“It’s hard to take the lug nuts off of your car with a pair of pliers.”
I like to say that to people that say any of the following to me:
“I can’t add blog posts or images to my website, I would have to call my web guy and have him do it.”
-OR-
“I can’t create online video, I can hardly get my camcorder to show video on my television, much less on my website!”
-OR-
“I can’t manage all of this social networking stuff! I don’t have time to add stuff to all of those different networks all the time.”
My father is a really handy guy around the house. His house is absolutely gorgeous because he is always making improvements to it. But he has often reminded me that you can do almost any project yourself if you have the right tool.
Your Website Platform
It starts here.
The “hub” of your businesses online presence should be your website/blog where you are consistently creating discoverable, shareable and interactive content.
See this post or download my free eBook (upper right corner of my blog) for more information on the Hub and Spokes model.
If you want to market your business on the Internet, your website platform is the most important tool.
Consult this do-it-yourself website audit — ask yourself these 5 tough questions about your website platform:
How Flexible Is Your Website Platform?
Flexibility is super critical.
Today, it is essential that you are adding to and editing your website. The days of “set it, and forget it” brochure websites are rapidly coming to a close.
A flexible website platform makes it easy to add and edit text, images, video and audio content.
Are you able to easily add and edit content on your website?
How Discoverable is your website platform?
The discoverability criteria is a disaster at its most extreme.
If your website is not discoverable, this means that search engines like Google cannot “see” your website. You can check whether Google can “see” your website by checking the Google index. If your website is not in the Google index, and it is more than 2 months old, you may have a major discoverability problem.
Some website platforms (unfortunately) create problems with discoverability. If you are getting zero traffic from search engines, this may be your issue.
The lesser side of this, but still extremely important, are the on-site SEO elements of your website. On-site SEO is the practice of bringing in more traffic from search engines like Google by making your site easier to crawl and categorize.
Does your website platform allow you to manipulate the basic SEO elements on your website?
The basic SEO elements are:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description (not for SEO but increasing clicks)
- URL
- Image Alt Attribute
By optimizing those tags with keywords, you make your site more discoverable. Google (and the others) will be able to categorize your website based on the clues that you give them through keywords in these elements.
How Shareable is Your Website?
Consumers love to share good stuff with their social networks. It used to be that we would see each other in the grocery store or at church and we would recommend things to each other. We still do that.
But the Internet makes it ridiculously easy to share with thousands of people across the world, that which we find valuable. Within seconds of seeing something I like, I can click a Facebook “Like” button, a “Retweet” button or any of thousands of other “buttons” that allow us to share great stuff.
The right website platform allows sharing.
How Interactive Is Your Website Platform?
Your customers and prospects expect that they will be able to interact with your business on the web.
This doesn’t mean one-way communication through a static website — it means two-way communication on your website/blog or through social networks. It also does not mean a web form that can be filled out by your customer.
We are talking about the ability to participate in a conversation with your business on your website.
The right website platform manages interactions between your customers/prospects and your business.
Does Your Website Platform Allow For Automation?
The Hub and Spokes model preaches that you need to build a resource on your “hub” — which is your website/blog — and then distribute that resourceful content through spokes.
These spokes include RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email marketing and others.
Your website should be able to automate the flow of this content from your hub to the spokes without you having to manually post it. In other words, if you right a new article on your blog — it should post to Facebook, Twitter… and so on.
The right website platform can communicate with these spokes automatically.
It’s hard to change the lug nuts on your car with a pair of pliers but I suppose it is possible. I suppose it is also possible to achieve all of the above criteria on most website platforms. However, if you want to succeed marketing your website online, I suggest using the right tool for the job.
What are your thoughts? What questions do you have about this do it yourself website audit?
Image courtesy of Indiamos
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