Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

If you have your own website, ask your friend for a testimonial and get him or her to sign off giving you permission to use their words to market yourself.

Next, consider getting yourself (and your portfolio) on O-desk, on E-lance, and on Rentacoder.

After that, complete your profile on LinkedIn and be sure to use appropriate keywords and key phrases that explain who you are, what you do, who you've done it for, and with what result.

While all this is going on, seek out any and all local business directories and organizations. Find someone you know who's a member of your local Chamber of Trade and ask if you could accompany them as a guest to a meeting or two (as allowed by whatever the rules are on bringing guests).

At these events, have business cards (double sided) that outline benefit-rich reasons for hiring you.

Rather than preparing an elevator speech about yourself, ask people about their needs. Ask people what they do and who they do it for. Then ask them how you can connect them to more of their ideal clients. Then, once you've got this information, find someone to match up to that person's business needs and follow up with an introduction.

By doing this frequently and consistently—by helping other people get what they want, those people will her more inclined to refer new people to you.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your new gig.

I presume you want a critique of the website you built, right?

I have a few quick reactions:

1. First, it's not clear how people are going to find the site, so I can't tell how they will react when they get there. Is this what they will have been prepared to see?

2. Second, the reverse type (white on gray) is not nearly as easy to read as black-on-white. A lot of people won't struggle with the double-whammy of long lines of type (i.e., many eye fixations per line) and reverse type. And some of the pages have an awful lot of copy for easy reading.

3. Graphically, the site is very boring. No pictures of humans, lots of gray, and a single static inanimate image that has predominantly subdued earth-tones.

4. No obvious call to action. What do you want someone to DO when they get to the page?

As for marketing the site, you may want to learn about Adwords and see if that will work for this kind of product.

Your website is likely an island on the Internet - there are no roads leading to it, and therefore no way for people to find it. As Michael has suggested, using AdWords (for example) will allow you to pay to get traffic. Long term, you'll want to improve your organic search results - so that people searching for your product can easily find it. Consider looking at the 20 pages of Bentonite on Amazon to learn how others are promoting their product, and then figuring out the best way to position yours. Even if it's an identical product, how you promote it and to whom can be very different.