Many people make certain errors when launching themselves into the world of the internet. Below are just 5 of the most common.

1. Assuming Your Customers Behave Like You

Just because you go to the blogosphere before you buy any products or services doesn't mean that your target audience does. Conversely, you might be a 70-year-old dentist, and you think the Internet is just a fad. You need to think the way customers think and figure how they find businesses. No matter what your mom told you, in this case, don't be yourself.

2. Not Knowing Your Limits

You can create your own Web site, do search engine optimization (SEO), and run your own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, but to do these things right, you need to spend an appropriate amount of time on them. That means that the five minutes you spend monthly on your PPC campaign may not be enough. You're wasting money that could just as well go to pay someone to take care of your local online advertising for you. Think hard about whether you'll make an ongoing commitment to optimizing your advertising campaigns. If not, maybe the best thing to do is go with the pros.

3. Assuming Web Site Aesthetics Equals Web Site Success

You may think all the frames, flash, and images you've put on your Web site look great. Unfortunately, that great stuff is all but invisible to the search engines. Search engines want only the facts. Not only that, they can't see the pretty pictures. So if your site is one big image, no search engine points for you.

4. Creating a Web Site That No One Visits

If you build it, they will come, right? Wrong. Just because you have a Web site doesn't mean anyone will go there. To get people to your site, you need to drive traffic -- whether that means using SEO, PPC, e-mails, banners or other tools. Give people a road and put them on a bus; then they will come.

5. Making It Difficult for Potential Customers to Contact You

You'd be surprised how many local business Web sites we see that don't even show the phone number. Or the contact information is buried deep down the Contact Us page. Your phone number (or however you want your potential customers to contact you) needs to be large and in charge on your Web site. Throw an easy-to-fill-out form on your page, too. That way potential customers who don't want to call still have a way to contact you.

There are many more things that we see, but these are the most prominent. If you don't have the time (or energy) to develop this kind of website then give us a call!

source:http://smb.informationweek.com/

Spread the word: Reading: Local Website

BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER DAVID LAVENDATue May 11, 2010

“I am baking cream cheese cupcakes this morning.” 

A colleague of mine tweeted this and got a message within a few minutes that said something like:

“Become a fan of Brand X cream cheese”

Now, wait a minute. Where did that come from?

Unfortunately, we can expect a lot more of this in the future. I say “unfortunately”, because this is clearly bad for business. At worst, it will erode the power of the social channel; at best, it will become the social equivalent of email spam – essentially transparent clutter in our inboxes.  With Facebook’s and Twitter’s new “publicity” policies, most people’s conversations are now exposed to those willing to pay for them. These are not “privacy” policies, because you automatically agree to share your information, unless you manually opt-out. First of all, how many people truly understand the issue, and second, how many know how to opt-out? Not many on either account.

Why is this bad for business?  To paraphrase Henry L. Stimson, a U.S. statesman, “nice people don’t read each other’s correspondence.” This means eavesdropping on conversations, or snooping on email, Twitter, or Facebook posts.  Since most people are not aware that they are being followed; they will be shocked and pissed when they find out.

So practice responsible social marketing. Here are some of my own guidelines:

1. Don’t connect with people beyond the context of the relationship – if people sign up on your website to get a monthly newsletter, don’t assume you can send them a message every week with your latest announcements.
2. Social outreach needs to be subtle – use Twitter and Facebook to create real communities where participants get value for participating. Pummeling prospects with ads or product pitches through these channels is inappropriate. Recently, I see more and more companies following me on Twitter. I don’t really think this is a good thing.
3. Respect people’s privacy online, even if you don’t have to. It is one thing to follow someone on Twitter, it is another thing to mine Tweets to build a prospect list. Just because I tweet that I am baking cream cheese muffins, doesn’t mean I want to be a cream cheese fan. This is really tricky, because this type of outreach can be a good way to find people who share your interests, but you need to be careful.  Err on the side of caution. The price of pissing people off is high when you are playing with your organization’s brand equity. Even if you don’t agree that this is inappropriate, others might. Would you like to see your “campaign” exposed in popular blogs as an example of inappropriate marketing behavior
4. “Social” means that interaction is two-way. Connect in ways that don’t trigger “fight or flight.” When you join a community, listen at first to understand the conversation, and then join the ongoing thread. Don’t try to divert the conversation to your agenda. How many times have you seen people join a LinkedIn group and immediately send out blasts offering their professional services?  This is such a turnoff. Would you actually hire someone like that?
5. Approach people in a respectful manner – how do you feel when someone on an airplane eavesdrops on your conversation, and then butts in with comments? It is no different online. Letting people know how you reached them, and providing a context for why they might be interested in interacting with you, is not only good manners, it is good business.

As always, I would like to hear about others’ experiences and hear more suggestions.

