We have put over 100 satisfied companies through the workshops during the past year and its been a great success. The 1 day course offers practical training on how to use all the latest social media tools to market your website along with advice on how to achieve higher search engine rankings.

If you are in London and fancy attending then you can register on our website for Internet Marketing Training Courses.

Hope to see you soon!

In some senses, this is still a current issue, with different companies doing different things. Many seem to treat it as a sort of brochure: especially guilty of this are design companies and many B2B consultants/service providers. Others view it as being something that all businesses ‘should have’, without any real idea what it is for: its simply a way to find their phone number.

As web 2.0 intergrations become more widespread, many businesses see functionality on other sites and would like to port some of that over to their corporate site. In our view, some of the best implementations we have seen seem to revolve around two simple elements:

• Commenting and review systems
  Its fairly simple to add commenting and review functionality to your site, although it may not seem it. Disquis is a free system with Facebook Connect functionality (which allows users to login and leave comments under a their Facebook account). This system could really drive your customer engagement by allowing customers to talk about your business in a moderated enviroment – consider a ‘leave a reccommendation’ page or similar.
• Aggregating other web content
  For larger organisations that already have a reasonable user base, many web users will be already be talking about your products or services, or using media related to your services. It is fairly simple to implement on a lot of content sharing sites: some people choose to use flickr to pull all the images with one tag on (e.g. london transport) and put it onto their site in real time. Have a look at the website of the artist London Elektricity. Any service that provides these options or has an open API (like Twitter, for example) will be easy to integrate into any part of the site.

Why not give one of these a go, as a weekend project? For small business, you need something to set you apart from the rest. Enhancing your web presence is increasingly important.

by Joe New
Future First Technologies

What I really mean is that assume that your website users are idiots. If you look at your website statistics you will probably be horrified at short a time  someone stays on your website home page before leaving to go somewhere else – perhaps a competitors.

This blog entry covers a few simple tips (common sense really) to make sure you give your website visitor every opportunity to turn from a potential customer into a paying one.

What do you want your visitor to do?

Set out an objective for your website visitor. Typically this could be:

• Pick up the phone and call you
• Fill out a form
• Send an email
• Buy a product
• Read a certain page or story

or a mixture of any of the above. So when you have decided what your objective for your website visitors is – then you assume that your website visitors are idiots.

Objective #1 – Pick up the phone and call you
So have a look at your website and see where your phone number is listed:

• Is it on the home page?
• Is it prominent?
• Is it on every page?
• Is it high up on the page -above the fold?

Basically if this is your #1 objective then make sure its near impossible to miss it. A lot of websites have the phone number hidden away on a contact us page and you are asking an awful lot of your users to start clicking away to find it.

Objective #2 – Fill out a form
So have a look at your website and see where the form is:

• Is it on the home page?
• Is it prominent?
• Is it on every page?
• Is it high up on the page -above the fold?

Perhaps you can see a pattern emerging – like I said earlier its common sense. Unless the form is pretty long then theres no reason it should be displayed on the bome page and perhaps you can work it into an ever present prominent feature. Also keep the fields in the form to a minimum – we are all strapped for time and don’t want to be presented with War and Peace.

Objective #3 – Send an email
I’m not going to start repeating myself and I’m sure you get the idea about where to place your email link – and yes make it a link. If you are worried about spam harvesting of your email address have a look at this link.

Objective #4 – Buy a product
Work out what your best selling, most popular or most profitable product is and make it prominent on the home page. If you owned a shop then you would probably have this in the shop window and not at the back of the store. Display enough information and an image prominently on the home page with a prominent buy button – you can always have a read more link if there is further information.

Objective #5 – Read a certain page or story
If your objective is to get the viewer to read a certain story or page on your website – perhaps its your latest product launch or review – then once again you need to make it prominent on the home page. Have an attention grabbing headline and teaser and click through to the page and once again have it prominent on the home page.

If you have other objectives then you can pretty much tailor the advice based on the information in this post to any objective.  Its common sense – make it prominent and make sure the viewer cannot miss it. Of course the key to a succesful website is good and consistent navigation and this goes hand in hand with  your users finding the correct information quickly and easily in the least number clicks possible.

You can always run a test

You can always do a simple test on your website. Ask someone who has never been to your website before to look for certain information – your objectives. Ask them to record how long it takes them to find it.

Stuart Brant runs a web design and internet marketing agency – futurefirst.co.uk. He also runs highly succesful Internet Marketing Training Courses in London .

Stuart Brant

www.futurefirst.co.uk

I once was lost, now I’m found on the web

If anyone is interested in learning about how to market their business using search engines, social media and other forms of internet marketing you can book for a free 1 day Internet Marketing Training Course

Muraspec Google listing

They also queried as to why this only happened after some searches, that bought up their website in the results, and not others. Although at the time I was pretty sure as to why i thought I’d carry out a bit of research and post it here on our blog.

Why does it happen in some searches and not others?
Google will only return thes type of results when the search criteria is specific enough – in this case the company name. When the search criteria is this specific then Google realises that it can go a bit overboard and give a type of menu to internal pages to save the user some time. In this case the company’s name was unique so there is little doubt as to what they needed. If the user searches for what the company does it doesn’t bring up these results when the company name is listed.

