During a coffee break at a Small Business BC web writing course I was delivering this week, an entrepreneur approached me for some advice specific to his business. After discussing a couple of solutions, he sighed and said, “things take forever to set up on the Internet.”

I grinned. Just a few short decades ago, business ventures required products to be built by hand, marketing opportunities were limited and distribution could involve railroads and steamships. Such vast operations would call for huge sums of manpower and money.

Continue reading →

Why do so many businesses lack respect for online customers?

It’s bizarre, especially in this day and age with Internet usage and spending relentlessly on the rise. Perhaps with so many suspect websites hovering in cyberspace, even credible companies tend to lose perspective.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of visitors as online guests. It’s a simple ‘mind shift’ that might get companies to better recognize how their websites communicate with those they intend to serve.

Continue reading →

Businesses are continuing to push more of their marketing budgets online.

Not too long ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported online advertising spending will grow faster in Canada than anywhere in the world over the next four years. Meanwhile, in the UK last year, Internet expenditures overtook traditional advertising in national newspapers. And in the US, Forrester forecasts companies will spend upwards of $26 billion on Internet marketing per annum by 2010 – approximately eight per cent of all advertising spending.

Webcopyplus conducted a poll to determine what entrepreneurs and small business owners spend to gain presence on the Web. Of the 60 polled, more than 38 per cent of businesses spend between $500 and $6,000 on online marketing annually, only five per cent spend more than $12,000, and the remaining 57 per cent spend less than $500 or less per year.

Continue reading →

Google will begin issuing its users cookies in coming months that will be set to auto-expire after two years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users so preferences are not lost. This change is in response to pressure from users and privacy advocates. Google notes that users will continue to have control over cookies via their browsers.

Google will soon be introducing a new ‘unavailable_after’ meta tag to allow web masters to advise Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling.

For example, if you have a promotion on your website that expires on a specific date, you could use the unavailable_after tag to tell Google when to stop indexing it. The new Google tags are designed to help maintain relevant, up-to-date listings, especially for sites like eBay, so closed auction pages are eliminated from search results.

Online traffic is useless unless your website content is able to connect with visitors. If it doesn’t, there’s probably little chance they’ll return.

Relevant website content is essential to engage your visitors in a bid to turn them into customers. Here are the basics steps you need to cover to connect with your target market:

Make sure your website content is scan-friendly and intuitively accessible to make it easy for visitors to find what they want. Lean web copy and well-planned site architecture can make or break your website.

Continue reading →

Just over a year ago, I had coffee with a pleasant couple planning the opening of a pastry shop in the Greater Vancouver area. I asked about the basics:

Branding? A friend helped them design a logo, which was printed at home on perforated business cards. Signage? A small, plastic banner was on order. Online presence? They planned to use a free template and “throw something together.”

After explaining the need to delegate, build a professional brand and get an informative website up so vendors, such as coffee shop owners, could conveniently peruse their product offerings, they politely nodded. It was obvious they saw such costs to be unnecessary.

Continue reading →

Clever business types recognize the fact that it takes less time, effort and money to retain customers rather than finding new ones. The same goes for website traffic.

Here are two strategies to keep visitors coming back for more, which establishes relationships and builds loyalty:

1. Offer a free tool or service on your website. This will keep visitors coming back, and when they’re ready to invest, you’ll be top of mind.

2. Build an e-mail list. By turning your visitors into newsletter subscribers, you’ll maintain contact and be able to highlight certain aspects of your website or business with every mail-out.

While it’s important to reach new visitors, never overlook opportunities to hold on to your existing website traffic.

Too many businesses, large and small, turn people off with self-absorbed websites.

Does your website content merely brag about your company’s “industry leading” products, features and services? If so, you might be boring your visitors and helping out your competition.

Customer-centric content is a quick and effective way to engage visitors and turn them into customers.

Plus, from a branding perspective, how you communicate with your target market says a lot about your company’s true focus. Are you striving to provide clients solutions and opportunities, or are you just out to grab additional dollars?

To be a true customer-driven business, you should be orienting all business messages and processes to customer wants and needs. In fact, the driving force of your company and culture should be to meet those desires to the fullest.

Here’s a typical and all-too-common example of self-centric website content:

We’re the best learning management system

(Company name) is the revolutionary online training system. We’ve won awards…

What’s this company focusing on? Its customers’ needs? Supposedly not.

Here are some guidelines to help establish customer-centric website content:

• Get familiar with your target audience before writing. What are their concerns, for instance?  This helps to position your product or service as a solution to their problems.
• Promote what visitors want or need — not what you sell. Your product’s won awards? That’s terrific, but be sure to accentuate what it means to your visitors.
• Focus on benefits rather than features. What does your visitor have to gain from your product or service?
• Speak to, not at your customers. Build a rapport with your visitors by using a second-person voice, such as “you” and “your.”

By communicating to potential clients with content geared to their needs and wants, you’ll keep them on your website longer. And the longer you keep their attention, the more they’ll realize how you can fulfill their desires.

Remember, in the age of the Internet, consumers are in the driver’s seat. If you’re not catering to your visitors, the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo will quickly guide them to a competitor that does.

Business never sleeps. And with the advent of the Internet never has the saying seemed so true to its meaning.

Every hour of every day, millions of people in every corner of the world log on to the Internet. They use it as a means of communication; a means of research; and as a means of purchasing products and services with their hard-earned money. To that notion some might even question how we ever survived without it.

Business websites are an integral part of the Internet world. If yours is lost or dead in cyberspace, you sit at a distinct disadvantage disconnected from a vast and growing customer base, now more than one billion strong.

Continue reading →