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Website marketing and website conversion are key pieces in having a website. Too often, we expect having a website will automatically mean I get more clients and more sales. That can easily happen, but the website needs to be a part of an overall marketing plan. Let’s review what a website will do and not do for us.

What a Website Will Do

Save time and money in answering miscellaneous questions

A website is a great place to refer people to for general questions. What do you offer? What are your hours? Where are you located? How do I sign up for service? These questions can be answered on web pages that describe your products/services. You also build trust with your audience by sharing your story, your company’s history, money-saving or time-saving tips, etc. on your website. We like doing business with someone we can trust.

Give you a place to refer potential clients and current clients

A web site is a great way to educate your clients. If they want more information about Product X, you can refer them to the Product X webpage. If they want to understand your Service A better, you can refer them to Service A webpage. A website is the ideal place to give your audience more detail about your services and products. Again, you are also building trust by giving them a place to research and digest this information at their leisure.

Gives you a larger audience

A website is seen around the world. Your audience suddenly becomes much larger. This is great if you are not location specific. If you are a retail business, it may seem that this isn’t necessary, yet in this age of technology, someone in another state or country can easily refer a friend or family member that is local to your business because they found you on the internet.

What A Website Doesn’t Do

Automatically brings in more clients

Although the end result may be more clients, a website doesn’t guarantee more clients. A website needs to fit in with your overall marketing plan. Offline marketing needs to promote your website. Your website needs to be on your business card, invoices, brochures, flyers, purchase orders, etc. Include social media as a part of your marketing plan. Be creative in how to get people to visit your site.

With millions of websites, your site is a small fish in a big pond. There are additional steps necessary for your website to perform well in search engine results. The going rate for search engine optimization is $300/month, often with a minimum of 12-24 months. (Onward! Studios is looking into cost savings options for this.)

Automatically increase sales

This goes along with the previous section. In takes a number of ‘touches’ before someone will buy from you. This is similar to traditional marketing. They may need to see your ad 7 times before they buy from you. It’s true with a website, too. The beauty of the website is that it’s there for their preview whenever they want. If this is combined with an effective marketing plan, you consistently provide the necessary touches to keep your company in front of your potential client.

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SEO is huge. It’s probably the most popular question among my clients. How do I better search engine optimization? How can I get my site on the first page of Google? Or in the first spot?

First, let’s address the First Spot vs the First page.

You goal should be the first page – within the top 5-7. Studies show that spot #4 often get more clicks than spot #1. Being #1 isn’t that important. Being in the top 5-7 is. Very few times will a visitor click to the 2nd page of results. Your first goal is to get to the first page. The second goal is to get into the top 5-7 spots.

Social Media

As much as I don’t like jumping on bandwagons, it’s necessary to jump on this one. The most popular options are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google+

You don’t necessarily need to be on all of these, but be active in at least one of them, and semi-active on 1 or 2 others, if possible. The more active the better. There are also techniques to use within each social media platform to help your search engine results. That’s for another post. For now, at least start using 1 or 2 of these platforms.

Regular Updates to Site

Search engines don’t like static sites. They want consistent regular updates. Find ways to regularly update your site.

• Highlight a client
• Do a promotion
• List events
• Show employee of the month
• Surveys
• Polls
• Blog (see below)

Blog

Blogging has so many benefits. Not only does it get you higher in search engine results, it gives you credibility and a platform. It is one way to regularly update your site. Blogging is also a great way to give your visitors/clients valuable information.

Optimize your Site

There is too much information pertaining to this to cover this in detail. I wrote a post for WPMayor that covers this in more detail. It will be published on May 15th. But to give you a brief overview:

Much of this can be done by your web designer, but as the content provider and being more familiar with your industry than your web designer, it’s best that you provide your web designer with the following:

Keywords
What keywords do visitors use to find your site? In addition to providing the keywords for each page, provide content that uses these keywords towards the top of each page.

Page Descriptions
Use effective page descriptions. The page description shows up on the search results page, under the link. Include keywords within each page description.

The page description is behind the scenes. Check with your web designer about page descriptions on each page. It’s best to provide your web designer with page descriptions with the option of them tweaking for best search engine results.

Inbound Links/Backlinks

The more links back to your site, the better. Potential sites that may include a link back to your site:

• local chamber
• community groups
• economic development corporations
• etc.

Being listed in directory listings is also helpful. Your web designer can help with this process, if needed. Also, sharing links with clients, vendors, suppliers, etc. increases links back to your site. Commenting on other blogs is another way to get inbound links.

Analysis

Getting top search engine results is an ongoing process. Search engines are constantly fine tuning their algorithms. Google Analytics is a great tool to monitor how your website is performing. SEO companies specialize in monitoring this activity, interpreting the data, and keeping your site performing well.

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Although Paypal is a viable option for accepting online payments, there are scenarios where handling online payment on your own website is beneficial. You may consider doing this if:

• sales exceed $5000/month
• over 100 items are offered on your site
• need better tracking for SEO

Setting up your own process for online payments can be tedious and overwhelming. Yet, knowing what’s involved upfront will ease the process. Additional upfront fees are involved with setting up to accept online payments as well as ongoing monthly fees. These costs will be detailed below. We’ll also look at alternative options that make setting up this process much easier.

