EduNotes Blog

Six Reasons to be Thankful

We are thankful for:

  1. New connections. The first part of our tagline is “We PARTNER with our customers” and we are excited about all the new “partners” we have this year. EduCyber is delving further and further into innovating to help our customers get ahead and stay ahead.
  2. Strong relationships. EduCyber has a very high customer retention rate. We help our customers succeed over the long term. And they reward us by keeping their business with us. Very thankful!
  3. Our jobs. We love designing websites and developing websites. The challenge of determining a clear action step and then implementing it. Removing all the clutter and distraction so that visitors can move on to the next step. This takes great design and it takes great development.
  4. Our community. We are engaged in our business community through a wide variety of organizations but we are also engaged with our neighbors and friends through Sunday worship, Boy Scouts of America, Optimists International, and volunteering at different charities around town.
  5. Our health. There is a lot of confusion and unrest around healthcare in our nation. But we are thankful that we have our health.  Take each day as it comes – Carpe Diem!
  6. New challenges. One of the exciting things about being in the Internet Marketing realm is that what was true yesterday might not be true today. We love delighting our customers as we bring new technologies and new programming to bear to give them a site that helps them grow.

So from all of us at EduCyber to all of you – Happy Thanksgiving!

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Staying a Step Ahead

Not long ago I wrote about the 10 Reasons You Don’t Need a New Website. That list was formed from conversations, perhaps I should say excuses – I have had over the years.  As we approach the end of the year, the time of reflecting on the year gone by and planning for the year ahead, I’d like to share with you the secret to staying ahead of the competition with your Internet presence:

The secret to staying a step ahead is one that, if you take the time to look, is obvious. Review your competitors. Who is growing? Who is staying busier than the rest of the crowd? Who is reaping the rewards of clients / sales / leads through their web site?

The secret is simple. It is, in a nutshell, applying enough of the right resources to succeed. When it comes to your website, the resources you have at your disposal are time, money, and expertise.

  1. TimeTime 150X150 1
    Spending the time to understand what your website needs is essential. There are ads out there, we’ve all seen them, touting a fantastic web presence for only $100 / month. Sound too good to be true? Yeah, it is. As simple as it sounds, the best use of your time is to spend it figuring out how your web site fits into your business flow. Set website goals based on getting more business. Then you’re ready to determine next steps.
  2. Money
    Speaking with a non-profit client last week, I explained that if the goal of their site redesign is to raise an additional $100,000 / year then they should be prepared to spend up to $25,000 the first year. But that wouldn’t be a bad return on investment and the second and third years would be even better. Set your budget based on the value you’ll get from the site. If you see it as an expense, your website will fail. But if you see your website as an investment, understanding that a good web site can generate leads or conduct more ecommerce, you will be on the right track.
  3. Expertise 150X150 1Expertise
    Tied very closely to the first two, website expertise can be in house expertise or it could be turning to an outside web development agency. They key is that you understand the expertise required based on the time you spent setting your goals. Then you can make an informed decision. If you have staff that understands conversion optimization (getting more from your web site) then that is the way to go. If not, then you can find expertise in an outside agency.

For most business owners it means taking the time to make sure they are spending their money on the right expertise. If you determine an outside agency is the best route for your organization, contact us for help.

 

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10 Reasons You Don’t Need a New Website

New WebsiteThat’s right. I’m not here to talk you INTO buying a new web site. I’m here to tell you why you don’t really need one:

  1. You paid for a whole new web site five years ago
  2. Websites don’t generate new customers, good salespeople do that
  3. Somebody told me I’d have to write something called a blog. Regularly. Not going to happen. Don’t need it.
  4. You’re not Amazon or eBay – you’re not selling products, you offer a service
  5. I had someone give me a quote for a site. $20,000 sounds like an awful lot. Especially when I get emails everyday telling me I can get a site for $100.
  6. You’ve been in business for more than 10 years and you haven’t needed one yet, why should you get one now?
  7. Your competitors have all had web sites for many years. You’d just be spending time and money trying to catch up to them.
  8. You’re only open 40 hours a week. If you had a web site it could give the appearance that you’re open 24/7.
  9. You’re too small for a brand. You don’t really have a brand so there is nothing to “put out there” for the world to see.
  10. People in your area need your product, not people far away so why give them an opportunity to buy it online?
  11. BONUS: Everyone else has a web site – you can stand out by not having one.

