Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Today’s website is like yesterday’s business card. It supplies a first impression of your company and is the biggest deciding factor for prospects who might want to learn more about the goods and services that you have to sell.

Here’s a sobering statistic if you’re still wondering about a website’s ability to push fence sitters off the top in your direction in 2017. Research tells us 70 to 80% of people who buy products online research the company first through their website. While 96% of SMBs use social media as one of their marketing tools, not everyone understands the need to have a website as a solid foundation in place as the starting point for all your other marketing efforts to point back to.

In other words, good Internet marketing is about building your house with his many floors as you want, provided you have a solid base with the website so it doesn’t just sink into the sand....

Instead of worrying about the what ifs, wouldn't it be much easier to have a comprehensive website checklist to run down before every site launch? One you could use for enterprise websites, microsites, landing pages, and everything in between?

Well, you're in luck because I've put together the following list of 57 things to check before launching a website. It's the same list that our team uses at our digital agency, and it's a list you can copy, edit, and make your own based on the software you're using to launch and host your website. We've grouped items into seven categories: page content, design, functionality, SEO, analytics, security & backups, and compliance. Keep on reading to make sure you don't forget a thing before your next launch....

Every use of your website is a conversation started by a site visitor. Think about it: why do people come to your site or app?

If you read my review and article on this same page ("Forget About Content Management...") about moving away from content management systems to developing audience development systems, then this article explains more about how to do that. Yeah!

I really like the specific examples and concrete steps laid out in this post. It all makes sense to me!

Once again, while never mentioning storytelling per se, the article is all about using stories and story elements to generate conversations and engagement with customers/prospects. Like: converse with personal prounouns, invoke action using verbs, and write visually. Sounds like storytelling to me.

So go grab this article and its tips so you can continue developing audiences and engagement to build business success.

Review written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it ;