Analytics is a free tool which tells you who, when, where and how people

are reaching your website.  It’s an indispensable tool for your marketing

strategy.

You can get information about visitors to your site. How many new

visitors, how many returning visitors, which country, state, city do they

come from, what keywords they used to find your site.

What are your traffic sources – how are you faring on search engines,is

your traffic mainly organic (found through search engines), does most of

your traffic come from referring sites – links to other sites, do you

have mainly direct traffic – people typing in your url in the browser

directly?

What is your bounce rate? Do they just leave your site after landing on

one of your pages or do they click on to other pages? What percentage of

your traffic are first time visitors and what percentage are return

visitors?

You can get a content drill down, which pages on your site are the most

popular, what keywords were used to find them, which pages do people land

on and where do they go after.

Another useful tool of Analytics is Goals. You can set up your goals to

look at conversion rates (conversions are what you want people to do -

eg, buy products, give their email address, etc), to get insight on what

is actually stopping people from converting.

You can also track your Adwords Campaigns (pay per click), find more

information about Keyword Positions such as how many visits a keyword

engendered or how many pages where visited through said keyword.

All that’s necessary to get Google Analytics is to put a little snippet

of code on each page of your site. All this information is vital for the

marketing process and best of all it’s free! Get your webmaster to get

you access to Google Analytics today!

Most people nowadays like to do their shopping on the internet. It is comfortable and the choice is much wider. If you own a business and you trade from the High Street, you would no doubt have noticed a drop in customers over the years. The trend is for online shopping to take over eventually. Is your business prepared for this?

E COMMERCE AND BUSINESS

A recent report “UK Supermarket Analysis (2007-2010)” by RNCOS has found that online sales in UK are anticipated to account for more than 19% of the combined retail sales by 2012 and are projected to exceed £62 Billion.

Way back in January 2006 the BBC reported that “Internet shopping among UK consumers soared almost 50% in the 10 weeks before Christmas, a report has found. Shoppers spent £4.98bn online during the period, compared with £3.3bn for the same time a year earlier, according to e-commerce trade body IMRG. ”

The Telegraph on April 1st 2010 says “New research from IGD, the food industry’s trade body, forecasts that UK consumers will spend £7.2bn on food and grocery shopping online by 2014 – nearly double the figure for 2009. ”

BUSINESS E COMMERCE

Even if your business is doing well offline (albeit the ongoing recession) you would definitely profit by having an e commerce website. Think of all the ways in which you can expand your market. With a physical shop you’re limited to its location. There are no such limits on the internet. You can sell your goods and services all over the world if you wish. You can also geo-target to a specific country or area too.

An E COMMERCE ONLINE SHOP does not only give you the possibility to expand your customer base, it can also save you time. You can have pages dedicated to frequently asked questions about your products and services and when your customers have queries you can direct them to your website. You can also gather vital information and feedback from your clients to help with your marketing strategies. You can use this information to send email reminders to your customers whom you have not seen for sometime.

An online shop can be a daunting task if you are not tech-savvy, but these days with systems like CMS (Content Management Systems) or CRM (Customer Resource Management) the process is made easier. Your web designer/developer should provide you with all the ongoing technical support that you need to make your E Commerce Experience a positive one.

2. .COM .NET .ORG .TV .MOBI ETC
Question is dot what? People are used to .COM as this was the first one around. .NET has also gained popularity. .ORG usually indicates a non profit organisation. .TV aims high, use it if you plan to upload loads of movies and videos. .MOBI is the latest trend and targets the internet on your mobile community.
If your target market is country oriented, you might be better off choosing an extension which reflects that, like .co.uk for the UK, .fr for France, .de for Germany etc etc.  However if you plan to target the global market .COM is still the preferred TLD (top level domain – extension).

3. If you can afford it, register more than one domain name. If you’re in the UK it would be wise to register both a .com and a .co.uk simply to avoid other people registering the same name and you losing business as a result. Some companies even register popular misspellings for their company name. It’s amazing how many people type domian name in search engines when looking for info on domain names. Goggle.com could make a fortune!

4. Last tip – check availability using a domain checker and as soon as you find a good one, grab it. Things on the internet move very fast. Do not sleep on it or you’ll end up missing out.

With more than 1 1/2 billion users on the internet each day, every website is in competition with all other similar websites to grab the attention of customers. One of the best ways to do this is to have a WEB PRESENTER on your webiste. A real person talking to your customers will leave a better impression than just text or images.

