Would you like a business grant that you can use towards a private training/coaching session with me to develop your Internet marketing skills?

Small business owners/managers are eligible for a grant of up to £1000 towards the cost of business training and development designed to develop their strategic skills to drive their company forward.

Take advantage of this grant funding from Business Link whilst it’s available, and as always the case, when the money is gone, the money is gone!

I’m able to develop a training programme designed for your specific needs, meaning we can skip over the bits you know already, and focus on what you really need to know to make your business more competitive on the Internet:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns
• Social Media Marketing campaigns:  Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogging
• Web design reviews
• Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Google Analytics and web metrics
• Improving Conversions
• E Commerce
• Email marketing
• International Web Marketing

One grant is available per organisation of up to a maximum of £1,000.  The first £500 is 100% grant funded, with an additional £500 available for you to match at 50%, for a total grant value of £1000.

Both business, public sector and charitable organisations with between 5 to 249 employees are eligible to apply. Organisations who accessed previous Leadership and Management funding initiatives from the LSC are not eligible. Funding is made available for the development of a senior manager or key decision maker.

Our training and consultancy services are a approved by Business Link in both the East Midlands and West Midland, and our training courses rated amongst the top three in the country.

Contact us to discuss your training requirements and learn more about how you can apply for a grant.

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So you throught the really hard part about Internet Marketing was building your inbound links.  But there are many legal issues and statutory requirements that may impact on your online marketing strategy.

It’s all too common to see some of these rules being overlooked, either deliberately “oh that doesn’t really apply to me” or due to ignorance.  But not knowing the laws surrounding Internet Marketing will not protect you if you get in trouble.  To avoid any confusion, I’ve pulled together some of the best resources online to help you to get it right every time.

Compliance and Your Website

Did you know that you have to include your company information on your website (and in your emails)?  That’s right, it’s not just good practice, it’s actually a legal requirement, as Susan explains in this post on Company Website Statutory Requirements.

Do you have a contact form or newsletter sign up on your website?  Then you must have a data protection statement on your site.

Ever heard of the Disability Discriminations Act (1995)?  The DDA has implications for your website. (psst! If your site is search-engine friendly it is most likely DDA compliant.)

And there are some extra laws for all of you with ecommerce websites to think about.

Email Marketing

There’s a whole host of dos and don’ts when it comes to email marketing, and if you fall on the wrong side of the law you could find yourself with a hefty fine.  The lists of things you’re doing wrong can include:

• Not including an “unsubscribe” option on your emails
• … or your company information
• Sharing or selling emails and other personal information, without a consumer’s explicit consent
• Not making it clear from the subject line that your email is in fact a form of direct marketing
• Deliberately offending your recipients

The punishment for these can range from a slap on the wrist to massive fines and a visit from the Office of Fair Trading.  Here are some great resources with more information and advice on the legal issues:

A Lesson on Laws Surrounding Email Marketing

Presentation on Email Marketing (with advice on social media and the Digital Economy Act too) from Melissa Campbell of Distilled.

Low-down on the Data Protection Act from the ICO.

Blogging and Social Media

Yes blogging and social media tools are excellent ways to connect with your customers, but just like any other form of Internet Marketing there are some stringent laws on how you can use them.

Since as far back as 2008 there have been some tough rules about pretending to be a consumer to promote your company via social media.  You might think it’s a great idea to act as a consumer to give yourself great reviews or promote your latest product but when you are landed with a hefty fine you’ll think twice.

These rules may also affect you if you are a blogger who receives money, gifts or anything else in return for reviews.  As a simple guide, if you’re sent a product to review, tell your readers.  That way they have the full story and you know that you are on the right side of the law.

Protecting Your Copyright

So far I’ve talked about how you could end up on the wrong side of the law – but the law can be on your side too.  If someone is stealing your content, you do have rights and you can make them stop.  For full information on how to do this see Susan’s great articles:

Protecting Your Internet Content – with a friendly way to make content stealers stop.

Protecting Your Copyright details the steps you have to take if the offending website owner isn’t playing fair.

Internet Marketing laws can be complex, but if you take the time to review your website and make sure you’re doing everything right you’ll protect yourself from getting in trouble with the law.

If you are concerned about whether your digital marketing strategy is all above board why not ask us to review your website – we can tell you if its fully compliant and offer advice on what to do if it’s not.

