5 Biggest Website Mistakes That Too Many Small Businesses Make
Let’s face it – your company needs a website. For many customers, your website will provide their first impression of your business. A simple, well designed website can go a long way, but watch out for these common errors that can turn customers off.
1. Making your Customers Work to Find You
For me, the most common reason I visit a business website is to get their phone number or address. I’m of the opinion that contact information should be on the header or footer of every page of your website. Unless you are doing online sales, the ultimate goal is to get customers in your door, right? Don’t make them work so hard.
2. Burying the Lead
Ever click on a business website and think ‘what are they even selling?’ Every page of your website should give a strong indication of your product or service. This can be as simple as throwing a picture of a truck on every page is you’re a trucking company. A strong company name and logo can also do the trick. But if your company name is “Dynamic Systems Enterprises”, you’ll need to be clear of what your website is about, and remind your customer on every page why they are there.
3. Out of Date Content
It seems pretty basic: keep your contact information and prices up to date on your website, but too many small business owners forget it. Changing prices and disconnected phone numbers can immediately kill a new lead. But also watch for old information in other parts of your content. If I see a website advertising an event from 6 months ago, or running a promotion that ended last season, I don’t trust that ANY information is current. I might even think you’ve gone out of business.
4. Goofy Stock Photos
Stock photos are inevitable, but some of them are downright ridiculous. These photos have even sparked the new trend of “stocking”, or imitating stock photos.
Sure, visuals are a must for your website, and if you don’t have high quality photos of your business, products, and employees buying or getting free stock images can be a quick and cheap alternative. But really look at the picture before you put it up there, is this really how your employees look when celebrating a success?
5. Too Many Gimmicks
Skip the crazy animation and graphics; the last thing you want is for your website to take a long time to load. This can lead to instant click off. Small business owners also can’t seem to resist the allure of Hit Counters. Not only will it reveal if you have low traffic to every person who visits your site, it just looks tacky.
Avoid these mistakes by remembering that your website should match your business. If you are an upscale restaurant, your website should feel upscale as well. If the client services your store is relaxed and personable, that’s how your website should feel too.
Approach designing your website like you would designing your store front. Would you put those two colors together? Would you have a photo like that hanging up? Would you have any information out of date? Use these questions as your guide when setting up your online presence as well.
Having a website for your business is essential to staying competitive in today’s marketplace, make sure it’s bringing new customers in rather than making them “click off”.
About the Author: Becky Canary-King is an Account Manager and Press Contact at Direct Incorporation, a company focused on providing a more economical and efficient alternative to using a law firm for common legal/entrepreneurial issues. She blogs for Direct Incorporation’s Blog, offering tips for the first 6 months of your small business.
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Key SEO Copywriting Tips for Start Ups
Understanding how to utilize the web is a crucial component in the success of a modern start-up. While social media driven businesses are becoming popular, you’re doing yourself a great deal of harm if you neglect the best source of potential customers that exists online: the search engines, and especially Google. SEO (search engine optimization) is the art of gaining high search engine rankings. SEO copywriting is the art of making sure your content not only ranks highly in search engines, but also persuades visitors to your website to buy from you.
Using Keywords on Your Site
Most start-up entrepreneurs have a vague idea that they need to know about “keywords,” but they don’t have a clear understanding of what that means. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you need to know.
Keywords are simply words or phrases that people search for at a search engine like Google. You want to do some keyword research to find out what people are searching for that relates to your product or business. You can use the Google Keyword Tool for an overview, or a paid product like Market Samurai for a more in-depth analysis of keywords.
Each of your web pages should be built around one main keyword phrase and two or three secondary keywords. The main keyword should appear in the Title of the web page, the page URL, the Description, the first headline, and it should make up 1-2% of the body copy. (If you’re using WordPress to build your site, you can make all this a lot easier by installing the All in One SEO Pack plugin).
Crafting Persuasive Web Copy
That’s a basic introduction to keywords – now you also need to understand the psychology of online selling. Just getting people to your site from the search engines isn’t enough – you want them to take some action. That action is called your Most Wanted Response. This could be making a purchase, signing up for an email list, or submitting contact details. It might even be as simple as clicking through to another page on your site. Each page should be written with a Most Wanted Response in mind. With sales pages, the Most Wanted Response is obviously to get an order there and then.
To be persuasive online your site must convey a sense of authority and trust. People are wary of Internet scams, so before anyone will punch their credit card details into your website they need to feel you are “legit.”
Your copy should also emphasize the benefits of what you’re selling rather than just the features. A feature is something the product has – a benefit is something it actually does for the buyer. For instance, if you’re selling a Spanish learning product, you might mention it includes interactive lessons. That’s a feature – but what’s the benefit to the customer? The benefit is that they can take advantage of the fast learning they would have in a class environment, without even having to leave their house.
Every feature corresponds to a benefit – it saves the customer time or money, or it just makes life easier in some way. Emphasize those benefits. Those are what people care about and what will ultimately make them buy.
Pleasing your human visitors should always take priority over making your pages “search engine friendly.” Some people get carried away with the need to get search traffic and they end up creating a lot of low-value content which has no real use to human visitors.
Don’t be one of those people. Stick to creating quality web pages and you’ll reap the benefits in the long run.
About the Author: Tom McSherry is a professional SEO copywriter and the founder of Premium Online Writing. His mission is to provide web businesses with a go-to shop for high quality written marketing materials and information product creation.
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How to Use Your Website’s Data to Expand Your Online Business
As web developers, we tend to obsess over other people’s website data, while tragically forgetting to leverage our own. Think about it. How much would you pay for a peek at your top competitors’ Google Analytics reports? But how much have you really paid attention to your own? With good search data on your site, you can monitor and optimize countless metrics that can bring your site to more SERPs, and more viewers. But many web developers fear that relying on Google Analytics can cause significant problems. So what programs are available that help you get the website data you need? And, more importantly, how can you use this data to launch an effective and long-lasting SEO campaign?
