Testimonials on websites are essential, provided they are worthwhile. ‘Chris is a nice chap and made me feel at ease during my appointment’ is weak and not worth including. It’s too short and not particularly helpful to anyone trying to decide whether to give you a call.

I realise that many of your therapy clients are protected under your confidentiality agreement. Anonymous testimonials cause an additional headache of it being difficult for you to establish credibility publicly on your website. This is where Sam’s suggestion of including specific case studies on your website also comes in useful. Anything to reassure readers (prospective clients) that you have worked with clients ‘like them’ before.

The value of Testimonials is that they provide what Robert Cialdini (author of the best selling book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) calls Social Proof. He says:

“The principle of social proof states that one important means that people use to decide what to believe or how to act in a situation is to look at what other people are believing or doing there. Powerful imitative effects have been found among both children and adults and in such diverse activities as purchase decisions, charity donations, and phobia remission….. People are more inclined to follow the lead of similar others.”

Providing pictures of the practice therapists  showing them as professional, friendly and approachable, on your ‘About Us’ page is also essential as it helps people to decide whether to get in touch and make an appointment. The About Page of a website is the second most visited page (after the Home Page) mainly because of our natural curiosity to want to find out about the person behind the website or business. Also it is the important first step in building the interpersonal relationship and rapport.

Further reading

Is your website putting people off?

What does your profile photo say about you?

What is your ‘About’ about?

What do you think? Do you prefer websites that have testimonials and photographs of the business owners? Please share your opinion in the comments below.

A blog is so important to the online success of all small businesses that it can truly be called the real heart

Have we convinced you yet that your blog is important? OK, here’s why it is:

It is the heart or hub of your online presence, and is the bridge between your website and the social networks.

For service business owners especially, a blog is where you can demonstrate your expertise by regularly adding written, audio or video examples of what you do, and provide proof that it works. It also a place to announce new products or services in a non-salesy way.

It’s the place where you can build online relationships with your readers who, if you’ve targeted them correctly, are also prospective clients for your business. Your blog gives them the opportunity to get to ‘know, like & trust’ you much more easily than  short updates of 140 characters.

It’s where you can send social networking connections to learn more about you, somewhere that isn’t just a sales page. It always amazes us when people still do this.

When you publish a new blog post, you instantly create new material to use as informative updates and share on your social networks.

By regularly adding new posts you increase the occasions on which Google & Bing will return to visit your blog. This in turn increases your general online visibility and rankings in the search engines. It’s a vital component of your content marketing strategy as this excellent post by Ardath Albee shows.

If you have chosen a self-hosted blog then your blog is a part of the internet owned by you. Which is more than can be said for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…… even if you do pay for hosting and buy a premium blog theme, setting up a blog is still an extremely cost-effective way to establish a professional presence online for your business. It’s also where you have total control over the content and are free to make as many changes as you wish, as your business develops and grows.

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, here are details of a short guide which may be helpful.

So, how are you treating the real heart of your business online?

If you found this post helpful, please share it by clicking one of the links below.

I’m hoping that 2012 is going to see me diversify my income more, not only with our plans for Savvy Marketers, but for a new sideline of my own – my first foray into e-commerce! I’ll reveal all once my new site is up and running, but in the meantime, if you’re planning on starting something new, whether for extra income or a brand new career, here are a few steps you need to take to get started online, even if you’re not ready to have your website built.

Get a Domain Name

This is the first thing you need to do, and try and get a domain name that is related to your business name. It’s getting more difficult to find nice domain names which aren’t taken, so brainstorm a few variations and see what’s taken and what isn’t. It’s worth checking that your domain name isn’t too similar to an existing site (as you don’t want to be sending visitors to your competitors if people get mixed up with your domain). If similar domains are taken, but their business offering is quite different from yours, then you’re probably OK to use it. Register your domain and any standard variations, e.g .com & .co.uk. Also hyphenated variations. When I started Forty First in 2002, fortyfirst.co.uk was registered but not being used, so I registered and started to use forty-first.co.uk (and registered .com). Since then fortyfirst.co.uk came up for sale, so I bought it along with the .com version. I don’t use them but own them, and it’s important that a competitor can’t get hold of variations of your domain. We’ve done the same for Savvy Marketers by buying up variations of the .co.uk and .com domains which are available.