Spread the word: Reading: Five Rules for Responsible Social Marketing

I have been doing a lot of research lately on what it takes to cut it in this always growing, always changing on-line game called marketing. Most say to get on twitter, Facebook, and any other social media that you can find. But, is this enough? The short answer is no, just being there and calling on the field of dreams incantation, “If you build it, they will come” simply doesn't work. Below is a good list of blunders that on-line businesses tend to make, hopefully this will help you and get your marketing going faster.

1. If You Build It They Will Come. How will they know you have built it? Print your web address on anything and every thing that you market with. Use a signature when posting to blogs, replying to emails, etc that have your address prevalent.
2. Fear of Conversation. Just because you have a Facebook or a twitter account doesn't mean leads will fly at you. You have to build a conversation with people and get them to trust you.
3. Insular Thinking. Your target audience is not in your “bubble”. Reach out to people that are not in your circle to gain a better market stance.
4. Ignoring the Search Engines. This is one of those catch-22 things, you build a site for customers, NOT SEARCH ENGINES, but at the same time if the search engine can't see it what good is it? This is where avoiding flash and non-standard web languages where possible.
5. Being Stagnant. A website should be relevant to today or at least this month. Always update the site as often as possible, it you aren't updating people will think that your information is out of date and go somewhere else.
6. No clear conversion mechanism. Do you have your email/phone #/etc prevalent on all of your pages? The idea behind a website is to drive a sale!
7. No real follow up system for the leads a site generates. Do you answer inquiries? If not customers will go somewhere else.
8. Sites targeting product numbers and industry terms rather than what people are looking for. This goes hand in hand with #4. Don't build a site for search engines or for special cases, build it for your market.
9. Assigning Internet marketing tasks to the companies “tech person”. You know how to fix a computer you must know how to rank a website. WRONG!
10. Not doing quality link building and digital PR. Get involved with the community that you serve and begin building relationships that can give you reciprocal links, get the name out there, but be weary of purchased links and get it quick gimmicks. This takes time!!

For the full article see http://seoaware.com/2010/05/13/common-online-business-mistakes-michael-gray-alan-bleiweiss/

Spread the word: Reading: Top 10 online marketing mistakes

What is your biggest pet-peeve when you visit a website? Mine… Music that auto plays. Although this drives me nuts, the consensus is that this is not bad enough to make the top 10. So what are the top ten mistakes that WebPages can make? Below is a conglomeration of the web developing community’s opinion on the matter, in no particular order.

• Slow load. Whether it is due to poor design or bloated tables, images, etc slow loading pages will make your bounce rate closer to 100%. No one wants to wait 1-2 min while your cool graphic loads to read the information they want.
  
•  Landing pages. There is nothing worse than being greeted by a message “please wait” while a flash intro loads. A user is looking for content not a flashy video telling how great your site is. Further, this landing page does nothing for your SEO efforts having no crawlable content.
  
•  Wall of text. Users don’t want to read your latest novel. They are looking for information and they want it quick. Make text easily scannable, and break subsections with headers to allow the user to find the information they need.
  
• No Contact Info. So… whose site is this? If you want to lose business or drive it away leave a phone number/ address/ email off of every page.  The drive of any commercial site should be CONTACT US, but with no contact info… yeah.
  
• Busyness. So where is the content? I only see the 5 flashy ads, but no information... Almost as deadly as the wall of text is the busyness of a page. If the pages are not consistently clean and direct the user to the content they need an overhaul.
  
•  Alternate content. Whether a PDF, video, etc, loading alternate content breaks the flow of the user’s navigation. A rule that I always design with is “If it can be text, it should be”.
  
• Readability. White text is OK, but not on a light blue background.  There are uses for 6 and 8 point font, but not as content text.  If you have trouble reading the text, what makes you think that a user will be able to read it, or want to?
  
• Over Advertising. What is the site about, the ads or your content? In most cases, ads are ok, but should be limited to as few as possible and should be outside of the main content so that it does not interrupt the user’s search for content.
   
• Over use of new technologies. This has been the downfall of flash sites, too much use and not well done. JavaScript can also get there. As a general rule don’t use something other than HTML or CSS to do what they can do by themselves.
  
• Uninformative information. Blah, blah, blah… Does your site say a lot and nothing at the same time? Websites are supposed to answer questions for clients. If you have pricing use it, if you have special cases tell them about it. In general don’t leave your potential customer guessing and going somewhere else.

Spread the word: Reading: Top ten mistakes of web sites

SEO… SE-shmo … what is all the hype about, I have a website that’s enough for me. WRONG! Unless you only want people that can remember your website address you need to do at least some basic SEO. Some of the easy things that you can do include keywords, and meta-data.  So, what is SEO anyway? Search Engine Optimization is the process of making changes to your website to make them show up better on search engines. There are two main camps of SEO “black hat” and “white hat” and everything in between. Black-hatters use deceptive means to try to rank higher like having a webpage specifically written for spiders that is completely different than any user will see. White-hatters on the other hand use common practices and common sense in tandem to improve your site’s content and keywords so that the users can find the information that they are looking for. In general the Big three (Google, Yahoo, Bing/MSN) frown on making changes just to improve your ranking on the search engine without improving the user’s ability to find what they are looking for. This point is actually one of the main reasons that Google is changing their algorithm. In short, if it doesn’t allow a potential customer/user to find the information that they request then don’t do it!

