There’s lots to do when it comes to running an online shop

A few small things can make all the difference and there are common mistakes owners of online shops make, which can even send visitors away! Here are 4 things to make sure you’re not doing on your website:

1. Complicated Navigation

Having pages too many clicks away from the home page can put visitors off from finding what they want. Making people click too many times is not only bad for usability, but can put the search engines off too! Try to make sure your products are no more than 3 clicks away from the home page to maximise visitor satisfaction and ensure efficient indexing by the search engines. Additionally ensure your products are categorised sensibly – the number of times I’ve clicked through to what I thought was a sensible category for a product on a website only to find it’s been put elsewhere! Also, if you have a site search facility make sure it works and brings back results from products relevant to the search (you’d be surprised how many site searches don’t work properly).

If you’re unsure about these things, get a few friends or contacts to complete a short usability test and give you feedback.

2. Delivery/Returns Info Buried Away

Some of the first things I look for when making a buying decision are delivery costs, returns policy, and how to contact the company if anything goes wrong. This makes me trust the business more so I’m more likely to place an order with them. But if this information is buried and hard to find, then it won’t inspire me to buy, and I imagine it’s the same for other people. The worst thing you can have on your site is only a contact form and/or mobile phone number. I like to see a physical address, email address and telephone number (landline) that’s easy to find on the site with all the information I need about buying a product from the company. Review your delivery and customer service pages to make sure you look like an honest, trustworthy business – not a fly by night site trying to make a quick buck! This leads us nicely onto customer service.

3. Shoddy Customer Service

Tip top customer service will ensure your customers stay happy and keep coming back, and this is an absolute must for any business, not just online shops. As mentioned above, your customer care information must be prominent on your site, but there are other ways you can keep your customers happy too. Twitter works well for businesses and they can respond to questions quickly and be seen to be doing so, which is really important. A blog can also act as a way of interacting with your customers and minimising anything that goes wrong – put up your hand and admit any mistakes you make rather than trying to hide them. We’re all human and as long as you keep customers informed, there’s no reason why they should go elsewhere. Above all though, don’t promise what you can’t deliver!

4. Shopping Cart Problems

Is your shopping cart making visitors jump through hoops to buy? This is another major sticking point for online shops, so if you’ve not reviewed your shopping cart process in a while, then it’s worth doing so. You should be able to find out your shopping trolley abandonment rate and make sure it’s not too high. You could also send a polite email to shoppers who didn’t complete transactions and ask them why. Whatever you do, ensure you don’t lose valuable sales during the final part of the process!

These are all mistakes that can be fixed but are still common across the web. In these uncertain times, fixing these issues can make all the difference between you retaining customers and keeping them happy, or losing them to your competitors!

At a time when a lot of people are tightening their purse strings, being able to make some additional income from your website is something we should all be thinking about, and let’s face it, we could all do with a few extra pennies right now. There are some great ways to make your website generate those extra pennies, and we don’t mean selling more of your own products and services!

Savvy business owners are finding some quite nice extra income streams by promoting other people’s products alongside their own – without detracting from their own offering of course! There are subtle ways of going about it and these are some of the most popular ways of creating an extra income stream from your website.

Amazon Associates Program

Amazon Associates Program is a very popular affiliate program whereby you can promote books or other products on your website sold by Amazon in return for commission. For websites selling products or services this can be a nice extra income stream as you promote books that complement the products or services you sell. We use Amazon links for book reviews in our newsletter and will be adding them into a resources section on the site. However, if you promote books that relate to your products or services, it’s important that you’ve read the books and can genuinely recommend them!

Amazon offers several different ways that you can promote their products, so you can choose an option that looks the best on your website. It’s free to join, you just need to create an account and then get choosing items you would like to recommend. Once you’ve chosen your products, then you need to insert code on your site where you would like the ads to appear.

Google Adsense

I expect many of you have visited websites with ads or text links within the content of the pages or as banners or buttons at the top or around the navigation of the website. Many of these sites use Google Adsense as an extra income stream from advertising, as it’s a very easy way of gaining revenue without having to create your own advertising offering. Google Adsense works by matching up the content of a website with Google Adwords advertisers who want their ads to show more widely, i.e on Google’s ‘Display’ network as well as alongside the regular search engine results. Each time someone clicks on one of the ads displayed, you receive a commission from Google. The commission varies depending on how much the advertisers are paying per click.

