1. Giving up after a couple of months because they aren’t ranked #1 on Google
Unless you are in a completely competitor free niche (try typing in “monkey shine on tree” in to Google!) your site will take time to be crawled by the search engine’s spiders, linked to by other sites and ranked high enough on a search engine to be found. Be realistic with your expectations.

2. Thinking building a website is a quick and easy affair
You can certainly get something up and running in a matter of minutes, whether that site will be attractive and/ or informative enough for repeat visits is debatable. Even the most simple of sites takes time and effort to get right. Don’t give up when you find an entire day had just disappeared and you still haven’t published the site!

3. Writing new content for the sake of it
You have heard search engines like updated content so you write new material each day hoping it will get your site ranked higher. if you genuinely have something to say, great, but this is such a minor consideration amongst all the other factors search engines use, your energy can be better spent elsewhere e.g. adding analytics tracking, tweaking the navigation, generating links, reading relevant blogs…
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At 123-reg we run an affiliate program that let’s you earn money by putting one of our banners on your site, and earning commission for each sale you send to us. Below are the top 6 reasons why you should sign up.

1. Earn up to £100 per product
Simply by placing one of our banners or links on your site and referring one of your visitors to us, depending on the product they buy, we will pay you up to £100 per product. There are no limits to how much you can earn, with commission paid out for every item sold. For example, if they buy a domain name, shared hosting and InstantTraffic you will receive £41

2. We are the UK’s largest web host
With 16% of all UK web sites hosted with us (source: Netcraft) we are the one of the best known web hosts around.

3. Your site’s visitors can search for a domain name on your site
We have a series of very cool banners that allow your visitors to search for a domain name directly from your site, with no extra work needed from you to make it work!
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Happy New Year to everyone. I thought I’d start the year with a quick post about the site that is sure to continue to dominate the internet news in 2008… Facebook.

Facebook has recently launched a new advertising platform to allow advertisers to write and manage adverts directly through their Facebook account. Facebook has always shown one banner advert underneath the left hand navigation area, however, this is a different proposition. These are the small static ’social ads’ you may have seen in your account sometimes in the news feed.

More information can be found here http://www.facebook.com/ads/

1. Keep the ads targeted
Facebook allows you to be very specific about who will get to see your advert, providing the tools to target by categories such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Interests
• Geography
• Political views
• Education status

It is tempting to keep them all open and target all 7 million+ users, but it is important you take advantage of these tools, especially if you choose to be billed on a CPM basis (per thousand views).

If you allow your advert to been see by one and all I can guarantee you will be wasting money on clicks or ad impressions from people who aren’t relevant and will never convert.

2. Keep your expectations realistic
Remember, these are still just banner ads, and just because its Facebook doesn’t mean they will be any more effective. Research has shown banner blindness is becoming more pronounced and banner click through rates (CTR%) is at an all time low of 0.18% (Source: www.adtech.de)
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So you’ve started selling online and you want to maximise your sales. Here are 6 tips that could help:

1. Use clear descriptions and good pictures. If you sell a physical product, it’s important people can see exactly what they’re getting. Describe the product in detail and include clear, well-lit photos - with large versions if possible. If you sell complex items, like electronic equipment, make sure you include the full specification too.
2. Get the fulfilment right. Once someone’s placed an order, make sure you ship the item in good time and keep the customer informed of what’s going on. Delivering an item quickly is an easy way to impress customers and encourage them to purchase from your site again.
3. Be comprehensive. Make sure you include information about shipping, extra charges, order changes and cancellations, returns and more. Think about what might stop a customer buying from you, and address those things in your FAQs or help content.
4. Make it easy for people to contact you. Give your online business a presence in the real world by publishing an address on your site where people can contact you. Supply a phone number and email as well, and try to answer queries in good time.
5. Don’t make payment difficult. Accept as many different forms of payment as you can, and make sure all online transactions are handled securely. Customers are more likely to buy if they can pay using their preferred method rather than the one which best suits you. Our ecommerce package lets you accept lots of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, PayPal and Google Checkout - in up to 9 currencies.
6. Keep an eye on your statistics. A web analytics package like Google Analytics can help you see how visitors are using your site. Look out for pages where people seem to drop out of the order process, or leave your site altogether. Why is this happening? Try making some changes and see if the figures improve.

What’s worked for your online shop? Leave a comment and let us know.

Previous top 6 lists:

• Books to read to help with your website
• Tips to improve your site copy
• Ways to increase conversion
• Online marketing misconceptions

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There are a lot of web design and online marketing books out there, so we thought we would share with you a few of the ones we have read and taken something useful from. Don’t worry they aren’t long winded reviews, just a brief summary of their content and then a link for you to find out more if it catches your eye.

