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Don’t Let the Fish off the Hook Small Business Internet strategies:Part III of III

Posted on October 16th, 2008, 01:10 pm
Filed Under (Biz Start Up, Interactive) by Joe Witte

Are you attracting a lot of “fish” to your small business website but not catching them? Think of your website as a fishing rod and online marketing (Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, online advertising, etc) as your bait. Online marketing attracts fish to bite your bait. But what reels them in? Leave that to page optimization or website conversion techniques.

What are conversions? Conversions are the action of a random visitor “converting” to a lead, sale, phone call, or registration. Conversion rate is the metrics used to determine how often visitors turn into sales or leads.

Conversion rates vary in every industry, but typical conversion rates are between 0.5 and 8 percent, with the norm running between 0.5 and 2 percent. So, if you aren’t converting 50 percent of your traffic, don’t panic. No one is.

While your small business website that is not “Amazonian” in magnitude, you can still have a major impact on tracking and improving its performance, or “conversion rate,” of visitors once they come to your website.

The first step to catching these fish is observing them. There are two key ways to watch what people do on your site. The first is to ask people (friends or family) to go to your site, and observe what they do. What do they click on? Do they have a hard time finding the links or actions you want them to take? This will help you with any potential redesigns that may be necessary in order to increase conversions.

The next priority is to create a click stream analysis. A Click stream analysis allows you to determine what pages people are finding by conducting searches (entry pages), and where they go once they visit your website, and where they leave (exit pages). Google Analytics (a free tool from Google Inc.) is critical for small website owners to use and review to look at their site statistics. This will give you a huge amount of information to determine what pages people are finding, and where they are leaving.

You can then ask yourself, “Why do they leave once they get to my services page?” Then you can research and work on improving that page.

The second step to catching a lot of fish is to think like them. Get in the mind of your clients and try to figure out what they look for, what’s important to them, and what other sites they compare you to.

Does your site’s unique selling proposition (USP) stand out from your competition? Can they easily find testimonials? What do you want your prospect to do? Do you want them to register for your newsletter? Do you want them to purchase your product? Do you want them to call or fill out a lead form? As simple as it sounds, once you determine the best course of action that will lead to the most sales, then you can gear your website towards this objective.

If you want your clients to fill out a lead form, I’d recommend putting a simple lead form on every page. If you want them to purchase your product, lead them to the pages that show your product or service and show that you have the best pricing, service, and product. Be wary of trying to drive your customers directly to the order form. Just because they are online, doesn’t mean that they will buy without some research.

You must lead people to do what you want them to do, and it must be simple and easy to find. If someone has to look for more than 3 seconds to determine what you do, they’ll steal your bait and swim. A significant challenge for any company is balancing design aesthetics with functionality and conversion performance. Sometimes, a button may be ugly, but if people are clicking on it and converting, then it may be worth the distraction.

Here are some obvious, yet easily overlooked tips for every website:

1) Ensure your company’s phone number is prominently placed on every page. Our company underestimated the number of sales we drive via the phone. People want to talk to the companies they are about to give their business to.

2) Put a lead form on your home page. Be sure to capture the users name, email, phone and their interest.

3) Get to the point- let people know what you do, and how it will help them, and why you are better than your competition within the first 2 sentences on your website.

4) Include EXTRA buttons for the pages you want people to visit in addition to the navigation at the top or left. Give people multiple paths to go to the pages you want them to go to, and keep it above the fold.

5) Feature the items or services you want to sell.

6) Keep your website fresh. Give people a reason to come back and visit regularly. Think BLOG!

This is our final article of three covering basic internet strategies for small and local businesses. The first article discussed building your website, the second article covered the basics of search engine optimization, and this article we discusses way to increase conversions once someone has visited your website.

Joe Witte is a partner at Logo Design Guru and WebbyGuru, and has successfully started 3 small businesses including CentricSource and Travel Ad Network.

