If You're Slinging Web Words, These Tools Help

6 Cool Tools Every Web Writer Needs

Once you’ve started to see an increase in demand for your writing, you’ll want to add some money-saving and time-saving tools to your kit bag. Check out the following. Some cost a few bucks, some are free or shareware. But all develop added value to your clients and that makes you a more valuable asset.

1. Skype. Today’s web writers have clients around the world and talking to a client 12 time zones to the east is going to cost a bundle using your cell or land line.

Skype allows you to use VoIP free or nearly free. You can call Skype to Skype at no cost, meaning you can talk to your client in Adelaide, Australia for an hour at no cost.

If the client doesn’t happen to be a Skype subscriber, that call down under will cost you .026 a minute so an hour chat will set you back about $US1.50.

Open your account with a $5.00 purchase of Skype minutes. This service also provides voice recording, call block, caller ID and even a separate Skype telephone number so you’re always in contact cheap.

2. I love Freemind’s Mind Map software. It’s a great tool for organizing lots of information from lots of different sources into a mind map – a visual tool that shows you how Tab A fits into Slot B.

It’s excellent for organizing longer pieces. It’s also a great tool for creating site maps for clients and you so you both understand what’s going to be done and by whom.

Very flexible shareware. (Pay what you can.)

3. SEO Elite. This software will set you back $US169 or so but you’ll get it back on your first gig. This software performs a variety of analyses on existing web sites, allowing you to spy on your clients’ competitors, see which keywords are working, how many in-bound links the site has and from whom – all good background when preparing your content for the client site.

No sense reinventing the wheel.

4. Conference calling. There are lots of free and low cost services that enable you to talk to Bob in San Francisco while you’ve got Rick on the same line in London. In fact, you can invite a crowd.

You’ll receive a call number and access code that invitees enter. Services are usually tiered so if you also want to share a Power Point presentation or get some face time, it’ll cost you something in the neighborhood of $0.036 a minute for the additional bandwidth.

Google “tele-conferencing services” and open an account.

5. Elance.com. Lead generation and marketing your services is time consuming. Sites like Elance.com deliver leads to your inbox – even invitations from job posters asking you to bid.

Elance takes an 8.75% bite but if you figure that into your bid price, the client pays. You can log on at any time and find 300 leads. Bid on those projects at which you can succeed.

6. AVG.com. Great security software – FREE. You can schedule scans, isolate cookies, viruses and other malware and clean up all of that garbage with a couple of clicks.

If you’re running your business off your hard drive you need solid security on the system side. AVG’s freeware is popular and effective. This one’s a no brainer.

There are other tools. Twitter is great for announcing posts to a blog or a newsletter you just blasted across the W3. There are free organizational tools, free communication apps, posting apps (got a blog, get Feedburner) and other tools worth downloading and installing to make your day more productive and more financially rewarding.

Later,

Paul

www.webwordslinger.com

BUSINESS SUCCESS IS FOUNDED ON A STABLE CLIENT BASE

Managing Customer Care:

“It’s easier to keep a client 

than find a new one.”

Yeah, it’s an old cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. The key to long-term site success is an expanding customer/client base – repeat buyers of your goods or services.

Keeping the customer satisfied, especially for web-based businesses, isn’t a walk in the park but there are things you, as webmaster, can do to manage client care, keeping the customer satisfied and coming back for more.

1. Maintain an accurate order tracking system.  If you use a delivery service like FedEx or UPS, you’ll get tracking software with your account. But, if you’re trucking 37 ceramic figurines to the post office every day, you’ll need an order tracking system – preferably one that can identify “downstream” problems like: “Hey, you’re going to run out of hula girl bobble heads next Thursday. Time to reorder.”

2. Stay involved. You may be using a drop shipper to manage inventory storage, shipping and handling, and it’s not always easy during the rush of the day to check tracking data – even if you’re shipping out of a spare room. Track all problem orders yourself.

3. Provide updates to the buyer. An auto-responder as soon as the problem is identified with an opt out box to cancel the sale. You may lose that one, but your straightforwardness and ease of use will make a positive impression.