What Data Should You Be Tracking?
While the data you decide to track will depend largely on the goals of your site, most webmasters have a few key ways in which they would like to improve their overall site. In general, you probably want visitors to:
- Spend more time on your website
- Return to your site more often
- Convert on more affiliate products or offers
- Let other people know you exist
Additionally, you want to make sure that your site is properly optimized from a keyword, code, and content standpoint.
The most important data you should be tracking is keyword data. In a nutshell, you want to see what keywords people are using to reach every page of your site. The goal is to find low-hanging fruit that you might not have meant to target in your original keyword campaign. For example, you run a wireless Internet service affiliate site and notice that one of your pages (which you originally optimized for the phrase AT&T 4G Internet review) is getting a significant amount of traffic from people searching for comparison phrases like AT&T vs. T Mobile and AT&T vs. CLEAR Wireless. The page users are coming to, however, are not converting well and are losing out on traffic to a competitor.
You can use this keyword data to target a new keyword phrase, perhaps on a fresh page of content. You might choose to create a page targeting the phrase AT&T 4G Internet vs. CLEAR, for example. By doing so, you should begin to see a small boost in traffic over time, assuming the keyword phrase search data remains consistent.
Bounce rate is another vital piece of data that helps you improve and expand your online business. Let’s assume that your website data shows that some pages keep visitors on the page for around two minutes, while some see visitors leave in about 30 seconds. Worse, you have a couple of pages where visitors seem to leave within only a few seconds. What’s going on with those pages? We call this data “bounce rate.” Most data programs not only give you an idea of how long visitors stay on your pages, but where they go next.
To use bounce rate data to expand your online business, you have to keep two things in mind, which the good people at searchengineland.com point out in the article Two Simple Rules For Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages. First, consider what people might be looking for on your pages with high bounce rates. Are you really offering the information they expected based on their original search? For example, if visitors searched “dog food,” they’re probably looking for information on what to feed their dogs. Now, if your page is full of recipes on how to use dogs as food (gross…), you might be seeing a high bounce rate because visitors see that your page is not exactly relevant to their searches. You might need to rewrite the page, or create a new page that targets the keyword phrase more relevantly.
You can also examine how people are viewing your page “above the fold” (or before they scroll down) by taking a screenshot of the page and using a tool like Attention Wizard to create a heatmap. Check out the example heatmap we created below using Attention Wizard.
Ideally, you want the hot spots to be on conversion opportunities. You can see in the image that, in general, that does happen. But you also want to check to see if the chronological order of what visitors view follows a conversion path, darting to each ad, submission form, and company logo. But our example also shows that the page is missing a few conversion opportunities, primarily in numbers 6,8,9, and 11. Visitors expect something to be in those locations, but we’re not offering it. If your heatmap seems sporadic, your website might be confusing and frustrating visitors, which can cause high bounce rates.
What Software Can You Use to Track Website Data?
Now, Google Analytics is a fantastic tool. But it often takes a couple of days for data to show up. Worse, some webmasters fear the Google terms and conditions – which seem to imply that any evidence of link campaigning could get you banned/get your AdSense removed. Let’s not forget that Google has also recently announced that Analytics will no longer report search queries from organic search to “protect user privacy.” This means that your keyword data from Analytics will be pretty sparse from now on.
Many webmasters, as a result, choose to use other software to safely track website data. Get Clicky and Woopra are among the most popular.
Get Clicky offers a powerful website data tracking tool, which allows you to check all of the data available on Analytics. Two areas you should pay close attention to are “Traffic Sources” and “Locale.” Traffic Sources helps you identify which countries your visitors search from. If you’re getting a significant amount of traffic from France, you might consider offering a french language version of your website, or at least try writing some content that targets French users in some way.
Traffic Sources is also a great piece of data that gives you some insight into how your various campaigns are working. This section reveals whether you’re getting significant traffic from advertising, or whether most of your traffic comes from links or organic search. This data can help you determine whether you need to bump up your link building campaign, or whether your advertising is not providing a good ROI.
Woopra is a very clean looking program, and helps you check out some very specific pieces of website data in real time. One great feature is “Visitor Engagament,” which tells you what people are doing on your site (reading, writing, or idle). Of course, you can also check other data, like which browsers your visitors use on your site more often, what language they speak, what operating system they’re using – almost everything.
If you’re struggling with conversions, or watching hopelessly as people go to your competition, you might be surprised at just how easy of a fix most problems can be using your own website data. Before you launch a massive link building campaign that could cost thousands of dollars, try looking at your own website data to find problems on your site. If you would like to expand your online business, using your website’s data should be your first step.
About the Author: Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.
Photo Credit: Eric Fischer
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5 Tweaks for Small Business Web Content
Google has once again tweaked its search engine functionality to put renewed stress on quality sites – and one of the criteria for quality is content that has been recently posted. If you’re a small business you aren’t going to out-design larger competitors but you can make your site more compelling with a few personalized steps. You can also bring more immediacy to your product lineup by changing the focus of your front page or your blog section on a regular basis.
1. Make your words count
By now every business professional understands that people read web pages differently than they read printed documents. It’s more accurate to say that the typical web surfer scans rather than reads. That’s why a few sentences or a brief paragraph accompanied by an image of some sort is far more effective than a page of detailed information. Brief statements that cause a site visitor to click over to a more detailed description or illustration are proven tools on a website; but you want your visitors to seek out that sort of detail rather than have no other visual introduction to your site.
