When it comes to taking payments online, I’ve seen and heard a great deal of confusion among many business owners. This is understandable, given the large array of options in the marketplace. However, the process itself of taking payments online is actually very simple. In fact, it involves only three key items - one of which you likely already own. I’m referring here, of course, to a merchant account.

If you’re in business, it’s highly likely you already have a merchant account - some of which allow you to process payments from an online source; some of which don’t. You’ll need to check with your bank whether you can use your current merchant account for this purpose. Be sure also to ask what fees are involved with the process.

Following on from your merchant account, the second item you’ll need to get started with online payments is a payment gateway. A payment gateway processes credit card details and verifies or ‘oks’ payment from your customer’s credit card through to your merchant account. Which brings me to an important point - be sure to check that the payment gateway you select works with your mechant account. Consolidation in the marketplace means it’s highly likely that it will, but it’s always wise to check first. Better safe than sorry, as they say!

Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle - the shopping cart. The shopping cart controls inventory levels and captures orders along with customer details. Some of these details are passed onto the payment gateway in order for the transaction to be processed so, once again, you’ll need to ensure your shopping cart is compatible with your payment gateway.

Remember - three easy steps, but just be sure you select a shopping cart that works with your payment gateway and a payment gateway that, in turn, works with your merchant account. And that’s all there is to taking payments online! 

Of course, I’d be a bit flippant not to acknowledge that the devil lies in the detail - there are many different options to choose from within each of these three easy steps. So be sure to keep an eye out for my next blog posting when, in recognition of this, we’ll take a more in-depth look at shopping carts.

No need to take a second look – you read me correctly. Who cares about the hits to your website?

Not me, for one.

Please don’t tell me how well your website is doing, simply because it gets a large number of hits. In fact, don’t tell me about your hits at all. I’m not interested in knowing, because it simply doesn’t matter in a marketing sense.

On the other hand, if you want to tell me about the visits to your website, then we may well be onto something!

Without wanting to sound abrupt, the point I’m trying to make, in short, is that it’s the number of visits – not hits – that matters when attempting to gauge a website’s popularity.

But how do you distinguish between the two, I hear you ask…

A hit, by definition, is recorded whenever your web server takes just that – a hit. Whenever it has to do something, like load a web page, the process is represented by what we call a ‘hit’.

However, you need to bear in mind that, as I mentioned previously, a hit represents any time your web server has to complete a task. So while the loading of a web page may be registered as a hit, so too is the loading of every individual graphic, video, sound, flash image (and so on) on that page.

The point here is that one person visiting a web page can generate many hits, giving a ‘false’ impression of your website’s popularity.

So who would want this data? Well, IT workers – that’s who. Mainly because it’s important for them to know how many hits a web server can take (and is taking) over a given period. After all, when the number of hits gets closer to the maximum capacity the web server is able to handle, it’s time to upgrade.

But while hits may be useful for IT workers, they’re less so when it comes to marketing. This is why – if you want to measure, more accurately, the popularity of your website – your visitor count is more important. 

Why? Because visitors represent those individuals that are accessing (and, one would assume, engaging) with your website. Admittedly, visitors are only the numbers of individuals visiting your website – unless you start to account forunique visitors. 

This data is represented by the number of visitors that access your website during a given period. Most importantly, a unique visitor is counted only once; even if they access your website multiple times during the defined period. This gives you a better indication of how many (new) individuals have not only found their way to your website, but are actually using it.

So, the next time you want to see how many people are actually using your website, be sure to take a look at your visitor and unique visitor counts – not your hits.

In fact, for many, it’s a fundamental method for converting a prospect into a client. Yet, most of the time, this great presentation is left sitting somewhere on your computer; only working for your business when you get a chance to show it. Wouldn’t it be better to have it working its magic 24/7 to a worldwide audience?

In my most recent posts, I introduced the idea of how to use social media websites for video and photo sharing. Both of these tools (YouTube and flickr) can be extremely useful when attempting to get your message out to a wider audience. Today, I want to turn your attention to the PowerPoint equivalent called SlideShare.

In short, SlideShare is a website that not only allows you to upload and share your PowerPoint presentations online, but it also has the ability to add audio to your presentation, turning it into a webinar. SlideShare’s website is also a great reference point in its own right, given that - as you can imagine - it boasts a number of presentations on a diverse range of topics.

