After an individual answers this question, I encourage them to perform an exercise.  This exercise can be performed any time, any place but best done where they typically make decisions of this type.  I ask them to setup a camcorder and record the entire exercise so that we can review it together.

This exercise has absolutely no rules, no time limit and only a few simple steps:

1. Identify 3 products or services that you will likely purchase in the next 1-3 months
2. Using whatever resource you typically would, start your research today (e.g. phone, yellow pages, Internet, etc.)
3. Once you are done narrowing down your options for these 3 products or services, document your decision

That’s it!  It really is that simple.  Go ahead and do the exercise now.  Document your results and compare them to ours.  You’ll see that they’ll be exactly the same.

So, what were our results? What did these individuals learn? Out of 11 individuals who performed this exercise, 29 of 33 decisions started with a simple search on the Internet.  Within mere minutes the majority of decisions were narrowed down to between 2 or 3 options and some decisions were even completed.  In more than half of these cases, the products or services that these individuals were seeking were not sold online, but, the information that they found was still absolutely vital in helping them to make their decisions.

IMPORTANT
Even if you don’t sell products or services online, it is where
the majority of customers decisions are initiated.

Furthermore we learnt how narrow our attention span is and how critical it is to be able to find answers to our questions quickly and efficiently.  Most decisions resulted in a handful of options within a few minutes and were quickly narrowed down to 1 or 2 options within a few minutes more.  Each site visited was given an average of 27.7 seconds of attention to make its sales pitch and then the decision makers moved on.  We also noticed that any website that was not visually appealing or easy to use gave us a bad first impression and was closed within 7 seconds or less in all scenarios.What did we learn from reviewing the camera footage together?   We quickly learnt that the majority of decisions, even our own are made online.  We are both privileged to witness how vital first impressions really are.  We’re all taught not to judge a book by its cover, not to make a snap judgment but we all do it.  The Internet is just too convenient to move onto the next option, because, well… there’s always another option.  Worst of all, a bad first impression lasts a lot l0nger than a good one… possibly forever.

EXCEPTION
It’s actually better to have no website at all than to
have one that makes your business look bad.

Finally, in 30 of 33 decisions we also learnt that we only really considered the options from the first page of search results.  Only in 3 scenarios were the results on subsequent pages even considered.

The truth is that by watching yourself perform your own decision making, a cataclysmic transformation in the way that you think will occur. You will no longer question why your business needs a website.  You will quite literally now be questioning why you were questioning it before.  Not only that,  you will also understand how absolutely critical it is that your website is built with quality, care and an understanding that practically everyone makes snap judgments which significantly influence where they will obtain the products and services that they require and you’ll take action today.

I can already visualize the paper in front of you, it’s got three action items on it:

1. Get a website (get started)
2. Make sure it’s visually appealing and quick and easy to find information (get started)
3. Work towards getting on page 1 of search engine results (get started)

Good for you!  Now that you truly understand the power of the Internet and how it can quite literally be the difference between making a living and leading your industry, it’s time to get to work!  I don’t even need to say it because you’re already on your way to the start but in case you haven’t… get ready, get set, go!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Many of these businesses started out with brick and mortar locations and have since closed their physical presences as a result of higher revenues and profit margins from their online sales.  Unfortunately, many other businesses started to execute our mutually created game plan and then got busy and put it on the side burner.

What’s the result?  Their ability to grow their business, stay ahead of their competitors and truly reap the rewards of their competitive advantages has not yet been realized.  Ironically, many of these companies should be sitting in a far better situation today than they are, but, they continue to struggle because they’ve got caught up in the day-to-day operation of their business and put aside the most important activity that’s vital to any company’s long-term success – following a game plan.  We’ve all heard the old adage, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

So sit down and ask yourself honestly the following questions.  It’s time to see if you’re truly doing all that you can to ensure that your ecommerce business reaches its potential.  Focus on the reasons that you started your business to begin with and plan where you want to be in the next 5 years.  Now, ensure that you’re doing everything you can to get there.  Always push yourself a little bit harder, never accept the status quo and you’ll truly become a leader in your industry.

Here are the action items:

Make sure your site is built right!

• Categorize products and services by how your customers will search for them

Make sure you don’t miss out on sales because your site is more difficult to use than one of your competitors.  If you sell maps, and your customers are only interested in fishing maps and have to wade through all of your maps to find what they’re looking for, they may choose a competitor’s site where it’s easy to find what they’re looking for.

• Powerful search capabilities

Enabling your customers to search for products and services by options is tremendously valuable.  Depending on your products, the options are limitless (e.g. type of product, price range, sizes, style, what’s new, bundled deals, specials, clearance, etc.)

• Great customer service

Make it easy for your customers to ask questions, find answers and contact you.  Your customers are what keep you in business, ensure that they’re never left feeling like they’re on their own.  Display your phone number, email address, contact forms and frequently asked questions prominently on your ecommerce site.

Get traffic to your website

• Paid search engine marketing (SEM)

Ensure that you are purchasing paid search engine marketing services for your website.  If done right, targeted paid search engine marketing can be one of your best ROIs.  Even large, profitable companies are purchasing keywords, because they work (think Amazon.com)!  Learn more about search engine marketing

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Ensure that your website is optimized for search engine indexing.  This doesn’t mean just optimizing the titles, keywords, file names, alt tags, etc.  It means learning about your customers, studying what they search for and potentially changing the layout of your site to attract more targeted traffic via search engines.  Learn more about search engine optimization

• Partnering sites

Take some time every month to consider potential partnering websites that could help sell your services.  If you sell chocolate, partner with companies who sell flowers, coffee or gift baskets.  This is a tremendously easy, but effective way to increase your sales dramatically with very little ongoing work after the partnership agreement has been set up.

• Affiliate sales

The largest online retailers of products and services have affiliate programs that motivate complimentary businesses and online entrepreneurs to sell products and services of other companies.  Every sale that an affiliate makes results in earned commission.  Learn more about this approach at Commission Junction

Currency

• Local currency

If a significant percentage of sales are generated from one specific country, and you do not accept payments using their local currency, then consider addressing this.  When one of our US clients, who sold 30% of their products and services to clients in the UK, started accepting payments via their own local currency, sales skyrocketed by 50%+ within just a few months!

• If you ship internationally, accept US currency payments

If you sell internationally, make sure your customers can purchase using US dollars.  The fact of the matter is that the majority of the world are comfortable making purchases online using US dollars, however, if you sell in a currency less well known, even Canadian dollars, you will miss out on many international sales due to customer apprehension.

Shipping

• Provide shipping costs ASAP!

Provide clear shipping costs, as soon as possible.  If you make it tough for your customers to determine shipping costs, you risk losing them before they even try to checkout.

• Provide fair shipping prices

Make sure that you are providing the best shipping prices possible.  If you aren’t comparable to your competitors you will lose sales… and lots of them!

Warning: If you need to pad your shipping costs, you’re pricing your products or services wrong.  I’ve personally witnessed companies lose hundreds of sales because of overpriced shipping costs.  When you charge too much for shipping, you insult your customers.  It’s as simple as that.

• Free shipping incentives

Know your profit margins inside-out, upside-down and backwards.  Now find a way to offer free shipping incentives to your customers.  Whether that’s at $50, $100, $200 in sales or higher, offer it… even if only 1 in 10 times it results in a customer purchasing something additional, if you sell $1M a year, you’ve just added a cool crisp $100K of revenue on top of that!  Alternately, ignore this tip and throw three brand new vehicles out your window… because well… that’s what you’ll be leaving on the sidelines (but call me first, so I can pick up those cars that you toss out the window, thanks!).

Brokerage Fees and Customs

• Do your research related to both brokerage fees and customs

If there are one or two simple steps you can do to reduce the potential tax and customs burden on your customers; then do them.  You will create hundreds of loyal customers for life if you can avoid additional fees and beat out other would-be competitors.  For example, shipping via UPS from US to Canada results in a $10+ brokerage fee (and most times it’s $29+), if you ship the same product via USPS, 95%+ of the time you’ll avoid paying this hefty surcharge and their fees are much more reasonable.  This all boils down to research.  Take your time and do it, this could give you a significant advantage over your competitors.

Taxation 

• Make sure that your shopping cart is legal

Don’t charge tax on the products and services that you sell if you’re not legally entitled and/or obligated to do so.  Not only can this provide you with a significant benefit over competitors, especially on large ticket items, but it could also prevent costly fines as a result of a post-financial-audit that reveals illegal tax practices.  Believe me; the benefits outweigh the potential costs in this situation.  If done wrong, not only will you have to remit all tax dollars for the last 7 years, but you’ll also have to pay interest and fines in addition.  For more details, visit the Government of Canada’s Business Network, the Internal Revenue Service, or if your company is in another country, visit your government’s online resources.

Adding value

• Rate and comment on  your products and services

When a visitor is trying to decide on the best product to fit their needs, ratings and customer reviews often times helps seal the deal.  The majority of lost sales is a result of indecision; give your customers the tools that they need to decide immediately.  If a customer is undecided and walks away, you risk losing that sale to a competitor if they change their mind later.

• Collect testimonials

Collect testimonials.  When customers talk about how valuable a product or service of yours was, it helps other potential customers to visualize the potential benefits that they will receive.  Often times, this takes down the last decision barriers at the moment when the customer is trying to decide whether to buy or to walk.

Cross-sell

• Complimentary products and services

When a visitor is viewing a product or service on your site, make sure that the most popular complimentary products or services are also showcased.  Most large sites do this nowadays and for good reasons, when cross-selling is done right it can easily increase your online revenue by 20% or higher with very little additional expense.

• Extended warranties

Depending on if it makes sense for your business, consider offering extended warranties on your products or services.  Not only can this result in additional sales as a result of increased customer trust and loyalty, but it can also be a revenue stream on its own when done right.

Up-sell

• Recommendations

Based upon a customer’s historical and/or current items in their cart, it’s valuable to provide recommended products and services that may be of interest or compliment their purchase.  This is an easy way to offer valuable advice to your customers while generating additional sales for your business at the same time.

• Others also bought

Showing products that other customers purchased at the same time is an easy way to generate additional sales and provide tremendous value to your customers.  Consider a real estate investor purchasing his/her latest book on multiplex investing, he/she may also benefit from a real estate tax law book.  This feature is also infinitely useful on websites that are social media integrated, when a customer sees that his family, friends or peers have purchased a product; they will be more inclined to purchase it as well.

• Spend only $10  more to qualify for free shipping

Simply put, everyone loves feeling appreciated.  By offering free shipping to your customers who make a larger purchase in your products and services, it immediately creates a sense of appreciation and helps to increase customer loyalty.  Companies that go the extra mile build highly loyal customers.  This is one of the key tools that have helped propel Amazon.com to the ecommerce giant of the Internet that it is today!  It’s estimated that their free shipping incentives have resulted in doubling the speed at which their business grows consistently over the last several years!

Communicate

• Email

If you offer email support, ensure that your processes are setup optimally so that all inquiries are responded to within the first 24 hours.  You won’t believe what a difference this can impact your bottom line!  Some companies have reported to me doubling their sales once they implemented this policy!

•  Newsletters

Deliver newsletters regularly.  If you keep your company in your customers’ minds, they are 300%+ more likely to consider your products and services again when the time comes to buy something you have to offer.

• Social media

No magic here, social media is an extension to traditional marketing.  Why the buzz word “social media” if it’s just marketing?  Cause it’s done differently.  Time to start learning now, if you’re not ready to get on the bandwagon then you’re only losing out.  Learn more about social media marketing

• Loyalty memberships

While this only works for certain businesses, it can do wonders for loyalty.  Think about it, how many times have you heard your colleagues say “I only buy my gas, books, groceries, etc. at [Insert store name here] because I collect points”.  Simply put, when done right, this approach has the potential to secure loyalty on it’s own.

While I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg, I hope that I’ve given you a lot to think about.  It’s vital that you take the time to consider your long term vision, put together a plan and ensure that you keep your eye on your competitors.  There’s no time for rest if you’re going to become or maintain your prestigious rank as an industry leader, start today!  When ecommerce is done right, it will take your business to levels that you never could have imagined.  There are thousands of success stories out there already, but yours could be next!  All that you have to do is brainstorm a plan, document your next steps and hold yourself accountable.  One step at a time, you will get there.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca
Ottawa web design

I’ve witnessed hundreds of companies massaging this expression to fit whatever message they’re trying to convey.  The term is used so frequently because it creates a sense of authenticity for whatever words follow.  The fact of the matter however is that the words itself means very little without further explanation.

