Every once in a while, it’s important to step back and evaluate how you are doing when it comes to the fundamentals of your field or industry. Because my field is Internet marketing and websites, I came up with 10 questions you can ask yourself to determine how well your site and online strategy are working.

10 Website Questions

1. What kind of Web presence do I need?

   Don’t worry too much about what kind of web presence you have just yet. Think carefully about what kind of presence you really need. Do you need an informational site, an e-commerce platform, or a community or network site? Which suits your business best?

2. What does my website need to accomplish?

   Is your site primarily meant to distribute information? Sell a product? Get subscribers? What are the end results you need to achieve?

3. Who do I want to visit my site?

   Think about your ideal audience. Are they tech-lingo-speaking engineers? C-suite managers? Teenage girls with generous spending habits? Do you need to serve more than one audience? How will you serve multiple audiences? Some reading about personas might help at this point.

4. Who is visiting my site?

   Do you really know who is visiting your site? This can be tricky to determine, but there are clues to who it is that is viewing your site. A web analytics package will go a long way in helping you to determine what content and which calls to action are resonating with your current audience. You can also ask your visitors directly—a short, online survey can do a lot to help unveil your visitors’ feelings and background.

5. How will I drive traffic to my site?

   There are many methods for driving traffic, and you need to figure out which will be most appropriate for your site and which are the highest priority. Natural search engine results? Pay-per-click ads? Viral, word-of-mouth marketing? Links from related sites? Press releases?

6. What is it that I want my visitors to do or learn?

   These actions are the baby steps towards achieving your main purpose in #2 above. Do you want your visitors to read a certain page, download a whitepaper, and then contact sales? Do you want them to read product reviews, look at a photo gallery, add a product to their cart, and check out? What are the most important actions that lead to achieving your goals?

7. How can I engage my visitors?

   Often the problem with a site is not getting visitors to come to a site, but making them stay. How can you connect with your audience and encourage them to stick around? What (small) set of calls to action are going to be used to motivate your visitors to explore, learn, and enjoy your site?

8. How can I increase repeat visits?

   How do you make a website “sticky?” Is your site a one-trick pony? Does your site have more to offer visitors at a later date?

9. How will my website be built and managed? In-house or outsourced?

   Once you’ve determined what your site needs to be, you need to think about how it will be built and maintained. Remember, it’s often the case that whatever site and system you have now is a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t unduly influence your decision about what to do going forward.

10. What kind of website can I afford?

    Once you know what you need and want, you have to look at what you realistically can have, at least in the near term. You may have to prioritize your goals and simply try to accomplish as much as you can with your limited resources.

More Than 10 Answers

These 10 basic website questions don’t have perfect, unchanging answers, even for the same company at two different times. The best answer often changes with growth or challenges your company is facing. Each question is also open-ended, so there are multiple answers to each one. The main point is simply to think about what’s important regularly so that your company or site follows its optimal path on the web.

To create a successful site, you must find a need and then fill it. Tabeze is trying to do just that when it comes to domain name research.

One of the basic problems of many domain name research tools is the time it takes to determine whether or not each domain is already registered or not. Another is that it can be hard to brainstorm because it is hard to keep track of your past ideas and use them for inspiration.

Tabeze Changes How Domain Name Research Is Done…

Tabeze is basically an AJAX domain name research tool. It allows you to create as many “tabs,” or domain name searchers, as you’d like. Each tab allows you to determine whether or not a domain name is registered. You can use as many tabs at a time as you’d like—I can’t usually type fast enough to use more than 4 or 5 at once. When you get a result you’d like to keep, just leave it on the page and open up another tab. It’s really cool to be able to research multiple domain names simultaneously and to be able to see all my searches on one page.

…But Has a Few Kinks to Work Out

I had problems with the page occasionally locking up if I had too many tabs running queries. That was frustrating because I have to copy down all the research I’ve done so far and reload the page. I lose the ability, unless I re-query all the previous domain names, of seeing all the research I’ve done on one page.