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Katie

Most companies set out to create a website that they can rely on to be relevant for the next few years.  While we don’t know exactly what changes are on the horizon, there is one thing that you can be sure of, your website needs to look good and function properly on a mobile phone.

Anyone who attended Charles Arthur’s talk at The Internet Conference will know that online browsing on the move is a major new trend.  More and more people are browsing the internet on their phone.  More and more people have smartphones.  The numbers of people buying smartphones and using them to surf the web is set to get much, much greater.

So all of you smart website owners will want to get ahead and make your website is mobile-friendly now.

Use the iPhone simulator to find out how your website looks on an iPhone.  Chances are if it doesn’t function properly on this fancy smartphone, less sophisticated mobile browsers will struggle with your site.

Do you like what you see?  Does your website look good on a mobile phone?

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Katie Saxon

Whether you have an ecommerce site or promote offline services to your customers, there is one thing every website owner wants to see: conversions.

It’s not enough to have thousands of visitors to your site, you need as many visitors as possible to follow your call to action.  You want your visitors to do something on your website – buy a product, sign up to your newsletter, make an enquiry – and your website needs to be designed so that they want to do it.

I went to Dr Mike Baxter’s excellent talk on Improving the Ecommerce User Experience at The Internet Conference last Friday, and while he had lots of great advice there was one fact that stuck in my mind.  Visitors decide whether they like your website in one 20th of a second.  And if they don’t like it, they won’t convert.

So how do you know if they will like your website?

Blur it.

Use photoshop or search for an online photo editor and blur your web page until you can’t read the text.

Dr Baxter explained that by blurring your site you avoid the tempation to read the text on your website and can focus on the design.  You can see if your colours are harmonious and can tell what your customers see when they first visit your site.  If you have a well designed site, your eyes will go straight to your call to action.  If they don’t, you may need to consider a redesign.

At Hallam Communications we’re planning a web redesign so let’s see how our website measures up.  Here’s how it looks normally:

And here’s how it looks once it’s been blurred:

Was your eye drawn to the bright orange box on the black background?  Good.  That’s our primary call to action.  The three other orange boxes all contain key messages, but aren’t direct calls to action, so they stand out less.

In fact the only concern is that your eye might be taken straight to the image of Susan’s smiling face.  Lovely though it may be, looking at her isn’t going to tell you what we need you to do on our website, and this could be affecting our conversions.

Go ahead and try this on your website to see how your web design measures up.  Remember you need:

• A harmonious colour scheme
• A clear call to action
• To draw attention to the call to action through colour, white space and placement.

So go ahead and blur your website and seeing if your design could be damaging your conversions.

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Katie Saxon

I have been playing around a bit with Google Sites lately and thought it would be worthwhile writing a quick review and investigating whether these “do it yourself” website services are appropriate for businesses.

One of my most popular blog articles is How to Build a Free Website, so I suspect this one will be popular, too!

The first thing I must say is that as these “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) template-driven website creators go, Google Sites is very flexible and easy to use. As you would expect from Google I suppose. Naturally, there are limits, but the built-in functionality and the extendable nature of the system makes for a compelling case for those of us not blessed with natural design and coding abilities.

There is no software to download or install, everything is done from within the web browser. You start by selecting a blank template or one from a fairly extensive selection, many created by users rather than Google themselves. You then choose a theme to match, which sets the colour scheme and background style for your pages.

Once set up, you can play around with the layout, colours and images used in your theme and template. Within a few minutes, I had a template looking like this:

Not the prettiest, but it demonstrates how easy it is to start playing around with things and shaping them to your taste. Remember, I hadn’t started to add any content at this stage, but doing so was easy – just click the Edit Page button and type away!

You should be able to make out in the screenshot above the editing controls, like a simple version of Microsoft Word. This is the classic “WYSIWYG” editing mode. It’s easy to insert images, make links, or add one of the thousands of Gadgets available for iGoogle. One thing that is missing is the ability to add files or documents for download – to do that, you’ll need to upload them somewhere else and make a link to them.

The options you have for changing the layout, colours, backgrounds and so on is very impressive, certainly compared to many similar systems I’ve encountered over the years. You are ultimately limited to having your navigation on the left or right, where many sites are now favouring navigation along the top. The amount of functions you can add in via Gadgets is huge, although many of them are pretty useless for business (Free Online Frogger anyone?)

You can point your own domain name at the website, so it has a professional address, and you can register the site with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, giving you great statistics on your visitors.