Federal law requires that orders must be filled within 30 days, after which the buyer is no longer obligated to pay. Don’t ship without renewed buyer approval.

4. Provide US-based customer support 24/7. In this global marketplace, someone is always buying, and someone always has a question. Also, empower telephone reps to accept returns with the customer’s receipts. This saves on call-backs and significantly lowers buyers’ stress levels.

5. Use dynamic pages designed specifically for each visitor.  Best example? Amazon. My home page is different from your home page based on our past buying histories. All of this data is stored in Amazon’s database and when I log on, I’m bombarded with recommendations based on items purchased five years ago.

But Amazon stills calls me by my first name. That’s nice.

6. Last key point. Overdeliver. If prudent, drop a personalized email or even make a telephone call. People are really pleasant when the company CEO calls and promises satisfaction.

The whole point of quality customer care is to create word of mouth (WOM) viral marketing. Treat your customers or clients right, and viral WOM will do the rest in growing that client base bigger and bigger.

editor@webwordslinger.com

The Right Words Convert Visitors to Buyers

If we don't write it, who will?

Web Writing:

Know Your Demographic

If you’ve been writing professionally for more than two weeks you know what the demographic is. For the rest of you, the demographic is the sweet spot of your client’s market. It’s your target audience.

And the better you understand that target the more effective your writing. It’s all about pushing the right buttons to compel the site visitor to perform the MDA – the most desired action.

The Target Demographic

Believe it or not, many of your clients won’t be able to describe their target audience. Let’s say you’re hired to write website content for a brick-and-mortar hearing aid retail outlet somewhere in Montana. (It could happen.)

The owner of the store may have had a lock on a 25 square mile service area – the only hearing aid dispenser in the region. So, dropping a quarter page advert in the local newspaper was all it took to create a profitable business. And the store owner never gave more than a thought to who she was trying to reach.

So, during the discovery phase you ask, “What’s the target demographic?” Your likely to get an incomplete answer: “People who need hearing aids.” However, that’s a broad demographic so a little research might produce a better return for your client.

Research the Demographic

Hearing aids. So you’re likely to immediately think of the over-50 crowd. Probably right. Nerve deafness goes hand-in-hand with aging so trying to hit that over-50, Baby Boomer demographic bubble may be just the way to go.

But, what do you know about this particular group, other than what you know about your grandparents and the 60-year-old neighbor next door? These people don’t make up a large enough group to actually define the needs and preferences of people over 50.

For example, a little research reveals that the over-50 crowd:

• Are less likely to use computers at home
• Are less likely to comparison shop for products on line
• Don’t make as many on-line purchases
• Are less familiar with local search engine options
• Scroll less than their younger counterparts
• Spend less time on line altogether
• Are not as tech savvy as younger computer users

All of these factors create a clearer picture of who you’re targeting with your writing. For example, if you know that seniors don’t scroll as much as younger people, all of the important stuff must be at the top of the page.

Use the Language of the Target Demographic. Jargon Sells!

What do these people want and need? What information do they require to make an intelligent buying choice? How do they talk to each other? Your writing should use the language of the target demographic.

Let’s say you’re writing a user manual for a mainframe computer company. (It could happen.) You better know what a trouble ticket is and what downstream consequences are. You can quickly learn the insider jargon by visiting websites that sell mainframes or service them.

There’s jargon in every profession. It’s a form of shorthand. But it’s also exclusionary, keeping out those who are NOT members of the gang. So, the use of the demographic jargon (1) enables you to present information in shorthand form and (2) makes you a member of the exclusive group of mainframe computer administrators.

The best place to look for industry-specific jargon is on websites and blogs designed to provide solutions to the specific demographic. These sites detail what the demographic wants so to cut down on research time, cut to the chase and go hang out with the people you’re trying to reach.

That’s the best way to learn the lingo. And deomographic wants and needs, as well.

What Does Your Target Demographic Want or Need?

Increased productivity? Faster shipping? A baby-soft maternity gift? If you don’t know what the target market wants or needs you can’t push the right buttons to induce the site visitor into taking the MDA. In other words, your text missed the mark.

