This week I’m pleased to include a guest post from Kat Prescott…

Plenty of news circulates over the amount of internet services available in Ireland and around the world, with 65% of the country already benefiting from broadband services. What you don’t often hear about is how our appetites are changing when it comes to what we’re doing online – until now that is.

According to research by Sky Ireland, consumer trends are showing distinct shifts as the ability to go online covers more of the country and becomes more autonomous. For those interested in targeting these markets more effectively using the latest information, here are some of the trends which Sky Broadband Ireland identified:

1. Email access

It may be a surprising first entry but the number of internet users accessing their emails is a market which is often foolishly overlooked. According to Sky Ireland, more than two fifths of those surveyed (44.2%) even log on to email accounts using portable devices so that they can check new messages whilst commuting to and from work.

Commuters have also swapped the traditional newspaper for online copies. According to the survey 51% of Irish commuters read the news online using their smartphone or tablet – changing the environment of local buses, trains and public transport permanently.

2. Social networking

An inclusion which was no doubt expected, social networking also featured highly on the to-do list of individuals using the internet whilst commuting. Just under half (49.4%) admit that they log on to social networks whilst travelling, emphasising just how important it has become to stay online throughout our day.

Social media networks have achieved increasing levels of popularity since their inception with even recruitment processes now taking social networking activities into account when hiring new employees.

Elsewhere in the business world, social seeding which publishes links to stories and online content via social platforms has also taken off, becoming a vital part of most modern business strategies which aim to make the most of current technologies and services. Digital brand awareness has also been pushed by social networks which now include almost as many individual users as they do companies, firms of organisations. The purpose of this is to extend influence and with so many people logging on whilst on the move, the benefits of getting online are more than evident.

3. Digital content

Not everything we do online occurs immediately though and the consumption of digital content in Ireland is claimed to make the most of the services at our disposal. Speaking on behalf of Sky Ireland and their research, Mark Anderson, their Director of Sales and Marketing, explained that many customers download content using their home broadband services and then watch it later, using their internet-enabled mobile devices to do so.

Commenting on the situation, Anderson explained that the brand expects “our digital diet [to] feature more media meshing as time goes on” and this means that live streaming and this ‘save it for later’ approach will be combined together to ensure customers have the best access to internet services.

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Digital appetites: what are consumers doing online? on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Is your WordPress website safe from hacks and attacks? “Brute Force” attacks on WordPress websites have made recent headlines. Make sure your website is secure.

The most recent release of WordPress has been downloaded over 17 million times. It’s one of the most widely used, if not THE most widely used, content management system for websites. Add to that the fact that many of the sites are fairly dormant, running on outdated versions of the application and managed by not so tech savvy users. So it’s not surprising that the application is frequently targeted by hackers and other malicious souls.

Why people hack and attack other people’s websites

Because they can You hear about really high profile sites being attacked to gain access to customers details, but why would these evil doers want from messing with your website? Some hackers just want to see what they can do or thrive on the notoriety. Sometimes they do it for a real ‘benefit’: adding code into your site that has links to other sites (“link injecting”) or to add phishing software to gain login or credit card detail.  They may want to use your site to run some of their activities from.

How these attacks effect you and your website

An attack may bring your site down which may cost you business as well as whatever cost to get back online again. In most cases these attacks are just a huge annoyance.  The effects may not be visible on your site, but you need to figure out how to clean up the mess.  There may be a financial cost to you to hire someone to clean up an problems.  If your site was used to host a link farm or other malicious content, it may effect your search engine rankings or you may get de-listed completely. If Google detects malware, it may flag your site in the search listings, warning people and you will probably lose visitors in that way.

How to Protect Your WordPress Website from being Hacked or Attacked

If you are uncomfortable doing most of the tasks listed below, I recommend that you hire an experienced web developer to manage your site to ensure that your WordPress installation, themes and plugins are up to date and secure. Most of these recommendations are do-able for a website owner with a minimum of technical ability, with a little bit of training and a routine in place.

Use a reliable web hosting company.  Sometimes the most popular and well known web hosting companies (Go Daddy, HostGator, etc.) are the ones most likely to be attacked themselves, so many developers avoid using them. Very small companies may not have the knowledge or facilities to protect their servers from attack. Ask other website owners who they use and if they have had any problems with their hosting.  Check the support forums on the hosting companies websites to see if there have been any issues in the past.  Ask your friends on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn if they can tell you who they recommend or who they would avoid.

Keep your software up to date.  Make sure that you update your WordPress, themes and plugins when available. Very often these updates are created because they have found a vulnerability and the update is a fix for it. In most cases, these updates only take the click of a button.  Occasionally you may have a problem after an update so you have to make sure you have back ups of your database and any other files that you can download again easily (themes, plugins, images, etc.). A good back-up plugin can help by automating this. I’ve used a number of backup plugins and have not been 100% happy with either. Click here to read a review of popular backup plugins for WordPress.

Only use reliable themes and plugins. There are a lot of free themes and plugins out there that are perfectly safe and updated when required to stay that way, but there are a number out there that have been created by inexperienced developers and haven’t been maintained to keep up with new versions of WordPress or for maximum security. Only use themes and plugins from the official WordPress Repository.

Delete any themes and plugins that you are not using. If you keep your admin area tidy, it will make it easier for you to keep what you are using updated; and also reduce what you need to check when you do have a problem. As noted above, outdated or insecure themes and plugins can be a gateway for attacks.

Ensure your admin account is secure. In the past the WordPress installation created a user with username ‘admin’ by default, making it unbelievably easy for attacks on that account. Now you can enter any username you like when installing the application, so DON’T make it ‘admin’ or anything like that.