One feature that I really, really wanted was the ability to reorganize the tabs—I kept wanting to click and drag the tabs to reorganize them and group them into related sets. Grouping ideas is one of the best roads to great brainstorming, and I missed the ability to do that. The other feature I wanted was to query multiple domain-name extensions at once and view the results in a table or list that would normally be hidden but would appear when I hover over or click on a tab.

Tabeze Needs to Grow Up

Well done, Tabeze, finding a need and doing a pretty good job of filling it. Please, please fix the connection problems I run into sometimes and add a few features to make domain name research much easier and snappier. If the server didn’t crash, I’d use Tabeze, with or without new features. Until then, I have to stick with the Network Solutions domain name research tool.

Some people have wondered: is Blog Rush against the Google AdSense terms of service?

Blog Rush, as I see it, is NOT against Google AdSense’s terms of service.

The Google AdSense blog says:

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

Google wants to make sure that site and blog owners aren’t providing people with an incentive (beyond normal interest and curiosity) to click on AdSense links.

Blog Rush Is in the Clear

If you examine each part of the quote above, you can see that Blog Rush does not violate any of the statements made.

No one is paid to click on AdSense ads after they land on a page they found through Blog Rush. Doing so does not result in a reward for visitors.

No one is being paid to surf or autosurf—in money or clicks. Even if you surf your own site for an extra 1000 pages, you’ve only earned impressions. If your article titles suck, no one is going to click them. This will be even more true as cheating is weeded out of the impression system. You can see this even now—the cheaters are generating thousands of extra impressions, but no extra clicks. Click-through rates are simply falling. If someone does click through, it’s because they are truly interested in what you have to say.

Blog Rush is not click exchange—no one is using the system to agree to click each other’s AdSense links.

There is no incentive to view other web sites’ pages.

Because Blog Rush in no way affects visitor behavior in relation to AdSense ads, it does not violate the terms of service. So go ahead and join Blog Rush and see if it increases your blog traffic.

I recently learned about a new traffic generating system called Blog Rush. I’m usually very skeptical of such systems, but this one had some very interesting unique ideas that kept me on the hook just long enough to try it. The system is in Beta, and there have been a few hiccups more than most Beta launches, but on the whole it is working as advertised.

The Idea Behind Blog Rush

The basic idea behind Blog Rush is to create a network of similar sites and facilitate the exchange and dynamic rotation of links between these sites. Each site in the network installs a widget that lists five links to blog posts in the network. Your blog’s widget will show the links from other blogs, and your blog will be linked to from other sites’ widgets.

Blog Rush Referrals

So how does the system decide which links to show? Through an impression tracking and exchange system. Each time your blog shows the widget (1 page impression, 5 link impressions), you earn the right to have your blog linked to for one impression on someone else’s site.

Because you are creating 5 link impressions for each page impression, but only receiving one, the system has 4 extra link impressions per page impression to hand out.

For now, Blog Rush has done two main things with these extra impressions:

1. They have reserved one link impression for themselves to use for advertising and handing out bonus impressions.
2. The other three are used for rewarding referrals to the system. If you refer someone, you get an impression for every impression they earn. The same thing happens for each level of referrals, all the way down to ten “generations.” You get less and less of an impression at each level (level 10 earns you 1/8 of an impression), and the fractions add up correctly to three total impressions.

Blog Rush Inequality

There was a person who left a comment on the Blog Rush blog who was concerned about unequal impressions. His example stated that if there was someone who had 1,000 impressions vs. someone who had 100, a growing deficit of available impressions would be created. This would be true, but only if you have too few sites. As you increase the number of sites, the deficits and surpluses will tend to average out almost perfectly, especially over time. Blog Rush has already served more than 40,000,000 blog headlines, so I’m not worried about the availability of page impressions to show the link impressions I’ve earned.

