by Marelise da Silva | Feb 16, 2010 | General
If your shop is located in the back alleys of the city because of expensive rent prices at better, high foot traffic locations; you can expect to attract fewer customers than the guy up the road who has his business located on the Main Street. You might be selling a product or service at a competitive price that people need, however, because of your location you’re probably selling a lot less than what you could be. The exception would be your few regulars who know you and your store, and will come to you to buy your products/services because they know the guy on Main Street is ripping them off.
I’ll compare the above scenario to the Internet. If your website (shop) is visible on Google (the city) then you can expect to attract a lot of traffic (customers). The only difference here is that a successful Internet business isn’t going to incur exorbitant rent prices and will be able to compete with the so-called ‘bigger and better’ organisations on a level playing field. Just like the shop in the city and its few loyal customers, your website will attract low traffic volumes unless you put an Internet Marketing strategy into action.
Increasing your Internet Visibility
Start by conducting an analysis of your target market and website. If your goal is to sell products and services through your website then it needs to be in line with the audience you’re trying to reach. Ask yourself:
- Can I describe my target market?
- What are their habits?
- How do my current advertising efforts compare with what my audience is reading, watching, and listening to?
Your website’s visibility on major search engines like Google is affected by a combination of things, some of which includes SEO, design, content, user-friendliness, and your use of Social Media Marketing.
If you’re serious about making money from your website then you should consider hiring an Internet Marketing agency to help you get started and generate leads on the Internet.
Francois Muscat is an expert on Social Media and Internet Marketing. Download his whitepaper 2010: The New Ways to be Found Online and get better insight into increasing your Internet visibility.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 30, 2010 | General
Its great to see the different WSI communities around the world.
My friend Vishay Singh owns a WSI Production Center called AVAX. He is also a South African so it didn’t take long before we hit it off together.
I was staying over in Atlanta for a night before going on to San Antonio to do the Digital Marketing training and Vishay kindly offered to let stay over.
Nothing like a free lunch because he has arranged a morning of presentations for me with the WSI Atlanta Smurfs Club. Here’s the invite:
One thing about the WSI Franchise that is attractive to people is the learning opportunity as it keeps the brain stimulated.
If there are any WSI Internet Consultants in the Atlanta area, make sure you contact Vishay at info@avaxusa.com
by Francois Muscat | Jan 26, 2010 | General
It is not often that one looks forward to a new boss especially when it’s your wife. Many people do not know that Marianna has been working behind the scenes for over 6 years supporting me in all that I do. Her experience in corporate business combined with her Internet Marketing knowledge is just what we need for our business this year.
Marianna joins us officially on the 1st March 2010 and will be managing our business as we are set for some good growth this year.
We are officially launching our WSI Solution Centre in February and will be providing Online Marketing solutions to the WSI community.
You can follow Marianna on our blog as she will start posting articles soon.
Here she is:
Our team are really looking forward to working closely with Marianna.
So what do you think about a husband & wife team in business?
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 10, 2009 | General
Your business and website should have a visible personality. Given that fact, what more natural personality to have than your own?
Think of all the antiseptic business websites out there. You see the words on those sites but do you see who wrote them? Can you say anything about who they are, what motivates them, or if they are even a legitimate business? If your website is there to promote a small, relatively unknown business, you may have a problem reaching new customers.
As I mentioned before, the Web is absolutely saturated with people trying to make a quick buck. To be noticed among them, you need a well-established reputation. If you don’t have one yet, it’s time to get personal on your website.
Mentioning yourself by name is a good start. If your website represents a corporation, you may not feel comfortable talking about every employee by name. But it’s important to have a spokesperson of sorts. Who best represents your company and is the proverbial backbone? This could be just the person you need to act as your public face.
Pictures are good, too. Although it doesn’t really have much to do with business, people like to know there are human beings on the other side of the screen. Again, you may not want every employee or partner’s picture on your site, but there should be a few so that customers can match a face with the words. Do you have an office-front or even just a room devoted to your business? If you do (or even if you can fake it), pictures of your work area bring a subconscious air of credibility.