Do Some Keyword Research

You may think that researching keywords is a little premature, particularly if you’re in the early stages of starting up your business, but it’s important to find out what keywords people may potentially use to find your products or services. It can also help with your market research. Once you find out how people search for your products/services, it can give you ideas for a niche and even how you may want to structure your site when you come to build it. Online market research is just as important as offline market research and you need to know not only the keywords to use for your own offering, but research other businesses in your sector which you can also find from your keyword research – find out what they offer as well as how they offer their products or services.

Put Up a Holding Page

Once you’ve registered your domain, put up a basic holding page saying your site is coming soon (even if it isn’t!) and link to the page from a website that is already in the search engines’ database. Even if you’re not going to be thinking about a website for a few months, the earlier the search engines know about your domain the better. Age is taken into consideration in how search engines rank sites, and although you don’t have to wait for your site to rank if its optimised and promoted well, any help you can give your site before it goes live will contribute towards it being found faster by potential customers.

Register Your Social Networking Profiles

Again, you may not be ready to start participating on social sites, but if it’s going to be a part of your online marketing, then it’s worthwhile making sure the name you want to use for your social profiles is available. Keep your name the same across all social networking sites so as not to confuse people. Sites you need to consider claiming your name on include Twitter, Google+ (pages, but you do need a Google+ account) & Facebook (again you need a Facebook account to create a business page). Don’t forget YouTube and Flickr if you’re going to be sharing videos and photos – you can create a YouTube Channel and Flickr Photostream with your business name.

So if you’re starting a new venture this year, best of luck and hopefully these tips will help things move along a bit quicker!

Resources:

Using the New Adwords Keyword Research Tool

What’s in a Domain Name?

Time to  Spring Clean Your Social Networks

What advice can you give to someone about to start a new business venture? 

This post is long overdue as I’ve been using Buffer for several months now

You’ll already know that between us, Sam and I read an awful lot of blog posts and visit many websites during the course of each day. When we come across articles or websites we think will be of interest to our Twitter followers, we like to share with them.

Now, we could use the sharing buttons already on the website, the Feedly ‘mini’ button or the ‘Hootlet’ bookmarking tool from Hootsuite, but here’s why we sometimes prefer to use Buffer.

If you’re anything like us, you probably do most of your online reading in the morning or perhaps wait until the evening. Tweeting out everything you want to share means that your followers will see lots of tweets sent out very close together, followed by a long gap with none.

Fortunately Buffer changes all that

Within your account settings you can specify exactly when you want the next tweet you place in your buffer to go out. Let’s say you want a buffer tweet to be sent out every hour, you can preschedule the exact time for each one (provided you have something saved in your buffer of course!).

You can arrange your settings to reflect the appropriate time zone and also select which days you want to tweet. I prefer not to send out buffer tweets over the weekend (a purely personal choice).

How do you add tweets to your buffer?

You simply install a little ‘add on’ icon in your browser bookmark toolbar (from the ‘Goodies’ page). Then, when you come across something you want to share, just click on the icon and Buffer will write the tweet for you (usually article title, website name plus a trackable link). Each tweet is fully customisable. I like to prefix mine with ‘Reading:’ ‘Great Post:’, ‘Interesting:’, or something similar. When you’re happy with the wording, click ‘Add to Buffer’ and that’s all there is to it! If you want to rearrange the schedule, it’s a simple case of dragging & dropping the relevant tweets to your liking.

Once you sign up for your own free Buffer account you automatically have 10 tweets you can place in your buffer. By referring friends to also sign up (using the special link Buffer gives you, like this one: http://bufferapp.com/r/8b44f ), you can ‘earn’ an extra tweet for each person who does.

Not only have I been impressed by the functionality of Buffer, the customer service has been excellent too. Soon after I first signed up for my free account, I had a few problems getting it to work properly. The automated welcome email invited me to contact co-founder @JoelGasgoigne with any feedback, so I hit reply and let him know about the problem. The speed of response and resolution of my query were a customer service delight! In fact, I think I was probably more impressed than if Buffer had worked perfectly first time

Do you use Buffer? If so, what’s your favourite feature? Please share!

However, there are things that can really put visitors off websites and over the years, I’ve come across common mistakes time and time again. Here are a few things that you need to check on your own site:

1. Make sure your contact details are easy to find, preferably on each page of your website. On this site, our phone and email address are within the header image, with a separate contact page too. It’s surprising how many sites still have their contact details buried away.

2. Make sure you tell people what you want them to do – lead people through your website, tell them which pages to visit first and make sure you put a call to action on your pages, such as contact us now, buy now, subscribe etc. If you don’t tell your visitors, it may not be obvious to them. If you’re not sure what the point of your site is, then read Louise’s post from last week: Do you expect too much from your website?

