YOU NEED SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING TO RAMP YOUR WEBSITE AND ONLINE BUSINESS

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Don’t listen to all those people out there who say you don’t need a site, that’s wrong, unless of course you plan on spending a fortune on Google Adwords PPC and the like - which is a good plan, eventually, but only once you’ve lad the groundwork. Otherwise this is one way you will go broke very quickly.

You need website marketing so that traffic will come to you and then you can sell products that are relevant on your own terms. Not only that but you want your readers to come back for more and become a trusted brand. If you just send them away to someone else site you may get paid but this will only be once. Why not spend Google adwords dollars on getting people to your site rather than to others?

So now you understand that you need a site. So with that in mind I’m giving you some information that I read recently about how people look at sites, and in this instance I am speaking literally, i.e How our eyes track on a website.

Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with website design. One study, Eyetrack III, published a summary of their eye tracking results for news sites.

In no particular order, here are 12 interesting findings from the study.

1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures. This will be surprising for some people including me since the trend has been to add photos and graphics specifically to draw the eye. .

The participants in this study looked at headlines, especially in the upper left of the page, before they looked at photos when they landed on a page. This means you can’t rely on eye candy to make up for poor headlines.

2. People scan the first couple words of a headline. Long headlines can work but this study shows that people scan the first few words before deciding whether to continue reading.

This means your headlines should be front-loaded with the most interesting and provocative words. It’s also an argument for getting your keywords up front in headlines.

3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines. When presented with a list of headlines or links, people will scan down the left side, looking at the first couple words, to find something they’re interested in. They don’t necessarily read each line beginning to end.

The implication is the same as before. Get your most mind catching words up front. As I read the summary I realised that I behaved the same way and this therefor makes sense.

4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second. The summary indicates online readers are grazers. They move fast and nibble. If you want to hook them into spending time reading about something, you have to catch their attention very, very fast.

No nonsense. No meandering copy. No “throat clearing” to fill space. You have to get to the point instantly. Twitter is helping us become much better at this, after all 140 characters is not a lot of space to get your point across.

5. Smaller type promotes closer reading. This makes sense because smaller type is harder to read. So, to read it, you have to really focus. Larger type promotes scanning rather than reading.

Be careful with this one. The researchers are not suggesting you shrink your web type to make it barely legible. In my opinion you need to decide what you want to occur and so avoid making your type too big if you want close reading and avoid making it too small if you want to communicate rapidly.

6. Navigation at the top of the page works best. This interesting from a design point of view since many sites now use side navigation. I avoid it myself as one SEO expert told me that this is where Google starts their robots and so you want your keywords in this section. Most of my sites have top navigation for this reason.

The point may be that anything at the top of a page will be seen immediately. And since top navigation must be simple because of space limits, top navigation is probably much simpler to use.

7. Short paragraphs encourage reading. No surprise here. Even in print this is true. Big blocks of type look imposing and difficult.

In writing for online marketing as in most ad writing, you have to forget normal paragraph development. Breaks should be logical, but they’re organized into a flow of ideas rather than distinct paragraphs.

8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership. Just to be clear, an intro paragraph is a content summary that appears after the headline and before the main text. It’s common in some news writing.

9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best. For anyone familiar with “heat maps,” this make sense. The eye tends to start in the upper left of a page. So an ad, or anything else, in that area will be noticed.

This is another one you have to be wary of. Ad blindness tends to happen when people get used to seeing ads in a particular place. So even the prime upper left area won’t work so well if you always put ads there.

10. People notice ads placed close to popular content. Obviously. This mimics the well-known idea in the offline world where ads are placed anywhere eyeballs point.

This is why ads right over a urinal work. Men look straight ahead, usually at a blank wall 12 inches from their face when standing at a urinal, so any reading material there will get read.

11. People read text ads more than graphic ads. It makes sense if you consider that information is usually in the form of text. So people looking for information are looking for text, not pictures.

However, graphic design can be useful for conveying information that is difficult to communicate in pure text, such as how something looks, mathematical information, before and after comparisons, etc. Which leads us to the last tactic.

12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information. Reading relies on people having some understanding of the subject. The more familiar they are with the subject, the faster and easier reading is.

If you’re trying to describe a process, for example, a video as used in video marketing or illustration conveys this information better than text.