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Create a Visually Pleasing Design: Capture your audience by having a professional looking design. Use a color scheme that flows naturally and is not harsh on the eyes. Use appealing icons, buttons, calls to actions, and graphics to help draw the audience to important parts of your site.
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Create a User Friendly Site Structure: Create a consistent layout throughout the site. Always have your main navigation, secondary navigation, content, and graphics laid out in a similar manner throughout the site so that your users are not searching for what they are looking for. Take the time to create a well thought out navigation that will lead users to where they want to go in 1 or 2 clicks. For sites that have lots of content, use breadcrumb trails to allow users to go back to earlier pages easily.
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Add A Blog: Start posting content regularly on your site. Write posts that will benefit your target audience and help build brand value and trust. Allow people to comment on your blog and entice people to participate in your blog discussions.
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Add Video: Video can be used in so many ways that can be engaging to the user. It can be a way to showcase your product or service, learn about the company, meet the employees, get testimonials from customers, create training videos, how to videos, or video blogs.
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Give Something Away….For Free: Who doesn’t like something for free. Offering something like a free whitepaper, free starter kit, free tool, free reference guide, free screensaver or wallpaper…it can pay off in the long run.
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Have Compelling Calls To Actions: Make sure your calls to actions are clear and concise. Lead your user to where you want them to go. If you have new offer on a product, make it painfully easy to find that offer.
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Use Images and Photos: Do not just have a website full of text. Break up your content with high quality images and photos.
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Create Free Web Based Tools: Create tools that are accessible from your website. Create a tool that will be useful to your market and can be used regularly.
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Add Live Chat Functionality: When people are reading about your products or services, they may have questions. If the user is new to your site, they may not want to fill out a contact us form or call you right away. Having a live chat function allows that user to informally ask their questions, without having to give any of their information away.
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Keep Your Site Current: Give your users a reason to keep coming back. Post frequent updates to your site for anything worth mentioning.
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Make Your Site Entertaining: Think of creative ways to make your site fun and engaging. Create a contest, conduct a poll, create a quiz, conduct a survey, add downloads, make a flash element, develop an online game, use animation.
- Allow User Generated Content: Let people talk and interact with each other on your site. Create a social community where people can talk about your products/services, give feedback and advice, and communicate with others who are passionate about your brand. This can be a great way to conduct market research without having to do anything. Let your customers tell you what is wrong with the product, how it can improve, what products they wish you sold, etc…