2. Make your blog a promotional tool
This is not as easy as it sounds, but the idea is to have your blogger write occasionally about actual cases of product usage where the product was purchased through your site and perhaps the client received some support on putting that product to use. A few elements have to come together here: you need either someone in-house that can write or a blogger that is familiar with your market niche.
3. Put video to work
You can provide video shots of a product on display or in use. A video insert can also feature a satisfied customer, if you have local sales where you can tape customers who are a car ride away. It shouldn’t take your marketing person long to learn how to hold a camera steady and how to edit a piece so that conveys the message you want. You can use video for a knowledgeable presentation on a product as well from you or one of your employees, but stay away from the “talking head” shot. Your presenter should be working with a product or with a graphic aid of some sort.
4. Customer testimonials never hurt
Quotes from a customer who has had a positive experience are even better if they are accompanied by a visual of some sort – photo or video – illustrating your product as it has been installed or put to use. If your customer is a few states away, find one that is supportive and ask for a photo or two. Many people can take decent snapshots today with their phones.
5. Focus on quality and experience
If your business has been open for a while, you can talk about your successful growth and steady expansion of your customer base. If it’s a new business, provide some evidence of related experience so that potential customers understand your depth of knowledge in your particular commercial field.
About the author: Bob Hartzell has been writing for five years about education, business and other life essentials on a variety of websites. Much of his recent work has been about the online master’s degree and its value in career enhancement, for those who are not yet working for themselves. He lives in Maine where many a small business operates out of a converted barn or farmhouse.
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The How-To Guide on Optimizing Your Website
Your website is unique to you and to you only. The online marketplace is ruthless, which means whatever steps you have to take to separate yourself from all the other websites are going to be imperative.
Effective (budget) Advertising
Small Business don’t have the budget of larger companies when it comes to marketing on a grand scale. However, just because they can’t spend major advertising dollars to push traffic to their site doesn’t mean it can’t be done effectively. Your website represents everything your company stands for; without it your business would be dead in the water. Twenty years ago brochures served as the face of a company. A strong brochure would say who you were, provide accessible information, and entice potential customers to call or visit your business. An effective website today should be no different.
Home Page No No
A common mistake of many websites is to stick as much information as possible on the homepage thinking it will give the visitor everything they need at once. What ends up happening is that the site becomes cluttered and the customer feels overwhelmed and leaves. Do not allow your website to become cluttered with unnecessary information. Your site needs to be direct and to the point.
Make sure your homepage allows for easy communication between you and the potential client. Tell them your products and service, but keep it simple. If they want to learn more, think about creating a forum to engage a potential community. Have your “Call to Action” feature be clear and precise so that the visitor can take the next step towards getting what they want and keeping them satisfied. Also always have a form where people can submit information to you if they are interested.
If You Build it Will They Come?
Once you create a website that is well designed and capable of capturing leads you face the critical issue of actually getting traffic to your website. There are several different ways to accomplish this. Paid Search Advertising is a common one. Google search, and AdCenter (Bing, Yahoo, MSN) are the major search engines that offer paid advertising to boost your traffic, but they aren’t very cost effective.
There are certainly less costly alternatives to drive a lot of traffic such as using SaleSpider. SaleSpider is the largest social network for Small Business owners who look to connect when building leads. With almost 900,000 members (Oct ’11) and over a million job postings, sites like these are a great place to start boosting your traffic.
SEO vs Paid Traffic
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also drives traffic. It’s a slower approach than direct Paid Advertising. You need to have your website not only indexed by Google, but able to achieve a solid ranking so you can have more hits to your site. Make sure your keywords and titles match easily indexed words by Google’s search. Try not to go for highly competitive keywords as it may take a long time before you even hit the 2nd page of a Google search, let alone the first.
What’s Next?
The online marketplace can be a savage beast, but with the right tips and strategies you can maximize your potential for strong traffic. This was simply an introduction summary to optimizing your website. In our next installment, I will go into greater detail each of these and on other opportunities to drive revenue for your site.
Make yourself seen and heard, and you will find that opportunities will come to you.
Having a website without generating traffic on the web is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you’re doing but no one else does.
About the Author: Russell Rothstein is the President and Founder of Sales Spider Media. The company owns multiple media properties including SaleSpider.com, the largest small business social network in the US, and the AdShare Network,a full service display ad network and email marketing company.
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The 9 Best SEO Tools for Small Businesses
Ranking high on the search engine results page is essential for driving traffic to your site; however performing search engine optimization (SEO) in-house can be a difficult task, especially when you don’t have a large budget to buy the top SEO tools out there. Good thing there are some awesome tools out there that cost little to nothing to use and provide you with the resources to perform offsite and onsite optimization.
Offsite Optimization Tools
Optimizing your page using offsite techniques can involve searching out link opportunities through providing content, getting on resource lists, and taking advantage of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Great tools for offsite optimization include:
- Rank Checker is a great tool for checking multiple rankings at once when you have little time. Rank Checker provides a user-friendly interface and the ability to run directly from your browser, which makes for complete ease of use. The downside to running directly off your browser is Google will localize your search results and if you are signed into a Google account, your results can be skewed from Google’s social media network Google+. Negatives aside, Rank Checker does a great job of seeing where you stack up against your competitors.
- Google Insights for Search easily allows you to input a keyword or keyword phrase and you can see the distribution of how heavily that keyword or phrase is searched. Results can be narrowed down all the way from worldwide to city level.Insights for Search gives you the ability to find terms related to your products or services that you should try to rank for.
- Open Site Explorer allows you to see whose linking to a certain page as well as providing social metrics, such as Facebook shares, Facebook likes, and tweets. This tool is great for competitor analysis and finding linking opportunities within other websites.
