Other Content
We’ve covered the kind of content virtually every business site should have, no matter what size the company. In this chapter, we’ll give you more items to consider for your site content. Use our lists as a frame of reference; you’ll want to think about the reference materials, resources, and utilities that are idiosyncratic to your business and industry. If you have other suggestions for content or any other ideas or questions to ponder, please send them along to share them with us via suggestions@ WebForging.com or submit them at the site. Visit the WebForging web- site for planned regular updates to the content of this book, or subscribe to our WebForging email newsletter.
Free Information/Samples
If you want to attract viewers, offer a free product sample, a free white paper, a free quotation, etc. One of our clients, Dehumidifier Corporation of America www.DehumidifierCorp.com does an excellent job of this with a “Free Analysis” offer on their homepage and in their drop-down site navigation.
Be careful of what you offer for free on your site and the way you make the offer. There are many “free stuff” websites out there that specialize in gleaning free offers from other websites. One of our clients got listed on a “freebie” site and got inundated with requests from, seemingly, every- one outside of their target business audience. One way to help avoid being gleaned by a freebie site is to make the offer on your website in the form of a graphic that can’t be parsed by the automated ‘bots’ that freebie sites send out (versus making the offer easy to glean and parse text).
It is a good idea to offer “free” information or samples in return for something of value: not dollars, rather contact information. If your free information or sample has value, you should be able to get contact information, and perhaps some idea of the needs of the requester. Offer a free subscription to your newsletter, or at least ask for permission to send follow-up correspondence about this free sample, or offer notices regarding future samples to the prospect.
You might require a quick survey to be completed to qualify for a free sample or white paper (surveys are discussed in more detail later in this chapter).