Marketing | A2Z Computer Services Inc

4 Reasons To Hire A Professional Web Designer

July 20, 2012 by Quincy Zikmund Leave a Comment

In our day and age, every company needs a website, regardless of the size of the organization or the volume of business that it does. When you finally decide to get your website up and running, you’re faced with many choices. You may decide to listen to the commercials on TV and visit a do-it-yourself web services provider that promises you can have your business website up and running in just an hour without any technical knowledge. Or, you may even feel really brave and visit the library, check out a bunch of web design books, purchase some expensive web design software, fill up on coffee and get to work. Odds are that in time you will be able to build a website. But there’s a difference between just building a website and building a website that yields results.

Aside from the seemingly cheaper options, there is another route you might choose to take in boosting your online presence with a new website: hire a professional web designer. The first thought that comes to mind when faced with these options is to save money. Considering the state of the economy, this is very understandable. And yes, hiring a professional web designer does in fact cost more money up front than the do-it-yourself options. However, hiring a professional will save you many headaches and bring in a greater return in the long run. Which is what having a website for your business is all about in the first place.

So here are 4 reasons why hiring a professional web designer is the best choice for your company:

You Need A Successful Website

Truth be told, almost anyone can build a website. But there’s all the difference in the world between just building a website and building a successful website. A website requires more elements and skill sets than you might think. Creating a high quality design requires graphic design and layout knowledge. Then you have search engine optimization, copy writing, high quality photos, marketing knowledge and ongoing maintenance. All of these elements are equally important to ensure your website yields results.

You Have A Business To Run

As a business owner, especially a small business owner, you already wear at least 20 different hats on a weekly basis. You may be in charge of everything from performing your company’s services, running sales, accounting, office management, payroll and much more. Do you really need to add building a website to that list? With that being said, you should play an active role in the development process by approving designs, suggesting how you want the content to flow and maybe even learning how to manage and update the site after it has been launched. But your time is better spent running your successful business and leaving the development of your website to a professional.

A Professional Designer Is Accessible

When you’re working with a professional web designer, you have someone you can call upon with questions or concerns, and in most cases you have someone you can actually sit down and talk with face to face. Communication is a very important aspect for business owners and web designers. When you choose to go the “do-it-yourself in an hour” route you are sacrificing customer service and human interaction.

A Professional Designer Is Dedicated To Your Project

When you take time to learn how to build your own site, you end up sacrificing precious time spent running your business, and will likely give up building the site altogether. When you work with a professional designer, you have someone who is fully committed to completing and launching your project in a timely manner, allowing you to focus on what you’re best at: running your business.

This is only a small selection of reasons to hire a professional web designer over a do-it-yourself approach. But, the point to take away is that you need a website. And more than that, you need a successful website that yields results and grows your business. So as you’re considering launching a new website for your business, consider contacting a professional designer to discuss your needs.

(If you’re interested in working with A2Z, we would love to sit down with you to learn more about your business and your website needs, and tell you how we can help get your successful online presence launched. You can contact us here, give us a call or stop by the office.)

Why Your Website Is A Constant Work In Progress

May 1, 2012 by Quincy Zikmund Leave a Comment

One of the most important pieces of advice that I can give to you in regards to your current or future website is that you should view your website as a constant work in progress. If you want to grow your business or cause, then your website is going to need constant testing, tweaking and updating.

Now before I go any further, let me explain explain what I don’t mean.

You do not need a brand new website design or theme developed every 6 months. There may be times when you need to tweak your landing page items in order to reach more conversions, but the overall design of your website shouldn’t change too often. You paid good money for a professional website to be developed and odds are that you won’t need a redesign for at least two years, unless you have some major product and service offering changes.

So which part of my website needs constant work?

While much more can be said, I’m going briefly explain just 3 aspects of your website that need a fair amount of regular monitoring and maintenance.

Website Software Maintenance

If your website runs on a content management system, such as WordPress, your software will periodically have updates available just as your computer’s operating system often has updates that need to be ran. These updates almost always have security enhancements and will occasionally include brand new features to make managing your site even better. You do not want to go without updating your website’s software. Failure to take advantage of these important updates can result in decreased security of your website or even compatibility issues that can cause your site to not function correctly.

SEO and Landing Page Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of internet marketing. Your potential customer’s ability to find you in search engines depends solely on how good your SEO is. What good is that awesome website you just had built if no one can find it? That’s why it’s important, at the very least, to track how much traffic your website is receiving and how that traffic is arriving. Tracking these stats will help to determine which keywords and keyword phrases need to be used more, or less, on your site.

While SEO helps to bring more people to your website, your landing page is what keeps them there. Even though you have a beautiful landing page, it still may not be effective at catching peoples’ attention and taking them deeper into the site. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your website designer did a bad job. All landing pages need to be tested, and at times even changed, in order to create more conversions.

