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I understand the point of this guide and I agree that these things will help you get a certain type of customer, however, isn't there something to be said for looking small? I have long term clients who like me because they found me...kind of like how you might like an out-of-the-way restaurant that you found. If I were pretending to be something I'm not, I wonder if they would still be my customer. Also, I have become customers of some businesses because of how unpretentious their lobby is -- I look and think "they don't spend a lot of money on marketing and impressive chairs and a fancy address...that's a good business that will be around a long time and one that can give me good prices because they're not spending money on those secondary luxuries."
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Google adwords now lets you bid to place commercials on cable and network TV. They even give you a 1800 number to help you track conversions and the effectiveness on media buys.
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I find that many of the answers in yahoo answers are wrong or haven't been fully answered yet.
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Hi Scott,
I've tested that and found the same thing. If I add a line "starting at $495" to my adwords, in an attempt to qualify the lead, the CTR goes down but the % of conversions go up and, all in all, it's more effective for me.
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Good guide to analytics.
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Some parts of SEO can be outsourced. However, a big part of SEO is key phrase analysis. If I were optimizing a web site for a Philippine audience, then I would trust a partner in the Philippines for this. However, if I were optimizing for America or an English speaking audience, then I'd want to make sure that my SEO partner had a fluent understanding of the language and the culture.
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Google Adsense now offers publishers the option to place pay per action adverts on their sites. I've been doing well with them. Now I'm noticing that they are automatically running the PPA adverts when they find a good fit.
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This is a helpful guide. I personally like it when google gives the snippet instead of the meta.
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BTW, I'm using Google adwords to bid on classified sized adverts for my clients. You can underbid the paper's published rates and they might still run the advert if they have the space.
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Certainly Adwords is getting more and more complicated -- with the quality rating we now have to optimize landing pages on the web. Then there is the possibility to target sites and demographics as opposed to targeting searches. Finally, we're able to target real fish-wrap news papers, radio stations and now TV even. There has never been a time when small businesses needed a qualified SEM professional more then today.
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My friend Janelle Brown is using facebook well to promote her book "
All We Ever Wanted was Everything." I'm getting pinged about her NY book signing & she's posting all her reviews there...
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It's also good from an SEO perspective to update your website frequently. The more you update it, the more often Google will visit the site. The same could be said for users. :-)
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I'm using
google apps as an ASP for my business. It replaces the Microsoft Office Suite and it's my email host at
wolfram.org
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What about grid hosting. It's quite a buzz word these days in hosting. It started with MediaTemple. Then Amazon got into it. Now Servepath has
Go Grid hosting plan. I guess that grid hosting is supposed to scale with traffic. Thoughts?
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Is there a way to get an RSS feed forwarded to your email? Or is there one that integrates with an email program? I just don't see these things catching on until it integrates with the pull client application everybody already uses -- email.
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I think that if you're going to monitor employee's surfing habits, you should let them know prior to doing so or else you'll risk demotivating them once they find out. I guess it's an ethical issue. Thoughts?
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Hi Jeff, I understand what you're saying, that the revenue of parking the domain might compensate for the cost of leasing the domain. And I certainly agree that it's easier to buy a domain than it is to develop it with helpful content. However, you say that there is "little time commitment" and are you sure you're taking into consideration all the time you're spending finding domains to buy. I don't know about you, but many people spend hours and hours looking for a single good domain because thousands of people have thought that they were going to get rich quick by sitting on domains, and consequently there is absolutely nothing available from the source. Secondly, are you taking into account the time it takes to attend the 3 conferences you recommend attending? ;-) Still, I see your point. But if you ask me, shooting to sell domains for 2K isn't a good business plan these days. Still, you can make a few bucks. But if you develop a web site, you could stand to make a few million bucks -- which I think is a better plan. Finally, I didn't see this link in your guide --
Afternic.com -- which I think would be a good resource for somebody dealing in domains. It's a domain auction site. I saw some 4 letter .com domains for sale for $60...pretty good if you don't mind domains with numbers in them :-)
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I'll second the Drupal recommendation although I wouldn't put it into the "affordable" box, necessarily.
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word-press comes with a bunch of templates. Although it's a blog software, the application has the concept of "pages" and I think some of the templates take advantage of that to make wordpress a pretty easy out-of-the-box web site solution.
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I think almost every business could benefit from a good
CRM
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I have Time Capsule and it's not so great. It's slow. Our laptop doesn't always maintain connection during backups. It's slow. The automatic hourly backups interfere with work and you can't set a schedule..it's either every hour or "off". .oh, and did I mention that it was slow? .
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I can't deny that putting "free" in a PPC campaign actually increases the CTR. But I see your point, in B2B it doesn't matter as much as with consumers. In certain types of B2B sales, anything "free" or gimmicky is a big turn off. They typically want facts and bottom line. Thanks for pointing this out so well.
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Good guide. I'm trying to improve my PPC campaigns. How long should we test A/B ads. In print direct marketing, I remember that 5000 was a number...but in PPC, especially at the Keyword level, those number often take too long to get to. I'm afraid that I'm altering my copy before the tests have had enough time to run. Any thoughts?
