What website colors say?

Most of the companies have certain colors associated with them. A lot of thought process goes into evolving a color as part of their corporate identity. Therefore, when this is translated into the internet, complete understanding of what your colors are saying is required. Some of the important analysis needed is about the target audience and the emotions you want to project. Given below is a list of common colors and the psychological emotions they evoke:

• Red: warning, excitement, aggression, energy, passion, love, danger
• Orange:  playfulness, courage, comfort, fun, youth, approachability, celebration, warmth,    and affordability
• Yellow: joy, curiosity, playfulness, happiness, light, amusement, cheerfulness
• Green: money, health, life, wealth, prosperity, naturalness, restfulness, healing
• Blue: trustworthiness, successes, peace, loyalty, patience, spirituality, freedom, power,    calmness, professionalism
• Purple: wisdom, sophistication, celebration
• White: purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace
• Black: seriousness, secrecy, mystery, elegance, darkness
• Pink: romance, youthfulness, tenderness, innocence, sweetness
• Brown: strength, earth, nature, stability, simplicity, credibility, tribal
• Grey: reserved, indifference, reliability, maturity, security

By understanding the deeper meaning the color projects, you are able to express visually the specific emotions your company stands for. If your identity colors invoke emotions different from your website’s goals, you could still include those colors as an accent color. There is a place in the site for the accent color to reinforce your corporate identity and by using other colors you can successfully project the emotional goals of your website.

As your website gets ready, the color of the page gives out vibes that attracts or dissuades audience.  So, analyze the emotions you want to project to your target audience, choose and act accordingly.

Blogging Effectively Increases Search Traffic and Sales Lead

In this post, I will discuss blogging and why it is critical for increasing search traffic and lead generation results over time.

Small businesses are generally plagued by limited exposure to marketing techniques and do not have optimized marketing plan. Thus they rely on more traditional marketing – cold calls, advertisements in print, radio and TV etc campaigns, which tend to be costly but also do not see corresponding increase in revenue.

Small businesses have agonising experience of sales leads calling them and asking them countless questions without necessarily showing interest to buy the products/services. They often spent long hours with one prospect simply explaining their products/services. The more they shared educational information with each customer, small businesses feared that they spent too much time teaching and not enough time selling. Without knowing the buying intent of prospects, sharing valuable information on a one-to-one basis can be costly but also give little to sales success.

Given that many people use search engines for acquiring information, and that websites listed on the first page of search results perceived as more credible, small businesses could leverage educational information and search engine optimization to draw prospects to their website at no cost. The key lay in leveraging organic search.

Sharing useful information online and making it easy to find small businesses could both educate large groups of people and do one-to-many selling. Customers trust sources where they find the most credible answers. They could then gauge their interest in its products/services.

Basics

To make the content findable, small businesses needed to create valuable content worthy of sharing. The frequency to publish blog articles really depends on the needs of a business and the nature of its industry. The trick is to blog at a consistent pace to enable the search engine visibility of the blog content growing.

Besides consistency in blogging frequency, one needs to focus on keywords for blogging success. Optimizing for certain keywords, help to target specific interests and segments. In deciding what keywords a blog article would emphasize, always consider phrases that best captured customers’ interests. Small businesses can specifically, compile a list of questions they received most often from clients and turn them into blog post headlines with keywords that resonated with customers’ interests.

Optimizing for long-tail keywords by targeting keywords with low difficulty is the easiest way to increase free traffic. Although these keywords tend to have lower search volume, they are highly qualified and targeted. That is, those who search long-tail keywords tend to have more specific and higher levels of interests than those searching general phrases, thus producing qualified traffic.

It is important to create diverse content as you never know ‘what’s going to catch fire’ but also diverse keyword descriptions of similar content as different customers frame the same questions differently.

Besides useful information, open and honest sharing help strengthen small businesses credibility and reputation. Ensure the blog is on the domain that also hosts the company website as this will enable to receive visibility for all work dedicated to it and allow all inbound links to attribute SEO credit to the primary domain,  which would then rank higher on search engines and gain more visibility.

Quality Interactions

Besides generating and optimizing valuable content, it is necessary to make sure that quality interactions occurred at the blog. Hence, this calls for prompt response and with detailed explanations at times, an approach that can be applied even to negative remarks, as long as these remarks are not defamation.

The goal is to draw leads and close deals. A blog that received many visits with a low traffic-to-lead conversion rate would not be considered effective. Hence, it is necessary to add a call to action (CTA) on the blog that led to a lead conversion form.

Link building helps to strengthen the blog’s credibility and visibility on search engines such as Google. Creating valuable contents helps to acquire quality inbound links to the blog page from authoritative third-party websites. Linking to other websites reinforces the information in a blog article and improves the credibility of a blog.

Promotion

Participation in online communities became another source of the website traffic. Using social media to promote blog articles help to maximize the reach. On Twitter share the blog articles and re-tweet interesting and valuable articles. Participate in online forums related to the product/service and give insightful answers to user inquiries and often referred people to the blog for other resources.

Results

Blogging can become a major contributor to SME’s online marketing and business success – resulting in accumulated blog subscribers, increased site traffic, and generate leads.

Data from independent industry report shows:

• Businesses participating in strong blog and content strategies receive 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages
• Businesses that blog generated 67% more leads over a 3 month period compared to businesses that don’t blog

SME’s start blogging!