Google Adsense is easy to set up. Just create an Adsense account and once your website is approved, you can then select the size and type of ads you would like to display. You can customise the text ads to the colours of your website, so they fit in with the overall look of your site, or you can choose to display banner ads. You then need to place the code on your site where you want the ads to display. You won’t know what ads will appear until they are live on your site, but generally they reflect the content of the page you place them on.

Affiliate Networks

There are plenty of affiliate programs out there to join, but you need to be careful that you don’t go overboard advertising all sorts of products and services that can distract from your own offering, or don’t complement what you sell.

If you want to find other products or services to promote, the main affiliate sites are Tradedoubler, Commission Junction and Affiliate Window. These sites all have a wide range of advertisers who want to use affiliates to promote their products and services for a commission. The commission varies depending on the advertiser.

Products / Services You Have Bought

Finally, don’t neglect to find out if any products or services you’ve used in the past offer an affiliate scheme. Many companies now offer incentives to customers to promote their products and this can be a nice way to recommend them on your website. For example, some of the services we use offer an affiliate program such as Mailchimp, Heart Internet (a web hosting company I use), Thesis theme and Headway theme (both WordPress themes), Sugarsync (which I use to securely store documents in the cloud) as well as various products we’ve bought. It’s well worth finding out if any products or services you use and like have affiliate programs that you could sign up to, to recommend to visitors to your website.

You can see that there are many opportunities to earn that little bit of extra cash, without any ‘in your face’ advertising or hype! All of the above are easy to set up, so we urge you to try out at least one of these extra income streams for yourself!

Are you using third party advertisers to earn additional income? Please share your experiences in the comments!

Image: Money by Images_of_Money, on Flickr

If you’re not sure what a ‘cookie’ is, basically it’s a small file which may download onto a visitors’ computer when they access your site. They’re often used by website sites to track visitor returns and log in details (so you don’t have to remember them each time you purchase something from a site). You can read more about ‘cookies’ here.

You may also be aware that earlier this year, a new law was passed by the EU that requires users’ consent before cookies can be downloaded. The Government is looking for a workable solution to this law at the moment, so websites have been given a year to comply. You can read more about this on the BBC website: Cookie law deferred for one year.

You may be thinking that all of this is for big businesses, but it’s not. It affects all website owners, and needs to be taken seriously.

Going back to the privacy policy, if you collect data of any sort from people visiting your site, you need to let them know that you comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 (if appropriate) and the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Legislation of October 2003. You also need to mention if you use cookies on your site and what they’re for. Although we don’t carry third party ads on our site, Google Analytics uses cookies so we explain that in our privacy policy too.

You can read our Privacy Policy here.

The BBC website has a much lengthier privacy policy which you can read here.

If you don’t have a privacy policy on your website, then it’s important you create one. It makes your business look more professional and your website trustworthy for visitors, telling them what you’ll do with any personal information they part with on your website.

Business Link has more information on privacy policies along with a sample template you can use on your own website.

Image: cookies-009.jpg by yurilong, on Flickr

I love learning, and am fascinated by all the possibilities the internet provides for small businesses.

The internet provides more information than I can possibly take in. Not even a lifetime will give me enough hours to read all the blog posts, articles, and eBooks that attract my attention and cause me to lose track of time!

When I fall behind with other work because I’ve been reading, watching or listening to yet another great piece of content, I make excuses (mostly to myself) that it’s research to help clients

While the information was available just to read, I was largely able to contain it by downloading and storing until I had finished my working day, and then read it in my ‘free’ time. That worked, and continued to work reasonably well even when audio information came along.

But my self-discipline seems to desert me when it comes to how-to videos and I find myself irresistibly drawn to watch them. Even when I know they’re ultimately trying to sell me something!

So now, I’m not only falling behind with work, I’m also putting off launching my own products! What a crazy situation! And that’s before I own up to the time spent on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ …….

I’m not blaming anyone here – this overwhelm is totally a problem of my own making. So what’s the solution?

Well, just as email was once the enemy of business productivity and needed to be put in its place, now the overload of available information has become my personal ‘bête noire’.

One of the problems with digital information is that storage is not a problem. If I had to find space in my office for physical products, I’d be much more aware of just how much was accumulating! So, another step could be to have to cancel a subscription, or delete one product, before ordering or subscribing to anything new.

Because I’ve been falling behind on business building tasks (shame on me!), finding out which projects need immediate attention and focusing on getting them completed makes a lot of sense.

So here’s a summary of the first three steps I’m going to implement immediately

1. Clean up subscriptions to online newsletters and blogs
2. Put into place a ‘one out before another one in’ policy
3. Make a list of all current & proposed projects, and prioritise them by ROI, in other words those that will bring in the money the quickest!

