What Does Blogging Cost For You

If you believe having a blog is a waste of time, effort and energy then you are probably not seeing their true value or don’t want to understand why they are an important asset for a business.

Many, who appreciate blogs, realize this innovative and creative writing technique can be beneficial for any website, when done correctly. Done correctly, huh?

An effective blog will be written to showcase experiences, suggestions, information, links to other websites for more information, tips, stories, facts and many other things relevant to your business or industry. Notice how I never mentioned, selling something. Selling something, anything, within a blog can cost your business trust and credibility. People aren’t going to spend time trying to be sold while reading a blog. Try this tactic and the little “X” in the upper corner becomes that much more attractive and, uh oh, your reader just clicked it!

Now that you have a basic understanding of how blogs work, let’s take a closer look at three important related costs of incorporating a blog into your website.

• Money: Some blogs take money to build into the website, while others are free. Linking to your free blog site from your website is a great way to reduce costs and build your credibility, but what if a blog could help you make money? When you have a free blog site, it can’t be crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders, meaning less content being read by the spiders. Now, if you have a built in blog, everything you write can be crawled and indexed. How nice is that? More content for the spiders to absorb, helping your website rank higher within the search engines. Think of a blog as a financial and reputation building investment.

• Time: I’ve spent 15 minutes writing this particular blog up to this word. What have these last 15 minutes consisted of? A couple minutes spent reading other blogs, to help with the creative stream of points to be made, while the other time has been spent thinking and typing. Depending on the topic, blogs can soak up a good chunk of time researching, reading and trying to be creative, whereas some may take a couple minutes explaining an experience fresh in your mind. Try to make a habit of writing a blog once a week and if you think you’re really good, try two a week. It’s not brain surgery, 18 minutes.

• Credibility: As stated above, blogs can be very good or very bad. Good blogs help readers understand past experiences of the writer or the company. Good blogs answer questions the reader may have regarding a specific subject. Good blogs direct readers to read more from another relevant website with built in links. Good blogs help with the branding of your business. Bad blogs try to sell you a service, a product, an idea etc… Bad blogs are poorly written and irrelevant. Bad blogs assist the reader with leaving your website faster. Be real, be informative and have fun.

I’ve heard over and over again how blogs aren’t for every business, I disagree. Blogs can simply be nothing more than experiences or stories and every business has them. Do research. Read blogs. Exercise your writing skills. What will your blog cost?

The Revive Team / 919.802.0424 / Contact Us Today!

Create More Customer Conversion

With good web design, visitors should be able to quickly understand what they are seeing on a webpage without thinking about it and have easy access to all aspects of the site within 10-12 seconds.

A good web development company should follow the 12 second rule. Within 12 seconds of a unique site visitor (someone visiting the website for the first time) seeing your website, they should be able to absorb who you are and what you do. This exercise of attracting people right from the start along with simple, easy to understand navigation and engaging web content entices those visitors to ultimately contact our clients if there is a fit to do business.

Simplicity should act as a guide in all Web-based communication. Consider the following tips:

• Pick one navigation scheme, and use it throughout the site
• Make sure you think of your website visitors when writing you textual content
• Consider how people are interacting with the site… What information are they looking for most frequently? Can they find it easily?
• Keep navigation items to a minimum
• Always have a "Call to Action" within your text to help your site visitors read through your site
• Get your site visitors to contact YOU

In all electronic communications, from your website to email newsletters, the reader should immediately recognize the company, who they are, what they do and why. Make sure your business logo is large enough to see/read, but not overwhelming to the page layout. Display it prominently at the top of each webpage and newsletters. Offer quick links to the most important parts of your website. If you specialize in "ABC", provide a nicely designed button to present itself on each page so your potential customers can access "ABC" with ease.

If no one in your office has web design experience, consider hiring an experienced design firm before jumping into a large project. The Revive Team encourages “shopping around” for the best possible fit. Understand your objectives for the website and do your research on all companies you meet with. Are they giving you sound advice? There goal for you should be for the website they design to generate as much business as possible for you to see a health ROI. Convert more customers, increase profits and have a great day!