Use strong passwords. Many of these attacks are by bots that keep trying to login using combinations of usernames and passwords (“brute force attacks”).  They run extremely quickly through combinations, so the more complex your password is, the less likely it will be worked out.  A combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and special characters is highly advised.  Do not include actual words.

Delete or downgrade any inactive users.  If your ex-webmaster or staff member still has an account, remove the account or at least reduce the Role to ‘subscriber’.  You may not be concerned about that person logging in and doing something, but any extra account like that could also be an opening for a hacker. When assigning roles to users, only assign the highest level role the person actually requires to limit the number of admin users, as a hacked admin account will cause the most damage to your site. Click here to read more about WordPress Roles & Capabilities.

A couple more techie tips:

Password Protect the WordPress login page. Everyone knows that the admin login for WordPress is “/wp-admin/” and that “/wp-admin/wp-login.php” is the login page; which makes both vulnerable to attacks.  If you ‘password protect’ both (either via your hosting control panel or through your .htaccess) you add a second layer of security.  Click here for a tutorial on adding password protection to your WordPress login. Some people also password protect other directories that hold scripts and other items that are often hacked.

Ensure that the ‘permissions’ for your directories and files is sufficient.  Some of the files/directories of your WordPress application need to be ‘writeable’ and most do not, so make sure that you have the permissions as tight as possible.  Click here to read more about WordPress and permissions. Some suggest moving your wp-config.php file as it contains important information about your installation and database.

Secure your database. Make sure that the username, logins and settings for your database are secure.

Secure your FTP application. If you use an FTP application to upload files to your site (you’d probably only do this if you were a web developer uploading installation files, etc.), add password protection to open the application.  Some attacks are on devices themselves and target applications that hold login information for various uses.  If they harvest your ftp logins, they can then access your site files.

For that matter, ensure that all of your devices (laptops, desktops, servers, mobiles, etc.) , network, WiFi, etc. are all completely secure.

Monitor your site via Google Webmaster Tools. This service now reports if it detects any malware on your site.  It doesn’t stop it, but the sooner you find out you’ve been hacked the better.  You will also get email notification, if you haven’t switched them off, if your WordPress application is very outdated. (Though you should know this from the alerts on your WordPress dashboard anyway!)

Click here for more advice from WordPress on securing your installation.

WordPress Plugins to Protect Your Site from Hacks and Attacks

I have not used any of these plugins, so cannot vouch for how well they work or how easy they are to install.  These are those I have looked at and plan to try out.

• Limit Login Attempts helps you from ‘brute force attacks’ where an application just tries over and over to log into your site.
• Bulletproof Security
• Wordfence Security
• MVIS Security Center looks like a great monitoring tool that sends alerts.
• Better WP Security
• Login Security Solution logs IP address, automatically logs out suspicious logins, sends alerts.

Also see these helpful compilations of WordPress Security Plugins:

• Hongkiat’s Hardening WordPress Security: 25 Essential Plugins + Tips
• Problogger’s 10-essential-wordpress-security-plugins-for-2013

Click here for advice from WordPress on what to do if you’ve been hacked.

Have you used any of these methods to secure your WordPress website?  

Do you have any other suggestions or recommendations for WordPress security?

Please leave a comment here and share.

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at WordPress Security Issues: Plugins & Actions to Protect Your Website from Hacks & Attacks on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

RSS Feed Icon

Are you looking for ways to get content ideas for your website, email newsletters and social media posts?

Are you sure that your own content is reaching as many people as possible?

RSS Feeds offer a great way for you to keep up with what’s going on in current events, your industry and on all topics relevant to your business across the web; providing a way to come up with great content ideas on a regular basis.

To get your own content ‘out there’, an RSS Feed for your own site and other online marketing channels is a great way to build your community and get your content included on other sites and included into search results very quickly.

So how come so many people don’t even know what RSS is?!

In my article “Web Content – 6 Free Tools to Generate Great Ideas (and All From Google)” I recommend Google Reader. In fact I’ve been recommending Google Reader to all my clients and in any courses or talks I do, on any element of online marketing, because content creation and coming up with ideas for content on a regular basis is important in getting visitors to your site and building community on all of your online marketing channels, especially social media.

Not too long ago, I read that Google was probably going to shut down Google Reader and many were forcasting the death of RSS, but it wasn’t until 13th March 2013 that Google confirmed that Google Reader will be retired on July 1st 2013.

I shouldn’t be surprised because the majority of the people I mention Google Reader to haven’t heard of it, and have no clue what an RSS feed is.

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS stands for ‘rich site summary’ or ‘really simple syndication’, depending on which source you follow. RSS is data generated from a website, as a ‘feed’, with the most recent content in a format, either. rss or .xml, so that this fresh content can be sent out to subscribers, search engines and applications to provide an aggregation of recently published articles.

RSS feeds have been commonly available on news sites and blogs for years, but are available on most sites these days as more and more sites are developed with content management systems (CMS), like WordPress or Joomla, that generate an RSS feed by default or using a standard add-on.

Subscribing to an RSS Feed

Many sites promote their RSS feeds with a link using either the RSS icon (see right; the icon may be other shapes or colours) or just the text “subscribe”. When you click on the link you can choose to subscribe via a number of applications such as feed readers (like Google Reader), news aggregators (like My Yahoo or NewsGator) or email. Some sites also allow you to subscribe to comments left on the site.

Subscribing to a site’s RSS Feed

Subscribing to an RSS Feed versus an Email Marketing (Mailing) List

Subscribing to an Email Marketing List NOT an RSS Feed

When you subscribe to an RSS feed via email, you are not subscribing to the site’s email marketing, or mailing, list.  You will get an email from the feed management application (more on that below), not the site owner, each time a new article is published on the site.  When you subscribe, or opt-in, to a site’s own mailing list, you will get emails from the site owner on whatever timescale they determine (often weekly or monthly), not necessarily each time new content is published. You can decide which type of subscription suits you best or you may subscribe to both.