- MozBar from SEOmoz is hands down my favorite offsite tool. The Mozbar is great for analyzing pages for link opportunities. This toolbar provides an instant look at page authority, domain authority and provides easy access to Open Site Explorer, Rank Checker, and other tools all from the toolbar itself.
- Shared Count gives you the statistics for the number of Facebook likes, Google +1’s, Tweets, Diggs, Google Buzz’s, Stumbles from StubleUpon, and LinkedIn shares.Shared Count was built with on open API to give you the ability to build tools over the open space to assist your social media efforts.
At first, social media may not seem like a strong factor, but be sure not to count it out; a study performed by Jen Lopez of SEOmoz showed that tweets and retweets affects traditional organic SEO as much as a link coming from a guest post.
Onsite Optimization Tools
Onsite optimization encounters factors such as site structure, internal linking, website crawlability, content, and overall quality. Performing site audits to assess your onsite factors is nearly impossible without a strong set of tools. Take a look at these tools before performing your next site audit:
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great for performing site audits. Link Sleuthis a desktop tool that provides a simple design that translates into a very simple user interface. Link Sleuth analyzes the URL you input and produces a report containing any broken links, lost servers (including mail servers), and sleuth will even provide what type of code is being written on each page.
- URI Valet is the multi-tool of onsite SEO. URI Valet performs technical audits that give statistics on over ten areas including page download time, internal links, external links, text to HTML ratio, and object details.
- SEO Browser is a tool that can break down a web page into a text file to show an easily readable layout of the page. SEO Browser gives the layout from the title tags to headers and so on. This tool is great for quick reports on site structure and deciding if all your meta tags and headers are properly optimized.
- Google WebMaster Tools showcase statistics on keyword visibility, impressions, time spent on your website, click through rate, average position of your keywords, and indexing issues. Webmaster tools offer a wide variety of tools that can be used easily for both onsite and offsite optimization.
Optimizing your site not only involves onsite metrics, but also finding great offsite opportunities. With these amazing tools and some practice, you can optimize your site to the fullest and build awareness through reaching the top of the search engine results pages.
About the Author: Matt Polsky is the Search Marketing Manager for VA Mortgage Center, the nation’s number one dedicated provider of VA home loans. You can connect with Matt on Twitter @mattpolsky.
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How to Find a Killer Strategy for Your Small Business Website in 3 Simple Steps
In this post you’re going to learn how to make your website more effective in three simple steps that you can implement right now.
Step 1) Choose a single goal for your website.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.”
- Credited to Laurence J. Peter
Your website may fill many shoes, and that’s okay. It can provide information to new visitors, it can help retain existing customers, and it can support e-commerce sales all at the same time.
The trouble with this is that more often than not, there’s no real goal for the website other than vague statements of wanting it to support the business. The purpose gets lost in all of the fancy features and great things that can come with a website.
It’s time to pick a single most important goal for your website. All decisions will be based around this goal, so it’s very important you think about it all the way through.
Why does your website exist? Here’s some sample answers to get your wheels moving:
- To bring in new local customers to my brick and mortar store.
- To provide support to existing customers in a convenient, 24/7 manner.
- To sell products nationwide through the power of e-commerce.
Step 2) Know your target audience.
If you want to sell something, it’s very important to know who you’re selling to.
For example: if you want to sell dog food, your target audience is dog owners. Your average dog owners will identify with a bond and connection they have with their dog and be interested in finding how they can give their pet the best they can without breaking the bank.
Think about the troubles that your audience encounters on a regular basis – go ahead and make a list. Here’s a few considerations for our dog owner example:
- Vet fees
- Scooping pet excrement
- Keeping pet at healthy weight
- Dog misbehaving
Now, make a list of all the positive things your audience encounters on a regular basis.
- Walks (in the park, at the beach, with other dog owners)
- Fulfillment and friendship in their dog
- Community with other dog owners
These examples are very short lists to give you an idea of what we’re going for here. Make these lists as big as you need to – these lists should be referenced every time you make a decision or write anything that is about or for your customers.
Usage Example: If you want to show how your product can help alleviate a common problem encountered by your audience, you have a list to refer to for that.
Usage Example: If you want to appeal to your audience’s likes and experiences, you have a list to refer for that.
Knowing how to communicated and reach your audience is one of the most important ways to develop a killer strategy for your website.
Step 3) Brainstorm a work flow that satisfies your audience’s needs and leads to your goal.
Now you have a clear goal for your site and you know how to appeal to your target audience. You’re already 95% there – by knowing why you’re making a decision and how to angle it for the people you’re selling to, the answers come fairly naturally from here on out.
Where does the audience start?
Hypothetically your audience could land on any page of your website. Where will you lead them? To your goal.
Perhaps you want customers to come to the brick and mortar store – the “Visit Us” page should be clear and prominent from every page on your website.
Perhaps you want to help answer any existing customer’s needs. A well designed FAQ section would do a great job at providing that. The FAQ should be easily accessible from every page of your website. You may even consider highlighting the most popular questions and answers throughout the site.
Think outside of the box! Put yourself in your audience’s shoes (by using the lists you made above) and think about what you might be looking for and where you’d expect to find it.
Take Action
Now it’s time to make things happen. If you haven’t followed these steps, you need to do so right now and make the appropriate changes.
Here’s to your effective website!
——
About the Author: Anne Dorko is a business web consultant helping business owners like you succeed online every day. Whether you need to create, shape or grow your website, Anne is there for you every step of the way explaining how to get it done in a way you can actually understand! For more tips and a free worksheet, be sure to sign up for the Web Tips newsletter.
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Review: 3 Complete Packages to Get Your Business Online Today
Getting your small business started online can be a frustrating task. You need a domain name, a website, someone to design the website and code it for you, a shopping cart programmed to sell your products, and another person to set it up for you. The fact is, many small business owners cannot afford to have someone else take care of everything.
