Archive for April, 2009
Google Profiles
by Sage Lewis
Google Profiles is a spiffy way to aggregate a lot of information about you. Check out this video to see what it’s all about and how you get yours setup.
Check out our small business news site.
Just Going Online? How to Budget for Web Success
by Stoney deGeyter
It wasn’t all that long ago that people in my industry had to convince business owners of the value of going online. For the most part those days are past. I think the value of the web has proven itself more than we can possible realize. Today I can pay bills, stream movies, schedule and even watch my DVR from anywhere in the world, so long as I have internet access. Getting your business online isn’t just about making money–it’s about accessibility.
Even if your business as little commercial viability online, having an accessible website allows people to learn more about you, your products or services, what types of things you do, what you believe in and care about, and how to contact you if needed. It’s about allowing people to come to you instead of pushing yourself on to them that is typical of most forms of advertising.
If you run a business of any size and you still have not made the jump to the Web, why not? If you know your business can make money online, (i.e. you sell an in-demand product or service) then investing money to build your web presence is almost a no-brainer. The question then becomes, how to do it right so you can be profitable.
If you run one of those niche businesses where online success isn’t a certainty, there is still value in being online. There is also value in investing in a bit of marketing in order to make sure your site can be found by those looking to find you, even if they just seek information.
Regardless if your business that can make a profit online or if the site’s just another way to provide information to the public, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider when budgeting for your website’s success.
Web Hosting
Web hosting can be considered a utility expense as it’s just another bill you pay each month to keep things moving forward. Just as lights are essential to a brick and mortar store, without good web hosting your site goes dark.
However, investing in web hosting services isn’t as easy as paying an electric bill and plugging the light in. As long as the electric bill get’s paid the lights stay on. With web hosting you have many levels of quality, starting with server space, speed, bandwidth, and any extras you might need to ensure you provide your visitors with a good experience. Web hosting can cost as little as /month, but those don’t have the reliability that most businesses need.
Before you select your web host company or package, you need to get a good idea on what your needs will be. Will the server be able to handle the regular every day traffic? What about sudden spurts of traffic from popular articles or advertising campaigns? Will bandwidth restrictions slow down your site’s performance or ensure that every visitor can access all of your content without download delays?
There are dozens of factors involved in site hosting and you’re better off comparing on quality than on price. To keep your site live and accessible, quality trumps price every time.
Web Design
Building a pretty website is relatively easy to do for any artistic person. But pretty doesn’t necessarily translate into web success. Many designs that look pretty are also poor performers in terms of visitor usability and search engine friendliness. These are important things to consider when in the design and development stage of your site.
Things such as color integration, navigation layout, site architecture are all just as important–if not more important–than the actual design of the site. Hiring a web designer that only makes pretty sites but ignores some of the other important aspects of web usability is like hiring a painter to build a good car. Sure they can paint one, but there is nothing under the canvas.
Like a pretty car needs a good engine under the hood, a pretty website needs good code, usability and architecture in order for it to be able to perform for you online. Before you hire any designer make sure they have the skills to do more than make your site look good. Make sure they know how to make it perform good as well.
Functionality
Each business has different needs. And what the business owner needs her website to do will vary greatly. More often than not you’ll have to go beyond the basic design and usability elements to build a site that has the functionality that you want.
What do people want to do once they get to your site? Are they looking to place an order? Read content? Ask a question? Research and compare products or services? Each of these actions require that a system be built in order to accommodate it. Those systems cost money, and depending on how detailed that system needs to be, the more money it might cost you.
Proper web budgeting needs to consider all of the additional “whistles and bells” that you want to add to your site. Figure out what you need versus what you want but isn’t absolutely necessary. Once you know how much things cost then you can focus your budget on what is most essential first.
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
I’m often concerned at how many people seemed surprised that SEO and web marketing costs more than building the site itself. The site, aside from needed functionality improvements, is generally a one-time expense. Marketing is an ongoing expense.
Making a website perform in the search engines is just one aspect of marketing, but an important one for online success. Most business can’t get buy just by renting space and opening the doors. They have to do some form of advertising and marketing. The same is true online. And if the marketing is what’s creating sales, its a much needed investment, so long as the ROI is there.
