The history of the company website began with the paper brochure that was handed out at trade shows and stuffed into envelopes for mailing to unsuspecting victims (prospects). When the Internet came into play, this same brochure was handed to a web designer who turned it into a beautiful website. This made sense at the time: Brochures were static, the web was new and mostly static, and companies had spent lots of money to have these brochures designed. However, having a “brochureware” website is where the trouble starts for many businesses today.
Megaphone versus Hub
If your website is like many of the websites we see, it is a one-to-many broadcast tool—think megaphone. We find that people visit these types of sites once, click around, and never return. Why? Because nothing on these sites, which are filled with sales-oriented messages, compels them to stay.
The web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s, and while it took a couple of decades to get there, the web is now truly collaborative. Instead of broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, the top-ranked sites today have created communities where like-minded people can connect with each other. In order to take full advantage of this collaborative power, you must rethink your website. Instead of “megaphone,” think “hub.”
What we want you to do is to change the mode of your website from a one-way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub for your marketplace.
It's Not What You Say—It's What Others Say About You
If your company is like most others, you put all your web energy on your site. Seventy-five percent of your focus should be on what is happening off your website concerning your brand, your industry, and your competitors. Your focus should include creating communities outside of your site for people to connect with you, your products, and others within the community. Ultimately, this “outside” focus will drive people back to your site. The model in Figure 2.1 is of the web—each dot is a website. You want your website to be a large dot that's connected to many other websites—in other words, a hub.
In effect, you want your website to be more like New York City than Wellesley, Massachusetts. NYC has several major highways running through it, three major airports, a huge bus depot, two major train stations, and so on. Wellesley has one highway passing through it, no airport, no bus depot, and no train station. The highways, trains, buses, and airplanes to your site are the search engines, links from other sites, and thousands of mentions of your company in the social media. All of this is what turns your website into a magnetic hub for your industry that pulls people in.
Does Your Website Have a Pulse?
Over time, many people will become regular readers of your website and subscribe to it. These readers won't visit your site directly to read the content, but will consume your content through a feed reader or RSS reader. RSS (which stands for “really simple syndication”) is a technology that allows content to be published and pushed to those users who are subscribed to a feed. RSS makes it very convenient for your readers to automatically know when you have created new content on your site without having to constantly revisit to see if there have been updates.
RSS-enabling your site changes the dynamic of your site from a static brochureware site that someone visits once to a site that's living and breathing. Every time you post something new, your RSS subscribers get that update automatically and are pulled back onto your site.
The same goes for e-mail. Not everyone is up to speed yet on RSS, so you should give site visitors the ability to subscribe to your site or sections of your site via e-mail. In the same way as RSS, this keeps your prospective and current customers in touch with your website—and by extension, you and your company—a totally different paradigm from an online brochure.
As we discuss in later chapters, you want to distribute your site's content to social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, where it can spread to new, interested audiences more virally. If you do this properly, people will consume your web content while using these applications, not just on your website.
Your Mother's Impressed, But…
If your company is like most others, you are currently in the process of or thinking about redesigning your website. Here is the typical process we see. For the first month or two after the redesign is complete, you love your new site and can't stop looking at it. It looks fantastic and your mother is very pleased! Around three months or so later, you start to nitpick about certain things—the navigation is not quite as cool as XYZ Company's, for example. By about six months after the new design, those nitpicks are now starting to really bug you—the background image looks a little dated, and the font choice isn't feeling right anymore. By the time nine months has passed, you start thinking that if you have to look at your site for one more second, you will throw up because you are so sick of that new design. The problem is, you spent a lot of money and the design process took six months, so you don't want to go through all of that again—budgets, delays, consensus building, and other matters to address. Then about a year after the new design, something really great happens: You get a new Marketing VP who has the brilliant idea to rebrand the company with new colors, a new logo, tweaked value proposition (verticals this time), and while we are at it, let's get rid of that tired website. Great news—you can start over! Rinse—repeat.
The reality is that most websites look perfectly fine. The colors are fine, the menus are fine, the logo is fine, the pictures are fine, and so on. You personally do not like the look of your website because you look at it so often. Your visitors, on the other hand, are not particularly interested in your site's colors or the type of menus used. Your visitors are looking for information—something interesting they can read and learn about—which is why it makes sense to focus on getting people to consume web content through other means such as e-mail, RSS, and social media sites.
Save the thousands of dollars and countless hours you were going to spend on the redesign of your site and do three things. First, add some collaborative functionality to your site, like a blog (which is easy to update on a regular basis). Second, start creating lots of compelling content people will want to consume (see following chapters on how to do this). Third, start focusing on where the real action is: Google, industry blogs, and social media sites.
Table 2.1 is a summary of the way we want you to start rethinking the current concept of your website.
Before you begin making the changes we outline in the remainder of this book, take some time to measure where you currently stand in order to track your progress and results as you implement changes.
The first thing you should measure is the number of subscribers you have. By subscribers, we mean people who subscribe to your RSS feed and e-mail list. Also include the number of people who are following you on social media sites, including fans of your Facebook page, members of your LinkedIn Group, and followers on Twitter. If you do not have any subscribers, fans, or followers, don't worry—we discuss how to get them in a later chapter. The more people following/subscribing to you, the broader your reach across your marketplace. This is exceptionally important, particularly in the case where you have some new product innovations that you want to tell your marketplace about or get feedback on.
In addition, you should be measuring the number of links back to your website from other websites and the number of organic keywords that are producing traffic to your site on Google. You can get this information from web analytics software and online tools that measure inbound links, such as grader.com.
The combination of your reach through blog subscribers, social media followers, links into your site, and traffic-producing keywords is the size of your city. You want to make it as easy as possible for people who may be your prospective customers to find your company online. In other words, you want to move from the Wellesley, Massachusetts, model to the New York City model.
Inbound in Action: 37Signals
Based in Chicago, 37Signals builds project management tools, such as the popular Basecamp product, that companies can use to better manage projects. In their early days, the company started the Signal vs. Noise blog—and because they wrote compelling content about their industry, readers spread their articles via e-mail and virally through social media, and they were often linked to by other bloggers. Due to this viral activity, 37Signal's blog articles appeared often in Google's search results. Ultimately, the company's blog became among the top 0.1 percent of blogs on the web and helped the company pull in over 3 million users.
If you visit 37Signals today, their website looks nothing like a traditional online brochureware site. Instead, it's an online hub for their industry and includes the company's original industry blog (Signal vs. Noise), a product blog, a job board, and information about their products and services. One interesting thing about this site is that the look and feel, colors, menus, and other features haven't changed much since we first noticed them five years ago.
Like 37Signals, you must begin thinking about your web presence in terms of an interactive, constantly changing hub for your entire industry—a hub that also happens to sell a project management product. 37Signals is successful because they leverage the disruptive power of the web to tip the balance of power in their industry from much larger players, such as Microsoft.
While looking at the 37Signals site for inspiration, ask yourself what you can learn. For example, what other types of information, other than product specs, would be useful to your marketplace? What types of information and tools can you put on your site that will pull in more people from your market?
To Do
Calculate your reach.
Go to grader.com (free) to find out the number of links to your site.
Stop obsessing over the way your site looks and feels.
Don't spend a bunch of money on a redesign. Start by adding a blog e-mail subscription and comments. Consider making your blog your home page the way Barack Obama does.