Luckily, there are solutions you can implement yourself.
1. Yahoo! Small Business
The basic 12 month web hosting package on Yahoo! Small Business starts at $7.46 for the first three months, then moves up to $9.95 per month. The package includes:
- A suite of simple website design tools. For those who aren’t tech-savvy, or don’t want to build the website from the foundation up, Yahoo! offers a number of free, professional-looking website designs that you can use to get started. There is also support for MySQL, Flash, Shockwave, and PayPal.
- Security and reliability. Yahoo! Small Business offers a 30 day satisfaction guarantee, an uptime guarantee, and 24/7 support online, or via phone or email. Your website is backed up on multiple servers to ensure your website stays live.
- Disk space, email and analytics. Your website has unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, and unlimited email storage for 1,000 business email addresses. Yahoo! also provides a full analytics suite, so you can see what kind of traffic your website is receiving.
- Ecommerce features such as a shopping cart, inventory management support, and order management are sold separately, but may not be necessary for the business just starting out.
2. Go Daddy
Go Daddy remains a competitive player in small business offerings, and the 12 month “Ultimate” hosting package costs only $14 a month. The package is very similar to the Yahoo! Small Business basic package above, including the unlimited spaces, data transfer, and the 1000 emails, but offers a few extras:
- Access to the ZenCart ecommerce add-on, a shopping cart for your users when purchasing items from your website. You have to set it up yourself, but Go Daddy offers some support, and there are tutorials available online.
- Advertising credit. Go Daddy offers advertising credits for your website to many major search engines and popular social networking websites, allowing for greater immediate exposure, ideal for any starting business.
Go Daddy has had some customer service issues, and occasionally website slow downs, but overall is a well respected, reliable hosting service.
3. Adobe Business Catalyst
Adobe Business Catalyst has the steepest learning curve of the three, but is also backed by a large, very well respected company that specializes in professional business software. The 12 month “Business” hosting package runs approximately $17 a month, and again offers similar options to the above packages, with a few notable exceptions:
- Rotating advertising. Not only does Business Catalyst support email advertising, it also offers support for dynamic ad rotation on the internet, allowing your advertising to stay fresh across websites.
- A free, 30 day satisfaction trial. Because of the learning curve, the 30-day free trial is valuable, since you may discover the web host isn’t a good fit for you.
- Business email addresses are limited to ten in this package, though if you’re just starting, you may not need more than that.
How do I get started?
All of these services are similar, and each will walk you through the set up process, once you’ve decided which is best for you and your budget. Get your domain and e-mail address set up first. After that, get your website looking the way you want, and enough information to attract your users and start generating sales. When the demand is there, create your shopping cart to offer any products you may have.
After your website is running, don’t just sit back and wait for the sales to happen! Online advertising, search engine optimization, and other marketing techniques can be covered by the remainder of your budget to improve your conversion rate and generate more leads and sales.
About the Author: Lin Edwards is a content and technical writer at SmallBusiness-Domain.com, where you will find web hosting, domain names and e-commerce offers and promo codes, such as GoDaddy coupons. Follow Small Business Domain: http://twitter.com/#!/sbdomain
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Affordable Website Design Utilizing Templates
Getting your website designed does not have to be expensive.If you are concerned with cost, many web designers offer an array of templates which can be customized to match your branding. Read more
How User Centered Design Can Help Small Business Owners Websites
The vast majority of small business owners are providing products or services in areas other than website design and effectiveness. As such, they are at the mercy of their web designers and developers to create an online presence for their company that is effective and successful at enticing its visitors to perform desired actions. In order to take control and provide higher chances of online success, small business owners might consider employing the principles of User Centered Design (UCD).
A general overview of UCD is such that the user is the focus of determining how their needs, wants and even their limitations are the primary focus driving the decision making process of the design. Many professional web designers fail to understand this concept, much less employ it in their work flow. If those you’re paying to come up with effective websites for your company are not even considering using UCD, you might want to take the lead and find someone or a service that will help you in the endeavor.
Understand the Users
When it comes to the design of your website, understanding what your users are doing is definitely an important aspect of online operations. The challenge however is that this type of metrics, also known as analytics, can only tell you what has happened:
- How many visitors came to your home page?
- Where did those visitors come from: search engine results pages, email newsletter links, deep links on other websites, etc.
- How long did the visitor stay at your site?
- How many pages did they view while they were there?
Again, this information is well and good, but even with the metrics you just don’t have the insight into what was going through the visitors mind.
Why They Do What They Do
This brings up the value of understanding why your website visitors do what they do. User Centered Design is just the vehicle you need in order to gain knowledge and understanding of that “why”.
The more you understand how UCD works, the easier it will be for you to learn what areas of your website can positively (or negatively) affect the visitor’s experience. Once you have this type of knowledge, you can make iterative changes which then allow you to further cement the user experience.
The Value of UCD Service
A quality UCD service will help you understand the intangible aspects of how a visitor uses your website. Often times there’s nothing more than a frustrated thought passing through the users mind. No click or time on page is likely to help you understand that emotion. But with UCD you might have the chance to watch video of test users as they make their way through your online pages.
Note a disgruntled sigh, or observe the slightest eye roll at the same time a user is attempting to navigate through your site, and you have a much clearer idea of where a problem could exist. You’d never get that depth of insight with a tally of the number of times a user made it through a page (via clicking on navigation links.)
Overall, when you decide to design your small business website with UCD techniques you’ll be able to make positive changes, faster. These changes help to support your business’ online goals and provide you with the justification for making otherwise hard decisions.
