I am a big fan of Interspire’s Email Marketer software.  This Australian-based company has just released a new subscription-based Software-as-a-Service shopping cart system called BigCommerce.  SaaS is the future of the web and the guys at Interspire have done a great job converting their existing product, Interspire Shopping Cart, into a SaaS offering.  I think that the product will be very successful because the product fills a bit of a niche in the market.  Here’s some more info…

BigCommerce is a hosted, fully managed ecommerce platform which includes everything you need to sell your products online. Interspire takes care of all the “tech stuff” so you can focus on growing your business. They make sure your online store is always up and running, they push new features to your store as soon as they’re ready to go and they’re just a phone call away if you have any questions.

There’s nothing to install, no hosting to buy, no servers to setup, no backups to worry about and no upgrades to install. Interspire takes care of everything so you can focus on growing your business with  BigCommerce.

Start by signing up for a 15 day free trial (no credit card required) so you can experience everything BigCommerce has to offer. The free trial is fully functional and the BigCommerce support portal includes a user guide and step-by-step training videos if you get stuck.

Sounds like a great way for small businesses to dip their toes into the world of e-commerce.

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I’ve recently started delivering training to small groups of website owners about how to take their websites to Number One on Google.  Here’s the presentation slides that I have been using:

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Firstly, what is a call to action? Well it is the action, response or activity you most want visitors to your website to take. You should have a desired call to action for every page on your website.

Depending on your site you may just want people to make contact with you (whether by email, contact form or phone), subscribe to your newsletter, buy something, download your free ebook or white paper or comment on your latest blog post.

If you have ever looked closely at your website statistics it is common for around 80% of visitors never to go past the front page or to abandon a website from the entrance page. So in other words … to find your website, arrive on any one of the pages and then leave without proceeding any further. Reasons for this may be they did not find what they were looking for, your message was not clear or your website did not prompt them to take action.

So here are some tips to motivate your website visitors out of inactivity!

Attract their attention
Visitors are busy and often in a hurry so your call to action needs to stand out and be immediately obvious. This often comes down to size, position and colour so you attract eyeballs! Depending on the real estate you have available make your call to action as large as possible with white space around. The best position is high up and towards the centre of the page. Choose a different colour to the rest of your content on the page and use images to help your message stand out.

Give a reason
Before visitors are likely to respond or take action they need some information. Your copy should be short but identify a need or problem and then provide the solution.

Tell them what you want them to do
Be specific and tell people the action you want them to take. Use words like “Call”, “Download”, “Subscribe”, “Register” or “Buy”.

Create urgency
Use language that creates a sense of urgency or offer an incentive. Use words like “now”, “for a limited time”, “offer expire s”, “free gift”, “free delivery” “try risk free” and “available for the first 100 subscribers”.

Make it easy
Make sure it is fast and easy for visitors to take your desired action otherwise they might abandon the transaction half way through. It is important to have as few steps as possible.

In Summary

1. Define a desire call to action for each page on your website

2. Measure results

3. Tweak and improve to achieve your desire outcomes

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One way to increase the findability of your website is to submit it to local directory websites.  Most directories offer a free listing service and it is relatively easy and quick to add your site.  I recommend doing this manually, rather than using one of the many auto-submission tools that are available on the market.

The benefits of listing with directories are twofold – not only is there the prospect of more visitors from the directory website itself, but your website may also receive a positive search engine optimisation effect from the inbound link, as the directories are normally well-established and respected by the search engines.

Consider adding your site to the following directories - note that some will try to ‘upsell’ you for a paid submission with greater benefits, but this is not mandatory (and in most cases, I suspect, not worth it):

http://www.yellowpages.com.au/awu_freeListing.do

http://www.hotfrog.com.au

http://www.aussieweb.com.au

http://www.truelocal.com.au

http://www.bigroo.com.au

http://www.dmoz.org - a difficult one to get into, but well worth trying due to the importance accorded to it by Google and others.

http://www.google.com/local/add - a very important one that will see your business plotted on Google Maps

http://www.webwombat.com.au/submit/index.htm

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Recently the Australian Domain Administrator (AuDA) changed its rules to permit the buying and selling of .AU domains.

Previously it was not legal to transfer .AU domains for a fee, the justification being that AuDA wanted to avoid the blatant cybersquatting and spiralling domain prices that have occurred in other unregulated markets.

Now, it is possible to trade .AU domains, albeit with some limitations - for example, you are not permitted to trade a domain until six months has lapsed from its time of registration.  The full guidelines can be found here:  http://www.auda.org.au/pdf/registrant-transfer.pdf

Over time I have accumulated a number of domain names that I had intended to develop, but have not got around to doing anything with.  Now that it is legal to sell them, I am going to consider putting them on http://www.netfleet.com.au/, a new trading platform which has been set up by Netregistry.

Whilst AuDA guidelines preclude the purchase of domain names purely for resale, I am sure that a small buy/sell industry will emerge, although not to the extent that we have seen with .COM domains, the trading of which is completely unregulated.

In the meantime, the loosening of the rules provides a good opportunity for netpreneurs to clean out their domain name portfolios.

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Do you use Google Analytics?

If you don’t, it is a free tool for tracking and improving how visitors are interacting with your website. To register you can visit www.google.com/analytics and set up a free account. Once you have set up an account you can add your website address as a profile you will then be provided with some code to place within your home page so that analytics can track what is happening and generate a series of reports.

