If you are an Internet marketer then you would probably know that Internet marketers spend thousands of dollars every month leveraging SEO to get found online but what many of these people fail to understand is that when it comes to Internet marketing, generating traffic is one thing and getting that traffic to stay on a website is another. Did you know that educational websites have, on average, a 60% bounce rate? This means that even if you generate a lot of traffic, if your website is not designed for optimum usability, a large majority of web traffic entering your website will leave without navigating to any of the other pages. If your website has a high bounce rate, you can improve your website’s user experience by following 6 simple guidelines which we will see by the end of this post.

1. A great first impression is important

What a visitor to your website sees when he or she first lands on your homepage or one of your webpages can make or break his opinion of you and what you have to offer. You see, any person looking for information, products or services online will use one of the search engines to conduct their search and if you did your SEO well then chances are, the person will be redirected to your website. When a person visits your website for the first time, they are most probably thinking to themselves is this website trustworthy? Does it look professional? Is the website credible? Will I find what I need here? Am I in the right place? Should I just look elsewhere?

For a great first impression, when you design your website, you need to ask yourself questions. Admittedly, the design of a website is not be the most important factor that makes to breaks a person’s Internet marketing strategy. For a start, you might have the best website ever but if you never get found online, then there is really no point. On the other hand, if your SEO strategy is perfect but your website’s design leaves a lot to be desired, your bounce rate will be high. For successful Internet marketing, you need to find that elusive balance between website design and usability and SEO.

To make your website look and feel great, you need to use the right colors to draw attention to select elements on it. Don’t try to make everything jump out and avoid chaotic mixtures of colors. You might also want to avoid anything unnecessary. Using Flash animations because they look cool is the wrong strategy. In most cases, it’s best not to use animated backgrounds or background music. Only use media and animations to help support your content and information. To enhance your website’s usability, create a clear navigation structure for it and organize page elements in a grid fashion. Topographically, make sure your website is legible. Use fonts, font sizes, and font colors that are easy to read. In terms of content, to make sure you say all the right things on your homepage and on the different pages of your website and make sure you answer the question we saw visitors to a website ask themselves when they first land on aw website including:

-Is this website credible?

-Is this website trustworthy?

-Am I in the right place?

-Will I find what I need here?

-Is the website easy to use?

-Why should I stay here?

2. Maintain consistency

When it comes to website design, it is best to keep elements on a site fairly consistent from one page to another. Elements include colors, sizes, layout, and placement of those elements. Your site needs to have a good flow from page to page. This means that colors should be kept the same as well as fonts and layout structure. Navigation should remain in the same location of your layout throughout your website. For layout structure, typically three page layouts exist for most websites: one for the homepage, one for the content pages and one for the form pages.

3. Use the right images

Images can be a powerful element to any website but you need to use them wisely. For example, stock images are seen everywhere because they are easily accessible and inexpensive but are they good to use? According to MarketingExperiments, real imagery on a website out-performs stock photos by 95%. This means that for a website design that looks and feels great, you need to resist the temptation to use meaningless photos. Every image on your website should transmit a subconscious message to your audience.

4. You need a solid navigation system

Perhaps one of the biggest factors that contributes to the user experience of a website is its navigation system. Your navigation system should support all search preferences. If people can’t find what they’re looking for, they will give up and leave. To create a solid navigation structure:

- Keep the structure of your primary navigation simple.

- Include navigation in the footer of your site.

- Include a search box near the top of your site so visitors can search by keywords.

- Don’t offer too many navigation options on a page.

- It’s best to keep your navigation to no more than three levels deep.

- Include links within your page copy, and make it clear where those links lead to.

- Make it easy for your visitors.

5. Limit the use of Flash animation

Flash animation can grab someone’s attention but it can also distract people from staying on your site. It is also important to note here that increasingly people use their smart phones to conduct searches online and not only do the mobile applications lack the capability to view Flash animation, but many people also don’t want to be bothered with unexpected noises and animations.

6. Make your website accessible

In order to gain significant traffic, your site needs to be compatible with multiple browsers and devices. With the increasing popularity of the smart phones and tablet devices, increasingly people are surfing the Internet on their mobile devices so make sure to get some of those views by allowing everyone to view your site, no matter what kind of system they run or which browser they use.

According to the former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, currently, the average cost of developing a mobile app is $6,453 and that cost can go up to as much as $150,000 depending on the complexity of the app you want for your business. Irrespective of where you fall on that wide and vast spectrum, the money and resources you put to conceptualizing and developing a great mobile app for your business can all go to waste if you don’t orchestrate a proper launch for it. In December 2011, the 1 millionth mobile app was launched in the market. At the end of 2010, there were only 300,000 mobile apps in the app stores. That’s a 233% increase in just 12 months. Put quite simply, that’s a lot of clutter in the mobile app stores.

For the purposes of this post, we are going to assume that you’ve already created a great mobile app that will yield active users and right now all you are interested in is making sure people know about your mobile app when it is released. Luckily, using inbound marketing, you can pull off a successful mobile app launch.

The 10 steps to a successful mobile app launch

1. Define success

If you’re aiming for a successful mobile app launch, you need to define some measurable goals around your launch. In general, measuring success around your active install rate is a good idea. Alternatively, you can also choose to measure the number of ratings you receive, your average rating in the app marketplace, and if you’re selling your app, revenue generated from your app. Free mobile apps have a higher active install rate during the first month, usually around 50%, after which it levels off around 30%.

2. Use your social media accounts

Before launching your app in the app marketplace, pre-launch it in social media and use your accounts to generate interest like Android Photobooth did on Twitter. You can use your social media accounts to showcase the app while it is in development and solicit feedback and ideas from your future users. When it comes to pre-launching your app on the social media platforms, do not discount the newer social networks like Pinterest. The highly visual social network is the ideal place to show other mobile app developers your product in its final stages. They may just have some great suggestions for some UI/UX improvements.