Before you write a single word, know to whom you’re writing. Know how they talk then talk right to them.

Know what they need or want. Then meet those needs and wants.

Don’t rely on your client to give you the goods on the target demographic. Most of these people are focused on business matters. It’s up to you to hit that bull’s-eye sweet spot with your writing.

And if you do, guess what? You just added a regular to your client base – a buyer who will come back for more without any effort on your part.

And repeat buyers are the basis of success for any freelance web writer. So know to whom you’re speaking when you write. Take aim at that bull’s-eye and fire away.

The more times you hit the mark, the more of the client’s problems are solved. And the bigger your client base grows.

Later,

Webwordslinger

JEEZE, BOYCOTT CONTENT SPAM, WILL YA?

  

cool pic courtesty of chotda

Content Spam 2.0:

What This Means to SEO

Weird email requests lately.

One guy wanted a bid on 1,000 articles – all about apartments. I doubt there are 1,000 things you could even say about apartments, much less write 1,000 articles on the subject. And if tasked with such an assignment, any self-respecting copywriter would gouge out her eyes with a spork after a day or two. Tops.

Another request wanted a price for a weekly newsletter on work-at-home jobs. Didn’t care what I wrote as long as it contained this list of 25 long-tail keywords. This isn’t writing. It’s a jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces are gray.

The move to content-driven sites, and the endless need for green content, has been good for word grinders who can crank it out by the pound. But there’s something in the ether-sphere. A change in the digital wind.

Elance.com: Lots for Cheap

I’ve been getting writing assignments through Elance for a little more than four years. And in that time there’s been a rather dramatic shift in what buyers in the writing and translation category want.

“500 articles on pig farming. Willing to go as high as $1 per article.”

“200-page ebook download on FOREX strategies – Budget > $500”

“30 press releases; various technical topics – Budget > $250”

Occasionally, buyers are actually more concerned with quality than quantity but those buyers are a shrinking pool. And this despite Elance’s behind-the-scenes efforts to improve the quality of its job posters.

Still, those cr@pfests of work get bids – out sourced to word factories where text by the kilo is produced by (1) machines (virtually unreadable) or (2) non-native English speakers who get paid in canned goods (humorously unreadable). A client sent one of these outsourced pieces for review and in it was the following quote: “American corporations are up to the business of the monkey.”

I read that 10 times before my wife figured out that the writer (or machine) had interpreted “monkey business” as “business of the monkey.” So, the sentence, when reconstructed would read: “American corporations are up to monkey business” and even that totally sucks.

Content Spam 1.0

Sure, this kind of junk has been around for years and there have been bottom feeders on Elance since the site started operations. So, admittedly, the use of content spam has been around since search engines (1994).

But early content spam was simplistic. Cram the words sex and porn into every keyword tag and you’d show up. Keyword dense gibberish (“Can you give me a 40% keyword density across the site?”) could be ground out like hash (and not the good kind).

But now, because search engine algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, content spam has taken on a new look.

Content Spam 2.0

The days of stuffing “blue pill” in between real text are over (except for that guy in the Philippines, and I’ll get you, you bastard!). Today, search engines want solid, informational content – something of substance, of use to the search engine user. The problem for copywriters is simple. Search engines know informational content. But they don’t know good content from a steaming pile of verbs and nouns.

This limitation has led to a huge number of posts on Elance and other freelance sites for words by the pound. Quality doesn’t get any extra credit. It’s sheer volume and plenty of it.

The Impact on SEO

This content spam 2.0 is used by site owners and SEOs to create sign posts that point back to the mother site – the center of the marketing bull’s eye. So the content ends up on blogs, on content syndication sites, on content-based sites, on sub-domains – it’s like putting up posters on construction site walls in New York City.

And though SEO has always involved creating identifiable targets for bots and eyeballs, this off-site aspect of SEO seems to be growing in importance. Why else would some guy want 1,000 pages on apartments? He’s going to place that content spam every place he can – or you are.

Based on the number of requests for content spam posted on Elance and showing up in my inbox, I suggest that SEO is going to employ a great deal more off-site activity in the future.

Anybody know anything about apartments?

