Small Office, Home Office Information

Ok so it’s been a while since either Toni or I posted anything here. I guess that some of our regular readers may have wondered whether our small business had died during the recession but it didn’t.

Times were a little tough there for a while but we’ve come out of it in pretty good shape and now we’re busier than ever … which is more than we can say for some other local businesses in our line of work.

The reason we stopped posting was because a local competitor was taking some of the things we wrote here and including them word for word in their newsletter and claiming them as their own thoughts, ideas etc. Now however that competitor is no longer in business … at least not in the form they were in when they were stealing our content.

So now that you know why we’ve been away let’s talk about a local small business that has found that a website has brought them a lot more business than they thought.

The business is Hearty Foods a small business that provides nutritious ready made meals. They operate from a small store where people can call in and pick up frozen meals that are prepared by a real chef on the premises.

Not long after they started business they contacted us to build a website for them. Basically they wanted to put their menu online so that people who were house-bound … and there are quite a few in this town … could choose some meals from the menu and then call and place an order and have the meals home-delivered.

We built the site and promoted it on a number of local websites and at the same time the guys at Hearty Foods added the site’s URL to all their off-line marketing and the site became quite popular. They didn’t get millions of visitors to the site but they did get plenty of locals who downloaded the menu and called to order meals.

We even had a couple of friends who found the site, downloaded the menu and wanted to give it to us because they knew that sometimes we’re too busy to cook.

Then late last year they decided to take their website to another level and have us turn it into an online shop so people could actually order and pay for their meals.

While we were happy to do that for Alex and Chantal we really did wonder just how many people would actually use the online store. The first problem we saw was that Hearty Foods only delivers to a fairly small area and the second problem was that the people who had been using the home-delivery service were mostly older people who may have been reluctant to use their credit cards to make online purchases.

But we built the site and turned it over to our clients and to our surprise people have actually been using the online shop to order and pay for meals to be delivered and the guys at Hearty Foods are now thinking of ways to expand their online presence.

So if a small business in a small town can make a website work for them can a website work for your small business? And if you have a website for your small business and it isn’t working for you then why isn’t it working?

Our business continues to boom and we’ve had some excellent results with outstanding search engine placement for a couple of clients in the last week. While none of them have been mission impossible it’s still good to be able to say that “I love it when a plan comes together”

On the other hand it gives me little pleasure to tell you that over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of enquiries from local businesses who have been dissatisfied with the work done on their websites by other local designers.

These people have spent anywhere from $1500 to $5000 dollars on sites that have turned out to be absolute failures. They neither rank well in the search engines or make sales or generate leads and the sites owners come to us in the hope that we can work some miracle without costing them any more money.

Sadly we can’t because our time is just as valuable as any other small business and all too often the site designs are so bad that they need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Even if the design can be recycled the cost of re-writing the text on the site is often more than the site owner can afford.

So if you’re about to pay a web designer to build a website for your business you’ll find 85 Reasons Why Website Designers/Developers Keep SEOs in Business in invaluable read for it will give you some guidelines that will help you to avoid wasting money on a clueless web designer.

Some of the reasons given in the article:

3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines

5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy (it’s the designer who should develop the text based on the concepts that you give them).

6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.

10. They think that SEO is submitting (the site) to search engines.

12. They put the same title on every page of the website.

18. They find it easier to use paid search.

I could go on with more but then I’d be breaching the fair-use rules of copyright so just let me encourage you to follow the link and read those 85 points. Unfortunately we’ve come across every one of them in the last few weeks.

More and more small businesses are going online with their own websites. Once their site is online it’s not long before they begin to wonder what their site is actually doing for their business. At that point the site owners start looking for an analytics programme that will give them the information they need.

Many small business website owners turn to Google Analytics and that’s certainly the one that we recommend to our clients. Google Analytics is a very powerful program and it’s also free so it’s hard to beat when it comes to value for money.

However, it’s one major flaw does rest in all that power and the information it can provide. For many small business owners all that information becomes overwhelming but help is at hand. Google’s own expert on their analytics programme was interviewed recently on just what was the important information that Google Analytics could tell small business owners.

You’ll find that interview here and it certainly does shed some light on the data that is important for small businesses.

Good images and photos can do so much to enhance your small business in the eyes of potential customers. Bad images and photos can turn people off rather than encourage them buy what you’re selling.

When it comes to those images and photographs do you take them yourself or do you use a professional?

Here on our Hervey Bay web design blog is a very a good reason why you should use a professional.

Many small business people who do their own email promotion campaigns or build their own websites struggle to get their target audience to actually read what they have written.

If that’s the situation for you and your small business then here is an interesting report that should help you to get your customers to read what you have written.

More and more small businesses are using email as a way of marketing their products and services to past customers and some future customers too. But there’s always a potential risk of being labelled as a spammer when you use email.

Many countries these days have strict anti-spam laws in place that clearly identify what constitutes spam and what penalties those who break the anti-spam laws will face. Because the anti-spam laws in each country are different I would encourage you to read those laws for yourself.

