Preparing Your Web Site for Christmas

As the winter holiday season approaches, smart e-businesses are gearing up for the busiest shopping of the year. This year, a study prepared by British research group YouGov predicts that the highest growth in Christmas shopping will be among people who typically do only light shopping online. What does this mean for your web site?

How to Target Light Shoppers in the Holiday Season

If you want your share of this fast-growing demographic, you need to make sure that your web site is easy to use for first-time visitors, the elderly, and people who are not very familiar with the Internet. This can be a challenge for SME owners who have spent years on the Internet and who know everything there is to know about e-commerce. Now is a great time to audit your web site for simplicity, convenience, and ease of use. Here are a few ideas:

Is Your Navigation Streamlined?
Light shoppers don’t have the patience to click through pages and pages of information to get to what they need. Make sure that your navigation is intuitive, clearly labeled, and can bring your site visitors to any page in a maximum of four clicks. Also, make sure you have easy and effective search options so that visitors who know what they want can go straight to them.

Is What They Are Buying Obvious?
People who are new to e-commerce need a lot of reassurance that they are getting exactly what they want to buy. Whenever possible, use plenty of descriptive text and large photographs of your product.

Is It Easy to Find Help?
Online shopping may seem easy to people who do it often, but new users may become befuddled at relatively simple concepts. Make sure that the answers to their questions are easy to find, through links to more information and to prominent ways to reach customer service.

Use Very Clear Calls to Action
Even something as simple as a highlighted link might not seem obvious to someone who barely has used the Internet. You don’t want to leave your customers stranded and thinking, “OK, I want to buy, but how?” Use very clear calls of action as road signs to guide your site visitors to their next step.

Get New Eyes to Review Your Site
Once you feel like you have achieved all of these goals, ask someone in the target demographic to walk through your site and track how successful they are at achieving their goals. An older friend or relative is a great choice. You may be surprised at how much you’ve overlooked.
The best part about performing this kind of site audit in preparation for the Christmas rush is that you not only can increase your web site’s performance for light shoppers, but you also can make life easier for your regular customers. All of these tips will work toward improving your conversion rate among frequent Internet users as well as the light shoppers who will be flocking online for the winter holidays.

If you would like help preparing your website for the Christmas period, call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.

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Social Media Marketing and Your Business

Search engine marketing (SEM) changed the face of Internet business with its ability to drive huge amounts of traffic at hardly any cost. With so many e-businesses catching on, however, SEM has become increasingly cut-throat. It’s difficult (or impossible!) for many small to medium enterprises to compete with mega-corporations for search engine placement for their top keywords. Luckily, a new form of online marketing offers all of the benefits of SEM while simultaneously improving search engine rankings. What is this new opportunity for e-businesses?

How Social Media Marketing Can Boost Your Profits

The answer is SMM – Social Media Marketing. Social Media are web sites designed to help people share information and opinions, and they are growing in popularity every day. Some popular Social Media sites include:

Digg – Originally designed to help users find interesting tech news story, getting an article or blog post on the front page of Digg can easily drive tens of thousands of visitors to a site – every day. Alexa, the web information company, ranks Digg around number 100 in terms of the web’s most popular sites.
Del.icio.us – This is a site that allows users to store bookmarks online and to share them with other users. People can browse through sites that others find interesting by searching for tags. Alexa ranks Del.icio.us around the 250th most popular site.
Facebook – Facebook is a social utility that helps people reconnect with old friends or find new ones. Alexa ranks it as the tenth most popular web site.
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon lets people find new, interesting sites in their favorite topic areas with the click of a button. They then can rate the site, making it easier for others to find it. Alexa ranks StumbleUpon around number 295 in popularity.
These sites are so popular and so powerful that they not only can drive tons of visitors to your site, but they also can improve your search engine rankings significantly. That means that optimizing your web site for Social Media web sites can enhance your Search Engine Optimization simultaneously.

