You are here: Home / Internet Marketing

E-Commerce and Shopping Cart Plugins for Econowebs: Part 2-Tips

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Tips for Your eCommerce Site

The purchase is the final step for the customer; it is the call to action, the conversion.

  • In some cases this step is on a separate landing page – as with a shopping cart. The decision has already been made, and the purchase process should be a simple as possible, such as a single mouse click on a landing page.
  • In other cases you have to get their attention, speak to their need, show how your product solves that, and then ask the action. Putting the purchase button at the very beginning of the process is worthless.

Here are some great tips for building an eCommerce site:

  • Speak to the customer’s needs – not yours. Your job is to identify their need and speak and act into that.
  • Tell them the benefits of your product.
  • Identify why they should purchase from you. Why is your product unique for that need?
  • Provide multiple paths to the action step. For social networking using Facebook (including groups and fan pages). Twitter, Linkedin including groups), website (with paths in the sidebar for multiple pages). I also use blogs (using the sidebar again), other people’s blogs, email signatures, and speaking engagements. (I sold one of my books in an airport with a new copy I had in my briefcase.) There are also multiple paths to my book purchases; not only from me, but from Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and more.
  • Provide multiple purchase options and multiple shipping options.
  • Provide multiple payment options.
  • Avoid surprising the customer. What guarantees or warranties are there? What are shipping costs? What is your return policy?
  • Make sure your website shows a real geographic address so they can contact you.
  • Be sure your order process is secure. When the customer any information they wish to keep secure, your address in their address bar should start with https:, NOT http:,
  • Study high-ranking eCommerce sites. Here are a few:
    http://disneystore.com/
    http://www.amazon.com/
    http://www,goincase.com/
  • Forms should use common names for their customer name, address, etc. so the customer can use the auto-fill.
  • Group products by category.
  • If you only ship to the U.S, say so on early pages and often.
  • Check spelling and grammar. Check it again.
  • Have friends who are much like your customers test the site.
  • Answer all emails in 8 hours or less.
  • Use professional photography.
  • Link your thumbnail images to larger images.
  • Set up a referral or affiliate program. Let others help you sell. If an affiliate applies with a free email account, that’s a red flag. Avoid those.
  • Be sure your product name, price, and purchase button (the 3 p’s) are above the fold on your pages. This not quite as important today as it use to be, but the purchase button should be above the fold at least – except for catalog pages.
  • Don’t force your customers to sign in or set up an account. Amazon can do that. Your job is to make things easy and fast.
  • Remember that pages that require an id and password will not be indexed by the search engines.
  • If at all possible, keep your cart on your domain.
    Ship fast – the same day if possible.
  • Use any reassurance ratings you have, such as the PayPal image for a verified account. I don’t count BBB as an reassurance, as the most corrupt business I have dealt with was Vonage, and they are BBB and yet BBB does nothing to stop their practices. I guess Vonage pays BBB enough to continue their corruption. BBB has lost my trust.
  • Keep your website fast. Check with http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/.
  • Remember any of your site pages are potential landing pages.
  • For holiday shopping days, let customers know your cutoff dates.
  • Ask for customer reviews. Use them as testimonies on your site with their permission.
  • Allow customers to copy their shipping address to their billing address if they are the same.
  • Use analytics and track important stats.
  • Design your site so that users with disabilities can use it. What happens, for example, when someone with poor eyesight is visiting your site with the font size increased? Does the word-wrap adjust automatically or do they have to do a horizontal scroll on every line?
  • Maintain a database of your customers. Don’t spam with it, however.
  • Consider purchasing a mobile phone interface for your site.
  • Tell them the customer support options (chat, phone, email, etc.).
  • Use short paragraphs in product descriptions. No more than five vertical lines, and use bullets and number lists frequently.
  • Use Google Alerts to track your brand mentions: http://www.google.com/alerts.
  • Monitor any black-listing of your website at http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx/.
  • People don’t notice banners any more, particularly those animated banners. And those banners that explode on hovering and cover your text are a big turn-off for any product and website.
  • Larger cart buttons work better.
  • Don’t use a “Cancel” button for a checkout. You don’t want to give the customer that idea.
  • Avoid the “Submit” button label. That’s a negative message. Use “Continue” or “Next Step” instead.
  • If the CVV number is needed for the order from the back of the credit card, tell the customer how to find it.
  • Let customers see the final order and have them verify it.
  • Avoid using all-capital text. It’s hard to read.
  • Never email to customers with a no-reply account. Always give a reply option.
  • Be sure your logo is hyper-linked to your home page.
  • Use contests and other promotions, particularly time-sensitive offers.
  • For links out of your site, be sure to the destination opens in another window. You don’t want to take them out of your website
  • Be sure your site has great SEO

Have any ideas you’d like to add to this?