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Also, I have to add -- wordpress.com -- the version that you install on your server (and not the hosted application) is solid -- it is not just a blog -- it has the concept of "pages" so the application can be used as "web site" and it has plenty of templates that can be used. It's what they're using here at blog.work.com -- so it MUST be good :-)
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You know, this is a very helpful guide. I've had problems with my clients when they are developing site searches for stores. Thanks for this excellent much needed specific perspective on the subject. I'm going to send some clients and some developers here...
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Here's' a cool twitter plug-in for firefox.
http://mashable.com/2007/05/06/8-awesome-firefox-plugins-for-twitter/
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Hi Jeff,
It's great that you can make $2000 selling a domain name that you bought for $12...no doubt. I wonder how many domains you bought that didn't earn any money -- how many do you still own? And it's true that developing content is a different skill than speculating on domain names. There are different risks too. And I believe that the pay-off for creating something helpful on a domain is long term -- both in cash and in karma. But if you can buy something for $12 and sell it for more -- more power to you.
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You know, Google Adwords is now judging the landing pages and giving them a quality score. A "poor" quality score will send your cost per click to $5 or $10 even for phrases that others are paying pennies for. Google is being typically not transparent about how to improve the landing pages and improve your quality score. So I'm interested in what, if anything, you have learned about how to improve a landing page for a Google adwords campaign.
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Somebody once told me: "Doing something is almost always better than doing nothing." I hate that advice because 1) it's true 2) It doesn't allow me to be lazy :-) I finally figured out that I'm actually happier when I'm doing something than when I've got nothing to do -- so now I'm more at peace with it...
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This all sounds very slick but I'm wondering what, if any, effects this would have on your credit rating to A) carry a balance for a long time B) Move it around on various credit cards.
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This is interesting. You don't want to leave anything on the table by low balling your salary expectations. Giving a range sounds good to me, as in, well I'm making 15-29K a month doing freelance and I kind of want to be in the same ball park if I took a full time position with you.
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What a good guide. I see a lot of luggage that looks like it's carry-on size but it's not. How can you tell if a suitcase will actually fit?
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Also, WordPress and Typepad, although they are known as blog software, which are chronological logs, both systems also have the concept of Pages. Pages are static and stay there even as time goes by. Wordpress also has some good templates for blogs that use a lot of pages. These are good options.
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Great guide Justin. This is a fantastic check list resource. I'm bookmarking it now. I'm an SEO professional and my clients will benefit from this. Thanks.
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Nice guide. Never underestimate the benefits of user testing. Simply sit some of your target demographic in front of your web site and ask them to do tasks like 1) Find the phone number 2) Add and item to the cart and check out 3) Find the address 4) Contact the support -- then observe them. If they are having problems with these sorts of conversions, you can bet that your users are.
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Hi. Nice guide. So many people build web sites and have pages meant to hold content that doesn't get written. Making the place for content is way easier than writing it -- isn't it? :-) One thing I'll add: A page of text can be a turn off. I found that I get lower bounce rates on pages after I put an image with the written content. I'm using
IStockPhoto -- a very reasonable and web friendly stock photo library to get visual content to go with the written stuff.
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IMO, usability is often the most important part of design. Sit some users in front of a web site and ask them to do some essential tasks. For instance, ask them to find the directions to the store, try to write feedback, how would you add something to the cart and then change the order, etc. Then observe them. Somebody who is familiar with the site, like your designer or you, might be shocked at how difficult some people will have doing these simple and essential tasks on your site. If so, fix the problem.
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Great guide. I never thought of a short term blog.
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This is a very good guide. I love it. Bloggers-block -- lol.
I would also add, if you have a blog, one motivator to write could also be cash. Go check out reviewme.com and sign up to write some Advitorials content. You could end up helping all involved.
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I always thought the best domains are what they say they are. New-York-Dog-Walking.com is a GREAT domain, if you're a dog walking service, for instance. It will also do well in SEO. Also, don't forget to look for domains for sale at afternic.com -- that's a place where people auction off their domains.
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Google apps also has a basic web design tool that's intended for small businesses within their suite of applications. Check out:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/business/index.html
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From what I understand, Drupal has a steep learning curve. it's certainly not something that you can learn in a weekend. There was a Drupal conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago and when my friend returned, all he could talk about what how Drupal was the cat's pajamas. I'm thinking about loading it onto my server and checking it out.
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My favorite small business tweet is from Woot.com -- they have something on sale every day and they have it at a very low price until it sells out. I think this would be a good model for many types of small businesses as a way to encourage your customers to subscribe to your tweets.
http://twitter.com/woot
Eric
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My insurance agent always hands me a ton of this stuff. Calendars, address books, umbrellas, pens, magnets, bags and note pads. Although a lot of it got tossed, some of it made it into my house. Over the years, I've used those items to find his number when I had an insurance question. So I tend to think these things work. But I think this sort of schwag is on a different level then the yearly sort of gift basket thank you gifts. One of the best pieces I received was a USB flash drive with the company's logo on it -- very helpful and a high perceived value!