Later,

webwordslinger.com

PERCEPTION IS REALITY ON THE W3: YOU'RE AS GOOD AS YOU LOOK

Got Something To Say?

How About a Webinar?

The growing popularity of webinars in recent months indicates two things: (1) they work and (2) you should be holding them regularly.

Webinar, the word,  is a back formation of web-based seminar. It’s broadcast over the web, and webinars come with lots of different looks, varying production values and information that generates leads and sales. A webinar can be a one-person presentation, a lecture, a work shop, discussion group or seminar, and available topics are limitless.

What’s On Your Mind?

Webinars differ from webcasts. Webcasts are one-way streets. The webcast runs, the viewer watches. The end. With a webinar you add the element of interaction. Your viewers can comment and ask questions, they can bring up new topics and bring a lively energy to even the dullest topics.

These “give-and-takes” are a great way to build a site community and brand recognition.

Preparing Your Webinar

First, decide on the topic. It can be a narrow focus or once-over-lightly discussion on the area of your expertise. If you’re a stock broker, you can produce a webinar on the basics of investing, Investing 101, or you can discuss the advantages of moving existing assets into cash flow instruments. Just remember, know your audience and know your stuff.

Now, who to invite? You can limit the number of invitees or throw the doors open to the world. Webinars that actually provide useful information are often broadcast from subscriber-based sites. Sign up for $499 and talk to your industry leader for an hour a month.

Other webinars are open to anyone who wants to log on and participate. As the leader of the group, it’s up to you to keep order. Fortunately, webinar software allows you to toss out malcontents and keep things moving smoothly.

Whether your webinar is invite only or wide open, make sure attendees have access to pre-webinar information. You can email invitees directly or provide a download from your site about an upcoming webinar. Obviously, you want to include the date and time the webinar will take place but also provide an agenda – the topic or topics that’ll be covered. This way, attendees have a context for your presentation and they can prepare questions for you to answer.

Remember, those in attendance will be able to talk to you in real time so a lot of hemming and hawing won’t deliver the knowledgeable, confident persona you want to project. So prepare notes. Have some facts and stats to back up your key points and think about questions that might come your way.

The fact is, you’re the teacher the viewers are your students. So have a lesson plan or topic list to keep the flow flowing.

Production Values

Production values are simply how good the webinar looks and sounds. They include everything from lighting to quality sound (use a good mike) to the backdrop behind you. These things may or may not count depending on your audience.

For example, if you’re an 18-year-old stock picking whiz,  a computer-mounted camera showing your dorm room is acceptable. However, if you’re talking to potential business associates or partners in the corporate sphere, the production values should be much higher.

In this case, hire a video shooter with a hi-res cam. Use a lapel mike to cut down on “room tone” (that echo-y sound you hear when a live mike goes dead) and use an attractive office setting – even if you have to rent studio space. Your audience will have certain expectations whether you’re broadcasting from the spare room or a spacious office conference room. Know what those expectations are and exceed them. If someone has paid $999 to participate in your webinar, they aren’t going to be overly impressed when you appear in a stained, seedy bathrobe.

Who Should Use Webinars and Why?

Webinars are low- to no-cost productions, guaranteeing a positive return on your investment. Your prep time will be your biggest “expense.” So, low costs make webinars attractive to site owners on tight budgets.

A picture is worth a thousand words and a webinar is worth more than that amount of verbiage. Webinars are ideal for training and explaining complex tasks or systems. For example, if your business model is complex, it’s simple to prepare a PowerPoint presentation that explains these complexities visually with charts, graphs and other illustrations. This makes webinars the perfect solution for distance learning.

In many cases, workers are required to earn a certain number of continuing education units or CEUs. For example, private detectives and security guards must accumulate a certain number of CEUs each year. So, there are lots of websites that offer webinars that can be applied toward the participant’s annual CEU count. In fact, there are many CEU-based sites that charge for webinar access on a class by class basis. This provides the flexibility workers prefer when selecting which webinars to view and which have no relevance to their work.