According to Dictionary.com, content is something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts”.  Well if content is king then does that mean that anything communicated automatically becomes preeminent in its class… both authoritative and influential?  Of course not!  So then, when is content king?  When it is communicated efficiently, leveraging the appropriate formats, to maximize audience engagement!  Simply put, it has to be earned!

How does content earn the prestigious rank whereby it can truly be classified as king?  There are a number of criteria which must be met.  Content must be:

• Communicated efficiently

I know you want to tell everyone how awesome you are and include that 1,000-word bio, but nobody is going to read it!  A bio should be no more than 300 words and include bullet points for accomplishments if they are relevant (e.g. degrees, awards, etc.)

• Easy to use

It’s vital that your content is organized so that it’s easy for your visitors to find the information they are seeking.  If they can’t find it within a few seconds, there’s a significant chance they’ll leave your site and move onto your competitors.

• Visual appealing

No matter what anyone tells you, first impressions are alive now more than ever.  Because there are so many resources available online, just like yourself, visitors will open up the first 4-5 websites and narrow it down to 1-2 potential companies that they will do business with in the first 60 seconds.  If your site is not visually appealing and matching the branding of your company, you’ve likely already lost the sale before you even had the chance to make the pitch!

• Interesting

It’s absolutely critical to communicate your message by leveraging multiple formats.  A careful mixture of text, photos and video will help keep your audience engaged.  Remember the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words?  Well… a video is worth a thousand pictures.  YouTube has become one of the most powerful marketing channels online today!  The facts are staggering!  800 million users, 4 billion page views a day, 3 billion hours of video watched a month with an average viewing session being 15 minutes!  Now that’s engagement! (reference: Time Magazine).  I know… I know… it takes time to get great photos and video is outside of your comfort zone… if you want to take your business to the next level, suck it up Princess!  It always amazes me how many business owners have taken so many risks to date to get to where they are but still find boundaries that they’re not comfortable to overcome.  You’re simply limiting the potential of your own success.

• Niche-sites Require User Content Prior to Launch

How many times have you visited a website with an intended purpose that resembles a barren desert?  Dating sites without profiles, business directories without companies, classified ads sites without listings, forum sites without users, and the list goes on!  Creating user-generated content that fulfills the goals of a targeted niche prior to launch is absolutely critical.  If you are building a site that’s intended to compete in a specific industry, for heaven’s sakes, take the time to ensure that there is valuable content that will actually provide an inkling of incentive for visitors arriving at your site to sign up and stick around!  Ever heard the saying “If you build it, they will come”?  It’s false… that only works if individuals have no other option and believe me, with the Internet there’s always another option.  Don’t launch until you’ve tackled this task or you’ll be wasting your marketing dollars.

Many companies make their websites text-heavy in an attempt to communicate every little detail about their products and services, at the expense of providing their visitors with an experience that is overwhelming, lacks engagement and counter-productive to the goal of increasing interest and closing more deals.

Your website is the most powerful salesperson on your team.  It has the potential to bring in thousands of leads that are interested in your products and services.  If you don’t take the time to prepare quality, credible content that is both informative and interesting, you’ve lost 4 out of 5 leads before they even really gave your company any consideration.

Doubt the accuracy of my claim?  It’s time to take a look at your web statistics and assess the drop-offs on each page.  I use Google Analytics‘ Visitors Flow feature, if you don’t have any useful stats you should have your web professional set this up for you today!  You’ll quickly find out which page(s) your website visitors start on, navigate through and finally when they abandon your site.  It’s an important tool to measure the effectiveness of your marketing content and to hold your site accountable for its primary responsibility of generating more leads.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

This week I thought I’d put together a few tips for users who are trying to learn to effectively use Twitter in order to engage an audience and create new connections.

The most common reason that Twitter isn’t working for many companies is because they simply haven’t taken the time to learn how to use it effectively.

I’ve put together a brief list of the best tips that will help get you on your way to successfully leveraging the power of Twitter in your social media marketing efforts.  What’re you waiting for?  Let’s get started and start creating some real buzz around your brand!

Here are the tips:

1. Be clear

Take the time to ensure that the messages you deliver to your audience are clear.  There’s nothing worse than a tweet that your users can’t understand.  If you’re tough to understand, imagine what they think doing business with you is like.

2. Use keywords

Make sure that you use keywords relevant to your industry so that your potential customers can find you when they’re searching for related tweets.  (e.g. if you’re in the business of selling freshly roasted, high quality coffee; take the time to ensure that the appropriate keywords are included within your tweets).

3. Only use 120 characters

It is vital to deliver your message in 120 characters or less so that it’s easy for others to retweet or reply to your tweets.

4. Shorten your links

Because you only have 140 characters to work with (but your goal should be 120), shortening your links is absolutely critical to ensure that you can meet this goal.  Equally important, many of the URL shortening services (e.g. bit.ly) provide you with valuable statistics that can help you to measure how engaged your audience is by knowing how many times each of the links you posted was clicked.

5. Schedule your tweets

Scheduling your tweets has two benefits.  It can help you to ensure that your messages are sent out when most individuals are online and it helps spread them out to keep users engaged all day.

6. Limit your hashtags

Be careful when using hashtags.  Make sure that they’re relevant to your topic and don’t include too many in a tweet.  My recommendation is 2 or less hashtags per tweet.

7. Add your thoughts to retweets

When you retweet, add a brief comment whenever possible.  It provides context and value to your followers.

8. Control your retweets

If you retweet too frequently you overload your followers and risk being unfollowed.  Choose your retweets wisely.

9. Ask someone how they’re doing, don’t always broadcast

You create connections by engaging with your readers, not by constantly preaching.  Don’t treat Twitter as a traditional form of marketing or you’ll find yourself with little to no success.

10. Ask questions

When you ask questions, you’ll be engaging your followers and learning more about them.  Choose your questions wisely because it can result in answers that reveal to you opportunities where your products and services can be valuable to your target audiences.

11. Be careful of your integration apps

While using 3^rd party apps to automate and simplify your social media efforts may seem like a fantastic idea, many of these 3^rd party apps don’t deliver your message very well (e.g. “I posted a picture fb.me/NoContextAtAll”).

12. Always acknowledge and respond in a timely fashion to @replies to you.

Whether your followers engage you, for positive or negative reasons, @reply to them and show them and your other followers that you’re listening and care about your audience.  By being active you encourage other followers to engage as well.

Well there you have it!  If you incorporate these twelve tips into your daily social media marketing on Twitter you’ll start to reap the rewards of growing engagement from your users and financial is only one of them!  Expect to learn more about your customers, their needs and how you can better help them.  Twitter will help you to look at your business from your customers’ perspective and that alone will bring your business to a whole new level!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

All the time people ask me how I get so much done each and every day.  There are a lot of weapons in my arsenal that you’ll learn about if you follow my blog, this is most definitely one of them.  I call it my “super-secret, no bullsh*t priority management approach” but you can call it the “common-sense well thought out approach” if you wish… I just think my naming choice sounds cooler.

Every week or two I intend to reveal another one of my weapons used to battle the obstacle-laden horizon of productivity.  If you want to take your business to the next level, with no cost other than the time you take to learn from and implement the strategies that I’ve honed over the last decade and a half, you too will become a powerhouse to be reckoned with in your own respective industry.  After all, what do you have to lose?  More importantly, what do you have to gain?

Over the last several months I’ve been mentoring more and more people including my very own executive and project management teams and even clients on a number of topics related to achieving and excelling in business success and balance.  Today I’m going to talk about one of the areas that I’ve witnessed dramatic positive results due to our team efforts on prioritization.

The reason that prioritization is such a challenging one to handle for most people is that they have too many obligations on their plate.  Even once they’ve narrowed down their “to dos” to the highest of priorities, they are still inundated with a sense of being overwhelmed.

How does one get over these feelings and learn not to sweat the small stuff?  After all, we all know that it’s counter-productive to worry, emotions quite simply don’t get the job done and negatively impacts our own sense of well-being.  Sounds like a difficult challenge isn’t it?  But it isn’t!  I’m going to reveal to you an approach that I designed 15 years ago and have tweaked countless times since.  I urge you to give this approach a try; everyone that has to date has showered me with praise and thanks, and a free coffee from time to time.

At the beginning of the week do these steps:

1. Create a “To Do List” (view Brent’s worksheet) (download blank worksheet)

Create a “to do list” with the tasks that you still have on your plate from last week’s to do list.

Categorize them by importance:

• Must do ASAP

• Important to do ASAP

• Want to do ASAP

Please note: My template supports managing the priorities of others as well.  This is often critical when managing a company, and extremely useful when mentoring others on priority management so I’ve left this in my template.  For those who do not manage others, just disregard this section, but for those who do, make sure you use it for the employees who report to you as well!

2. Prioritize the “To Do List”

Now that you’ve categorized the importance, take the time to sort them, most important first, least important last.

If there is one or more tasks that you are uncertain the duration that it will take to complete, make sure you prioritize any tasks that will take less than 15 minutes and do them first, so long as they’re within the same prioritization (e.g. multiple tasks categorized as “must do ASAP”).  An obvious exception is that an emergency task will precede all others.

Every working day do these steps:

1. On your “to do list”, scratch off any tasks that are completed from the day prior, if applicable.

2. Create a new “today list” (view Brent’s worksheet) (view blank worksheet)

Now, from your “to do list”, choose the tasks that you will perform today and create a new “today list”.  Now, put away the “to do list” and focus.

Important: Don’t worry about the things you can’t do today, instead focus on ensuring that the tasks you’ve put on your today list get done, respecting the priorities that you’ve set from most to least important.  Don’t sweat the small stuff, just go!

As you complete a task, scratch it off of your “today list” and smile knowing that tomorrow you will also scratch it off your “to do list” and move onto the next.

Throughout the day, write down any distractions that took you away from your priorities on your “today list”.  Don’t throw out each “today list”, you’ll need it for the end of the week.

At the end of the week do these steps:

1. Review your week

This is the most important step, and the one that most individuals skip.  Unfortunately, it’s also the most important.  It’s time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished this week and to review the distractions that are hindering you from performing even better.  If there are any distractions that were unnecessary or could be delegated to somebody else, make sure that you create a new task on next week’s “to do list” that will put steps into place that ensure that these distractions do not recur.

2. Prepare for next week

Ensure that your “to do list” is up to date with any completed items scratched off and any new items added to the list.

Increment the number beside each task so that it shows how many weeks an item has been on your priority list, this will help you to indicate any items that you have been letting stay on your priority list too long – this could be for a number of reasons (e.g. wasn’t prioritized correctly to begin with, missing key requirements to perform task, procrastination, etc.).

Whatever it is, it’ll either reveal a different task that needs to be added to your “to do list” or possibly even reveal a weakness of yours that you need to focus on improving.

Prioritization is a critical element of planning and if done right it can have a dramatic positive impact on you, your business and the colleagues that work with you.  Treat the importance of prioritization with the respect it deserves and in turn it’ll return massive rewards.  You’ll not only be less stressed each and every day, your focus and productivity will skyrocket!

Well, you have a choice now.  What are you going to do?  Are you going to reduce your stress and increase your productivity or accept the status quo?  The rest of your story is yet to be written…

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

 

Why is the entire picture important?  Why consider my weaknesses?

Simple!  If you consider both your strengths and your weaknesses, it’ll increase your awareness of where you stand in the market.  It will help you to assess and understand your key selling points but it’ll also reveal your key weaknesses that are costing you many potential customers to your competitors.

Obviously increasing and focusing on your strengths will help you to generate new business and additional revenues.  Conversely, by focusing on eliminating your weaknesses can result in the same benefits of increased growth, often times even more significant than focusing on the strengths.

How can eliminating weaknesses provide a better return on investment?

By eliminating some of your weaknesses, you are systematically eliminating many of the key advantages that your competitors have over you.  Furthermore by scratching a weakness off the list and re-writing it as a strength, you are gaining twice the benefit!  The majority of times a customer’s final decision boils down to the minor differences between you and your competitors, often times it’s these strengths and weaknesses that impact this final decision.  Think about it… if you earn 15% more sales in the next year, how much more positive momentum would that bring to your business?  Enough said…

What if it’s infeasible to eliminate a weakness?