For an especially small or new business, you may want to get even more personal than that. Do you have a blog? If so, consider moving it to your business website. The more your website establishes you as a real human being with a family, ambitions, and character, the more comfortable people will feel contacting you for the first time. Not to mention, the less likely they will be to treat you with disrespect.
Even if your business exists solely on the Web, don’t be tempted to live and die by automated forms and email. You may not expect to do much business over the phone or via postal mail, but having a number and physical address will again make you seem more real and trustworthy. After all, if you don’t make all this public, customers might well think that you are hiding?
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 9, 2009 | General
As computers and the Internet have taken more important roles in the business world, those who came before have largely lamented the presence of technology. They will claim that it strives to remove the relationships between you and the customer and that it makes business even less personal than ever. I, however, argue that this is only because so many are not using these powerful tools correctly which is why 70% of all CRM projects fail.
There is no excuse for a web-based business to be considered cold and impersonal. Your business is living in an epic, border-less world economy where customers are not hindered by geography and time zones or even out of stock situations. Blogs such as this one, message boards and other forms of online communities including the proliferation of popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo and YouTube allow you to interact with customers from anywhere in the world at any time. Even when you aren’t there, your presence is felt thanks to your ‘hopefully’ interactive website providing the ability to communicate or obtain information as well as old posts and replies that help to sell your business even while you sleep.
More importantly, customers can interact freely on an online community. Unlike many conventional businesses, customers aren’t influenced by location and the odds of a potential customer and a previous customer ever crossing paths is quite slim. Your interactions with customers on your website are there for the world to see. When you are helpful and receive customer thanks and praise, visitors notice it. It is important to allow customers to post testimonials and you should be constantly asking for feedback on your products or services. Every time someone sees these interactions or gets responses directly from other customers, you’ve helped to win over new customers without having to spend a cent on advertising.
Another way to cultivate word of mouth is to make use of ‘customer get customer offers available to your current customers. The way these work is usually that for every new customer that someone brings in, he or she would then receive a discount or a share of the profits from that new customer. This sort of program could be applied to just about any goods or services delivered in an automated fashion and provide you with quality word of mouth advertising at minimal costs – especially since you don’t pay anything out until you’ve already turned a profit.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 4, 2009 | General
If your website suddenly lost all rankings on Google it was once listed for, you might have been blacklisted (sandboxed) as a spammer by Google. Not to worry and panic. There are steps you can follow to get your website restored. Google and other search engines usually penalizes websites that follow black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO usually includes link farms, paid links and selling text ads. If you fix all the problems on your website (removing all the black hat SEO stuff), chances are good that you can submit a Google Reconsideration Request through to them to get your website listed again.
View below a YouTube video by Google where they explain the steps for “requesting reconsideration using Google webmaster tools”.
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Check for access issues
On the overview page once you have logged into Google Webmaster Tools and selected a domain, you can view the last date that the Googlebot successfully spidered your website. On this page you can also view any crawling errors that the bot encountered while crawling the selected domain. These errors usually include pages not found, unreachable URL’s, timed out errors, URL restrictictions, xml sitemap errors, restrictions by the robots.txt file and HTTP errors.
Check for messages
Check on the message center of your Google Webmaster Tools account for any messages Google has sent you regarding the errors of your website.
Google Webmasters Guidelines
If there’s no messages regarding your website and no errors on the overview page, have a look at the Webmaster Guidelines by Google to see if your site is or has at some point been in violation with their guidelines.
Fix your website
If your website is in violation with their guidelines as explained above, make the necessary fixes on your website so that it falls within their Webmaster Guidelines.
Submit a reconsideration request
Once logged in to your Webmaster Tools account click on tools, “Request Consideration”. Explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it. You will receive a message in the Message Center confirming that Google received your request.