Viewing RSS feeds in a Feed Reader or News Aggregator

My RSS Feed Categories in Feedly

Feed readers and news aggregators are applications that provide a way to view all of the feeds you subscribe to in one place.  You may choose to use a ‘desktop’ application, one you download and run on your device, or ‘web based’ that you use through your web browser (like Google Reader or Feedly). When you subscribe to a feed with one of these applications on your device, or as an extension to your favorite web browser, the subscription will be automatically added to the application (or perhaps after confirmation from you).

Many feed readers/aggregators have features so you can save, favorite or share the articles; keep track of what is read and unread; and mobile apps that sync with your desktop or web app so that you can use on the go. You can organize your subscriptions into categories to make it easier to scan through.  Some apps organize them for you based on the data it picks up from the feed.

Some aggregators will also integrate feeds of your social media channels if you prefer to view all in one place, rather than go from social media channel to channel. Flipboard is an app only for mobile devices (including tablets and some Kindles) where you can view your social media channels and feeds in one very easy and visually appealing way. (Google didn’t put much effort into Reader recently so had not kept up with its competitors in style and function.)

Other popular Feed Readers

• Feedly is my new feed reader of choice. There is a web based version and a mobile app and I use both extensively.  It syncs with Google Reader so easy to make the transition over.  I also use the Chrome browser extension so, if I find an interesting site as I browse, I can click to subscribe to it into my Feedly.
• FeedDemon is an favorite of many early fans of feed readers, but this Windows only app has an outdated look and feel.
• NewsBlur has free and premium services.
• I used to follow my most important sources via my personalised iGoogle page, but this is going to be retired in November 2013.
• You can add feeds to many social media dashboards, like Hootsuite or NetVibes.

RSS Feeds versus Social Media Feeds

You may be wondering, “Why would I need to subscribe to an RSS feed if you are already following a company/site on Twitter or Facebook, where they would post their newest content?” With a Feed reader you can view all of the most recent content in one place, not mixed in with other comments and posts by your friends, at the time you want to.  On social media channels the news feed moves along during the day and you will miss new content posted when you are not online. Most feed readers/aggregators have tools so that you can share the links on your social media channels. (See the Flipboard screenshot above.)

How You Can Provide an RSS Feed of Your Website

An RSS feed for your own site is the easiest way to get your newest content pushed out to search engines and other sites and social media channels as quickly, and easily, as possible.

If you are using any of the popular content management systems, like WordPress, your site will have an RSS feed by default.  The default feed is often very basic so you may want to use a feed management application, like Google’s Feedburner, which allows you to offer subscriptions via email, to show a formatted version of your feed on other sites, etc.

With the demise of Reader, many are wondering when Feedburner will be retired as well. Inactivity on the app’s blog and the fact that the stats provided for the app have been down for awhile, could be a sign that this will happen sooner rather than later. Click here for a list of alternatives to Feedburner. (I’ve not tried any, but will probably be checking these out myself shortly.)

If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed produced by default you may need a web developer to set one up for your or move to a  new or better content management system.

Other uses of RSS Feeds

• To import content into your site or an app, you can add a feed of news or other content from a relevant site.
• If you are providing great content on your website, other site owners may want to import your content to include on their sites or include in a Twitter or other sort of feed. Many organisations (trade organisations, chambers of commerce, regional bodies, etc.) include content from members’ own sites which is pulled in via feeds.
• Frustrated that Twitter didn’t have a ‘save for later’ button, I created a feed of my favorited tweets so that I can view later in Google Reader when I had more time to read full articles.
• The application I use for back-ups offers the ability to get notifications of the status of your back-ups via an RSS feed. Many apps offer various reports as RSS feeds.
• I set up a feed for the service notice posts for any application that is critical for work, like my CRM, that sends an email when there is a post, because I don’t want to chance missing the message in the business of my other feeds or social media posts.
• TwitterFeed is a great app to create a feed your new posts to your social media channels.  I am not usually a fan of autoposting, but I do feel this is a great tool, as long as you keep in mind how the posts will come out when setting this up.

Are you a fan of Google Reader, or
are you one of the many that had never heard of RSS until now?

Any recommendations for alternatives to Google Reader, or
interesting ways to use RSS differently?

Leave a comment below and tell us all about it!

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at RSS Feeds: The Most Powerful Online Marketing Tool You May Not Know About on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Are you paying out for online advertising and not getting significant results for your business?  Make sure you aren’t making these 3 common mistakes!

More and more businesses are turning to paid online advertising, most commonly Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising, for a number of reasons:

• Search engine optimization takes effort – and time and money, if you are using a professional SEO expert.
• Paid AdWords ads at the top of Google searches can overpower the organic (not paid for) results, which are pushed down on the page.
• Directories and other large sites are very hard to compete with in organic searches.  Even if you put in the effort, time and money — these businesses often have (or hire) a professional or team of professional online marketing experts and more money.
• Paid online advertising can give a boost to your results when you are waiting for your organic search engine optimization efforts to ‘kick in’.
• If you are having trouble targeting certain phrases organically, either due to lack of content or if you have a competitor that is very strong for those phrases, paid ads may give you results for these phrases.
• If you have a specific product, service or offer you want to push; paid online advertising is a good way to get it out there quickly.
• Getting relevant users to Like your Facebook Page is hard work!

I am NOT a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising expert.  Luckily my sites and clients’ sites do so well for organic searches that we’ve not had to do much online advertising, but because of some of the reasons outlined above, I have done some and I’ve helped a number of people recently with Facebook Advertising.

