I've decided to step out of my Designer shoes and step into my Salesman shoes to write my top 10 list of features I would expect to find on a designer's website who is serious about making money and taking full advantage of a potential client's visit to his/her website.

1) Blog - I have beaten the "get a blog" topic to death at this point and refuse to bore you with it. For my new readers you can find more on blogging here and here.

2) Quote Request Form - An important thing to remember, if nothing else, is to give the client multiple ways to contact you. A quote request form might be a more convenient way for a client to present their request, outside of your email or contact form.

3) Phone Number - We are so afraid of a telephone call or sharing this information with people. Remember, you are a businessman, not a movie star. Sharing your contact information should be as necessary as the air you breathe. The funny thing about putting your telephone number on your site is that your clients may never use it. They might prefer to contact you through your contact forms or email. You are simply telling your clients hey, "I'm accessible" if you ever need to talk.

4) Avatar Photo - Have a picture of yourself on your website. No one cares what you look like, unless you're Gisele Bundchen, of course. Your clients only care that there is a human being behind that beautifully created website you took months to develop. Give your clients an opportunity to get to know you.

5) Bio-Design history-Schools-Awards - Your about me page should be pretty elaborate. Talk about everything. Your long term goals, your relevant child hood experiences. Give them a nice creative history of who you are and how you've become. Of course everything you talk about is related to the bigger picture of why they should choose you for their next big project.

For design companies, you will obviously have to adjust your about us page accordingly. You can talk about your mission, your brand, what you stand for, what kind of pro bona projects or community contributions you've done. Etc, etc. Work on appealing to the softer side of your clients; you might find you'll be able to connect with them on other aspects of their lives.

6) Testimonials - This is a no brainer but had to be included because it's pretty important. Clients want to know that you are capable of producing products or services that warrants a satisfied customer who is willing to tell their story. This can be added to your about me page or placed alongside specific projects.

7) Case Study (Your design process) - A case study is a project you've done, one that you are really proud of and the client has been very successful and happy as a result. Take the time to go through the design process, detailing every step and taking your potential clients through your entire process, right up to the live project/website, including the actual client's testimonial and contact information if possible. (use images, videos and illustration to keep your potential clients engaged)

8) Your Social Networking Sites - In your contact me section make sure to list all your social networking places. Clients may prefer to connect with you on LinkedIn or Twitter rather than on your website. Meet your clients where they want to meet, not where you want to meet.

9) Your Customer Service Policy - Have this information easily accessible on your website. Let your potential clients know what kind of business you are, and what they can expect if they are going to do business with you.

10) Declare Your Expertise - What do I mean by this? Everyone has one or two or even three things that they are exceptionally good at doing... This is especially true in the creative industry. Let your clients know what area(s) of design you are an expert, "Yes, I'm a Flash Genius... " Let's face it, you can't be everything to everyone, unless you're Google. Why not be everything to a few selected people that will continue to come back and refer people to you because you are exceptional at what you do.

11) IM (BONUS) - This is a great way for clients to reach you immediately if they have a quick question that can't wait. Give them the option to instant message (IM) you. Take every chance to connect with your potential clients. A simple IM can get you hired.

Remember, with all the options to choose from when selecting a designer of design company, your clients are looking for a perfect match, they are looking to weed you out as quickly as possible. Don't let them!

What are some of the techniques or features you've used on your website that have led to solidifying new clients ?

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Your Blog Articles Are Your Design Company's Assets. They Must Be Protected At All Cost.

Last week I received a Google Alert for my domain name styleapple.com. I use Google Alerts to follow my brand online. Great tool to use to get updates on keywords, people, products.... Need I say it... competitors... you know the important stuff.