Any marketing you do online needs to provide you with a positive return on investment. This is can be quickly accomplished with PPC. SEO can often take months for the ROI to be realized. But that’s just the nature of this type of work. Once the SEO campaign begins to take root the ROI is generally greater than what you’ll see for PPC campaigns.
When budgeting for online marketing it’s not always a choice between SEO or PPC. It’s often just a matter of strategy. It often makes sense to get the PPC campaigns going while the SEO is being implemented and still building into a positive return. Both campaigns can compliment each other satisfactorily.
Building a successful site online doesn’t have to be expensive, but it will cost money if you want to do it right. But it’s not about how much money you spend but how well you plan and how wisely you spend.
There is no way to provide estimates on how much all this should cost because it’s different for every business, depending on the specific needs. But a little bit of research will help you find the best value for your dollar (again, cheapest isn’t always the best value) that will provide you the results you need without breaking your budget.
Check out our small business news site.
7 Quick Ways to Lose Business (Quickly)
by Stoney deGeyter
Every now and then I look at a site and wonder if the owner is even trying to make money. Well, I guess I know they are because they do all the “right” things to make money, but they are doing all the wrong things to serve their customer’s needs.
Building a great website is a lot of work, but the job is never really done. There is always something you can do to improve performance, create a better customer experience, or generate a genuine desire for customers to return. And there are also things that shoo customers away, elicit a poor customer experience, and interfere with site performance. Here are just a few:
Too Many Ads
Business sites with too many ads make your site look unprofessional. Most business sites selling products or services are probably better served with little or no ads whatsoever. Ads are great on editorial and content driven sites, not so much with traditional product or service driven sites. The exception to this rule is ads for your own products. That’s called up-selling and is just good marketing.
Broken Links
Check your links regularly, like once a month. If you find any broken links, internal or external, be sure to get those fixed. If visitors click a link on your site they need to be taken to a legitimate page. It’s very easy for links to break if you ever move content around. You also want to check external links pointed in to your site. See if anybody has links pointed to you that are broken. If so, request that those be fixed or redirect them to the correct page.
Confusing Navigation
Keep your navigation clean and consistent. Make sure it is generally easy to use and to for the visitor to find what they are looking for without having to spend to much team reading through each navigation link. Navigation should be segmented, sections highlighted properly and any drop down or fly-out menus should be easy to use, as many are not.
Blocked Content
Don’t block content behind registration pages. You may feel a need to capture certain information from your visitors, but you’ll find you’ll have far fewer visitors if you force them to enter information they don’t want to give you. Give your content away, expect nothing in return and you’ll likely get a lot more back than if you force visitors into providing you such information.
Slow Load Times
Broadband has almost made this obsolete but there are still things that can interfere and cause your site to load slower than it should. Get rid of any convoluted code, unnecessary tracking javascripts, and size your images properly. These will all help. It’s also a good idea to have a reliable web host that you can trust to keep your information live and deliverable at higher speeds consistently.
Ineffective Site Search
If you have it on your site, your customers need to be able to find it. If you have a site search that doesn’t deliver the results then visitors will leave assuming you don’t have what they want. Check various keyword combination, misspellings, close matches, etc and make sure your search results give the visitors what they came looking for.
Long Checkout Process
Keep your shopping cart short and simple. Every screen they have to click through before their order is finished is an added opportunity for the visitor to rethink their purchase and leave the site. Don’t give them that opportunity. Get all the information you can on a single page, only going to multiple check out pages if absolutely necessary. And don’t collect more information than you need.
Follow these simple guidelines and you should see an improvement in your customer retention and return rate. Then again, if you’re just in business for the fun of it, don’t bother and see how quickly you lose business.
Check out our small business news site.