In many respects, using SlideShare is similar to using YouTube, and getting started is just as simple. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and then upload your presentation.

Uploading is a simple process: just select your presentation file on your computer. This will start the upload process. After the website has uploaded your file, you’ll be required to enter in some details about your presentation.

SlideShare requires a title for your presentation, some tags (these are to help users find your presentation) and a description to inform users of the SlideShare site as to what your presentation is about. During this process, you can select whether you want your presentation to be viewable by everyone or to keep it private. Additionally, you’ll need to select the correct category for your presentation. It’s important to fill in these fields correctly so users can find your work.

Once your presentation is uploaded, you can then embed it into your website - just like I have with the one you see below.

To do this is as simple as cutting and pasting the embed code into your web page’s html code. This will not only provide you with the benefit of presentations on your own website, but will also give you the added bonus of having a hook into a popular social media website.

You might remember that, in a previous blog posting, I discussed the option of using YouTube to provide a hosting platform for your business videos, which could then be embedded into your own website. In a similar vein, I want to turn your attention now to another popular web destination—this time, for the option of hosting your business photos.

The website I’m referring to, of course, is flickr (www.flickr.com)—a popular photo sharing website. Best yet, flickr is free and easy when it comes to signing up for an account.

Now, the reason I want to highlight this website is that I’ve noticed a number of clients/businesses really struggle with how to place pictures on their website in a user-friendly manner.

One of the great things about flickr, in this respect, is that not only will it provide exposure for your photos to the flickr user base, but it will additionally allow you to easily create what is known as a slideshow.

To create a slideshow, all you need to do is upload your product/business photos to the flickr website, create a grouping or set of your target pictures, and voila—you’re done! Sound simple enough?

Now, you might be thinking: “Well, great, I have a set of pictures on flickr. How’s that help my website?”

The answer is: flickr allows you to embed a slideshow into your own website, in much the same way as YouTube allows you to embed your videos. For example, take a look at the slideshow below:

This is a slideshow set up on flickr, of which I then cut and pasted the embed code into this blog posting. To find this code, once you’ve created it, watch your own slideshow on the flickr website, and click on the ‘share text’ option while doing so.

Flickr Embed

This will give you the appropriate code that you can then cut and paste into your own website’s HTML code to include your slideshow on your business website.

In my last post, we looked at how to upload a video onto You Tube and then use that very same video within your own website. Now I am going to show you how to brand a You Tube webpage so that it looks similar to your own website. That’s right—many users don’t realize that they can customize a You Tube channel for their business. I have provided three links below just to give you an idea of what can be done.

Link: www.youtube.com/Qantas

Link: www.youtube.com/australiasoutback

Link: www.youtube.com/WorldVisionStir

As you can see, these pages reflect the channel owner’s brand rather than You Tube’s brand.

So how did they do this? To achieve results like the above, you’ll need to be a part of YouTube’s advertising program. However, there is a great deal of customisation available to you for free.

Firstly, you need a You Tube account; don’t worry, they are free, but for the purpose of this mini tutorial, I am going to assume you already have an account set up. (If not, you should read my first posting regarding how to set up your own You Tube account.)

Sign into your account and then click on more, which can be found under the Accounts option at the top right-hand side of the webpage.

You Tube Account Option

This will bring you to the account webpage, where you will find many options that you should take the time to go through. In today’s posting, I am only going to focus on the key options for designing your own You Tube channel. This is primarily done with the options that fall under the heading of ‘My Channel’.

You Tube My Channel

So, the first element to address is the channel info section. Here, the most important options to address are:

URL (web address)
This gives you the ability to have the web address www.youtube.com/YourBusinessName.

Title
This is the title of your channel—again, name this the same as your business name for branding consistency.

Description
Here, you will want to give a description of your business using keywords, if you can.

Channel Tags
This is where you should list your keywords for people to find your services

And finally, you have the options to control whether you want users to be able to comment on your channel; you will need to decide this one for yourself.

You Tube Channel Info

Once you have addressed the options within the channel info section, you will want to move on to Personal Profile. There are a number of fields to fill in on this webpage, but the key ones you will want to address are:

Profile Picture
Here, you can upload a picture or company logo.

