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There are some important features that all websites should include. When building your own website it’s a good idea to create a checklist of things that must be created in order to plan a proper site. Add the following to your list:

1. Contact Information

This is the most basic of design elements you need to have on your website but so many people miss it. You may think that because people are surfing around from website to website that they don’t bother to contact people and just order whatever they want and go on their merry way.

The fact is that people want to do business with other people and if they can’t tell you’re a real person from your website, and find a way to contact you through that site, then they’ll just go to another site where they can contact the owner.

This is important even if you don’t have a product or service that people will typically want to call you about. As I mentioned, your potential customers want to know that you are real and that they CAN pick up the phone and call or send you an email if need be, even if they don’t want to at that moment.

Another issue with website contact information is that people often hide it on an obscure page where no one can find it.

Try this test:

Visit your site and start counting. Pretend you are a first time visitor who doesn’t know where your contact information is and quickly scan around the site for it. Or better yet, have a friend or family member who doesn’t already know where it is do this for you. How long does it take to find it? If it takes you more then 10 seconds thats way too long!

2. Easy to Read Content

One of my biggest pet peeves is going to a website I WANT to read but the content is just so hard to read that I have to leave and be done with it.

Make sure your website content is easy to read.

Best ways to do this:
*Easy to read font, like Verdana, Arial or Georgia for the web
*Font size
*Bullet points!
*Headlines
*Black text on a white background is always easiest on the eyes
*Add in some images

3. Mailing List

Many people are afraid to start their mailing list for fear that they have nothing important enough to send that list. One of the biggest fears is that they will have to come up with great, original content on a weekly basis.

Even if you’re not ready to start a full HTML weekly newsletter lists there is no time like the present to start collecting email addresses from your site visitors.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the majority of the visitors to your site will come and go, never to return. If you don’t have a method to capture those visitors and offer them more information or products, then you’re missing out on sales – period.

4. Good Navigation

Can your website visitors find what they want, when they want it? Good website navigation is very important, so don’t overlook this.

You may need to do testing to find out what navigation works best for your visitors, but it will be worth it.

Starting out with a simple navigation menu is a good idea. You don’t have to link everything off your main page. Only have the main categories on your index page and then link to the other pages from within that category.

5. Copyright

While having a copyright notice at the bottom of each page on your site might not prevent dishonest people from swiping your content, putting it up is something you should do to deter as many people as possible.

Some people believe if you don’t have that copyright then your content is free for the taking. Others just don’t realize that you can’t just copy and paste whole pages from other people’s sites without them becoming pretty upset that you took their content (and rightly so!).

You can also grab yourself a copyright image that says ‘this page protected by Copyscape from Copyscape.com to try to deter a little more.

It would be a shame to spend many hours and dollars on a website that isn’t very use-able. Make sure whoever designs your website puts just as much effort into use-ability as they do into the creative design. A pretty site won’t get you anywhere if no one uses it!

If you want to save yourself a lot of time and money then join me as I teach you in this online video, webinar and email coaching program everything you need to know about creating quality user friendly websites and blogs with WordPress.

I am proud to say that I am ready. My Facebook page is set up for the timeline format and all my customers who I manage social media for have been transferred to the timeline format.

Here is what you need to do to meet the new format

1. Have a cover photo at the top of the page that is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels height.
2. Have a picture at the top of your page that is 180 pixels wide.
3. For each of your tab pages have an image that describes the tab that is 111 pixels wide by 74 pixels wide.
4. Arrange the order of your tabs.
5. Take an orientation around your page to understand the new layout and see how your posts appear.
6. Make sure to read Facebook’s Page Guidelines. You will see important information such as your cover photo cannot have information that goes in the About section such as your URL, telephone number, etc.