Unfortunately the reality is that occasionally it will be infeasible to eliminate a weakness at this time.  What you should do is take note of these weaknesses and then identify the challenges that prevent you from overcoming them at this time (e.g. financial, educational, etc.).  Guess what?  You’ve now got a game plan to execute in order to systematically move towards eliminating it.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.  Insert cliché here, whichever one you need to motivate yourself.  The point is that you won’t eliminate all weaknesses in one fell swoop and if you aren’t willing to accept this reality then you’re accepting the status quo and helping your competitors to maintain an edge on you.  Read that last statement again, it should be more offensive than a long string of %&$!!@ words.

How often should I do this?

Most companies do this once a year (if at all).  I strongly recommend making this a quarterly exercise.  I also urge you to do this exercise outside of your work setting.  When at work, it’s easy to get distracted and interrupted.  Take a day off with key staff and perform this exercise during a company retreat.  Doubt this will impact the results of the exercise by much?  If you’re that pig-headed, try doing this two months in a row, once in your office and once during a retreat.  The difference in the quality and creativity of the results will be so significant that you’ll never doubt me again.

I’ve helped hundreds of companies with their strategic planning and I’ve created a lot of strong and meaningful relationships as a result.  My customers know that their success is my highest priority and that when push comes to shove I’ll tell them the straight dope, even if they don’t want to hear it.  It’s important to be faced with reality.  Sometimes we’re too close to our own businesses and can’t see or won’t admit our weaknesses.  Here’s a revelation, you aren’t helping yourself… you’re harming yourself.  If any of this blog offends you, that’s okay, that means it was a much needed dose of medicine and you’re on your way to a new level of health that you’ve never experienced; one that’s awakened a sense that’s been dormant within you for years, awareness.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

So then, when talking about websites, how do we find our weaknesses and more importantly what do we do to fix them?

It’s actually easier than you think.  Here’s five suggestions to get you started:

• SWOT those flies!

If you haven’t done a SWOT analysis to date, or if you are like I was a few years ago when one of my mentors urged me to perform this exercise, stop what you’re doing now and get started!  A SWOT analysis is one of the most vital exercises business owners can perform in order to gain a better understanding of their strengths, weaknesses and identifying the opportunities available while recognizing the threats that may hinder success.  If you haven’t carved a sustainable niche in your line of business, it’s vital that you start here.  Try contacting your local centre for research and innovation to see if they offer a mentoring program.  If you’re in Ottawa, then consider OCRI’s iProft small business mentoring program, they did wonders for us during one of our our re-branding phases and I strongly recommend them to everyone.

•  Location.  Location.  Location.

Start with search.  Visitors to Google perform 2 billion searches every day and visitors to Bing and Yahoo! add another billion to the mix!  If your potential customers can’t find your products or services when searching, you’ve identified your first weakness.  You need to be in the top results, optimally the first 3 for any keywords that are targeted to your business.  If you’re just getting started out, pay for your results.  But be careful, don’t buy keywords that are too generic (if your customers are in a small geographical area, make sure your ads are limited to them).

• Interview yourself!

Pretend you’ve sold your business and moved to another city, but now you need the very same products and services that you once sold yourself!  Now remember… your business doesn’t exist.  Go to your website, would you hire yourself?  Don’t let your competitors steal your customers!

•  Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Look at the websites of your competitors.  Ask at least 10 trusted colleagues to take notes of any and all item(s) that your competitor does better, especially ones who don’t know your business.  You should do this exercise yourself as well, but, don’t prioritize your own findings, you’re way too biased because you’re too close to your own business and industry.  Put all feedback together, adding up the items that are repeated.  Meet with 3 of the trusted colleagues and prioritize the weaknesses that are most significantly harming your rank against competitors.  Tackle the top 3 items, don’t move down the list until they’re accomplished.  Rinse and repeat.

• Easy as 1-2-3?

Ensure that your website follows the rules of the Secrets of Online Success (SOS).  Your website must be consistent with your brand, visually appealing, simple for potential customers to find and purchase the product/service they are seeking, quickly and easly.  Not sure how to make this clear?  Compare with your competitors, which site is it easier to find information on?  Remember, the amount of time it takes a website visitor to find the information they are seeking is infinitely more important than the number of clicks.

There are many avenues that you can explore to attract new customers and increase your revenue.  Do not do this until you’ve ensured that your website presence is in top shape.  I’ve witnessed hundreds of companies implementing numerous time consuming and expensive initiatives from paid ads to social media campaigns, generating impressive amounts of traffic to their websites, but, feeling disappointed when sales didn’t spike as much as anticipated.  Would you go out on a date without making sure that you look your best?  I didn’t think so!  Your website is on a first date with every one of your potential customers.  Within a few seconds of visiting your site, the first impression is set in stone and the visitor to your site has already decided if they will do business with you or not.   Because first impressions are nearly impossible to reverse, it’s critical to ensure that you’ve set the right one.

So… are you going to accept the status quo or are you going to eliminate your weaknesses and take charge of your business to create your own success?  It’s all up to you now.  Don’t sit idle giving your competitors an opportunity to gain an edge on you, because believe me, if you are they may be narrowing that competitive gap quicker than you think.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Taken from one of my favorite sites, Wikipedia, ironically one that would be blocked if SOPA was enforced, here’s a definition of what it is:

“The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a law (bill) of the United States proposed in 2011 to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Proposals include barring advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with allegedly infringing websites, barring search engines from linking to the sites, and requiring Internet service providers (ISP) to block access to the sites. The bill would criminalize the streaming of such content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.”

User-content websites such as YouTube would be greatly affected.  Concerns have been expressed that they and many other similar sites would be shut down if the bill became law.  Entire domains could be blocked if something was posted in a single photo, video, blog, article, etc.  Taken to extreme, practically any website on the Internet would be infringing due to their content.

Let’s use the 6 websites with the most Internet traffic in the world and consider how SOPA may be enforced against them:

• Google

Almost every search result includes copyrighted materials which are not owned by Google: image search results, video searches, news searches, shopping searches.  Google has the most to lose as a result of this SOPA enforcement.

• Facebook

Almost every photo and video includes copyrighted materials which are not owned by Facebook or its users.

• YouTube

The majority of videos posted on YouTube contain copyright infringements.  In fact, even just recording a video of yourself with a bottle of Heinz ketchup in front of you is an infringement without prior written consent by Heinz themselves.

• Yahoo

Same issues that are identified above regarding Google.

• Baidu

Baidu, the most popular website in China, serving 4.02 billion search queries a month.  It will also suffer the same fate that Google and Yahoo will as cited above.

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia, who participated in an anti-SOPA blackout demonstration for 24 hours in mid-January , is considered the single most powerful research tool for many individuals in the world.  Furthermore because it’s maintained by all of its users it is considered one of the least biased sources of information available today.  Because it contains a lot of text, photos and videos; many of which is similar to previously created works (physical encyclopedias, etc.), you can count on this site being blocked by SOPA.

If you look at the top 50 websites in the world, I’m not even convinced you could find one single site that would not theoretically be infringing on a copyright in one way or another… this poses a tremendous issue.  What is SOPA going to do?  Block every site in existence?  Obviously this doesn’t make sense, nor will it work.  Do you think the economy is rocky right now?  Just wait until you see what happens if this were to be enforced!  Entire businesses would cease to exist over night and hundreds of thousands of individuals would become unemployed.  In fact, odds are that a revolution would be started, one that would be accompanied with violent protests than would make recent protests look like meditation meet up.

Of course, we all know what would really happen.  SOPA would be used as a tool, subjectively being enforced on some sites while blatantly ignoring infringements of others, but aren’t severely impacting the revenues of the rich.  Energies would be focused on any website that is perceived to be costing the elite billionaires of the world even more additional revenues.

Now, let me make this clear, I’m not opposed to anyone enforcing their legal obligations.  I purchase all of my music via iTunes, subscribe to Netflix for TV shows and movies, purchase a $60/month cable package just so that my son can watch one channel (Teletoon Retro) and buy the majority of my books on Indigo.ca and Amazon.ca.  I don’t believe in infringing on copyrights, I want the hard working individuals and companies to be compensated for their efforts so that they can come out with even more fabulous entertainment for me to enjoy.  But what I have a problem with is the reality that SOPA is being created to fulfill an agenda, an agenda of a few elite super rich individuals in the world so that they can essentially dictate and restrict the Americans’ freedom, at their expense via taxes nonetheless.  This is unethical, no matter what justifications are behind it, do we still live in a democratic society or has it now become a dictatorship?

Oh and a few more things to think about…

• Who ultimately decides whether a site is blocked or not?

• What if a site is wrongfully blocked? How will they be compensated for their lost revenue?  Will they essentially be out of pocket all lost revenue, plus court costs, plus lost time?

In the nation that we live in, an individual is considered innocent until proven guilty.  Are we now considering reversing that?  You can sit on the sidelines and watch this train wreck happen and waste millions of dollars of taxpayers monies simply to accomplish one goal, make the rich even richer, or you can speak up and fight… even just voicing your opinion helps because otherwise you’re guilty until proven innocent.

Time to choose…

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

After years of discussions with thousands of business owners, I’ve come to the realization that there’s no single location to find clear, concise and non-technical descriptions of keywords related to our industry.  For this reason, I’ve decided to create a list of acronyms and abbreviations used when describing projects related to Internet presences on all mediums – web, mobile and social media.

Because technology evolves so quickly I will be adding to this on an ongoing basis so that hopefully it can remain a helpful and useful resource for our leads, clients and any website visitors that may come across this.   If there are acronyms or abbreviations that you feel are too technical and require a more simplified description, or if you feel I’ve missed one that should be added to the list, please leave a comment.

Please feel free to bookmark this resource and refer to it on an as-needed basis.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

–

Web & Mobile

• General 

• 404 Page Not Found
  A 404 page shows on a user’s screen when they reach a page that doesn’t exist on the website.

• 301 Redirect
  A permanent redirect from one URL to the other.  Very important to use so that search engines know where a page has been moved to.

• FAQ (Frequently asked questions)
  A common support mechanism on many web sites that provides answers to questions that are commonly asked.

• HTTP (HyperText transfer protocol)
  Protocol which is used to transfer information on the web.

• HTTPS (Secure HyperText transfer protocol)
  Similar to HTTP cited above, however, specifies that data is/should be encrypted and secure.

• URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
  The global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

• SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
  Used to transmit private information via the Internet (e.g. account information, credit card information, etc.)

• W3C
  International standards organization for the web.

• WAI (Web accessibility initiative)
  Enacted by the W3C for improving the accessibility of web pages.

• WCAG (Web content accessibility guidelines)
  Guidelines published by the WAI (cited above).

• WWW (World Wide Web)
  A network of interlinked documents available through the Internet.

• Design & Development

• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
  A web programming technique that uses JavaScript to transparently interact with a web server, eliminating the need to reload a web page to see changes.

• CRON (Command Run ON)
  A scheduling program used to schedule time-sensitive activities for software programs to perform.

• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
  Used to define how a web page written HTML or XHTML should be presented and displayed in a web browser.

• CVS (Concurrent Versions System)
  Allows several developers to collaboratively work on a single set of code.

• DBMS (Database Management System)
  A structured collection of data organized to allow for easy retrieval by computer programs using SQL.

• DHTML (Dynamic HyperText Markup Language)
  A term used when HTML, JavaScript and CSS are used to create animated or interactive web sites.

• Favicon
  Small pictures you see beside some URLs in your browser’s address bar.

• FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
  A protocol for transferring files from one computer to another over a network.

• FLA (Flash Authoring File)
  The primary authoring output files of Adobe Flash.

• HTML (HyperText markup language)
  Tag-based language used to create web pages.

• JS (JavaScript)
  A scripting language used for client-side (web browser) web development.

• RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
  An XML specification for publishing frequently updated web content to subscribers.

• SVN (Subversion)
  A version control system that allows several developers to collaboratively work on a single set of code.

• SWF (Small Web Format/ShockWave Flash)
  A proprietary vector graphics format used to create animations on web sites.

• SQL (Structured Query Language)
  A special programming language used to retrieve data from and modify relational database systems.

• WML (Wireless markup language)
  A tag-based language used to create web pages displayed through a wireless mobile device.

• XHTML (Extensible HyperText markup language)
  A special type of HTML that conforms to strict rules of XML.

• XML (Extensible markup language)
  A general purpose tag-based language used to describe data in a structured manner.

• eCommerce

• API (Application Programming Interface)
  An API is a way for website or service to talk to another website or service via programming. APIs let you mix information and media from other services into your own site or application.

• B2B (Business to business)
  Business-to-business, denoting trade conducted via the Internet between businesses.

• B2C (Business to consumer)
  Business-to-consumer, denoting trade conducted via the Internet between businesses and end consumers.