Perhaps you already have an Analytics account but it collects such a large amount of data and reports (over 80 reports plus the ability to generate custom reports) you really just check the basic dashboard summary every now and then.

Here I explain just some of the useful features and data to help you make the most of Analytics to improve the effectiveness of your website:

Website Profiles
You can use a single analytics account to measure more than one website through adding multiple Website Profiles. This is useful if you have more than one domain name registered or you manage more than one website or blog.

Goals
Apart from just more traffic, you can set more specific online marketing goals and Analytics can help you measure these goals. For example: you may want to increase the number of visitors who complete a sale, subscribe to your newsletter, download your e-book or simply fill in the enquiry form on your site. Analytics lets you set these goals within your account, then provides the code to place on the relevant page to allow tracking and reporting of the results.

Benchmarking
The benchmarking feature allows you to get some idea of how your website data compares to other sites of a similar size or in a similar industry category.

Visitors
Apart from measuring the total number of visitors to your site you can also see how many pages each visitor is viewing, how long they are spending on your site and the number of new visitors versus returning visitors. If the main goal of your site is to attract new business then you’ll aim for the maximum number of new visitors but if you are trying to build a loyal subscriber base then you may want a higher percentage of returning visitors eg. on a blog.

Bounce rate
The bounce rate measures the number of single page only visitors. That means the number of visitors that left your site from the page they arrived on. If this percentage is high then your site doesn’t encourage people to look further, browse or take action. In this case, one action you could take is to look at the most common entrance page visitors arrive on, tweak this page to make improvements and then check whether your bounce rate is reduced.

Connection Speeds
If you are introducing large downloads such as video files to your site you might be interested to see the connection speeds of those visiting your site. For example: at the time of writing I was able to see that 4.47% of visitors to my website in the last month were on a dial-up internet connection!

Traffic sources
This group of reports can give you an overview of traffic to your site or more specific reports for Direct Traffic (that is someone who either typed in your web address or had it bookmarked), Search Engines, other Referring Sites or Adwords. This is particularly handy if you are working on your search engine optimisation, building up links with other websites or paying for online advertising.

Content
The content reports show which pages on your site are the most visited as well as the top entrance and exit pages. A common website problem is a large percentage of visitors arriving on the Home page and leaving without going any further. One of your goals might be to improve this by tweaking your home page to make it load faster, look neater and have clearer calls to action. If you are launching a new product or service you might add a new page to your site and then work to increase it’s popularity and the number of people arriving on this page.

Site Overlay
The Site Overlay feature opens a new window with your website shown inside and overlays data about the percentage of people that click on each active hyperlink. You can navigate your site as you normally would and see data for each page on your site. This is a really handy feature to see where you visitors are clicking.

Advanced Segmentation
This new feature allows you to split your data into segments to do more meaningful analysis. For example: you may be running a marketing campaign to increase sales from outside Australia. You can segment out all visits that resulted in a sale and were from outside Australia. You can also view data side by side on the same screen and compare it. So in this example we would be comparing conversions outside Australia against conversions inside Australia.

Adwords Integration
If you have an Adwords account, you can use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business and which ad campaigns are working best.

Once you get the hang of Analytics you can create custom reports to track what you need to. You can also customise the Dashboard so you can log in and see a summary of the stats you need to in one quick glance.

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Where possible, all direct mail marketing should contain some form of response device. A response device provides the recipient with a means of getting back in touch with you, either through a return mail coupon, website, email address, telephone number etc.

A response device is very useful because it allows you to acquire new business, to capture prospective client details, and it gives you an indication of whether your mail campaign has been successful or not.  Indeed, you can determine a response ratio if a response device is included in your communication.

Here are some tips for good response devices:

• Incentivising your prospect to respond is a good idea - eg entry in a competition, a free brochure will be mailed out
• Reduce the amount of work that the recipient must do to respond - eg. include a reply-paid envelope, pre-populate all known fields on the contact details coupon so that the prospect doesn’t need to fill them out
• Make the response device easy to find and apparent.
• Provide clear instructions and clear choices on the response device.
• Ensure that you capture the necessary information with your response device.
• Make sure that you response device is consistent with the creative attached to it.
• Include a closing date to instil ‘urgency’ in your prospect.

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The seminar covered a host of words that you should NEVER use in copywriting and words that are WEAK and shouldn’ t be used, where possible.

The source wasn’t attributed.

NEVER USE

• Access
• At this point in time
• Define
• Despite the fact that
• Due to
• Etc.
• The fact is
• For (instead of because)
• Frankly
• Has got/have got
• However
• I mean,
• Impact
• Importantly
• Indeed
• In terms of
• Meaningful
• Muchly (didn’t even know that was a real word myself!)
• Needs
• Prioritise
• Remember,
• Thusly (is that a word?)
• Utilise
• What’s more
• Wise
• You know

AVOID USING

• Available
• The fact that
• In fact,
• Feature
• One of the most
• Quality
• Receive
• Value

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The Direct Mail Seminar focused on a 15- point checklist for writing powerful copy from Drayton Bird.  The checklist is as follows:

1. Is there a letter?
2. Does it read like a letter?
3. Does it look like a letter?
4. Does it waffle?
5. Is it simple?
6. Does it use boring jargon?
7. Are there too many words?
8. Can you edit?
9. Is it active (not passive)?
10. Is it complete?
11. Are you worthy?
12. Is it warm and friendly?
13. Is there proof?
14. Does it ask for action?
15. Is it idiot-proof?

This is a useful checklist to run through prior to sending out those thousands of marketing letters.

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