Cheating on Blog Rush

The biggest problem with Blog Rush so far has been some cheating. Many bloggers have created ways to game the system by creating bad pageviews—for example, using a script to auto-load pages to earn impressions, even though no human ever sees the pages. These cheaters have sucked up impressions earned by legitimate bloggers and have nearly killed click-through rates. However, Blog Rush has switched to a manual review system for new blogs and is purging existing blogs that aren’t meeting standards, so this problem should be fixed soon.

Click Through Rates on Blog Rush

My last concern about Blog Rush will be click through rates. How many impressions will it take before someone clicks and visits my site? The last time I checked, I had nearly 300 impressions without a click. It can take over a thousand impressions to generate a click, though, so no final verdict here… The headlines you write for your blog posts will also be extremely influential on your click through rates, so write headlines that will grab attention and will be short enough to fit in the widget (7 words, 40 characters or so).

It can’t hurt, so go try Blog Rush. I have visited some blog posts that sounded interesting, so it has value for discovering new information, even if no one clicks your links. And if I’m clicking links, there’s a chance I will visit your blog some time!

You’ve been working hard on your site, posting new content regularly, playing by the rules, being a good netizen and all that good stuff. One day you decide to check and see how you are doing in Google’s index. So you type in site:yoursite.com to see how many pages have been indexed.

Oh the horror!

A large portion of your pages are listed with the phrase “Supplemental Result” next to them.

Supplemental results are just that—supplemental. Provided when the primary variants aren’t good enough, or when someone who is starving consumes all the other results and still wants more. This means that your pages aren’t going to have the optimal traffic generating characteristics that you’d hoped for.

Two Possibilities with Supplemental Results

Take a deep breath—supplemental results aren’t the end of the world. There are two main situations where supplemental results come into play:

1. Your pages are new, and Google isn’t sure about them just yet. They are in supplemental results for a while until Google integrates them into the main search index. You just have to wait for a while (2 months should be enough). This happened to over 100 of DiamondLime’s pages after I moved my site and was first indexed at the new domain name.
2. Google doesn’t like your pages as much as the alternatives. This is tougher than simply having to wait like in case #1, but again, not the end of the world. There are things you can do to get your pages to move into the main index.

Page Rehab - Getting Pages out of Supplemental Results

There are things you can do to get your pages out of supplemental results. The central point is that you have to do things that will make your pages better (or at least seem better) than the alternatives. Here is a list of things you can do to get a page out of the supplemental results, starting with the most effective:

1. Get links from other sites to the page that needs to move out of supplemental results
2. Link to the page from other pages on your site
3. Add useful content
4. Improve your on-page SEO elements.

Get Links from Other Sites

The most powerful factor for moving your site’s pages out of supplemental results is to have other web sites link directly to your pages. This deep linking tells Google that someone values your content enough to link to it, and that immediately puts you up over all the resources that aren’t linked to from external sites.

Link to the Page from Your Site

If you link to your struggling page from many varied locations on your web site, you are telling Google (and other search engines) that out of the pages on your site, you deem this particular page to be important. This is almost as effective as getting an external link. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may shake the balance of your site’s SEO up too much.

Add Useful Content

Adding to and modifying the content on your struggling page indicates to search engines that you are trying to improve the page and that this particular resource is up to date.

Improve On-page SEO Factors

Improving your page’s SEO for on-page elements (headers, titles, etc.) is like waxing your car—it’s the same old car, but it looks like it’s worth more.

Once you’ve done what you can, wait. It can take quite a while. SEO requires patience. If, though, after 6 months and two passes at improving your page, you don’t have rankings, it may be time to focus on another page targeting that term.

Best of luck getting out of the supplemental results! It is possible, I did it—as of this writing, not one of the pages indexed on my site is a supplemental result.

I wrote a few months ago introducing Tag A Cloud as a possible method for generating free traffic to a site. At this point, I think the results are mixed.

Starting Off

I signed up with Tag A Cloud back in January. I put a link on my site in a blog post I wrote about Tag A Cloud, and then I simply clicked on my own link each time I visited my site. I usually browsed a few of the other links that were there, too, doing my part to help drive a little traffic. The day I put the link up, my site visitors started to click through as well.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many links, and many of them weren’t upgraded, so if you could make your link on the Tag A Cloud pages larger, you stood to gain a decent amount of traffic. I know I clicked on the larger links, especially to see why they were larger—was there something about the site that was driving clicks or traffic?