• OOS (Out of stock)
  Out of stock

• Payment gateway
  A payment gateway is an e-commerce application service provider service that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and mortar locations, etc.

• POS (Point of sale)
  The point where money is exchanged for products or services.

• VTP (Visits to Purchase)
  A metric that indicates how many sales a website completes in comparison to how much traffic it gets.

• CMS 

• WCMS, CMS (Content management systems)
  A web content management system (WCMS or CMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. 

• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
  A user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created.

• SEO & SEM

• CPC (Cost Per Click)
  The amount an advertiser pays each time an ad is clicked.

• CPM (Cost per “mille”)
  Cost per thousand impressions (or displays).

• CTR (Click Through Ratio)
  A ratio of the number of times an ad was clicked on by the viewer and the number of times the ad was displayed. For a banner that was clicked 100 times and displayed 1000 times, the CTR is 100:1000 or 1:10. This can be changed to a percentage value by multiplying by 100: 1/10 * 100 = 10%, meaning 10% of the impressions have led to clicks on the banner.

• META tags
  A special HTML tag that provides information about a web page to user agents, such as search engines.

• Organic search results
  Listings on search engine results pages that appear due to their relevance to the search terms.  In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising.

• PPC (Pay Per Click)
  An advertising model where advertisers pay only when a user clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

• PR (PageRank)
  What Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results.

• SEF URLs (Search Engine Friendly URLs)
  Contain words and proper filenames only. They do not contain any special characters or spaces (when necessary, use dashes to separate words). Using SEO-friendly URLs can dramatically improve your organic search rankings, simply because they emphasize keywords that actually mean something and are easier to index than numbers and strings.

• SEM (Search engine marketing)
  Search engine marketing includes any activity aimed at increasing visibility in search engines, whether it be paid or organic listings.  A strong SEM strategy typically involves a robust mixture of both.

• SEO (Search engine optimization)
  Aims to increase exposure in organic search results (e.g. unpaid).  At its most basic level, the purpose is to increase rankings for a website in search engines for keywords that are relevant to its content.  This involves writing top-notch content, optimizing the website in question and doing external marketing.  The nature of the website backlink profile also plays a big role in how well its pages will rank and how much traffic it will get organically from search engines.

• Security

• XSS (Cross-Site Scripting)
  A hacker injects javascript into your site.

• DOS (Denial of Service)
  Brute force attack from multiple servers at once to overload a site’s server.

• LFI (Local File Inclusion)
  A hacker includes a file onto a site’s server.

• RFI (Remote File Inclusion)
  A hacker includes a remote file onto a site.

• CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)
  A hacker executes commands through an authorized user.

• General

• SMM (Social media marketing)
  This is something of an enigma to most people.  Everyone knows what social media is, and everyone knows that no one wants to be marketed to when they’re spending time on social media websites.  Generally speaking, old-fashioned marketing (hey, here’s our product, buy it now!) is destined to fail on social media platforms.  Good social media marketing involves engaging the consumer base as real people talking to real people on the social media platforms that they use.

• Blog
  A web site which individual(s) record opinion(s), information, etc. on a regular basis.

• Vlog (Video blog)
  A web site which individual(s) record opinion(s), information, etc. on a regular basis using video as their communications medium.

• Facebook

• Tagging (@)
  Tagging individual(s) or page(s) in a comment. Your tag optionally begins with @ to indicate to Facebook that you are intending to tag.  Once tagged, the ‘@’ symbol is no longer displayed.

• Twitter

• At replies (@)
  People say lots of things on Twitter, and sometimes you want to say something back. Your reply will always begin with @username (insert username of the person you are replying to). Any Tweet that is a reply to you will show up in your Mentions tab on the Connect page.

• DM (Direct message)
  Message sent to one of your followers.  You cannot send a direct message to a user who is not following you.

• Hashtag (#)
  The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.  The third party site hashtags.org offers an overview of popular hashtags used on Twitter

• RT (Retweet)
  Used to indicate that you are retweeting another individual’s tweet

• TMB (Tweet me back)
  Used when you want individual(s) to respond to your tweet

• Tweets
  A tweet is a post or status update on Twitter, a microblogging service. Because Twitter only allows messages of 140 characters or less, “tweet” is as much a play on the size of the message as it is on the audible similarity to Twitter.

If any of my personal blogs don’t interest you, please, feel free to skip them.  On the other hand, if they do and if you find that we have mutual interests and are compelled to reach out, even just for a chat over coffee, then give me a call.  If there are three things in life that make me smile every day, it’s family, friends, and coffee!

So then, what makes me tick? It’s story time… jump into my time machine and let’s go back a dozen years.

I was sitting at a desk, happily creating advanced database models that powered payroll, scheduling and email systems within largest telecommunication company in Canada.  Alongside me, was an extremely talented team including my sidekick, Reid Ivens (the other co-owner of our firm), a wonderful caring and extremely talented individual whose responsibilities included ensuring that anything I built was intuitive and easy to use.  I was young at heart, equally passionate as I am now, with aspirations that I still have yet to accomplish but needed to expand my horizons and my experience beyond the technology sector.  Luckily, I was completely aware of this, because one of my strengths is the ability to identify my weaknesses and hold myself accountable to improve them.

Here I was in my early 20′s and the entire world available for the taking, everything is possible and I decided to do some exploring, both personally and professionally.  I sat down and started with the creation of a wheel of life.  If you’re unfamiliar with what this is, it’s a common exercise used by personal coaches to help you to assess who you are today and prepare a plan of who you want to be in the future.  After having performed this exercise, I found that my life was not very balanced at all and I sought to rectify this, one accomplishment at a time.  Still today, every year I continue to perform this self-assessment and review it with loved and trusted colleagues.  Simply put, it helps me to keep myself accountable in my goals (both personal and business).

Brent's wheel of life assessment (2002)

Over the last decade, my wheel of life has encouraged me to explore many different interests that I otherwise would never have considered.  Best of all, these explorations have delivered an abundance of life experience over the last decade that have helped me to become who I am today, both personally and professionally.  I’ve outlined some of these accomplishments so that you can peek into my past (the items italicized are no longer active interests of mine, but I still treasure the life experience that each of them have brought me).

While some of these accomplishments did not lead to the goal that I desired, I don’t consider any single one of them as a failure.  The life experience gained from all of these accomplishments far outweighs the costs of perceived or potential failure.

“Failure is success if we learn from it.” - Malcolm Forbes

The most critical element to success in life is to step outside one’s comfort zone and take some chances.  If you don’t ever take a risk and try something, you’ve already given up on your potential before even giving it a chance to reveal the fruits of your labour.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” - Pablo Picasso

I realize that by sharing with you the accomplishments that I’ve done doesn’t really teach you anything about me, but rather, just shares with you what I’ve done.  So… back to the original question: what makes me tick?  Why do I wake up each and every day with a smile from ear to ear, happy to be alive and motivated just as much as the last?  Well, in a nutshell, life is what you make it.  As cheesy as this line is, it’s true that “every day’s a gift and not a given right”.  We’ve all been delightfully surprised by the small pleasantries in life, but, at the same time we’ve also experienced the challenges and sorrow of an obstacle that seems insurmountable.  At the end of the day, however, whether it’s going to be a day that is filled with celebration or one filled with challenge, I have to deal with it, so I decide to deal with it with great joy!  I prioritize my tasks each and every day and get straight to work, procrastination is an action (inaction?) that I removed from my hobbies the day that I left college.

As a result of respecting the priorities I’ve placed on balancing my life, and giving every day 110%, over the last decade my happiness continues to grow, my stress steadily diminishes and I sweat the small stuff much less.  I continue to strengthen the bond of friendship with my family, friends and clients and every day my smile gets a little larger (soon my cheeks might tear)!  I am in control of my destiny and every day brings about innumerable new opportunities.  Where I am today is not where I’ll be in 1, 2 or 5 years.  I will continue to expand my horizons and explore life.  The rest of my story is yet to be written… but a few of my aspirations includes writing a book, help others to become financially free, and to be invited to perform a presentation at TED.  Only time will tell if I can accomplish all of them, but, what’s certain is that I’ll learn a lot while trying and I’ll have a great time doing it.

Well now it’s your turn, why don’t you tell me… what makes you tick?

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Before I get into the topic I’d like to re-iterate what I consider to be a successful website.

For those of you who have read parts 1 thru 3 inclusively, please feel free to skip this.

To me, a successful site is one that accomplishes all of the following goals consistently on an ongoing basis.

• Revenue generated by the website (directly or indirectly) exceeds the expenses of operating the website.

• Positive cashflow (revenue minus expense) is growing year over year at least 15% (please note: this doesn’t sound like a lot but due to the power of compounding, your profits will triple over 9 years at this rate)

• Your customer base is consistently growing and you have a way to communicate with and solicit repeat business

* Please note: I do realize that not all websites are in existence to earn additional revenues and some websites may be created solely for the purpose of reducing expenses (e.g. online technical support, online help, etc.).  The criteria of this type of website is essentially the same, however, its goals are reached by reducing expenses as opposed to increasing revenues.

Once any of these goals are no longer being successfully accomplished, it’s time for a refresh; your website has either aged too much and is no longer current or competitive with other companies in your industry.  Remember, just because your site is doing fantastic for you today, it can all change overnight when one of your competitors takes charge of their Internet presence and revamps it entirely!

Before getting into discussing the importance of content, I’ll re-iterate the four main dimensions that I have addressed during my four-part series.  They are all vital so be sure to read each one and extend each aspect the attention that they deserve, don’t leave areas of your website presence weak, the goal is to build a formidable sales channel for your business:

• Content
  Informs leads and clients about your products and services.

• Design
  Graphical elements that make up the design of the website, reflecting the image of your business to your leads and clients.

• Organization
  Determines how information is organized so that leads and clients can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

• Functionality
  Enables your leads and clients to perform a task on your Internet presence (e.g. send an email, request a quotation or callback, etc.)

Now, it’s time to talk about functionality.  What is it?   Website functionalities are the features that enable website visitors to accomplish tasks that will increase their likeliness of fulfilling one or more of the goals that you have outlined for your website.

I’ve chosen to talk about functionality last within this series because it’s the aspect that most business owners are confident is vital to their online success, yet, never seem to find the time to accomplish.  Even business owners who understand the importance of and therefore make the time to focus on brainstorming and accomplishing vital functionality within their website tend to overcomplicate or improperly prioritize the functions within.

So then, how do you determine what functionalities are vital to your website presence?  If you recall in the previous article, I discussed identifying the three main goals of your website.  You’re going to need those three same priorities for this exercise as well.  Now write them down.  For this example, I’ll stick with the example I used in the first part of this series, a martial arts academy.

What would be the three main goals of any academy?

1. Sign up more members
2. Retain existing members
3. Maintain (and enhance) the world-class image that we’ve created as the best academy in the region, and among the best in the country.

Notice how none of them relate to “revenue”?  It’s far too generic of a goal and if you’ve got that written down, place your pen to the left of it and drag it slowly along the paper to the right of it.  Write a new goal, one that doesn’t focus on revenue, but rather focuses on improving your business.  If you provide value to your customers, revenue will come.  Having revenue as a primary goal always clouds your true priorities.

Perfect, now with those goals, write down all the benefits that your visitors can fulfill for each of your goals.  Also, identify all of the risks (or potential barriers) that you’re up against.  For this example I’ll outline the first goal identified above: Sign up more members

1. Benefits (Goals fulfilled)

1.1.    Get into shape

1.2.    Look good

1.3.    Increase confidence

2.       Risks (Potential barriers)

2.1.    Takes too much time to train

2.2.    Costs too much money to sign up

2.3.    Too intimidating to join

2.4.    Not motivated enough to sign up (insert excuse here – time, energy, etc.)

Finally, consider what functionalities you can build into your website that will help to re-enforce the benefits and minimize the risks outlined above.  Ask each question one by one:

• What does my website need in order to show members the benefits of [insert goal here]?
• What does my website need in order to address the potential barrier of a member being/feeling [insert risk here]?

Here’s a quick list I put together by asking a few of those questions in a couple of minutes of work:

• Before/after photos of other members (1.1, 1.2, 2.2, 2.4)
• Testimonials from existing members (1.1, 1.2, 2.2, 2.4)
• Compare benefits versus other academies (or gyms, etc.) (1.1, 1.2, 2.4)
• Describe programs, identify inexperienced students are welcome (1.3, 2.3)
• Showcase student of the month (1.3, 2.4)
• Highlight student promotions (1.1, 1.2, 1.3)
• Show team and professor photos; highlighting experience and accomplishments (2.2)

Two points that are difficult to address are time and money, because they tie into virtually everything, but believe me, Individuals will make the time, and find the money if their requirements or goals are fulfilled by the products and services that you offer.

