Do you want to actually make a sale or do you want to make them feel like running away and hiding.
Have you ever thought what message you’re sending when you’re marketing a product to women?
Whether you’ve thought about it or not here is an interesting post - from a woman - that you may find helpful.
For those of us who are involved in business online - whether as a service provider or by selling online - and are paid in US dollars here is some news that is not good.
The US housing market is not recovering as some figures that came out last week seemed to indicate. Instead it’s actually deteriorating and is much worse than most people thought. You can read the full story here
‘Dave’ lost his small business domain name because he never had control of it. Don’t be like ‘Dave’, protect your domain name because losing it can do an incredible amount of damage to your business.
Learn how to protect your domain name by following the link
Online merchants need to know the demographics of the people who are online. For a long time it was thought that it was mostly kids and those in the 35 to 44 age group that made up the largest groups online.
However that’s been changing in the last few years and now it’s the baby boomers who are out there surfing the Net in big numbers.
Hitwise has just released some interesting statistics that show that, in the UK, those in the 55+ age group are about to become the largest group online. You can find the Hitwise report here and you should add the Hitwise feed to your reader - the information you can glean from their blog is invaluable.
… and also get seen by all the other search engines too.
If you’re reading this then you already understand that although you think your small business’ website is the best thing since sliced bread the search engines might be seeing things quite differently.
So you’re left wondering what you should be doing to get Google and the others to see your site in a more kindly light.
Well, there are some lessons to be learned from one of the biggest retailers on the Net and you can read more about it at Amazon.com: The SEO-Smartest Retailer on the Web?
That’s something that I often wonder about. In so many ways it’s very dependant on small businesses and medium sized businesses and yet it seems to lack the ability to interact with those businesses on any level. It even appears to understand why it needs to interact with us.
Here is an interesting story about the way Google dealt with one Adsense advertiser. The interest isn’t so much in what it did to win back this advertiser’s business but what it hasn’t done for other businesses of a similar size that are also having problems.
This comment from the article left me wondering.
“Google can’t meet one-on-one with every unhappy client.”
Why can’t they?
It would certainly go a long way to changing the perception that Google is arrogant and indifferent to the needs of their customers.
Actually there are 15 rules but they’re split into three lots of five and they really are fundamental to your online survival. Follow the links and you will find:
Five basic SEO rules for small business
Five tips for small business when choosing a web designer
and
But that doesn’t mean they understand it
A recent survey in America has shown that the number of small and medium sized businesses that are online has increased in the last six years. In 2000 53% of small and medium sized business were online and that has risen to around 60% today.
However, it’s obvious that there are a lot of small and medium sized businesses out there who don’t have a grasp of the fundamentals they need to know and understand about how to make their website work for them. One of the problems that we see time and again in the web design side of our business is that these business people don’t understand what it takes to get their websites to the top of Google for the terms that are important to them.
Way too many people seem to think that it all just happens simply because they have gone online. They fail to understand that it takes a lot of work - as far back as the website planning stage - to achieve those top results. Even after the website goes live there is a lot of ongoing work that needs to be done every week to achieve the results your looking for.
And just to make things even more difficult for the small and medium sized business people, the work that has to be done can change because the way the search engines rank the sites they list is continually changing.
Trying to get our clients to understand that is a frustrating part of the business I would rather not have to deal with but it’s something that every web designer is duty bound to talk about with their clients.
If you’re a small business person who wants to launch a website for your business be sure to listen to your web designer when he talks about the work that needs to be done to get your site listed in good and relevant spots. Some will be waffling on and talking nothing but nonsense while others of us will be laying out the facts for you in terms that you can understand.
Please try and listen because there’s nothing worse than telling a small business owner exactly what work is involved - and the time it will take - to get their site to appear in Google and then have him call you two days after the site goes live and complain that Google has no listing for his site.
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