My experience as an online marketer, and especially in SEO, does give me some great insight into what works with paid advertising and I see people making three big mistakes that are causing them to waste a lot of money:

1. Not focusing on the transaction (aka goal) that they want to get a user to do via the ad.

2. Targeting too general an audience.

3. Using ad copy that is not relevant or specific to their audience. This could be because they are making mistake no. 2 noted above.

Don’t throw your online advertising money down the drain. Do not make these three mistakes and ensure your ads are focused and targeted.

Pick a specific action that you want a user to take after responding to your ad.

The most successful online marketing (or any marketing for that fact) is focused on the transaction that you want the user to take. Do you want the user to purchase a product, sign up for a course, call to make an appointment, join your mailing list, etc? If there are a number of transactions, you need to run a number of relevant ads.

Make sure that after a user clicks on the ad that he arrives on a page or post (whether on your site or Facebook Page, where it would be a tab or a post) where the user can get the information required to take the action and then immediately take this action. This is called a Landing Page (or post or tab, I guess) and brings the best results.  Don’t make them search for the information or how to buy or contact you, etc.

If you are doing Google AdWords advertising don’t run one ad for all of the keyphrases you’ve selected as relevant to your business. Organise the ads in relevant groups and have an ad specific to each group.  Make as many groups as needed to be targeted and focused.

You may only want to target what I call transactional phrases, phrases where the user is looking to make a transaction. For example: ‘buy sports watches online’ versus ‘sports watches’. These phrases will cost more per click but are much more likely to bring you a user that will buy rather than just browse.

You shouldn’t judge the effectiveness of your ads by how many clicks or visitors to your site you are getting; but by how many sales, bookings, mailing list sign-ups, etc. — results that actually mean a measureable value to your business. If you get sales worth $1,000 and you’ve paid $50 for ads to get those sales that’s a great result.  If you get 1,000 visitors to your site that haven’t purchased or contacted you and you’ve paid $50 for ads, you aren’t sure what value you’ve got from the ads.

Be careful if you are thinking of using paid advertising just to build brand awareness (unspecific traffic to your website or Facebook Page) — it’s an overly expensive and ineffective way to do this. If you are not being very specific with your advertising, make sure you are not paying much for it and carefully monitor the results you are getting, if any. Organic search and social media are much more cost effective for creating general brand awareness.

If you charge advertisers on your site by the amount of traffic or impressions your site gets, then you may consider this more general advertising to increase ‘hits’, but even then you’d find greater value for your advertisers, and therefore your own business, in getting more focused and targeted.

If you are using Facebook Advertising to increase Likes on your Page, you also need to watch that you are getting these Likes from the type of user that is going to then take the action that you are hoping to achieve from you Page.  You will get more measurable value from a Facebook Ad that goes to a relevant post or landing page on your Facebook Page or your website.

Target a very specific segment of your desired audience.

Unfortunately this ad is targeted to me because of my age

Using the sports watch example above, the user looking to buy a sports watch could be a sportsman himself or his wife looking to buy a watch for him, or a mother looking to purchase a watch for her sporty daughter’s birthday. The language in your ad and the audience it is shown to will determine the effectiveness of your ad.

If your ad is being shown to a very general audience, either because you are targeting very general keyphrases on AdWords or haven’t defined a more specific audience for Facebook Ads, you will not get the measureable value you need for best results.

 Use Ad Copy and Imagery that is specific to that segment of your target audience.

If your copy is too general it will not catch the attention of anyone, or it will get ‘wasted’ clicks from people that will realize they don’t want your product/service AFTER they get to your site/page – and you are charged for that click. If your ad copy speaks to the needs/wants/desires of a specific audience you will get more clicks that will result in a sale (or other action you are focusing on).

In the sports watch example, ad copy like “Sports Watches for Sale” is very general but “Manchester United Sports Watches: Get Yours Before The City Match” (if there’s a big rival match coming up)  is much more targeted.  On AdWords have it shown for Manchester United watches and Manchester United Sports Watches.  On Facebook have it shown to those that have Liked a Manchester United Page.

You may have a hard time relating my sports watch example to your own business, so give it a try yourself. Pick a product or service that has a measurable value, determine what you need the user to do to achieve that value (a sale, booking, sign-up, etc.) , determine the audience and make up an ad with relevant copy/imagery. Then pick another product, mix and repeat.

Always keep the following in mind with your ads.

In Google AdWords:

• target only relevant phrases;
• targeting transactional phrases will bring more specific, measurable results;
• use the Ad Groups to show different ads and ad copy (and imagery if included) to relevant phrases;
• select regional settings and channels to get very specific with your audience
• run as many different campaigns, ads, groups, channels, etc. as is necessary.

For Facebook Advertising:

• target only relevant audiences;
• set up different ads with different relevant copy (and imagery) to specific audiences;
• run as many different ads targeting specific audiences as id necessary.

Running a number of highly targeted ads takes more time and effort, but it will bring you a better return on your spending.

Don’t forget the other important selling points: call to action, speaking to a users problems/needs, etc., AND be sure to monitor the cost and results of your ads regularly and change your campaigns to improve.

FYI: not many people are doing Facebook Advertising well (I had a really hard time finding good examples, maybe because my location is set as Ireland and less would be targeting here), so if you ARE, you could really smash it!

Have you done any paid ads?
What results have you achieved?
Do you have any other techniques that have worked for you?

Leave a comment below and share with this community!

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Online Advertising: Three Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

This is the first of a series of video tutorials I am working on.
More on this new project to come soon.
Join E-Business.ie & be the first to hear all about it!

Today I look at how to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to choose a domain name for your website.   If you have used AdWords or have done some search engine optimization on your website you’d be familiar with the AdWords Keyword Tool, but as the tool is a great market research tool, I highly recommend using it to select a domain that contains popular keywords related to the topic of your website. (Please excuse the load background noise, but the content is worth it!)