In today’s world economy, many companies have employees around the world. Webinars are a great way to get some face time with employees working 10 time zones away. This is a great morale booster and a terrific way to illustrate new products and procedures in house. The fact is, webinars are a great way to keep in touch, disseminate new information and to close a sale.

One recommendation: Participate in a few webinars before you plan one for your own subscribers. Once you see how effective these tools can be, you’ll find new and better ways to make them work for you.

Later,

Webwordslinger

YOU, TOO, CAN BECOME AN EXPERT IN YOUR FIELD. HERE'S HOW!

photo courtesy kikriaturas

The Five Steps to Becoming a Guru:

Are You the Next Peter Lynch, Dan Kennedy or Skip McGrath?

Gurus, good ones anyway, are hard to find these days. Oh sure, the word gets thrown around quite a bit. “He’s an SEO guru.” “She’s the best marketing guru ever to walk the halls of this office.” “This guy is a penny stock guru. You can’t miss if you follow his picks.”

You know, anyone can become a guru on the web, regardless of subject of expertise, or any expertise at all. Google “Life Coach” and see how many hits you get. Today, it was 68,900,000 “gurus” on the amorphous topic of life coaching. That’s a lot of gurus all in one place. Now conduct s search for “Job Coach.”  Not as many hits as life coach (more narrow topic) but Google still delivers 39,900,000 links to job coaches – gurus who are going to help you climb the ladder of corporate success.

Life coach, job coach, stock picker, SEO expert, health and wellness insider – you can’t swing a dead personal development coach without hitting the next guru wannabe. In effect, becoming a guru is nothing more than good marketing and, with apologizes to Dan Kennedy, sales letter guru, there are better, so you don’t even have to be the best if you create the online persona of guru.

Here are five tips to start you down the yellow brick road (solid gold) to gurudom.

1. Take a different road. One-of-a kind explanations for common phenomenon set you apart, whether were talking about baking the best scones ever or building the perfect website.

Don’t rehash the rehash. Take a different tact from the rest of the pack and find that new slant. Peter Lynch, ex of the Fidelity Magellan Fund, used to listen to his kids for good stock picks. If the kids and all of their friends were going to the all-natural salon in the mall every Saturday, Lynch would do the spade work, find the corporate owner and take a position. It was a completely different take on fundamental versus chart (technical) stock analysis and Lynch made a whole lot of money listening to his kids and their friends.

2. Present different tips and tricks for putting in to place common procedures. The whole world might know how the procedure or model works, but if you come in with a unique way of analyzing a topic and presenting very specific strategies for improving your readers’ lives, gurudom is just around the corner.

How-to advice is a good place to start. Let’s say your claim to the title of guru is based on your uncanny ability to pick penny stocks just before they become dollar stocks. Bingo. You’re a penny stock buying guru and people will pay you a lot of money for your sage counsel.

3. Present both sides of the discussion. Gurus aren’t totalitarian cult figures. They have that inner calm and self confidence to present the other side of their position with self-assurance that their position is the correct one.

Get together a room full of SEO experts and you’ll hear every possible SEO strategy that ever appeared on the web. (If there’s an open bar, there’ll probably be some imbibing but you know how those SEOs are.) A guru – a good one – listens to all sides with absolute confidence that s/he is correct. And these gurus are getting $5,000 a head for their well-booked seminars.

4. Criticize. Warren Buffet, the Oracle (even better than a guru) of Omaha (and a true stock picking genius) constantly speaks to audiences on investment strategies that work and Mr. Buffet has made many shareholders of Berkshire-Hathaway millionaires.  

Back in the ‘90s, when everybody was hopping on this new web marketplace thing and buying anything with a dot com after its name, Buffet was buying steel, concrete, construction companies – the basic, nuts-and-bolts of our infrastructure. He spent years criticizing those brokers and faux gurus who were pushing their clients into these online startups and, if anyone can remember the Spring of ’01, we saw the dot com bubble implode.

On the other hand, Berkshire-Hathaway (Buffet) weathered the storm just fine. Don’t be a follower. Gurus don’t follow they lead.