As a virtual assistant and internet marketing specialist who partners with internet marketers to create free eBooks, social media campaigns and blog postings, here are three key tips that we follow to ensure our online success:

1. Be Creative. If you are selling widgets, make those widgets stand out! Nobody wants to buy a widget that is simply “easy to use” and “better than the rest”. People respond to innovation, to creativity, to things that appear to be exciting and new… even if they are not. Don’t waste your time with sales driven messaging. Instead, spend your time carefully crafting creative marketing that will grab the attention of others. Once you have their attention, going viral is the next logical step.

2. Be Different. There’s nothing worse than more of the same. You and your business have to stand out in the crowd. And even if your product is one in a million, make that one appear different and most importantly, the best. How? Add value to your offerings by incentivizing your products. Make customers feel appreciated and deliver on your promises. And above all, stay on top of the competition. You can’t do it better than them if you don’t know what they are doing and how they are doing it. Find out what message your competitors are sending and differentiate yourself with a stronger message, more strategic campaign and overall better offering.

3. Be Consistent. Without proper management, the attempt to go viral with any campaign can quickly turn sour. Consistency is key with any marketing, but when attempting to go viral, you will need to stay on top of every single message you put out there… and do so often. Viral marketing takes a lot of time and quality management. Prepare yourself to make this part of your daily routine, and invest your time as you would invest your capital into any advertising projects. While viral marketing is essentially “free”, you will need to spend valuable time and effort in order to make it work for you.

Whether you are a veteran of the viral marketing world or new to this approach, remember that it’s about what you put in that really matters. The more you manage all aspects of your online marketing, from tweeting to status updates, to feeds and daily blog posts, your message can only go viral if you are putting it out there on a regular basis.

And don’t simply plaster your social media accounts with sales copy and unattractive pitches. As we’ve discussed, be creative. What would interest you? What would you want to share with your friends, family and colleagues? What would you encourage others to take a look at?

As an internet marketer you need to take the time to respond to others, to craft creative messages and pay attention to what others are saying. Get feedback from your virtual assistant and social media specialist on your ideas. In order to become part of the conversation, you have to engage in it and that is what viral marketing is all about.

Viral marketing is a phenomenon.

Viral marketing, while driven by strategy and well-planned messaging, is only successful when its audience is captivated. A marketing campaign will only go “viral” if people like it and ultimately, share it with others. Therefore, they have the power. Not the marketer.

Online business owners and internet marketers alike understand the important role viral marketing plays in the success of their businesses today. Social media networks have become just as much about business as they are about pleasure. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other key players are now joining us in the boardroom and in sales meetings. Blogs are replacing news media in many ways, and we must adapt our marketing approach to become players in this game.

From reaching the masses with special deals, invitations for sale events and enticing customers to purchase new products, viral marketing is a lucrative business tool, approach and strategy all wrapped in to one.

Say, for example, you are an internet marketer. You and your virtual assistant can create and sell valuable sales tools, including E-books, reports, videos and webinars. Not only should you have a list to which you apply your email marketing campaign, but in addition, you can share your products by posting them on Facebook, tweeting about them on Twitter or uploading lessons to YouTube. The possibilities are endless.

With a little bit of creativity and a true understanding of your target market, viral marketing has the ability to skyrocket your business to new heights. Not only should you consider the favor of your current customer base, but approach your viral marketing campaign in such a way that encourages – and makes them want to – share your business with others. You could offer free products for every ten people your customers share your link with. The more you give incentives, the more likely people are to share with others.

Think about it, if you were your own customer, what would entice you to share your products? Would it be quality customer service? Great deals and monthly specials? What grabs your attention? Start there and see what works. The other great thing about viral marketing is, if one approach isn’t working, you lose nothing by switching gears. Just be careful to settle in to a consistent message, no matter what your approach might be. You don’t want to run the risk of turning people off.

So, get together with your virtual assistant and / or social media specialist and engage in your viral marketing campaign. Be social on social networks, share others information and they in turn, will share yours.  Viral marketing is a give and take and the more you give, the more you will get. There is an unspoken set of expectations that accompany viral marketing, and the most important of all is to respect those you are marketing to. If you do, they will recognize that and most likely help you on your way to going viral.

