A Website On A Small Budget

For many small businesses the idea of having a website can be a daunting one. Many of the questions raised are:

• What benefit will a website bring?
• Won’t it be expensive?
• I don’t know a lot about computers so how will I manage it?

These are all very valid questions as many small businesses have not yet looked at the possibilities of a website and some tend to think that it really isn’t for them.

The benefits it can bring to a small business, whether you are a sole trader or employ a small work force can be impressive. It gives you another avenue in which to advertise your services or products, for instance, if you are a builder you can use the website to showcase your services. This is especially important as you cannot advertise all of these in a newspaper and you can also provide photos and videos within the site of previous work so that potential customers can see the standard with which you work.

A website can be built to suit most budgets, no matter how small. The way prices work for website designs is dependant on what you require. For instance if you require a website with moving flash objects, lots of contact forms, a search facility, shopping cart, merchant services and multiple pages, then your costs will be high due to the extent of the work and the hours involved in building that site. However if you just require a basic website with a few pages then it really isn’t expensive, you can usually get one designed for about £250. Once that website is built it is yours but the only thing to factor in is the cost of hosting the site per year.

If your knowledge of computers is limited please do not be put off, a good website design company can offer many things, one of them being a CMS system (content management system). If your website would require regular updating of content and images a CMS would allow you to log into the site and make those changes yourself. Your website designer can train you on how to use this system, this would add slightly to the cost but well worth it. Your site maybe one that doesn’t need changing once it is set up so that would be a static site. This means that once it has been completed you will not have to do anything but if you require changes then only a website designer can do this, charged at an hourly rate.

It is important to understand the factors involved in owning a website. No matter how small your business is potential customers will use the internet as a way of finding your services either locally or nationally. That means that without a website your competitors who have one will get all of those potential customers.

Rather than thinking that you cannot afford a website, you should be asking yourself can I afford not to have one.

Social Media – Changing The Way We Live

Social media has become a massive presence on the Internet and the way in which we now lead our lives. In days gone we relied solely on the telephone and postal mail to keep ourselves connected both within business and socially. Then email came along and allowed us to contact each other as and when we liked also including attachments in the form of pictures, videos and text. This dramatically changed the way we communicate because it is quick and can be read by the recipient at anytime.

Then social media came along and really changed the way we live. Websites such as Facebook and Myspace have now allowed us to contact both existing friends and past ones. It really is like your own website, you create a profile of yourself including your interests, what you do for a living, pictures and videos. You can then share that information with whomever you want making as private or as public as you want. These sites also host your profile pages all for free, making it accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Not only has it changed the way we communicate, allowing friends and relatives to see exactly what we are up to but also it has consumed many people’s lives. Users of Facebook and Myspace are finding that they spend a good proportion of their time on the site changing their profile and updating what they have been up to with pictures, text and video. There is also opportunities to join groups supporting charitable causes, fans of your favourite band/ singer and some groups set up generally for fun. This encourages users to spend more time on the sites communicating with others, which has to be a good thing.

Social media websites are also available via mobile phone so that even when you are away from your PC you can still connect to all of your friends and keep them updated.

Social media sites are not just limited to social networking either; sites such as Youtube and Videojug allow Internet users to upload their videos and share them with the world, even embedding the video into your own website. This enables any user of the Internet to click onto the website and watch a video of their choice, whether you want to see your favourite band, comedian, funny family video etc… This is also available for pictures too with sites such as Flickr offering you the ability to upload and share your pictures.

One site that has really blossomed recently has to be Twitter. This website allows you to enter a limited amount of characters almost like a text to your profile to let everyone you choose know exactly what you are up to at that moment in time. If you want to say that you are currently on the London Eye then you can take a picture of it, write some text and instantly update your own Twitter page. It is proving so very popular due to its complete ease of use and the fact that it is very easy to use on a mobile phone.

Social media is definitely here to stay and it will only get stronger in 2010, it can be used to market your business as well helping get your message across through all of its formats. If you do not currently use these websites I encourage you to try them out as communication and sharing of ideas has never been so easy.

Is A Business Logo Necessary For My Online Business

If you are thinking about or are in the process of creating an online business then one of the issues that arise is the one of a company logo.

Creating an online business is exactly the same as creating any other business you need an identity. Think of all of the businesses you currently use in your life, whether it’s buying your weekly groceries, purchasing clothes, buying a car etc… All of these companies have a good logo and this can be a sign of confidence and dependability to customers. If you have had good service from a company then their logo/ identity becomes one you trust.

Taking this into consideration you can then start to think exactly about the online business you are creating. Whether it is one offering advice or selling products, having an identity is vital. When people come onto your website they instantly recognise it and as previously discussed if they have had a good experience with you, an identity they trust. This will in turn help with retaining customers, giving them a quality online experience that they will just keep coming back for.

