Website plan: How is your site working for you?

NEWS FLASH: Something exciting happened over the summer holiday break … I devised a website plan and got a new website!

I’m just putting the finishing touches on my new website for my personal brand Elizabeth Campbell – The Word Stylist.

I can’t wait to show it off to the world!

It was one of my goals over the Christmas break when I was supposed to be on holidays … and in keeping with the theme of goal and new year resolutions, I devised a list of goals I wanted the website to reach. Essential my website plan is that:

It needed to explain everything I did in an easy-to-read format.
The SEO needs to super hot!
It needs to grow my list.
It needs to get bums on seats for my workshops.
And, it needs to still be a wealth of information.
It’s got a big job to do for me this year.

But I worked with an incredible developer and we are now in the midst of getting it live!

So if this is one of our goals this year, can I give you a few pointers? Have a think about what you really want:

Do you want to increase traffic? By what number or percentage? Over how long? (eg: by 10 percent a year)
Do you want to increase the amount of time people stay on your website?
Do you want to increase sales from your site? By how much and over how long?
Do you want to increase newsletter opt-ins or memberships? By how much?

TIP: Take each of your general goals and make them measurable. By what number or percentage would you like to increase sales? Over what timeframe do you want to achieve these goals? Create specific goals.

Website plan: What are your page goals?

But which pages do you need? I’ll go into this in more detail in Part 2, but for now, let’s assume you’ll need most of the following pages:

Home
About
Products/Services
Portfolio
Testimonials
FAQs
Blog
Contact us

Now, using this page list as a guide, think about what you want each page to do. This is all part of the website plan. Every page on your website should have a purpose. So often I have clients who add pages just because that’s what everyone else in their industry is doing. Just because everyone else has a certain page on their website doesn’t mean that you should – every page must earn its place by having a clear purpose.

Consider the following questions for each page:

Do you want this page to inform or sell?
What do you want your reader to do when they land on this page? Which features or information will this page need so they can complete that action?
What are the benefits of this page to the reader?
What is your call to action?

For example, if you have a products/services page, its purpose might be to inform your visitors about your offering. The call to action could be contacting you, or requesting a quote (which means there needs to be a link or button pointing to your contact page, or even a quote request form on the page itself). The main benefit of this page for the reader could be that you clearly outline how you can solve the problem they’ve been struggling with through your product/service.

Think about how you will create all this beautiful content!

The first step in creating your content strategy is creating your content goals – check!

Now it’s time to figure out how to achieve those goals.

As with anything, whether it’s getting in shape, learning a new language or climbing a mountain, you achieve your goals by taking small, consistent steps in the right direction.

As far as your content writing goes, these small, consistent steps involve regularly producing content.

So think about the content you want to create:

How often will you write for each of these? (Once a day/week/month)
Who will write it? (You/a team member/outsource)
How long will you need to do this?
Are you working on a short-term campaign, or is this a long-term strategy? (Build it into your weekly workload)
Think about the small, consistent actions you can take to achieve your online content goals. This could be as simple as blogging once a month, to having a weekly blog plus daily social media posts and fortnightly articles you publish on other websites. Once you have an idea of what you’d like to do, set aside some time in your calendar to get it done (once a week or once a month usually works well). If you can’t make the time, consider hiring someone to help you with this.

TIP: Consistency is key. No matter how much content you commit to creating, it’s more important to create it on a regular basis, rather than having an active spurt here and there and a lull in between.

If you need a hand with your content writing, get in touch. I’m sure we can help you -simply email [email protected]