WordPress has an abundance of FREE plug-ins to help you boost your results and traffic. Here are three WordPress SEO plug-ins to consider.

1. All in One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/  is one of the most popular SEO plug-ins and has more than 30,000 downloads. A comprehensive solution, it covers the basics and lets you set page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions automatically.

Here are just some of the features and functions:

*  Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
*  Generates META tags automatically
*  Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
*  For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
*  For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
*  You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

2. Google Positioner

Google Positioner, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-google-seo-positioner/, actually tells you which keywords are getting searched for on your blog. This is a great analytics tool because it’ll help you hone in on the most popular and useful keywords for your readers. Thus enabling you to focus on what they are searching for. This plug-in coupled with Google Analytics empowers you to have all the information you need to make strategic business decisions.

3.  SEO Smart Links

Smart Links, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/, automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. More than 100,000 downloads, this is a highly rated plug-in.  Your internal linking structure is one of the key elements search engines look for when analyzing and ranking your website. Manually creating these internal links takes hours of your valuable time. SEO Smart Links does it automatically.

These amazing plug-ins and many more are why many website builders choose WordPress. When trying to get to the top of the search engine results, it’s smart to use every tool available to you.

Want some more FREE SEO tips? Get my FREE eBook 10 Things Your Virtual Assistant Must Do For Your Website To Be Found Online.

Want something additional for your SEO. For only $19.99 get Breakout SEO – “Powerful SEO Strategies You Can Use Straight Away To Easily Attract Organic Search Engine Traffic!”

Content marketing

One definition of content marketing is: a technique of making and distributing valuable and relevant content to bring in a much defined target audience with the over all objective being the creation of sales. Basically this is a way to reaching out to your customers and potential customers in a way specifically designed to attract them to you and keep them coming back.

Content marketing is all done without overtly trying to sell a product; it is intended to educate and inform the customers. With typical marketing, the goal is to make a sale and the product or service is the main point of the approach. Content marketing is very different from this approach and has proven to be very effective.

The idea around content marketing is to deliver consistent and useful information to the customer. In return, they will reward the company with their business and, over time, their loyalty to the brand. This form of marketing creates a bond between the customer and the company. This bond is a very hard one to break and results in ongoing business over time and a loyal customer.

Traditional marketing is becoming less and less useful as customers are able to skip commercials or change the channel on the TV. Ads in papers and billboards are not interactive and provide no real help to the customer. Pop-ups on the Internet are another way advertisers try to market their products but this can be ineffective as more and more people use their pop-up blocking tools on their browsers to avoid these invasive marketing tactics.

Content marketing breaks the mold completely and as odd as it may seem, the customer is the one who searches out the information they need. Not only do they remember where they found what they needed, they remember who provided the useful information as well -and this is where the marketing comes in.

Potential customers will buy from a company they trust and feel has the same interests as they do. This is why providing helpful advice and information is so very important to this marketing strategy. Most of the time, the people reading information on a web page don’t realize they are being marketed to as they read the content.

Recent studies have shown 70-80% of people who were surveyed, felt more comfortable buying something from a company they trust. Content marketing builds trust, because the customer begins to look forward to your next content installment and may make decisions based on the information given.

Want some ideas to put content marketing in place? Try it with social media. The next time you create your tweets for Twitter, try the 80-20 rule. 80% of your tweets should be non promotional – just free tips and ideas. The other 20% can be promotional.

Social Media – Many virtual assistants are social media specialists. In fact, VA Classroom has a social media certification program specifically designed for virtual assistants to work with small business owners. A virtual assistant who specializes in social media can schedule your Twitter tweets and Facebook posts in HootSuite (3 times a day, 4 times, etc.), grow your Facebook likes, add followers for you on Twitter, design your Facebook landing page and so much more!