A good company logo will not only help create an identity but it will also help you to market your business. By creating business cards, flyers, newspaper advertisements etc…. You can take your company logo to the masses and create your company brand and image.

Once you have decided to have a company logo then the next step is to get it designed. By using a Professional graphic designer you will be able to effectively create the ideas you have or better still use the knowledge and experience the designer has to create a logo. Ideally the logo has to be created in the best possible quality and available in such formats as JPEG, GIF, PNG and bitmap. This means that whenever you want to use that image especially in different sizes you will still retain the quality.

Your logo can also have some bearing on your industry, for instance if you are working within sports you could possibly use a bat and ball as part of your logo. If you can relate this to your logo then you stand a better chance of people instantly recognising what you do.

Within your website it is best then to use your company colours. For example if your logo is predominately red and black, then your site would be better off following these schemes so again recognition is gained. This can work greatly for any website that you have whether it is for a club/ society or your business, it is recommended good practice.

If you can create a good corporate identity for your business then you have a very good starting block with which to market your website and create good levels of traffic.

What Makes People Buy Online

The buying of products has completely changed over the years and especially the last decade. Once upon a time we purchased most of our products from stores either in our local town or nearest city. Mail order catalogues changed the way we purchased, enabling us to look through a list of products in the comfort of our own home and then simply pick up the phone and place an order.

The biggest change in consumer shopping is the advent of the internet, not only can you buy pretty much anything you require as obscure as it maybe but you can also research products finding out the lowest price, best returns policy etc….

Consumers are now better informed than they have ever been before and with that information they can make purchases knowing exactly what they should be paying for a product or a service and what they can expect from it.

With a click of a button consumers can find the best price (be it through comparison websites) and find reviews on the best and worst bits of the product or service. This means retailers and manufacturers are working harder to ensure quality and price, which is ideal for the consumer but not always good news for the seller.

The main attractions of buying online are:

Buy from the comfort of your own home or office
No travel costs
Time effective – can be done from the office or home when time is at a minimum
You can purchase new or second hand goods
Purchase bespoke/ items that you would not normally find in the high street
Generally better value due to high competition levels
Compare lots of prices in a short space of time so you know you are getting the lowest price available

Many people or not only out there for new products but are interested in buying second hand or used products, this was where the Ebay phenomenon started, Ebay gives the opportunity to people who don’t want to own their own website but still want to sell both new and used items.

Retailing online has also opened a wave of new businesses with small independents working from either small offices or home, which are reducing start-up costs dramatically. It has also given the large multi national companies an opportunity to increase their market shares and try new product markets.

Purchasing online is set to overtake our usual buying habits of the high street due to it’s simple and time efficient way.

Buying products online is here to stay offering consumers variety and information like never seen before.

Starting An Online Business

So you want to start an online business? There are a few issues to discuss before doing so, in this article we will talk about:

· Good planning – Of site and business
· What products you are selling and how you will go about selling them
· Business strengths – Compare yourself to competitors
· Designing the site
· Marketing your online business

Good Planning

For any business to succeed you need to plan exactly what your business wants and needs to achieve. For instance if you are selling products how many do you need to sell per month or week to survive? This is based on your overheads as a business such as utility bills and wages. The best part of an online business is that you do not normally need premises however this depends upon how much stock you have to carry and the amount of employees needed.

You must correctly plan your business to the smallest detail so that you do not get caught out. You need to set realistic budgets for your costings too, by this I mean how much do you want to spend on your website.

What Products are you selling?

By identifying what products you want to sell you will be able to carry out some research on your competitors. You need to find out what products they sell and what their prices are including delivery charges.

It is vital that you understand your competitors as the Internet is the quickest way for customers to find products and more importantly compare the prices. Are you going to be the cheapest? Or is there a special service you can offer that your competitors can’t.

Business Strengths

What are your strengths as a business? When you compare yourself to your competitors, are your products or services better quality or cheaper? What will make you stand alone in your industry, it maybe just a good brand name or experience.

Identifying these strengths will enable you to understand exactly where your business stands in your market place. This is a step some have taken and realised that after taking into consideration the above they just could not survive and so creating the business would be a bad thing to do. Rather know this now then after you have spent money on a site design and stock.

Designing the website

My first bit of advice is to contact a Professional website designer. They will be able to offer experienced advice on your website such as what theme to use and how to layout the pages to make the customers experience of your site an enjoyable and above all simple one.

This is also a great opportunity to create a good business logo and identity, you want customers to instantly recognise that it is your website and they have come to a well reputed place. Installing the consumer with confidence is an important part of your website design. Use your own ideas as well as the designers otherwise you can lose the ideas you originally had with which to create the business.

