You have about 3.5 seconds to attract and capture the attention of a visitor to your website or blog. They will not scroll down, but only look at what is “above the fold”, what is on their screen. They will either be motivated by an image, bold content or compelling data to stay and respond to your call to action or they will hit the backspace button to return to their search screen. That is the hard cold facts of a keyword search.
When most business owners look to develop a web presence, website, or blog they seek out website development help to create an image and end up focusing on themselves and everything they have to offer a prospect or potential customer. Basically a sophisticated and sometimes very expensive yellow pages ad.
The “You Site”
This unfortunately represent s a vast majority or websites and web presence strategies. As one client said “that was what I thought I was suppose to do”. These websites are all about them, their company, their products, their services, their people, their expertise, their locations, their experience, their successes and their vision. Which basically means nothing to a potential prospect, unless they represent the less than 3% who are actually looking for a specific product or service at any one time and stumble upon the site.
Most visitors will spend 3.5 seconds to glance, glaze over and hit the back space button to continue the search for their need, not how wonderful some one else is.
I spent over an hour on a client site the other day, scrolling through pages of great looking graphic and content about how wonderful this company was, the team they had assembled, the success they had achieved and how they were a leader in their industry. In the end, I was more confused about what they offered in the way of products and services and found no easy way to even get more information if I had figured it out.
The site was a monument to them, whatever that actually was. Sound familiar?
The “Them Site”
This is the information overload site, that is chock full of keyword rich content, information and ideas that a Googler loves to come across. It has pages of great stuff based on a topic or subject. A major league brain dump of information on a subject, which was really the initial concept of the World Wide Web. The open sharing of knowledge and information.
For web purest, this is how the internet should be. I am all for this, if your goal is to share knowledge and information. The reality is that the majority of people who now post a website or blog on the internet are doing so to market a product or service and not be a friend to man. A business owner is not going to spend thousands of dollars developing a web presence and then just give all his ideas away.
The ironic thing is that in business there is little difference in the effectiveness to create a new customer in using the “You Site” or “Them Site” method of web presence development. Neither create a prospect, connection or customer.
The “Us Site”
This brings me to the “Us Site” which is based on market content to educate the searcher, establish need, potential gaps they need to fill and a “Call to Action” that will enable them to learn more, thus motivating them to stay beyond 3.5 seconds and take the next step to connect with you as a resource and solution.
You do not have to sell your self or overwhelm them with mostly useless data. All you need to do is get them to ask questions through the use of effective content and statistics that will help the prospect identify that they have a need and there is an opportunity to fill it though your site.
Once you capture their contact information, you can then identify the need, the pain it is causing and finally the product or solution that you have to satisfy the need and eliminate the pain. The key is not to lead with products and services your business offers. Educate to help prospects identify that they have need, guide them to quantify the pain and then show them how you can solve it.
So simple, but so complex!
Bill Sifflard - With over thirty years experience as an entrepreneur, an executive, an author and as a business consultant, Bill Sifflard has a long history of experience bringing innovation, efficiency and success to large and small businesses adapting to evolving markets.
As a premiere Sales and Marketing Innovator, Bill is changing how business integrates traditional marketing strategy with the power and potential of the internet utilizing his "Velocity for Success" matrix.
To learn more about Bill and Bssential Small Business Solutions you can visit http://www.bssentials.com and register for his Free eNewsletter or follow all of his blog posts by clicking on the RSS feed button above. 
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