Posts Tagged ‘Business Advice’

14
Jan
2009

Top 10 Web Site Mistakes That Businesses Make

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Many small businesses fail to take advantage of the great, low cost marketing opportunities found on the web and make costly mistakes which can be easily avoided.

Where are you?

I don’t get it but a lot of small businesses think hiding their contact information is a good idea. I could get into why your contact information on every page is good for localized search engines, or how it could help regional linking but you know what? It’s simply common sense for a business to want prospects to be able to find them. If you’re a public facing business (retail, restaurant etc) your address should be on every page, it’s that simple. Other companies need an easy to find link, clearly labeled to a contact page.

What do you do?

Honestly, I’m a web designer and half the time I can’t figure out what companies do based on their website. Does your website over think the process? Most do. If you’re a restaurant, post a menu. If you’re an inn, show me your rooms. Post your product or service in the easiest, clearest way possible.

No Images

The only thing worse than a website without contact details? A boring, stale, dull one with lots of text. Pictures say a thousand words right? Well, stop typing so much and buy a $100 camera. Take pictures of your products and people, let me see your lobby, reception area, board room and then I’ll feel better about spending money with you.

Your Company is Run By Robots

Web site are not about technology, stop worrying about fonts and colors. Let me see your people, this goes back to the picture issue above but honestly, it’s worth a second point. Who’s won awards this month? New hires? Experienced professional? Let me know! By the way, having a video on your website is brilliant, people love videos.

Fire and Forget Web Sites

Nothing ticks me off faster than a business who launches a website and ignores it. The Internet is the first place your prospects are going to go to, and they’ll simply move on if ignore them. Answer every email, provide updated content, add a blog to keep content fresh and follow up on every comment on your site. Prompt service wins business.

Outdated Content

If your business wants to succeed, respect your website is an extension of your physical business. Look at it all the time, assign it to somebody in your office or if you can’t afford the time, assign it to me but for the love of all that is digital … Christmas is over in December, make sure your website isn’t promoting St. Nick by News Years. The same goes for the big trade show, holidays, news events and staffing requests.

Butchering the Brand

If your website doesn’t look like your brochure, fire your web designer. Honestly, there’s no reason for your logo to be different on a website. There’s no reason you don’t look as good no, scratch that. There’s no reason you don’t look BETTER on the web than you do in print or in person. Think about it, full color printing costs money but on the web, it’s free.

Broken Down Sites

A 404 Error is the technical term for a website page that no longer exists. 500 is the error code for sites which failed to execute a PHP script from your site … if your clients ever see this, you have no business running a website.

Web Sites Designed by Friends and Family

If your cousin is an award winning designer, hire her but if she’s a database administrator or makes a living putting monitors on desks for a living … walk away. Your website is an extension of your brand, it’s about marketing not technology so hire a designer with a proven track record building quality sites.

Typo’s and Mistakes

Broken images, grammatical errors, poor spelling … these are signs of a business owner who doesn’t care about the company and that tells me that they’re not going to care about the product they sell. Before a website goes live, make sure it’s done.

Effective online marketing is easy, it’s cost effective and it’s a key element of the marketing program of a modern, success business.

If you’re already running a website, take a few moments and ask yourself:

  • Does my website look better than my business card?
  • Does my website tell my clients what I do?
  • Does my website tell prospects how to reach me?
  • Is my website easy to use?
  • Is my website’s content fresh?

Once you’ve asked yourself those questions, ask 20 other people those five simple questions about your website and really listen.

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03
Dec
2008

What is the most important part of your web page?

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In the Cider House Rules, Author Rose challenges Homer with the simple question “And you know what your business is, boy?”, actually it was as much a statement as a question but the point was that Author Rose (played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo) knew what his business was and that Homer did not. 

Most web pages are like young Homer, they don’t know what their business is, which gets them into trouble.

Yesterday I let you look under the hood of my website and see how I used the <h1> and <h2> title tags to tell Google what was important, while using Cascading Style Sheets to control how it appeared to my audience. This allowed me to show my readers a well structured technical document while ensuring that the marketing value of my page was also respected. Today, I want to spend a few paragraphs enforcing the importance of document hierarchy in online marketing and explain why structuring your document is important for making money on the web.

A web page is made up of two primary parts, the <head> and the <body>. These two areas have specific purposes and can most easily be understood by common users by explaining that the <head> is read by the browser but not displayed to the site visitor while the <body> is what we see on a web page. More accurately, the <head> of the document stores information relevant to computers, while the <body> is for people.

Within the <head> of the document is stored a <title> tag which contains the phrase displayed at the very top of a web browser, it is literally the <title> of the document which has significant implications with regards to your website and brings us back to the original question: What is the most important part of your web page? Both from a structural and a marketing perspective your title must not simply reflect the content of your web page but must broadcast it like a triumphant banner in moral war.