Anyway Google Alerts usually gives you a summary of the content and selected keyword with a direct link to the site that published the content. I was expecting to find a simple link referencing the article back to my website. Instead I found my entire blog post on their website, graphs, pictures and all. here

All my referral links vanished. Except for a link on the very far left corner of the page hidden amidst advertising with the word LINK on it. As I'm scrolling down the page the very next article was also mine , here. So naturally I got concerned.  I decided to write a quick email to the web host or contact information I saw on the website:

-----------------------------------------------------
From: Calvin Cox
Date: Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 8:55 PM
Subject: Please Remove My Blog Content From Your Website.
To: visualtoo@gmail.com
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
Thank you.
--
Calvin Cox
Styleapple, Inc
calvin@styleapple.com
www.styleapple.com
Create & Promote Your Own Design Portfolio Website In Minutes.
| Our Goal Is Simple, To Build Your Design Company's Brand By Effectively
Utilizing Social Media & Inbound Marketing Techniques |
------------------------------------------------------

The following day another Google Alert showed up with 2 more articles hijacked from my blog. So I sent another email including all links to the stolen articles on their blog with a little bit more edge to it. You know " this is illegal" and yes I twittered it as well, I had to blow off some steam, @calvincox. I've included the follow-up email below

----------------------------------------------

From: Calvin Cox
Date: Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 12:01 PM
Subject: PLEASE REMOVE MY CONTENT FROM YOUR SITE
To: visualtoo@gmail.com
To whom it may concern.
Please remove my content from your site. It is illegal to copy entire
content of someone's blog.
This is my second email request:
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
http://www.oxadox.com/article/menhealth/2009-02...
--
Calvin Cox
Styleapple, Inc
calvin@styleapple.com
www.styleapple.com
Create & Promote Your Own Design Portfolio Website In Minutes.
| Our Goal Is Simple, To Build Your Design Company's Brand By Effectively
Utilizing Social Media & Inbound Marketing Techniques |
--------------------------------------------

The next day I got an email from my brother with a link to a blog post on how to report duplicate content to Google, which I found to be a valuable piece of information. Now I'm sure you are all SEO experts by now, Google can and will penalize you for having duplicate content on the web, regardless if you put it there or someone else did. It's your job to police and protect your intellectual property.

The next morning Pro Blogger posted an insightful article from Devoracles with specifics on dealing with this sort of thing, titled: How to Defend your Blogs Copyright. I'm not a big fan of writing about these kinds of problems unless I believe I can provide the solution to deal with it .

So after reading all this stuff, I was ready to go to battle one more day. Before I placed my armor on, I decided to check one more time on the blog articles stolen from me earlier in the week. And to my happy surprise my posts were removed from their site. Woohoo.

Remember: Your ‘content is king' and should be protected at all cost. Every article you write about your business and your industry you are investing in your advertising and inbound marketing campaign. Don't let anyone steal your money.

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You know you're good when you can create a viral YouTube video about inbound marketing while using inbound marketing techniques to effectively promote your inbound marketing business. Simply Genius, Kudos to the guys at Hubspot. 

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I would like to make a quick point of reference to one of my past sales experience.  I remember back in the day when I was a sales executive  at New York Health and Racquet Club , a New York City based health club.  Our monthly sales quota was to sell about 60 gym memberships per month at a premium price of $2100/yr.   Imagine having to talk to someone you just met and tell them to write a check for $2100 after 10 minutes.  Very daunting task to say the least, but still obviously doable - we met our quota quite often.  But  there is something not being said here. 

You see we had two types of clients coming into our club:  The first was the client who just walk off the street and into the club and the other was a client who knew of our service, quality and reputation (And this was mainly due to the pre-sales efforts incorporated in our sales cycle)    So I'm sure you can guest which client or customers became members more often... The ones with the background of our company of course.  No surprises there.  So if that is indeed the case offline.  Why are we not taking the same initiatives online?  Especially now that more and more of our business income is coming from our website and online efforts.  There are many things  that can assist in the pre-sales process,  including the obvious ones, email campaigns, newsletters  and company design blogs; but what about your website itself? 

Don't get me wrong,  I'm a big fan of blogging to share just this kind of information to your clients; as a matter of fact  Jacob Cass, a well respected graphic designer wrote an article on why logo design does not cost $5.00 in which he outlines his thought process when designing and also justifies his price even before the client hires him. BUT....  How many clients are going to be able to read that article before hiring:  How about those who simply come to your website and is looking for  some direct information regarding your products and services and is not a regular reader or a subscriber to your design blog.  This is why I recommend having a website that truly engages and provide a sense of  understanding and guidance keeping front and center the thought process your customers.

