Small Business Design Resources

Quick Tip: Keep Your Website’s Main Content “Above the Fold”

In website design the term “above the fold” is referring to content on your website that the user sees first without needing to scroll. Keeping your most important content above the fold of your website, gives you a better chance to get your point across as soon as the user enters your website.

How to Make Money From Your Blog

When you develop your blog, you need to keep in mind the 4 basic principles of profitable website building. These are commonly known as CTPM. The letters stand for Content, Traffic, Pre-sell and Monetize. The four principles work for all aspects of your website business but let’s take a look at them in light of your Blog.

Let’s take a look at each of the words and how they apply to blogging.

Content

Your website content needs to be relevant and interesting first of all. To keep people on your site long enough to pre-sell or monetize, your website content needs to appeal to your readers, so it needs to be relevant to the topic of your website. That’s what will keep people coming back and that’s what will get people to sign up on your mailing list or your RSS feed for more information. A blog is a great way to enhance your content because you can change it regularly, especially with regard to changing search engine entries. You should be analyzing traffic to your site regularly using analytics tools, and you should be checking on reverse seach engine keywords regularly too to make sure you are keeping up with what people are typing in the search engines.

Traffic

Generating traffic is possibly the hardest part of running a website, and this is where the science turns into art. Blogging is one of the most highly recommended ways to drive traffic to your site so it’s a very handy tool if used in accordance with the four principles. But it’s not the only thing you can do. Here are some of the things you must look at, understand and master to generate traffic to your site:

• Affiliate marketing – affiliate marketing is where you get other internet marketers to help market your business by offering them incentives or rewards. For example, if you sell a product, you can have an affiliate sell your product for you and then they get a percentage of the profit and you get a percentage. You generate the product, and they generate the sales.
• Blog carnivals – bloggers of similar topics unite and blog on similar topics. A blog carnival has an edition, like a magazine, centered on a theme. Links to all the contributors are created in the blog. You can look for carnivals being run by others or you can create your own and get others to join in. You can create a carnival edition in your own blog and invite other bloggers to send you articles. Look for experts with great blogs that you want to associate to your blog carnival.
• Advertising – Look into advertising revenue using things like Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Adwords is a program for people who wish to post ads based on relevant keywords. They pay Google to post the ads. Adsense is the program that picks up the keywords and looks for relevant sites to post them to. When you create your site builder template you build in placeholders for ads. Of course, you can rearrange the ads at any time, or remove them all together from your site builder template. It’s up to you.
• Social Media – blogging is one form of social media, but there are many others. Look for ways to get your site linked to from other sites; submit articles to sites like Ezine.

Pre-sell

Preselling your customer means getting them interested in your service or product by nurturing them as customers and giving more than they bargained for in the best possible way – lots of useful information, good service and so on. Your blog should specifically help your customers and is a great pre-selling tool.

Monetizing

Simply put, this is the part where you make money. It might be from advertising dollars, or selling your service or product. Ideally it’s a combination of both.

Using the four principles is just the beginning. For a successful and profitable website you need to be dedicated and determined to reach the top of the search engines. Of all of the above, traffic is probably the most important because without traffic it doesn’t matter how good your content is and you won’t make money.

Quick Tip: Use an ALT tag for your website images

For search engines an image is just a block that they cannot read. So to help search engines recognize images on your business website you have to include an ALT tag in the HTML code. To check if an image has an ALT tag just hover your mouse over an image and if you see text appear next to your pointer, then there’s an ALT tag associated with that image.

Here’s a sample HTML code for an image that includes an ALT tag:

<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”image description goes here”>

Go ahead and mouse over on the image to the right to see the ALT tag in action.

Targeting Specific Geographic Locations for your Small Business

Once you publish your small business website to the internet, anyone across the globe with internet access will be able to see it. But perhaps you run a local service and you really only care about local traffic in your neighborhood. You might be asking yourself if it is still worth maintaining a small business website. The answer is – absolutely! When people are researching a business, the internet is the first place people go – even for small and local businesses. They want to know whether you are a legitimate business, what times your business is open and what services you offer.

The internet if the first place people go when they want to find out if a business exists in their local area. When people see that you have a website, it makes them feel that you are a legitimate and reliable business. So running a website is an important part of doing business in today’s market place whether you are a big business or a small, locally-based business.