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There is also the type of "consultant" who is really an employee. That is, they must show up for work from 9 to 5 and are unable to determine their own hours, they sit at their desk and answer their phone and are unable to work from other locations, and they provide an ongoing service for years at a time. The employer calls them a "consultant" to avoid paying benefits or employment taxes and the worker does it because they like the higher gross income.
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How do you balance the need to be profitable with the desire to be green? I mean, the number 1 task of a business must be to stay in business. Sure, you can look for the win-win...telling your drivers to idle less saves some CO2 from the air and it also saves you $$ in gas money -- so great! But beyond the win win, how do you balance these social responsibilities with the responsibility to your bottom line? A bankrupt business isn't good for anybody. So even if you give back to society or go the extra mile to be green, staying in business must be your first task at hand. You have to find a balance. Sometimes this involves a little waste.
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Does this work the same way with Yahoo or MSN?
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How do you get your ads to appear next to a Google maps search?
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It also helps if you put the keywords as the name of the images. For instance, calling it white_shirt.jpg will increase the relevance and probability that this image will appear in a Google Image search then if was called 2038958.jpg.
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Interesting concept. Can you give some specific examples of web sites that have good flow and then explain why you think they have good flow?
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I'm glad you posted this guide. I'm so spoiled by Google that I get very frustrated when a site search doesn't work as expected...ie, lets me find information that I KNOW is on the site! Thanks.
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That's cool that you continued to improve this. I think you'll find that it helps more people.
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Isn't this is a guide to making post cards and not really a guide to direct marketing. Postcards are a subset of direct marketing.
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Excellent guide with ample tips and resources. Well done!
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Even so, I like this guide because it attempts to differentiate marketing and sales and I think too many new small businesses confuse the two, or focus too much on the marketing problem and not enough on the sales problem. They spend all their money on logos, advertisements, web sites and brochures before they solved the sales problem. If you're trying to sell something that can't be sold, all the marketing in the world won't help. On the other hand, If you have a great product that fills a need where droves of people will want to buy -- even the worst logo in the world won't stop all of them. Marketing is there to keep leads coming in for your sales team. Sales is the problem that isn't being solved by most small businesses who are suffering. Or put it this way, if you can solve the sales problem, at least you're in business. Marketing will help a lot after that...anything guide which helps people understand the difference between the two is a good guide...even if it's a guide that uses a labored relationship metaphor to do it :-)
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These are some helpful tips. Thanks.
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One way to judge how important a web site is: How many people can update it. That's why sites like ebay, wikipedia, and craigslist (not to mention work.com) are some of the most important web sites around -- anybody can contribute! Web portals give that sort of power to the web sites of small businesses. Even if you don't want everybody editing or contributing to your web site...even if all of your staff have that power that will increase the power of your web site. Good guide!
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How about some pointers to other web sites about email best practices?
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I would like to know more information about these indicators and why they're important. Nice try.
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Thanks for the excellent guidelines for a home page. I would argue that it's not the most important page. Maybe it is, but for the sake of argument, I assert that the checkout funnel is more important. I would be interested in reading the same sort of advice from you about the checkout funnel...do's and don'ts. Good guide though!
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This is some good advice. #3 is particularly important if you're trying to keep the costs down.
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Devils advocate: Haven't these domain camping waters been completely fished out already? Plus, the whole concept of "type in traffic" is a declining industry because browsers alter the behavior. Originally, many of these domains would get free traffic as users typed in, for instance, "free socks" into the browser instead of going to a search engine and many dominant browsers would send that user to "freesocks.com". These days, however, more and more browsers will send that user to the browsers search engine and show them search results for free socks. Finally, you can't even get a .com domain these days for almost any series of words. I know many people who have spent lots of money registering domain names and they have created no value, cluttered the internet and created no revenue. Instead of hanging your hat on domain camping (ie, placing only adverts on many domains and relying on random type-in traffic), I still believe that publishing helpful content on one domain is a superior revenue generating strategy these days.
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I like help like this, breaking something down into a usable bit. Web design means different things to different people -- so ultimately, communication between designer and client is highly important. This guide is a good start.
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This guide would be more helpful if it were more specific. "Online Business" is a huge category to be covered in 1000 words.
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This is another guide with link spam...the whole guide exists so to provide links to 9searches.org -- probably for the sole intention of boosting the sites ranking in google.
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As an aside from an SEO professional: People misspell words when they search for things on Google. If you misspell the words in the same way on your web pages, your pages will appear high in the search result pages for those misspelled words. If you're selling potatoes, it might be helpful if some of your web pages were titled with potatos or poatatoes in the title...for instance.
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My cable modem is great for downloading. However, in my business, I often have to upload huge multi-gig video files. I am considering a T1 for that.
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This is a really cool guide. Thanks. I'm going to add it to my favorites. I really like the free wi-fi directory.