Leveling

Like role playing games, leveling up is addicting. My visitors and I drove about 190 clicks to Tag A Cloud, and my tag is now level 9, which means it’s now a larger version of the standard black text. No bolding, underlining, or colors yet. I wonder how far you have to go to get more than font-size upgrades.

Google Juice

In my last post about Tag A Cloud, I wondered what Tag A Cloud would do with the Google page rank it would surely get. Their rank is up to a 6. That question is still to be answered. They may not need to think about it, though, if enough people keep paying to have their tags upgraded.

Noise. Lots of Noise.

Tag A Cloud recently introduced their “Point Shop” which allows tag owners to pay to upgrade their tags in an effort to make their tag more visible and drive more traffic. Most of the sites that joined early on have had their tags upgraded through natural clicks to and from Tag A Cloud, too. Between all the upgraded tags and the paid highlighting that many have been doing, Tag A Cloud is starting to look rather noisy. It’s harder to make sense of the big pile of tags. Since they’re displayed randomly, it’s a little tricky to find a tag you know was there before from earlier. They need a save-a-tag feature that lets you save tags to your own personal tag page.

Free Traffic

Despite the noise, Tag A Cloud has delivered 27 clicks to my site. This may not seem like many, but it’s nearly as many as I have ever received from any other directory-type listing, and certainly in a shorter period of time. If you don’t need to pay attention to it, then your interested visitors will do the work of clicking through to Tag A Cloud and increasing the prominence of your tag. If you have to babysit your tag, however, the invested effort compared to the traffic you will get is an ROI that doesn’t make much sense. I think I may make one last push to get my tag to be more visible and drive traffic, and then I am probably going to let it go dormant and let the link on my site and the tag on Tag A Cloud do all the work.

We’ve released a new version of SeboMarketing.com!

Old Site

The old version of SeboMarketing.com had a number of problems with it. Many of these problems fell into “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” category—as Internet marketers, we know better than to make some of the mistakes that were being made, but we’ve been so focused on our clients’ sites that we neglected our own.

Click to Enlarge

Table-based Layout, Invalid HTML

Our site was put together with a dated version of DreamWeaver, and so the layout was based on a series of nested tables and the HTML was awful. The use of CSS was limited, and the code was bloated and full of presentational elements and markup.

Too Little, Stagnant Content

The overall size of the site was less than 30 pages. The content hadn’t been updated to show some of our new clients, any news from Sebo Marketing, or even new copyright dates.

Insufficient Navigation

Perhaps the greatest sin for a site that is meant to have a clear conversion path and to present Sebo Marketing in a good light is the fact that its navigation was confusing and inadequate. It was difficult to find the client bios or case studies that had been placed on the site, and it was nearly impossible to know what part of the site you were on.

New Site

The new version of SeboMarketing.com is much improved over its predecessor. Besides a visual update, we have made the following improvements:

Click to Enlarge

Valid HTML, CSS Layout

Because it’s a new site, there are probably some few mistakes left lurking in the HTML of the site, but overall SeboMarketing.com is now 98% valid. The layout and presentation have been effectively separated with the use of stylesheets. Maintenance and the next visual update to the site should be a breeze.

Updated Content

We updated and added a lot of content. We have all of our clients whose sites we’ve completed listed, and we have case studies to show the success we’ve had since we last updated our site. We’ve also posted some informational articles about different aspects of Internet marketing.

Clear Navigation

The navigation on the site is leaps and bounds better. A more complete list of options is presented, and a highlighting scheme for showing the visitor where they are on the site has been put in place.

Additional Credibility

Finally, since we last updated our site, Sebo Marketing has been recognized as an Adwords Qualified Company by Google. Pay Per Click advertising is an important facet of our service offerings, and being an Adwords Qualified Company strengthens the trust that our clients, both current and potential, can have in us.