The Revive Team / 919.802.0424 / Contact Us Today!

Your First Impression, Make It Count

When others don’t personally know you or your company, how your website looks can say a lot about your business to prospective clients, existing clients and anyone else who may see the work. It’s important to make the extra effort to educate yourself about recent Web 2.0 trends when designing or re-designing you website in order to have it look its very best.

While designing a custom website, think of the page design as the framework or skeleton and the textual content and images as the finishing layers within that framework. Design decisions about the layout, typography and web copy are critical to the website’s success.

Consider the following guidelines for creating a clean, simple website:

• Webpage Layout
• Allow ample space between elements
• Follow the guidelines for good typography
• Use headings, subheadings and bullets to separate information
• Minimize the use of clip art
• Use 72 dpi, well-cropped photographs
• Use color for a specific purpose — to direct attention, create emphasis, or differentiate textual content

Each element on a webpage should function as part of the whole rather than a separate entity. This can be achieved by grouping elements or by creating obvious similarities of line, shape, or color. The end result of a balanced layout is equilibrium among the various elements that make up each webpage.

Typography & Web Copy:

• Use clean and easy to read fonts
• Keep the copy clean, simple and to the point
• Make text BOLD if you want to draw more attention
• As with webpage layouts, spacing should be evenly distributed
• White text on a Black layout is harder to read then Black text on a White layout
• Choose a main textual color and stay consistent through the website

The most important design consideration is that your website be easy to read and easy to interpret. Following good typographic and copywriting principles will increase the readability of any website. Remember, people don’t read one word at a time. Instead, they scan lines of text, reading three or four words at a glance. The type you choose should make it easy for the eye to move smoothly through the text.

Good typography and copywriting also helps organize your website by signaling levels of contentand hierarchy of information. And it helps convey meaning by telling your reader which words are most important.

For more information about typography and web copywriting, please visit the services offered by The Revive Team. We want you to stay informed!

The Revive Team / 919.802.0424 / Contact Us Today!

Taglines, Slogans and Content, OH MY!

Are you able to name the company behind such popular taglines as “Just Do It”, “The Ultimate Driving Machine”, “The Breakfast of Champions”, “Tastes Great, Less Filling” and “Don’t Leave Home Without It”?

If you didn’t have to think twice about whose taglines these are, you watch way too much television OR pay too close attention to the commercials! I’m joking. These taglines have been around for years and years and have never changed.

As stated, they’ve been almost forced into the homes across the U.S. and sometimes the World in their advertising campaigns. This is why we can name the companies who branded these taglines, as well as, many other taglines we hear daily.

Oh, the answers to the taglines mentioned above are Nike, BMW, Wheaties, Miller Lite and American Express respectively. Taglines create brand recognition, a first impression. People will remember a tag phrase, but have no idea about the company name. They are unique, yet simple. They are one of the first steps in building a brand. A good tagline is your best and cheapest form of advertising. If your company name, logo and tagline are all working in harmony, they become an ad themselves.

Taglines go anywhere and everywhere your logo goes; t-shirts, business cards, websites, radio ads, TV ads, etc… Consultants from The Revive Team stress that whatever logo and tagline you may use, keep it consistent throughout any and all marketing collateral. Keep it short. Keep it simple.

Not every business needs a tagline, but if you decide to go that route, do your homework, brainstorm, get mentally involved and ask for outside opinions. Be prepared to take positive and negative feedback and willing to revise many times. Make your tagline work for you!

The Revive Team is currently working in close collaboration with a business that needed to re-brand themselves starting with their logo, their website and their marketing collateral. When dealing with their logo, both parties toyed around with each other’s concepts for a catchy tagline to accommodate the logo. They came to a conclusion and you will be seeing their new and improved website in the next couple of weeks.

The Revive Team / 919.802.0424 / Contact Us Today!