Small Office, Home Office Information

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.

“Marketing professionals who specialise in legitimate SEO (search engine optimisation) don’t get a heck of a lot of respect” … or so says Anna Maria Virzi a former editior of Forbes.com and I’ve got to say that I’d have to agree with her.

Most clients that we do search engine optimisation work for don’t fully understand what we do or how we do it … all they see is a lot more hits coming to their websites from the major search engines. When they see that they tend to get rather excited.

4.30pm last Thursday … the Thursday before Easter and Toni and I were getting ready to head off to the next state to visit the grandkids. Our minds were more on what had to be packed in the car than on work when the phone rang.

On the other end of the phone was one half of a typical Mom and Pop small business that we will be doing some work for over the next week or so. At first I thought the call was about that work but it wasn’t … the Mom side of the business was ecstatic that a minor change that I had mentioned in passing … just the addition of three words … had taken their site from so far down in Google for an important term that you couldn’t find them right up to position five on the first page.

Sounds hard to believe that just adding three words can have such a major impact but it can … and I knew it would.

Frankly I don’t care whether other people respect me because I’m good at search engine optimisation or not. All I care about is that my customers get they results they pay me to achieve for them so that phone call was a great start to my Easter weekend.

If you have a small business website that is doing poorly in the search engines then contact us and see if we can help you achieve the rankings that need to succeed. You’ll find our contact details here at Total Website Management and don’t be afraid that we may be in an entirely different country to you. Search Engine Optimisation is something that we can do for you no matter how far away you are.

There’s no doubt that, in this day and age, just about every small business needs a website. Even in small country towns more and more people are going to the Web to search for information about the goods and services they want to buy.

Because there’s such a need for small business websites there are plenty of people around who make a living from building websites for local businesses. Some are very good at what they do while others … no matter how professional they might look and sound … simply have no clue.

Many, whether they’re good or bad, will try to hold on to you as a client … and that’s fair enough … but it’s what they do to retain you as a client that can really hurt your business. Good web designer businesses will seek to keep you as an ongoing client by offering you services that go on adding value to your small business.

The not so good web design businesses will seek to keep you as a client by holding you hostage and you need to be aware of some of the tricks that they use.  Here are two of those sneaky ways that we’ve come across in the last year.

Owning Your Domain Name
Many web design businesses will offer to purchase your domain name for you … and that is quite reasonable. If you’ve never done it before you can end up paying a whole lot more for your domain name than you need to and in small business every dollar counts.

However, if you do elect to have the web designer purchase your domain name, make sure that they transfer it into your name as soon as possible. We know of one designer who purchases many domain names for his clients but seldom transfers them into the client’s name. That means that if the client ever wants to take their business elsewhere they can but they have to leave the domain name behind and start all over again.

Content Management Systems
Content management systems are scripts that many designers use to build out a website. There are definite pros and cons when it comes to content management systesm and, for what it’s worth, we prefer to use straight HTML to build websites for clients. We see the disadvantages of content management systems as far outweighing the advantages.

There are many content management scripts out there on the Web; some are free and very well supported and some are not. Some content management systems are custom-built for clients and if that is what you need you will be able to take the script with you if you take your website business elsewhere after your site has been built.

Some web designers have their own unique content management systems that no other designer has access to and they use them to build clients’ websites whether such a system is needed or not. The end result there is that if one of their clients wants to take their business elsewhere the new designer has to start from scratch and do a complete re-design of the website and if you’re that client it’s going to cost you a lot of money.

So make sure that your web designer is either using straight HTML or a content management system that you can take with you if you elect to move to take your business elsewhere.

Getting your small business online can have great benefits for your visibility and your cash flow but it can also cost you a lot of money if you get caught by an unscrupulous designer who is prepared to hold your business hostage simply to put more money in his or her pocket.

We came across a small business here in Hervey Bay the other day desperately needs some good search engine optimisation for it’s website. People coming from the search engines are very important for this business and in the years ahead the importance of that traffic from the search engines is going to grow. If this small business was in the United States then it would be seeing it’s competitors doing a large amount of their marketing on the Internet.

We found that this small business does not even rank in the first four places on Google for its own name and that is a very bad sign indeed. So we identified three reasonably easy steps we could take to improve their ranking not only for their own name but for the search terms that are important for the products they sell and then we contacted them.

We were surprised to find that they already employed a business here in town to do their search engine marketing for them and, knowing the business involved, they were undoubtedly paying a lot of money for very little return.

If you’re employing others to do any sort of work for you are you really getting what you pay for? Do you even bother to check to see if you are getting a positive return on your investment?

“Remember that there are no barriers to entering the web development business. Any person from anywhere in the world can simply say “I’m a web developer” and start bidding on jobs. As a result, there are large numbers of inexperienced and unqualified vendors in the web design industry, and most of them lack the experience to execute your project properly”

Dave Hecker - Outsourcing Web Projects

Then you have to understand what you’re doing?

by Stuart Livesey

We had a wonderful time this morning with a local small businessman. He wants to take his small business online … and not just with a brochure site. This guy wants to go the whole 9 yards and sell his products online even while they’re still in a container at sea. He even pointed us to a well-known marketing site here in Australia and told us to build him something like that.

Our time with him was wonderful because this is a guy who understands what it takes to produce a website that sells. He understands that what he is doing is opening a branch of his business online and to do that effectively is going to cost money.

If you were moving your bricks and mortar business to a new location there would be costs involved in fitting out your new premises and getting it set up for your business and there would be ongoing costs as well. It’s the same in the virtual world.

 You want your place in cyberspace to be set up and functional so that you can sell your product and that is going to cost real money.

It would cost real money to move to a new location in the real world and take planning and execution by professionals so why do so many small business people expect a move into cyberspace to cost $50 and  be entrusted to their nephew or some kid in high school?

Obviously it can’t and the guy we talked to today understood that so the session wasn’t about convincing the client that he was going to have to spend money. Instead the session was about listening to the client’s dreams and devising ways of making them happen.

By the time this site is built our client will have a bricks and mortar location and a website and I wouldn’t be surprised if the website didn’t outsell his bricks and mortar location … and that’s saying something because this guy moves a lot of product every single week and quite often his container loads are pre-sold before they even arrive on the docks.