About Myself
Here, again, you will want to fill out information on your business using keywords if possible.

Website URL
This is where you can insert your own website’s URL, so this it is on your You Tube page.

You Tube Personal Profile

After addressing both the Channel info and Personal Profile sections, you will want to move on to Channel Design section. Here, you can customize what your You Tube webpage will look like. There are a number of options within this section—all having to do with customizing your You Tube page.

You Tube Channel Design

The page is set up so you really cannot break it or do anything wrong, so the best way to learn is to get in and try it. Just remember: whatever design you take on, make sure it is easy for users to read and to engage with. If you do create a custom You Tube page and you are an Australia business share it below.

You Tube Upload Details

Three options are made available to you during the upload phase:
1. broadcast options;
2. date and map options; and
3. sharing options.

The broadcast options allow you to control ‘viewership’ of your video. You can either share your video with the world or limit it to 25 select people. The limit option can be useful if you want to share a video with selected clients only or to allow selected staff access to an internal training video. Alternatively, if it’s a promotional video you’re looking to upload for your business, it’d be fair to assume that you may want to make it available to share with anyone.

You Tube Broadcast Options

The date and map options, on the other hand, allow you to select where the video was recorded and when. This feature won’t be all that important to a lot of businesses, but if you’re promoting a certain location—say, for tourism—you’ll want to spend the time to fill in this data.

You Tube Date and Map Options

The final option is the sharing option, where you can choose the level in which you allow users to respond to your video. This step is rather important, so spend the time to consider what selection will prove the best for your business purposes and intent.

You Tube's Sharing Options

Once your video is uploaded, you can embed the video into your own website like this:



The video you see above is one that I created earlier and uploaded to YouTube. To embed the video like this, I simply grabbed the embed code (which is clearly marked) from its YouTube page and inserted it into this web page’s code.

You Tube Embed Code

Now YouTube is hosting my video and paying any bandwidth costs associated with it—although, admittedly, as web hosting becomes less expensive and more feature-rich, this becomes less of an enviable benefit. The real benefit to your business of YouTube is its management of the complex issue of video-on-the-web, and also the exposure it provides you to YouTube’s massive audience.

If you want to know more, keep an eye out for my next blog posting, which will explore the issue of how you can customise a YouTube web page to look like your own for brand consistency.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that a high ranking in search engines isn’t important when clearly it is (in fact, saying otherwise would run counter to my previous post on tips to improve your website’s ranking). What concerns me, however, is the number of businesses that, in their obsession to maintain a high ranking, do so at the cost of improving their website.

The vast majority of websites I review through my work here at Austrade typically fail on one of the most important elements of any website – ie. the call to action.

A ‘call to action’ is what you want someone to do after they’ve read your content. The most common call to actions are ‘contact us’ or ‘click here’ to purchase. However, businesses shouldn’t be limited to these alone.

When casting a critical eye over your website, consider what your end objective is for the user. Is it to get them to contact you? Is it to get them to purchase something? Or do you want them to download a sales brochure or some other additional information?

You need to identify what your end goal is for the users of your website so that you can clearly tell them how to get there. Remember: if a user is on your website, it’s likely they’re trying to solve a problem. You need to provide the solution.

So, for example, when dealing with a client face-to-face, you go through a sales pitch. This might involve introducing yourself, outlining your offering, building confidence in your offering, and then closing the deal or transaction. How are you doing this online?

A call to action can help guide the user through your website and, in turn, through your sales pitch. Rule of thumb suggests you should have a call to action on every webpage. In my web travels, I’ve seen as many as six plus calls to action on an ‘About Us’ webpage (see example here) and none of them were out of place.

The call to action is especially important since, if you have visitors to your website, you already have a captured audience. Equally so, engaging with a search engine optimisation (SEO) program, you’re hopefully going to achieve a higher ranking for your website and, thus, attract more visitors to it. The question common to both scenarios is: how are you going to service these visitors/customers?

If you don’t have call to actions strategically placed around your website, it could become confusing for the user. The problem with that is it’s all too easy for them to hit the ‘back’ button and go to the number two website in their search results.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is commonly represented by a graphic that looks like this:

RSS Feed Icon

You’ll see it on any number of major websites, including this one (check the top or bottom right hand corners).

