1. Put yourself on a schedule. Choose once a month on the first Monday, or once a quarter on  Jan 3, April 3, July 3, Oct 3. Whatever you choose make sure you stick to your schedule. Part of being professional is completing activities consistently – without excuses. So mark your calendar, and don’t waiver.

2. Have a simple header that describes your business succinctly – e.g., Sam’s Computer Service. And have a simple ending that includes your contact information – email, phone number, address.  Your email subject should state the company name, volume and issue for this newsletter – e.g., Sam’s Computer Service July 2010

3. Three articles is all you need.

• Article 1 – write something of human interest, like a community service you or an employee recently did, a donation, a scholarship – something that makes your company more than a company.
• Article 2 – something new. Write about a new product, a new service, a new offering – something that makes the reader feel that this newsletter is timely and important.
• Article 3 – the ask. A discounted product, a sales item – something that makes them forward the newsletter.This is where the revenue opportunity is. Make sure to add a link (see 6).

4. Don’t focus on your micro-target market. For example, I write my first article on how I gave a netbook to a homeless shelter. Now I am thinking about netbooks, so I write about a new netbook offering, and finish my newsletter with a discount on, you guessed it, a netbook service. Because I got in my netbook groove, my entire newsletter is focused on a small percentage of my readers. Wrong. Spread the love around. Pick different topics for your newsletter so most of your readers get something. Otherwise they may choose to ignore your next newsletter.

5. An image for each article. Every article should have a unique photo or image. People associate concepts with pictures, so offer your readers an image to go along with the words. But one image per article is usually enough.

6. Always link back to your website. Your newsletter is the gateway to your website. And don’t just link them to the home page, link them back to a relevant interior web page on your site. If you discuss a product in the newsletter, link them to that product page on your website.

7. My favorite small business newsletter tools: Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, and iContact.

I am not sure she is enjoying this learning experience, which is too bad. I believe that we must embrace the journey we are on, or else it is a long boring drive. And getting there is no fun.

Typically I urge my clients to add content to their website, but this content should empower a goal, not inhibit it.  Usually the website’s goal is to either directly produce revenue (an e-commerce website) or the website is intended to attract people to contact my client (a lead generation website).  Quite often we lose site of these website objectives. Images, text, movies, and other glitzy media is added to the site without regard to purpose. Other times “administrative” information is added for a select few customers or because we can. Does this content aid the decision process of a potential customer, or does it detract? If you were a salesperson, would this information help the sale or would it make the sale more difficult? These are questions you should ask yourself when looking at your website.

The Value of the FAQ

A FAQ (frequently asked questions) can suffice for many pages of website content. This is because a FAQ is responding to the following two needs:

1. The customers’ most likely concerns, and
2. The information we most want to transfer to our customers.

When we net this FAQ information to 20 Q and As, much of the content on the website becomes redundant.  Since we have an objective for our website, i.e., to sell something, we need to succinctly meet our customers’ needs without taking advantage of their time.

While good content adds search opportunities, useless or redundant content wastes your customers time. Develop content based on the sales funnel needs but, like a good salesperson, know when to be quiet. If you want to extend your customer discussion, use the blog.

The Blog Bar

A customer is often processing purchase information, long after the salesperson has made their pitch. Depending on the customer, they may internalize this process, others will externalize. The Company Blog can provide both these customer-types with a method to keep engaged with your company while they sort through their buying process.  This is the watering hole they come to, to support their thinking. They read the company comments, they read the reviewer comments, they get comfortable with their decision. This is potentially where all that extraneous website verbiage can go – the Blog.

In summary, keep the site’s objective in mind when you look at the finished product. Ensure that you are thinking of the customers need for information and not your need to publish all the content you own. A FAQ can often get to the meat of the issue without pages of unnecessary text. And finally, your Blog can be the resting place of great ideas without a definitive sales purpose. Somewhat like this post just did. (-;

Sales people are always thinking about their sales funnel. A sales funnel describes the conversion of prospects into stages from inquiry through to the final sale. Prospects start at the top of the funnel and convert into a sale at the bottom. The success of this conversion reflects the quality of prospects at the top of the funnel and the sales skill at each conversion stage.

Sale Funnel and E-commerce

All these concepts apply to an e-commerce web site. That is, what is the quality of your prospects and how are you informing them so that they can “funnel” down to a sale? I use the navigation bar to describe the key components of the funnel. What would an ace salesperson say to a prospect first – that is, what should be on the farthest left of my navigation bar. What would they say next? And finally we have the buy tab on the far right. I am not suggesting that this is how sites should be displayed, but I am suggesting that all the steps should be on your website in a logical order.

The Sales Funnel and SEO

One of the best ways to build useful search engine content is through your sales funnel.  Suggest a path for your prospect. They can always choose to skip a component. This is the beauty of the self-help e-commerce system.

An Example

Let’s use an inn as an example of building content using the funnel. If someone were to call the innkeeper for information, what would the innkeeper say? Maybe the innkeeper would like to tell their prospect about themselves, then a little about the town they reside in, then about some upcoming activities, then maybe describe their rooms, then say which rooms are available and their rates, and finally ask them the information that is required to book the room. That is the sales funnel. At each step we have a potential conversion, which leads to the booking of the room. This is the method of building a logical set of web pages that inform a buyer throughout their buying process.

