Your 24-Hour-a-Day Salesperson...Your Website
Learn Some of Patricia Fripp's Inside Secrets and Web Strategies

For 2005 Odd Couple® Marketing and Strategy Seminar Attendees — on Websites from Fripp's Webmaster, Aylene Rhiger

For further tips on improving your electronic marketing efforts visit: http://www.fripp.com/websitetips2.html

Is My Website "Working"?

You don't have to check your website's traffic statistics to know if it is "working." The best measurement of success is your return on investment. You can do this with carefully constructed tracking links and website traffic statistics; however, the most basic way to know if your website is working is to ask yourself:

Has anyone found me online who wouldn't have found me otherwise?

Have I been able to use my website to demonstrate to a potential client what I'm all about?

Am I getting online requests for my services?

Am I getting online orders for my products?

Is my list of potential customers and clients growing as a result of my website?

Is my phone ringing with potential buyers who've utilized my website?

If you do check your website traffic statistics, you will have a baseline for tracking improvement while you take steps to increase your site traffic. If your host does not offer a useful statistics interface, you may want to consider a third party statistics interface like Web Trends, http://www.webtrends.com

Search Engine Placement
Great search engine placement can bring new visitors and more business to your website. If you're not sure if your site has been optimized for search engine placement... it probably hasn't been! You or a professional should evaluate your site for:

relevant keywords in text

page-specific title tags on each page

page-specific "description" and "keywords" metatags

search engine-friendly design.

These qualities are essential for "crawler-based" search engines like Google. (Some search engines rely on human beings to evaluate and rank your site, and others use a combination of both crawler and human evaluations.)

There is no single magic formula to great search engine placement. The most successful websites use a variety of techniques in an ongoing effort. Here are some additional techniques for search engine placement:

Get other sites to link to your website. Inbound links not only bring in visitors through other sites, they can also help with search engine rankings. Ideally, in-bound links should be hyperlinked keywords and/or your name rather than simply hyperlinked web addresses: http://www.fripp.com/secret_weapons_fripp.html

You can also publish your articles on other websites, with the condition that they include a link back to your website: http://www.tech4speakers.com/presentations/whitepaper.htm

Take advantage of any organization you belong to that can provide a link from their website back to yours: http://www.ewomennetwork.com/faculty/fripp.html
Have your website listed as a resource on a resource link page: http://www.webmasterpaste.com/freearticles.html has a link to: http://www.fripp.com/articleslist.html

Link to other sites. Some search engines favor sites with outbound links. Visit: http://www.fripp.com/links.html for a good example of how to do this. (You need to include some descriptive text; some search engines will reject a list consisting entirely of links.)

Use a site map or index with links to all of your pages. This will help both human visitors and search engine crawlers find pages within your site: http://www.fripp.com/frippmap.html

Create individual pages with similar content geared towards different search engines. You can study search engine variables and customize pages accordingly or you can use Web Position Gold. http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=LK7-55DC is a professional web placement tool that can critique your current pages, generate new search engine specific pages, and assess your position in individual search engines. These pages are ALSO sometimes called "doorway pages." We are also trying a new service from GoDaddy called: Traffic Blazer.

Find out what key words people are actually typing in when they search online. Yahoo Search Marketing has a free area of the site where you can check to see how many times a word searched on their system in the last month: http://www.overture.com click on "Search Term Suggestion Tool." Yahoo Search Marketing moves this tool around periodically so you might have to look for it.

Establish mini-sites that drive traffic into your main site. These mini-sites add to your inbound links, are listed in search engines in addition to your main site, and will help increase traffic all around. Patricia Fripp's mini-site http://www.siliconvalleyspeechcoach.com/ helps bring traffic to http://www.fripp.com

Web crawlers will automatically visit your site. You can sit back and wait for them to come by, or you can take some active steps in getting your site indexed in search engines.