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? What has worked well for you? We’d love to know!

As with many consultants

I expect some of you have watched the latest run of programmes on the TV: Gordon’s Kitchen Nightmares, Hotel Inspector & Country House Rescue. They all have a common theme of businesses needing help. For the most part, the party involved took on the advice of the consultant, whether it was Gordon Ramsay, Alex Polizzi or Ruth Watson. However, there were a few individuals, who despite being in terrible debt with a failing business, refused to accept their advice. This is the first reason not to hire a consultant: if you don’t take any notice of what they say. Keep your money instead and keep doing the things to promote your business that don’t work – you know better after all!

The second reason is if you’re not committed to the project. Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then other things got in the way and slowly but surely, the website got neglected, you don’t have time to follow up the actions recommended by your consultant, you have to stop for a while as other things have taken priority. If you’re not 100% committed to making the project work, then it won’t work. A half-hearted attempt with any marketing campaign is a sure fire way for it to flop. Like any marketing, internet marketing takes just as much hard work, time and commitment.

Finally, you’re desperate! Business isn’t good, you’ve neglected to market your business properly during the good times and now the economy isn’t great, you’re panicking. A cobbled together campaign in a very short time, in the hope of immediate sales and leads isn’t going to help your business. If things have got that bad then it’s professional business help that you need, not internet marketing help!

It can be tempting to think that the internet will bring instant results for your business and you can easily pay for leads and sales which will come flooding in once you get a presence on Google. If only it were that easy! If you’re thinking of hiring some help for any of these wrong reasons then think again and consider what type of help you really need.

Firstly, most sites seem to agree that mobile marketing is going to be much bigger this year as more and more of us use our smartphones to stay connected. Marketers are going to need to think about how they can reach increasingly mobile audiences with more searches being carried out from these devices. This means we need to make sure our websites are mobile friendly too!

Social media is going to play a bigger part in search as the search engines are already taking into account social media activity as part of the way they rank sites. I wrote a post on this before Christmas, Social Media Does Affect Search Engine Rankings. It needs to be a part of any online marketing strategy, not an ‘add on’ or a replacement for other online activities. Your social networking activities therefore need to integrate into all your marketing efforts, something we constantly preach at Savvy Marketers!

Here’s a pick of what I’ve been reading over the last couple of weeks;

5 Social Marketing Predictions for 2011 from Search Engine Land – a few predictions on the growth of Facebook & mobile, Groupon – an online discount/voucher site.

2011: The Year of Social SERPs, Bing Instant & Social Search from Search Engine Watch – this post mostly discusses how social media is affecting SEO

2011 Digital Marketing Predictions from b2cmarketinginsider.com – interesting post on how social media should be part of any marketers strategy, mobile growth and websites being part of a hub of online marketing activity.

Best of the 2011 Predictions from Eggblogg.co.uk – roundup of interesting predictions as picked out by Robin Houghton, which includes design and consumer trends

2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical from Emarketer.com – how quality content that helps people will replace traditional advertising, i.e push vs pull marketing

5 Online Media Trends for 2011 from thenextweb.com - looks at technology such as e-readers and music in the cloud.

Have you got any predictions for 2011 or making changes to the way you promote your business online? Please share them here!

To keep peoples’ attention on your site, it needs to be ‘great’ rather than just ‘good’. Savvy internet users are becoming increasingly fussy about who they do business with, and your site needs to stand out and make sure those people do business with you.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on a new website (unless it really needs it), but there are a few things you can do to improve your visitors’ experiences within your existing site.

1. Review your website content. If it’s a bit vague or out of date, you need to take some time to re-write it. If you sell a business service, make it clear who your target market is. If you sell a product, go through your product images and descriptions and make sure they’re clear, well written and enticing – vague product descriptions won’t inspire people to buy from you!

2. Create clear calls to action. Do visitors to your website know what you want them to do or where to go when they arrive on the home page? Do your product or service pages make it easy for visitors to know what to do next?

3. Keep content up to date. This is something we’ve written about many times on Savvy Marketers. If you start a blog or news page then you need to commit to keeping it up to date. Is the information on all your web pages up to date? Do all your links work? Broken links can put visitors off as much as an out of date site!

4. Commit to your social media activities. I wrote about this just before Christmas as social media can now influence search rankings. If you’ve made a start on some of the social networks, then plan out who you want to reach with what messages. Remember consistency is key.

