Signing up for a web award, an online contest, the “best web 2.0″, “start-up 2.0″ or best whatever is a rather simple step. Start with a search on Red Herring, Webware, Start-up 2.0, Internet awards, …

Read carefully what participating or winning the contest involves:
- Registration fee or free: money upfront
- Invitation to participate in the award ceremony at the other side of the world, which is out of pocket expenses.
- The awards expects you to make a local investment or hire local people for your company: should fit with your business.

There are three types of contest:
- Awards with sufficient applicants
- Awards requiring a registration fee
- Contests having little number of applicants

In case of sufficient applicants, you need to analyze what the organisers really want, in order to write the descriptions and statements to their liking, as your application needs to be approved and passing the first selection.

In case of registration fee: we don’t even consider as this is out of pocket money without any certain Return On Investment (ROI). Thus also no experience on these type of awards.

The third case with hardly any applicants is the easiest as your entry will be approved without any problem.

Once approved, your entry will get listed on a webpage with the company name or the product name and probably with the url linking to your website. That will give you at least one entry in Google.

When submitting you have to decide whether to disclose the company name or the application name and url. This makes a big difference: The best is to have your application or solution registered as this will bring direct visits, whereas with applying under your company name, the visitors need to go from your company website to the solution website.
Of course the easiest is where company name is also the product name.

Results:

Will this getting listed generate website visits? yes – but not many at this stage.
Mainly other participants, one or two organizers and a few the members of the jury will visit the website in order to find out about your solution and your company.
In most cases the members of the jury are Venture Capitalists, Investment Bankers, M&A firms or a well known website like Technorati looking for a potential interesting start-up.
Thus they do have an interest in your company and solution provided.

These lists of companies or solutions stay on the contest websites for a logn time and even months afterwards you will get clicks on the links.

If the organizer is well known, it is possible a blog writes about the list of companies and your company is mentioned amongst the others without any further explication. This will hardly generates any additional website visits. Moreover the type of visitors of these blogs is mostly non-business and thus no direct lead generation potential.

If the organizer is less well-known, there will be ferwer applications, but also less interest from visitors and probably not a single blogger mentioning the event.

Conclusion:

- For effort it takes, getting into a web competition is worth the time and will cost you nothing if you don’t pay for registration.
- Both popular and less popular awards will get you some links and clicks.
- If you are looking for funding, this is a good start as a web contest exposes your company to Venture Capitalists. Do expect to get some inquiries from Venture Capitalists and Investment bankers.

However don’t expect to get more leads or sales, as many are non-business visitors.

What are your experiences?

Did you manage to enter a web award?
What was the result?

The goal of an on-line business is not the selling of the product; the goal should be creating value for your website visitors and become a trusted adviser to your potential customer and customers.

The content of the website should help the visitors looking for information or a solution:

1) The website should provide interesting information, for advice, guidance or confirmation:
– Advice or guidance: if they had the information they wouldn’t be searching for.
– In case they have the information, they want to get confirmation.
The need of these people is information, thus give these people free information and they will start to trust your website and company. This will convert visitors to leads by coming back and then could become customers after lead nurturing.

2) The website can address the problem the visitor is facing
Thus first you need to identify problems, which can be solved by your solutions, services or products. These problems have to be described and the solution clearly explained.
This communication is harder than most other, as it is one direction only, whereas most communications are bi-directional: like face-to-face, telephone or Instant Messaging conversations. Even email can be considered as a two way communication, if the addressee replies. Bi-directional communications have the advantage one can adjust the message by the replies on the answers posed or by the questions from the potential buyer.

A website is more or less in the same (difficult) communication category as advertising: they both are one way communications.
However the difference is that advertising can be for only one specific target or segment of the market: thus the message is specific for this potential group. Whereas a website addresses to any visitor on your website, as they have found the website from many different sources, not always under your control. Thus many different problems need to be addressed within the website and the visitor needs to find his problem.

If you address the website visitors with appropriate problems they can recognize and provide a feasible solution, the website will bring returning visitors, who can become customers.
These solutions can even bring customer retention as they will re-visit the website on another occasion.

As a conclusion:

You need to address the information or solutions to the potential customer by thinking like the person who will be buying.
Not just one single transaction, but this will allow having repeat customers and could even generate a word of mouth by providing adequate interesting information.

This tool from Ezer checks you Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) rank in 37 different countries.
For any given domain or URL, this web service will lookup the position for the keywords entered.
The rank can be different form country to country.

Why is this interesting?
In just a few seconds you know how high your domain is positioned, or the chance of being found on Google.

According to SEOmoz click through rates for SERPS are estimated as follows:
– Position 1 receives 42.1% of the clicks
– Position 2 receives 11.9%
– Position 3 receives 8.5%
– Position 4 receives 6.1%
– Position 5 receives 4.9%
– Position 6 receives 4.1%
– Position 7 receives 3.4%
– Position 8 receives 3.0%
– Position 9 receives 2.8%
– Position 10 receives 3.0%

International importance:
The Internet is available in almost all places of the world. Thus your website can be visited from anywhere. If you want to sell in certain parts of the world, you have to make sure the company can be found in those countries, as leads need to be generated from your website.
If you are lagging behind in a target country, time to work on the findability of the website on certain keywords.

Notes:
Actually Google is active is 152 countries.
We know we have to work on “Lead Generation” as keyword.

The goal of the LEADSExplorer website was to promote our online web service. Thus lead generation.
In order to promote a website there are many methods and systems.
Many books and articles have been written on these matters.
Services from many companies are available for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

We choose to write content.
Seeing the early results on Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and others, this stimulated us to write even more content. Google has indexed about 65 pages per language on the website.

In order to get referenced by the search engines, content sure helps.
We believe as there are many subjects and keywords used in all those pages, the likelihood of getting indexed on specific keywords is higher. It is just a matter of quantity.

A SEO specialist will probably be able to work with less content, but we are no SEO specialists.

The sole problem with content is: you need to have a service or product, with related subjects for writing content about.

Now we are going to try to blog in order to find out how this works out for search engines.