The best news is that you don’t have to be an expert in design or have a doctorate in user psychology in order to take advantage of these concepts. There are services available in the marketplace that excel in providing small to medium sized businesses with the capabilities to do much, if not all the research and development online. If your online success depends upon the actions of your website visitors, why not take the time to find an effective and reasonably priced user centered design service as soon as you can. Your bottom line will surely thank you!
Author Bio: Shelly Towns is a writer and avid blogger, who often finds herself writing about website design testing, user experience, and website development.
Photo Credit: ivanpw
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Expand Your Business in These Hard Times: Start an Online Business
In the current economic scenario almost every one of us is into budgeting and cost cutting. Most people are not thinking about investments or expansions, all they want is to safeguard their current assets.
But statistics show that online sales are steadily increasing despite the slow economy. There could not have been a better time to either expand your business online or start a new internet business.
Brick and Mortar Vs. Online
The Wall Street Journal tells us that there is not much movement in the retail business, but that is to be expected in the slow economy. With people facing financial crunch due to bank problems and lost jobs, things could not have been different. It is a natural instinct to spend less and save more.
It is a pleasant surprise to see that online sales have actually increased during the last year or so. Web simply doesn’t conform to the traditional scenario. Retail sales have been suffering, but the online sales are showing a steady growth of 4% by the time the holiday season arrived.
So if you are determined to make money in these hard times and are prepared for something new, then internet business is a great option to try out.
An Attractive Option
Let’s see why the internet business option is so attractive, and let’s compare it to off-line business options.
Say, one of the off-line options for business expansion is opening a new branch location. But this is a pretty expensive option when you consider the amounts of cash you need for real estate, insurance etc. On the other hand if you decide to start an online business, it is going to be quite easy on the pocket.
A new business location will mean more staff. Employees are a big expense. Again an online website selling your goods seems more advantageous, as the only staff you need for it is yourself. And some software, e.g. autoresponder, is an inexpensive addition to your online business.
But Isn’t It Too Late?
You may have this nagging feeling that you have missed the boom or that you are way behind the thousands who are already on the internet with their online businesses. You couldn’t be more wrong. Just look at the figures: more than 50% of America’s small businesses are still offline while the trade pundits predict that internet sales are projected at $334 billion by the year 2012!
So if you are already running a small business in the brick and mortar world, it is high time you started selling online too. The proposition does not require too much of investment and the advantages are great, thus you are exposing your limited resources to minimum risks.
There are plenty of services available that make it easy for a small business to go online. You can set up a great website and create a data customer base, all with the help of these services. They are very affordable, too!
About the Authors:
Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko, publishers, InternetBusinessBTS.com If you consider starting an online business but don’t know how to host website our FREE email course will help you to find your low cost web hosting. Moreover, other issues of internet business such as autoresponder software, keyword tools and many others won’t be gobbledygook to you anymore!
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Photo Credit: knuton
5 Ways to Save Money on Your Small Business Website
If you have a website of your own, chance are you are paying fees out every month or year to have the site.
While conducting research recently for reseller hosting company 34SP.com, I discovered that website fees can force site owners to abandon their sites. Often, the burden of paying monthly fees takes a toll on the webmaster. Sometimes the webmaster simply closes down the site rather than sustain the loss of money every month.
If you have a website, and if you pay fees to maintain it – you may want to consider these 5 easy steps to save money on your website right now.
1. Pay less for your domain name – While you definitely need to have a distinctive domain name and brand, you don’t need to pay top dollar for the privilege. Here’s a good example – if you have your domain name registered with Register.com you’ll pay $35.00 per year for a .com domain name. That same domain name if registered at a discount registrar like GoDaddy.com will cost just $10.69. That’s a price reduction and savings of nearly 70 percent. Imagine the savings if you have multiple domain names for your websites.
2. Pay less for your website hosting – You will absolutely need great web hosting as well. However, why pay for what you don’t need? If you run a straightforward WordPress website, then you shouldn’t need a hosting plan that charges $89.95 per month (I found this plan doing a bit of research into pricing). Great web hosting is available for less than $15 per month. Shop around and start saving – especially if your paying anything over $50 per month for a basic hosting setup.
3. Get an advertiser (or two) – No matter what the topic or content on your website, it is very likely that there is an advertiser willing to pay real money to get in front of your audience. If you are sales-minded you can likely figure out which niche you serve and approach a few companies about becoming an advertiser. Don’t be discouraged by hearing the word ”no”. This is simply necessary to get to the ”yes” that the ideal advertiser will say. You could also consider getting paid by a third party to advertise on your website. For example both Pay per post and reviewme will pay anywhere from a few dollars up to hundreds for a site review or blog post on the subject of their paying advertisers. See their websites for details.
4. Put AdSense ads on your website – Another great option to get paid ads on your website is to use Google’s AdSense program for publishers. The system is ubiquitous around the Internet and requires no selling at all by the website owner. If fact, Google will even figure out which ads perform best on your site. You simply sign up for the program and then put some AdSense code on your website. The ads appear automatically. You can find all the details here: http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/index.html.
5. Ask for donations – Depending on your audience and site content, it may be appropriate for you to ask for donations to keep your website operating. Large scale sites like Wikipedia operate this way, as do smaller non-profit sites. PayPal has made the process very easy with their pre-configured donation buttons. Similar to AdWords, to get the donate button on your site you simply cut and paste html provided by PayPal into your website. Once set up, you can accept donations made with credit cards, debit cards, or PayPal. There are no set up fees with the donate button – but you will pay a transaction fee for each donation. See the PayPal website for details.
Good luck with your website, and don’t forget that a penny saved on your website is a penny earned.
