In today’s digital universe–complete with apps, tweets, and the cloud –a regular website may seem positively old-fashioned and quaint. However, maintaining an effective website is still one of the most important things that you can do to achieve greater success in your business. In fact, eMarketer estimates that by 2015, 170.3 million people, or 76.3% of the online population, will make a purchase on the web.

So, how can you capitalize on the benefits that the Internet has to offer? Here are some tips for writing a website that will work for your business:

• Understand your audience. Before you start writing your website copy, conduct some research about your target audience members to understand their needs, values, and expectations. Once you know what your readers are hoping to find on your website, you can style your website writing accordingly.
• Know your business. To some extent, your writing style will be dictated by the standards within your chosen business. For example, websites for law firms will typically feature more formal writing, but advertising firms might use a more fun and whimsical tone.
• Establish your purpose. Your website’s readers should know right away who your company is and why your products and/or services are better than the competition’s. Hold your reader’s interest by providing these essential pieces of information on your home page.
• Keep it simple. Separate your text into chunks of related information and use descriptive headings to make your site easier to navigate and understand. Avoid lengthy sections of text; website writing should be concise and accessible.
• Use the best possible keywords. Maximize the number of visitors to your website by choosing keywords that most frequently appear on Internet searches. You may want to hire a marketing firm that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) techniques.
• Update your content. One of the greatest benefits of your website is that you can update it whenever you want. The best way to ensure that your website copy is current and relevant is to maintain an in-house editorial calendar. Remember—the websites with the highest traffic feature the most fresh and exciting content.

Julie Roberts is a Copywriter at Redirect. She can be reached at Julie@redirectnow.com.

To achieve these goals, we created a comprehensive multi-channel marketing plan. We sent customized direct mail pieces that highlighted neighborhood-specific issues. The mailer listed a personalized URL (PURL), which offered a link to a survey focusing on topics such as transportation, citizen equality, and downtown development. The reader could also use the PURL to connect to Mayor Becker’s website to learn more about his administration’s accomplishments and objectives.

By measuring the numbers of people who participated in the survey and visited Mayor Becker’s website, we determined that the marketing campaign was a huge success. In fact, between August and November 2011 the number of new website visitors more than quadrupled—which indicates that the marketing initiative helped to start important conversations in the Salt Lake City community.

Click here to check out a sample of our mail.

A report recently generated by Intuit finds that more and more businesses are using social media to engage and connect with prospects and customers. But, according to the report, not all small businesses are finding success with social media. Only 9% of the small businesses included in the report said that their social media programs “exceeded their expectations” and 36% of the small businesses included said that their social media programs “fell short of expectations.”

So, what’s the rub? Social media is intuitive. It’s easy to use. Why aren’t more businesses seeing greater success with their social media programs?

Here’s what we see at our digital and direct marketing agency: most small businesses using social media fall one step short of a successful social strategy. They have a plan to attract new friends and followers. They may have a plan or methodology for posting content in their social channels.  But very few have developed a strategy or are executing a strategy to convert their social media friends and followers into revenue and profits. Importantly, that one step usually ends up being the difference between a successful and a failed social media initiative.

Successful social media campaigns need to work on three levels: 1) connect, 2) engage, and 3) convert. Moreover, they need to work effectively on all three levels.

Connect
Build Your Friend and Follower Base

Remember that not all connections are created equally. Businesses need to seek out friends and followers who are interested in their products and services instead of those looking to build their own base. You should also try to seek high-quality friends and followers who will share your information with their friends and will push your content across social channels.

Engage
Relevant and Consistent Content Will Activate Your User Base

Appeal to your audience’s interests by including relevant, recent, and interesting content in each post. Remember, the biggest advantage of social content is viral impact. You’re not just trying to reach your friends and followers, but also their friends and followers. If your users find your posts interesting and compelling they’ll share them, and you’ll gain greater traction.

Also, it’s a multimedia world, so post a variety of content. Add videos, photos, presentations, and other rich content to your social media channels.

Finally, remember that social media is a place to interact and communicate with people. Make sure that you’re monitoring social channels to find out what people are saying about your brand and join the conversation.

Convert
Turn Your Friends and Followers Into Paying Customers

There are any number of ways to turn your social friends and followers into paying customers, including promotions, advance purchase opportunities, discounts, special packages, events, contests, and social stores. A few things you should consider. First, don’t focus on promoting behavior that is already likely to occur. In other words, don’t provide discounts to existing customers on products they probably will purchase anyway. Second, develop offers that encourage your friends to share them. Again, the greatest advantage of social channels is the viral spigot.  Don’t turn it off.

Finally, use your social channels to say thanks in addition to saying pay.  Too many businesses are so busy promoting products and services through their social channels that they forget to provide users with friendly tips and gifts. After all, it’s always nice to say thanks.

The average time spent on Plus reached its highest point in July at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, reported by Brian Womack at Bloomberg.com. To entice users into spending more time on the network, Google has been working on adding more features. One of the new services is a game service, launched in August, with Zynga and the creators of Angry Birds, Rovio Entertainment Oy. The average time spent on the network did increase for the week ending August 27 at 5 minutes and 47 seconds, up from the previous week by about 4%.

Even though these numbers look positive, Plus still has a lot of work to do to catch up to Facebook’s impressive total of 750 million users. But because Google hasn’t opened up the service to everyone yet, some people say it’s too early to accurately assess user numbers. The main issue, despite Google’s argument that Plus should be used as a supplement to existing networking sites like Facebook, is this: Are people willing to adapt to an entirely new program, or will Plus become the latest in failed attempts at social competition?

There are a variety of reasons for this: online leads are disruptive to the normal business development team, there’s no existing relationship with online leads, or most companies don’t have an adequate sales automation program. But the number one reason that online leads don’t easily convert to sales is slow follow-up time.

The simple fact is, when consumers or businesses request information online they expect an immediate response, and most businesses aren’t equipped to respond immediately to online leads.

We recently helped a client, Celtic Bank, enhance its online lead generation program by adding an automated inside sales operation. Before the enhancement, Celtic Bank would generate leads, which then would be placed into the standard sales funnel. Even when given priority, most of those leads wouldn’t receive a follow-up action within 24 hours.

After the enhancement, which included a CRM, automated dialing, and outsourced inside sales support, leads are being followed up within less than five seconds after they are received. Moreover, we’ve added several layers of lead qualification so that the leads that actually do land on the desk of a business development officer’s desk are right-sized, have a quality credit score, and are ready to get a loan.

The new process has resulted in a significant increase in conversions.