Filed Under: ecommerce, econoweb, Internet Marketing, shopping carts, web design, wordpress

How to Turn your Facebook Profile into a Fan page

March 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How to turn your Facebook profile into a fan page (Found by Chris Brogan)

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2011/03/31/turn-your-facebook-profile-into-a-fan-page/

Filed Under: facebook, Internet Marketing, social media, social networking

Using Blogs to Increase Your Web Traffic

March 24, 2011 By 9 Comments

Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

First – the direct costs are almost zero. You can use an open source and free blog such as WordPress for many hosts. It’s also easy to install and use. Support is provided through a forum. You’ll have lots of people trying to spam your blog with unrelated comments, but you can add the free Karma 2 spam filter that takes out almost all of the spam at the host level.

As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

This author posts in three blogs and comments in others. You may feel that what you have to say can’t have much effect in the cyberspace with over 19 million blogs out there now. Quite the opposite. Let’s take an example how it works. I got ripped off by Vonage, a VoIP company, for over $8,000 dollars when they dropped my business line in transferring it from Qwest. A quick search on Google using “vonage problem” +blog showed they were ripping a lot of people off. Letters to Vonage, Better Business Bureau, FCC, FTC, SEC, Federal Attorney General, and a lot of others had no affect. If fact, it seems the Administration arm of the Federal government has rolled over and died.

As a starter, we put our primary correspondence online with a page on our business web site. Anyone can read and see for themselves how bad the situation at Vonage and the Federal Administration is. Then we scanned Google again and located all those blogs about the problems at Vonage and added our comment to each, with a pointer to our web page. In a short time (no Google sandbox stopping this) we received many emails with others verifying what we had experienced and the traffic on the Vonage web page we created zoomed to the stratosphere. We posted the testimonies people sent us online with our page.

Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to almost zero from when the IPO was launched. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Administrations do nothing. Our stuff is dated now; but nothing has been done and this Administration will hopefully be gone as people hold it accountable time after time.

The point here is that one person can create what is known as a blog swarm. The effect snowballs through what is referred to as the tail of the blog. The total traffic in the tail of the blog is far more that that of any major blog that gets those high traffic counts.

Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. A few years ago (June, 2006) the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories.

Blogs make your site dynamic, and you’ll see your blog posts showing up in the Google index within days if you already have a strong site. To make it really work, however, you need to visit the other blogs and comment there, pointing to your blog posts and pages.

Two big words of caution, however.

  1. Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell prescription drugs, casino games, and fake Rolex watches.
  2. Make sure your facts are right and the writing has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.
Filed Under: Blogging, Internet Marketing

The New Marketing Paradigm

March 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

“If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains that money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”
Guy Kawasaki

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. This is also referred to as permission marketing or relationship marketing.

Outbound marketing, in contrast, focuses on building brand awareness through advertising and press releases. It is the more traditional form of marketing – an older paradigm. It is also called interruption marketing.

Carl’s task, in working with you, is to show you how to use inbound marketing effectively to get high visitor traffic with an affordable web site.

To quote Robert Allen(1), too often people develop a product and then look for a target audience. Allen says you need to reverse this – find a hungry target audience and then feed it. So the real question here is how to identify this hungry target audience and “create this feeding frenzy.” Your first goal, then, is to find the hungry fish.

I like marketing expert Jeff Paul’s definition of marketing:

“Marketing is setting up automatic, repeatable systems that create the environment where people want to buy from you instead of you having to sell them.”

Need help? Contact Carl.

1 Allen, Robert G. Multiple streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People Make Extraordinary Money Online (John Wiley & Sons, New York) 2001

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, social networking

Who lost ranking with the latest Google algorithm change?