About the Author:Derek Vaughan is a web hosting industry veteran, marketing consultant and writer. Mr. Vaughan has architected the marketing growth of several prominent web hosting success stories leading to acquisition including Affinity Internet, Inc., Aplus.Net and HostMySite.com. Prior to his entry into the web hosting industry, Mr. Vaughan was responsible for online marketing at The Walt Disney Company where he marketed ecommerce for the ESPN.com and NASCAR.com brands. Mr. Vaughan received his M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University and currently serves on the HostingCon Advisory Board.
Photo Credit:Alan Cleaver
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How To Build A Good Website That Keeps Your Customers Fully Satisfied
In this guest post Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko share their tips to building a website that keeps your customers satisfied, and coming back for more!
It is fairly common knowledge that there is wider acceptance of the online mode of shopping today, than ever before.
More and more customers who never considered the online mode for making routine (as well as exotic!) purchases are starting to discover the absolute convenience of being able to carry out their shopping from the comfort of their homes or offices, make payments online, and have the merchandise delivered to where they would like it to – totally hassle free!
Online Shopping Challenges
That said, all online business store owners – small or big, need to make sure that their customers remain happy with their efforts and keep coming back to them often. This is particularly true in the face of significant competition online.
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One of the major challenges that online stores face in particular is the lack of personalization and the human touch or element, which is often extremely important to many shoppers – they like to touch and feel the products that they are looking to buy. Another agonizing experience for online shoppers is the lack of instant nirvana or gratification – they actually have to wait out for the item that they have bought to arrive through the mail.
Advantages are Numerous
Yet, online stores proffer numerous advantages which actually outweigh the disadvantages by a huge margin. Customers can get exactly what they want, however exotic the item may be, something which a lot of offline, brick-and-mortar stores are loath to stock up on. Also, they never need to leave where they are, and can order, pay and expect delivery of the item they have shopped, from the comfort of their home or office.
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Online stores are great for the sellers as well – no major inventory to stock up on, neither any costs of sales personnel to incur. The only major costs are the marketing costs and ensuring that customers actually visit as well as buy things from the store.
Not to Burst Your Bubble, But…
But that is where the catch is – the costs, or at least the efforts for marketing and promotion are reasonably significant. This is particularly true since barriers to entry for all other prospective sellers are reasonably low, and there is immense competition.
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Also, while you may be able to sell to the whole world, anyone in the entire world could be selling those items too, as against having a shop in a particular neighborhood, where, by and large, you are competing with shops only in the vicinity.
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So, how to build a good website that keeps your customers fully satisfied?
Find the Right Tools
This is where website building tools really come in handy; they guide you on ensuring that your efforts are channelized in the right direction so that you end up getting maximum bang for your buck (particularly when the bucks we are referring to here are essentially metaphorical, denoting the efforts that you put in more than the money).
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For instance, keyword research tools can save you a huge amount of time and effort by providing you with just the right keywords that users are likely to key in when searching for what you have on offer. Similarly, there are tools such as those for email marketing and promotion, affiliate marketing tools, web design and hosting tools and so on, which can together go a long way in ensuring that your efforts pay off to the maximum.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it would be wise to try out each tool one after another and see which one works best for you; you can then accordingly channelize your efforts and focus on those tools that work the best. The approach maybe is slow to begin with, but ultimately it bears maximum fruits.
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Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko, internet publishers, can show you how to start up an internet business and use appropriate tools such as website building tools, keyword research tool, follow up autoresponder etc. to make your customers happier and create their desire to keep returning to your website.
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Photo Credit: katerha
Your Keyword List: The Most Important List You’ll Ever Make
Yesterday we talked about the importance of your business having a web presence, and making sure your website is optimized for search engines. A big piece of optimization is having the right keywords, and today Corey Perlman, author of eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business
The Most Important List You’ll Ever Make
(For the purpose of this article, when I refer to Google, I am also referring to other major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and ASK.)
How does Google decide where to rank your Web site on any given search query? Well, the exact formula is as top secret as the ingredients that made up my diet coke I had with lunch.
But Google is very open about the criteria they use to evaluate a Web site and today’s topic covers one of the most important factors in improving your Web site’s overall Google ranking!
Feed the Googlebot
Late at night, when we are fast asleep, Google’s spider (named “Googlebot”) goes to work. It creeps from Web site to Web site in search for words to feed on.
It doesn’t like the taste of common filler words like a, the, to, and, it, but, etc. Instead, the spider is looking for unique words that are specific to the site it’s searching and explains exactly what that Web site is all about.
These specific words are called keywords. The spider returns this information to Google so it can produce relevant Web sites when these certain words are searched.
Help Google Help You
Our goal is to help Googlebot find the words WE WANT him to find. The more control we have over our keywords, the more control we have over how we rank on Google.
As Google evaluates a site, they are not only looking for specific keywords, but how frequently the keywords are used.
They figure the more a particular word is used, the more relevant it is to the overall purpose of that Web site. And so if you search the word “business” in Google’s search engine, then Google will provide you with Web sites that include that word in the content.
Now most of us don’t just use one word when doing a Google search, we type in phrases. So, again, Google will look to match as many of the words that you searched (minus the filler words) with the words found on the Web sites they provide for you.
For Example
Take a look at the image below. I searched the phrase “hip hop dance classes” in Google and this Web site was one of the top sites that came back in my search results. Notice all of the times they have the same words I searched for repeated in the homepage content.
One other thing to note on the example above is that the sentences still make logical sense. You don’t want to just add a keyword to gain credit with the search engines. That can frustrate people visiting your site and the search engines frown upon it anyway.
Your Mission, If you Choose to Accept It
So let’s get to your mission at hand: to figure out what your top keyword phrases are and then sprinkle them throughout your Web site content.