3. Equally, don’t give too much choice – you really don’t want to give your visitors half a dozen things to do or look at otherwise they won’t know which way to go either. If you’re promoting your own products, make sure someone else’s aren’t on the same page as yours (for example if you also have affiliate links on your site). You don’t want to steer them away from your own offering when you’ve put time and effort into getting the visitor to your site in the first place!

4. For service providers, explain the outcomes of using your service, how the visitor will benefit from working with you, how you will solve their problem. Don’t explain the process as most people won’t be interested in that, it’s the end result that they want. Case studies are a great way of showing off results you’ve achieved for other businesses.

5. Equally if you sell products, give your products descriptions that will resonate with your target market. A poorly written, bland description probably won’t motivate them to buy from you. Reviews can also help influence buying decisions, and I recently wrote a post on this subject: Product Reviews Increase Conversion Rates.

6. Scatter testimonials around your website, don’t just hide them away on one page. I always tell clients to put their testimonials around the site and on the corresponding product/service page.

7. Check your web stats regularly – check for trends over time and popular pages. If you’ve got a high bounce rate for particular pages on your site it could be that the page is poorly targeted, so look at the keywords you’re targeting and how the information on the page is presented.

8. Finally make sure that you’re writing for your target market and that they understand your terminology. Avoid using jargon that people won’t understand or writing in a very formal style. People scan web pages so highlight important points in bold, use bullet points and a more informal writing style.

What improvements have you made to your site to enhance your visitors experience? How have they worked for you?

If you think you could benefit from an audit of your site and feedback on where improvements could be made, please contact us to see how we can help!

Image: Frank, May 29, 2011 – choice by pat00139, on Flickr

Using social sharing buttons has become a great way of letting our connections know

Facebook often confuses me

I do not profess to be an expert in Facebook (despite what Sam might say ) nor on social media marketing in general – it changes far too quickly for that to be possible (and I do occasionally have to do other work!). But I try my best to keep up with the major social network developments and love trying out new widgets and buttons – sometimes just to see what happens when I click!

For quite a while now, I’ve been confused by the different Facebook buttons popping up both on websites, blogs and on Facebook’s own pages and have taken the easy way out by mostly sharing via Twitter. So I decided for today’s post to do a little research and find out what Facebook’s ‘Like’ ‘Send’ ‘Share’ and ‘Recommend’ buttons mean so as to be able to use each of them in the most appropriate way. I think I’ve untangled them in my mind now, so here goes:

Like

This is the first button Facebook introduced, initially on its own website and then made available across the internet (in April 2010) and it must be the most clicked on and recognisable icon on the internet! Installing a ‘like’ button so that it shows at the end of each of your blog posts is straightforward – with the option to provide a counter showing how many people have clicked on it. The results of clicking will show up in the timeline of your Facebook profile & newsfeed of your FB friends.

Recommend

I don’t see this button often and was puzzled not to find many references to it. All became clear when I read this blog post:

Like Button Full Story

The ‘Recommend’ button is just an alternative to the ‘Like’ button but it serves the same function. So which word you use on the buttons installed on your website or blog, will depend on context and personal preference.

Share

Launched in October 2009, what used to differentiate Facebook’s Share button from the Like button was that your update would include the link to the web page where you clicked on the button, also showing a visually pleasing thumbnail (little extract) of the blog post or article.

While I was putting together this post, I discovered that one of the many incremental and continual changes by Facebook is that the ‘Like/Recommend’ Button now has the same functionality as the ‘Share’ button in that it now automatically includes a link, and enables you to add your own comment too.

Send

It was a relief that I easily understood this latest button, launched by Facebook in April 2011! When I find a blog post or web page I think is of interest to people I know, clicking the ‘Send’ button will enable me to choose who to send a link to, and add an optional personal message. The drop-down menu allows me to select individual Facebook friends by name; whole Groups that I belong to; and even to type in the email address and send the link to someone who doesn’t belong to Facebook. This promises to be a very powerful and popular social sharing button.

Here’s a good explanation on the Send button from Mashable

My conclusions

If I understand correctly, Facebook will begin to phase out their ‘Share’ button as its functions have been incorporated into the ‘Like/Recommend’ button. Liking sends an update which is visible to all your Facebook connections, whereas the ‘Send’ button allows for selective sharing both inside Facebook and outside via Email.