So what does an RSS feed do? Simply put, it pushes data out from your website to any web user that has subscribed to your information ‘feed’. The data it pushes out can be anything you want it to be. In the case of this blog, an RSS feed will tell subscribers when a new blog has been posted. Therein lies the benefit of an RSS feed. 

Rather then a web user having to constantly come back to your webpage to see if it’s been updated with new content, they’re able to subscribe to your RSS feed and be automatically updated when new and relevant information becomes available. This is great for me, for example, as it lets my readers know when I’ve published a new blog posting without the need for them to have to constantly come back to the website and check – which only the very dedicated will do. The same can be said for most websites.

RSS feeds can be applied in interesting ways. For example, an online shop might have multiple feeds such as the latest ‘news feed’, a ‘sales feed’ and ‘run out feed’. Each will only show information when new content is available. The benefits of a sales feed in this example are obvious: only people interested in your sales are going to subscribe, which means you can let those users know right away when you have a sale on.

Now, you might be saying, “what is the difference between this and e-mail?” On a superficial level, both can seem very similar. But don’t be confused – they’re not. Technically, an RSS feed is very different from email, but explanation of this is best left for another time. What you really need to know is that an RSS feed differs from email on two important levels: 1) it allows a user to subscribe and engage with your online content on their terms (much less intrusive than email); and 2) RSS feeds can be picked up by other websites syndicated across their network, which can give your content much broader reach than the customers in your address book alone.

The best way to understand RSS is to get in and give it a try. You may find that it not only enhances your website, but it might just make you more productive too!

While not every blog will generate that kind of traffic, clearly there are opportunities in this space. So what is a blog??

Well, you’re reading one right now. A blog is a website, usually maintained by an individual (in this case me), with regular entries of commentary on topics of interest or timeliness, descriptions of events, and/or other material such as graphics or video. A blog enables a reader to interact with the author by publishing reply posts below the blog entry.

So how can a blog aid business?

Typically, it can do this in a couple of ways: through promotion and/or community building. Which approach you take will largely depend on your business objectives and resourcing levels.

All websites should encourage ‘revisits’. Think of revisits as your repeat customer: the more often a user revisits your website, the more comfortable and familiar they will be with your business, and the more likely they will be to transact with you directly.

A blog helps to build revisits by offering regular entries of interest and a way for users to post their own opinions. Often, you’ll see users posting comments in reply to other users’ comments and suggestions. This can be an invaluable tool in gathering feedback and engaging with your customers.

However, running a blog yourself requires regular interesting content. Obviously, not everyone has the time or resources to maintain this.

That doesn’t mean you should miss out on the benefits that a blog can provide. As mentioned earlier, there are over 70 million blogs out in the marketplace, and many that already have a large number of readers.

Also, because blogs require ongoing content of interest for their readers, their authors are on a constant search for content. If you have some interesting news or a new product launch, you should consider contacting an industry-related blog and getting your offering in front of them. This will give your announcement exposure to a whole new market that may never have heard of you or your company.

Remember, however, if you take this approach, these are third party people. They may or may not like you or your product, so do your research well before contacting any blog authors.

Amongst our group of readers, has anyone had any success using blogs?

References:

Blog Numbers: The State of the Live Web, April 2007

Engadget Numbers: The Blogs of war: Engadget vs Gizmodo

Previously, we explored some high level pointers on how to help ensure your webpages rank well in search engines. Among these was the idea of receiving inbound links to your website. But how do you tell who is linking to your website so that you can further nurture these relationships?

If you go to the Yahoo search engine (www.yahoo.com) and, in its search box, type link:www.YOURWEBSITEADDRESS (for example, link:www.austrade.gov.au), you’ll be presented with all the inbound links to your website.

The best thing about this feature is you can use it on anyone’s website — including that of your competitors.

The second feature can be found in the Google search engine (www.google.com). When at Google, type site:www.YOURWEBSITEADDRESS (for example, site:www.austrade.gov.au). This will show you all the webpages on your website that can be viewed by Google.

It’s important to check that all your webpages are visible to Google. If they aren’t, they won’t be returned as a search result, which means nobody will be able to find them! If you do find any webpages that aren’t visible to Google, you’ll need to consult with your web developer and question why this is so.

Share any of your unique search engine tips here on our blog.