This is an extremely simplified exercise that I went through in a short time but if you want the most out of it you need to invest the time to perform all of these steps.  Start today and create a scheduled task to perform this exercise once per quarter.  Each time you perform it, you’ll find it easier than the last and it’ll not only help you to achieve your long term goals, it’ll help you to formalize and adapt them on an ongoing basis.  I’m sure at this point that you realize, this article covers a lot more than just your website, it encompasses everything about your business.  Now you will be ready to accept what I’m going to say, because you realize it’s true, your website is your business and today is the day that you’ll remember forever because your business has already started the most  dramatic transformation that it’s ever experienced.  Go get ‘em tiger!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Before I get into the topic I’d like to re-iterate what I consider to be a successful website.

For those of you who have read parts 1 and 2, please feel free to skip this.

To me, a successful site is one that accomplishes all of the following goals consistently on an ongoing basis.

• Revenue generated by the website (directly or indirectly) exceeds the expenses of operating the website.

• Positive cashflow (revenue minus expense) is growing year over year at least 15% (please note: this doesn’t sound like a lot but due to the power of compounding, your profits will triple over 9 years at this rate)

• Your customer base is consistently growing and you have a way to communicate with and solicit repeat business

* Please note: I do realize that not all websites are in existence to earn additional revenues and some websites may be created solely for the purpose of reducing expenses (e.g. online technical support, online help, etc.).  The criteria of this type of website is essentially the same, however, its goals are reached by reducing expenses as opposed to increasing revenues.

Once any of these goals are no longer being successfully accomplished, it’s time for a refresh; your website has either aged too much and is no longer current or competitive with other companies in your industry.  Remember, just because your site is doing fantastic for you today, it can all change overnight when one of your competitors takes charge of their Internet presence and revamps it entirely!

Before getting into discussing the importance of design, I’ll re-iterate the four main dimensions that I intend to address during my four-part series:

• Content
  Informs leads and clients about your products and services.

• Design
  Graphical elements that make up the design of the website, reflecting the image of your business to your leads and clients.

• Organization
  Determines how information is organized so that leads and clients can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

• Functionality
  Enables your leads and clients to perform a task on your Internet presence (e.g. send an email, request a quotation or callback, etc.)

So what’s website organization?   It’s the process of determining how content will be organized within a website to meet one or more goal(s).

I’ve chosen to talk about the organization of a website next within this series because at this point if you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, you will have determined all of the content that you would like to be included within your website and the presentation that you will use to sell your products or services to your target audience(s).  Now it’s time to organize the content in order to best accomplish the goals that you’ve set out to complete.

Start by writing down your three main goals.  You can look at more goals later, but, for the purpose of this exercise, limit yourself to three.  Every time you make a decision, you must qualify it against the three main goals that you’ve outlined.  If your decision doesn’t fulfill one of your three main goals, then it’s simple, like when you were in school, erase and try again.  It’s vital that you make the best decisions for your business at this point.  If you start off with an unclear or disorganized plan that only partially accomplish your three main goals, you won’t get the results that you desire.

Most books and articles will tell you to create an inventory of assets and then create hierarchies and taxonomies, then delve into a number of technical descriptions of how critical it is and well… you’re lost… don’t worry… I won’t ask you do to that.  I do things differently because even though I understand the benefits of that approach, it’s an unnecessary complication for the majority of projects.  If you’re reading other articles you simply don’t understand and you’re concerned about “missing out” on something… just relax.  There are many ways to skin a cat  and my approach will be easier (that poor cat… he’s lucky he has seven lives).

Stop, breathe and relax…  Now, visualize yourself on another planet (I used to ask people to visualize being in another city but it was not strong enough to convince people to think outside the box, our imaginations are far too repressed as children).  You’ve arrived and no longer own your business.  You go out looking for the very products and services that you used to sell and land on the website of Martian on Mars Inc.  What questions would you have first?  What would help you to decide on whom to do business with?  Quickly… identify the first 5 things that pop into your head… NOW!  You’re probably pretty darned close to having already decided the main menu areas.  You may need to add or remove one or two, but beyond that would only make the organization of the site more difficult to find what you’re looking for.

Next step is to create a website structure chart based upon your brainstorming and the start drilling down from there.  Here’s an example website structure diagram to give you an idea of what I expect you to be planning.

Website layout example

A couple of tips:

• If an area has too many links or feels too busy, then continue to simplify.  It’s not perfect yet.
• Maintain consistency throughout your site, if you have a number of products and services that compliment each other, ensure it’s easy to navigate between them
• Ensure that you plan to leverage standards throughout your site that users expect to be present in order to help them navigate quickly and efficiently (e.g. header, menus, submenus (when necessary), breadcrumb trails, footer, etc.)

Know what’s true and know what isn’t:

• There’s a fallacy that exists that claims that a website visitor should get to the information they desire within two clicks or less.  While this goal can be accomplished in some instances, it shouldn’t actually be the primary goal.  Using this approach as a rule of thumb in many cases would clutter a website with so many menu items that visitors will be unable to quickly decide which link to click.  We’ve got government beaurocracy in place to ensure that there’s enough indecision for everyone, we don’t need that to spill into our websites as well.  The amount of time it takes a website visitor to find the information they are seeking is infinitely more important than the number of clicks.

Most company sites that sell products or services can be broken down as follows.  In fact, I’ve studied so many statistics that I can even predict the percentage of traffic that each section of the site will receive after visitors arrive at the homepage based upon the thousands of websites traffic that I’ve assessed to date.  I’ve included the statistics for both your amusement and education:

• Home
• About Us
• Products (or) Services

• Product 1
• Product 2
• Product 3
• (etc.)

• Portfolio
• Testimonials
• Contact Us

What does this tell you?  Website visitors want answers quickly.  Most visitors (65%+) will first review your portfolio of previous work (service-based businesses) or products (product-based businesses).  Once a visitor has confirmed interest in your products or services they’ll typically view testimonials (50%+) or learn more about your company (25%+) next.  These are going to be your most vital pages to focus on the quality first.  You see?  Potential customers go right for the information they require and then they drop off once they’ve received it very quickly if they are not interested.  You have 15 seconds to make a first impression or you’ve lost the chance to gain a customer, likely forever.  Your content and design play a tremendous role in impacting this, however, so does the organization of your site.  If you ignore any one of the elements of a successful website, including organization; you’ve added unnecessary risk and increased the possibility of losing a sale to your competitors.  How to make this clear… do not make it difficult for your visitors to find the information that they’re seeking, they’ll go to another site (one of your competitors) where they can find the information quicker and… we both know what’ll happen.  I know, I know… you don’t want to hear it… fine, then see it!

So what?  Your competitor is up by one, right?  Wrong way of thinking… if this happens over and over again you could find yourself with a competitive disadvantage that is so significant that there’s just no way for you to compete.  It’s all about momentum and the more success that you have, the better odds will be that your cashflow is stronger, which in turn will enable you to invest into continuing to widen the gap between you and your competitors, ensuring that you remain on the leading side of that scoreboard you saw earlier.  Even if you are already a leader in your industry, resting on your laurels and accepting the status quo is the wrong approach or you could find yourself in a similar conundrum that Research In Motion (creators of BlackBerry) are currently in; once upon a time they were virtually the monopoly of the smartphone industry but present reality dictates that this was in fact a fairy tale as they’ve been toppled by their competitors and now find themselves in a very challenging and disadvantageous position.

Sound like an over-exaggeration?  It’s not!  It always amazes me how often key stakeholders in companies undermine how critical the effectiveness of their website presence truly is.  It’s ironic that they wouldn’t keep underperforming sales staff on their payroll, well then why do they turn a blind eye to an underperforming website?  The reality is that many of the larger companies have websites with significant investments in content and design, leveraged by their significant investments from more traditional marketing methods; but yet, fall significantly short on their navigational planning.  It simply feels like it was assembled during an executive retreat weekend that included the consumption of more bottles of alcohol than minutes spent determining the navigational structure of their most powerful salesperson, their Internet presence!

I honestly hope that I’ve opened your eyes to how vital it is to ensure that your website is organized as efficiently as possible to ensure that your website visitors can find the information that they are seeking as fast as possible.  Simply put, if a visitor can’t find that information within the first 15 seconds or less, they’ll be closing your site and buying from your competitors and that’s a fact.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Before I get into the topic I’d like to re-iterate what I consider to be a successful website.  To me, a successful site is one that accomplishes all of the following goals consistently on an ongoing basis.

• Revenue generated by the website (directly or indirectly) exceeds the expenses of operating the website.

• Positive cashflow (revenue minus expense) is growing year over year at least 15% (please note: this doesn’t sound like a lot but due to the power of compounding, your profits will triple over 9 years at this rate)

• Your customer base is consistently growing and you have a way to communicate with and solicit repeat business

* Please note: I do realize that not all websites are in existence to earn additional revenues and some websites may be created solely for the purpose of reducing expenses (e.g. online technical support, online help, etc.).  The criteria of this type of website is essentially the same, however, its goals are reached by reducing expenses as opposed to increasing revenues.

Once any of these goals are no longer being successfully accomplished, it’s time for a refresh; your website has either aged too much and is no longer current or competitive with other companies in your industry.  Remember, just because your site is doing fantastic for you today, it can all change overnight when one of your competitors takes charge of their Internet presence and revamps it entirely!

Before getting into discussing the importance of design, I’ll re-iterate the four main dimensions that I intend to address during my four-part series:

• Content
  Informs leads and clients about your products and services.

• Design
  Graphical elements that make up the design of the website, reflecting the image of your business to your leads and clients.

• Organization
  Determines how information is organized so that leads and clients can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

• Functionality
  Enables your leads and clients to perform a task on your Internet presence (e.g. send an email, request a quotation or callback, etc.)

Okay let’s cut to the chase, what’s design?   Simply put, it’s a creative process, most often involving a client and designer(s), which focuses on creating a presentation to convey specific message(s) to target audience(s).

I’ve chosen to talk about design second within this series because it’s an aspect that the majority of business owners do not understand its true value.  After having been involved in literally hundreds of design projects to date, I can honestly say that I’ve experienced an entire spectrum of different types of customers.  Some customers don’t care at all about the graphical design aspect of their project and some care so incredibly about it that you would be willing to wager it was life or death!  I had one client actually fly halfway around the globe to sit down in person with me and select their colors and specific shades of every single visual element!  As painful as it was, I ensured that I was paid hourly for this painful process, so I happily obliged to the 3.5 days of torture.  Want to know the worst thing?  After they flew back home, they doubted their selections, reviewed it with their friends and tried to make every one of them happy which resulted in yet another 2 days of torture.  That was years ago and I’ve since healed, cleverly hiding the wounds deep within my Photoshop software.  Thank goodness for technology!

So then, what are the most important aspects of graphic design?  Instead of addressing what’s important and following a number of guidelines or rules without understanding why, let’s address why it’s important which will in turn reveal what’s important.

2. Remember how our eyes move

In our culture, we’re trained from the moment we start reading to scan from left to right, starting from the top left of the page and working down to the bottom right.  We develop a rhythm and our eyes move swiftly from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.  Take a look at Facebook, they’ve performed in-depth eye-tracking studies on their website on a regular basis so that they can continue to tweak and maximize the return on investment for their advertisers and in turn their own revenue.  They understand how vital this is… a well organized design can sell 500%+ more products and services than a disorganized one!

Eye Tracking Study of Facebook.com

Many designers have tried to create visual effects that look really cool, only to work their way back to an earlier concept that is simpler once they’ve received feedback from their visitors.

Simply put, your goal is to make life easier for your visitors and disrupting their natural eye movement will cause strain and in turn cause confusion.  Most times this would result in your worst nightmare… your visitor will simply choose a competitors’ product or service over yours simply because their site is easier to use.

Summary: Don’t use too much flashy or visual effects (even if you’re making a website for a bar or nightclub, it still must be within reason).  Remember how most websites are navigated and stick to the standards as much as possible.  Visitors do not like websites that feel like a learning experience, it’s best not to lose half of your leads on this basis alone.

