techniques that we have discussed? Over these few weeks, has there been any change in your conversion rates, visitor numbers, or other statistics?

Is web presence and competency the only thing that you look for in a PR firm? There may still be a place for traditional marketing in this world. After all, we still have to sit through commercials, and there are dozens of billboards along my morning commute. Would you use a PR agency for your business?

Continuing in the same theme of measurement, chapter 12 is about measuring your people. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but our book forwards four measurements that make a great inbound marketing employee. A good inbound marketer is a Digital Citizen, who is very Analytic, with great web Reach, and who can create remarkable content. These properties correspond to the sort of properties you would have looked for in a traditional marketer (someone who understands their craft, can appreciate numbers, has a wide range of contacts, and who can provide ideas), but they are specifically tailored to the world of online, inbound marketing.

This chapter devotes little time to the idea of training existing marketers/employees to fulfill these crucial inbound marketing roles. This may be writing them off a little too early, and taking things a little too cynically. Do you think that you can teach an old dog new tricks? The analogies of old marketing and inbound marketing are incredibly tight, and there was a day when the internet was new, and knowing how to use it grew with time. What portions of DARC do you think are teachable and learnable? Would you be better off starting fresh with a new face?

Chapter eleven talks about a marketing funnel. There are many different methods for enlarging different portions of your funnel. The first portion of the funnel, prospects, can be enlarged by increasing the traffic to your website. The second part of the book (Get Found By Prospects) is about enlarging this portion of your funnel through SEO, Blogs, and social media. The next portion of a marketing funnel is made up of leads. Converting prospects into leads was the basis for Part Three. The bottom two levels of the funnel are Opportunity and ultimately, Customer. Measuring the changes in size of all these levels is another essential part of testing—if a change increases your Prospects, but not your Leads, then you should consider making and testing more changes. The main point of this short chapter is measurement—keeping track of what has been changed and how it has effected your marketing funnel is essential to making systematic changes to improve your return.

Which part of a marketing funnel do you view as the most vital? Which portion of your marketing funnel could use some stretching?

An important part of monitoring and nurturing leads is being able to grade them. The grade that a lead receives should take into account not only the amount that they have interacted with your website or your social networks in the past, but also the type of interactions that they have had. Someone who posts comments on your blog, engages on your Facebook Fan page, tweets with your regularly and takes multiple calls-to-action should obviously receive a higher grade than somebody who has only visited a couple of pages on your website. Once you have graded the leads, you will be able to see where you should direct most of your attention and energies.

If you haven’t been nurturing your leads, you could be letting go of people who would be willing to use your product or service, if they were simply reminded of it.

What have you done to nurture leads in the past? Are you in the process of nurturing any now? Would grading help you determine who to spend more time nurturing?

A portion of this chapter is made up of a list of “landing page best practices,” One of the most exciting things about landing pages is that you don’t have to worry as much about SEO. This leaves you open to do a lot of other things—like include images—without having an adverse impact on the page. Much the opposite, in fact! Eye-popping graphics catch the attention of visitors and are a great asset to your page.

Take a peek at your competition's landing pages and see how they use images to their advantage. This is a place where you should have fun, and see what works best. What kind of images do you use? Do you create them yourself, or do you use open-license images? What sort of impact are you looking to make with them?

In Chapter eight, they reiterate that “you’ve gotta give to get,” especially when it comes to calls to action. With the amount of spam out there, people want to be certain that what they are giving up their e-mail for is worth it. Similar to a blog, you have to give something out with a call to action, in order to get the best returns. That “something” is usually more remarkable content; our book gives a short list on page 132, but there are always plenty more options. You should experiment with all different sorts of offers to see which converts the best.

Out of the four criteria for a compelling call to action (valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented), the requirement of value is one of the hardest to implement. Creating a prominent and action oriented form or link is not so difficult as thinking of a way to make it valuable to the visitor. What was the value of any calls to action you have engaged with recently? What kinds of things can you offer to make a call to action valuable?

Marty-At the end of the video you could add a quick text recap of the most important points. You could use Windows Movie Maker, Apple Movie Maker, or I have Adobe CS3 Creative Suite that I could use to help you. Can't wait to see the videos once they make it to YouTube!

