5 Ways to Spruce Up Your Website

In the Web 2.0 world, you need to start looking at your company website as a much more dynamic marketing tool to get your customers and prospects interested in what your company can do for them. The five ideas below are just a few of the possibilities for sprucing up your site and building stronger relationships online. The key to seeing success with any of these ideas is to create a goal before implementing new tools.

1. Be Dynamic

In today’s market your website needs to be kept updated with information about your industry, your projects and your points of view. The best way to do this without hiring a webmaster is to add a content management system (CMS) to your website. CMS is software that runs on your Web server; popular options include Joomla, Type3 and CMS Made Simple. The system will keep you in control of your message and more involved with keeping the information current. Updating your message will keep clients and search engines interested in what your website is all about.

2. Get Social

Are you on LinkedIn or Facebook? Today, most of us are using social networks to build relationships with existing customers and clients, but we separate our social network marketing from our website. Let your customers know where to find you and your team. Add a link on your website inviting visitors to look you up on the social site you’re involved with and start building relationships through your website. You may want to take it a step further and create a group on Facebook and use your website to encourage visitors to become part of your community.

3. Offer Value

We are all looking for good advice from the experts, and if you’re a business owner, you are probably an expert in your industry. Create an eBook (a digital book commonly created in PDF format) that provides value to your visitor. For example, compose a list of questions to ask when evaluating service providers in your industry, or a list of tips that will save your clients time and money. This a great way to build a relationship and collect e-mail addresses for future marketing efforts.

4. BECOME THE SOURCE

The goal behind sprucing up a website is usually to keep prospects and customers interested in your company. Become the go-to source for information for your audience. Add a feed from outside news sources to your website. Or go viral and create a widget that other sites will want to add to their website. A widget is a mini-application that can be embedded into another Web page. You can hire a developer to customize a widget for your website or create your own and review some samples by visiting widgetbox.com.

5. SHARE THIS

Being a part of the Web 2.0 world today, we are always online adding sites to our del.icio.us accounts or forwarding pages to friends for review. Make it easy for your visitors and gain marketing insight by adding a ShareThis (sharethis.com) link to every page on your website. This service gives your visitors the ability to send your page to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook and more, and it also allows them to easily e-mail it to a colleague. By using this service, you will gain insight into what pages your visitors are finding the most value in.

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