By improving the visitor experience on your site even within your existing site design, you really can see a difference to the leads and sales coming through.

What are your plans for your website for 2011? Please share them here!

Since this is the final working week before Christmas, I thought a few tips for tying up your website’s year end activities may help some of you. For those of you with e-commerce sites, I hope the last couple of months have generated good sales for you!

With all the activities of sending out orders or making sure you’ve finished any client work before Christmas, a few things may get forgotten, so here are a few reminders of things to do before the year end.

1. If you’re running pay per click campaigns with Google Adwords & Microsoft Adcenter, don’t forget to turn off your Christmas ads, or turn them off completely if you’re planning an annual shutdown until 4 January. If your sale starts now, then you may want to change your ads to reflect this.

2. Thank all your customers on your website and send out an e-card if you can’t send individual Christmas cards in the post.

3. Update any specific Christmas content, opening hours over Christmas and New Year if applicable, warn customers of any price rises from 1 January due to the increase in VAT.

4. Thank your customers and contacts on the social networks. It’s important to try and keep your presence up right up until you take a break.

5. Get your website ready for New Year sales and promotions, pre-schedule blog posts, tweets etc ready to go out when it starts.

Finally, don’t forget to take a break yourself! No doubt many of you have been working even harder this Christmas to promote your business, so make sure you take a well deserved break and give yourself the chance to think about your plans for next year.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

ad:tech had a series of free seminars throughout the two days (I only went for one), although the downside was that many of the popular topics such as social media and SEO were packed and I couldn’t get a look in on a couple I wanted to sit in on. I did however, make sure I attended a couple of the free seminars by Google, one on Search Funnels for Google Adwords, the other on conversion optimisation.

I haven’t used the search funnels tool in Google Adwords and can see that it’s a useful feature. The lady who presented this particular seminar, however, went through it very quickly and in a rather techie way. Judging from the number of people who left the seminar before it finished, I think many found it confusing. In short, the search funnels tool helps you to identify which keywords may have led to conversions from a Google Adwords campaign, calling it ‘assist weighted attribution model’ – no wonder people found this confusing! Basically it can often take several searches to find a site before a conversion takes place and it’s these keywords that Google is helping advertisers to identify via a series of reports. Often people will find a particular site through their searches that may ultimately lead to a brand search, i.e a company name. Knowing which keywords people are using up to the brand search means that advertisers could increase spend in keywords that are more likely to lead to a conversion. You can read more on search funnels here: Adwords Search Funnels Part 1 and also Spotlight on Adwords Search Funnels Part 2.

The second Google seminar I attended was on conversion optimization. This was really useful as the speaker explained how to identify pages with high bounce rates (one page visits – you can read a previous post I’ve written about bounce rates), products with low conversion rates and identify where visitors may leave the conversion process such as abandoning shopping carts. He explained how to find this information in Google Analytics and some tips on how to improve conversion rates on websites. This information will help me to  assist my clients more with improving conversions on their sites (particularly e-commerce sites).

So was this exhibition worth going to? Yes, definitely. It’s been a while since I attended an internet marketing exhibition, but it’s good to keep your knowledge up to date and a day out of the office learning new things is always worthwhile!

Have you attended any internet marketing exhibitions or conferences? What did you get out of them? Was it worth going? Please share your experiences here!

I think it’s safe to say you’d find it very difficult (if not impossible) to cope with such a massive daily delivery.  And yet we allow our email inboxes and RSS readers to amass more messages and articles than we can ever hope to read in depth – because they don’t (seem to) take up any physical space.

Reading articles and blogs in your areas of interest – both for business and personal enjoyment – is made very easy with the internet.  Unfortunately, finding good quality articles can also mean sifting through a lot of very average offerings.

Even with all the online tools to help manage your online reading lists, there comes a point where you need to look carefully at each of your different subscriptions, for example:

Email newsletters – are you still learning from it or is it time to unsubscribe and move on?
Email marketing lists - if you’re deleting more messages than you read, why are you still on that particular list?
RSS Subscriptions (email or reader) – some people send out the same message by email and simultaneously publish it to their blog.  If you’re subscribed to both, weed out duplications and also any posts you no longer look forward to reading.

If your heart sinks when you look at all your unread emails and blog posts, then it’s time  to be really ruthless and prune out some the overload of information before you get completely swamped by it.  Then you won’t miss the genuinely helpful stuff and you’ll free up enough time to put the good ideas into action.

Have you done any subscription pruning lately?  Do let us know in the comments