I briefly alluded to this in my last blog post, but sometime early last year, I launched a very simple website for my parents’ shoe repair store (www.moodyshoerepair.com). And when I say simple, it is *very* simple. All it has are a number of static pages with a few pictures and some blurbs pertaining to the store. You know the website is a simple one when the most complex part of the website is the CAPTCHA validation that exists in the ‘Contact Us’ page.
At any rate, here are some things I’ve done so far to maximize the benefits of this website:
1. I submitted the website’s URL to various websites that act as a gateway to other businesses–such as Yelp and Manta. I thought this would be a good idea since websites such as yelp.com holds information pertaining to a ton of other businesses. I see it as free advertisement.
2.Business cards: I ordered new business cards for cheap through Vistaprint and included the website URL in the card.
3. Google AdWords. I was offered a free trial for Google AdWords. I believe it was a $10 credit. It was my first experience with Google AdWords and it was a positive experience. I was basically given a slew of options that would help AdWords decide when to display the ad (like how you see random ads off to the side when you’re reading your emails in Gmail). I could decide on options such as keywords, locations of the end users, and types of devices (computers and/or mobile devices).
4. Google Analytics: I got Google Analytics set up for this website so I can track all sorts of useful information–such as how many people visit the website, how they get to the site (i.e. via search engines, by typing in the site’s URL, or via other websites), which pages people visit, how long they stay on various pages, etc.
5. Pingdom: I got Pingdom setup for this website. Pingdom is basically a website monitoring service that sends out alerts when the sites it’s monitoring go down. Being that a website is only useful if it is actually visible to the world, this was a no-brainer. Very nice is the fact that they have a free edition of the tool. I got it set up so that it texts me if moodyshoerepair.com goes down. Pingdom has definitely saved my butt a few times.
6. Facebook: Although I thought it was silly, I still went ahead and created a Facebook page for it. I bugged some of my friends to see if they would become a “fan” of Moody Shoe Repair. 22 fans and counting. Wonderful.
Well, this pretty much sums up everything I’ve done to maximize the site. It’s been almost a year since the site has gone up and all I can say at this point is that the site is most definitely being underutilized. I know it’s being underutilized because of the information that Google Analytics tells me. I know it’s being underutilized because of the (low) number of questions I receive via the website’s contact form. In order to better reap the benefits of the website, I know that I need to put up some more information that both potential & present customers would find useful–information that tells customers how much it actually costs to get various types of items repaired.
I’ve thought about implementing a customer-login section in the website whereby customers can login and check the statuses of their repairs and view their repair/order history. However, I decided not to pursue it (at least for now) since I didn’t think that was going to be very helpful in generating new traffic to the website.
Also, I’ve thought about creating a blog for the business as well as a Twitter page. Again, I decided not to because I question how many customers who frequent the store (or any shoe repair for that matter) would be the kinds of folks who check out blogs and tweet. I may be wrong here and might be underestimating the tech-savviness of the customers. I’ll need to do some more research on that.
If you’ve had similar experiences before with trying to cash in on the benefits of a business website, I’d love to hear from you. Are there things you’ve implemented that have helped you reap the benefits of your (or your client’s) website?