Above all the design needs to be simple, using your company colours effectively and having a simplistic approach to navigation. Remember if the site is hard to navigate then the user will get bored and use a competitor instead. You also need to make certain things as quick as possible, for instance if you are selling products then allow the user to add the product to a shopping basket and checkout efficiently. By all means try and sell add on’s but do not make the user navigate screen after screen to just pay as again you will lose them to a competitor with a simpler layout.

Designing your site is one of the key elements to making your online business work so plan it and take your time.

Marketing Your Online Business

So now you have designed the site and have your product range and prices ready to go. How are you going to attract customers to your site? One of the major factors is the search engines that people use such as Google, ask and Yahoo, when people use these engines to search for you type of product you need to be visible within the first two pages as users very rarely go beyond these pages of search! It is a good idea to consult a Professional SEO company to market your website.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and there are many companies whom specialise in this sector. The most common ways to market your site to enable it to rank highly on the search engines is keywording, CPC, social media, social book marking, link building, Press releases and blogging. An experienced SEO company will manage all of these for you and inspire you with ideas with which to take your business to new levels. By using an SEO company they will be able to increase the traffic to your website by making it highly visible to users of the Internet. Obviously the more traffic you have coming to your site then the more orders you are likely to take.

You also have to look at ways to advertise the website, this is dependent on your budget and the product you are selling. If your product is purely local to your area then look at advertising in local newspapers and listing within local directories. If however you product is designed for national and international use then other such methods to contemplate are national newspapers, national directories, Yellow Pages and even television advertising. A great example of this at the moment is the amount of turning your unused gold into cash websites popping up. These websites are advertised on national television but due to the value of their service it is vital that they advertise in this way. These websites will also be spending large amounts of money on good SEO too.

Hopefully now you will have a good understanding of the key processes in building an online business. Remember do not rush into creating a business until you have carried out complete research on the areas I have highlighted.

Using Email As An Effective Marketing Tool

Many businesses have found email to be an effective way to sell their products and services. There are however many considerations to be made before you use this method.

The first thing to consider is what message are you trying to get out to your customer? Is it a new exciting offer on a product or service? Maybe you just want to contact customers that you haven’t spoken to for a while informing them that you are still offering the products or services that they once purchased.

After you have thought about what message you would like to get out there you must also consider how often you want to send out your emails. You can send emails on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis; it is recommended that you send your emails regularly. However you do not want to send your emails so regularly that is discourages customers and they just end up deleting them instead of reading them.  Many people do not like receiving high levels of email unless they are informative or offer them a special deal.

How many contacts do you have to email? Some business will have a figure in the hundreds and others in the thousands. Depending on how many contacts you have to reach depends on how you will approach you email campaign. You can of course send the emails yourself through whatever email programme you use such as outlook express etc…. If you have a large number of contacts then this can be a very time consuming thing to do, my advice is to contact an experienced SEO company to manage this for you. They can manage high levels of email for you and make sure that your message really does get across. An SEO company can also design a template for your email so that once received your customers will automatically identify that it is from you – Good brand identification.

If you have an e-commerce website then email marketing is a must as when people order a product from you they give you their contact details, this however must be treated with caution as there are laws in place such as the Data Protection Act to ensure that these details are not abused and customers can opt out of any use of their personal data.

Using these contact details correctly and Professionally you can keep good contact with all of your customers increasing your changes of making a repeat sale and stopping them from maybe using a competitor for a future purchase. It is also an effective way to reach potential new customers who haven’t yet heard of your company or service.

Email Marketing is a great way to keep in contact with your customers and getting them to return to you no matter if your business is based online or not, however please treat with caution and do not over use as you could deter more than encourage.

Is It Worth Building Your Own Website

Many people prefer to build their own websites rather than spend money on a website designer, they see it as a good cost cutting measure. Sure, building your own site will save you money but I would first like to determine what your website is intended for.

If your website is intended for a club or society with which you are a member or you would just like to broadcast yourself and share your thoughts and images with friends and family then please go ahead and have a go at building a website, if however your site is intended for business use i.e. a site showing off your services, showcasing your business or even selling items online then my advice is to employ the services of an experienced website designer.

Building your own website can be a fun and worthwhile thing to do, there are many WYSISYG (what you see is what you get) programmes out there that allow you to create and design your own site. You can enjoy hours of designing the site and writing good content. Many of these types of programmes are free to download. If you have experience of HTML coding then even better. This is the perfect way to design a site for personal use.

If you are considering a site for business purposes then consulting a website designer is key. The reason I say this is because not only will they have some great ideas for design but they have probably previously built websites within your industry. An experienced designer will know exactly how the pages should be laid out and this is so very important as the user will be expecting certain things from your site and the designer will have these in mind.