March 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

Google recently did a major algorithm change (called “Farmer” change). The purpose was to improve the quality of search results. The big losers in rankings were sites such as business.com (a directory-type site), ezarticles.com, and related sites. In other words, if you were basing your results on links from these sites, you probably dropped in position of the results. To see more specific who got hit, see http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

Filed Under: enews, Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

The Dragonfly Effect

March 6, 2011 By 2 Comments

Wanna read a hot book? I read several reviews on it from leading people (like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Joel Peterson – chairman of JetBlue) and finally decided I had to get it. The book is: The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to use Social Media to Drive Social Change, It’s authored by Jennifer Aaker (a Marketing Professor at Stanford) and her husband, Andy Smith, a business consultant.

The dragonfly is the only insect able to propel itself in any direction – with tremendous speed and force – when its four wings are working in concert. When people do this, they can make a tremendous impact disproportionate to their resources. There are really only four chapters here, each representing the four wings of the dragonfly. (1) Focus – how to hatch a goal that will make an impact (2) Grab Attention – how to stick out in a noisy world with your message (3) Engage – how to get people to connect with your goal and (4) Take action – how to empower and enable others to cultivate a movement. They researched lots of people doing this and the book is loaded with example stories. They drive their message from their stories. The Amazon book listing has a very good interview with the two authors if you scroll down after finding the book. You can order book here

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, social networking

Tips for Using Twitter

March 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Remember that when you enter a posting, or tweet as they are called, to Twitter that you are broadcasting information to anyone that meets either of these conditions unless you have secured your tweets on your profile.

  • Those who are following you will see the tweet as soon as they go to Twitter and log in.
  • Others will be able to see it if they search on the relevant subject area.

You will receive only the tweets from people you are following unless you are searching on a subject. When doing that, you receive the tweets relative to that subject.

Security Issues:

You should exercise caution when entering your posts if your postings are not secured – the default mode. If you are leaving on a trip, don’t advertise it on Twitter. There are those who scan Twitter to see who won’t be home for awhile and take advantage of that. DO tweet about your trip when you get back. If you are getting a divorce, one of the first things your lawyer will do is scan your postings to see what you have been doing online. If you are looking for a job today, there is about a 50% chance the prospective employer will scan the Internet for information about you. In the same way, it is not wise to post company information or your concerns about your employer.

Many people violate this rule. I try to honor it. Even if I’m out for the evening, I tweet about it AFTER I get back.

You can set the security of your tweets so that only those who follow you can see them from your Settings option. If set to private, only followers can see your tweets and Twitter will not index them.

More tips:

Setting Up Your Account

  • In setting up your account, use some variation of your first name. Using a variation of your last name is not personal enough on something like Twitter. And keep it short, which gives you (and those that reply) more message space. And your Twitter account name is important in the optimization of your tweets in the search engines.
  • Use a picture that shows a close-up of your face is normally best for your avatar. Smiling face, of course. With only the default clipart picture Twitter uses, don’t expect people to follow you.
  • Be sure to fill out your bio information. Use your full name. Use keyword phrases there that will trip those you want to meet. Share your personality here. You have 160 characters.
  • If you set the tweets to private, only your followers can see them. In addition, Google and Twitter Search will not index them.
  • When twittering for a company, these rules still hold. Use the logo as the background. Use a personal photo as your avatar. Let the bio show the company’s identity. Post as a person, not a depersonalized organization. Be sure to follow company policies on your tweeting for this account.