You can speed the indexing process up a bit by manually submitting your website address to search engines for their consideration. (Do not repeatedly submit the same page to the same search engine in a short period of time. The search engines frown on this and you might hurt your website status.) Here is the current Google page where you can submit your website to Google:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Search engines still welcome free submissions, but the trend is to charge a fee for consideration and/or expedited consideration. It is a good idea to find out what kind of pages a search engine accepts and favors before you pay for consideration. This information is available on the search engine websites, on search engine news sites and through search engine positioning systems like: Web Position Gold http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=LK7-55DC

You can use pay-for-placement programs. With these programs you bid on search terms and pay per visitor who clicks through. Some pay-for-placement programs partner with other search engines to feature your listing in more places as a premium listing (at the top!) Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords are our favorites.

For more information on search engines visit:

Once you have attracted website visitors, build your marketing email list by offering a quality, not-too-commercial electronic newsletter or ezine. Only send your ezine to those who have chosen to "opt in" to your newsletter — which means they have signed up or subscribed. Sending your ezine to purchased email lists or email addresses you've otherwise obtained from others can get you banned as a "spammer."

Alan Weiss' high-content ezine, The Balancing Act®, is a great electronic newsletter:
http://summitconsulting.com/newsletter.html

Fripp's SpeakerFrippNews and FrippNews are also wonderful ezines:
http://fripp.com/newsletter.html

Ezines are a great way to keep you, your expertise, your services, your products and seminars in people's minds; especially when this is combined with genuinely useful and/or interesting content.

Make sure you keep backup copies of your ezine mailing list(s) — you do not want to lose this valuable asset in a server crash.

Though subscription to your ezine is ideally free, you need to convince people to subscribe by presenting the value of your ezine.

You can gain further subscribers by packaging the ezine subscription with an offer for a free mini-email course, free downloadable e-book, or free special report. Make sure the ezine subscription is fully disclosed with the freebie offer.

For more help on ezines visit Alexandria Brown's website. Known as "The E-Zine Queen," Alexandria helps entrepreneurs and small business owners create ezines to attract new clients, build customer relationships, and increase sales: http://www.ezinequeen.com/

Harold Hingle
Harold is recommended by Tom Antion, works with Speakers Roundtable, and is also part of the Fripp Team.

Harold Hingle
(415) 564-5146
harold@haroldhingle.com
http://www.haroldhingle.com

Chad Barr - President, CB Software Systems, Inc.
Fully integrated e-commerce & e-business solutions such as the one CB Software Systems developed for: http://www.sskemp.com See the work CB Software Systems has done for international consultant, speaker and author Alan Weiss and join Alan's Forums for debate, networking and ideas exchange at: http://www.alansforums.com Subscribe to CB Software Systems' monthly electronic technology newsletter, jammed with resources, articles, and tips by clicking: http://www.cbsoftware.com/etc/newsletters.php To read Chad's article, "Blog, Blog, Blog — How to improve your marketing exposure" click on: http://www.cbsoftware.com/cbnn/How-to-improve-your-marketing-exposure.php View Chad Barr's Blog: http://www.chadbarr.com

Chad Barr
(216) 991-2277 x 112
http://www.cbsoftware.com
CB Software Systems, Inc.
Tower East
20600 Chagrin Boulevard #1110
Shaker Heights, OH 44122

Jason Saeler
Jason Saeler is also recommended by Tom Antion; read Jason's very informative articles on keyword targeting and link exchange strategy.

Jason Saeler
(520) 325-2801
quotes@saeler.com
http://www.saeler.com/
Saeler Enterprises
P.O. Box 64043
Tucson, AZ 85728

Wally Bock
Technology expert Wally Bock provides web strategy and Internet marketing project management for select speakers, consultants, and authors. Wally was there when Fripp first envisioned her own electronic marketing strategy; he knows the speaker/consultant industry, as a successful player in this industry himself.

Planet Ocean Communications
http://www.searchenginenews.com/

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/

"Aylene Rhiger prepared this handout for Odd Couple® Seminar attendees on her own time as a service for you. It took several years and lots of training to be able to gain the knowledge that went into it. She has my 100% endorsement. I had not met Aylene in person until the 2000 Odd Couple. It is possible to have a good working relationship with a webmaster you have never met!! Take her up on her offer. You will not find an easier person to work with. She really is one of my secret weapons!!! "
—Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE

For further tips on improving your electronic marketing efforts visit: http://www.fripp.com/websitetips2.html