A Fixed, Unmoving Core: Why Your Home Page Belongs at the Center of Your Strategy

A Fixed, Unmoving Core: Why Your Home Page Belongs at the Center of Your Strategy

Check out this slick-looking, seriously informative piece from unbounce.com. It’s a one-click tutorial on what you need to be doing for a complete web marketing strategy. It could even be used as a circular to-do list.

At the center of it all is landing pages- your company’s web home, a site specifically commissioned for you that your company has total control over.

Why is your company’s web site at the center? Why isn’t social networking there, if it’s so popular?

Matt McGee, an expert in online marketing, points out a sobering fact: social networking, although it is important, shouldn’t be at the center of your strategy because of the fact that those technologies lie outside of your control. He gives the examples of AOL and Myspace: they were on top of the online world in the 1990’s and 2000’s, but they’re gone now.

“Facebook and Twitter could disappear a year from now. It doesn’t seem likely, but neither did the fall of AOL and MySpace.” -Matt McGee

He has some positive advice to give after this ominous prediction: make your own home page that you have control over. It will last as long as you need it to, a completely customizable, permanent nexus of your online strategy. No matter what other trends come and go, lighting up the flickering online landscape in their meteoric rises and falls, hyper text transfer protocol (http,) the technology your company’s private site is built on, is going nowhere.

Join us and Learn How to Market Your Nonprofit

Come to this Meetup on Tech & Fundraising Strategies for Nonprofits, February 28, hosted by the NYC Nonprofit Club!

Free Marketing From Your Email Signature

Here’s a nonprofit marketing tip from Nancy E. Schwartz at Getting Attention. The results are surprisingly powerful, even though it takes no resources. It’s also very speedy to put into place.

We do everything with email, so let’s use this ubiquitous medium to its full potential. Remember that your email has a built-in signature at the end. Every organization employee ought to create a signature line that includes their name, contact info, position and a URL to the organization’s web site. Here’s the format:

Name
Title
Organization Name

Web address

Phone
Fax

Email

An example:

David Wall
Information Technology Director
Hubert Foundation

http://www.hubertfoundation.org

Phone (555) 456-897
Fax (435) 555-7634

dwall@hubertfoundation.org

The traditional letter signature includes the street address, but Nancy E. Schwartz recommends we get rid of the street address and include the web address instead. You can also just simplify it to a few lines, and add a personal touch or a tagline that encourages the reader to click on the URL. Be sure that it fits in with the overall style of all of your organization’s external communications, since it is your modern-day calling card. Here’s a simplified example:

Jessica Sockington
Assistant Marketing Director

http://www.savingmoneysavinglives.org

“A penny saved is a life improved”

Look in your email program’s help feature with the keyword “signature” to find out how to implement this useful tool. Web-based email accounts and smart phones also have this available in the settings.
Once you do this, you’ll definitely notice more attention coming your way.