In conclusion, we’re happy with our new site, and we’d love to have you come take a look sometime.

Many user-generated content sites face one (or several) problems, including the following:

1. Copyright Issues

   Site users occasionally post content that is copyright, or steal the content generated by others on the site.

2. Quality Issues

   Without an incentive to do high-quality work, users will post “just good enough” (or “not quite good enough!”) content to fill a particular purpose.

3. Quantity Issues

   Without motivation to create more, communities don’t have enough users contributing content.

A Solution to Some of User-Generated Content’s Problems

Getty Images, which specializes in all sorts of digital images, has purchased Scoopt, a company that is using a new model for acquiring and distributing user-generated images. Users who contribute images that are chosen for distribution are compensated with a percentage (currently 40%) of the image’s sale price.

This model could be a solution to issues two and three from the list above—a financial incentive would motivate the public to submit high-quality (more likely to be chosen) images more frequently.

I think this is a novel approach to an application that could really use the “wisdom of the masses,” and perhaps one that could be applied to other content-types or industries.

Is there anything that your customer-base or audience could do for you that you wouldn’t mind paying for?

People are the most decisive factor in your company.

Think about it: without people, who would be running the computers, operating the machines, or answering the phones? Who would be buying anything that you sell?

I know that this is definitely an obvious observation, but I thought I would take the time to make you think about it again. It’s so obvious, and we have often thought through who is involved in our business, and thus we tend to forget that the human element is the most important element.

How Can People Be More Decisive?

What can you do to make the people involved with your company happier and more effective?

What are your customers asking for? What need can you fill for them? What pain or irritation can you remove from their lives?

What do your employees need to work more efficiently? What hampers them from meeting (or even setting!) goals? How can you help your employees to be more motivated?

Just remember to periodically look at how each part of your company affects the people involved. People will thank you.

Let’s imagine that you have a hot new web service. An AJAX-powered, Web 2.0, community-based Google killer. Let’s also assume that, like most new web services, you have limited time to reach critical mass and profitability before you run out of money.

How Do You Promote Your Service?

So what do you do to promote your service? What methods are available to those who are strapped for cash and time?

• Viral Campaign

  Create a video, contest, game, or activity that people want to pass on to their friends and that uses or mentions your service.

• Press Releases

  Put a press release out to every possible effective PR source. Accurately describe the benefits of using your service.

• Reviews

  Ask bloggers, magazine and newspaper columnists, technology pundits, futurists, educators, and other influential experts or members of the media to have a look at your service and share what they think.

• Word of Mouth

  Encourage, promote, and assist people to take the effort to share

• Pay-Per-Click

  You could pay to drive traffic to your site, but this would only work for a start-up under the above conditions if the cost per click was low and competition sparse.

In short, you should gratefully accept any interest or exposure for your product, especially if you are receiving qualified prospects.

Mum’s the Word

What would make you swear off one of these methods? Expense is a big one that might be involved in a few of the items listed above. What else? Not much.

But that’s precisely what one particular service is doing. ChaCha Live Search’s user agreement has a clause that limits its guides from asking people to become guides in public forums, blogs, or classifieds. Let’s think about this for a moment: ChaCha could potentially be receiving large numbers of interested, qualified guides, but is limiting itself to the people who fall into its guides’ close group of friends and family.

That seems silly to me. ChaCha is dramatically limiting the speed at which word of mouth can travel by limiting who its guides can invite. What’s wrong with the total strangers who express an interest in ChaCha and have the skill to do a good job? Nothing. And what would ChaCha have to lose if it accidentally let someone less skilled or interested through? Nothing. So why clam up its guides, its most effective advocates?

Breaking the Silence

Instead of clamping down on what people can say about you or your service (especially legally), you should try to help people to discuss and promote your service. Make it easy for them, and create incentives that will attract the right kind of people, rather than controlling the methods by which the word can be spread. Remember, your promotional methods will be vitally important to the success of your service, and you don’t want to punish or limit those who are helping you.