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Wow -- lots of buzz words in this guide. So many, I'm not sure what it's about. This reminds me of the late 90's when there was a site called "balls.com". But when you went to the site, you couldn't figure out what they did. The text was all "Impact your customers with brand awareness by increasing synergy in win win on-line multi-media b-2-b marketing" You could read the whole front page and not know what they did. It turned out, they sold balls with your logo on them.
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Nice guide. One tip for creating a successful website is to use some paragraph tags to break up the text a bit. Throw in some bold tags for some headers and some links that point to resources and you've got yourself a nice looking guide.
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I think it's true that more and more sites will have media elements to them. I also think it's important to wrap these elements in some sort of web page with meta data to go with the media elements.
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I have found that one of the hardest things about implementing a CMS is the change management to getting the staff to actually use it! I wonder if there is a guide to change management.
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Great guide. One of my favorite internet software suite is
google apps
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Thanks for the comment. Let us know your progress. BTW, I deleted all the link spam from all of your recent comments.
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Sometimes it's difficult to get cable at a retail location and I had troubles setting up a friend on Madison Avenue street level store in NYC. I run cable modem from my home office on the upper east side, however, and it's far faster on the download speeds then DSL. Upload, however, is throttled and there is no way that I can open that up. With my old DSL company in SF, I could order faster upload speeds. This is important in my business because I sometimes want to upload huge DV video files to TV stations. One thing I will say for cable in NYC, it doesn't lose the connection...I uploaded a 3 gig file overnight and it worked.
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Amenda, how SEO friendly a shopping cart is depends on the shopping cart. Things to avoid: Session IDs and Flash navigation. Things you want: The ability to edit the title tag and to see keywords in the URL (instead of id numbers or database non-words). You also want permanence in the URLs, ie, when you add new products, that all the other URLs don't change and when you delete a product, it's best when it disappears from the navigation of the site, however, it's still there if you try to go to it directly but you can't add it to the shopping cart and instead there are links to other similar products that are still in the inventory.
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My advice on web development for small business -- make your site helpful to your customers and don't just make it an a big sales job for your services. Make the site serve your customer (and staff) and it will serve you. Put your pricing up there, put your hours, list your inventory, put up helpful "how to" articles, link to helpful resources, make sure your phone number is on every page, be up-front and open about features and limitations, more information is better than less, put up pictures and contact information of your staff.
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Nice guide. I just did some consulting for a store that had a web page that didn't look like it was an on-line store. It had a very good looking design, it's just that the front page didn't say "store"...it looked more like a site for consulting service of some kind. So, my advice, it might seem like a no-brainer, but make sure you put some products on your front page so it looks like you're selling something! :-)
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I like blogs with photos. I think this subject lends itself well to nice visuals!
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okay...this is cool. I'm bookmarking this right now. Thanks!
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Here's a
Sample Proposal that I made for some tech work in the past. This formate has worked for me, although I usually deliver it in a nicely formatted Word document, of course.
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I always make sure my proposals include, not just what I'm going to provide the client, but what the client will provide me. For instance, in the schedule section, a payment schedule and client deliverable schedule is included in addition to the work that I'm supposed to deliver. I also include a section called "assumptions" where I clarify things that may be obvious. Among these "assumptions" are things like "changing the scope of work could have timing and cost implications", etc.
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I hesitate to ask, but what would account for the growth in career opportunities in psychology?
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I heard that dark carpets make the space look smaller. What are some of the most common carpet design mistakes for small business? I imagine it's white carpets!
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I've been working as a freelance and making good money. Whenever I look at jobs, they seem to make less but they get benefits. How do I compare my independent freelance income with the income I would be making as an employee?
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This is a really good guide because I'm sure doors are on the minds of every business owner, and yet...where would you start? This guide is a good place. Here in NYC, all businesses seem to have the metal roll up doors or a slide cage type barrier that are secured with these harden steel dead bolts. I imagine that's the safest?
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I have an apple extreme airport router. It says that it acts as a firewall. I'm wondering how safe this is. I'm assuming the firewall is not software...but maybe I'm wrong. Any idea?
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Should you replace drives before they go bad, and if so, how often?
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This guide brings up a point that is very interesting to me (and it should be interesting to all business owners.) How to convert visitors into customers? I agree that Analytics is an excellent tool, especially if you use the Goals feature to track users into your sales funnel, to see where they're bouncing. I've done a lot of testing and it's strange how changes will increase or lower the bounce rates or conversion rates. I'm developing some "best practices" guidelines and maybe I'll share them here in the form of a guide once I come to more conclusions. However, this is very interesting to me. Great guide!
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Submitting your site to google is often unnecessary and it's not entirely sure that it even helps at all. My site scores #1 in google for many high volume and competitive keyphrases, and I've never submitted it to google. As I
wrote in 2003 the best way to score well in google is to make your site useful to others, show it to them and get the word out. As people use your site, Google will track that behavior and index the pages.
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This is pure link spam. Don't hire the Agents of Value for SEO because all they'll do is spend time spamming the web with links. And this tactic, which may have worked in 2002, doesn't work in 2007. They're basically wasting their time.
