A few years back I embarked on a weight watchers diet. I was successful and lost 6 stone in just one year! During this year I became an expert in calories and weight watcher points. I noted that the “diet” versions of foods were not always the dieters best choice.
For example Special K – marketed as the choice for ladies who are watching their weight. The truth is, if you study the packet, it’s actually slightly more calorific than good old Cornflakes. It’s not a huge difference but was enough for me to opt for Cornflakes to start my day. But for Kelloggs, Special K was not about calories (although it would have been reckless for them to chocolate coat them). Special K was always about brand and marketing.
I was talking to a client a few weeks ago about her complimentary therapies. Claire offered a range of services at fixed prices. I suggested that she package them up to target a specific market – for example weddings, maternity, parties… etc. Claire was not immediately certain of my suggestion since on paper her treatments would be the same regardless of who was receiving them. However after a bit of creative thinking we looked at how to bundle treatments together and add some extra value.
Packaging up your products to target a smaller market will result in a product much easier to sell and easier to buy.
So how can you package up your products and services?
Business | 13.08.2010 11:09 | LEAVE COMMENT >>
There are so many ups and downs to running your own business, long days and hard decisions. It can be very easy to lose track of why you started it all in the first place.
For me, running my own business was borne out of love, passion and desire. On a practical level it also means that I am able to manage my work commitments and office around my own family.
So lets remember why we started this journey: love, passion and desire. Keep these thoughts close by and you will be forced to focus on what makes you tick: the projects that turn you on, your core skills and the type of customer you really want to attract. Stay faithful to this formula and you will succeed – because I say so!
Business | 5.08.2010 13:20 | LEAVE COMMENT >>
The concept behind BuyStudentArt is original: BuyStudentArt is an on-line art community where students can upload and sell their art to the public. Students are allowed to upload 5 pieces at a time to sell in different sizes formats and prices. Visitors to the site can browse or search for artwork and purchase on-line.
BuyStudentArt Actinic website – Home Page
BuyStudentArt Actinic website – Product Page
As a start-up business we had a fairly tight budget for this project. The graphic design was created by http://www.pellingdesign.co.uk who also worked with the client on their brief/specification/functionality.
In order to stay on budget we advised the client to make a small number of sacrifices to the desired functionality. In an ideal word the students would have their own secure admin area to manage their accounts, see stats & upload products. But we have kept things for phase 1 very simple. BuyStudentArt will have some manual processing of student accounts. The idea is that we can get the project up and running and revise the back end functionality in a later phase.
We like to phase many of our clients projects for a number of reasons:
- Start ups can test the market without massive initial investments
- Phasing allows investments to be made in-line with growth/return
- Project to go live sooner (and start earning money quicker!)
- Live user feedback will allow for better specification of future enhancements
The key to a successful phasing is identifying the core elements of a project that must be in place to launch. To ensure the best possible chances of success the look and feel of the website need to be spot on from the outset. It also goes without saying that it’s also really important that the site should be really well coded – skimp on this and you’ll miss out on all important visitors. Where you can make some cost savings without too much sacrifice is usually in the back end/processes. But it’s really important that you discuss these with your developer so that the site can be built to grow – you don’t want to have to start from scratch 12 months down the road.
Back to BuyStudentArt. This website has been built using Actinic v10. This powerful e-commerce platform includes a ton of brilliant features which we have been able to incorporate without reinventing the wheel. Chris is an experienced developer so has been able to dig deep into the core Actinic code to customize functionality to allow us to create a pixel perfect interpretation of the original design.
The site is not live yet, we have a few custom forms to add in and then we are ready to go!
Website Examples | 2.08.2010 15:17 | LEAVE COMMENT >>
There are lots of different reasons for starting a blog. But I will assume that you started yours: to drive traffic to your main website and to help with being found on Google. In this scenario integrating your blog with your main business website is absolutely the best way to go.
The key to a successful website is simplicity – everything needs to be really really easy to find and use. Place hurdles (no matter how small) in the way and you will lose visitors. So if you are writing 3 blogs a week, promoting your blog via twitter/facebook and eagerly checking your blog visitors stats – please please please consider integrating your blog with your main website. By this I mean that the main website menu should remain on all your blog pages.
