Quiet Rebel Writer

A potential customer or client visits your site. Will she be confused, or will she be converted?

For freelance writers, visitors that come to your site have questions. Same goes for contract IT consultants, or small businesses, or anyone seeking to sell themselves or a product. Visitors want to know the steps involved in using your business. They want to feel reassured that you’re the best for them. They want to know why you blow the rest of the competition away. And they want this bounty of information on their time and their schedule.

How can you make your website pleasing, potent and rife with possibility?

Make it Clear

If your message is buried, how can you expect potential clients and customers to find it? Many freelancers and companies get too caught up in presenting all their amazing features, along with their history and reputation. They don’t boil it down into information visitors will understand.

Think about your own buying behavior – don’t you want to know what’s in it for you? So do the people visiting your site. With writing that focuses on the benefits for readers, telling them how you will make their lives easier and infinitely better, you speak to them. You engender intimacy and a sense that you truly understand their unique needs and goals. That’s the kind of company people want to do business with.

Make it Easy

Cool design and pleasing graphics are limited. If visitors can’t find what they seek within a few clicks, you risk alienating them and losing their business.

The crucial part of making your website easy to understand and navigate is clear text. Is your copy reader-friendly? If you’re relying on jargon and $5-words, your readers may miss something important. The best marketing content relies on personal, features-driven, and conversational writing.

Ensure that the most important pages (the contact page, the order page, or the products pages) are easily accessible from the home page. This prevents clients and customers from getting bored or frustrated with the site, and clicking elsewhere. Also, craft content that clearly points visitors in the right direction. Anticipate their questions, and answer them in easy-to-find locations.

Make it Quick

Many websites are predicated on the assumption that bigger is better. More pages make it more professional and more effective, right? Nope. Most people usually aren’t looking to spend hours, or even multiple minutes, at a new site.

Pare your site down to the necessities, and think carefully about the value of each new addition. Reduce the amount of bells and whistles to get your site to fighting weight. Get rid of the flash intro, the slow-loading high-res photos, and the excessive links. By maintaining a lean and mean site, but one that contains all the necessary information potential customers seek, the site packs a punch in less time. Your message is consumed quickly and appropriately.

Make it Trustworthy

Visitors want reliability in a potential product or service. They want an instant impression of trustworthiness, and the website is often the first source of this impression. Make your design bold, but professional. Make your text powerful, but appropriately toned. Think long and hard about the customers you seek, and craft a site that exudes reliability in the ways they see it.

Make it Current

Your website is not a static piece of advertising that is sent out into the ether and never changed. Consider your website as ongoing communication with current and potential clients. Make it a priority to regularly update your site, and show visitors that you have.

Another part of keeping your site current? By making it top-of-mind and top-of-search. If your site is buried in the Google pages for your keywords, look into simple search-engine-optimization tips. This can be as simple as a few tweaks to the text, or some back-end design.

Simple stuff, right? Absolutely. But it often gets lost in the drive for more visitors and more customers. Keep these things in mind, and you’ll be a lean, mean, business-getting machine.