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I love analytics and I use it all the time for my clients. I often need help and the analytics support will help if you're also an adwords customer. This is a good guide. One resource that I use frequently -- www.webmasterworld.com -- this contains a forum specifically for analytics and the users who write there are very skilled and informed.
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Maybe we need a guide on "writing copy for ebay" -- I really think it's key. When I buy something on craigslist or ebay, it often has good descriptive copy. Maybe i'm just a sucker :-)
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Nice guide if somebody is using HyperOffice. I'm a bit confused as to exactly what HyperOffice is. Is it a hosted application suite?
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More linkspam and linkspam in the comment. No value here either...
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This is more link spam. I recommend deleting this guide. It's not a guide.
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This guide is an advertisement for agents of value. It's link SPAM. There is no value here.
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sigh...this guide is not at all helpful and it's full of link spam. It's basically an advertisement.
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Great guide. In my experience, web projects frequently get out of hand -- off schedule and over budget -- when the process isn't followed. The process is similar to building a house. Architect, design, build. Often, business owners want to see the web site before they comment on it or request changes and they didn't even look a long time at the designs/spec that the web developer gave them. That's wrong. How expensive would it be to build a house if you didn't look at the designs or blue prints and waited until they built the house and then walked around and said, "no wait, move the garage over here and put another bathroom there"? It's the same with web sites. Have your designer show you a completed specification/blue print and make sure every detail is exactly as you want before they start building.
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After reading this guide a couple of times, I have a hard time understanding what EDI is, and who uses it, where it comes in handy, how it can help me and why it should matter to me as a small business person. I have more questions then answers...
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The best way to protect your name is to register the domain before the squatters get there.
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Some games could be good for business, like online poker on
facebook.com or their "Scrabulous" application can go a long way into building rapport with clients and associates or potential clients and associates. It would be good to have a more complete guide to these sorts of ideas. Plus, some of the online games could be good for team building activities. I'd like a serious guide about that.
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Awwww, another guide full of link spam. Ya, don't invest in a web site, just let me throw up some links in hopes that I'll score better in google...sigh...that doesn't work anymore. People actually need to follow those links -- google is tracking behavior not JUST backlinks anymore...
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Don't overlook
Google Apps for your company domain, web host, office applications and email host. Even the free versions work and you have to assume that Google is going to keep adding business applications to this suite...
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Setting procedures for small business is important if the owner ever wants to not do everything. Even simple text files like: How to Lock Up If You're the Last Person Leaving or Setting Up Your Email Account can save time and stress. Get in the habit of asking staff or consultants to leave you with such information -- even if it's just a few lines of text -- and keep those procedures in a single place. This goes double for learning the software. One of the things I've done is set up "test packages" which I can give to staff after they've learned a software, which are sort of real life scenarios that encompass most of the challenges the staffer might face -- this takes the pressure off and lets the staffer use the software in a sort of test run of a real situation. Anyway, great guide!
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Great Guide Felix. Nothing beats a free education!
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Google has added "presentation" to it's suite of office applications. It looks like it measures up to PowerPoint very well. The cool thing about this is that it will work well for conference calls, where anybody who's invited can view the presentation and a person can "take control" of the presentation and switch which slide everybody else is seeing -- even if those people are in different places!
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Where can I activate my old batteries? I have some old gear, lick a clam-shell portable DVD player that my son uses in the car. The charge seems to empty faster then when it was new. Suggestions?
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Second Life is a whole other world to advertise in...There is huge potential to brand this space.
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I've rated this guide "supremely useful". Don't underestimate what you can learn from looking at the competitors. I help clients in a variety of industries with on-line competitive analysis, and it never ceases to surprise me how various strategies have worked for different industries.
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I'm an early adopter of many of Google applications. They just released a presentation application (think PowerPoint) to their other office applications -- Documents (think Word) and Spreadsheet (think Excel).
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These days, I've been using Google Analytics to help my clients determine if and where their customers are jumping out of their sales funnels. I've discovered that simply moving a button and making it more noticeable has reduced the bounce rate and increased sales and ROI. If you have Adwords set up, you may as well also use Analytics to discover trends.
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This guide has very little editorial integrity. The author of this guide, Sue. S., seems to have some sort of affiliation with localweb.com because this author has created more then one guide, which exclusively point to localweb.com as if that company is the single solution to an entire industry.
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This guide looks like an advertisement for Microsoft Exchange and, in particular, for one service provider. As a work.com expert in technology, I recommend also considering other email strategies, including
Google Apps and standard opensource solutions like sendmail and qmail.
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Somebody offered me $4000 for a domain name that I owned but I didn't sell it. Still, it's difficult to place a value on a web site -- especially a domain name. Here is a
forum about appraising domain names
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I use paypal.com merchant services to allow me to take credit cards payments via the phone and web. I don't need a merchant account to do this. They charge me $20 a month plus a percentage of each charge. It was pretty easy to set up and it only took a couple of days to get verified. What's the downside of using paypal to take visa?