5. Create controversy. Ultra-conservative and barely watchable, Ann Coulter has made a whole pile of cash with her controversial criticism of 9/11 widows, Democrats, cancer-victim Elizabeth Edwards, wife of candidate John Edwards, claiming that Ms Edwards, who is fighting a courageous battle against cancer, is using her disease to raise the sympathy vote, and while Ms. Coulter’s comments are reprehensible to even conservative Republicans, controversy sells – a lot.

The web is crawling with experts – cruise ship gurus, gold bugs, retail poo-bahs and other so-called experts. It’s actually pretty easy to make a name for yourself within a particular field because of the speed at which information moves across the web. The key is to find something that sets you apart from the crowd.

If all you’re doing is playing the same game that a thousand other gurus are playing you won’t stand out. Change the rules, provide utile information, don’t follow the pack and create controversy.

It’ll only be a matter of time before you’re asked to appear on Oprah. That’s how you know you’ve become a guru. So pick your topic. Health and wellness, weight loss painlessly, investment advice, marketing advice – whatever your area of expertise, you can become the next guru to be recognized on the web.

Next stop? The book tour. Oh, and the percentages that come with publishing a best seller.

The world is waiting for you. What are you waiting for?

Webwordslinger.com

REAL WORLD MEETS WEB WORLD: MARKETING CHANNEL INTEGRATION

photo courtesy of alles-schlumpf

Business and Website Synergies:

Real World Meets Virtual World

There are plenty of brick-and-mortar business owners who don’t recognize the value of a store web site. They’re doing well, lots of foot traffic, improved margins every year – so why take on the headache and expense of a web site? It’s just one more thing to worry about, right? Wrong.

A web site that promotes your real world store can not only boost profits, it can eliminate routine chores that currently eat up a lot of time. When you own your own business, time is money.

The Costs

The cost of a fully functional, secure, commercial web site aren’t what you think they are. With a little help (actually you can do it all by yourself) you can have a web site up and running in just a few hours – a web site complete with a secure checkout, a blog, product pix and all of the other bells and whistles you expect from today’s web sites.

The costs are surprisingly low if you go with the right web host – the company that will rent server (computer) space that’ll hook you in to the world wide web. Prices as low as $7.00 a month get you plenty of disc server space and a box full of free site building tools – free. So, for less than $100 a year, you can have a web site open 24/7 selling your goods and services. Cost should not be a factor when deciding on whether to build a site or not.

Saving Time

Working in your store each day takes up a certain amount of time for administrative chores. You process credit card orders, make deposits at the bank, keep track of inventory and expenses – all activities that take away from the one thing you should be doing and that is taking care of your customers.

With a web site, payment collection is automated, order print outs can be printed for fulfillment, deposits to the business account are automatic – it’s not exactly passive income, but it certainly won’t double your real world workload. It’ll save time.

For example, let’s say you plan a “special customers” sale available to your most highly-prized clients. A computer can help you get the word out quickly and inexpensively. That’s what auto-responders do. They notify customers by e-mail of this special sale or special event. No postage, no running to the post office and no expensive ad in the local newspaper. Instead, you send out a personalized invitation to your best customers to notify them of the impending sale.

Save time and money through the automation of many administrative functions. On-line purchases can be completely automated so that purchase price is deposited into your business account, a shipping bill and label are printed automatically and, if you use drop shippers to handle order fulfillment, all necessary information to process the order is sent to the shipper. You don’t have to do a thing.

Saving time by automating routine functions via a web site is a great way to improve your margins – additional sales without additional labor.

Using Your Website to Promote Your Business

The critical factor, here, is to create synergies between your store and your web site. And there are lots of them.

Use your web site to conduct polls and surveys to see what your real-world customers like and don’t like about their shopping experiences. Low cost promo with high end potential. After all, real world or virtual world – the customer is always right.

Develop sales leads using an on-line form. If someone in town is looking for a good price on a new furnace, you’d want to know about it, right? Well, a web site can give you name, address, telephone number and even the customer’s needs. How convenient is that?!

Use give-aways to collect e-mail addresses. These are called “opt-ins.” You give the site visitor a free pamphlet, a downloadable e-book or a printable 20% off coupon and all the visitor has to do is give you his or her e-mail address. As your e-mail list grows, so, too, does your potential customer base. Each one of these opt-ins has a relationship with you and you can stay in touch with auto-responders, keeping your company’s name and services in front of the customers.