Have you heard these? Have you heard them coming out of your own mouth? If one or more of these reasons belongs to you, then I say, “Welcome to 1995”.

The reality is you do need a web site. A good one. One that is less than five years old, reflects who you are as a company or business, shows to all visitors that you are legitimate, builds up your brand – whatever your brand is, and what about those $100 websites or even the free ones? You’ll end up looking cheap. Is that your brand?

So if after reading this you decide you really do want a web site despite all these great reasons to the contrary, give us a call at 303 268-2245.

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Economics of Conversion Optimization

I spend a lot of time every day explaining Conversion Optimization because it is such an important part of what we do.

The general idea is to get more of your visitors to perform a specific task – a task that will help your company grow. It may be as simple as signing up for your newsletter or sharing on Facebook something about your site. Or it could be as significant as buying something online or calling you up, ready to do business.

First you have to determine what you want visitors to do, then start working on the process. But why? Is it really useful?

Let’s say you have a web site that sells widgets. Each widget is $10. During a typical month you get 10,000 visitors to your website and you sell 100 widgets, one to a customer. You have a 1% conversion rate:

100 (customer)/10,000 (visitors) = 0.01 or 1%

So you set to work on improving the conversion process and after much work you go from a 1% conversion rate to a 1.5% conversion rate. What? Only a .5% increase?

No. Not a .5% increase. Look again. That is a 50% increase. Now instead of making $1000 for every 10,000 visitors, you make $1500.

Conversionoptimization 1Stop and think about that. If you had not conversion optimized your site, and instead run an SEO campaign to increase traffic to 100,000 visitors a month you would make $10,000. But if you first optimize your site for conversion and then do the SEO campaign, you are suddenly making $15,000 month.

Spend time optimizing your site before you optimize your search! If you spend the resources to improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you will double the money you get from your site.

Well that makes sense for ecommerce but what about a lead generating site? The same principle applies. If you get 1000 visitors a month, ten of which call and one of which becomes a customer, you now have a formula. First look over your site and see what you can do to optimize the conversion process. Then make some changes. It is actually better to make small incremental changes so you can determine which changes are working.

On the web site itself you can’t change the conversion rate of 10 calls to 1 customer. That is an internal process you can (and should) work on. But you can work to get more people calling. Again, get 15 or 20 calls a month and you have a 50 – 100% increase in conversions, leading to more revenue for you.

So invest the time and resources to make your site better. It will have a positive impact on your bottom line.

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Check Your Eyesight

What a difference being able to see clearly makes! I have been busy lately. So busy that I didn’t take time to get my glasses polished up. They had several scratches on them and just never quite came clean. Then a few weeks ago I was horsing around with my kids and bent the left wing of the glasses.  Still too busy I dealt with the frustration of bent glasses I couldn’t see well out of for a couple of weeks until two days ago.

Then I took them in and asked if the store could rebend them into the proper angle. They not only did that, they replaced the nose rest pieces and polished the lenses. Needless to say I feel like I have a new pair of glasses. I can see clearly again!

And the same concept applies so clearly to your web site. Have you polished the lens through which you view it?Eyeglasses 1

Here are a few tips that can help you:

  1. Go to a Internet Café or borrow a friends computer and look at your site
  2. Look at your website on a variety of devices: desktop, laptop, tablet, phone.
  3. Sign up for your newsletter
  4. Review your web site statistics (Google Analtyics or  server based program like AWSTATS)
  5. Ask three customers or vendors to use your site (note: I did not say look at it – give them a specific task)

By following one or more of these tips it will help to take you outside of your normal framework and see your web site from a fresh perspective. Ask yourself “how is the web site helping my business grow?” And if the answer is, “it isn’t”, give us a call at 303 268-2245.

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Take a Break from Technology

Step away from the technology

For a couple of years my email signature read “Go outside. The graphics are amazing.” Though it wasn’t original to me, I did have several people ask me if they could use it in their signature.