I really like the “watering hole” analogy of social media. The people are already there, all but waiting to learn about you and your business. The extreme density of users allows for incredibly quick viral transmission—if one person becomes a “fan” of your page, you are make visible to all of their friends, and (depending on their profile settings) their friends’ friends. The workload of maintaining a social media site is not too high—while users do expect you to update frequently, the volume of those updates (in the form of status messages) can be rather small.

What do you think a good mixture of these updates would be? This question also applies somewhat to blogs—what seems like a good ratio of articles, links, blogs, and videos?

In this chapter, we learned about what sort of criteria Google uses to measure the value of a site, and to rank it within the search results for a term or set of terms. It was interesting learning about the “magic” going on behind the scenes of every search. It was simultaneously a little disheartening—there are tens- or hundred-of-thousands of results for many searches, and getting your page into the top 10 is essential.

That said, the chapter offers advice for tackling the problem through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This was a great takeaway lesson, because you can take what you learned and begin to apply it right away. What changes did you begin formulating while reading this section? And to keep things on a positive note, where does your website already succeed?

In chapters four and five, Halligan and Shah talk first about generating intriguing and captivating content, and then they discuss one of the modes for dispersing this content—namely, a blog. Blogs can do a great deal toward making your website into a collaborative hub, which will lead people back to your products.

Something which surprised me was their recommendations regarding comments. It would definitely be hard for me to give up the extra layer of control and security provided by enabling comment moderation. Their arguments against this are pretty convincing, though. It would be hard for people to take you seriously if end a blog by asking for comments and then require that the comments be approved. Conversations work best and are taken most seriously when they can flow unhindered.

So here I’m going to ask your opinions: what have you experienced with comments, or with blogs in general? Have you been able to use a disagreement as “a public opportunity to handle objections and exhibit your customer service skills?”

I found myself taking a lot of notes reading this chapter. It is a totally new way of thinking for me as a internet marketer; in an exciting way. For me it sounds so much more fun to create a dynamic collaborative "hub" that people want to contribute to over something that is static and gets lost in the clutter of internet content. I agree that there is *power* in collaboration! What have you learned in this chapter?

In Chapter 1 of Inbound Marketing , our current book under discussion, Halligan and Shaw make a strong case for the death of push marketing.

My experience is a bit more mixed. Yes, I purchase a lot of products online and have for a very long time. But, based on the amount of junk mail we still get in our mailbox and the number of unsolicited calls we get from telemarketers (even though we’re on the National Do Not Call Registry) I would have to say push marketing is not dead yet.

However, I’m very much aware of which companies are sending us this mail and which companies are making these unsolicited calls, and we will not be doing business with them. I am voting with my actions, with my dollars, and talking about it with my friends. Hopefully, if enough people do the same, these companies will get the message and move towards the attraction or pull marketing model.

What do you think about push marketing? Should we do anything about it, or can we? Leave us a comment and tell us what you think.

The reading has been divided into 2-3 chapters a week. We’ll be posting our thoughts on each section as we go. If you are reading along it would be great if you joined the conversation.

Week 1: March 22nd-28th

Chapter 1-Shopping Has Changed…Has Your Marketing?
Chapter 2-Is Your Website a Marketing Hub?
Chapter 3-Are you Worthy?

Week 2: March 29th –April 4th

Chapter 4-Create Remarkable Content
Chapter 5-Get Found in the Blogosphere

Week 3: April 5th – 11th

Chapter 6-Getting Found in Google
Chapter 7-Get Found in Social Media

Week 4: April 12th – April 18th

Chapter 8-Convert Visitors into Leads
Chapter 9-Convert Prospects into Leads
Chapter 10-Convert Leads into Customers

Week 5: April 19th –April 25nd

Chapter 11-Make Better Marketing Decisions
Chapter 12-Picking and Measuring Your People
Chapter 13-Picking and Measuring a PR Agency

Week 6: April 26th – May 2nd

Chapter 14-Watching Your Competition
Chapter 15-On Commitment, Patience and Learning
Chapter 16-Why Now?