3. Create content around your app

Spend some time and resources creating content that clearly explains how to use your mobile app. This content should include blog posts, press releases, social media content, website copy, and email marketing copy. You can pre-schedule all of this to go live on your launch day.

4. Record a demo

For the launch of your mobile app, create a video that shows how to use your mobile app. You can easily do this with a user-friendly program like Camtasia that allows screen capture and voiceover recording. A short video demo is one of the easiest ways to display the value of your mobile app.

5. Launch a dedicated site or page

To get the launch of your mobile app right, you can create a dedicated website for your app or simply create a page for your mobile app on your website. The latter is what most companies who launch a mobile app choose to do. To complement your social media efforts, you should launch these pages even if your app hasn’t yet hit the market.

6. Choose an app store

Despite what many Internet marketers tend to think, it is highly recommended that you choose just one app store in which to launch your mobile app at first. This should help you get the highest concentration of users and ratings possible. In addition to that, in the first few weeks after the launch of your app, chances are, you’ll be making lots of changes and improvements to your app and having your app in just one store will help you streamline those updates as they roll out.

7. Pitch your app

For the launch of your mobile app, pitch your story to tech, mobile, and industry journalists and bloggers. Be armed with the video demo you recorded, and be prepared to give them a free download of your app so they can get to know the interface and your app’s capabilities. You might also want to make yourself readily available to them to answer any of their questions. Consider them as another test group for your app who can find bugs and make UX/UI recommendations.

8. Set up paid advertising

Because of the freshness update of the Google algorithm, you might gain some organic search tractions at your mobile app launch. Complement that search presence with some paid advertising during launch week. You can also set up paid, targeted ads on Facebook to drive users to your Facebook fan page, where they’ll be greeted with your welcome screen encouraging them to sign up for your mobile app.

9. Put download links for your app everywhere

This step is for when you’re ready to go live with your app. Put links to download your mobile app on your blog, your website’s home page, in your marketing emails, and on your social media accounts. You can even add a mobile tab to your Facebook page.

10. Monitor feedback and encourage reviews for your app

Finally, monitor peoples’ feedback about your app and as far as you can, strongly encourage users to post reviews. It’s not just that the apps with the best reviews get the most visibility and downloads; this process helps you identify bugs you wouldn’t otherwise know about allowing you to make quick changes to improve the user experience and make your app stickier.

When it comes to social media marketing, things don’t always work as we assume they do. For instance, if you consider the above question then the true answer is that you are much better off having thousands of followers who never buy from you as compared to keeping your reach restrained to only those people who have qualified themselves as serious buyers and your loyal clients. In social media, the audience you manage to reach directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared. The more people you manage to reach, the more you increase your business’ ability to get found and generate leads. Having a large number of followers can also extend your online footprint as a thought leader. Put quite simply, when it comes to the world of the Internet, social reach shouldn’t be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing such that more followers is always better.

Why you need thousands of followers online even though only a small percentage of them are likely to ever make any purchases from you

1. More followers = Access to more followers’ followers.

This concept is simple. There is nothing magical about it and there is definitely nothing hard to understand so it’s really surprising how many inbound Internet markets just fail to understand the overall importance of reach. Think about it. If every one of your followers has his or her own followers and let’s say that one of your followers has as little as 50 followers assuming we are talking about an average individual. If that person shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets, you will have exposure to 50 additional people who were not initially directly following you. All you need to understand and consider here is that when it comes to social media, there is always a small but yet distinct window of opportunity and possibility that a follower shares your content with his or her friends and followers so even if that original follower of yours was never really a client, it does not necessarily mean that none of his followers will be interested in what you have to offer. Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool. You only need to know what to do with it.

2. Influencers sometimes have, oh well, influence

If you have an overwhelming social media presence with thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, chances are, you collected a few influencers on the way. While influencers may follow but never buy from you, these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships or to other influencers, bloggers and experts in your industry. Sometimes they can even put in a good word for you with investors and although that follower never contributed any direct revenue to your business, the inbound links you generated through the person are absolutely valuable.

3. Followers who don’t personally buy from you can refer you to other people

Indirect exposure to your followers’ personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. For instance, taking a hypothetical example here, Fargood, one of your Facebook fans may never have purchased your industrial vacuum cleaner for his tiny real estate office but if one day, his buddy, landlord Lenny, happens to need a new one for the apartment buildings he owns, Facebook fan Fargood might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn’t the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Fargood is.

4. Social shares impact SEO.

Believe it or not, the impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when ranking your content, which means that the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.

Hypothetically speaking, let’s assume you own this professional dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of a dog’s coat in between visits to the groomer. Let’s also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you do and that his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+ as well. Your competitor will have quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in the search engines. Because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking content, you need to keep encouraging social shares for your content and the more followers and Facebook fans you have, the better.

5. Your followers might surprise you

If did your research well and you spent a lot of time developing your buyer personas then most probably you have a pretty solid grasp on who your potential customers are. That’s all great but if you have been narrow-minded about who exactly might be interested to buy from you then you could miss out on a completely different set of people who might also choose to buy your products and services for one reason or another. To make sure you don’t lose out on business, you need to make sure you get to different groups of people before your competitors do. Building up your social media presence could expose your brand and products to groups of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you have to offer.

The lesson to learn

In summary, just because your followers may not always buy from you does not mean that they are useless. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the Internet Marketers who understand this know that continuing to build their reach online is a smart social media tactic. If building reach isn’t something you’re consciously doing at the moment then you may want to start working on attracting more fans and followers for your social media accounts.