Your <title> tag is your business. It is what Google and all incoming links believe your web page is about. If your web page had a Facebook status, it would be it’s <title>. It would Twitter about the title, it’s RSS feed? The title. I hope my point is clear, whatever you have between your <title></title> tags is your most important message on your entire web page, it’s your business. Homer? His <title> was empty.

As for your page <body> there’s an equally important tag in the content displayed to your users. The <h1> tag is by default the biggest, boldest tag in the HTML arsenal for a reason, it commands respect. In the old days, when the web was young and mostly used by academics the <h1> tag was used properly by people. It embodied the very essence of the page because university types used it to encapsulate the most important part of the page, the title. That’s right … the where the <title> tag was used to tell web browsers, robots and search engines what your website was about the <h1> tag was used to tell readers, through document structure what the most critical part of your web page was.

Today, it’s often forgotten that we can use basic document structure to build better web pages. Building web pages to properly reflect the structure of your page content will both help decrease marketing losses and lower the technology budget of companies. Want to know how? Sign up for my RSS feed, or check back next week.

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24
Nov
2008

The business impact of social networking

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Social networking fosters collective intelligence, collaborative work and support communities. Tools and behaviors from the consumer world are now making the transition to the corporate world, with diverse implications for changing the way businesses operate. This paper explores 10 opportunities presented by social networking, along with 10 associated challenges.

http://www.business.att.com/enterprise/exchange_resource/Topic/technology-trends/Whitepaper/the_business_impacts_of_social_networking/

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11
Nov
2008

Eight Ways to Make Money Online

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In August, there was a great article in Information Week called 8 Ways to Make Money Online, I have to admit that I stole the title from them but then again I think Forbes did the same when they published their piece called In Pictures: Eight Ways To Make Money Online. 

Here’s the trick to making money online, you won’t get rich. That’s a bitter pill for most people to swallow but sometimes it’s not about getting rich, it’s about helping to make the bills and earning money while you’re doing other things, a little at a time.

A few years ago I read a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad in which the author discusses how to make money and the power of a hot dog cart. In essence, he explains that the way to get rich isn’t through great ideas but by generating money while you sleep, eat or even play with the kids. That’s the trick with the Internet and making money on it, I get paid a great salary consulting for businesses around the world but I also make money every day just by running my websites.

Think about that, it doesn’t matter if I’m sick or on vacation, if I’m playing in the backyard or taking out the trash. My websites, my online stores and my games are all making me money everyday. 

Here’s how I do it:

1. Affiliate Programs – See that link for Rich Dad, Poor Dad? Click on over to Amazon and buy it, you’ll get a great deal and I’ll earn a couple of dollars for sending you to them. That’s how Affiliate programs work. I have a similar deal with BlueHost, one of the best hosting companies around, who also happen to pay me each time people sign up with them.

2. Pay Per Click Advertising – By far, the best known source for advertising revenue is Google’s AdSense. With Google, you can place a small piece of JavaScript code on your website and they’ll present your users with advertisements from related sites. Each time a visitor clicks on one of the ads (mine are located to the right on this page) you’ll receive a small amount of money from the advertiser.

3. Affiliate Advertising - Throughout my website you’ll see small ads measuring 125px x 125px, these ads are for products and services that I’ve selected for my website. Unlike Pay Per Click Ads which pay each time you click them, these advertisements work more like the Affiliate Program model, with money being paid for sales received from my referrals.

4. Write Quality Content – Regular readers here on my blog will know that I’m a huge believer in writing quality content, what they might not know is that I also sell my work to other websites and to other bloggers who need quality content for their own sites. Sites like elance.com and helium.com are great sources of professional writing projects.

5. Photographs – Web site such as istock.com will pay you between 25¢ and $3 each time somebody wants to download your photography. With the advent of digital cameras, it’s easy to upload hundreds of quality photographs to websites and earn royalty cheques each month.

6. Sell Stuff Online – Use websites like eBay, Kijiji and CraigsList to sell everything from old LEGO to quality services. Some are free, some cost a little. I wrote a piece called Making Money Online all about this. 

7. Be an Expert – Using tools such as Adobe Acrobat Connect, it’s easy to run online web seminars. Running these virtual training sessions allow people who live in remote areas to attend virtual conferences, learn from experts and take part in discussions without having to travel.

8. Create Content – We’ve already touched on the fact that you can sell photographs and writing but if you’re an illustrator or an animator, why not use those skills like I do? My content sells to people all over the world on websites such as istock.com and even Second Life.

During the course of writing this article, I found the following websites great sources of information:

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