3. Remember you’re here to communicate

If you want to keep it simple, this is the only rule you need to follow.  Make sure that you don’t create designs for just for the sake of design.  This doesn’t mean that your website shouldn’t be visually appealing, attractive, consistent and exciting.  Of course it should!  But the visual elements that make up the graphical design of your website must be consistent, relevant and cannot detract the visitor from finding the information they desire.  Remember this and you’re ahead of the majority of your competitors.  It’s far more important to draw your visitor’s attention to your product or service that fulfills their needs than to dazzle them.

When was the last time you walked into an electronics store and the staff attempted to impress you with the awesome lighting or comfortable couches in the studio?  I bet never!  Unless these items are also for sale, the staff won’t even pay any attention to these features and their goal is that you won’t either.  The lighting and couches are carefully added to each presentation in order to delicately compliment the ambiance of the top of the line electronics while ensuring that they do not divert your attention away from the actual products for sale.

Summary: Presentation is critical, so is the art of ensuring that it is complimentary and not distracting.  Don’t design for the sakes of design; but rather design to compliment your products and services.

4. Give up some control to the pros who have been through the above steps a hundred times or they simply won’t be able to help you.

You’ve hired the pros to create a website that will help generate additional revenue for your business.  Of course, you have personal preferences just like everyone else.  Don’t let them get in the way of common sense.  How to say this bluntly? You will not earn more revenues by being anal.  If you think a specific text, font size, shade or color will increase your revenues significantly, you are focusing on the wrong thing.  Of course minor customizations make sense in certain situations, but like anything, there’s such thing as going overboard and luckily those who are guilty of this will recognize it when reading this very sentence and grit their teeth in anger.  All I can say is goosfraba, a word that Eskimos use to calm down their children.  After all I’m Canadian and live in an Igloo, didn’t you know?  How do you know when you’re overboard?  If you find yourself trying to satisfy your personal preferences, you’re off course.  Refocus and regroup, you have a goal to satisfy and it’s not yours, it’s your company’s – treat it as a separate entity because it is.

Summary: If you hire a pro, let them do their job.  Listen and provide your feedback and a pro will always explain the reasons behind their decisions.  Accept the fact that you have personal preferences, but they may not be in line with the majority of the population.  Every pro has a primary goal in mind which is increasing your revenue; if you get in their way then they may not be able to do their job effectively.

Well that’s it for this article, I hope that you’ve enjoyed it and learnt a thing or two about design.  If you have any comments or feedback I’d love to hear from you.  Here’s to continuing your positive momentum.  Take what you’ve learnt and make a difference for your company knowing that you can hear your competitors shaking in their boots from a mile away.  They have a reason to be scared, they are missing one key ingredient… your competitors worst nightmare… N-VisionIT Interactive.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Before I get into the topic I’d like to address what I consider to be a successful website.  To me, a successful site is one that accomplishes all of the following goals consistently on an ongoing basis.

• Revenue generated by the website (directly or indirectly) exceeds the expenses of operating the website.

• Positive cashflow (revenue minus expense) is growing year over year at least 15% (please note: this doesn’t sound like a lot but due to the power of compounding, your profits will triple over 9 years at this rate)

• Your customer base is consistently growing and you have a way to communicate with and solicit repeat business

* Please note: I do realize that not all websites are in existence to earn additional revenues and some websites may be created solely for the purpose of reducing expenses (e.g. online technical support, online help, etc.).  The criteria of this type of website is essentially the same, however, its goals are reached by reducing expenses as opposed to increasing revenues.

Once any of these goals are no longer being successfully accomplished, it’s time for a refresh; your website has either aged too much and is no longer current or competitive with other companies in your industry.  Remember, just because your site is doing fantastic for you today, it can all change overnight when one of your competitors takes charge of their Internet presence and revamps it entirely!

Before getting into discussing the importance of content, I’ll identify the four main dimensions that I intend to address during my four-part series:

• Content
  Informs leads and clients about your products and services.
  

• Design
  Graphical elements that make up the design of the website, reflecting the image of your business to your leads and clients.

• Organization
  Determines how information is organized so that leads and clients can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

• Functionality
  Enables your leads and clients to perform a task on your Internet presence (e.g. send an email, request a quotation or callback, etc.)

Now, it’s time to talk about content.  First of all, what is it?   Simply put, it’s any type of content that helps any of your website visitors to make an informed decision, regardless of if its text, image(s), audio or video file(s).

I’ve chosen to talk about content first within this series because it’s typically the aspect that is most neglected, and also the aspect that is usually most underappreciated in terms of value that it can bring to a project.  How many times have I been approached with web design projects whereby the customer simply requests that I “throw together” a site based upon some disorganized and outdated content along with a handful of low quality (and often blurry) images?  I would tell you but I don’t like being responsible for making people cry.

The truth is that most people are just “too busy”.  But what is “too busy”?  I mean, what does it really mean?  Can someone be too busy to eat? surf the net? watch TV?  If you’ve lied your way through answering those questions, shame on you!  The truth is that nobody is too busy, merely placed their priorities and expended their time elsewhere.   This is irony at its best because if “individual with excuses” was to spend their time creating interesting, engaging and up-to-date content for their site, they would actually be less busy because their sales would increase dramatically and individuals wouldn’t have to spend so much other time trying to find additional customers that fall out of the sales funnel due to poorly organized and unappealing content.  Alternately, they may experience a “good” problem, they’d be busier and more successful selling more of their products and services to valuable customers that need them.

If you read online about creating valuable content you’ll find out that everyone and their grandmother has created an approach to preparing high quality content.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the grandmother approach outlined on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_lifecycle.  Find one that works for you and stick to it – just don’t sit down, write for half an hour, stand up, walk away and wash your hands of the task declaring it as complete.  Take your time, do a good job, consider what format is best and plan it out.  If you’ve got a 5 page website, you can expect to invest at least 20 hours in planning, creating, reviewing, revising and polishing your content before it’s ready for the web.

How much content should you write and how do you choose what format is best?  Here are a few simple rules to help you out:

• Keep textual content to a minimal.
  Be efficient with your writing.  People’s attention spans are short when they are surfing the Internet and nobody wants to read pages and pages of content.  Interest them with as little text as possible, have links to additional details if it’s necessary for their decision but do not inundate them all at once with too much information or you’ll lose the majority of your leads before they’ve even considered your products or services.

• A picture is worth a thousand words.  A video is worth a thousand pictures.
  Think about it when you surf the net.  Looking at pictures helps you to get a feel for a product or service a lot quicker than reading paragraphs of text.  Watching videos gives you an even better understanding of a product or service than looking at dozens of photos.  Consider this carefully.

• Accept that there are exceptions to the rule.
  If you are selling something that the specifications are critical to the deciding factor, textual content may be more important and keeping textual content to a minimal may not be advantageous.  Accept that there may be exceptions to the rule and that my article cannot address all specific situations.  This is where your common sense and brainstorming comes into play.

Now it’s time for an example.  Take a look at the following information, taken from the various Internet presences of the Ottawa Academy of Martial Arts (a client of ours and Ottawa’s best martial arts academy).  They’ve done a tremendous amount of work ensuring that regardless of which format they are communicating with, their message is very efficient, clear and easy to understand.

Text from their website:

OAMA Muay Thai offers the best quality Muay Thai in the Ottawa region. All of our world class experienced and certified Krus (teachers) have trained with the best in the world and give everything into each class they teach in order to ensure OAMA’s Muay Thai program stays at the top! Whether your goals are getting in shape, gaining knowledge of this incredibly powerful art, or becoming a world champion, it is all possible with OAMA Muay Thai.

The OAMA Thai program is broken down into distinct classes to provide the best training possible from the novice to the pro-fighter. Our Basic Muay Thai program includes the Conditioning class and the Technique class. The conditioning class focuses on training methods to develop a well conditioned body. This might include: skipping, push-ups, crunches and bag work as well as other conditioning exercises. The technique class will focus primarily on punching and kicking techniques and prepare the student for the Advanced program. The Advanced program is for those students who have that competitive edge and the desire to be in the ring. Advanced classes will teach specific techniques such as elbows, knees, and the clinch and include sparring in the ring. Enrollment in the Advanced program is based on a minimum 9 months basic training and/or approval from your Kru.

Competing in Muay Thai is completely optional and no pressure is ever put on students to do so.

Photos from their website: 

Video from their YouTube channel: 

Which one of these has the most significant impact on your opinion of their services?  I won’t make the decision for you, but you’ll quickly nod in acceptance that the rules I’ve outlined above are entirely valid and you’ll thank me for opening your eyes about how vital it is to take the time to prepare high quality, well planned out marketing content for your company’s products and services for the web and all other traditional means as well.

So there you have it.  Most of you who have read this will agree with what I’ve said, but walk away and do nothing with the knowledge that you’ve just gained.  Being “too busy” is just too convenient of an excuse.  Those of you who are serious about your business will realize that “too busy” is an invalid excuse and have already started to dissect your marketing materials with similar excitement and bewilderment that you experienced when you first dissected a frog in chemistry class.  Good for you!  I’m glad that I’ve ignited a spark inside you that will help you to make 2012 your best year yet.  Until next week, when we talk about design, you’ve got your work cut out for you.  Get busy and have some fun while doing it, after all your business is about to transform like you’ve never seen before.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Over the holidays I had a couple of challenging situations with companies contacting me to help with emergencies.  Ironically, these emergencies could have likely been prevented had some cautionary steps been taken to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

These emergencies occurred because these individuals simply chose their suppliers based upon price alone.  These suppliers both were new in their own respective industries, smaller companies with very few testimonials and mixed online reviews.  A quick review of the quality of their products revealed several clues that they were most likely not very experienced in their respective industries.

If you were ever to require an emergency operation, and have the option of two potential surgeons; one that has performed a dozen operations with a 50% success rate versus one that has performed a thousand operations with a 95.3% success rate but costs marginally more, which one would you choose?  Now that you’ve answered this question, think about why you’re willing to take so much more risk with the success of your business?  Is it simply because it’s your company’s life on the line and not your own?

Now that you’ve thought about that, here’s a summary of the emergencies that occurred:

• Domain name expired.  No customer service available to rectify the situation.  Downtime prior to resolution was 42 hours.
  • Amount saved by choosing based upon price alone: $5.75
  • Lost revenue*: $11,700.00
• eCommerce transaction issues on boxing week.  Nothing supplier can do, their servers are overloaded.  Intermittent transactional issues totaled approximately 19 hours.
  • Amount saved by choosing based upon price alone: $1,500.00 / year
  • Lost revenue*: $32,915.79

* Estimated by taking average revenue from previous year during same time period.

If you consider the financial impact alone, you will quickly understand that choosing suppliers based solely on price in most cases can be catastrophic to your cash flow.  In these cases, one of these companies that contacted me relies heavily on seasonal sales and it will take them several months to recover.  This doesn’t even address the potential damage done to both the reputation of their company and the loyalty of their long-term customers who very likely have purchased the products and services that they required from competitors.  Ouch!

Believe me when I say that these companies have learned their lessons and are already performing the steps necessary to prevent these issues from occurring again.  They are not only performing research and assessing customer reviews to correct these issues.  They are also assessing all of their other suppliers and have vowed to make the changes necessary to ensure that the backbone of their online presence is in top shape.  Essentially they’re executing a New Year’s Resolution to get their business in top shape; one that is stable, secure and agile so that they can focus on ensuring that they remain industry leaders in their respective domains.

The next time you’re about to make a decision with respect to potential suppliers, ensure that you consider if the supplier you’ve chosen is one that you can trust during both smooth and turbulent times only after you’ve taken the time to do your research.  Deciding on your suppliers is an important decision that will drastically impact where your business is positioned within your industry.

So many people are mesmerized by price alone and don’t even make any consideration with respect to the quality and reliability of the products and services that they are purchasing.  In many cases, individuals make decisions to save a few dollars that cost them several thousand later.  This is the wrong approach.  It’s time for you to realize this and compliment your own personal New Year’s Resolution with one for your business.  Individuals make New Year’s Resolutions all the time as a goal to improve their health, wealth and happiness; it’s about time that companies do the same.

I hope that you found value in this article and can learn from others’ experiences, it’s a lot less painful than learning them yourself.  What’s most important is to not dwell on any past mistakes or misjudgements, but to correct them and look forward.  Live each day in the present, but make sure that you create and revise your plan for the future a couple of times each year.  Happy New Year!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

You’ve hired the right team and ensured that your online presence is better in every way to that of your competitors, because you cleverly realize how vital it is to stand out.  Thinking about how you shop online, you realize each time you perform research, it feels like a speed dating session whereby you, like the majority of others, quickly browse 5-10 websites and within mere minutes have narrowed down your potential supplier to one or two options.  A combination of first impressions and your own personal priorities have been the criteria in which you’ve narrowed your choice.