These include:

• Correct positioning and ordering of menus
• Simple use of colours to not confuse user
• Correct usage of images within pages
• Simplistic text font and size
• Graphic design
• Animation if required
• Page keywords and descriptions
• Good URL structure

All of the above will mean that your website design will work for you. Don’t think however that the design is completely out of your hands because most designers want and need your input! This is something that you must look for when choosing your Professional website designer.

Please don’t fall into the trap of over designing your site though. This can be true if your building your own site or having a designer do it for you. Some people believe that the more fancy things a website has the more appealing it will be to the user, this however just isn’t true! The user has to come to your website for a reason, whether it is to buy a product or find out information, if the site is too fussy and complex then the user will not be able to navigate it to find what they want. A lost user!

To conclude – By all means build your own website but first think about what the site is intended for. If the site is going to be an important part of your life or business then my suggestion would always be to use an experienced designer as the benefits both now and in the future really are priceless.

Shoot Will With My Gun

Cost Per Click – Isn’t it expensive?

Cost per click or CPC is an effective way of making you visible to users of search engines on the Internet. It basically works by you selecting the keywords you would like to use within peoples searches and bidding a price on them.

For instance if you wanted to use the keyword sport then you would add this to your CPC campaign and bid a price for it, then when a user uses the word sport in a search engine search your website will appear within the sponsored result part of the page, this with Google is located at the top and right hand side. If the user selects your website from this result you will be charged whatever the price you paid for that keyword, the price can range from anything like 2p to over £30 depending on what keyword you require and the popularity of it.

A lot of people get scared that by choosing this method of website marketing it can be very expensive which in some cases has been true. If you do not set a budget for how much you would like to spend or use keywords that are very popular and dictate that you spend a lot of money to achieve the result you are after then yes you could spend a lot of money on CPC but at the same time you may not get much out of it.

To create an effective CPC campaign in both respects of increased website traffic and sticking to a realistic budget you must contact a Professional SEO company. Most CPC campaigns are run by people who do not fully understand how they work in terms of achieving results and limiting the spend.

An experienced SEO company will not only manage your campaign with a set budget but they can also save you money by identifying keywords that have a high percentage of searches and are not being used by your competitors. An example of this is:

Keyword to be used – Sport

Cost – £5 per click

Monthly searches – 12,000

This keyword would probably be used by most of your competitors and an SEO company can tell you if they are. The sort of thing an SEO company can find out is as follows:

Keyword to be used – Sport deals

Cost – 5p per click

Monthly searches – 5,000

This keyword has been found to not be used by your competitors hence why the price is low, this means that you can save money on CPC but increase your visibility in new ways not previously thought of. SEO companies can find many keywords that are in demand search wise but not in demand to be purchased by your competitors.

This is why it is important to employ the services of an SEO company as not only will your budget stay intact but also your visibility will be become greater and you are likely to save money in the process.

CPC is a great tool to show off your website to the search engines but do it correctly as your costs can spiral out of control if it isn’t managed correctly.

Travel Related Searches, What Was Google UK Used For In 2009

The Internet has changed the way we travel and explore the world, it has changed how we manage our journeys, plan our trips and book our hotel rooms or flights. We can now book a holiday, including trains, flights, hotel rooms and excursions sat at home on a cold winters evening with a glass of wine.

But, with a recession and more people staying at home in 2009, did Google UK see a massive change or drop in what people searched for. Below are the top searches as shown on the Google Insight research tool for the whole of 2009, which are just travel related.

Top searches 2009

1. holidays
2. flights
3. train
4. rail
5. holiday
6. ryanair
7. easyjet
8. virgin
9. national rail
10. cheap flights

If we now look at 2008 for the same searches:

Top searches

1. hotel
2. flights
3. holidays
4. hotels
5. train
6. holiday
7. rail
8. ryanair
9. easyjet
10. national rail

When we compare the two results, we can see that the search terms are pretty much the same, it is just the order of popularity that has changed. Far more people searched for holidays in 2009 than 2008, possibly indicating that people are now looking for an escape to the home grown doom and gloom or that the recession is easing and people are planning for the following year. Flights were still the second most searched for travel term in 2009, with companies like Ryan Air and Easy Jet still maintaining a search strong presence.

It is interesting to see how search terms have changed in terms of popularity in the space of 24 months, but the majority of the top ten remain the same, meaning that the search trends for both years remain the same, which could indicate that most of us are now so reliant on the internet to book our holidays that we rarely look for anything a little different.

With the Virgin Galactic service due to really receive heavy promotion in the forthcoming year, can we predict that space travel will form a large search presence next year, or are people really just sticking to what they know on the internet, which is a great place to find cheap flights, hotels, trains and all inclusive package holidays. Either way it is clear to see why the internet has almost signalled an end to our travel agents on the high street, as more and more people plan, book and pay for their holidays online, on their own and with only Google to help them!

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