Content, Content, Content

Your website’s content plays a huge role in your overall SEO as well as ensuring repeat visits to your site. I can’t overstate this enough. A beautiful looking website really isn’t worth much without quality content. You need to ensure that your website’s content is both search optimized and easy for your target audience to read and understand. You also need to make sure that your website always reflects your current services and products that are being offered. You know very well that when you launch a new service you must get the word out about it or else you shouldn’t expect to make many sales. Your website should be one of the first places that displays your new service or product information. You also need to make sure there isn’t old, irrelevant information on your site.

Adding new content to your site always helps your SEO because it gives the search engines more to look at and index. A great way to do this is by starting a blog. I know that four letter word may be scary to many small business owners, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. As long as you start small and create a blog schedule that you’re comfortable you’ll do just fine.

Okay, I get it. But I don’t have time to constantly monitor and update my website.

I understand. Time is a limited commodity when you’re a small business owner that already wears ten different hats every single day. Because of that, we have created various website maintenance packages that are both affordable and highly effective at ensuring the success of your online presence, and in turn, your business. If you are interested in learning more about our website maintenance packages, please contact us here or give me a call at (270) 830-9590.

Why Your Website is the Hub of Your Internet Marketing

November 3, 2011 by A2Z Computer Services Inc Leave a Comment

With the rise of social media marketing through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all of the others, many businesses have forced their websites to take a back seat when it comes to their internet marketing. There are even businesses that opt out of setting up a website because it seems easier and cheaper to just have a Facebook page. While Facebook is a very important tool for companies to embrace, it cannot replace your website. Rather, it should be used to pull more customers and leads to your website where the real sale can take place. Below are 4 basic reasons why your website is the hub of your internet marketing.

1. You own your website.

It’s important to remember that you do not own Facebook, or any other social networking site for that matter. Facebook has strict rules that many business owners either don’t know or simply ignore altogether, especially when it comes to contests, sweepstakes and giveaways. If you break these rules your page is subject to being removed. Facebook is also known to make big changes and updates without warning. Your website only changes when you want to change it. You dictate how your website functions and when changes are made, this is very important.

2. Your website can display all of your information.

Your website can be as large and complex as you need. To give a full presentation of your services and products you need space and organization. A website meets this need by allowing you to have as many pages as you can fill with content. You’re also able to easily make changes and updates as your products evolve. Facebook only allows for so much, which is why sites like Facebook and Twitter are perfect for giving your potential clients a teaser, or sample, and then pulling them back to your website where the real sales presentation can take place.

3. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is king. Being involved in social media does help your SEO, but your website does more. As I mentioned above, you can fill your website with as much content as you want. The more pages of content that you have, the more that search engines such as Google and Bing have to look at. Search Engine Land recently blogged that a new industry report says SEO Beats PPC & Social Media For Generating Leads. Search engine optimization cannot be ignored and the organic SEO on your website is the foundation for it all.

4. Mobile Optimization

More individuals are accessing the internet from their smart phones. Social media is perfect for mobile interaction, but not so much for sales presentations. Keep in mind that making more sales is what drives you to market and promote your business in the first place. Facebook allows you to have custom tabs and applications on your page, but those tabs and applications are not viewable in the mobile version of Facebook or in the native Facebook application. However, your website can be optimized for mobile browsing and allows for consumers to conveniently view your content on the go, which is very important.

These are very basic points, but my purpose in presenting them is to simply remind you of the importance of your website. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all of the other social networking sites are very important as well and should not be ignored. All businesses and organizations can benefit from using social media in some form. Just make sure that you don’t forget your website, which is the hub of your internet marketing.

Is Facebook Killing the “Like”?

October 4, 2011 by Quincy Zikmund Leave a Comment

Over the last few weeks the Facebook announcement mill has been pretty busy. At their f8 conference Facebook announced the new profile called Timeline that will be released to the public within the next few weeks. However, before the announcement of Timeline and updates to Open Graph, Facebook also released the News Feed Ticker in the right sidebar of your news feed, changes to what type of content you see in your news feed and the ability to subscribe to people in order to see their public posts without being their friend.

Updates to Pages

We now come to a change that has already been made live and is something all Page admins needs to pay close attention to. There were two updates made to Pages recently which are the the Friend Activity tab and the ability for users to comment on and interact with a page without having to “Like” the page.

