35% of visitors fail to achieve their goal when they visit Las Vegas websites! By following two simple rules, you really can increase your web revenue by a third or more!

Respected website usability researcher, Jakob Nielsen, published results of his latest study. His test subjects visited over 139 websites and on average they failed to find what they were looking for about 35% of the time. Shockingly, 37% of users couldn not even find company location details and contact information.

What was truly surprising was that users did not give up… they found the information they were after, but they found it at a competitor’s web site.

So how exactly do you stop potential customers falling into the hands of your business competitors? Nielsen is right when he suggests user research. Yes, it is imperative that know what your users need and are looking for at your Las Vegas web site. But what he does not say is how to structure your website so it meets your users needs.

There are two main rules to follow:

1. Write first and build later
2. Write to your customer

The real message on most Las Vegas web sites is in the writing and the writing should determine the structure.

This is not the case for most local businesses, however. Most of the time, the writing is merely an afterthought and they design their website first, then try to fit the writing to the structure they have created. This makes no sense. You should not decide on a structure, then change the message to fit.

For a truly user-friendly website, you should plan what you want to say and communicate before you create the website and even write all the pages out before desigming or building.

So how do you decide what to write? Most customers will want to know the basics:

• What do you do exactly?
• What benefit do you offer them with your service or product?
• Why should they choose your service or product over a competitor?
• How much does your service or product cost?
• How can they contact you and where is your location?

Your Las Vegas website has to convey a lot of information and you must use your home page real estate wisely. Your website visitor should be able to find ALL relevant information on the home page (without scrolling) in a single window. So you’re probably thinking now ‘how am I going to fit it all in a single window?’ That’s where planning out your copy for the home page comes in, just do it carefully.

Your web site is an important marketing tool and is a very cost-effective way to communicate and find new customers. Remember, however, your competitors are doing the same thing. It’s important that your writing is clearly written and short and to the point, especially with your competitors’ web sites in mind.

8 More Reasons to Write Specifically for Your Audience

1. There are over 550 billion documents on the web
2. Every day another 8 million are added
3. Visitors take so long trying to find information that it costs organisations $750 billion annually! (A.T. Kearney, Network Publishing study)
4. Reading a web page from a monitor is 25% slower than reading from paper. (Sun Microsystems)
5. Helpful content develops interaction and website loyalty.
6. 79% of users scan read when online (Sun Microsystems)
7. Information gathering is the most common use of the Internet – 73% (American Express survey)
8. 48% of people use the Internet to find work-related information as opposed to 7% who use magazines. (Lyra Research)

The internet is a very loud place. If you want to be heard by your clients, email marketing is the best way to personalize each user’s experience with your product or service. There are many reliable and dynamic vendors who offer email marketing software and can help you nurture your brand.

Why is it important to incorporate email marketing into your brand management strategy?

It can attract repeat customers. Email outreach campaigns urge consumer motivation, it is a way to keep your brand name fresh in their mind. The brand to client relationship is strengthened each time they see your brand name in their inbox. Email marketing is also cost effective; it eliminates the cost of printing and mailing promotional material. Paperless and virtual marketing is a green compatible strategy. Email marketing is not just for rekindling a relationship with old customers, it can also reach new customers who are unfamiliar with your brand. Under this medium you are able to control the information that is being fed to prospective consumers as you define your brand.

Why seek the help of a professional email marketing software company?

You want your brand to be taken seriously. Email marketing software companies provide professional and eye catching HTML emails and newsletters. Using templates and pre-designed settings, you can present your message in an organized and dynamic style. Email marketing companies also take the grunt work of maintaining a database of client information off the shoulders of the marketer by providing email list management. Email list management is a low cost service that is often accompanied by low cost or free email output assistance.

Who should I trust with getting the word out about my brand?

The biggest and most trusted names in email outreach are Contact Contact and MailChimp. Constant Contact offers sophisticated emails and other services including online surveys and event promotion packages; packages start at $15 monthly, with free support and training. Mailchimp offers free accounts up to one thousand subscribers and six thousand emails per month. All of their paid packages for client’s with under the 50,000 subscribers range from $15 a month to $240 dollars a month and offer unlimited email output.

The bottom line

It is virtually impossible for a brand to exist in this day and age without a digital presence. Online marketing software provides a practical and economical solution for reaching clients past, present and future!

You have a website and it is helping promote your Las Vegas business and your products and services and finding new customers. You want to sell more through your website, but how do you properly test the messaging and copy writing on your website in order for you to know how it is performing and if in fact it is causing a visitor to take action?

Internet Marketers talk a lot about testing your sales copy on your website, but very few discuss details about the methodology of testing. It is easy to get confused and potentially remove changes that were helping increasing sales on your website.

Back in college, I took a Chemistry class where we did a fair amount of experiments and our professor was a stickler for teaching us the proper way to perform our experiments. One day, we were give a series of experiments to perform and he stressed the importance of testing. When performing an experiment there are many things you want to change one step at a time in order to perform the experiment properly. As an impatient teenager who was waiting for class to be over, it was an interesting learning experience.

Our professor would say, “In order to properly perform this experiment you need to make one change at a time and then measure the results of that change. Then, will you know which change performs the best and gives you the desired results. You could make all the changes all at once, but what if you undo the change that works?”