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Small Business Tips: How To Choose an Internet Service Provider

Posted on September 25th, 2008, 10:09 am
Filed Under (Biz Start Up, Interactive) by George Bardissi

In today’s world, the internet is just as important as electricity, heat, AC, food, and water when it comes to running any kind of business. The size of your business ultimately affects how you shop for an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Now keep in mind that there are several different kinds, sizes, and shapes of businesses so I am going to have to keep this topic broad. Let’s break our business categories into 3 different choices, small, medium and large businesses.

The first option to review is small business which could be run out of an office or a home office. If you are running a home-based business, as I know many people are today, you are probably running under your home internet connection, which most of the time is either a cable or DSL connection to the internet.

Of course you have many options with DSL carriers just like you would with home telephone service. Cable providers are usually limited to your particular municipalities’ cable franchise agreement. One more option I forgot to add is the recent option of Verizon FIOS. Either one of these options are no problem for a home based business. If you are running dial up please give up on fighting with your computer because it isn’t going to get any better. Pay the extra few dollars a month and save yourself a lot of hassle and aggravation. If you are running a small or medium business but have an office outside of your home then you must get the business upgrades that are offered by your Cable, DSL, or FIOS providers.

Keep in mind that the business rates for any one of these options are more expensive than your home options due to the fact that the internet providers usually have a different internet connection system for business clients as well as the option to add STATIC IP addresses for server or remote access needs. When I say the word STATIC, I mean an internet address that does not ever change. You can buy these IP addresses usually for five ($5.00) or more dollars per address on top of your internet fees.

For the medium size businesses and large companies you have all of the above options for small and medium business but you can now add T1, T3, and so on. These services are offered through a phone company such as Verizon, Paetec, Cavalier, AT&T and the list on this could go on for days.

What is the advantage when going with one of the higher end options like T1, T3, and beyond? Well, it would be that you have a dedicated connection to the internet and you are not sharing your internet line with anyone else that may be nearby as well as steady bandwidth rates. These higher end options have been the standard for years in the industry but are starting to lose out to the more inexpensive options listed below.

Now why is this an important decision if you are a business? Usually when you chose an ISP you are married to them like you would be in a cell phone contract. Questions to ask when looking for an ISP: What is your turn around time from when I sign to when your service will be installed? Do I need to run any lines or are you, the ISP, responsible for this? How do I contact support and what is the response time if there would be an issue? What is the cancellation fee if I chose not to continue service before my contract is over? Is there any setup or installation fees? What should I be expecting in terms of my speed or bandwidth?

Your IT department or person, or consultant should help you evaluate how much bandwidth or speed your business requires based on what kind of equipment you are running in your office or location. I personally have seen a lot of companies drop off of the more expensive solutions such as T1 for internet because the cost is a lot higher and the speed is a lot lower. For example, T1 speed will get maximum 1.5 MB bandwidth up and down at somewhere between $350.00 to $600.00 per month depending on your provider.

If a company was faced with the above option and a cable, FIOS, or DSL connection at 30 - 10 MB down and 1 - 2.5 MB up for around $99.99 a month to $149.99 a month you can see the cost savings and speed upgrade you would receive by going the other direction.

Even if the speeds on cable, FIOS, or DSL are not guaranteed how badly could the speed be cut down? Even if it were to be a bad day and your speed would be cut by half it still would not come close to the 1.5 MB speed a T1 provides, for the most part. The only thing that could be a determining issue is the up-time or reliability of cable, FIOS, or DSL versus a dedicated line such as a T1. There would probably be a 2 to 1 odds of your connection going down when you go to one of the 3 options to T1, T3, and up. So what would you do for more mission critical based companies that can’t afford to be down at all not even for a few hours? Some companies in that situation would have two separate internet connections in the event one would go down the other one would be available so that the company would not be down.

This should get the conversation started on this topic. There are other things that I didn’t have enough space to discuss however I touched on most of the major points and hopefully this should give you a good handle on what you are looking at in terms of an internet provider and what the potential price versus speed options are for you out there. Keep your eyes open however because within the next 24-36 months you will see a major increase in speed and bandwidth options that will be available to you!

George Bardissi is the President and Owner of Bardissi Enterprises, a Managed Information Technology solutions company, providing IT services to small and medium sized businesses.