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My first business was going to put me on easy street and, boy, was I disappointed. The point is, what I've learned since then, is the advice in #2 and #3 of this guide is NOT to be ignored. Invest plenty of time in those steps. This can save you ample time and money in the long run if you use those steps to determine if you should even start that business at all.
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Adding audio to websites can be very easy and you don't really need a 3rd party provider to accomplish it. For instance, you can convert audio to the quicktime format (.wav) and then upload that audio to your web server. From there, you can use a simple action reference tag (see an
HTML tutorial) to point to the audio.
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Great guide Samuel. I have used
istockphoto.com to buy low price ($1) stock photos for my web site. The good thing about this site -- easy to use and low prices for low resolution versions. Just to be clear, I think I had to set up an account for $10 and they gave me 10 credits. Low res photos were 1 credit.
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I always wonder how you can tell if it's a "she" or a "he" in second life. I guess it doesn't matter...I guess...
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OpenACS is an opensource (free) framework for web development that has an extensive internationalization feature. It comes with a ton of pre-built community applications, ie, forums, calendars, blogs, wiki, ecommerce, Content management, photo albems, etc -- and users can log-in and join groups, etc. Here is a
site that is using openacs. The system allows for the user to switch the language of the applications, and if there isn't a translation yet, it makes it easy for somebody to translate.
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John, this is a good guide. I just read another guide about setting up a specific shopping cart called
getting started with zen cart, which I think can help some of the people reading this guide.
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Great Guide Phil. This is very helpful to small business owners because you've listed every step somebody needs to go through to get the cart up. I'm wondering if you can point us to a couple of examples of sites with the zen cart up and running.
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This guide appears to be very self-serving. There is very little copy. All the resources are pointing back to one site. On wikipedia this is known as link spam.
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I setup up the paypal website standard and then upgraded to the virtual terminal so that I could accept credit card payments over the phone. This immediately helped my business as I could accept deposits in advance for services. I also avoided accounts payable efforts by getting payment in advance for services.
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Ya, trillian is great for keeping all the services together. Also, mac's ichat lets you do the same. I wonder if anybody is using IM successfully for customer support or sales?
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If gmail users mark your emails as SPAM, this can actually hurt your web site's chances in the Google search result pages. So I've adopted the practice of asking for a double opt in. This means once a user has signed up for "two free copies of my news letter", I send them the first two with a note at the top saying basically, "Hi John, please let me know if you want to continue seeing new issues of this news letter by clicking on this link or replying to this email". The list I end up with is smaller but they are enthusiastic readers.
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Good guide Paul, I've heard of people who are using gmail to filter their spam. Gmail has an excellent spam filter based on user feedback. Now that google will let you host your email with your own domain at
google apps, it seems like this is a good solution to the problem.
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I have noticed that plenty of sites rely on the browser to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com (or visa versa) and that one or the other actually don't resolve to the site (unless you're on certain web browsers.) However, I've done SEO for a long time and I haven't noticed the problem with www.domain.com and domain.com causing duplicate content issues or PR leak. Even if it did, I think this sort of thing is best handled in the DNS A records and not with mod_rewrite. If you have an A record to treat www as the main domain -- no problem -- and I think search engines like google handle it just fine. Besides, only apache server has mod_rewrite, not MS servers or AOLserver, etc. On the other hand, I have used mod_rewrite in SEO when a client is redesigning their entire site and I want to preserve deep backlinks with a permanent redirect.
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I've always thought that a good test to determine if a web site is usable (for everybody) is to see if you can navigate the site on a mobile phone. I designed
my personal site with that in mind back in 2001 and it's finally paying off big. I won't need to redesign as more and more people start browsing with small screens.
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I think this really puts extra pressure on Microsoft because, when the hosted applications paradigm for common office applications gets adopted, it will strike at the root of Microsoft's core business. Plus, Microsoft domination is under attack from many major fronts -- linux, apple, google, etc. I'm a big fan of these Google Apps and I use them in my
Search Engine Consulting business and my
New York Video Services business. I find them easy to learn and use and full of all the features you'd expect from things like a calendar, spreadsheet, email client, word processor and basic web content management. I'm a big fan. The videos are on that link, you just have to click on the images.
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How about lag time. The same reason there is an echo on cell phones. This could be a concern to online game players or video conferencing. I heard that they were sending up low altitude satellites to solve that problem. Has that happened yet?
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Don't forget
blip.tv as a place to host videos. They allow you to place adverts before, during or after your video and they share the profit with you 50/50. For an example, check out this short video of my 2 year old riding a 2 wheeler -- one of those new
Like a bike things for toddlers.
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I understand the frustration with webspam sites -- designed for search engines and search engines alone. However, I disagree that a web site needs graphics to be sucessful -- and I'll use
craigslist.org as the ultimate example of that. I also want to agree with
useit.com pointer. My test if a web site is sucessful: It works well on a cell phone.
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Nice humor in this guide. I agree, I agree, I agree.
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Here's my collection of
SEO tools and sites. This includes links to keyphrase evaluation and other hosted applications that help with SEO.