You may be missing valuable traffic by not marketing your website to your local users. Geotargeting lets you target users in a specific geographic location. If you maintain a user list for your web users to sign up, geotargeting ensures that you are finding people in the right area for your mailing list.

Geotargeting Techniques

Geotargeting means finding ways to advertise your services to your local customer base or customers in a specific geographic area. It might be that you want to reach people who live in hot climates or people who live in areas where a specific type of plant grows well… there are hundreds of reasons why you might be seeking a customers that live in a certain area of the country or a certain part of the world.

There are actually several ways that you can use geotargeting to reach your local users.

Online Geotargeting

• Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign an address to your website. This address can be assigned to your geographic location so that the geographic location of your business can be identified. Then you can target traffic locally. Talk to your ISP provider to find out more.
• When you sign up for your internet service you usually provide the zip code of your business. Your zip code can then be used to geotarget your customer audience rather than your IP address.
• Use a tool such as Google’s Webmaster tools to define a geographic location to the search engine. For more information visit: Google Geo Targeting

• Find other local online businesses, such as your local newspaper online, or businesses with services that are in line with yours (but not in direction competition of course) and become an affiliate. You can advertise each other’s sites by providing linkbacks free of charge.
• Use Google Adwords and other pay per click advertising to target your demographic.

Offline Geotargeting

1. Offline geotargeting means creating an advertising campaign to local users like sending out postcards or broadcasting a radio advertising campaign to get your internet address out there. You can combine this with a special offer to draw attention to your business.
2. Take advantage of local marketing publications, flyers and circulars by purchasing a local advertising campaign.
3. Get in involved in community events and look for opportunities to put your website address on the back of T-shirts for charity events, local fundraisers and so on.
4. Subscribe for free to other websites that can help. Try Sharon Fling’s website at: www.geolocal.com

Geotargeting is especially well suited to small business who would like a web presence but don’t necessarily want to sell their products or services nationwide or worldwide. Of course, you don’t want to rule out opportunities for worldwide traffic, but it’s nice to know you can exercise some control in your advertising campaigns.

Why Authentic Customer Testimonials are Important for Your Small Business

Your website is seriously outdated. You need to hire someone to do small business website redesign for you. You’ve researched your options online and narrowed them down to three promising candidates. How do you decide between the three?

One of the best ways to make sure someone can deliver on their promises is to check their references, and when it comes to online businesses, third-party testimonials are the best references. Of course, you need to make sure the testimonials are valid before you can trust them.

Why Testimonials Work

What works for you as a small business owner when you hire a service provider also works for you when you want to get hired. Prospects will have an easier time trusting you when they see that your previous customers were happy with your services and are recommending them. Again, the best way to demonstrate that you are trustworthy is to use client testimonials.

Third-party testimonials are powerful because they are believable. When you tell prospects that you’re good, they won’t necessarily believe you – after all, you’re trying to sell something and could be lying or at least exaggerating.

But your customers don’t have to say good things about your services. They don’t have to say bad things either – they can say nothing at all. That’s why when they do go out on a limb and tell the world that you’re good, the effect, in terms of your reputation and trustworthiness, is significant.

Not All Testimonials are Believable

Of course, not all testimonials are created equal. Written testimonials on your own website are easy to create but are the least effective, simply because they’re not very authentic – you can write them or edit them yourself. At the very least, to give them some validity, these basic testimonials should include the customer’s full name.

Video testimonials are much more effective because they can’t be faked, but they are time-consuming and many customers are reluctant to give them. Audio testimonials are also an option, although – again – many customers won’t be too cooperative when it comes to providing them.

Authentic testimonials on a Third Party Website

One of my favorite methods for collecting authentic testimonials is to place them on a third-party website such as RatePoint. There are several benefits to doing this:

1. Typically, third party sites save you the work of updating testimonial web pages manually by automating the process of collecting client testimonials.  Clients post the testimonials directly to your page and you can approve them before they get published.

2. Using a third party service for collecting and displaying your customer testimonials is far easier and less time consuming than creating video testimonials.

3. Above all, these testimonials are significantly more effective than placing written testimonials on your own site, because they are authentic – prospects know that they cannot be faked.

If you own a small business, don’t forget to harness the power of authentic customer testimonials. They are one of the best tools you have for convincing prospects to trust you and to choose you over your competitors.