At Next Step Computers we run a custom program over your site to determine a score based on best practices. For example, does your site have keywords listed in the meta-tags that are actually on the page itself? Just because you shove a bunch of words in the meta-tags, doesn’t make them KEYwords in the eye of search engines. There are also many free tools available that will tell you bits and pieces of the information that you need to accomplish a good SEO. One of the best tools comes from Google, Google Webmaster Tools.  There are many others, but through Google you can access a community that will help you with questions, the tools will give you information on true keyword usage on your site, etc.

Spread the word: Reading: SEO… SE-shmo … what is all the hype about?

One of my business associates shared with me an article titled “How to Hire a…” from Good Housekeeping's march 2010 the other day. This article touted “Find the right fix-it pro for those jobs you can’t (or don’t want to) do yourself.”  The article listed Electricians, plumbers and a few others, but no mention of a web developer. So here is my take on what you should be asking a web developer before you hire them.

Web Developer

• What is included in the service? Does a certain amount of SEO come included with the design? What about analytics? Is the site written in HTML, CSS, or simply an image?
• What other sites have you done? Ask for a portfolio, this will give you an idea of the work that the developer is capable of and as with any artist they will be happy to show off their work. Be wary of developers that do not have a portfolio.
• What guarantees do I have that the site will be functional? What is the developer’s policy on upgrades breaking code, or accidental deletion of a page?  How much will they charge to fix a problem?
• What other things will I need to make the site functional? Be careful when a developer doesn’t ask you about your hosting situation at the get-go. An integral part of making your site functional is hosting (ie where the files go for the web to see them). This will be needed for your site to be used.
• Is there a written contract? Does the developer have the terms of the development written out so that there are nothing is hidden and time-tables are known? Verbal communication is great, but if it’s not in writing it won’t stick. Get all agreements in writing so that both sides are held accountable.

Now, let me answer these questions from Next Step:

• What is included in the service?
• We have 4 basic packages, each including Search engine friendly pages (basic SEO) and creative customized design. All of our sites are designed in HTML with  CSS for visual effects, and php for processing. Our Bronze includes 5 customized pages and free content placements. This is the most basic design. Next our Silver package includes 10 customized pages and 1 hour free updates after launch. This is great for small businesses! Our Gold package includes 20 customized pages and 2 hours free updates after launch. This is a great start for small e-commerce websites. Lastly our Platinum package includes 50 customized pages and  5 hours free updates after launch. This is a great start for larger e-commerce websites.
• Our hosting packages include email, mailing lists, Google, Webalizer, and Awestat analytics.
• What other sites have you done?
• We have a complete portfolio on our website (http://nextstepcomputers.net/portfolio.php) that shows a wide variety of designs.
• What guarantees do I have that the site will be functional?
• We guarantee our work till the end. If there is a coding error that has been caused by something other than the customer going in and changing it, we will fix it at no charge. This includes server upgrades, and accidental deletions.
• What other things will I need to make the site functional?
• As always, a website host will be needed to make the site functional. We require a host that supports php, mySQL, and recommend it be a Linux/Unix platform for most functionality.  We offer affordable hosting options for those who do not already have hosting. This info can be found on our website (http://nextstepcomputers.net/hosting.php).
• Is there a written contract?
• Yes, we believe in informing customers up front about all the requirements and the performance time expected for each project. We go over the contract before we begin work.

Now, there may be more questions that you personally would ask, but this is a good starting point.

Spread the word: Reading: How to Hire a… Web Developer!

    My morning has been spent looking at websites as usual, but one thing I noticed is that a lot of sites have too many images or they are poorly optimized (if at all) for displaying on the web. This, as I have posted before, reduces the performance of the site making it load slower. This, in turn, causes potential customers to bounce. This is not good for business, nor the customer!

    Another flaw that I have seen is the website that is basically a Photoshoped image that has been exported as HTML and called a page. This may look great and exactly how you want the site to appear, but it is basically a ghost to the search engines. This is a HUGE problem, because as I posted earlier 85-90% of your traffic will come from a search engine. So, if the search engine cannot see information on your site, you automatically loose 85-90% of your potential customers. Having said this, there are ways that you can make the site more friendly to search engines, but the best way is to reduce the image to a minimum and use text where possible and CSS for design. The most important part being your contact information and a description of what you do.

   If you find yourself in this predicament don't panic, SEO! The basics of SEO will only help you, but will not be enough on their own. These basics include complete meta-tags and compelling content. Now, if this is Greek to you, hire a web developer (not designer) to complete these tasks for you. Once you have the information, the process is very quick and straight forward. Any good web developer will know the questions to ask you and know what content is needed to complete a basic SEO once looking at your site.
Spread the word: Reading: Pictures are good ...right?