Email me direct:
Tel: +27 12 331-0921
Ms Moneybags...
..Will she find you?
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Email me direct: Tel: +27 12 331-0921 |
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Ms Moneybags... ..Will she find you? | ||
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Your web site must find and bring new customers. Most business web sites fail dismally! To attract visitors, two things are essential:
Yes, you know that your small business web site should bring targeted, ready to buy visitors to your business from across the globe and from around the corner! You took the trouble to get a web site, you spent a lot of money and time on it to get it just right, now you sit back contented, and wait for your customers to arrive in droves. Sadly, the reality is this: You wait and wait, but besides a few nibbles that really excites you, nothing further happens, ... not ever! If you've ever asked yourself "Hey! what is wrong? Why doesn't my web site attract visitors or bring customers? After all the hype, why, oh why doesn't it work? Why is it costing me money rather than making money?" This page will suggest things which could've gone wrong and how to fix them. On this web site you get some guidelines, as well as emergency measures and quick fixes you can implement on your web site. (Many of these fixes you can do yourself!). Once you know what problems to look for, where to look for solutions, and who to believe and trust in this virtual sea of 'over-hyped trash', it will be plain sailing and you will be building your business success, and your web site, with great confidence. You may find this hard to believe at first, but I sell nothing, NOT A SINGLE THING. on this web site! It is here purely as a service and to help you get your business going, or, if you already have a small business or a small to medium enterprise web site, to get your business web site working like clock-work and churning out a steady stream of money! What's up? Am I out of my little mind? How can this work? Surely its a scam? No, it isn't. That is my 'ugly mug' on the right at the top of the page. I give you my direct email address and telephone number as well, if you want to contact me. If you have any questions or comments, Please contact me! Here and there on this page and others, I have inserted links to further information and valuable resources. All of these links and resources have valuable services, information or other content to offer you for FREE. Some of them offer a service or product for sale. If I refer you there and you buy a service or product, I get a commission. This is called an Affiliate system. It is one of the easiest ways to make money, without having a product of your own, that there is! Mystery solved! If you want to know more about affiliate systems, Click this link. A personal note for you: On the right hand side top of the screen, there is another picture, (somewhat prettier, don't you think?), of a blond lady with a lot of money in her hand. I like to call her "Ms Moneybags". Maybe you want to call her "Mrs Best-Customer-Ever" or "Mrs Future Customer" or what-ever you want. She is your future customer, and she is looking for you. Actually, "Ms Money-bags" has a double-barreled name, because she is so very important. She has lots of money, and she is looking for a specific product or service. If you have the product or service she is looking for, she is almost begging to do business with you! Keep her picture firmly in your mind. To help you to keep her in mind, I have placed her face at the top of each page in this site. Without doubt she, and millions like her, her wants and needs, should be foremost in your mind, and in your business. She should be the "VIP" of your business and your web site, or to paraphrase a well known slogan "She is number One! I digress. But thinking of the pictures reminded me of how important Ms Moneybags is to my business. You should keep Ms Moneybags firmly in mind. Your customer is the most important person in your business! So Ms Money bags are looking for your business on the internet. Will she find you? Unfortunately, for more than 13 million of the 16,6 active web sites on the internet, or the web as it is called, the answer is an resounding NO! Only perhaps the top 3 million sites out of 16,6 million active sites world-wide, get a worthwhile amount of traffic and only perhaps the top 1 or 2 million web sites make enough money to show a profit. And, surprise surprise - the amount of money spend on a site, or the size of the corporation behind it, has very little bearing on the amount of traffic the web site gets or the profit it makes. This issue is discussed else-where. The main reason for this sordid state of affairs, is that people set up web sites with total disregard for and in complete ignorance of the nature of the medium, the sophistication of the audience, and the need to attract the search engines, and the speed with which all this changes. Some large companies are wasting millions of rands or dollars on web sites that operate at a loss, and that attracts only a oiddling amount of visitors, compared to their costs. Perhaps the