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Build it, But They Won’t Come:Building Good Content For Your Website: Part II of III

Posted on September 19th, 2008, 09:09 am
Filed Under (Biz Start Up, Interactive) by Joe Witte

You must be so relieved. You FINALLY have a website. It looks hip. You’re getting lots of complements and the content that took your spouse over a year to write is pretty good. So why isn’t your phone ringing? Well, first of all, your website is NOT the field of dreams. Remember the movie where the ghost whispers, “Build it, they will come.” A better title for your website would be “Build it, and it will get lost amongst 2 billion other websites.” But don’t get frustrated, because getting targeted traffic to your website may not be as overwhelming (or expensive) as you might think. But it does take some time and discipline.

So, what can you do? Well, one of the most important factors in achieving rankings naturally (verses purchasing pay per click ads) in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.com, is the content you have on your website. Now don’t get defensive. I know that your spouse worked very hard on your content, and it’s written at a college graduate level, but it may not have the keyword density necessary to get the attention of Google. Don’t know what keyword density is? Read on.

What is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization? It’s the action of manipulating your website through your content, linking with other websites, and basic html coding techniques in order to achieve higher rankings in search engines.

Well written, SEO friendly content can do great things. After all, if someone conducts a search for a specific keyword, and that keyword is not on your website, the odds are slim that your website will appear in the search engine results.

Now, when it comes to placing the content on your website, DO NOT put the text in flash, and don’t embed it in an image (like a Gif or Jpg)- this is critical. Otherwise, the search engines can’t read it.

Now, with all this techie/SEO talk, don’t forget the basic rules of writing professional, enticing content for your audience. Here are a couple of basic writing tips that are far too often ignored:

* Capture the user’s attention! Get to the point. The readers should know in title or the first two sentences what your company does and the benefits of your service.
* Consider your target audience, and write in a way that will make sense to them (avoid jargon; it’s ok to be funny, unless you are a mortician or engineer or the like). Mention the benefits of your products and services, not just the features.
* Use spell check! You can quickly lose credibility with poor grammar or spelling.
* Limit your copy to 2 or 3 paragraphs per page. If the user has to scroll down too far, you’ll lose them.

However, SEO writing adds a new twist to traditional business writing. You’ll need to incorporate the key words that someone would typically type in when searching for your business online. For example, let’s say you own a moving company, some primary keywords that someone would search for would be: movers, moving company, residential movers, Pennsylvania movers, Philadelphia moving company, expert movers, etc. Then, take these keywords and plug them in to Google’s Keyword Research Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . This will help develop an extensive keyword list. From this extensive list, pick the words that fit your business, and that you can realistically get ranked on. (For example, if you are local moving company based out of Philadelphia, don’t expect to get ranked for the keyword “movers” after rewriting your content. Focus on less competitive, and more targeted keywords such as “Philadelphia movers”, or “Philadelphia moving company” with an emphasis on surrounding towns and counties and “long tail keywords”).

Now it’s time to integrate these primary keywords in to your content. A simple rule is to use the primary keywords around 3 to 5 times throughout your text. The number of times keywords are used through the text is called “keyword density”. Over use of keywords is a flag to Google and you can actually get penalized. As you write, be descriptive, and do your best to be natural. Ensure that the primary keywords appear early and often and include them in your titles. Also be sure to hyperlink some of the keywords to the other pages on your website. The engines like this for whatever reason. Now, once you’re done, launch this page right away so that the search engine “spiders” can pick up the new keywords. Don’t worry about “submitting” your page our website to search engines; they will pick it up naturally. After your new home page is launched, start working on the rest of your website. Try to add an article or white page every week or month. It may take months, but yes, “they will come” – and buy, hopefully.

Joe Witte is a partner at Logo Design Guru and WebbyGuru, and has successfully started 3 small businesses including CentricSource and Travel Ad Network.