If a keyword rich domain is not what you want for your website — you may want to choose a domain with your business name — do not despair. Having keywords in your domain is some benefit for search engine optimization, but if you do all other optimization, you shouldn’t lose out too much.

I use Blacknight.com to register my domains, but most domain registration websites will have a tool to check if a domain is available.

Leave a comment below and let me know how you get on
or if you have any questions!

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Using Google AdWords Keyword Tool to Choose a Domain Name for Your Website on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Looking for better results from your online marketing techniques?

You need to focus on how to increase website sales!

You can be on Twitter and Facebook 24/7, writing blog posts on a daily basis and building a large mailing list; but if your website is not optimized for sales, you will waste all your other internet marketing efforts.

There are a number of things you can easily do to increase sales on your website. Most are common sense and you’d think that any e-commerce website would already be doing these things, but very often these details are overlooked in the overall website development process.

15 things you can do to increase website sales — with examples of great online shopping sites that do it right:

• Clean up your Homepage
  Remove the waffle about how great you are and put your featured products or nice layout of the categories of products so that visitors can start shopping straight away.
• Clear the Path to Checkout
  Ensure that it is obvious to visitors how to make a purchase on your website.  A clever website design may be a talking point for you and your buddies; but if the visitor has to search at all for where to go to purchase, you are less likely to make a sale. If  you think that large ‘buy now’ type buttons are too commercial,  just find a design that suits, but is still clear and prominently placed.
  

  1800contacts.com highlights its easy order process all over its website
  — and check out the very ‘clean’ homepage!

• Remove Distractions
  Take away any elements on your website that may distract visitors from making a purchase.  Twitter feeds, lists of blog categories, blogrolls, etc. will on serve to take the visitor’s focus away from the ‘buy now’ and any distraction may mean that you lose the sale completely.
• Add More Payment Options
  People have very specific feelings about how they are comfortable to make payments online.  Some people love PayPal because they don’t have to get out their credit card for a purchase, while others are afraid that PayPal isn’t secure. If you only offer one type of online payment, you will lose sales from people that prefer other methods.
• Provide Next Day & Express Shipping Methods & Maybe Free Shipping
  If you don’t offer next day delivery options, you will lose out on sales to visitors that need the product quickly.  Many people shop online because they are caught for time and are looking for express shipping options.
  

  Oriental Trading, like most websites I reviewed, offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount.

• Ship to More Destinations
  Unless you are restricted by licenses or other trade laws, don’t limit the destinations you will ship to.  If you pass on the additional cost of postage, your profit will remain the same.
  

  Delighted to see that Macy’s now ships to Ireland!

• Use Great Images and Descriptions for Products
  A visitor can’t feel your products or see them in person.  High quality images and complete descriptions provide the next best thing and will more likely bring a sale without a need for additional information.
  

  Forever21 has a number of views of its products and detailed descriptions

• Cross Sell and UpSell
  Create packages of complimentary products or inclusive services (like training, support, maintenance, etc.) that the visitor can avail of at the time of initial purchase, rather than expecting customers to come back.  Most Shopping Cart applications have modules where you can show visitors what “users who bought this, also bought…” or let visitors “buy 3 for the price of 2″ and other techniques which can help to increase sales, as long as they don’t distract from the sale.
  

  Avon has always been a master at the cross sell and upsell!

• Don’t Require Registration
  Many visitors will decide not to buy from you if they are required to register for your website. Even though they may not need to enter more information to register than just to make a purchase, a more streamlined checkout process will bring more sales.
• Offer a Money Back Guarantee — & Make Returns Easy
  Many visitors think that it’s impossible or too difficult to return an item purchased online, but most online retailers find that offering a money back guarantee and having an easy way to make returns gives visitors confidence to purchase.
  

  FreshDirect has a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee — offering a credit or refund.

• Use ‘Live Chat’ as a Virtual Salesperson
  For a small monthly fee you can install a Live Chat application to your website so that visitors can get answers to questions straight away. In many cases a visitor is reluctant to ring, either out of inconvenience or fear of a hard sell; and if a visitor has to email and wait for a reply, the urge to purchase may pass.
  

  Nordstrom highlights its Live Chat facility.

• Communicate the “Pain that You Heal”
  Rather than just listing your products, tell and show visitors how buying the product will benefit them.
  

  VistaPrint highlighting visitors’ needs they provide a solution for: “Attract new customers and promote your business.”

• Highlight Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) & Benefits of Shopping Online
  Show visitors why they should buy from you rather than the other websites that sell similar products. Do you provide a wider range of sizes, unique products, free shipping, etc.? What sets you apart from your competitors? If there isn’t anything now, there should be!
  

  Keurig clearly states the benefits of shopping on their website.

• Meet Visitor Expectations
  Did the visitor come to your site expecting something else? Make sure that all the promoting you do off the website; social media posts and profiles, advertising (online and offline), email marketing, etc.; communicates properly what you are offering and leads the visitor directly to relevant information on the website. ‘Landing Pages’ meet two of my suggestions: no sidebars or navigation to distract visitors and specific information on the product that the visitors is looking for.
• Get & Maintain the Trust of Visitors
  Be very clear about what you are offering from when a visitor first enters your site.  Some sites use a tactic of withholding pricing or what is involved in purchase until just before checkout, but this turns off many online shoppers. Be clear from the start. Many savvy marketers do hold off on this information until checkout, so this must work in some cases; but you need to be sure that what you are offering is so attractive that it won’t damage your chances with the visitor.
  

  Netflix has links at bottom of page to “How it Works” & details of their free offer.

While all of these examples are e-commerce websites, many of these techniques can be used on sites that don’t have shopping carts and are offering services rather than products.

Do you have any techniques for increasing sales on your website
or more examples of great online shopping sites?

Please share by leaving a comment below!