    • Using Twitter

    • Click the Reply button in the lower right of a tweet to reply only to that individual. Click the Retweet button if you wish to tweet their tweet to all your followers.
    • You have only 140 characters for a posting. Use them wisely. Tease and motivate the reader, then lead them to Facebook, your blog, or your website. To save characters, use web sites such as http://bit.ly to shorten the URL for the destination.
    • Use your cell phone as an extension of your computer postings. The twitter address is 40404;. For example, to send an direct twitter message from your phone to another Twitter account, you would enter: (To) 40404; and (body): d accountname message. Great for keeping up with friends when traveling! You can also send to a list.
    • You will quickly learn the abbreviations your friends are using: great becomes gr8, before becomes b4, you becomes u.
    • Keep your postings interesting. Who cares what you had for breakfast? If something relational happened at breakfast, you should tweet on that.
    • When someone tweets that they are following you, send them a thank-you, you will see this in your normal email. Reply to them direct mail from within Tweeter. (Remember you cannot direct mail someone unless they are following you.)
    • You will notice that some of your followers occasionally will tweet a posting that is a thank-you to a list of friends. Looks boring, but it is important. Scan their list in their post – you may find a new friend there and you can click and follow. The reverse is also true. If someone helps you on Twitter, thank them.
    • How often to tweet? Everyone has their own answer on this. Don’t tweet just to be tweeting or your people will quite following you. If you don’t tweet for a day or two, watch your visitor traffic fall off to your account, the web site, and your blog. Keep your life interesting and tell people about it.
    • Save tweets you wish to explore or use later. To do this, click on the time line that is under the tweet that shows how long ago the tweet was initiated. This brings up the tweet. The URL that is displayed now in the browser is the URL for that tweet. Save it in the browser Favorites. Another alternative is to save that tweet URL in an external program such as delicious.com or related tool.
    • To find if someone is on Twitter from Google, search on firstname lastname Twitter. Use caution here. The results returned may not be a real person (C. S. Lewis, for example, is no longer alive but has a fan page.) Or it may not be the person you expect. Or a fake account on a real person.
    • There are lots of good plug-ins for your Twitter account, but use caution. Some plug-ins are malware. Check with friends and get reviews first.
    • Here’s a good URL to find tools for Twitter: http://oneforty.com/. Twitter’s mobile web site is http://m.twitter.com.
    • If you are running a conference on Twitter, Have everyone agree to a hashtag (#) and tweet against that using an application such as TweetDeck.
    • Link your web site to Twitter. Link Twitter to your web site on your Twitter profile page.
    • Check your “grade” on twitter at http://twitter.grader.com.
    • Use Twitter to tease people into your blog. Twitter entries are indexed immediately.

    Need consulting help on this or related issues? Contact us! http://www.netadventures.biz

    Filed Under: Internet Marketing, social networking, Twitter

    Using Blogs to Increase Web Traffic

    March 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

    Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

    First – the direct costs are almost zero. You can use an open source and free blog such as WordPress for many hosts. It’s also easy to install and use. Support is provided through a forum. You’ll have lots of people trying to spam your blog with unrelated comments, but you can add the free Karma 2 spam filter that takes out almost all of the spam at the host level.

    As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

    This author posts in three blogs and comments in others. You may feel that what you have to say can’t have much effect in the cyberspace with over 19 million blogs out there now. Quite the opposite. Let’s take an example how it works. I got ripped off by Vonage, a VoIP company, for over $8,000 dollars when they dropped my business line in transferring it from Qwest. A quick search on Google using “vonage problem” +blog showed they were ripping a lot of people off. Letters to Vonage, Better Business Bureau, FCC, FTC, SEC, Federal Attorney General, and a lot of others had no affect. If fact, it seems the Administration arm of the Federal government has rolled over and died.

    As a starter, we put our primary correspondence online with a page on our business web site. Anyone can read and see for themselves how bad the situation at Vonage and the Federal Administration is. Then we scanned Google again and located all those blogs about the problems at Vonage and added our comment to each, with a pointer to our web page. In a short time (no Google sandbox stopping this) we received many emails with others verifying what we had experienced and the traffic on the Vonage web page we created zoomed to the stratosphere. We posted the testimonies people sent us online with our page.

    Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to less that half of the price when the IPO was launched a few months ago. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Bush Administration did nothing.

    The point here is that one person can create what is known as a blog swarm. The effect snowballs through what is referred to as the tail of the blog. The total traffic in the tail of the blog is far more that that of any major blog that gets those high traffic counts.

    Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. In June of this year, the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories. Our blogging e-book has a few more. Get your own copy.

    Blogs make your site dynamic, and you’ll see your blog posts showing up in the Google index within days if you already have a strong site. To make it really work, however, you need to visit the other blogs and comment there, pointing to your blog posts and pages.

    Two big words of caution, however.

    1.

    Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell prescription drugs, casino games, and fake Rolex watches.
    2.

    Make sure your facts are right and the writing has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.

    Filed Under: Blogging, Internet Marketing