Author: Zealus

Categories
clients

Blogging For Small Business

Many resources recommend having a blog and creating content in order to position yourself as an expert in the field. Blog attracts attention to the product you are selling giving it a contextual boost from the content you are writing. In most cases, people who know the most about the product or service are those who run the business. They are so busy creating the product or service, dealing with clients and suppliers or whatnot that they simply don’t have time to create quality content.

Sure, you can hire a blogger, ghost writer or just an English-major intern to write stuff for you. Problem is – he doesn’t know the product. He doesn’t have the feeling for the product, like the owner has. There is no passion, no interest (except for being paid) and no understanding of how to present your product to the readers. Those readers, who later may become customers. It’s all about presentation, after all. So blogging becomes new sales tool that the owner doesn’t have time (or some times skills) to use.

What we recently started doing is we offer our clients to keep their blogs for them. We know the product, since we worked on presenting it for so much time. We know the target audience, since we’ve been talking to them since the launch of client’s web site. And we have interest in promoting clients’ businesses, since it means more business for us.

Everybody wins. Except for the guy who’s hands are full already.

Categories
seo

Free Link Bait

Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

  1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
  2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
  3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
  4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
  5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
  6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
  7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
  8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
  9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.

Categories
software

No client left behind

We get to deal with many leads. However, not all the leads become clients. Part of that non-converting crowd are people who choose hosted shopping cart software. The reasons why we like those people are numerous, but I am going to list just one of them.

Reason 1: Even if they didn’t accept our services, they can still spread the word. People have very different needs. One person could be happy with hosted shopping cart; another would need a full-featured web store front. So even if we suggest some third-party off-the shelf e-commerce solution – we still on good terms with our lead.

Reason 2: Even with the third-party solution customer may need unique design. This one is too obvious to complain about, so I won’t. No matter how sophisticated the solution is – people will have natural urge to tweak it to their heart’s content. While a customer is able to upload inventory from Excel file and couple of images, tweaking style sheets and design may get too complicated and boring.

Reason 3: Off-the-shelf (or hosted) e-commerce solution does have its limitations. While being useful and user-friendly your hosted solution falls short when you really need to grow. If you host plenty of pictures, sample images (or if you are electronically delivering your products, like eBooks or downloads) server load and bandwidth become issues with your hosted solution provider. You come back to people who can build a custom-fit solution for your business.

Reason 4: No matter which software you are using – there is a steep learning curve at the beginning of it. When you just starting – everything seems unusual and complicated. Once you familiarize yourself with it – you’re the king of the hill. Good thing is – when you come to someone to design and develop your custom-fit business solution – you already know what you want! We, the design and development guys, spend tremendous time determining what is it that client wants. People with experience are a great gift, like a second free customer. What could be better?

Overall, the idea of hosted shopping cart or online web page creation tool or whatever else is there is very productive for consumers, solution providers and web design guys. Consumers acquire knowledge and understanding of what they want. Solution providers acquire a stream of customers. Web design guys acquire educated customers. Everybody wins!