So, it’s easy to use, has a wide variety of functions you can add in and the design is easy to tailor, within the restraints of header/left sidebar/right sidebar/footer, which to be fair most sites use anyway.

Is it, then, a good idea to build a business website on the Google Sites platform?

I don’t think so, and I’ve compiled my reasons why:

1. You don’t own the site, it’s Google’s. Look at what happened to Geocities a couple of months ago.
2. Someone still has to design and build the site, even if it is easy. Does anyone in your business have the requisite graphic design and Photoshop skills? There is no training included in Google’s free offer.
3. Zero support if something goes wrong. Yes, there are online tutorials and a Google Group for support, but you can’t actually pick up the phone and demand something be done about it if there is a problem. There is no SLA on fixing problems. If the website is down for a reason out of your control, Google can’t be pressed into doing something about it!
4. You are limited to Google’s templates, which you might not want, or paying an approved Google supplier for a custom design. You will always have the header, left (or right)-navigation, middle-content layout, even if you want something different (e.g. a navigation menu along the top).
5. Tailoring the look and feel of additional functionality such as Calendars is nigh-on impossible, plus it will only do what Google allows you to do. This may be sufficient, or you may want it to work in a different way, but you won’t have the option to change it with a system like this.
6. Uploading files for your visitors to download requires the use of a third-party service, increasing the risk of files not being available and other technical problems.

These problems aren’t unique to Google Sites by any means and their system is actually one of the most flexible I’ve come across. Sadly, though, for businesses it just doesn’t make sense and in fairness to Google, they aren’t pushing Sites as a business solution, except for collaboration (i.e. internal or project-based use, rather than a main business website).

My opinion is that if you are serious about your business, you need a proper website, designed and built to your specification, so that you can be sure it does everything you want. Otherwise, you may well find yourself frustrated at the limits imposed by a system like Google Sites.

Contact me for information about independent website consultancy: How I can help you develop your website strategy and find the right web developer.

Google have developed a cool new tool that shows what a “typical” user sees when they visit your website if they choose not to scroll.

Your browser size determines whether we need to scroll up or down to see content, and Browser Size gives you a visual estimate of what people can see on your site, and whether they need to scroll to see your content.   The assumptions are based on Google’s own data of it’s visitors’ browser characteristics.

Of course your business may get more visitors with high resolution monitors, or lots of visitors using mobile devices, but it is useful starting point when considering your web design.

My own website is being redesigned, and here’s my report:

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Take a look at the content that 99% of people can see, and the content languishing where only 20% of folk can see it.  It is my Web Review service that is positioned badly where folk can’t see it. Time for a redesign, eh?

This tool may over simplify matters, but the principle of “above the fold” is one of those basic truths in web design that we should all swear by.

“In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page,” comments Google Senior Software Engineer, Bruno Bowden. “If it’s a really important piece, then it’s placed ‘above the fold,’ which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn’t readily seen when you first look at the newspaper.”

“The same concept applies to browsers as well,” he adds. “There’s no clear line for “above the fold” on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. “

4Q is a free survey tool that gives you feedback direct from your website visitors.

Why did they come to your website (their intention) and how satisfied they are with their experience of your site?

When you came to the website today, you may have been presented with an invitation to participate in a 4Q survey after your visit.

4Q stands for “four questions” that will help you to better understand their user experience, and most importantly task completion: did the visitor manage to complete what they intended to do?  And as a result, how satisfied were they?

The four questions:

1. On a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with my website?
2. What is the purpose of your visit?
3. Did you manage to achieve the purpose of the visit?
4. What do you like the most about the website?

It is all about conversion based on the tasks your visitors want to complete, and how to improve your website for a better user experience.

Setting up the survey is simple, and it designed to work straight “out of the tin.”  You can change the wording of some of the 4 questions, and upload your company logo.  You then need to upload the tracking code to your website, in much the same way that you installed Google Analytics tracking code.

iPerceptions have shared the typical survey response rate as 2-4%, although my response rate is significantly lower.  As a result, small businesses might want to set the survey invitation rate (the proportion of visitors invited to take the survey) to 40% or even higher so that you get sufficient visitor data.

And the system uses cookies so that, in principle, a visitor should only get invited to participate in the survey once.

Looking at the Survey Results

The data is presented in your 4Q dashboard, and you can also download the findings straight into a spreadsheet.

Why are visitors coming to my website?

And what do they value most on the site?