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at How to Increase Website Sales on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

When you move a website in a way that will change the URLs of the pages, it is important to ensure that search engines and other traffic to your site can follow the old URLs to the new URLs or:

• visitors to your site, either through bookmarks or links on other sites, will find  broken links and probably leave your site;
• links set up to help with your search rankings will be broken and lose their value; and
• your pages themselves will lose out on any ranking they have on search engines.

There are a number of ways and reasons to move your site:

• If just moving to a new host, but keeping the domain and site exactly the same with no change in URLS you shouldn’t have any change in URLs and you shouldn’t have any issues with pages indexed by search engines or bookmarked by visitors.  To keep your rankings on search engines, ensure that there is no change to the spiders access with the new hosting.

• If moving to a new content management system (CMS) it is likely that the redeveloped site will have a different URL naming structure and this is when you have to take action to avoid a drop in rankings and visitors getting the dreaded “Not Found” error page.

• If rebranding and changing the domain of your site, it’s likely that you will want the old pages to redirect to the new domain.

• You may also decide to change the URLs of your pages to something more user or search engine friendly — i.e. www.yoursite.com/pages1.html to www.yoursite.com/move-a-website.html. The new name may be more search engine friendly, but you need to ensure that the search engines can follow the old url to the new url to keep any ranking you already have and to avoid dead links.

I find that most website owners do not consider these issues when deciding to move a site and that there are still a number of web developers that don’t know how to minimise the impact.

You can never be sure that such changes will not effect your search rankings, but there are a number of things you can do to get the best result possible:

• Even if using a new platform or CMS for your site, try to keep the URLs the same. This is an important consideration before chosing a new platform for your website.  In WordPress you can use ‘Permalinks’ to indicate how you want the URLS to be formed.  The normal page structure is www.yoursite.com/?p=64 but in the Permalinks settings you can change it to use a more search engine friendly structure, like www.yoursite.com/move-a website/.  There are plugins where you can customise the url to include “.html” (www.yoursite.com/move-a-website.html) so that you could have the URLs match your static site after the changeover. If there are a lot of pages on your site you’d probably want to hire a developer that can write a program that can take care of this for you, but there still may be a lot of inputting to do manually.

• Add “301 redirects” to your .htaccess file.  The .htaccess file sits in the root directory of your website and provides the server with information on your site, like passwords and how to handle file requests. In this file you can indicate with a file should redirect to another and also if the file has been removed permanently. A “301 Redirect” provides information that one url has permanently moved to a new url.
  • If you are using a CMS, like WordPress, there should be a plugin or add-on that will help you do this easily.  I use the Redirection plugin for my WordPress sites, but in the past manually added the code to the .htaccess file. Click here for step by step instructions on manually creating 301 redirects.
  • When using 301 redirections take care to do a few then check they are working properly to avoid redirections to the wrong location or a never ending loop of redirections that brings a your nowhere.
  • After your site is moved, use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to see if visitors are getting error pages and update your redirections acording.
  • If you have URLs on your existing site that are ranking well on Google, proper redirects will help to bring some of that value to the new URL. There is a question of how much of the value is passed to the new URL, but it’s definitely a great benefit to set up the redirects.
  • Don’t be tempted to redirect all the pages from the old site to the homepage of the new site alone.  It’s better for visitors and search engines if you redirect to the relevant page on the new site. If you weren’t using search engine friendly URLs on the old site, take this opportunity to use them on the new site.

• Create a great “404 Page Not Found” page in case visitors do still use an old URL.  Apologise and explain that you are in the process of moving the website.  Include a search box and/or a link to your site map so visitors can find what they were looking for more easily. You can also use this page to include links to the sales pages of your site to try to get better conversion.

• Use Google Webmaster Tools ”Change of Address” when you are moving from one domain to another. This needs to be done in addition to the 301 redirections to get the best result. You need to have the new site in place and verify ownership, before you can do this. Click here to learn more about Google Webmaster Tools.

• Contact all of the sites that have the old links to your site, notify them of the change and request that they update their links to your website. While you are at it, check if the link text used is the best for you — i.e. “Online Marketing by Ann Donnelly” vs “www.annonline.com” — and if not, ask them if they can update the link text to something more relevant while making that update.

• Promote and Advertise the new domain name (if that’s the case) through your usual marketing channels – online and offline – to be sure that people are aware of the change. Use it as a PR opportunity.

Please note that you should do ALL of these things together to get the best possible result. Only doing one of these will probably not do enough.

Don’t take down the old site until the old URLs are no longer showing on the internet. It can take a few months for search engines to pick up on these changes completely — picking up on new URLS and dropping old URLs — so plan accordingly.

Do you have any other techniques for getting best results when moving a site?
Do you have any tools that you use to help in this process.
Please share in the comments below.

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Move a Website and Keep Your Search Rankings & Traffic on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

In an earlier post, Timing is Everything in Online Marketing, I discuss how effective scheduling and planning can make or break your online marketing success.

Business owners, even those that are experienced online marketers, commonly fail in two main areas with scheduling and planning:

• NOT taking the time to make an online marketing plan and schedule activities in advance, and
• NOT having the patience to keep to their schedule and recognise that an online marketing plan is for the long term.

User friendly social media and content management systems for websites make online marketing look very easy – but to get success you need to develop some skill — and this takes time.

The fast pace and ‘real time’ nature of social media make it seem like you have to do everything quickly to keep up with the competition and be a part of the whirlwind.  This is the case with urgent announcements and breaking news, but not for regular articles and posts you are putting out there.  Unless what you are posting is time relevant or it is important that you get your message out there as quick as possible, don’t rush into posting at what may be a bad time.

What’s a bad time to release information on your online marketing channels?

• When your target market is not online.
• When there is a lot of other stronger posts competing for the attention of your target market.
• When your information may seem irrelevant or in bad taste to your target market.