Any business website has 2 objectives:
a) to rank well on search engines
b) to engage the viewer and get conversions.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) takes care of the first point.

Studies have shown that the use of video engages the viewer more than text or plain images. A WEB PRESENTER is a short video of someone who can speak directly to your viewers. It’s an important part of web marketing. People tend to be lazy, they’d rather watch and listen than read.

A WEB PRESENTER captures your viewer’s attention and that is the first hurdle to overcome. Getting people to stay on your site long enough to interest them in what you are saying or selling is no mean task. A web presenter can help you do that more easily.

A WEB PRESENTER can introduce your site and what it is all about in just a few words and hook your customers.

A WEB PRESENTER can be an efficient web marketing tool, someone who can demonstrate the use of your products or services on a short video. Best of all you can even upload these videos for free to websites like Youtube and get even more exposure. Think of all the free advertising!

Get a WEB PRESENTER on your website TODAY.

What is really worrisome is the apparent lack of work, some ‘established’ designers are experiencing,  must be the case, since they have ample time on their hands to spend surfing the net looking for their idea of ugliness.   Someone needs to explain to Gracie and Co, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that variety is the spice of life.  Live and let live etc etc.  Some people just do not get the ideo of retro,  although they seem to enjoy wearing retro 70’s sunglasses! Maybe she should have gone to spec-savers!   Someone else who commented on the blog and seems to dislike QVC should note that their own link from their name to their website doesn’t work at all, (this as of today, sure it will be fixed soon).   Amazing how three fingers point back to you when you point one of yours.  Could comment some more here but what’s the point?   Being mean is not something I aspire to.

Seriously now, what people like Gracie do not get, is that many people are wary of doing business with people who’s idea of getting to the top is not through working hard but through bashing other people’s work. Would you really want to do business with someone who might very well sing praises to  your business in your presence in one minute and put you down behind your back in the next? Is that really a good way to run your business? Of course there are always the jackals who pass negative comments on other people’s work hoping they’ll impress enough to be able to get some redesign work out of it.

Wouldn’t it be good for Gracie and Co to get off their high horse, actually do some work and leave us uglies out of it!  I wish Gracie all the best with her designs,  machiavellian and otherwise,  and if she needs help with business management I can pinpoint a few good tutors.

Oh and pity someone pointed out rel=”nofollow”! I appreciated the traffic and the request I got through Gracie’s link. Cheers Gracie

When people type in words they are looking for on their browser (Internet Explorer,Firefox, Opera etc), these words are used by the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo for example) to find the websites that best match these words. There are various factors that search engines take into consideration to decide which websites best match the words people input.

The main ones are the following:
- Relevant Content (mainly in text form)
- Links from other websites
- the age of a site and how often it is updated

The more relevant your content and the more topical links you have to your site, the higher up the search engine ranks it. Additional new material also helps with ranking.

Content needs to be relevant to the title of the page.  Search Engines cannot read images and although lately there has been some improvement in the way Google reads flash, relevancy still boils down to text, so using the right keywords in your title, alt tags and content is vital.

Links are also important. But links have to be relevant ones. It is bad practice to link to as many directories as possible if these directories are not relevant to what the page is about. Better practice would be to get a few quality links. For example if your site is about language teaching, try and get quality links from directories that have to do with education. Getting links from places like shopping directories would not really help in this case.

Uploading new material shows the search engines that the site is in use, it is not an old static site that offers nothing new. One good way of doing this is by having a blog on your site. Try to submit new material to your blog frequently and let people know about this through a method called RSS wherein you submit your new additions to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. This keeps the website fresh and innovative and search engines love this.

Lastly be friendly to the search engines and in turn they’ll be friendly to your website.

FREE ADVERTISING – Save on traditional Advertising Costs – magazines, newspapers etc, enhance marketing effectiveness, Good Value for Minimal Investment. Reach a wider audience. Try a Brochure style website: Promote your products, services, events to all the world.

SELL ONLINE – Reach regional, national,even global markets.  A shopping cart provides your customers with the opportunity to purchase goods or services from your site. Offer your goods and services 365/24/7

TEST new products and services – Get feedback about your products from your customers. Ask what they want to know, their expectations,  gather information through interacting with potential customers who visit your website.

BUILD A COMMUNITY – share basic business info,
increase customer loyalty by keeping in touch with your customers.

SAVE TIME – put all necessary info on website and direct customer queries to it. You can  update information quickly. Customer service – a convenient and trouble-free way of reaching you 24 hrs a day!