WordPress Blog Maintenance – Need someone to schedule your blog posts into WordPress? A Virtual assistant can paste them in to WordPress, insert your pictures and add good font colors to make the posts more visually appealing. A virtual assistant who knows WordPress SEO will work with the WordPress SEO Plugin to give your posts a meta title, meta description and meta keywords.

Customer Service — By installing a ticking system for your clients to ask questions and get assistance and then giving your VA the information to sign in, he or she can answer most of the client concerns and questions on your behalf sending on only the most serious issues to you. Give your VA the power to give refunds when needed, and keep track of the most asked questions in a FAQ that your VA can point to when answering the questions. If you’re not ready for a ticketing system you can instead, give your VA access to your customer service emails. She can answer them for you, and pass on the serious ones to you to deal with personally.

Document Preparation -- Whether editing, formatting, proofreading or actually creating the entire document, many VAs can do these tasks expertly. You can send your documents by voice, or you can send over rough drafts with bullet points that you want to cover, however you do it, there is no reason why a VA with basic secretarial skills cannot handle most document preparation. This can be done via email, or by using collaboration tools such as Google Docs, Drop Box, or a project management system such as Central Desktop.

Bookkeeping – Whether you hire an accounting professional or  you assign your VA to  bookkeeper duties entering data into a spreadsheet or an online system like QuickBooks online, or Outright.com your VA can take these tasks off your hand. Simply scan receipts, checks, and expenditures and income, put into your Dropbox or send by email and let your VA do the rest. If you hire a professional bookkeeper or accountant they can even prepare your financial documents for you.

Article Marketing and Search Engine Optimization — If you  are marketing your business online you’re likely engaging in Article Marketing. Your ghostwriter can send over approved articles straight to your VA who can then post them to the article marketing directories for you. Using Dropbox, a content management system or email works great for these tasks. You should provide your VA with your accounts and password information in order to post these articles in your name.

Administrative Tasks — This is what virtual assistants are known for and includes a variety of tasks such as managing your calendar, appointments, contacts, arranging travel meetings, data entry, research and more depending on what technology you’ve invested in and the needs of your business.

Just think, instead of spending 10 to 20 hours a week doing these tasks that do not earn money for your business, you can assign them to a VA which will give you that much more time to do the tasks in your business that are money makers instead. While all of these tasks are necessarily to keep your business running well, for you to keep doing them are simply time wasters. See a large return on investment by outsourcing these tasks to an experienced virtual assistant.

Since you define your experience on the site and set your own goals, you basically want to choose the activities, applications, groups, and networks that will help enhance this experience.

Here are some ideas for using the site for social networking:

• Inbox. You can send messages to other users and accept messages from your friends.

• Groups. Joining and participating in groups is a great way to meet people.

• Friends. Once you find someone you have something in common with, you can add them as a friend. Once they accept, you can do things like sharing photos, inviting them to participate in groups, and encouraging them to add certain applications.

• Applications.There are a lot of different applications on the site. Each of them helps the user engage in social networking. You can play games, send the applications to each other, take quizzes, etc.

• Share. The ultimate way to enjoy the site and use it for social networking is to share things with each other. This goes for applications, videos, and photos. You can also invite them to join groups, and use the site to take a look at the groups your friends are interested in.

• News Feeds. This is another important social element of the site. It is through the feeds where you can see what your friends are up to. For example, if a friend added a certain application, you have the ability to check out what they added and decide if adding it is a good thing for you to do.

Those are just a few of the examples. The site has so many resources that it’s up to you to figure out how to use them for social networking. Just make sure you abide by the Terms of Use and conduct yourself in an ethical way while using the site.

A lot of people get in trouble for not using Facebook as ethically as they could. In fact, people who are part of social networking sites throughout the world continually abuse the privilege of being part of the site and end up using tactics that are less than ethical.

These are called black hat tactics, and they could result in your profile being banned. For lasting results, don’t use black hat techniques or anything related to misdirection.