Note that I relate all of these timings to your target market. The only time that is significant to your online marketing, is time that relates to your target market. It doesn’t matter if the only time you have to go on Twitter is at 6am when you first get up in the morning, unless that’s when your target market go on Twitter.

I have to admit, that many times I’ve lacked the necessary patience: when I’ve written a great post and I can’t wait to tell everyone about it or was afraid I’d be too busy or forget to post at the later time; so I know first hand how this comes about and the effect it can have on your online marketing.

What are the effects of releasing at a bad time?

• At the least, you will waste your time.
• If you are paying someone to do your online marketing or an application to do it yourself, then you are wasting money.
• At the worst, you will ruin your brand by annoying or offending your audience: by posting at the wrong time, too often or at a time that may make you look unprofessional or insensitive to the audience.
• You are not building on the long term success of your online marketing.

So how do you find the right time to release information on your online marketing channels?

There are no set times that suit ALL online marketing campaigns.  11am tea break may be when a lot of people go online and check personal emails – the some countries – but others don’t have a tea break, don’t hold traditional jobs or won’t have time to read a full article until they are home at night. You need to determine what is the best time for your specific audience.

• One of the most important parts of your online marketing plan is target market research.  This doesn’t have to be scientific, you can use common sense.  If you are targeting the average person, they will be awake from 7am-11pm. If you post between these times it is likely that they are asleep (doh!). If you are targeting Stay At Home Moms, when are they likely to have time to go online? If you are targeting different time zones, you need to adjust your activity to suit. The more you segment and pinpoint who your target market is, you can better determine the best time to post or send an email newsletter.
• Review the data you have: interactions you’ve had on your social media channels, website analytics, email marketing campaign reports, etc. Where there are trends of user activity in the past, there is likely to be activity in the future.  You usually cannot argue with real statistics.
• Even with your research and data, you still need to test to see when the best time is.  Post at different times and see what the reaction is.  Send your email marketing campaign in batches. Use the information from these tests to build on the information you have with your Target Market Research.

How do you fine tune your timing to get the result you are looking for?

• Keep an eye on seasonality and relevance.  Don’t try to sell umbrellas on a sunny day. But if you have the capability to jump on an opportunity, push that back inventory of umbrellas on a rainy day with a quick post “Don’t get caught in the rain next time!” with a good call to action.
• Give your audience time to respond — and give a clear deadline.  Too often I’ve received an email with a special offer that is time relevant, but the deadline is not mentioned until you get deep in the message.  I open it too late and am cross and frustrated — not in a way to think, “Oh, I must open their emails straight away next time,” but in a “Their emails are just a waste of time. I’m unsubscribing!” way. Why not put the deadline in the subject: “Today Only: Special Offer on Umbrellas. Next time, don’t get caught in the rain”.
• Balance putting your offer out with good time to respond versus putting it out too soon.  This will depend on the habits of your target market and the nature of your offer. People will need more time to consider a two week break, but may decide in a flash on a last minute weekend break.  In some countries it would be common practice to give people a couple of weeks to make a decision; whereas in Ireland, if you put something out there too soon, people will not react. Last minute offers can be appealing and give a sense of urgency to get shoppers to react, but don’t make all of your offers last minute or you may get caught short on sales.
• Favour your dedicated community (subscribers, members, those that ‘liked’ your Facebook Page, etc.) priority status and give them exclusive access to information before the general public.  Release information in a subscriber only email before posting to the Facebook Page and then on Twitter.
• Don’t panic if you don’t get instant results, especially if you are just starting with your campaigns.  It takes time to build your mailing list and followers on social media channels.  It takes time for people to make the decision to buy or sign up for your services. You need to determine what is the likely time frame and only start to get concerned when results are coming in more slowly than that. You may not get a lot of sales via the first email campaign you send out, but after a number of weekly mailshots you will start to hit at the right times.

What tools are there to help getting your timing right?

In addition to your analytics and reports from email marketing applications, there are a number of tools to help you keep your patience with your online marketing:

• Social media dashboards like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to create the entry to be posted at a time in the future.
• Google Calendar is good to put posting into your schedule.  You can also use my downloadable Internet Marketing Planners.
• Apps that determine best times for posting based on analysing past performance like Tweriod andCrowdBooster.

It may not be obvious at first but, with patience, in time you will see a more clear pattern of the best times to release new content to your website, post onto your social media channels and send your email marketing campaigns — all coordinated for the best results for your business.

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Online Marketing: Where Patience is Your Greatest Virtue on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Update: These websites are now off the market and are current being redeveloped as personal blogs on the area.

Check out West Cork Week and West Cork Directory.

These sites have a value for three main reasons:

• The longevity of the registration of the domains, going back to 2001 and 2002, carries weight in Google’s rankings.
• The sites achieve good rankings for searches related to ‘west cork’ and ‘cork’ due to the optimization of the sites.
• The monetization of the site through Google AdSense ads currently covers it’s domain & hosting annual costs and there is great potential for further monetization.

Ownership of these domains and sites can benefit your business in the following ways:

• If you have an existing west cork or cork website, proper redirection from these sites to yours can help boost traffic directly and pass existing Google ‘PageRank’ to your own site to help boost rankings.
• If you have a business or organisation that doesn’t already have a website, this can get you a head start, whether you use the site as is or redevelop on the domains.
• If you keep the sites and redevelop to bring up to date and maintain the site, the Google AdSense revenue could be significant. Without any effort, the sites are generating enough AdSense income to pay for the hosting and domain registration. Even if you completely redevelop the website, using these ‘aged’ domains will bring better results on search engines than a newly registered domain.

The value of the site is not down to the amount of traffic or earnings it generates now, as it is not maintained or promoted; but down to the potential to bring more value to your business or to start up as a new business.

