How to turn a business around in 10 minutes or less

If you’re struggling to make enough sales in your business, this video by Brett McFall will stimulate you to think in ways you probably never have before about what makes your business unique.

Hardly anybody in business puts any effort into thinking about their Unique Selling Proposition. Those who do, will walk all over the competition.

Most business websites are “me too” sites. Everyone copies everyone else. Occasionally, you get someone in a market sector with the courage to stand up and state what makes them different.

Watch this entertaining and challenging video (about 6 minutes long). It could help to revolutionise your business!

You can’t make pigs fly

Website owners often think they can boost their sales by hiring a search engine optimisation expert to get them more traffic.

While more traffic is always good, you need to bear in mind the advice of Bruce Clay, who is regarded as the world’s leading expert in search engine optimisation.

To quote Bruce: “It is not the job of search engine optimisation to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the website so that it becomes an eagle.”

In other words, it’s a waste of money sending more traffic to a website if the site doesn’t work effectively to convert those visitors into sales.

It’s far better to invest money first to transform your website into an eagle… so it really flies.

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic

To quote another top marketer: “Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a website with a poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes”

Most New Zealand websites are full of holes. The priority is to get these plugged (or in some cases it’s better to build a new bucket).

If you’re serious about selling online, you do need to work on search engine optimisation too. But that should come AFTER you’ve got your website converting at the best rate possible. And bear in mind, SEO (done correctly) is expensive. It’s easier and cheaper to double your conversion rate than to double your traffic.

How web designers often feel

We really do love our clients… but some can test our patience just a little. Someone just sent me this video which basically sums up the experiences I have with a some clients.

If you’re in the web industry, or any kind of creative industry, you’ll identify with this video.

And if you are a client working with a professional designer, please take note

12 questions any good web design company should ask before starting work on your website

If you’re a business owner with a website, here is a question…

How many new leads and/or sales has your website brought in during the past week, the past month, or the past year?

If your website is bringing in a significant amount of new business on an ongoing basis, you are in the minority. Most small business websites are almost worthless as a marketing tool because they’ve been built by designers or programmers who know very litle about marketing.

On this point, (and as a sidetrack before I get into the 12 questions mentioned in the heading) I was approached by a client this week who needs help to get his website ranking higher in Google. I had a look at the site and saw a massive problem. The site is built using a content management system, which doesn’t allow meta tags to be added to each page. This means the title of every page on the site is the company name… nothing else. This site contains a large number of products, each of which people could be searching for in Google. But they won’t find this website because of its non-existent meta tags.

Now, the programmer who built this website is obviously very talented as a programmer. He has custom-built a content management system. But while the site is technically brilliant, sadly, it’s almost worthless in terms of marketing the company’s business on the Internet. 

So, bearing this in mind, before I agree to build a website for a client, I need to be sure in my own mind that the site I build will actually be a valuable investment in terms of bringing in new business. Otherwise, what’s the point of building it?

Here are the 12 vital questions…

 The answers will help me to determine, first , whether the business actually needs a website (not every business does) second, what type of site they need, and thirdly, what sort of ongoing internet marketing strategy they need.

1. How do you acquire new customers or clients now?
2  What is your business plan? Specifically, what is your Mission Statement? What do you deliver to your clients/customers above and beyond “quality at a fair price”?
3. How do you keep in touch with your current customers?
4. What’s your most profitable product or service?
5. Do you have any underused capacity that you’d like to scale up?
6. What causes you the most aggravation or frustration in your business?
7. If you already have a website and/or email marketing strategy, how is it working?
8. Where do you want your business to be in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from now?
9. What is the “Lifetime value” of a new customer or client?
10. What is the profile of your “Ideal Customer”?
11. Do you have an advertising budget?
12. What is your current return on ad spend?

These are vital questions, which every business owner should know the answer to. It’s my job, if they hire me to help them market their business, to ask these questions and then offer the right solution, based on the answers.

New website for Christchurch company selling steel-frame kitset homes

I’ve just launched a new website for C-Style Homes, a Christchurch company that sells a great range of steel frame kitset homes at amazingly low prices.

This website project is the first of what will be many more as part of a new business relationship I’ve developed with MARKITABLE, a Wellington company.

The website is built with the Joomla open source content management system and has a contemporary look. It’s clean and simple in its design. And furthermore, it is already ranking on page 1 of Google for the keywords steel frame kitset homes due to some pre-launch work on my part ot help get it optimised in the search engines.

The long-term strategy will be to get this site at the top of Google for the term kitset homes, which is much more competitive. I achieved this a few years ago for another website selling kitset homes and I’m confident within a few months C-Style will also be near the top of Google, certainly on Page 1.

Search engine optimisation is very important for any business website, particularly in the current economy. It’s still relatively easy to get a good search engine ranking in the local market in New Zealand, because so few websites are optimised.

That will change, of course, as more busineses get web savvy. But for now, a few simple strategies such as the right meta tags, alt tags on images and developing some good incoming links, is enough to get most sites well ranked on Google in their local market.

How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet

I have just published a new report called
‘How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet’.