It’s important both for personal and professional reasons to step away from the technology. There are dozens of articles about why that is important for your personal well-being. I want to address the importance of stepping away for professional well-being.

  1. The Tyranny of Email. Us desk workers often have our email up on our computers all day long. The problem is with what I call the tyranny of email. Whenever a new message comes in, if you feel the need to stop whatever it is you’re doing and respond to the email, you have a problem. If getting away from your computer isn’t possible, close your email for a while. This morning I ignored email for more than an hour to work on a proposal. The proposal turned out well and I was still able to respond to the emails in a timely fashion, just not IMMEDIATELY.
  2. A Change of Pace. We are blessed to have offices on the north bank of Clear Creek. When we need a break, taking a walk along the creek is awesome. But you don’t need a creek to get away. Walk down the hall. Turn away from your computer and do a few stretches.  Close your office door and jump up and down. How does any of this contribute to your professional well-being? Often you can be much more productive by taking breaks throughout the day. I have to force some folks on staff to do this but when they do, they always come back refreshed and with a new perspective on the issue(s) they are addressing.
  3. A Different Medium. If you do all of your work on a computer, try using a different medium. Your brain actually thinks differently with different media. Use your white board instead of your keyboard. Try using a notepad (not a computer tablet! I’m talking about one of those yellow notepads with lines on them) to take notes or compose on. I’m not asking you to do this every time but by doing it from time to time it helps you use different parts of your brain and you might be surprised on the different kind of results you get.

You might be getting a raise sooner or landing more clients faster by trying one or more of these. The overall goal is to take steps to help you focus more or focus differently on what is really important. Technology is just a tool to help you do your job.

8/28/2013 update:

I just came across this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8. It explains it best!

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Your Web Site: A Unique Marketing Message

One of the questions I ask potential customers is what sets them apart in their niche. Almost inevitably the reply is “Our service”. The obvious problem there is that if everyone’s service is what makes them unique, then it isn’t unique.

It is important to have a UNIQUE marketing message that resonates well with others.

And resonating in the right manner is key. Last week I attended a networking event in downtown Denver. One of the hotels had a free giveaway of Whoopee Cushions. Now their web site stresses they are a uniquely fun boutique hotel and they do guarantee a “completely humorous and modern hotel experience” but does a whoopee cushion convey that? Or are you as likely to turn off potential customers as get them excited? I have a difficult time viewing this as a positive experience but I guess I don’t find fake flatulence as funny as some.

Another example of how NOT to have a unique marketing message goes back nearly 10 years ago to the ad campaign that nearly doomed Quiznos. Remember it? Some referred to it as the dancing rats.  Relive the horror at

 

if you don’t recall. Associating your restaurant chain with something that looks like a rat turns out not to be a good idea. Whodda thunk it?

So how do you determine what makes you unique? It takes more than a few minutes or a short blog article to get it but here are a few tips to help you get started:

1.       Ask your customers why they work with you / buy from you.

2.       Look at the entire spectrum of your clientele – is there a certain theme or niche running through all (or most) of them?

3.       If you are a service based business, write down EVERY service you have ever offered and then review the list looking for a common thread. Perhaps you are a CPA that offers services tailored to non-profit organziations? Or to home-service companies such as plumbers, electricians and drywallers?

4.       If you sell a product, review your list of SKUs and ask yourself what they have in common. Are they all outdoor products? What group are they most likely to appeal to? Stay at home moms? Fly fishermen? Couples in their 30s who don’t have children?

5.       Set out all the printed marketing materials you use and look at them all. Compare them to your web site and any other marketing you do. What emotions bubble to the top?

Take some time and really think through this. Once you have a good idea, let it cook for a few days to make sure it is done. We took a long time coming up with Partner * Engage * Convert and finally just listened to ourselves as we communicated with customers. Guess which three words we kept hearing and in what order?

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Listening to Your Web Site

Have you every stopped to listen? Really listen? I have often experienced situations where someone has a question and the listener is so sure they know the question and the answer that they haven’t really heard the question and end up giving an answer to a different problem. And I’ll confess that more often than not, I’ve been the “listener” who didn’t hear.