With the advent of business pages on Facebook, companies and marketers have put a lot of time and money into gaining more “Likes” on their Facebook Page. Getting people to Like your page on Facebook truly has been important because if no one’s on there with you how can it be effective? Unfortunately, a lot of businesses and marketers have put all of their efforts into gaining more Likes. The effect has been a lack of quality content, community and interaction. If you use the number of “Likes” that your page has as your only metric for measuring Facebook success then you’re doing it wrong. The best metric that you can use to measure your Facebook success is the quantity and quality of interaction with the people who already “Like” your page.

What These Changes Mean for Your Business

Is the “Like” button going away? No, not technically at least. With the ability for people to comment on and interact with your brand without being forced to “Like” your page you now have a few responsibilities that are not new but that will now be forced on you in order for your business to succeed on Facebook.

Use Your Page to Create Quality Content

This is something that I have been pushing for a long time. The simple truth is that if you don’t use your Facebook page (or any other social media outlet for that matter) it will be of no benefit to you. If you use your page to do nothing but sell something in every post then you won’t succeed. Content is king and it always has been. But now that Facebook news feeds only show the most popular posts at the top you really have to develop good content that creates interaction for your posts to even be seen.

The plus side to all of this is that once you start engaging the people who already “Like” your page their friends will notice when they interact with your posts. Now that users don’t have to “Like” and promote your page just to comment on your posts you have an opportunity to create even more interaction than what you can project by looking at the number of “Likes” that you have. Now you don’t have to force people to “Like” your page to do what really matters on Facebook – which is to create community and interaction.

To say that getting people to like your page is not beneficial would be a lie. You should continue your efforts for getting more likes on your page by promoting your page in your print media, running Facebook promotions and offering something of value to the users that like your page. Just be sure that you continue creating quality content that keeps your community engaged and participating.

Facebook Contests: Do’s and Don’ts

September 20, 2011 by Quincy Zikmund Leave a Comment

Facebook contests and giveaways are very popular these days. It’s rare to not see posts from friends who have just entered to win a gift card or an iPad. It’s just as rare to not see posts from company pages that you like promoting their latest sweepstakes and how you can win. Contests are a great way to generate buzz about your brand on the largest social network around. However, there are a few problems that many businesses run into when it comes to making Facebook contests a part of their social media strategy. Below is just the tip of the iceberg that I hope will create some conversation and get you thinking about the use of contests in your social media strategy.

You are not allowed to run contests on the Facebook platform.

According to Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines, companies are not allowed to run contests or giveaways using the Facebook platform. This means that you can’t ask a question in a post and randomly pick a winner from the comment thread. You’re also not allowed to run a contest through voting in your photo albums. Essentially, if a tool or feature is native to Facebook you’re not allowed to use it for running your contest.

So what is the right way to run a contest? Third party applications. These applications integrate with Facebook but they are not part of Facebook, they are not running on Facebook’s servers. These applications allow you to run fan generated contests, sweepstakes and other types of promotions. This is the only way that Facebook allows you to run contests. Unfortunately, many either ignore this rule or simply don’t know it exists. You’re also not allowed to announce contest winners using the Facebook platform. Winners must be contacted in private through email, phone or some other method.

It’s important to run your contests the right way so that you won’t potentially lose all that you’ve worked for in building your Facebook presence.

The contest is over. Now what?

Picture this: Today is the big day. For the past month your company has been running and promoting a sweepstakes on your Facebook page to give away an excellent prize. You check your page insights and see that your interactions, impressions and new likes have skyrocketed over the last few weeks. You’ve managed to gain hundreds, maybe even thousands of new likes on the page. You’re ecstatic. All these new people have seen your logo and shown interest in your company (or at least the contest). You draw the winner, give them their prize and thank all the entrants for participating. You go home for the weekend and relax knowing that you have succeeded on Facebook. Monday morning comes and you sign into Facebook as soon as you sit down at your desk. You pull up your company page, click the text box to begin writing a post when you suddenly stop and think “What now?”

As I said before, running contests through Facebook is an excellent way to generate buzz, gain more likes and to simply show community appreciation. I also believe that these special promotions can be a part of everyone’s social media strategy in some form or fashion. However, contests cannot be your entire social media strategy. If you do nothing but continually run contests how will your business truly benefit? You may have 10,000 likes on your Facebook page or 10,000 followers on Twitter but are those individuals truly relevant to your business? You need to provide true value to your online community or else they will leave. If they don’t care about your products or service then they will probably leave as soon as the contest is over. Give your followers a reason to stick around, give something of value.

Your business needs a social media strategy that makes education and customer service a priority. Yes, you should grow your page as time goes on with various promotions. But the true value lies in the content that you’re putting out there and the conversation that takes place around your brand daily.

Our goal at A2Z is to help businesses use social media in a way that is effective in giving value to the online community, creating awareness about your products and services and bringing you more business. Contests help but they cannot do it all.

Are contests part of your social media strategy? Based on what you read above, are you running them the right way?