Many people are still familiar with these sites and domains.  Many clients and others listed on these sites comment that they are still getting business via the listings.  One local plumber noted that his IR£10 investment in 2002 is still bringing phone calls and customers.

Keep in mind

• The existing value for search engine optimization will be lost if you make changes that don’t follow good search engine optimization (SEO) practices.
• The value of ‘aged’ websites is only one part of optimization, ongoing SEO good practices must be followed to maintain and improve results through search engines.
• As much of the future success of these sites depends on how you will manage the site in future and because there is no control over how Google and other search engines derive their search results and weight various factors; there is no guarantee of the results you will achieve.

Delivery of Product

Upon agreement of sale and payment received, the domain purchased will be transferred to your control and you will be given login details for the control panel of the related website to retrieve files if desired.  You will need to organize your own hosting and move/set-up the website within 30 days of transfer of the purchased domain as the original hosting account will be disabled and removed.

Background

I registered westcorkweek.com in January 2001, when I was starting out in web design and saw a need for a regional directory of events and activities.  Through the site I got to know a lot about the area and meet a lot of people that have become long term colleagues or friends.  In February 2002 I started west-cork-directory.com, a directory of businesses and organisations in the region.

Great effort went into gathering the content and setting up the sites, but as my web development business grew I didn’t have the time to maintain the site as needed to keep it up to date and interactive.

The sites are made mostly with static html, not database driven, as most sites today are; though both use server side includes to more easily update areas of the site. westcorkweek.com does use an old cgi/perl script to manage the events.

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at West Cork Websites & Domains for Sale on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.

Realistically, the majority of your mailing list is ambivalent about you and your product. They ignore your emails, maybe even thinking they will get back to read it later, but they don’t. That’s not great and you need to work on being more relevant, interesting and connected to improve your open rate; but “annoying” is the one thing that will turn that ambivalence into dislike and prompt the user to actually unsubscribe instead of ignore, or even worse to mark your message as spam or complain about you and get you banned from your email application.

4 Things You May Be Doing that Annoy Your Subscribers:

Obvious and/or Mis-Use of Personalization in your Email

“Hi Ann!” is probably okay, but “Hi   !”, “Hi First Name!” or “Hi Donnelly!” looks tacky and unprofessional.  If you aren’t sure that you have an accurate First Name field for all of your subscribers or can leave it out completely in those cases, don’t personalize here.  Even worse, down in your message you throw in something like “Well Ann, that’s why I’m sending this message to you.” It’s just creepy. Maybe for some it will make their egos soar and make them think you really care about them personally, but most email users are a bit more sophisticated than that.

Personalization can be helpful at times if done properly and is relevant and helpful.  I like a “You are subscribed with slkdjfasdfj@alksjflasdfj.com email address.” So I can better see how I subscribed.

Irrelevant Information in an Email

Sending a client or prospect irrelevant information may not just be silly and annoying, but could actually hurt your reputation and relationship pretty seriously. Aga sent me emails about their Queen’s Jubilee sale and offers of Union Jack designed linens. From my email address alone Aga wouldn’t have known that I was located in Ireland and not the UK. Some email marketing applications do pick up on location when someone subscribes or when they open a message, but there are a few reasons why this isn’t completely accurate to determine a persons ‘home’ country. I know that Aga is a very British company and I wasn’t offended by this mailing, but there are many cases where a UK company has sent emails like this (as well as posts on social media) that are publicly ridiculed — and it just comes over as being very unprofessional. When you are selling to people every little impression is important.

The most effective email marketing is completely relevant to the user, so gather information about your list that will be helpful to ensure you can segment your list and send only relevant content. You are better off with a small list that you know a lot about (and are really interested in you and your product/services) than with a massive list of people that don’t care, don’t open and are one click away from unsubscribing.

Sending the Same Message Over and Over

I just unsubscribed from the Amazon mailing list because since Christmas I’ve received the same email about International Shipping at least 10 times – really, I am not exaggerating.  Now I have a few Amazon accounts, so at first I put it down to that, but I kept getting these messages. Then I thought it was actually from someone phishing for my logins and only pretending to be Amazon, but the links all led back to the actual Amazon site. Yes, I could have just ignored the repeated messages, but I just got tired of seeing them and I’ve been trying to keep my Inbox tidy!

Take the time to maintain your list properly and make sure that there aren’t duplicate addresses or, if possible, duplicate people with different addresses. If you are sending different messages to different parts of your list, be very careful that you aren’t doubling (or tripling) up. If you resend a mailing by mistake do apologize at some point, but don’t send yet another message that may be annoying!

Failing to Give the User Suitable Mailing List Subscription Options

As noted above, when people subscribe include fields to gather information on their location, interests, etc.  If you want just a quick email only subscribe form, then include a link in your mailing asking people to provide more information ‘so we can provide the most relevant information for you.’ Most won’t do that, so try your best to get it up front or by other means.  If they do choose add relevant information, make sure the interface is easy, friendly and helpful in a way that will keep them on your list.

In the Amazon example above, I logged in to change my email preferences and there were two main options: “Do not send me marketing e-mail” or “Send me marketing e-mail from the following categories” followed by a list of  over 40 categories that were all ticked. At first I thought I would like emails about a couple of those categories, but I would have had to un-tick all the other categories.  ANNOYING!  I ticked the “Do not send…”

Always remember you only have a short period of time to influence your subscriber: whether he opens your message or not, if he unsubscribes or not; so it’s worth taking the time to plan your email marketing campaign and think through all of these items that can possibly ANNOY a subscriber. While you are at it, build in great things that will delight and build your relationship and sales!

The above article was originally published by Ann Donnelly at Email Marketing Mistakes – 4 Things That Will Annoy Users & Kill Your Mailing List on the site O'Mahony Donnelly E-Business.