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Using Social Networking to Promote Your Business

Posted on September 12th, 2008, 11:09 am
Filed Under (Biz Start Up, Branding, Interactive) by Brad C

In a conversation with a musician the other day I was posed a hypothetical question that made my mouth drop open: “so the internet is where things are moving, huh?” Shocked, I politely declared that this is the year 2008 and the internet has been “where things are moving” since before the freak-out of the Y2K end-of-the-world hilariousness.

Obviously, taking your business to “where things are moving” starts with some kind of company site. The question is - How do you use this site? Or, even more pressing, How do you leverage the vastness of the web to bring people back to your valuable little corner?

Whist there are a myriad of different strategies and this topic has been discussed on numerous blogs in much depth, let’s close in on leveraging Social Networking. I don’t think the argument needs to be made for interaction within these communities, but just in case, Christopher Carfi, an expert at building trust with the customer explained:

“Deceptively simple, online social networks contain great power. They change the online space from one of static web pages and stale marketing messages to a live, vibrant network of connected individuals who share their abilities, expertise and interests.”

Originally posted on The Social Customer Manifesto

Heads up: ‘Social Networking’ is the big broad general term. However, there are distinct differences between social networks, social bookmarking, social news, social media, blogs, and micro-blogging sites. (I know, that’s a lot! More on these later.)

GETTING STARTED:

Before you or your employees unleash your efforts and dive headfirst into the “social sphere” you need to set some boundaries and define a few things:

WHO YOU ARE:

Know the image you are projecting (literally and metaphorically).
Come up with a slogan or catch phrase and stick to it.
If you don’t own a URL yet, make sure you get one before you start your campaign so you can have everyone spreading the exact same links

Realize that you are climbing the “branding hill”. Consistency is key!

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE:

OK, here is where you’ll need to understand the difference between all the ‘socials’ involved in Social Networking. Here’s a brief glimpse at each:

Social Networks: like MySpace or Facebook. Meet friends and show the world who you are.
Social Bookmarking: like Magnolia or Del.icio.us (or related recommendation system Stumble Upon),share your bookmarks with your friends and find what they like.
Social News: like Digg or Reddit. Submit any type of content to be voted upon by other users.
Social Media: like YouTube or Flickr. Share your videos or pictures and comment on others.
Blogs: like Mashable (on social networking) or Technorati (on technology). Keep people informed by writing a post or article. Include visuals. Best online source for writing blogs is Skellie.
Micro Blogging: like Twitter or Tumblr. Let people know what you’re doing, what you’re interested in, or whatever - sort of like an “away message” on instant messenger.

How do you know which ones to target? It all depends on you and your business. If your product is music, like mine, then you probably won’t be spending much time on a business social network like LinkedIn Instead you might use one like ShareNow.com - the creators of Lifestyle Social Networking (my current employer) where you can participate in different communities based on common interests.

INTERACTION:

You are you - so maintain your you-ness! People don’t want a generic response, pretty sure they never did. They are done with corporate emails and packaged statements.

While it may be time consuming to actually communicate with people, Aaron Uhrmacher at Mashable tells us that “Social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, not companies” - you are absolutely relished by your consumers.

Your goal is to establish a relationship here. You represent a company or product, but because you are still you people will take the time to listen. You need their trust or you will be written off to the spam pile. Once you’re in that pile it’s over.

The type of relationship you are looking to forge will give you an idea of what medium you will use to communicate (which will, in turn, shed light on the appropriate people within your business who should do the communicating.) Should you be putting up funny video responses to spread virally? Creating a fascinating blog? Running contests and promoting them with micro-blogging? Maybe you build a widget that can be embedded across the net… or eventually all of the above!

Don’t forget - be open and honest about who you are and what you do! Otherwise you will be found out. It’s inevitable!

PURPOSE:

Keep the bigger picture in mind! Your only investment here is time, but the fact remains that time is limited. Find the balance between infiltrating the entire internet to splash your link everywhere and only getting to know a select crowd on one or two communities. Maybe you split your task into a job for two or three people.

Using Social Networking to promote your business puts you directly in touch with your consumers. Have fun with it!

Brad C. writes the Official Blog for ShareNow.com - the LifeStyle Social Networking community and spends most of his waking hours either riding his motorcycle or performing around Los Angeles

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