Why does this not happen when I search on my company name – even though I’m top?
This gets back to one of the central points of our Internet Marketing courses – A well structured website. In this case Google obviously thinks it knows enough about the site to give this mini menu. From a quick scan of the site it seems that its showing the values that are either text links or Alt Tags from image buttons – so whatever you do make text links on your site and make sure you have Alt Tags on any image menus.

In conclusion
At the end of the day a website owner has to make it easy for search engines to go through its site and find information. Although you can’t force Google to provide a listing like this you have to give it what it wants – which is information:

• Provide a text based menu – either the main menu or perhaps a quicklinks footer menu
• Put Alt Tags on all images – especially navigation buttons

Another important note to remember – you can also give extra information on text links (within the code) using the Title tag.

Credit – some of the information included in this blog article was found at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/092509-google-adds-links-to-web.html?hpg1=bn

Stuart Brant

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Creating a blog for your small business isn’t easy; it requires hard work and the ability to think creatively about your work. But if you avoid the five big mistakes laid out in this post, your chances of building a successful business blog will be much better.

Mistake #1: Treating Your Blog Like a Press Center

How to Avoid: First, don’t ever put out a press release on your blog. You can use your blog to make product or other business announcements, but do so with original writing and in a more casual voice. Second, do use your blog to write about things other than your core business. Share your thoughts on your industry, share insights into the day-to-day work life and processes at your company, and provide tips and tricks you have learned during your time in business.

Mistake #2: Not Blogging Regularly

How to Avoid: Blogging regularly isn’t easy, so to avoid burning out, brainstorm editorial ideas ahead of time. If you plan to put out new posts every Tuesday and Friday, for example, try not to start writing Tuesday’s post on Tuesday morning. Get other people at your company involved so that one person isn’t shouldering the entire blogging load, and even consider sourcing content from your customers. Remember that anything can provide fodder for a good blog post, so pay attention to the things you read or see on other blogs, newspapers, magazines, or television.

Mistake #3: Not Enabling Conversation

How to Avoid: Obviously the first thing you need to do is enable commenting on your business blog. But beyond that, you need to remember that the conversation is two-way. Get in there and respond to the comments readers leave on your blog and you’ll be more likely to develop a community around your writing that can help turn your customers into fans who will evangelize your products and services and provide you with quality feedback. You should also participate in the conversation on other blogs in your industry by leaving comments on posts elsewhere around the blogosphere. That will help you to establish your “blogging brand” and bring new readers your way.

Mistake #4: Making New Content Hard to Discover

How to Avoid: There are a few ways to make sure your blog content is more easily discovered.

- Make your blog easy to find by linking to it prominently from your company’s web site and including your blog’s URL in your email signature, on your business cards, and in sales and marketing collateral.

- Use a full RSS feed (because the goal with most business blogs should be to get read, not boost page views) and make it easy for your readers to find and subscribe to.

- Embrace social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook as a way to notify your fans and followers of new blog content, and make it easy for your readers to share content with each other through social media channels and via email.

- Optimize for search engines by putting relevant keywords in post titles and URL slugs and write about the things that your customers are most likely to be searching for — but avoid sounding artificial simply so you can stuff some more keywords into a post.

Mistake #5: Expecting Too Much, Too Soon

How to Avoid: Set attainable goals and realize that you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t cancel your blogging efforts after three months — give it at least a year of regularly putting out quality, original content. And make sure that your blog is easy to find, and that your readers are able to easily comment and share posts with others.

We come to this point at the end of our Internet Marketing Workshops and to be honest its not normally something our delegates even think about – but its crucial in turning website visitors into customers. So I thought I’d discuss a few things we try to get over to people attending our internet marketing courses. The question you need to ask is:

What do you want them to do?

When you go to IKEA on a Saturday afternoon you enter the store and then, whether you want to or not, you have to walk through virtually every section and past every product (2 floors worth in the Croydon store) before you enter the scrum of the checkout area and are able to leave the store. This is not by accident – IKEA have sat down and asked themselves – What do we want them to do? The answer is probably “We want them to see every product we sell so they buy more products”.

So as the owner of a website you need to ask the question “What do we want them to do”

If you have an e-commerce site then the answer would normally be:

• Buy a product

If you haven’t got an e-commerce site then the answer could be any of the following:

• Give us a call
• Send us an email
• Fill out an enquiry form
• Join a live chat
• Sign up to our newsletter

Of course some of you may have more specific answers and these may change depending on your business circumstances or may even be seasonal.

So you have identified what you want your website visitors to do – now how do you get them to do it.

Well the simple answer is use the landing page to lead them to it – depending on your on your objectives:

• Have a telephone number prominently displayed – so they can’t miss it – put this on every page
• Have your most profitable and popular products prominently displayed with a logical (least amount of steps as possible) path through to actually entering the credit card details
• Have a newsletter sign up form on every page
• Have prominent links through to a contact form (and please keep the questions to a minimum)
• Have email links prominently displayed

Its all pretty logical but by sticking to a this simple theory you will be able to convert browsers into customers – once you have got them there. Like IKEA won’t let you leave their store until you’ve seen every product – you should follow the same approach.

I will be expanding on this in forthcoming blog articles and also on ezine.com.

Forthcoming articles:

Assume your customers are idiots!
Mental Recoginition and SEO

Stuart Brant

http://www.futurefirst.co.uk