So how can you get noticed by popular Social Media sites? Some tips include:

 - Write unique content that people will want to talk about. Don’t be afraid to be controversial.
 - Make it easy for people to link to your content on SMM sites by including helpful links to each site.
 - Get the ball started by linking and promoting your own articles.
 - Reward people for spreading the word through reciprocal links, contests, etc.
 - Get to know what kinds of content get picked up by each of the SMM sites. Target your articles to that audience.
 - Be active on those sites. This will help you gain an insider’s perspective, and also will make it more likely that other people will help promote you.
 - Social Marketing sites are an extremely powerful way to drive traffic and get high-quality links that will boost your search engine rankings. Be sure to consider Social Marketing Optimization as you add content to your web site in order to be able to maximize your articles’ effect.

If you would like a no-obligation consultation to explore how a Social Media Marketing could work for your business, please call 01491 614121.

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Boosting Your eNewsletter Marketing Impact

Most SMEs put a lot of thought into their e-mail marketing. They hire a top copywriter to create an informative white paper or newsletter; they tweak the sign-up process to make sure it’s as easy as possible, and they test every image and link to ensure that it sends the right message and encourages readers to take further action. And yet, a huge percentage of companies leave potential customers feeling cold about their sign-ups. Why?

Are You Overlooking an Important Way to Hook Customers?

Because, according to a recent study by Silverpop, an average of 33 percent of U.S. and U.K. e-commerce businesses don’t bother to send a welcome e-mail to a new subscriber.

Sending a welcome e-mail is a vital part of e-mail marketing. For one thing, it’s very important for customer satisfaction. How does a new subscriber know if the sign-up really went through without a welcome? Plus, he or she now will know how your e-mail messages look, which improves the open rate and reduces the likelihood of having your message discarded (or reported!) as spam.

Furthermore, you’re also reaching out to the subscriber at the very moment that he or she is most receptive to your message. After all, if someone cares enough to sign up to your newsletter list, that person obviously wants to learn more. So why not make it easy for him or her to do so?

Any generic welcome e-mail is enough to resolve the first point. Thank new members for signing up, let them know the information that you have on file, and show them how to unsubscribe if they want. That will be enough to satisfy your new subscribers.

However, you also can do much more than that. A customized welcome e-mail can engage your new subscribers, answering their questions, improving loyalty, and improving your chance to make a sale. Some great ideas for leveraging the power of your welcome e-mail include:

Add coupons with discounts for your products and services to the welcome e-mail.

Include links to relevant articles and information. If a user just subscribed to your “New Gadgets” newsletter, then show him or her some examples of new gadget articles and reviews that you have on your site.

Link to your forum or blog to make it easy for the new subscriber to join your community.

Create special offers just for subscribers – free members-only white papers, e-books, or other useful tools – to thank them for joining.
Let subscribers know about other newsletters that might interest them as well.

By reaching out in a welcome e-mail, you can show your new subscribers that you really are trying to help them, while giving them a better overall feeling about your e-mails. Don’t ignore this powerful way to engage subscribers when they are most receptive to your message.

If you would like to evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing activities, or wish to create your own email marketing strategy, please call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.

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Amazon Offers Online Payment Processing

Amazon has announced its intentions to follow Google into the online payment processing arena, a market previously dominated by PayPal. Online payment providers allow e-commerce businesses to accept payments without the hassle and expense of setting up their own merchant account directly with the credit card companies.

Bookstore to Challenge PayPal in Online Payment Arena

Many online shoppers also prefer using a service like PayPal or Google Checkout, because they know exactly who is handling their credit card information. Instead of handing over their payment information to little-known online companies that could have questionable security or morals, customers are reassured that only the big, more trustworthy players ever see the actual credit card numbers.

Another strong advantage is that buyers do not necessarily need a credit card to be able to make online purchases through online payment systems. They also can transfer funds directly from their bank account, which many shoppers prefer.