Adding Quality Prospects

But how do we insure that we have the right “quality” of viewer looking at this information? By using the right tools we can increase the quality of the prospects. If we see that visitors that arrive from a specific website are staying longer, viewing more of our web pages, or booking more rooms, we either increase our presence on that website or find other, similar sites to have a presence on. Search engine optimization done correctly is more about marketing than it is about technology.

Ahh, the funnel of love.

Recently many users and programmers on the web have developed great applications that are Open Source, that is, non-proprietary and free. The Firefox browser is an example of Open Source software.  Fortunately there are quality open source CMS systems. The advantage of an open source CMS system is that they are free (!), many, many people developing niche applications, and often the core product is well tested. Two of my favorite Open Source CMS applications is Joomla and WordPress. I suggest going to their websites and taking their Demo. Other quality Open Source CMS applications include Drupal, Mambo, and Plone.

With a system like Joomla or WordPress, adding new content is as easy as using MS Word. Also the cost of maintaining your website will probably decrease. If you are interested, I know of developers who can quickly estimate how much it would cost to simply migrate your website to this new software, and how much it would cost to maintain your site.  Currently businesses as large as the IHOP restaurant chain use Open Source CMS, but most of the users are smaller businesses. Their sites has a comprehensive list of who is using Joomla and WordPress.

Often people don’t purchase from the low cost provider. Sometimes they don’t buy from the most convenient vendor. Instead customers often buy from the company that provides the best advise and has trained the buyer to be a discriminating buyers. This is true of the bike shop, the wine shop, or the consulting shop. On the web this advise is also called content.

The Web Offer

Follows is an example of offering a customer something they want that is not your product. I have a client who offers corporate strategic consulting services in a niche area. In order to differentiate potential clients visiting the website, from people interested in the service but not decision makers, we offered the potential client, a RFP template. No one but a potential customer would want this. But a potential customer will find a RFP very attractive. It could save them a lot of work trying to develop their own proposal. We also track who referred these RFP-interested visitors and then we altered the web advertising accordingly. The key is to think about who your customer is. In this case it wasn’t the CEO, it was the middle manager whose job it was to find potential consulting firms.

Developing Online Customer Relationships

There has been much written about developing online customer relationships. I believe that companies must become their industries thought-leaders. That is, they must become the “go-to” experts by providing quality content. Having a distribution mechanism like e-newsletters is critical. In fact, collecting email addresses on your website might be the single most important activity that you accomplish on your website. Often companies fail to place client-valuable content on their website like fact sheets, data sheets, old newsletters, and mixed media. A blog can also allow you to share your expertise, but this is a topic onto itself. Become the expert and the client relationship will follow.

The elements of a press release are fairly well established. PRLog has a good summary of these components.

I’d like to discuss the finer details of a press release – that is, what makes it interesting.

1) A captivating image or photo is critical. Images express so much that a  verbiage laden press release cannot.

2) A quote from a relevant person with an important sounding title adds credibility and readability to the release.

3) Finally we have the subject. The most captivating subjects deal with the humanity of the organization. Therefore a dry description of a new product might be a PR fizzle. Instead consider a volunteer effort that your company was involved in, some community outreach, or at a minimum something someone earned or accomplished. While I don’t totally understand it, animal-centric stories capture attention.

On-Line press releases provide an efficient method do gain organization exposure. And exposure often leads to increased traffic and revenue.

I usually assist my clients in deriving 10 or so keyword phrases. These are phrases that a prospect would  use to search Google and find my client. An example of a keyword phrase for a local bike store might be “Bend Oregon Bike Shop”. Now that you have these keywords what do you do with them? What we do with keywords is as important as finding the correct keywords.

Embed Keywords in your Website Content

Google and the other search engines analyze who your site is relevant to. The search engines want to ensure that they place the most relevant sites on the top of their search. Our job is to BE the most relevant. Don’t be coy. Use your keywords throughout your text. In fact you want these keywords to represent between 2 and 10% of all the words you use on your site. It is best to keep them in the order you had for your phrase, but that is not as important is using them. Back to our bike shop example, including in the website, Smurf Bike Shop is the best in Bend, Oregon, is not quite as good as saying that Smurf is a Bend Oregon Bike Shop, but it is better than not saying it at all! Click here for my current favorite free keyword analyzer .

Methods for Embedding Keywords

One of the best methods for embedding keywords is to exchange pronouns with keywords. E.g., We Welcome You, could become Bend Oregon Bike Shop Welcomes You. Look for opportunities to add keywords in links, headings, and the verbiage that exists behind an image (alt tag).

Remember that while search engine rankings are important, customers are the MOST important. Do not try to force the wording on your website to meet the 2 to 10% goal at the expense of readability. However, with a little forethought, you can get both the right keyword “density” and good sounding prose. Repetition is important for both the technical aspects of search engines and for the readers. Using a different adjective or noun may not be in the best interest of your organization.