A great example of this is Studio Grafik, A Logo Design and Branding company with a website  that is very simple but has a very effective presentation of their products and service.   They give a quick summary of the client job request,  some thoughts on how they approached the design (1) , showed the completed logo and presented their branding efforts in different mediums, i.e.  Print (2) and website layout (3) and breaks down the logo to its bare mininum to expand on their thought process (4)  This kind of detailed outline of projects engages  and provide a sense of security to the client that this company know their business, even before any phone call or email has been sent.  This is a great pre-sales technique.   I've layout  the flow of Studio Grafik presentation of  one of their clients,  Sublime//ip  for your reference.

What are some of the techniques you've used in your design business for engaging your clients/customers on your website?

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What does it mean to maximize your site visitors? Well... the idea is to squeeze out as many visitors as ‘legally' possible out of the search engines, the pay per click campaigns, your banner ads, your email blasts, word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn contacts, the blogosphere, PR Newswire... I think you get the picture!  You want a successful launch, one that will leave you with many new contacts, subscribers, and/or sales.

So how many visitors qualifies as a successful site launch? Well, your industry should give you a good indication of a reasonable goal that you can expect to see at launch time. Look at your top competitor's visitor traffic numbers and deduce what would be a reasonable number of visitors you can expect taking into consideration your launch budget and human resources (launching a website can be both time consuming and budget intensive) Setting a new site visitor goal will help you focus your resources in the right places in order to attain that lofty figure in your head of 100,000 new visitors, WINK WINK. 

We are currently in the process of launching a really cool website called Styleapple - a design portfolio and job site for designers (can't wait) and wanted to really maximize the amount of site visitors when we launch in September. So I've outlined the steps that we are currently taking coupled with the advice of a few industry leaders to hopefully guarantee a successful launch, and so far... so good. The first thing you should know about a website launch is that there are three stages: THE PRE-LAUNCH , THE ACTUAL LAUNCH AND THE POST-LAUNCH .

THE PRE-LAUNCH

The pre-launch period should start about 6 to 8 months prior to the actual launch of your website (this number may vary depending on who you talk to) This will allow for plenty of time to build your company's brand image in the public eye for them to become excited about your product or service. Think of the prelaunch as a concert or blockbuster movie promotion; giving your audience a trailer or preview of what's to come. Your trailer arsenal should include a company blog, social media and networking presence (Twitter, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn, Facebook) a prelaunch press release, opt-in email list (Emails should be sent out three weeks to a month prior to launch and the day of the launch at minimum) and directory subscriptions.  These steps are vital to a successful website launch for this primary reason: Would you consider going to a movie opening or a concert you knew nothing about?

THE LAUNCH

It's a good idea to launch early Monday or Tuesday morning. This way you take full advantage of the day and week of your website launch. Get on your social media bullhorn to tell the World Wide Web that you're open for business. "WhooHoo, my new website launched today: http://www.styleapple.com" could be an appropriate Twitter title on that Monday morning. Use Stumble Upon and Facebook to post the news. Write a blog post on your launch day, I would recommend that the post be your press release. There are many additional marketing techniques you can use depending on your business and industry...exhaust them all.

THE POST-LAUNCH

This is when you employ your website analytics (Note: You should be using your analytics throughout the entire launch process to track how well your pre-launch efforts are working) There are many free alternative that will provide site visitors information, Google Analytics is one of the more popular; Hubspot, an Internet Marketing Company has an awesome paid service that will help you with most aspects of your prelaunch and post launch preparation, I would definitely recommend them. Send an email to thank your opt-in email list as well as your new contacts thanking them for making your company's website launch a success. This email should include a link to your website and relevant product or service information for them to review. This email marketing technique will drive the no-shows to your website the following day because they want to see what all the fuss was about. Pay close attention to where your visitors came from and how long they stayed by analyzing page views, referral traffic and keyword information. Beef up or enhance the pages or products they found most interesting to maximize conversion, and modify page content or layout of the ones that weren't as effective. Pay very close attention to any complaints and or suggestions made by your visitors (implementing a comment or feedback page on your website will prove to be a vital tool for a new business startup) Remember the customer is always right; even on the internet.

AND THE WINNER IS... 

A company's website is successfully launched when they come away with lots of new visitors who became contacts , subscribers and/or customers. So when you're thinking of the layout of your website consider the layout and navigation that will optimize your contact forms and email subscriptions , product placements and buy now buttons. Your goal more than anything else is to get as many contacts as possible. If your clients don't bite the first time you will have a second chance to woo them.