large companies can afford this, but your small business cannot. For an in-depth discussion on finding the right keyword, on how to structure your web site to attract the search engines, and how to optimize or optimise your web site for a good search engine rating, and some search engine position tools and submit site web to search engine resources, click this link! The rest of the page you are on, assumes that you have already attracted your visitors, and discusses the non-search engine issues that effects the success of your web site as a marketing and money generating small business tool. For the purposes of of this page, you will assume that you are already getting enough visitors to your web site, if you haven't been there yet, click the link above, or select "Fix your traffic" from the drop-down menu. So you're getting a reasonable amount of traffic, lets say 200 visitors per day (you could do much better!) but lets stick to that figure for now. So, you are getting visitors, that's really nice, but like the little joke about the dog who caught the bus, "Do you know what to do with it?). After just having fought the continual battle for traffic to your web site, you now get caught up in a new skirmish: The battle of getting your visitors to delve deeper into your web site and not to hit the "return" or "back" button. There are a couple of components to this: To be attractive to your human visitors and to keep their interest, your web site must be:
Lets look at these aspects in a bit more detail:1. Fast loadingThe twin requirements of having a fast loading site and of attracting the search engines, (as you will see on "Fix your web site traffic", both leads us to less graphics and more text. Without very funny tricks such as invisible text, which will in any case get you ignored or banned at the search engines in the long run, a graphics only web site, or even a graphics rich, text poor website, will attract very little traffic from the search engines. On the contrary, there are many attractive and high traffic sites that are almost purely text, such as http://ananzi.co.za and http://yahoo.com .So, beware of a pages with lots of graphics and almost no text. Besides not atttracting the search engines, pages with lots of slow-loading graphics may lose you customers who aren't prepared to wait. Rather than the use of slow and inefficient graphics menus, or addresses, rather make use of the table trick, or if you have a office or shop, your address can be part of your local area keywords and tell people where you are. In my own experience graphics adresses and menu bars only create havoc and slow loading. Script menus solve many of these problems, but do remember to link your pages at the bottom with actual links or the search engine spiders won't find some of your pages. If this place the links in awkward spots, make them small and inconspicious. 2. Have no errors or dead linksIt goes, almost without saying that 'dead' or non-working links, and errors on your web site tends to chase away your customers. It simply isn't professional. A perpetual "under construction" sign on your web site gives a similar message. Although I dislike FrontPage, as it creates a lot of unnecessarry garbage, (extra tags) it got a very handy facility for showing off-site links and broken links. (Of course, if you use Site Build It! to make your pages, you cannot get internal dead or broken links. You still have to check your off-site links, however).3. An attractive designIt is difficult to describe in words what an attractive design for your web pages is. An attractive design will in general not have too many colours, or be difficult to read because of an intrusive background or unpleasant colour combinations. An attractive design won't be harsh on the eye, or contain inconsistencies, be overly-cute or pretentious, or try to create an phony naturalistic or whatever look, or have obvious technical imperfections.You should also check your web site and pages on various browsers and at various screen solutions. Especially if you do your coding by hand, it is very easy to create something which appears to be ok in one browser, but which bombs out in another browser. 4. A Professional lookAs difficult as it is to describe an attractive design, it is even more difficult to tell you what a professional look is. You yourself, often look at a web page and think to yourself "this web site looks a bit amateurish". After doing only a bit of surfing, one can also often distinguish between different levels of expertise in the design and construction of the web site.Does your own web site look professional? If you want an answer to that question, ask an experienced web master or surfer for an opinion. The importance of having a professional looking web site cannot be over-rated. In my considered opinion, it is much more important to have an professional looking web site, than to have an attractive design. Design issues differ from person to person, and from business to business, but to be effective, your web site must always look professional! You are serious about making a success of your home or small business online, or you wouldn't be reading this. I