So how does that apply to Internet marketing?

You ought to “listen” to your web site. You can listen in different ways:

1.       Talk to customers who have actually used your site. Ask them what they liked. What they didn’t like? What they noticed? What they passed by without a second thought? And then listen to their answers instead of making assumptions about what they’re about to say.

2.       Look at your site statistics. There are many different ways to do this – you know what you want people to do on your web site but you can listen to visitors by seeing what they actually do – what links they click on, what actions they perform, whether they actually do what you want them to. You can try free programs like Google Analytics and I also recommend looking at the statistics program on your web server – look for something called webalizer, awstats or logaholic (three of the most common stats programs).

3.       Run one or more tests on your web site. A/B testing is the easiest to perform and usually the easiest to understand the results of. Listening through testing can help you understand what the best message is “Buy now!” versus “Check out pricing”, which colors to make your buttons (sometimes a blue button gets more clicks than a red one, who knew?), how much information to ask for (do you really need a physical address to get a newsletter subscriber?) and other useful kinds of information. Google Website Optimizer is a good tool to get started with.

What other ways have you found to listen on your web site?

If you haven’t been listening but want to, let us know how we can help by filling out this form.

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Mobile Goes Wild

As we monitor our customer’s sites we are seeing, understandably, a huge increase in traffic from mobile devices. What does that mean for your web site? What does that mean from a design perspective?Mobile Increase 1

First it is important to understand that tablets (iPad, Kindle, Surface, and a variety of Android tablets) are considered mobile devices. So when we’re talking mobile devices, we’re talking everything from a BlackBerry (probably having the smallest screen) to the iPad and larger tablets.

It can be a nightmare trying to make things work across all these platforms. “it can’t be that bad.” You might be thinking. But you’re wrong. One of our sites has had over 350 mobile devices visit their site. 350.

Once upon a time we designed and tested our sites in three to five browsers and at least two different platforms (like Windows and Apple). Now the rules have changed.

If you are changing or updating your site, you’ll want to ask your web firm if your site will be mobile-friendly. But that phrase “mobile-friendly” can mean a lot of different things.

Here is what you should be aware of when planning for mobile:

  1. Often it is fine if your site simply appears small and can be pinched or unpinched to zoom in and out
  2. Navigation is different. If you have drop down menus on your site, test them on mobile. Often dropdowns work with a hover or mouseover. There isn’t a hover or mouseover on mobile.
  3. If you need a look substantially different from the desktop view for mobile devices, be prepared to spend more as you’ll essentially be designing two versions of your web site
  4. Make sure your web firm is using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that detect browser version and can serve up the mobile changes for a mobile device
  5. Be prepared for additional changes in the way people interact with their mobile devices (and therefore your mobile-friendly website) over the next 18 months. The only constant in web site development is change.
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Building Websites on WordPress

A few short years ago we built most of our websites on pages that were more or less static. If a customer wanted to try something called blogging, we would add a piece of software into the site that allowed them to do this.

We had also been building sites on Content Management Software (CMS) like Joomla and Drupal. While the romance of users being able to update the content was consistently dangled before us, we found pretty consistently that users didn’t like or simply didn’t get how to use the backend interface.

In the meantime, this blogging software called WordPress was getting more and more powerful and users loved it. It had that elusive trait called “intuitiveness”. Users didn’t have to think. They could just put their content in and save or update it.

Before long we started building more and more of our sites completely on WordPress. It has grown to a very large user base (58.5 MILLION sites) and growing.

There are two great features of WordPress that fit very nicely with how EduCyber builds websites:

  1. EduCyber custom-designs every web site we build. Rather than starting with a template and shoving your content into it, we design the look and optimize it for conversion. Once we’ve got the look established, we create a template based on that look rather than vice-versa. WordPress has a flexible template system that allows us to approach design from this perspective.
  2. EduCyber develops powerful database-driven web sites. WordPress has great database features. We use those features and often add to it our own open-source software – onWord – to create web sites that have a variety of features – membership management, ecommerce, and more.

So if you are in the market for a custom-designed, database-driven website, why not give us a call?

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