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It's strange, I've been putting RSS feeds on my sites for a long time but I haven't used a reader to read other sites yet. I'm going to Google right now and starting with the Work.com blog :-)
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This is a very good guide. As a freelance videographer in NYC, clients often ask me to make them 20 minute promotional videos -- which is too long in most cases. I've had clients return 6 months later asking me to cut it to 10 minutes -- which is still too long in most cases. You've got to say it in 4 to 5 minutes, especially if the delivery is on the web. There is a theory that: The smaller the screen size, the shorter the video should be. So that's why movies are 2 hours, TV shows are 30 or 60 minutes. Something that is 320x240 pixels should probably be 3 to 4 minutes. Also, don't forget about
Blip.tv as an option for uploading web video for free.
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I've been using a framework for web applications called
OpenACS, and it has a fully integrated "internationalization" feature. The applications (forums, ecommerce, blogs, wiki, etc) are already translated into many languages. This enables the user to select which language they speak and all the applications are translated to that language. Of course, for your own content, the company who uses this framework would have to provide their own translations, but look into openacs as a solution for companies that need a web site in many languages.
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Closing the deal is essential -- even online. Good guide.
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It may be syntax, but I've always had a problem with the term "community building". You can build things that enable or nurture the community, but the community itself -- the people -- can not be built. I know community nurturing will not be adopted over community building -- but add it to the long list of things that I feel are misnamed :-)
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I'm often selling things that cost a significant amount of money, ie, $500 to $60,000 -- usually software or high end marketing services. These are they types of purchases that are not impulse buys. Instead of trying to convince someone that they need my services, I ask them questions until they tell me that they need my services. It's a technique that I learned called SPIN selling and here's a basic review of the
SPIN selling technique that I wrote. Basically, you ask implication questions, which help the lead verbalize the implications of their choices. Here's an example of how to come up with
SPIN selling Implication questions. If you know of common situations in your industry, and common problems that your product solves, I recommend going that next step and coming up with questions that invite your prospective customers to verbalize the implications of those problems, instead of just trying to tell them that your product solves these problems that you're saying exist. It's better if they say they have a problem then if you tell them they have a problem.
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Here's a basic guide that I wrote about
sales pipelines. So many small business owners that I meet, don't really understand the concept of the sales pipeline, and if they did, they'd definitely have more incentive to use their contact management software correctly. .
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Yes, put it this way, if you have customers, then you're in business. Almost every small business that is in trouble could be out of trouble if they just got some big customers. So face it, sometimes you just have to call someone and set up an appointment so you can show them what you have. Don't be afrade. Here is a book review of
cold calling techniques that I use when I just have to smile and dial.
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This is a great guide. Having spent my adult life in San Francisco and New York City...I can't really comment on the challenges of staying connected in the rest of the country.
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I've used rackspace.com for many years as a leased server where I have root access. They're not the cheapest but they do have good support. Also, a new option appears to be on the rise,
Grid Hosting which is where the hosting company distributes your web pages across a grid of many servers, which helps when there are spikes in traffic. Another note, every year the deals get better and better in terms of how much bandwidth, hard drives space, etc, that you can get from a web host. If you've reached your maximums, make sure you check around for the newer deals, which are bound to be far far better then what they were giving last year.
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I've used blogs as a part of small business sites simple to increase a web site's ranking in search engines like google. By publishing frequently and by linking out to relevant articles, search engines like Google (not to mention your customers) return more freqently.
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Anything that can get people to focus on their "about us" page is important -- that's why I love this guide. An about us page is a great place to humanize the corporation or company...it's not a company it's "us"! I think the about us page is a good place to tell the narrative or "story" of the company...and a good place to not take yourself too seriously. For instance, here's an example story that is meant to be funny and humanizing, which explains how we came up with the company name "John remembered that gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. That sounded good but Gnosis.com was taken. So Eric suggested Gnosio, which got a good laugh. Later, Eric started babbling about a web site that claimed that Ghandi spoke of gnosis, not simply as knowledge, but as a 'sudden realization that changes ones current perspective into a perspective that is more truthful' Wow! By then we were hooked. Gnosio.com didn't seem so funny any more."
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Akwasi, ruby on rails still can still use apache and it can run on linux. Perl is a programing language. Ruby is a programming language. Unlike Perl, Ruby on Rails is more of a framework for web application development. My understanding of what this means is, in basic terms, it's like a predeveloped toolkit of common code that can be reused in typical web applications. Maybe someone can explain it better, for instance, many web applications contain forms (like this one I'm using to type this comment) and a framework for forms would be a single code in ruby that could be used in many applications, ie, a blog, a forum, a contact us form, a survey, or whereever on your web site that a form is needed to interact with your database.
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This isn't a guide to affiliate marketing!
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I agree that
WebmasterWorld is the best resource for search engine related forums. There is so much information there.
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When was the term "world wide web" coined?
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This is a good guide. I'm wondering how a seller can protect themselves from Paypal's buyer protection plan. I've heard that paypal can sometimes take the buyer's side on things and is rather draconian with the sellers.