Amazon is in a strong position to enter the online payments arena, since it already offers an in-house processing system called Amazon Payments for people who buy and sell products through Amazon Marketplace and Amazon Auctions. The new Flexible Payment Service (FPS) simply will expand Amazon Payments to work on other web sites as well.

Amazon claims that its FPS system provides unmatched flexibility for both businesses and consumers. Some benefits include:

Buyers can pay using a credit card, a bank account, or their Amazon Payments balance.

You can set up complex payment instructions, including limiting how much people spend in a certain time period or accepting micropayments.

You can set up aggregate payments, so that people can make payments in installments.

You easily can create one-time, multiple, or recurring payments.
You can specify which party pays Amazon’s fees.

You even can set up payments between two third parties.

FPS charges less for less expensive types of transactions, helping you save money on your processing.

Amazon also offers FPS Sandbox, in which developers can build their own applications and try out and test all of the features without actually charging anyone.

Increased competition in the online payment processing arena is really important for many small businesses. While brick and mortar stores can accept cash or checks at no cost, online businesses rarely have that option. It can be difficult or prohibitively expensive to get a merchant account from the credit card companies.

While PayPal did open up payment processing and make it easier for online businesses to receive money from their customers, it has a very bad record in terms of customer service. Many businesses have reported that their accounts have been frozen or even shut down altogether for little reason and with no warning.

The arrival of Amazon on the payment scene will, at the very least, shake up the competition. Just as GMail’s arrival forced online e-mail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo to offer much more storage for their customers, Amazon’s features will force PayPal and perhaps the credit card companies to be more flexible and helpful to avoid extermination. In the best case, Amazon will help merchants save money and provide better, more transparent service for their customers.

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Creating an Effective Link Strategy

The ability to link is one of the strongest advantages of the Internet. As e-business owners, links also are a powerful way of driving traffic to our web sites and of providing important, relevant information to our readers. However, as search engine marketing becomes more important, links have taken on another vital role as well – they strongly influence rankings in the search engine results pages.

How to Use Links to Increase Traffic

Google uses the links to a page to determine its popularity – whether other people in the industry think that that page is worth sending visitors to see. Sites that are very popular are considered to be higher quality, and are bumped up in the search engine results pages.

So how can you use links to drive traffic directly and to improve your search engine rankings? Here are six tips:

Emphasize Links from Related Sites. If your page is about widgets, links from other sites about widgets will have more effect on your rankings.

More Popular Sites Give Stronger Links. A web site that has a high popularity rating itself will do more to boost your rankings than a relatively unknown site.

Pay Attention to Anchor Text. Anchor text is the words that a reader will click on to be brought to your web site. Including your keywords in the anchor text will improve your ratings for those keywords. A link that says 'Bright Blue Widgets' will be more effective for your rankings than one that says 'Read More'.

Get Links to Deep Content. Don’t try to just get links to your home page, but encourage other web sites to link directly to related content. This will improve the user experience, as readers are sent directly to the information they need. It also will boost the chances of individual pages being found in the search engine results.

Stay Away from Bad Neighborhoods. The search engines take any attempt to game their system very seriously. If you are getting links for the sole purpose of raising your rankings, without improving user experience, your page may be banned from the search engines altogether. Avoid “link farms” and other low-quality reciprocal links, and be sure to put your users’ needs first. If your readers won’t get added value from visiting a link, don’t include it on a page – and don’t encourage that site to link to you.

Too Many Links Dilute the Effect. It’s a good idea to link to other sites that link to you. After all, if you are getting high-quality inbound links from related sites, your readers probably would benefit from visiting those sites as well. However, too many outbound links – such as a Favorite Links page – can seriously dilute the benefit of the reciprocal links, and even could be viewed as spam. Use links in moderation and where relevant to your readers.

By following these six easy tips, you can attract high-quality readers to your web site through relevant links while also making your web pages easier to find in search engines. Just remember that you always want to put your readers’ needs first. This is a good strategy to stay in the good graces of the search engines, while also keeping your readers happy. If you would like a develop an effective link strategy for your website, call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.

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