suggest you seriously consider the Site Build It suite of programs, comprehensive guidelines and blueprint books, and hosting and search engine submission and tracking services, from Ken Envoy. I call Site Build It (or SBI for short) a "suite" for lack of a better word for something this comprehensive. For the price that you would pay elsewhere, for a single component on its own, not an integrated package like this, you get a 600 page business blue-print to design and start your own business, and not some canned, "make money quick" scam, but the real dope about doing what you love and are good at, and turning it into a business. In a single easy to do package, you get integrated software for keyword evaluation, for doing market research, for evaluating your keywords, for constructing a professional web site, build to bring you new customers from the Search engines effective to attractdesigned to ton, hosting, submission to the search engines and tracking of your various marketing and advertising streams. In short, everything you need to build your buisness. The unsurpassed Site Build It system, which has helped me to make a reasonable success of my business in a short time, and which has also helped a disproportionate number of the successful businesses you will find on the search engines (over 500 000 of which 51% lies in the top 6%), now includes a 'top-of-the-line' forms construction and auto-responder follow-up system as well. Click this link to see how you can use Site Build It to build your business on the internet or to increase your traffic numbers! Now, just before you rush off, please help me with the little marketing experiment in the paragraph below:Marketing experiment!Now help me and answer this question without looking it up, just off the top of your mind: How much is 300 Canadian Dollar? If you answered "About R3000-00, that is the answer I expected!. You may be surprised to hear that you are very wrong. It is, at present, R1598.93 (as on 7 November 2003), which is about half of what you thought, and the good news is, it is still going down! You can verify the present rate for yourself at xe.com Universal Currency Converter. (Use the "back"-button of your browser to come back to this site!) Your mind is a wonderful (and creative!) creation of God, but sometimes, when you don't use your mind correctly or are simply too lazy to think, your mind supplies an answer which was valid more than a year ago, but which are no longer current. Now lets explore this figure of R1598.93 (for simplicity lets work with a round figure, lets call it R1600-00. Now lets assume that is a yearly cost. Lets re-work this to a per month cost R1600-00 / 12 = R 133.33. Now, before you go any further, firmly fix that figure in your mind R133-00 per month. Now click this link if you want to see how you can use Site Build It to build your business on the internet or to increase your traffic numbers! While we are talking about a "Professional" look, I have one further thought for you: There is just one thing that is likely to be more disastrous than doing your own business web site, and that is to let your cousins son or some other family member or a previous staff member staff member who recently did a FrontPage course, do it! Yes you will get it cheap, but yes, your results will most likely also be cheap. I would be highly surprised if you got any traffic! The crazy thing about all this is, that the web site you get may even look very pretty, and surprise, surprise, it may even look professional. With all the FrontPages and other site generators available, some with really good templates, it is easy to make something which looks good and even possibly looks professional on the surface. However, with no or little knowledge of marketing, and a propensity for using all the "cool" and "groovy" thing that were teached in the course, such as frames, it is not likely that such a new site will bring either business or visitors. You know the old say, "The proof of the pudding lies in the eating". The true value of a web site, and the final worth of an web site's design and construction doesn't lie in an esotheric "attractive design" or "professional look" but in a simple number: the number of visitors you get per month. We have a few other things to discuss, which are listed below. They will come later4. Build credibilityBesides a "professional" looking web site, there are a few other things one can do such to build credibility, such a using a photograph, giving full contact details etc.5. Inform and recommend rather than ...6. ... try to do a hard sell.You are welcome to select one of the links below for more information. Please pick the link which are most relevant to your own situation. All the links contains similar information, but each from a different perspective. Please click on the subject that interest you:Fix your web site.Fix your web site traffic. Start your web site. Fix your small business. Fix your small business marketing. Start your business. Copyright © 2001 H.A. Abbott (All Rights Reserved) Tel. (international): +27 12 331-0921 Fax. (international): +27 12 323-0321
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