On the internet, some people will use dubious tactics such as optimizing a site for a keyword that is really popular, but doesn’t even relate to the niche. Facebook has its own version of that.

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Generating blogger traffic to your blog requires you to exercise a little effort but thankfully modern technology has made the task much easier and it is not that expensive either. Now by using WordPress blogs you can maintain your budget and at the same time you can practically double your customer base and sales overnight.

Here is a stepwise approach to attract customers to your blog within 24 hours of its creation:  

1) Use hosted WordPress as your blogging platform. You will like the features a WordPress blog gives you and it is very easy to use.

2) Next, use article marketing which is the easiest way to drive traffic your blog. Article marketing is nothing but the proper use of keywords in articles used for websites. Keywords are generally the most relevant tags used by an internet surfer. The targeted keywords should have a density of approximately once in every one hundred words or so. Remember, the search engines filter out the article if it uses keywords often and ignores it if uses too few of them. However, the uniqueness of articles should never be compromised. An easier method is to use an article submission site.

3) Use social bookmarking sites to bookmark your blog. It is a great way to gather traffic but do not overuse this method. Over use can lead to spamming of the sites. One of the most famous bookmarking sites is Digg.com. There are several other famous bookmarking sites such as YahooBuzz, Del.icio.us, Technorati.com, MyBlogLog, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Fark and Propeller etc.

4) Use social networking sites. These sites, unlike the social bookmarking sites, are used to connect to other people online and create friendships and social networks with people related to your niche. Some of the most diversified social networking sites are Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Groups, Classmates Online, Xanga and MSN Groups etc. Via these social networking sites you can promote your business even, if it is only marginally.

5) You can also use video marketing to publicize your blog by making videos related to your blog content and uploading them on sites such as YouTube, VideoEgg, DailyMotion, Eyespot, GoogleVideo, Blip and AOL etc. You can get good ranking on the search engines quickly after publishing, provided you maintain quality content.

You need to apply your plan in a systematic way. By incorporating these simple but effective and advanced traffic generating tools it is not difficult to drive targeted traffic to your site even within 24 hours of its creation. But whether you really make your sales incorporating these guidelines depends upon how you create the feel of your blog, its site layout, the provision of ease of navigation, quality content and the type of plugins being used to attract your bloggers to stay longer on the blog.

Hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can help you pass off various tasks to others so that you can concentrate on only the money makers in your business rather than tedious tasks that you don’t want to do but are still essential to a well run business such as bookkeeping, customer service, uploading information to your website, posting blog posts, article marketing and many, many other tasks. The great thing is that you can do all this without hiring a single employee, but rather instead you contract with an independent contractor that markets themselves as a Virtual Assistant.

Hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can help you take your business to the next level. It does not matter if you have a bricks and mortar business, or a solely online business, you can still hire a VA to do various tasks that either you find tedious, or that you don’t know how to do well. You can actually be holding yourself back from having a successful business if you don’t let go of some of these activities by assigning them to a VA.

When you hire a virtual assistant (VA) you only pay for the actual time spent on your tasks, not benefits, breaks, or extra taxes. In fact, everything you pay your VA is a deductible business expense, dollar for dollar.  You don’t even pay for training because a VA is an expert in his or her niche. VAs can be terrific resources regarding technology and business organization so take advantage of that fact by asking your VA for advice regarding various aspects of your business. You can only find out new information if you ask the right questions.

The very best reason why to hire a virtual assistant is the time savings and freedom that you will experience due to outsourcing some of your tasks to a VA. You will once again regain your nights for movies and family, your weekends for time with your spouse and your friends all without even one employee being on the payroll. Instead, you’ll have an assistant who will be conducting these tasks on your behalf who cares about your return on investment because if you’re successful they are successful.

As you see, hiring an experienced and dependable virtual assistant to help you run your business can pay off in many ways. You’ll have more time for family, or other money making activities, and if you play your cards right you’ll have one or more experts at your finger tips to help make your business more successful than you ever dreamed possible.