Small Business Websites

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When you are running a business, whether it be offline or online, you know how important your customers are. Without them there is no business. Good customer service should be your number one priority. But if you are running an online business, customer service may be a little more challenging for you.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

Be honest. Why are you in business?
To sell something.
This product or service may solve a problem, entertain, or be useful in other means, but we’re all working to make a living. The better we understand the minds of those we sell to, the more successful we’ll be. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 73% [?]

The internet is different than print in many ways, one of them being the expectations of the reader. Since the internet was created as a way to share vast amounts of information, people use it in exactly that way and expect, well… information. They do not want to be sold to and are often turned off when it appears that may be the case. There are of course, exceptions to this rule, but normally they expect info, not sales pitches.

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Popularity: 75% [?]

So you’ve got a great product. Let’s say it’s meditation tapes designed to decrease stress in people’s lives. The product includes a book and four audio CDs. You invest in a professional photographer to take great photos you can use throughout your website. One image is of the book, one of the four CDs and one has the whole package.

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Popularity: 96% [?]

“You get what you give.” We’ve all heard it before and probably don’t think about it too much. But in the world of business websites, it couldn’t be more true. In its most basic form, if you give your visitors nothing, you’ll get nothing in return. I’m not talking about having nothing to sell here, because if you have no product or service, you’ll obviously get no buyers. I’m referring to an added value of sorts, a reason for customers to trust and buy from YOU versus everyone else or even doing it themselves. To gain a better understanding how to put this to work in business, let’s explore the concept.

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Popularity: 79% [?]

When you have a website built, your webmaster will enter page titles and meta tags. These are very important to the search engines in being able to find and identify what your website is about and targeting. Search engines have ’spiders’ or ‘bots’ that search the web constantly for new and updated sites and information. These ’spiders’ are basically just programs that go out searching and retrieving information on the internet. The information they get comes primarily from your page title, meta tags and text content. The search engines will store the info they learned about your site and when someone does a search with the keywords it found, your site will come up somewhere in the list.

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Popularity: 87% [?]

I want to write articles that target your needs and areas of confusion, so tell me what puzzles you the most about websites. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 74% [?]

I stumbled on a site last week, Local Cooling.com that offers a desktop download to help manage the energy your computer uses. This free tool “automatically optimizes your PC’s power consumption by using a more effective power save mode. You will be able to see your savings in real-time translated to more environmental terms such as how many trees and gallons of oil you have saved.” Frankly, it’s been quite fabulous to watch my savings for the environment add up and fight global warming. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 75% [?]

Take a look at your home page. It’s the first page people see when visiting your site. Does it have impact, clarity and interest grabbing images or text? Or is it bland, ordinary, unhelpful and difficult to use?
FACT: 85% of people ABANDON a new site due to poor design.
FACT: 50% of visitors are LOST because they can’t easily find content.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

Great headlines. The kind that draw you in and make you ask for more. Can you write one? A really good one? If not, you’re losing business.
“On the average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that, unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money.”
– David Ogilvy

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Popularity: 88% [?]