I'm sure there are additional techniques that I may not have covered in this article. Comment on some additional techniques you've used when launching your website so we can discuss

Article Update:

I decided to include my Alexa traffic numbers to answer a question asked on my comments:  This graph shows 3 months of blogging and social media networking for Branded Designers.  The yellow line represents our blog and the other two are blogs and or websites that are similar in content and within a year or two of launching.

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 Now, I can start my weekend. Have a great weekend people.

Calvin, Cheers.

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1. Create Cheeky Blog Titles

Blog titles are just as important as the blog content itself "at Hubspot, we probably spend close to half our time thinking about a cheeky blog title and half our time actually writing the article." Says Brian Halligan of Hubspot, an internet marketing company after reading my post on "How to write a Blog Title That Shows Up On DIGGs Front Page".

2. Write Great Content That Invites Discussion

Sometimes I find myself lecturing to my readers, which is not my intention, but when it does happen it tends to close the door for an open discussion about the topic of interest. Try writing with a relative instead of an absolute point of view.

3. Create Keyword Rich Content.

Keyword rich content could be tricky sometimes because keyword rich content is only for search engine purposes. It might become a little annoying for your readers if you repeat a keyword over and over in your content. I find writing your content with your readers interest first and then go back and replace or add your keywords only where appropriate works very well.

4. Make Sure Their Content Is Complete With Referral Links

Links to other relevant resources is very important. As much as I would like to think that I have the best content on the web - I don't. I read amazing articles by other bloggers all the time that addresses a point of view that does wonders as a great reference for my readers. Linking to those kinds of articles helps to complete the readers experience.

5. Create Internal Links To Other Articles & Tips Within Their Blog

Linking to other parts of your blog (internal linking) helps you with your PageRank and helps to build page authority. It's a big misconception that internal links doesn't matter.... they do.

6. Leaves Constructive Comments On Fellow Bloggers Articles

Leaving constructive comments sparks a conversation on fellow bloggers articles help to promote the discussion. The more interesting your comments the more visitors will want to know who you are. Most blogs have a reply URL that will provide a link to your website.

7. Track Readership Subscriptions Closely To Find Out How To Improve And Grow Their Subscriptions

Your readership is the most important asset a blogger has. If your readership is at a standstill, you should work on finding out why your traffic is not increasing, if your articles are engaging enough and how to improve your subscriptions.

8. Track Web Traffic And Analyze When Are The Best Times to Post Articles For Maximum Impact

This is something that I'm working on myself, most bloggers have an international following; you should find out where most of your readership is coming from and post your blogs usually in the mornings of that demographic. For your email subscribers, this will give them a chance first thing in the morning to read your new post. And besides most people take the first few hour in the morning to get the scoop of what's new and exciting for the day.

9. Reply To Comments Made On Their Own Articles.

When someone makes a comment on your articles, its good practice to reply to their comments; this helps to promote the discussion and engage other readers.

10. Continues to Research Articles And Topics That Will Engage Their Subscribers.

your goal as a blogger is to continue to build a level of trust with your readers, giving them new and exciting things to read and learn so than they will want to come back to your website.

11. Post Their Articles On Popular Social Bookmark Sites Like Digg And Designfloat.com

This is a great way to get new visitors to your site. If your articles are interesting enough, readers will vote to put your articles on the front page of these sites which increases your exposure and send lots of new visitors to your blog or website.

12. Surf the Internet; Sometimes Randomly

I've found lots of cool sites and gadgets on the internet that I've use as the subject of my blog posts and have written fairly successful articles around them, one such article is "How Much is Your Website Or Blog Really Worth? Your Numbers May Surprise You."

13. Add Their Blog to Selected Design And Blog Directories

Placing your blogs in directories can also help drive readers to your blog. Be careful and check out the directories to make sure they are not spammy and are respected; some directories you can try are of course the Yahoo directory, technorati, dexigner, and and blog catalog.

14. Write With Their Readers In Mind

Write with the intentions of truly providing your readers with quality stuff. No one wants to spend time reading articles with little substance.

15. Get Involve With Social Media Sites

Get on Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook - These sites can be a great resource and will help improve your readership if you take the time to learn the culture and become a part of it. My post on "Twitter is the Most Coolest and Stupidest Thing Ever" may give you some insight.

I've learned that blogging is both an art and a science; if you learn and do it correctly it can be very rewarding.

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