Examples of blogs with an integrated main website menu
Integrated website/blog –
http://blog.very.co.uk/The alternative I often see are blogs with “click here to visit the website” links from the blog. The Integrated websites/blogs solution is superior for the following reasons:
- Simplicity. Your blog visitors will be just a single click away from all your important top level website pages: services, offers, contact, about us and main website information. The rule of thumb is that less clicks is better.
- Visibility. Your main website menu will be very easy to spot. No matter where you place a “visit website” link (or even a fancy graphic) people can and will miss it.
- Usability. Information is much easier for your visitors to find if people know that it is available. Why hide the most important links on your website?
- Engaging. You will be encouraging people to move more freely back and forth from the blog and website.
- Motivation. The “visit website”option is hardly motivating is it? Including a keyword rich menu is more likely to catch the attention of the visitor.
- On-site SEO. The website menu will naturally include keywords, including them on your blog pages will help with your on site SEO.
- Funnelling traffic. Using the “visit website” option is a massive wasted opportunity for potentially the largest source of inbound traffic to your website. The clicks won’t help towards your SEO unless they include keywords (like your menu).
- Consistency. One of the first lessons in user interface design is that consistency is key. If you visit a website and click on the blog link – you do not expect to be whisked away to a new website, pop up window or for the main menu to move/change/disappear. Integrating your main website menu is far less confusing.
To summarise: integrating your website with your blog will result in more visitors to your website.
Of course there will always be exceptions to this general rule. I am a big advocate of using the right solution for the job (and every business and on-line marketing campaign is different). But if you run a small business and want to use your blog to drive traffic to your main business website – I can’t think of a better way to set up the blog. Can you?
Integrating your blog does not have to be expensive. If you already have a website (with a design that you like) and hosting that can support a blog then this can usually be achieved by an experienced web developer in just a few hours.
Blogging | 1.08.2010 19:26 | LEAVE COMMENT >>
I must admit that this may sound odd since I am always preaching about why DIY websites just do not cut it (another post!). But I am a complete believer in DIY search engine optimisation.
SEO is effectively broken down into the following types of task
- Competitor & keyword research
- Updating your website (on site SEO)
- Monitoring
And the process goes on.
You can spend as much or as little time on SEO as you like. The more time you spend the better the results and the more skilled you’ll become. There are some HUGE benefits for small companies to SEO their own website(s)
- Budget. Initially there may be some costs involved, I would definitely recommend a good training course or mentor to ensure that you have a sound foundation of the process. And you may need to pay a professional to make some changes to your website (that you can then self maintain).
- Control. I outsourced SEO to an external company about 4 years ago. I paid the money and then they wanted FTP access to my site to make changes – I am a bit dubious about this, I didn’t really want people playing around with my website without understanding or reviewing the changes first. I’d invested a large amount of time on my wording and just couldn’t have a stranger changing it around!
- Realistic goals. If you are optimising your own website you will be forced to set realistic goals. You will soon realise that optimising is not all about getting a top stop on Google – hits mean very little if you do not convert them to paying customers.
- Font-line. Part of the process of optimising your website will involve searches on Google and looking at competitor websites. And this is good. It’s so important to be checking your completion and to be aware of change.
- Context. Fancy tools are not required to optimise a website – you can do it all by hand. It’s all very well receiving a report each month from your SEO company with your new Google position – but far better to do the search manually and see who is ahead of you. If the only people ahead are the major players like: wikipedia, yell.com, tesco or argos then you can pat yourself on the back. If your arch rival is ahead – then you’ll be inclined to take a peek at their website and see why.
DIY SEO is not without it’s issues. It will take time and you will want to ensure that you have a firm grounding in the process before you start. But once you get going I am certain that you will see lots of benefits including more customers!
I ran an SEO workshop yesterday with 6 fabulous business women. I had a great time and we covered some great topics. Here is some of the feedback
“Thank you so much for such an interesting and invaluable training session on SEO, your pitch was exactly right and I can’t wait to start using my knowledge!” – @katielevett
“I really enjoyed this SEO workshop – thank you so much” – @BojangleComms
“Lot’s of information, great support and endless knowledge” - @q5partners
“I just wanted to thank you for yesterdays SEO workshop. It was so informative and such great added value and support for your clients” Giselle -www.infocus.co.uk
If you would like some more information about how to DIY SEO then I would love to hear from you.
SEO | 21.07.2010 11:05 | 2 Comments
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