The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 3: Desire, Part 2
We’ve been discussing the well-known AIDA conversion funnel and how it governs all Web conversions. We’ve already examined awareness and interest, and now we continue looking at the desire stage. …
Fear the Google
Fear is one constant in a world of uncertainties. Why do industry experts, advertisers, and pundits seem to be afraid to say anything negative about Google? …
Another DOJ Antitrust Investigation for Google, This Time for Book Search Settlement
Months after Google pulled out of a search ad deal with Yahoo! due to a Department of Justice antitrust investigation, the search engine is facing a similar battle – this time with its Book Search settlement.
You may remember that Google reached an agreement with Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) last October. The deal would resolve a long-standing class-action lawsuit brought by the group. A court still needs to approve the deal, and a hearing is scheduled for October 7, 2009 (rescheduled from June 11).
Critics fear that the agreement would give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, including orphan books where the authors cannot be contacted or whose rights are unknown.
However, on Google’s site set up to address questions and inquiries regarding the settlement (Googlebooksettlement.com), Google says its rights are non-exclusive.
An inquiry doesn’t mean that the DOJ will nix the settlement. But the DOJ does share some of the aforementioned concerns of critics, despite Google’s assurance that the deal is non-exclusive.
Hulu Surpasses Yahoo Sites in Online Video Race for March 2009
Looks like the momentum created by an ad campaign that began during the Superbowl continues to bring a boost to Hulu. The online video joint effort by NBC and Fox landed in the top 3 video sites in March 2009, something comScore says is a first. Hulu pushed Yahoo! sites to position number 4. Google, with its ownership of YouTube, and Fox Interactive, with its ownership of MySpace, still dominated the top two spots respectively:
More juicy data nuggets from the March 2009 online video space include:
- 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The average online video viewer watched 327 minutes of video, or nearly 5.5 hours.
- 99.7 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.1 videos per viewer).
- 47.4 million viewers watched 349 million videos on MySpace.com (7.4 videos per viewer).
- Hulu accounted for 2.6 percent of videos viewed, but 4.9 percent of all minutes spent watching online video.
- The duration of the average online video was 3.4 minutes.
Related Reading:
‘Family Guy’ Tops Internal Search List for Hulu
Zillow Release iPhone Real Estate Search App
Zillow has released an iPhone app for real estate searching on-the-go. All of the same data available on Zillow is available on the app. Zillow uses Microsoft virtual earth for its mapping.
“Researching homes and house-hunting is inherently a mobile experience,” said Rich Barton, Zillow co-founder and CEO. “The GPS-enabled iPhone untethers our Zillow users from their computers and puts the power of our database of 88 million homes in their hands when they need it most – while they are looking at homes.”
Here are screenshots of the app:
(Listing for my dream house here in Raleigh.)
Related Reading:
Zillow Partners with 180 Newspapers for Co-Branded Real Estate Sites
Zillow Launches Answers Feature
Zillow Unveils Automated Quote API
Microsoft Offers Vine, Social Media For Important Personal Info
Microsoft announced the beta launch of Vine – a social media platform for personal information sharing. As the site states: “The Microsoft Vine Beta connects you to the people and places you care about most, when it matters.”
While it may be in beta as an emergency Twitter like app, the potential for this could eventually become a challenge to Facebook as well as Twitter. It has the potential to set up, through its interface, as a tracking and mapping networking tool that combines elements of both of those programs.
AOL Ad Revenues Drop 20% in Q1 2009
Time Warner, parent company of AOL, has reported their first quarter earnings for 2009 and the news isn’t great for AOL. Ad revenues have dropped 20% or 9 million. The losses largely contributed to the 7% decline parent company Time Warner experienced overall.
The losses added to Time Warner’s desire to rid itself of AOL.
“With our separation of Time Warner Cable, Time Warner has become a more content-focused company. We’re also working to determine the right ownership structure for AOL,” said Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes. “With our powerful brands, industry-leading scale, track record of innovation, heightened focus on efficiency and strong balance sheet, I’m confident that we’ll continue to make progress toward our key long-term goals – to be the world’s leading content company and improve returns to our stockholders.”
After shopping itself to potential buyers, Time Warner appears to be posed to spin off the struggling internet company. Time Warner has notified Google of its intent to purchase their 5% stock in AOL.
AOL recently hired Tim Armstrong, former Google Senior Vice President, as CEO.