So you’ve got the most visually appealing website that’s the easiest to use in your industry and your products and services are among the highest quality.  Your prices are even amongst the lowest… everything is going for you!  You’ve even ensured that your website has been optimized for indexing by search engines (if you don’t know what this is, please read this article next: What Most Search Engine Optimization “Experts” Won’t Tell You).  But… there are no customers!  Why?

This is the single most common challenge that business owners experience when launching their first website.  How do you attract potential and existing customers to your website? How do you start gaining traffic so that your website can sell your products and services?  What do you do next?

When you build a business with a physical presence, it benefits from tons of traffic from neighboring businesses and residences that are already present.  Unfortunately, websites aren’t placed in high-traffic neighborhoods; they simply don’t launch and start generating traffic all on their own.  For this reason, it’s imperative that once your website is built you must create awareness and attract potential customers.  Simply put, it’s time for marketing and here are the steps that you should take next:

Integrate marketing into conventional materials
One of the most obvious, yet most common oversights in marketing.  All of your conventional materials should contain marketing (your website address and tag line).  This includes, but is not limited to business cards, brochures, posters, clothing, pens, company cars, displays, boardroom walls, exterior signage, etc.  Any potential and existing customers that come into contact with any of your conventional materials will quickly learn and remember your web address.

Search engine marketing
One of the most important methods of gaining targeted traffic is to gain traffic from paid search advertising via Google, Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook and others.  If you’re not sure where to start, I recommend starting with Google.

While I cannot explain everything you need to know about search engine marketing, as it’s a topic on its own, I’ll provide you with a couple of the most important points to consider:

• Specific keywords

Make sure that you setup keywords that are specific to your business.  If you sell kickboxing gear, do not target “kickboxing”, but instead target “kickboxing shin guards”, “kickboxing headgear”, etc.

• Location

If you sell in one geographical area only, restrict your ads to be shown only in those areas (do not waste advertising dollars on displaying your ads to visitors who are not potential customers).  If you sell in the Ottawa and surrounding areas, restrict your ads to be displayed in those areas only, you will pay the same (or higher) cost if someone in Las Vegas clicks your ad, however, you have no chance of selling to them.

• Get started today

Too many people procrastinate when they are faced with a challenge.  Today you are not going to because you realize that if you do, it’s only going to negatively impact the revenue of your business, a consequence that you are not willing to accept.  So, get started today.  In order to learn more so that you can get started, visit the online help section of Google Adwords

Consider high-traffic “neighborhoods”
Make sure that your website has been submitted to all major search engines and online directories such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, DMOZ, etc.  Set up a plan to approach and contact several potential partners each and every month.  Add a calendar item and don’t forget to do this, you should spend 2-3 hours once per month considering who you will approach.  If you own a summer camp program for kids, some great websites to consider would be ones that list summer camps, extracurricular activities, etc.  If you search the web for “Ottawa summer camp programs”, “Ottawa extracurricular activities”, “Kids activities in Ottawa” you’ll find several listings of sites that you will want to be listed on.  Each month consider new keywords, get creative and ensure that you are listed everywhere.  In the bricks and mortar world this is referred to as “location… location… location”.

Social media marketing
Set up profiles at popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Network with potential and existing customers and get established on these sites with a customized profile.  It’s extremely easy to grow your network, people who are interested in your products and services can find you easily. If you can use video marketing to your advantage (for example, martial arts demonstrations), include YouTube in your social media marketing strategies.  Please note, it’s vital that you use these social media channels to network, and not to advertise, because if you simply perform outright advertising, you’ll quickly find that your social media presence will resemble a barren desert, as there’ll be nobody reading your posts.  If you want to learn more about social media marketing, please read other articles that I’ve written on the topic:

• Social Media Marketing – Is it Important?
• Social Media Tools that Measure Effectiveness and Keep You Accountable

Funnel traffic from other sites
This strategy requires a bit of creative thinking, but you want to consider ways that you can funnel traffic from popular websites such as: Kijiji, Craigslist, eBay, etc.  These are very popular and high traffic websites that can be easily targeted if done correctly.

Once you’ve gotten through these steps, there are additional ways that you can market your website.  Most experts recommend these items first simply because they are free, because it’s the easiest way to convince you that they’re an expert, hoping that you’ll recommend them to others and say something along these lines “You should call him/her, because they saved me a lot of money”.  What most experts leave out of their equation is the fact that time is money and while you’re waiting for these efforts to generate some momentum and sales, your competitors are reaping the rewards by pulling ahead of you.  All of these ideas are excellent complimentary marketing efforts that you should consider when the time is right, but, be aware that they require an investment of time, patience and technical challenges to overcome before they begin to gain momentum and generate revenues before they can compete with my previous recommendations outlined above.  Furthermore, once you’ve started these methods of marketing, it’s vital that you continue to contribute to them on an ongoing basis; otherwise, your momentum can quickly turn the other way, on a downward slope.

Article marketing
Write articles that are related to your industry, products and services. Include a brief bio and link to your website at the end of each article. Submit each of these articles to article directories and websites that rank well for your keywords.  Here’s a few locations to start with: Squidoo, EZineArticles, ArticlesBase, Gather and GoArticles.

Forum marketing
Search Google for forums that are related to your products and services.  If you are selling kickboxing gear, for example, search +kickboxing +forum. Find the top forums in your niche and join each of them. Do not spam, but do set up a profile (and signature, if allowed) and post an introduction. Get involved in each of these forums by posting at least one thread or response each day. This will help you gain exposure in your target market, and people will naturally be interested in your related website.

Answers websites
Using popular answers websites (e.g. LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo! Answers, etc.), find questions related to your industry, products or services.  If you can provide a legitimate answer to their question, you can include your link as the resource or reference.  Again, without spamming, if you can contribute to the community you will interest them in your related website.

Viral marketing
Write a free article (or report) that will be of great interest to your potential customers, and give it away for free.  Post it everywhere that you can: on your website, on your social media presences, add it to collaboration websites (e.g. Digg, Delicious, etc.) and even in your email signature file.  Be sure to identify in your article that it’s completely free and encourage readers to share it with their friends and family.

Blogging
Blogging can be considered another form of Social Networking, and enough so to be considered a stand-alone marketing technique. You want to set up a blog that is directly related to your website’s topic, and post content to it frequently (at least weekly).  In order to ensure that you are prepared to maintain a blog, create a list of blog topic ideas and ensure that you keep it populated with 20 potential topics at any time.  When you’re ready to write the next blog, you can pick from this list instead of trying to figure out what you’re going to write about next.

Press releases
You can write and submit a press release free of charge.  While some websites charge to publish your press release (and this often is worth the investment!), many also offer a free submission option.  You want your press release to be newsworthy, so you choose your angle carefully.  Do a search on Google for press release tips and take your time.  Rushing through the preparation of a press release can have the opposite effects than desired.

Now that you’ve been given everything you need to start generating the traffic that your website needs, get to work!  You won’t procrastinate, you won’t make excuses.  You are in complete control of the potential of your business and you realize that in order to reach its potential, it’s going to require action.  This is the year that you will take your business to the next level.  2012 will be a year to remember… it’s not just going to be a Happy New Year, it’s going to be an ecstatic one!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa web design

Today I’ll write a brief article about social media tools that help to measure effectiveness and keep you accountable, ensuring that your social media efforts are making a positive impact on your organization.  I’ve decided to write about this because it surprises me that the majority of companies that have started to leverage social media can’t even answer the simple question, “Is it making me money?”.  My response every time is “Don’t you think it’s time you figure out how to validate and justify your investment?”  When done right, it can easily become the single most powerful marketing tool for a company.

Let’s briefly consider what should be measured during our social media efforts:

• Are we using social media right?
• Which of our social media announcements are gaining engagement? Where should we focus?
• When is the best time to send out our social media announcements?
• How much engagement do we have?
• Are we gaining additional fans/followers/traffic?
• Is the traffic resulting in additional leads?

Most of these can already be answered with Facebook’s Insights page and Twitter’s upcoming web analytics due to launch in early 2012.

I’ve put together sample charts of each to help you to learn how to decipher the statistics.

Facebook

Twitter

1:
Number of tweets mentioning your site
 
2:
Number of clicks to your site from tweets

Alternatives for the Non-Technical User

Alternately if you want a universal and easy way to measure your engagement with very little technical experience required, then I encourage you to consider this combination of two completely free and easy to learn tools (neither of which I’m affiliated with):

• Bit.ly (http://www.bit.ly) enables you to shorten any links and easily assess the amount of engagement that your content gains and the source of their clicks.
• Buffer App (http://www.bufferapp.com) assesses when your fans and followers are online and schedules your social media announcements to automatically post at times that have highest odds of generating increased engagement.

Bit.ly

Buffer

As you can see these tools will help you to answer the above questions because you will know if you’re posting the right types of content based upon how engaged your fans are, you’ll be able to drop approaches that result in few clicks or interest and dedicate your time to the higher impact tactics that work.  You’ll have a “social media assistant” that’ll schedule your notifications to be posted at the time that’s best for you.  You’ll be able to compare your engagement trend growth (or loss) over time and you’ll be more confident in the decisions you make towards your social media efforts.  Finally, you’ll know exactly how many leads are clicking the most important posts that you make, the ones that lead to increased business and revenue.

If you want more powerful tools at a modest cost you should consider HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com).  I highly recommend it.  Please note that if you’re not an intermediate computer user, there’ll be quite the learning curve but if you stick with it, the rewards could really pay off.  It offers a rich variety of features and functionality that attract even larger companies.

This is a summarized breakdown and a brief primer.  I hope that it helps to whet your appetite to dive in and make a difference for your company.  Our social media presence generates approximately 20-30 calls or emails from potential customers and partners each and every week.  If yours doesn’t then you need to dedicate more time to getting it right, but, when you do… watch out!  The floodgates of opportunity will open!

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca
Ottawa web design

Where am I going with this? Why am I talking about old news? What am I doing talking about the obvious? Why am I wasting your time?  Well quite simply, I’m not.  The truth of the matter is that too many business owners are spellbound once again.  This time it’s not by the lure of success and riches but rather it’s their own manifestation of a belief of a pace required to meet all of their responsibilities.  What I’m talking about is their inability, or rather, unwillingness to step back and take the time to plan.  As a result of the sense of urgency that resonates within them, the majority of time I’ve witnessed countless business owners make decisions without any planning whatsoever and consequently blame the delegates around them that they’ve asked to do the job for any resulting challenges.

There are multiple points whereby a project can fail due to insufficient planning before the project has even been awarded.  If your first steps don’t sound like this when you approach your next technology project, you’re probably setting it up for failure (don’t worry, you’re not the first… 7 out of 10 technology projects fail before the project has even started!)

1. Requirements Gathering
   As the customer, it is your responsibility to document the requirements of the project.  Ensure that you take the time to assess and document all of your requirements. Make sure that you plan them out in detail. Start by a few simple questions, it’ll get the ball rolling:
   
   Who will use the site? (be specific about demographic groups, users with different needs, etc.)
   What does each type of user need to accomplish on the website? (be specific)
   Why are each of these activity(ies) necessary?
   When do they need to perform these activity(ies)?
   How can I measure the success of the website?
    
   Answering these questions will serve as the basis for your project requirements.
    
2. Assess, Clarify and Propose
   The supplier will assess the requirements that you’ve provided.  They will typically ask questions and document answers to fill in any gaps within your requirements. Thereafter they will prepare a proposal for your review and consideration.
    
3. Proposal Review
   Review all supplier-provided proposal(s) in detail. Ensure that each one has captured all of your requirements (or at the very least addressed them all, realizing that some may be technically infeasible) and ensure that they’ve taken the time to plan a solution that will successfully fulfill all of your requirements.  After reading the proposal(s), you’ll likely be able to narrow down your choice to the top couple of proposals and then you can move onto preparing questions that you intend to ask the suppliers in order to help you select the company you wish to hire.Quick Tip: Discard any proposals that do not address all of your requirements.  There is simply no way for you to ensure that a proposal with insufficient details will meet all of your needs and the supplier is only under obligation to provide the deliverables explicitly outlined in the contract.
    
4. Award Contract
   If you have a clear winner, award the contract and prepare (or obtain from the supplier) a written contract based upon agreed proposal.  Double check the contract terms, review with a lawyer and then proceed once you’re happy.