Here in Australia there are three key requirements set down by our anti-spam laws. Those three requirements are:

1. Consent - you must have the consent of the recipient and you must be able to prove that you have received that consent.

2. Your emails to past clients and potential clients must clearly identify you and your business as the authorised sender.

3. Your emails must contain a functioning unsubscribe link
(you can read more about the Australian anti-spam laws here)

Now if your laws are similar then there is an important factor for every small business in that first point. You must have the consent … and prove you have the consent of the recipient … before you can start sending them emails. That means that you just can’t go round harvesting email addresses wherever you might find them and adding them to your email list. There’s simply no consent in doing that.

I know that’s what a lot of small businesses do to build their email lists but if you want to stay on the right side of the law then the only way you can build your email list is with the consent of of the people you want to send those emails out to.

If you’re trying to build up an email list of potential customers then the only way to do it to stay within the law is via an opt-in option … nothing less will do.

Even a basic website can generate leads and sales for a small business

About six weeks ago one of the partners in a small business that was just starting up in our town came to us for a quote on developing a website for them. We gave them three different proposals for three very different websites and suggested that two of those options - the less expensive options - would basically be a waste of money. Neither of the cheap options would really produce a website that would do what they wanted their site to do.

They agreed and understood that if they chose one of the cheaper options the work that they paid for would basically have to be scrapped when they wanted to move to the third option. Unfortunately, like most small businesses that are just starting up, their funds were limited so, after some discussion, they asked us to do nothing more than put up a very simple home page which we did.

We optimised it for the search engines and we also added in a link to a PDF of their products that people could download. Then we published a link to their site on a local news blog that we run and that was it. You can see their basic site at Hearty Foods. It was basic but at least it was getting the cleint’s name out there on the Web.

Last week we called in on the way home from the office to buy something for dinner and was amazed at what the partners in the business had to tell us. In the four weeks that they had been open their small business had grown so much that they were taking on new staff and increasing their product lines … and much of the business had come directly and indirectly from their very limited website.

Our server stats showed that only 240 people had visited their site since it went live but those 240 people had told others then those people went on to tell even more. A member of one social group in town had printed off that PDF and handed it out to every other member in the group and many of those people had come in to buy … and then come back to buy even more when they discovered how great the products were.

In a few weeks work will start on developing that small website into something a whole lot bigger than what it is now. There will be photos of every product this small business sells and customers will be able to order and pay for their purchases online and the site will become a vital part of the business … but even now, in it’s very limited form, it’s working for them.

So don’t be put off having a website developed for your business by the cost. Instead look at some cheap interim options that will still generate leads until you can afford something better. And definitely don’t settle for a home page that shows nothing but an ad for the web designer you’re using.

Avoiding the carpetbaggers

These days search engine optimisation for business websites is booming. More and more small business owners are beginning to realise that just having a website isn’t enough, it has to rank well for the terms people are using to search for the products a business is selling.

For people like us that’s good news, we’re busier than ever getting good rankings for an ever-increasing number of clients but the demand for search engine optimisation has brought a lot of carpetbaggers into the industry who will take your money and basically run.

So it can be hard for a small business owner to avoid falling into the trap of paying for SEO that’s not worth a cent. However one expert in the field suggested that “If the SEO calls you first, chances are the service isn’t a good idea.”

I might also add to that - if they email you it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll waste your money if you decide to deal with them - and - if they promise to submit your site to all the major search engines then they’re definitely to be avoided - submission became irrelevant years ago.

For someone who has spent a large part of his working life outdoors, on the road, dealing with people in crisis working online has and will continue to be a lot of fun. Helping people make money from their websites is even more satisfying than helping people survive bad financial times and usually everything flows along without a much drama at all.

But when the wheel falls off it usually happens late at night when you would much rather be in bed than sitting up rubbing your tired eyes and squinting at the computer screen. Last week the wheel fell off not once but twice.

On Thursday night we were about to head for bed when we discovered that one of our sites had been hacked. So we trudged through over 400 pages of content weeding out the garbage that had been inserted and then upgrading the security measures so the hacker couldn’t get in again.

Last night we found that another upgrade that we’d just done to one of the scripts on a server we run had messed with the individual scripts that we run on 10 different sites so we sat up again updating those scripts and fixing a couple of other glitches as well.

I guess that just goes to show you that running a small business is a 24 hour, 7 days a week kind of job.

One aspect of our business specialises in the design, hosting and ongoing maintenance of websites for small businesses. While we certainly haven’t cornered the market in this town we certainly do have a lot of very happy customers because their sites always rank well for important search engine terms and so add value to our clients’ businesses.

Sadly not all web designers can make a claim like that and if you’re one of the thousands of unhappy website owners out there then here - in Small Business Website Marketing Frustrations - are a few tips from an expert in small business websites on what you should really be doing to turn your site into the sales and lead generation machine you hoped it would be.

Sadly some of the not-so-good advice the ‘victim’ in this story encountered is exactly what our competitors in this town tell people.