In the video below, Facebook expert Mari Smith (she really is an expert!) explains how you might want to use the Like and Recommend buttons in different locations on your blog for best results. She also recommends other social sharing buttons you might want to consider.

I realise I’m probably one of the last people to get to grips with Facebook’s social sharing buttons, so please can you help me out: Which button do you click on most often, and why?  Oh, and if you enjoyed reading this post – perhaps you’d be kind enough to click one of the buttons below?

“What would be really interesting to know is whether Facebook really can be used in the b2b sector or whether its real value is in retail, consumer driven companies?”
(Joyce Turton - www.marketing2business.co.uk)

Here’s a great question we received from one of our Q&A Hour listeners! While it’s undoubtedly true that there are more B2C companies using Pages and actively attracting ‘fans’ on Facebook, we believe there are some compelling reasons why B2B businesses need to be there too.

As a social network, Facebook is probably the most social of them all. With over 600 million members, it’s highly likely that there will be owners, directors or employees of businesses amongst them, or their families. The numbers are just too big to ignore.

Business buyers are people

The business your business sells to will eventually sell to a consumer at some point down the line. Not to mention that buyers within companies are people who just may be on Facebook.

Certainly the number of small, service-based businesses (marketers, coaches, trainers, web designers, IT companies, and so on) setting up Pages and connecting with fellow local business owners is growing every day, so it makes sense to be a part of those networks.

Hubspot, the all-in-one marketing software platform creators, have some excellent and informative free webinars and downloads – including this Guide to B2B FaceBook Pages.

Pages can like other Pages

In the last big Facebook Pages shake-up (March 2011) one of the major changes was that Pages are now able to ‘like’ other Pages and it also became possible for the Admins of business Pages to post both as themselves and as the Page on walls of both personal profiles and other Pages. It sounds more convoluted than it is! The point is that businesses can support fellow businesses – client and suppliers by joining each others’ networks and sharing each others’ links, industry news, and so on.

A Facebook Page is a valuable internet asset

Just as we learned to claim the web domains of our business (and personal in some cases) names before anyone else could buy and hold them hostage; and more recently our Twitter handles – it’s also vital for businesses to claim their Facebook Page urls for the same reason. (Ours is http://facebook.com/savvymarketers.  Hint – we’d love you to join us an ‘like’ it )

In Social Media Examiner’s 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, results showed that 96% of B2C focused companies used Facebook, compared to 85% B2B companies.  And B2C are more interested in learning about Facebook (74%) and blogging (72%) versus B2B (Facebook and blogging: 65%).

Here’s their short (6:17 mins) video summary of the report with more important information:

Do you have a B2B Facebook Page? Please let us know in the comments below, so we can visit and ‘Like’ it.  :)

‘Tis the season to be jolly

Yes, these are the very first Savvy Marketing Awards, with best practice sought, deliberated and cogitated over by two people! We would love your comments on who you think deserves an award too!

Categories include Best Email Newsletters, Best Online Ordering, Best Blog, Best Facebook Page, Best Use of Twitter plus a Wooden Spoon for the worst website we’ve visited!

Best B2B Newsletter
‘More Clients’ weekly newsletter from Robert Middleton. This isn’t an all singing, all dancing newsletter, just great tips for B2B professionals to help them attract new clients each week in plain old text! It goes to show that good content can still win over pretty pictures.  Louise and I have been reading this newsletter for several years and always take away valuable tips from it. You can sign up to the newsletter on the Action Plan website.

Best B2C Newsletter
Omlet Newsletter – fun weekly newsletter from the creators of the Eglu for chickens. They’ve built a community of chicken keepers around their newsletter, feature a Keeper of the Week and use many a pun. A very eggciting newsletter with that little bit eggstra! View a recent issue here.

Best Facebook Page
Giles Babbidge Photography – for the best small business.  Giles is building a lively and visually pleasing page for his fans – he regularly posts updates of interesting photography related articles and links to his own well-written blog posts.  All are delivered in Giles’ personal whimsically humorous style.

The Dental Business Club – for one of the best looking pages.  Chris Barrow’s recently launched page (with a fast-growing fan base) shows off some slickly branded graphics and makes good use of multi-media with video on a special Welcome tab, as well as in the updates.

Best use of Twitter
@GrammarGirl (aka Mignon Fogarty) – tweets a delightfully eclectic mix of facts about the English language, witty observations as well as the odd promotional tweet about her podcasts and anything else she notices!

