The Silent Avatar Speaks

Some people are too tired to do the thinking and will opt to go with the flow whatever is the trend, be it on fashion, sports and even with businesses without even thinking what it is for.

Most businesses find themselves in the need of providing websites for their company and/ or products because everybody else does. If you are one of these people, you may now start knocking your head for a very expensive mistake of not knowing what you do. Websites are being made to support a business and not as mere decoration and attraction, and no matter how dynamic your web design is, it will be useless if you are lost in the conceptualisation.

Now, what you have to do is, since the website ought to support the business and gain earnings, to make sure that the business website is doing well.

There are six critical elements your small business website must have to survive and perform better.

1. Content. Everybody is going crazy with website design and images, however many missed the principle that it is the content that matters. Site visitors browse the web in search of information and not just to look on a website. Therefore, you have to make sure that included in your website design is the principle of content. Information on the website should be relevant to the site that you own or to the niche where you have included your site. This is very vital when a search engine like Google has to crawl your business site. You will be more referred by Google if it sees that you have a good content about your business. More so, to be more effective, several articles of 500 to 1000 words will help the system recognise your business site. If you do not have the time to spend to do the writing, you can have this outsourced through a ghost writer that will make a good article for you.
2. Blog. Some people neglect the value of blogging and sees it as for the “nerds only” and yet, blogging has proven its effectiveness of use to support the sites. This is for the reason that blogging can create a community around your site thereby generating traffic and in the long run will ultimately boost your site’s performance. It should be noted however, that a blog is not a duplicate of the site, hence, you should put new content on it to achieve better ranking and reference from Google.
3. Video. The Internet provides vital information to people, and becomes an effective tool in marketing. However, because of the advertising overload often generated by automated systems, consumers are becoming cautious in browsing the sites to search good content. A video introduction in your site can help attract users that your site is genuine and there are real people behind the website. Additionally, this can be powerful in promoting interactions to generate trust and promote visitor’s loyalty. This means that users will prefer to visit your site often, seeing good information and good users’ interaction, founded on credibility.
4. Email capture. Internet users tend to be cautious of online businesses. It takes time to establish trust and reliability on the target audience. Unless these users become familiar with the site and have encouraged visits, this will be the only time that these people can think of buying any of your product posted on the business site. Hence, making email capture as part of your web design like giving free reports or subscriptions to your newsletter can be a good way, you can have access to them by being bale to acquire their email addresses. You can have their email addresses as means to contact them for product or business promotions and entice them to visit the site most often.
5. Credibility through business details. It is a known fact that users are reluctant to visit a site until they knew that there is a real person behind it. Therefore, it is essential that you provide data or profile of the people behind the business. In addition, an address, phone number and other necessary details are helpful to establish that you are a true human being and not an automated system.

Lay-out of the website design. Lay-out is not as simple as the physical appearance. You can have a dynamic website design with a lot of flash files and yet your business site may not be performing well. The essence of the lay-out of the website design is that you should be able to keep the users involved. This should be user-friendly and easy to be understood. Moreover, if you are selling a particular product, the details should be accessible and easy to find. It is a necessity that your website design’s lay-out is not difficult to navigate. People do not have all the time to browse your site and you should be able to relay your message to them in a single glance.

To sum up, all these key elements of website design and SEO points to a single thing: the user. It is the audience that is the lifeblood of the business site. Make them see your site and expect that your small business site will boost its performance.

I’m the silent avatar.. and I have spoken

Tags: Web Development by the silent avatar
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One of the quickest ways to get your website details out is to add an email signature to your outgoing mail.

And it never ceases to amaze me how often it doesn’t happen! This is web real estate just begging to be utilized.

Every time you send an email you are effectively letting your recipient know about your site.

So what makes a good email signature?

Let me show you a good signature:

(your name)	Joe Citizen
(your position)	Sales Manager
(your webaddress)	web: www.yourbusiness.com
(email address)	email:joe@yourbusiness.com
(your tagline)	“Minding Your Business”
	Subscribe now to my newsletter with tips, tricks and how to’s on growing your business. To subscribe click here

You can also use your email signature to let everyone know about promotions you are doing at the time. Just change your tag line to something like.. Click here to view my amazing offer where you can save up to 50% off…”

(for instructions on how to add an email signature using Outlook 2003 click here)

Another option is to use Feedburners Headline Animator as part of your email signature. Feedburner’s headline animator offers a rotating headline from your blog.

You can use the headline animator on MySpace, bulletin boards – in fact anywhere you can use html you can use this nifty animator.

From viewing my Feedburner site statistics I have found this is a great way to get people reading your blog.

Do you use an email signature?

Tags: General by the silent avatar
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One of the quickest ways to get your website details out and take advantage of viral marketing is to add an email signature to your outgoing e-mail.

And it never ceases to amaze me how often it doesn’t happen.

Everytime you send an email you can be letting your recipient know about your site.

So what makes a good email signature?

Let me show you a good signature:

Your Name (in bold)
Your Position
______________________ (make a separation line)
Web: Your Company Website (in 12pt, same colour as Name)
Phone: Your Phone Number (in 10pt)
Email: Your Email Address (in 10pt)
Post: Your Postal Address: (in 10pt)

Tagline: “Webdesign Made Easy” (italic and bold).

This signature is very easily done in Outlook or Outlook Express. You can get step by step instructions for Outlook 2003 here. And for Outlook Express here

A signature can also be spmething more glamourous like a grahic with all the details in the graphic. They can also include your photo.

Whatever you do keep it in the theme of your branding. Maintain continuity in the colours, the  type font and the layout (of you are using graphics).  This signature will also blend itself in with your corporate identity.  You will become known by your colours just as sure as we all know MacDonalds is red and yellow.

If you haven’t done a signature for your emails do it now.

P.S And make sure all of your employees are following suit – your branding is at stake.

Tags: Advertising, Tools For Your Business, Traffic Generation by the silent avatar
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Your web business can potentially get product inquiries from customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you won’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached them. Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, they will take their business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When you first start marketing and following up with prospects, you can usea follow up method that I now call the “List Building Technique.” Essentially it’s a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about your products and services.

Keeping track of these prospects would require you to write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from you. While this probably can help you win a few additional orders, it isn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List BuildingTechnique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies or business has “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. They can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When you write follow up messages using the List Technique, you are writing news bulletins to everyone you know. Instead you should be sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, any feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

So, in order to do follow up your vistors or customers the right way you need to have an autoresponder.

So what is an autoreponder?

Quite simply, it’s a piece of software that enables you to send emails to people automatically. This doesn’t mean that it writes the emails for you and it doesn’t involve spam or sending unsolicited email. What it means is that you set up a sequence of prewritten emails that are sent out to prospects on your database at regular intervals.

The main benefit to using an autoresponder is connected to the fact that the majority of people need to be told about a product seven times before they buy it. So I want to ask you, how many times are you telling your visitors about your product? Chances are it’s less than seven.

Inavariably they’ll land on your homepage or somewhere else on your website and they’ll look at your offering, but the majority of your sites visitors will disappear. So unless you can get them onto an opt-in mailing list, either a course or free information that is of multi-part format, the chances are you will have lost them forever. You can use an autoresponder to send these messages out to people with their permission convincing them and educating them about your product.

The autoresponder I recommend is AWeber. You can check out all about them here

Tags: Tools For Your Business by the silent avatar
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