The items needed to set up your own process are:

• Internet Merchant Account (IMA)
• Payment Gateway
• SSL Certificate
• Approval from credit card processing companies

Internet Merchant Account

This is a special type of account  used to accept credit cards online. If you already accept credit cards in your business (which means you have a merchant account), contact your bank to let them know you want an online merchant account.

If you don’t accept credit cards yet, there are dedicated merchant account providers you can use. Your merchant account provider will give you the account details that are necessary to set up online processing. Costs associated with an Internet Merchant Account include 1-2% transaction fees. (compared to Paypal or Google Checkout at 3-5%)

Payment Gateway

Online transactions require a payment gateway. They may also be known as Payment Service Providers (PSP). They handle the pages on a website where customers submit their payment details. A payment gateway or PSP transfers customer card details and payment instructions to your bank (IMA). Authorize.net is one of the most popular payment gateways. Payment gateways usually have a set up fee ($99 for authorize.net), a monthly cost ($20), plus a transaction fee.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate allows for secure connections over the internet. A secure connection means all data is encrypted.  This is required for credit card transactions. A secure connection is indicated when the url address includes an ‘s’ after the http. For example, https://onwardstudios.com indicates a secure connection. (I never enter credit card information that does not have the ‘s’ in the URL address.) An SSL certificate can be purchased from most web hosting companies. Another common source is Verisign. Costs for an SSL certificate can run $30-$200/year.

Approval from Credit Card Companies

If this is the first time for accepting credit cards, you will need to apply for approval from the credit card companies. You may contact each credit card company individually, or use a Payment Processing Company (see below) to pool the application process. There is usually a monthly fee, along with transaction fees, from each credit card company to accept credit cards within your business.

Payment Processing Company

If you are ambitious and up for a challenge you can obtain each of these one-by-one. However, an easier option is to use a payment processing company. They will handle obtaining an internet merchant account, if needed, the payment gateway and the SSL certificate.  They will also take you through the steps in obtaining approval from each of the credit card companies to accept credit card charges. There are number of options available, including:

• Propay
• Paypoint

I have not used Paypoint. I have used Propay and found them to be very good to work with.

Shopping Carts

Most online shopping carts also offer services for setting up credit card online payments. Many will handle the IMA account, payment gateway, and SSL certificate. One example of this is BigCommerce. I am most familiar with BigCommerce, but there are certainly other options out there. Shopify is another common one. These are viable options if you have various products to offer.

Conclusion

Although setting up your own processing for accepting online payments can be overwhelming, going with someone like Propay or Paypoint or a shopping cart option makes it easier. Keep in mind the additional costs associated with accepting credit cards through your own account versus someone like Paypal. The Paypal fees (3-5%) are minimal compared to the fees associated with doing it yourself. However, if your scenario requires something other than Paypal, a Payment Processing Company makes the setup and management of accepting credit cards online much easier.

Onward! Studios can assist you in setting this up, if needed.

Last week we discussed how to set up your paypal account. This week let’s discuss how to manage your account.

When a paypal account is set up, it really gives you another account. It’s not your bank account, it is a paypal account. This paypal account is used for deposits (you sell something) and withdrawals (you buy something). Transactions done using paypal results in money being transferred in and out of this account. If you make a purchase and no money is in your paypal account, you will be prompted by Paypal to withdraw funds from your bank account or use a credit card.

When you sell a product or service using Paypal, the money from the transaction is placed in your paypal account, not your bank account. There is an additional step to transfer the balance in your Paypal account to your bank account. It is simple to do, but it is not an instant transfer. It can take up to several days for the money to show up in your bank account.

To transfer money from your paypal account to your bank account

It is assumed that you have already linked a bank account to your paypal account. To transfer funds from your paypal account to your bank account, sign into your account and select the “withdrawal’ tab.

Click on the account you want to transfer the money to, enter the amount to transfer and click submit.

Transfers from your paypal account to any bank account is free and can take up to 3 to 4 days.

You can also set up an option within your paypal account to have moeny automatically transferred to your bank account on a daily basis. There are pros and cons to do this. For more info, see this post on Tamebay.com: PayPal add ability to auto withdraw funds daily

What is your experience in managing your paypal account?

I’ve set up a number of clients to use Paypal to sell their product(s) online. To see a couple different examples, see Dry Creek Alpacas and Cowboy Church TV. In this post, let’s go over how to set up a paypal account.

Before we get started, let’s discuss why I recommend Paypal:

• easy to use
• quick integration with website
• no monthly charges (for most accounts)
• does not require online merchant account
• handles all processing fees

If you are just starting out online or our monthly sales will be minimal, Paypal is a great way to go to avoid initial setup fees and monthly fees associated with online credit card and payment processing. Once your online sales exceed a certain threshold, then you may want to explore other options. But, Paypal is a great option for starting out.

Requirements for paypal account:

• email address
• bank account info for your business (routing number and account number)

Go to paypal.com and choose signup.

Select a business account and select the Standard Option. The Standard option

• accepts credit cards and payments through paypal
• has no monthly charges
• allows you to send invoices, if desired

Fill out the form with the appropriate information.

After completing the signup process, Paypal will test the payment process by making two deposits of one or two pennies to make sure Paypal is able to communicate with your bank account.

If you are a non-profit organization, further paperwork will need to be sent to paypal to verify your non-profit status. A non-profit status gives you a break in the processing fees.

Paypal deducts a percentage from each transaction. The percentage is around 3-3.5% per transaction.

If you have more questions on how Paypal works preview this video.