4Q shares the daily overall satisfaction measures of all the companies using the service, so that you can benchmark your own satisfaction results:

Great Ideas to Take Away From the Survey

The most valuable part of the 4Q process is discovering actionable ideas that your business can take away and work on.

For example, I discovered that a number visitors wanted to access the materials in the Client Area, but did not have a password to get in.  They took the time in the survey to write about their frustration.  I need make a way to provide delegates with a simple way to recover a lost password.

In terms of our course booking process, one visitor provided me with a detailed breakdown of how it didn’t work, and then asked me to give him a ring to discuss his requirements.  The survey provided another way for customers to get in touch with the business

And finally, I can see that that visitors value the free information, the impartial advice.

Conclusions

4Q is quick, it’s free, and it gathers valuable data for better understanding your visitors’ expectations of your website, and their experience engaging with your site.

Gathering the visitor data is only the start of the process;  the more difficult task is then making the changes to your website, and testing new assumptions for improving your visitor experience.

My main hesitation for recommending this service? I’m not keen on intrusive pop-up invitations, and have no way of knowing what the impact of that pop-up might be. Is there any chance a visitor would bounce as a result of the pop up?

http://www.4qsurvey.com/

Efficient Frontier have published its Q1 2009 UK Search Engine Performance report based on a sample of UK search engine advertisers and there are a number of very interesting take away messages:

Search marketing advertising spend in the UK dropped 6% in Q1, year on year.

Advertisers’ Cost Per Click (CPC) is falling steadily, with average price falling from 44 pence in Q1 2008 to 30 pence in the same period 2009.

The volume of advertising impressions is on the rise as more consumers are using the Internet, and as the networks have lowered their minimum bid price bringing formerly inactive keywords into play.

As a result of the higher number of impressions, advertisers’ click through rates (CTR) have declined. By way of example, Google AdWords typical CTR dropped from 2.94% in Q1 2008, down to 2.06% in the same period in 2009

These results are based on a sample of advertisers in the financial services, travel, entertainment, retail and telco sectors.

You can read the full report here (PDF).

What does your business do? If I were to limit you to just 25 words, would you be able to delight me with your business proposition?

Stop right now and think: are you able rattle off a succinct sentence that conveys the breadth and depth of what you do, as well as make it clear what makes your business special, and the benefits you offer me?

And do you have that 25 word statement slapped prominently on your web site home page?

The lack of a simple, clear statement like this breaks a number of cardinal rules of web design:

• Don’t make me think. I don’t want to hunt around to figure out what you do. If I can’t see it straight away, then I’m hitting the back button.
• Don’t assume I know your business. You know what you do, but I don’t. So make it simple for me, and tell me what you do.
• Don’t keep your light under a bushel.  You know your business is great, so go right ahead and tell me.  Tell me the benefits of using your business rather than your competitors.

This 25 word statement isn’t just for your Internet marketing. As they say, there is nothing new under the sun, and this statement means you have a handle on your business.  It might form part of your marketing collateral, or your elevator pitch (That’s the 30 seconds you get to clinch the deal with me if we were trapped in a lift together. Heaven forbid.)

Your 25 word statement is essential in Internet marketing because:
• My attention span is short on the web, I’m scanning your website, so keep it short and sweet
• Your statement is very likely to be naturally keyword rich, which will help in your search engine optimisation. And if it isn’t keyword rich because it is full of waffle, or using those wasteful words like “quality” or “solutions” then rethink your statement.
• You can reuse the statement when it comes time to include a description of your website in directories, or as part of your pen picture.

So, what exactly is is that you do?

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Would you like me to take a look at your website, and write up a review of the kinds of improvements I think you should make?

For £100 + VAT I’m offering a one hour review of websites during which I’ll take a look at your:

• search engine optimisation
• usability of your site
• legal compliance
• and give a general warts and all review

I’ve been offering this service to delegates when I speak at conferences, and I’ve been surprised at the demand.

Don’t expect a fancy-dancy report;  I’d rather spend my hour writing up plain speaking analysis of specific steps I think you could take to improve your site.  And if your feelings are easily hurt, then this might not be the report for you!

The kinds of people who have requested the report include companies who are:

• wanting to improve their rankings in the search engines
• doubting whether they are getting value for money from their search marketing agency
• needing a plan of action to use with their web designer
• planning a new website redesign
• wanting to improve the conversion rate on their websites

Get in t0uch by dropping me an email or use the Contact Us form on the website.  Tell me a little bit about your business and what’s going on with your website.

And I’ll get back to you by return to get the ball rolling.