@FrancoiseM (aka Francoise Murat) – who we featured earlier this year –generously retweets many diverse articles of interest, finds the most wonderful design images to aspire to and shares the most  mouth-watering menus she plans to cook that evening, so that you want to be invited to dinner at her house!

Best Online Ordering
Moo.com – Louise and I are great fans of Moo.com as they allow us to print business cards in small quantities, which is great if you want to change your message fairly regularly.  While we’re no graphic design experts, each item we’ve ordered has been excellent quality and you’d never know we had designed them ourselves! Orders arrive promptly and well packaged.

Best Blog
This French Life – Craig McGinty who runs the blog has done a great job not only of building up a community around the site, but keeping the content fresh and up to date on a daily basis. The blog is well designed, easy to navigate and makes good use of other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. If you have any interest in France or life in France, the blog is well worth a visit.

Wooden Spoon!
Lings Cars is a car leasing company based in northern England. The site is a navigational and usability nightmare with so many animations, flashing images & information all over the place that you can’t stay on it for too long without getting a headache! It’s completely over the top but may appeal to a select few. Visit the site to see for yourself (you have been warned!)

Congratulations to all those on our Awards list, a Virtual Award will be making its way to them soon!

Don’t forget to add the sites you think deserve an award in the comments below!

Whether your business sells products or services, the following list of low-cost and no cost ways to get more visitors aren’t at all techie to do.

1.  Tell people about it – don’t assume everyone knows about your website.  If you’ve recently added something interesting, that’s a good reason to mention it when you’re out networking.

2.  Business card – give people a reason to take a look at your website, offer them something interesting like an article or free report (this will also give you an opportunity to include them in future email marketing campaigns)

3.  Online Directories – there are so many of these directories that they aren’t as useful as a few years ago.  But it’s still worth taking advantage of free listings that include a link back to your website so long as the directory looks reputable.

4.  Social Network Profiles – people you connect with on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are more internet savvy and will probably want to visit your website to find out more about you, even before connecting.  Give them a warm welcome

5.  Email Signature – so often forgotten, this is a great place to encourage people to click through and visit your website (or blog).  Make sure to provide a ‘live’ link and check it works OK.

6.  Postcards and direct mailers – just because traditional mailings are offline, don’t stop promoting your business’s online home.

7.  Letterhead – same as 6. above.  (Does anyone actually use letterheads anymore?)

8.  Invoices – why not include a discreet promotional message and your web address? (I’d advise against anything too brash when you’re also asking for money)

9.  Voicemail – Use the outgoing message to encourage people to visit your website after they’ve left a message for you.  It’s quite unusual, so they may just do it!

10. Articles (online and offline) – If you’ve written something of interest, be sure to provide a link (url offline) so readers can click to find out more.

If you consistently use all the above methods, you will get more visitors to your website.

Do you have anything to add to the list?  Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know

Shortening an unwieldy and long URL is very convenient. If you use Twitter, you’ll know the number of characters is at a premium (only 140 per tweet), so the shorter the url, the longer the rest of your tweet message can be.

When you use a long URL in an email, there can be problems as a long link is more likely to ‘break’, in other words clicking on it doesn’t take readers where you intended them to go.  Instead they end up with an error message.  While you’d think people would get in touch and let you know the link was broken, often they forget because they’re busy, and you’ll always wonder why there were so few click throughs to your latest promotion.

Some URL shorteners enable you to ‘personalise’ the result. For example, you might want to include ‘mynewproduct’ – so the shortened URL would be http://tinyurl/mynewproduct (hopefully not a real web page!)

If you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client, they offer two URL shorteners: Ht.ly includes a ‘social bar’ (see below – the bar is at the top of the screenshot).

This means you can easily Retweet the blog post and have access to submit the link to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FaceBook, etc.

The second of Hootsuite’s URL shorteners is Ow.ly – which creates a simple short link.  Both Ht.ly and Ow.ly provide click through statistics.

Click through stats are possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use a URL shortener (not all of them provide this service, so check the one you use does).  Being able to see how many people are clicking through to your webpage or blog using your link is very valuable marketing data to have.

It’s a good idea to check the shortened link before you give it out – just click to make sure it takes you to the page you want to go to!

There are many (over 100) different URL shortening tools, some more reliable than others.  For an in depth analysis of performance and uptime, see Mashable’s helpful blog post from earlier this year.

Have you tried URL shorteners?  If so which do you like?  Please share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d love a retweet