(The Amazon links are for more information and so you can read other people’s reviews, no more than that)

Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results
This book looks at online marketing from the one metric that really matters, conversions i.e. getting a visitor on your site to take your desired action (hence the title!). It is an easy to follow book, well written, and has practical real life ideas that you can implement yourself without a PHD in web design or marketing. Call to action

Winning Results with Google AdWords
If you are just toying with the idea with advertising on Google or you have had ads on there for sometime, you will still take something away from this book. Covering each stage from beginner through to just below advanced, this is incredibly well structured and explains each step in getting your ads running up to bid strategies, simply and clearly. Winning results with Google AdWords

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Focusing on website usability design, this book packs in loads of ideas to implement on your site to improve your visitor’s experience and to ensure they don’t ‘bounce’ away in frustration. Don’t make me think

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
Installing analytical software such as Google Analytics is all well and good, but if you’re not using the information what is the point? This book is an in depth look at how to use your site’s data to your benefit. Web Analytics

The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand
You might have heard or read someone describe how they are targeting “The long tail” recently, it’s certainly a buzz word people are fond of using at the moment. This is where it all started. In essence it puts forward the idea that online traders can offer almost unlimited choice, and those products that sell infrequently and not many at a time, when added together contribute as much (if not more) to the bottom line as the best sellers. The Long Tail

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Thousands of blogs appear and disappear every day around the world. Many fall by the wayside due to the amount of time and effort they take to maintain. This book deals with blogs and their place in the business world, and how they should be used as an integral part of a site’s communication process. Naked Conversations

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Most websites are trying to sell something. It might be a physical product, or maybe just an idea. Whatever it is, the words on your website can make or break that sale. 

Selling doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so here are a few quick ways you can make your copy more effective.

1. Think about who’s reading. Everything on your website should be tailored to the audience. So stop thinking about what pushes your buttons, and start thinking about the people you want to come to your website. What will make them stop in their tracks?
    
2. Explain the benefits, not just the features. People want to know what’s in it for them. Don’t just tell them what great features your product has. Tell them how it will make their life easier or save them money.
    
3. Beware of over-emphasis. It’s fine to tell people how great your product is, but don’t overdo it. Too many capital letters make text difficult to read (definitely don’t SHOUT in upper case), and using exclamation marks everywhere can make your website look cheap.
    
4. Make it personal. Connect with the people reading your copy by making them part of the text. Use the second person (words like ‘you’ and ‘your’) rather than the less-friendly third person (words like ‘they’ and ‘their’).
    
5. Make it urgent. People don’t need reasons to procrastinate. But they do need reasons to act. If they think they might not be able to get the same deal tomorrow, then they’ll be more likely to buy right now.
    
6. Repeat and summarise. Repetition reinforces your message, so don’t be afraid to say things more than once. And if your copy has got someone 90% convinced, they might just need a summary of the salient points to make them press that ‘buy’ button.

Those are my recommendations. Do you have any of your own? Leave a comment and let us know.

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1. Define the objective of each page
Why does that particular page exist? Is it to provide information to encourage the visitor to enter the order process, is it to capture a prospect’s details for future communications…

By defining the role of a page on the site, you can either tighten up a page’s content/ design to pull more visitors through the conversion funnel, or prune the unnecessary ‘filler’ pages that distract from your site’s ultimate goal.

2. Install web analytics software
With out hard data about your site’s performance at every level, you can’t identify what is working and what is failing. Once the preserve of large companies, good web analytics software is now available free and easy to install in the form of Google Analytics.

3. Clear call to action
At every stage make it blindingly clear what you want the visitor to do next and how they do it. For example, if they have to fill in contact details to get a free gift, then make that form the clear focus of the page, and remove any distractions that may grab their attention and draw them away.

4. All killer no filler!
Don’t write for the sake of it, as more often than not people simply won’t read it. You may think that paragraph after paragraph of text makes your site look respectable or authoritative; in fact most people’s eyes go directly to content such as product features, lists or links.

Keep your page’s opening text simple and answer two questions for the visitor, what the page is about and why they should read it.

5. Ask for visitor/ customer feedback
Every time some one visits they are essentially testing the design of your site and are in a much better position to provide a critique about their experiences than you are. Once they get to the end ask them some simple questions about how they found navigating the site, and for ideas on how to improve it.

6. Act on the information!
This might sound obvious but you would be amazed how often lots of great information can be collected and then never used, as if the exercise of getting it was enough. For example, now you know that product page has a higher than normal bounce rate than the other product pages, or you can see people are dropping out at a particularly text heavy page, start investigating why and make the necessary changes.

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1. I must be ranked #1 on Google
Getting ranked at the top is certainly something to aspire to but it is by no means a measure of failure if you are not. Every site will have a list of dozens if not hundreds of keywords that drive traffic to their site, some very broad such as “sport shoes” and others very specific such as “Nike sport shoes Lancaster”. To be number one on the broad search queries is typically the hunting ground of medium to large companies.

2. Banners are a great sales tool
The era of traditional banners on websites as a direct sales tool is coming to an end. With banner blindness and our increasing awareness of advertising online leading to people asking why they should bother clicking on a banner, banner click through rates have fallen to their lowest levels since records began, currently at 0.18% (source: http://www.adtech.info/en/pr-07-10.html)

3. If I pay for advertising on Google it will help my organic ranking
Quite simply, no it won’t. Not one bit. Google keeps the two areas of its search engine very separate from one another. Being placed high (or low) in one has no effect on the other.

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