Promote special sales and events on your site’s home page. Provide “how-to” information to keep customers coming back. The possibilities are endless. Think of a web site as a salesperson who never sleeps, never calls in sick and never complains about your management style. And all of that for less than $7.00 a month? Talk about a bargain.

Use Your Business to Promote Your Website

A web site has a certain cachet – it’s an indication that the store owners are sharp business people. And because the cost of building and operating a web site are so low, a web site is a low-cost, badge of prestige and you want as many people as possible to know you’re on-line.

Once your site is functional and all of the bugs have been worked out (pretty easy to do) it’s time to use your business to promote your web site, developing synergies that lead to sales.

First, make sure your web site URL (address) appears on all business stationery from letterhead to business cards and from invoices to adverts in local, traditional media. By telling people where to find more information about your business, your web site becomes an on-line billboard along that ‘Information Highway’. Customers who see your URL in a newspaper ad may choose to make a purchase on-line rather than drive clear across town or across state.

Design an on-line campaign to drive more people to your web site. Announce in your local newspaper advert that customers will receive a printable coupon for 15% off when they visit your web site. Of course, while they’re on-line visiting your site, entice them to make an on-line purchase, as well.

And don’t forget giveaways. T-shirts, bumper stickers, pens and other free stuff that display your web site’s URL will all generate more site traffic and, therefore, greater business efficiencies.

Explain to real-world customers that all transactions can take place on line or in person. Your web site should be a seamless extension of your actual business, enabling buyers to make purchases and payments, ask questions and even process returns. There’s plenty of software that will enable you to do this – free checkouts, free inventory managers, free shipping software – it’s all there making your job and your customers’ buying experiences easy.

Another reason to maintain a web site? Let’s say you run a local deli offering specials of the day. Your regulars will appreciate the ability to log on and see “what’s cookin’” today. Web sites are very easy to update, so use your site to keep customers up to date on daily specials, menu changes, new product lines and other helpful information. If your URL appears on all business-related paperwork, more and more people will find their way to your site. And, if they find useful information on the site, they’re more likely to visit your store one town over.

Selling Pizza in Zimbabwe?

A web site provides a world-wide presence so if you run a pizza place in Dayton, you won’t have much interest in orders from Zimbabwe – even if they want the super-deluxe special. How are you going to get it there in 30 minutes or less?

If you’re business is strictly local (it doesn’t have to be, by the way) you can use various search engine filters so that only people within a certain range will actually visit your web site, which will cut down on questions from Zimbabwe regarding the status of their order.

Localize your listings with Google and Yahoo so you’re reaching those customers who might actually visit your store or order something because they’ve been to the store before and know they can count on your quality and service.

However, don’t rule out expanding your little enterprise globally. Let’s say you run a small town hardware store. Most of your business comes from local residents looking to buy a wheelbarrow or a hammer. That doesn’t mean that you can’t ship a hammer to Zimbabwe. In fact, that’s one of the coolest things about having a web site.

One web user was looking for those plastic cases used to protect baseball cards. They’re called “screw downs” in case you didn’t know. So, instead of driving from one sports memorabilia store to the next, the buyer Goggled “screw downs” and found just what he was looking for eight states away. The buyer never would have even heard of Ed’s Sports Collectibles, or made the purchase, if old Ed hadn’t built a web site.

So, a web site can save time by automating routine tasks – everything from processing sales to answering FAQs. This frees up your time to devote to in-store customer care.

Next, you can build marketing and promotion synergies between your brick-and-mortar and your virtual on-line store, using one to promote the other.

Finally, you can do all of this for very little money. You don’t need a big, fancy expensive web site design firm and the cost of hosting a feature-rich web site are low – often less than $7.00 a month.

Now the question is – what are you waiting for? Promote your business and your products around the corner and around the world by building synergies between real and virtual worlds. You’ll be amazed at the jump in sales and  just how easy it is to do.


Webwordslinger.com