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This guide seams to be promoting one wholesaler. I'm wondering if you (or other interested people) could list some other sites that sell jewelry...
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One comment about user-friendly: It's not just about the site's navigation and architecture. Sometimes user-friendly is about the words and copy. I like sites that are clear about certain basic things:
* what they actually do (ie, not just the benefits of what they do)
* how much it costs
* where they are located
* how to get in touch with them
It sounds simple, but there are countless examples of web sites that fail miserably at one or more of those points.
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It's the same as with hiring any staff or service.
* view work they've created
* check references
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During start-up, or if you have no web site at all, using one of these low cost templates might be the way to go. However, many of these templates that I see have problems that will ultimately present more problems then they save in terms of customization, cross browser compatibility and impression. By impression, you might be buying a style which, although it looks slick, metallic or modern, is actually dated, cheesy or worse. I guess my advice to someone who is looking at using a low cost template would be: Select 5 or 6 that you think would work and then ask plenty of creative or design oriented people for their opinions on which look would best represent your company.
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Upon rereading this guide, I have to say that the advice here is spot on target for making a site useful, and therefore popular in search engines. Small business owners would be wise to heed this advice, because it will pay off on-going in free leads that convert.
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Remember that the words "under construction" and "coming soon" also hurt the page in terms of how likely that page will be shown on a search engine result page, especially if those words represent a significant percentage of the content on that web page. In other words, search engines like Google penalize web sites that have pages or areas that are "under construction" or "coming soon".
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It's good to keep up on the buzz words. I always thought Web 2.0 had something to do with Ajax. I guess I was wrong. It's a term to describe sites like Work.com, where users are empowered to contribute to the domain in new meaningful ways. Web 1.0 sites were maintained by a webmaster or a small development team. One way to judge how important a web site is is by counting how many people can contribute to it. Sites like ebay and craigslist are very important because millions of people contribute.
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I recommend maintaining a double opt-in list. That is, users must opt-in to receiving email from you, and then at a future time, you ask them to opt-in to continuing to receive email from you. Some sites start spamming their "customers" without asking if that's okay with them. So just because you bought something from them, doesn't mean that you want to receive email from them forever (even if you forgot to uncheck the little box that invited them to send you email.) What these marketing people from these sorts of sites don't know: When gmail users (gmail is google's email application) start marking such email as spam, this may negatively affect the seach engine rankings of any URL within the emails. So these marketing people may be shooting themselves in the foot. They do increase second sales from customers at the expense of free search engine traffic in the future...
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I've used adwords to increase traffic to my sister's auctions with some sucess. It only works in some situations and you really have to watch your costs (obviously) to make sure that the effort is worth it. Does anyone else have stories of driving PPC traffic to ebay auctions?
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Isn't it better to let the employees know that you're going to start monitoring their internet usage? I think it's important for moral reasons and the employees' dignity. I don't mind if I'm being spied on if I know it's occuring. A worst case would be a boss who suddenly springs it on everyone "hey, for the past 3 weeks I've been watching which web sites you've been surfing and you three are fired and the rest of you -- you better watch out!"
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There used to be a time when the costs of starting an on-line store might have exceeded the benefits. Those days are gone. Thanks to services like yahoo, there is almost no excuse NOT to have an online store. Good guide!
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Good guide. I find that Pay per click from search engines works for most businesses, but it doesn't always work as well for every product. For instance, it's hard to compete with a random unique luxury gift product, because "gift" is very competitive and unless the searcher is looking for exactly what you have (and how would they know) then the click through and conversion rates aren't always high enough to justify the costs of the adverts. Examples of where it will work are typically things that people go to search engines specifically to look for, ie, computer parts, travel, mortgages, insurance, hotels, books, baby gear, furniture, etc.
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A search engine friendly web site is a user friendly web site -- organized, labeled, categorized, helpful or useful. Thanks for the guide!
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Nice collection of cafe-links!
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This guide doesn't help me use clickbank at all. After reading the guide, I don't even understand what clickbank is.
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There is no doubt that, from a direct marketing point of view, you want to test landing pages. When the pages are part of the web site, they must link home. Every page is your home page :-) I agree as a general rule that frequent call to actions as well as less navigation or links from the page tend to increase its conversion rates. Therefore, a store should have the contact information on every page -- not just a link to "contact us"! Nice guide!
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In the long run, I don't think "link spam" is going to be a major problem (although it can be a tad annoying these days). People who go around spamming wikipedia with external links, commenting on blogs or creating content in forums, etc, might fool some search engines for a couple of months/years. Google has already moved beyond that as they track actual user behavior now, and not just the number and quality of backlinks. As a long term goal, I don't think this sort of link development activity as having much value in by itself, unless the pointers are associated with helpful content.
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Guanxi is an interesting concept. I wonder if there are signs that a Westerner can easily see which indicate that enough Guanxi has been achieved to move forward in the business relationship. What are some of the signs? How can a Westerner indicate that they believe enough guanxi has been established to do business, without appearing pushy or foolish?
Comments Posted by Eric Wolfram