His words came back to me when I started my Internet Marketing years ago. If I am making copy changes to my websites or sales copy to monitor the conversion rate then I need to make one major change at a time, drive a sufficient amount of traffic to it, and then analyze the results. If the response rate and conversion rate increases, then I keep the change. If it decreases, then I discard the change and try another.

By performing web site testing in this fashion, you will know exactly which changes best affect your conversion rates and be able to build upon them in order to gain the highest possible conversion rate for your site.

As a Las Vegas marketing professional, you should be aware of serveral mostly free internet and online marketing tools available on the internet. Here are some links I’ve collected that could be of great value to your Las Vegas business or company.

• Twitter
• Google Analytics
• Site-Perf.com – Know all about your site performance
• The Flameproof Online Marketing Pitch – inc.com
• Nonprofit Online Community Great Marketing Tool
• Mike’s Marketing Tools – Free Internet Marketing Tips and Articles
• Why most people don’t use effective but free online marketing tools
• Web Marketing Tools
• IP and redirect checker
• Web Page Analyzer - Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis
• Web Marketing Promotional Tools and Techniques
• iBusinessPromoter (IBP) is the award-winning web site promotion software solution that helps you to get top 10 rankings in Google, Yahoo and all other major search engines.
• Free Search Engine Submission
• Free Business Startup Tools, Free Ebooks, Tips, Training and Success Strategies
• Internet Marketing Tools – Precise Expert’s Guide to Marketing Tools
• Website Head Checker Tool
• Search Combination Tool
• Keyword Density Analysis Tool
• The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industrybest practices & standards
• Server Head Checker Tool
• Website Loadtime Test
• Website SEO Tool – Website Grader
• Add Google Custom Search to your Website
• Guerrilla Marketing Coach and E-zine

Improving Search Engine Rankings for Your Las Vegas Website

For many, the traffic to and from a website is the most important part of the internet marketing process for your Las Vegas web site. Without visitors and traffic, many sites cannot flourish and the information on them is then meaningless. To increase the number of visitors and traffic to a website, many businesses turn to search engines, hoping that if their site appears more often or closer to the top in a search, that the traffic will increase. 

One way of doing this is referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This process attempts to improve visitor rates “naturally” by alter the content and presentation of information on the site itself, hoping to increase how many keywords the site falls under in a search. For example, if a site were to be originally focused on horse breeding, this site would probably only appear in searches for that specific keyword: horse breeding. Applying SEO, the site host would add articles concerning horse breeds, care and up keeping of horses, feed options, etc. All of these all still fall under the category of horse breeding, but the site will now appear in a number of other searches with different keywords separate from just horse breeding. Unfortunately, many sites use SEO to draw people into spam sites, referred to in the industry at “black hat SEO”. These sites attempt to fall into as many keyword categories as possible, so as to appear as options in as many searches as possible and be seen by as many people as possible. While not necessarily illegal, this use of SEO is considered against internet ethics; it is, however, a good way of explaining and understanding the SEO process.

Another option of optimizing the number of visitors to a site is SEM, or search engine marketing. Unlike SEO, SEM does not alter the actually content of the page. Rather, it places paid advertisements for the site on search engines. Put any keyword you can think of into Google Search and hit enter. On the right side of the page at least five little advertisements will appear, each with at least on of the words from your keyword search in it, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This is an application of SEM. By paying Google to host their site as an ad, websites increase their visibility and, hopefully, their visitor rate.

I write a lot about what businesses and companies in Las Vegas SHOULD do to ensure proper marketing, internet marketing and marketing communications strategies and tactics, but I thought it was important to point out marketing mistakes that businesses and companies often make and should be aware of.

Top 10 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid for your Las Vegas business:

1. Not having a basic marketing plan written. You need to know where you are going to go and how to get there, right?
2. Not reserving a marketing budget. This is a big one in Las Vegas. You need to be aware that to market your company or business properly in Las Vegas, you need to have a budget to execute a marketing plan.
3. Not understanding your target market and target customer and their challenges and problems. You need to know this in order to best market to them and to know how to effectively communicate with them and help solve their specific business problems and issues.
4. Not having consistent messaging across all of your marketing materials including brochures, websites, flyers and ads can hurt the core messages that you are trying to communicate through your marketing efforts and leaves potential customers confused and makes your business look unprofessional.
5. Not understanding your product or service’s specific benefit that is provides to your customer. You need to clearly define how you can help your client and why they should choose your products or services over your competitors.
6. Targeting “everybody” is a huge mistake as well. You may think your product or service may be targeted to “everybody” but it’s not. It’s always best to define groups within your market, a zip code, an age range, one particular issue you can solve for a prospective client.
7. Badly written marketing copy can ruin the first chance you have at converting a looker into a customer. The copy and text on your marketing materials, brochure and website should be well written, concise and should describe the benefits of your products and services and should contain a clear and compelling call-to-action.
8. Not using testimonials from your present clients. They are your most powerful advocates and you should use quotes and case studies in all of your marketing materials.
9. Thinking you do not need a website. A website is CRITICAL to competing in the Las Vegas business market. Your competitors all have websites!
10. Not measuring the results of your marketing campaigns and refining them as you go along. Marketing is not an exact science, you make professional estimations and even if a campaign is going great, you can continue to monitor and refine a marketing campaign to ensure you get the best results possible!