The report is too long to post here (about 9 pages). So I’m offering it to you as PDF to download. The report is free and you don’t even have to give me your email to get it

But if you find it helpful, I would like to ask that you will forward it on to someone else who might also benefit from it.

The Report covers:

• How People’s Behaviour Changes in a Recession and How to Profit from It [Page 2]
• What You Should NEVER Do in a Recession and What to Do Instead [Page 3]
• The 4 Reasons Why You Need to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 4]
• The Top 3 Ways to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 6]

To get the Report, Click Here.

With email marketing, boring is usually better

If you are sending out an email newsletter or promotion, it’s tempting to go for a “flashy” high-tech design, rather than “boring” plain text.

But my experience over several years has convinced me this is usually a big mistake.  In fact, it was confirmed recently when I designed a slick, professional-looking email newsletter template according to my client’s directions (and against my better judgement). The newsletter looked fantastic. But a large percentage of them went straight into the recipients’ junk mail folders.

The important point is, every time you send an email to your subscribers, their email service checks to make sure it meets their deliverability standards. Emails that contains a lot of graphics and HTML automatically raise a red flag with email service providers, because that’s what a lot of spammers tend to use.

For example, SPAM Assassin, which is a spam detection software used by many email providers, will penalise your email if it has more than 30-40% HTML content.

Furthermore, most email clients now block images in emails by default, as a built in security precaution. In order for the recipient to view the graphics, they have to click on a button or link to allow it. (And why would you want to make a customer click anything just so they can read your email properly?)

Experienced email marketers know newsletters that focus on content rather than design achieve a higher sales conversion rates than newsletters with heavy HTML and graphics.

Your subscribers might be duly impressed by the design of your first email newsletter. But after that, the only reason they will keep reading your emails is if they contain something of interest to them. 

The bottom line is, if you want your email newsletters and promotions to get read, you should make them plain text… or if you must use HTML, keep the graphics to a minimum. Leave plenty of white space, so it’seasy for people to read.

Email marketing can be highly effective. But only if your messages get past your subscribers’ spam filters and they can actually read them. The most important thing about an email newsletter is not how nice the design is… it’s the content. That’s the only reason people will want to read it.

Why aren’t more websites designed with ordinary people in mind?

If you’ve ever tried to buy something online and have been asked to set up an account first, before you can make the purchase, you will appreciate this article by Jared Spool of www.uie.com.

The $300 Million Button: How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300 million a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

“I’m Not Here To Be In a Relationship”

We conducted usability tests with people who needed to buy products from the site. We asked them to bring their shopping lists and we gave them the money to make the purchases. All they needed to do was complete the purchase.

We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

Some first-time shoppers couldn’t remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering.

Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)

Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either

Repeat customers weren’t any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn’t remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.

When a shopper couldn’t remember the email address and password, they’d attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can’t remember which email address you initially registered with.

(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

The $300,000,000 Fix

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

On my answering machine is the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer, the first week they saw the new sales numbers from the redesigned form. It’s a simple message: “Spool! You’re the man!” It didn’t need to be a complex message. All we did was change a button.”

‘Winning Websites for Small Businesses’ - a new handbook for New Zealand businesses

I have just finished writing a brand-new handbook for New Zealand businesses, called “Winning Websites for Small Businesses”.

I don’t believe there’s any other publication in New Zealand quite like this handbook because it’s aimed specifically at the unique needs of the New Zealand marketplace.

If you have a website for your business and it’s not getting you the amount of visitors, leads, or sales that you wish it was - this handbook has been written for you!

I’ve basically tried to summarise everything I know about website design and selling on the Internet, in a user-friendly way that is easy for the ordinary business person to understand.

This handbook is not about website design in the ordinary sense. It is about how to build a website that SELLS - and there’s a big difference

If you are keen to find out more about this handbook (and if you’re a New Zealand business that has a website, then you should be) then go to www.winningwebsites.co.nz.

Win customers by giving away FREE information

By Harvey Segal

What is the best way to attract visitors to your website? Everyone agrees on this point - it is by providing Free Information.

Let’s see how to do this and why it works so well. Suppose you are a supplier of video recorders. Hopefully you will be the owner of a professional sounding domain name, such as VCRworld.com.

You write an informative article entitled “How to Choose a Video Recorder” which explains:
* the key features of video recorders
* a guide to prices
* handy tips for using video recorders
* useful accessories
* potential problems
* future developments

Put this article on your website or have it available by mail (on an autoresponder if you expect a big response). While your competitors are all posting similar ads which say “Buy, buy, buy our cheap video recorders” or sending unsolicited bulk email to thousands, you will be posting short ads which say:

Our Free Guide: “How to Choose a Video Recorder” explains the key features to look for, prices and handy tips. Visit www.VCRworld.com. And whenever you contribute to any group where there are potential customers you include your signature:

“How to Choose a Video Recorder”
FREE guide - www.VCRworld.com

Your visitors will be impressed by the quality of free information you are providing and your well chosen domain name: they will regard you as an authority on the subject.

They will be easily influenced to buy from your site while your competitors’ unoriginal ads are consigned to the email waste bin.