Simple Keyword Selection Exercise
Here’s a great exercise to figure out what keyword phrases you want to target. Go out and talk with total strangers; ask them to tell you what they’d type in Google if they were looking for a business like yours.
What you’ll find is they will offer words and phrases that might surprise you and get you thinking differently about what your keyword list should be. And by all means listen to them!
Input from Somebody Other Than Me
When we try and come up with our own keyword phrases, we put ourselves at a disadvantage because we live and breathe our business. For example, I’m in the Internet marketing business. I talk about this stuff all the time.
If I were to think of what some of my keywords are, I might be inclined to use words like search engine optimization, html, web site usability, and other industry specific terms. But that’s not what people are going to type in Google to find me!
Real Life Example
Another example that I mention in my book is about my friend Ray who owns Ray’s Shoes in Seattle Washington. When I asked Ray what phrase he’d most like to come up #1 on Google, he quickly responded, “that’s easy, ‘Ray’s Shoes’!”
But Ray, if someone is searching specifically for you, don’t you think they’ll find you one way or another?
What about the stranger who is just looking for a shoe store? Isn’t that the person you are targeting on Google? Phrases like ‘Seattle shoe store’ and ‘Seattle Wash Shoes’ are the phrases Ray ended up targeting.
So when coming up with your most critical keyword phrases, you want to think about the person who knows nothing about you or your business. All you know is they need the product or service you provide. They hop on their computer, go to Google and they type in…what? Figure that out and you are well on your way to creating your perfect keyword list.
Things to Remember
- Target about three keyword phrases to focus on
- Make the phrases about three to five words
- If you have a brick and mortar store, make sure to use your city and state in one or more of your keyword phrases. And try and use it in your homepage content exactly the way it is often written. For example, we usually write Michigan as “mi”
- Just because your Web site has the exact phrase that a person searched for on Google, it doesn’t guarantee you will rank #1 or even on the first page. Their algorithm is robust and this is just one of many things Google evaluates when deciding where to rank your site
Things to Avoid
- Don’t overdue the amount of times you add a keyword to your Web site. You want your keyword density ratio to fall between 3-9%. To figure this ratio out for any word on your site, simply divide the amount of times you use the word against all of the words on your page. So if you use the word ‘homes’ 9 times and you have 100 words on your page, then you have a ratio of 9%. Any higher than 10% and it might look like you are intentionally adding the word to trick the search engines. They don’t like that.
- Here’s a link that will analyze any page on your site for you and tell you the keyword density ratio for every word. Try it out!
- Keyword Tool
Take Action
- Decide on six to eight critical keywords for your business. You can use them together to make search phrases.
- Increase the amount of times they appear on your Web site.
- Make sure your sentences still make sense and you don’t lose any of the quality of your content.
About the Author
Corey Perlman is the President of eBoot Camp, Inc., an education company that provides business owners with the knowledge and skills to effectively market their business on the Web. Corey’s book, eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business, hit #1 on the Amazon.com bestseller’s list. To learn more about Corey or to pick up a copy of his new book, go to eBootcamp Book
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Don’t Create Your Business Website Without Reading These Five Tips
If you’ve got a small business, you need a website – that much is clear. But don’t go off hiring a designer until you check out Corey Perlman’s five website design tips to help your website not only look good, but make your business money.
If you leave your website’s look and feel strictly to the designers, be prepared to get a beautiful, sexy, artistic site that does everything but make you money.
Why? Because they know website design, but they do not know your business. The five tips below will help ensure that you not only have a website that looks professional, but a website that’s open and ready for business!
Five Design Tips for Your Business Website
#1 – Keep your important information above the fold
64.9% of people don’t scroll. And 77.3% of statistics are made up on the spot.
So forget the statistics, just remember that your phone number, physical address, “Buy Now” button all have a greater chance of being clicked on if you don’t require people to scroll down to click on them. Make sure all of your important information is eye level and consistent on every page throughout your site.
#2 – Include an Opt-in Form on your Website
By securing a person’s contact information prior to them leaving your Website, you’ve ensured that you can continue to communicate with this person down the road.
This is critical to your success via the Web. As you know, people are very protective of their information and will be hesitant to give it away. To increase your chances of having a successful opt-in box, offer something of real value so people feel good about giving you their name and email address.
Remind them that you will only email a periodic eNewsletter and that you will NEVER sell or give their email address to anyone else.
#3 – Link Clarity
Another rule of thumb: if the user doesn’t feel confident they know where the link they are about to click on is taking them, they won’t click on it. So take the guess work out of it and make your links abundantly clear. Contact Us. Yep, that’s pretty clear.
#4 – Color Pollution
Remember when your mom thought anything you brought home from art class was the most beautiful masterpiece in the world? Well, no offense, but I’m willing to bet it fell into the category of color pollution. Color pollution is simply more than three primary colors on a page. Any more than three and your brain slowly begins to turn to mush. This is crucial when it comes to your website because you want your user’s attention to stay focused on the content, not that odd shade of mauve.
#5 – Include Key Words in your homepage content
This is not your web designer’s job, so you can’t blame them for not doing it. Again, they don’t know your business and wouldn’t have the slightest clue what words would make the most sense to include on your homepage. Key Words are those words your users will type in search engines to find you…or your competitors. You want any word or phrase that they might type in to be scattered throughout your homepage as the search engines will give you credit for those words and that will increase your likelihood of a higher search engine ranking.
Author Bio:
Corey Perlman is the author of the #1 Amazon.com bestseller eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business. The book provides easy-to-do strategies and techniques to help you market your business on the Web. It covers topics such as social networking sites, Web site optimization, online articles and press releases, video marketing, and much more. To learn more about eBoot Camp or to purchase a copy, go to www.ebootcampbook.com.
Photo Credit: billaday
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