This should be considered the bare minimum for any project that you ever undertake.  I know… I know… I can hear you now “But I just don’t have the time!”  Guess what? Take the time now, or inevitably, you’ll be forced to make the time later to deal with the repercussions of not having planned prior.  In addition to all of that unaccounted for time, you’ll have to address shortcomings, cost overruns and a whole bunch of other intangible challenges that accompany the result of a project without a plan.

I strongly believe a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a quick look at this.  The top line showcases a project that started with planning, the above steps were followed and the resulting success is obvious.  The bottom project, however, unfortunately skipped the critical planning stages.  As a result you can see the direction of the project being changed over and over again.  While your supplier will be able to adapt to these changes, this will result in wasted time and additional costs due to change requests that are made outside the scope of your agreement.  Your lack of planning will cost you dearly, in both time and money.  How do I make this clear? 10 hours of planning can save 100 hours of work, the larger the project the more significant the impact.  These costs are significant!

The lifecycle of a project: planned versus unplanned

While choosing a supplier that has extensive experience in planning can drastically increase your odds of success, it’s important to note that if you are unsuccessful in determining and communicating all of your requirements, your supplier will have a partial portrait of your goals and while they may be able to fill in some of the blanks, the odds that they will fill in all of them with respect to your business requirements is very low.  It would be nearly impossible for a construction company to build your dream house without having you first inform them of your requirements, such as how many bedrooms and bathrooms you want, wouldn’t it?

“Your requirements must be clear and concise. It really is that simple!”

If you’re a gambler, reserve those activities for the casinos, sports bets and in-house poker games where your odds of winning are low but still much higher than gambling with your business.  Take the time to slow down and plan your requirements.  Leverage that creative genius within you; after all it’s that exact asset that got your business where it is today.  Do not let the pace of today’s hectic society thwart you from investing this very important time into your business.

Remember, the old adage still applies here: if you fail to plan then you plan to fail.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca
Ottawa web design

In order to best position your online presence for success, you should ensure that your presence successfully accomplishes the following baseline requirements:

- It must be visually appealing and match the branding that your target customers desire

• Simply put, if your website is not visually appealing or does not match the branding that your target customers desire, they subconsciously may decide to purchase products or services elsewhere.
• Actively compare your site to your competitors (if you don’t know who your competitors are, find out by asking colleagues “where would you buy this product/service?”).  Also, ask some colleagues to do the same.  Sit down and review all of the comparison notes.  Categorize any feedback into one of four categories (critical – must address, important should address, nice to have, ignored) and then make a gameplan to ensure that you stay ahead of your competitors by addressing any of the items within the first two categories and possibly the third depending upon your existing revenue, profit margins and budgets.  Don’t just do this once… at the very least, perform this exercise twice each year (but I recommend quarterly) or you could get caught off guard and won’t notice until it’s too late and your revenue is negatively impacted!  Caution: if you are unable to budget for any important items in this list, you likely have a bigger problem on your hands, because not only are you not keeping up with your competitors, they’ll likely increase the gap of their competitive edge even more over the next several months.

- It must be simple for potential customers to obtain important information regarding your products/services

• Easy and quick to read product descriptions.  Too much content will overwhelm your customers, most customers do not read detailed descriptions so hide them by default with the ability of your customers to click a link to view more.
• When questions are asked and responded to, ensure that you consider if you want to add it to your online “Frequently Asked Questions” page.  If you’re asked the same question every couple of days and it’s not in your FAQ, you’re wasting valuable time that you could use to help grow your business in other areas.

- It must be easy to understand

• Have colleagues that know very little about your products/services review your site and critique it.  Have them write down all of their first impressions, good and bad.  Be cautious, do not try to please everyone, that’s virtually impossible, instead try to please most and once you’ve made your decision stick with it and see how it goes.  If you are indecisive you’ll never reach your goal.

- It must empower customers to make decisions quickly and easily

• When describing your products and services, describe them as a customer would identify their requirements and the benefits that they are seeking by purchasing your products
• Compare your products to other products, possibly even competitors.  Enable your customers to do the same.
• Offer a reasonable warranty, if possible.  This will increase the customer’s comfort in purchasing your products and services.  Obviously, you’ll need to protect yourself as well, this should be fair to both parties (e.g. 30 day warranty on unopened products can be returned for refund less shipping costs).

Once you’ve dealt with these, you must ensure that your products and/or services are easy to purchase.  If it’s difficult to purchase, customers will simply shop elsewhere:

- Provide your customers with all standard payment options (e.g. credit card, PayPal, etc.). 

• Simply put, if you don’t have a common payment option you could be losing a percentage of your sales (and a large percentage at that!).  Bare minimum implementation must include all major credit cards.

- Identify shipping and handling costs, as soon as possible.

• Without clearly identified shipping and handling costs as soon as possible, an individual may abandon their cart in fear that the shipping costs no longer make the purchase a “good” deal.  More than 25% of carts are abandoned for this reason.  Think about things from your own perspective, if you were buying a $50 item and shipping was not identified, would you take the risk during checkout? Think about it and answer honestly.

- Provide bulk purchase incentives.

• The easiest way to increase purchases is by offering free shipping for orders over a certain value.  Amazon.com has increased their revenues by 30% alone with this tactic!  All of their products are priced carefully so that in the majority of cases, individuals need to buy just 1 additional item to earn free shipping.  Once again, think about yourself in these situations, have you added an extra item to your cart to earn free shipping? I know I have!

- Easy to checkout

• Can’t stress this enough, someone who gets frustrated with how difficult it is to checkout of a site will at one time or another abandon their purchase.  We’re people, we all hate hassles, the easier you make it for us to checkout, the less abandoned carts you’ll be putting back on the virtual shelves.

Get your potential customers to the website:

- If your customers cannot find your online presence, you’ve already lost the battle, but don’t invest in this too early, because if you haven’t addressed the above points, customers will find you but be unwilling to purchase your products and services.  This translates into wasted marketing dollars.  Too many times I see companies rush to launch their online presence because of some perceived deadline only to watch it fail.  Can you imagine what would have happened to Noah if the rain came before his boat was finished being built?

- Get in the top results for your targeted keywords.  If you need to, pay for it, this is not the time to cheap out.  Once again, read this sentence three times: Without interested leads you’ve got no revenue.  If you’re still not convinced, read it another 3 times, rinse and repeat until you understand how important this point actually is.

- Make sure that your products and services are listed on as many complimentary websites that you can get them listed on.  One of my clients enjoys a significant percentage of their sales as a result of their product listings in Google Merchant Center, another one of my clients gains significant sales as a result of having their products listed on Amazon.  Not only do these increased sales result in increased revenue, but it also earns them hundreds (or thousands) of additional loyal customers for life.  Most important point here is look around, take the time to experiment, don’t give up too quickly, keep at it and find what works.  Most businesses are literally throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue simply because customers cannot find their products.

What’s next?  Make sure that you monitor and adjust your strategies and plans regularly.  Do not become complacent.

- Those who become complacent or happy with the status quo, wake up one morning and wonder what happened.  How did they let their sales dip so quickly.  On the Internet things change quickly, competitors are always looking to increase their share, if you don’t monitor where you stand and adjust your strategies and efforts on an ongoing basis, you will lose ground.  It’s inevitable.  Stay alert, remain persistent and make a difference for yourself by monitoring and adjusting several times per year.

Finally, it’s time to plan and brainstorm for the future.  Do this at least twice a year, schedule it and make it a mandatory process.  Once again, do not become complacent.

- While it’s important to focus on your goals, it’s also important to step back from your goals and allow your focus to wander a couple of times a year.  Consider all possibilities and plan and brainstorm for the future.  Imagine there are no limits, where do you want to be in 2 to 5 years?  I know… I know… it’s tough to just drop all our psychological barriers.  Instead, imagine you’ve sold your business and moved half way around the world.  You get to start fresh with unlimited funds, what would you do? There you go… now you’re thinking.  I bet you’re 2 to 5 year plan is just rolling off of your tongue now.  You’re welcome… now get back to work and make it happen!

Well that’s it in a nutshell, a recap of my call and the best advice that I could extend to a dear friend and colleague of mine who I’ve had the pleasure of doing work with several times over the last decade.  I hope that it helps you and I’d sincerely appreciate hearing back from anyone that this helps on their pursuit to success in their online entrepreneurial efforts.  Even if it improves things marginally for you, I’ve made a positive difference in your life and that puts a smile on my face.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca
Ottawa web design

I’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands of clients about their websites, their visitors and the vital link between their websites’ traffic and increased profitability.  During these discussions, I’ve been privy to many insider stories about past experiences with previously hired search engine optimization experts and I can only wish that I documented the feedback that I’ve received over the last dozen+ years, but I had no clue that these particular conversations would have been so surprising, so revealing and so frightening that I never thought to do so.  Sure would have made for a spooky and spine-chilling Halloween story… but because it wouldn’t have been fiction, it would have bordered on the line of witnessing a real-life Horror and since I haven’t bought the “Halloween chills” binder on my liability insurance I’ll save that story for another day…

Instead today I aim to teach you a thing or two about search engine optimization, and about what search engine optimization experts especially don’t want you to know.  I’ll empower you so that in turn you can help yourself to succeed.  If you’ve got the time to learn and to execute, you will be able to take these steps to help increase your targeted traffic and of course your revenue as a result.  You may not be able to do it as fast or as effectively as a search engine optimization expert that has years of experience, but at least it’ll start increasing your revenue so that you can start to realize the value of search engine optimization services and make the decision as to when you want to invest in an experts skillset and at the same time have a better understanding of what they will be delivering.

Why am I doing this? Why reveal what SEO experts won’t tell you?  Because I can!  Because I am 100% confident in my abilities and because I know that it takes years to gain the skills and experience that I have, and while you are perfectly capable of performing the steps that I’ll outline, you’ll invariably spend more time and lose significantly more money  than you ever thought possible.  I can hear you all now “But how can I be losing money if I’m not spending?”  The answer is simple, you’re losing money because your competitors continue to grow and reap the rewards while you experiment and tweak your SEO efforts in an attempt to gain higher search engine ranking.

So then, let’s get down to the details…

Please note that my article will not cover the technical instructions, if you are unfamiliar with them, you should likely seek a professional because what could be a day or two of work, is more likely to exponentiate into a week or two of work and if done wrong could do more harm than good.

What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization (commonly referred to as SEO) is the optimization of your website’s layout, content and connections to increase it’s ranking within search engines.  Each one serves a specific purpose:

Layout

Most companies offer more than one product or service and target many different types of clients.  In order to reap optimal rewards from SEO, it’s critical to market each product or service distinctly.  It’s also critical to consider the motivations for purchase from each of your target demographics at the same time.

Content

After carefully considering and determining your website’s optimal layout, it’s important to ensure that each page targets the most relevant keywords based upon what that demographic is likely to use when searching for your products or services.

Connections

Connections refers to how many websites link to you.  These links must be one-way links (not reciprocal) and must be of moderate to high quality (or at the very least not a website known for being a link farm or a spam haven).  Consider the networking world, it’s who you know, and the same applies to websites.  If a high-traffic, reputable company links to your website, it increases your “value” to search engines just like when you’re at a networking event and are introduced to a colleague by someone that holds authority and respect in the community.

Where do I start?

While I could never teach  you everything in one article, here’s a quick little exercise to get you thinking, to whet your appetite and to help you determine if you want to go through the motions and try to increase your own search engine rank, or if you’d rather hire someone else to do it.  There are 4 steps to do.  For this example, I’ll use a local farm:

Step 1: Identify supporting information

• What are my products/services?
• Days
• Jumping pillows
• Pumpkin patch hayride
• Children’s discovery barn
• Cedar mazes
• …etc.
• Nights
• Haunted hayride
• Barn of terror
• Stalkers
• Gathering of the Ghouls
• …etc.
• What are my target demographics and what are their main motivations?
• Teenagers/young adults
• Thrills, fear, dates
• Children/parents*
• Entertainment, group activities, shows, togetherness
• Weddings
• Unique and memorable experience, unforgettable photos, romance of the country setting
• Corporate
• Team building, showing appreciation, marketing

* To get children to sign up, you must captivate their interest but at the same time you also must convince the parents that it’s a good idea.  Marketing to children is always a two-dimensional challenge; both the child and the parent must be considered.

Step 2: Plan layout

• Determine the association of products/services to their target demographics
• Determine if you will layout your website primarily based upon products/services  or target demographics.

Step 3: Plan content

• Research most searched keywords (try using Google Analytics, it’ll take some learning but it’s worth it)
• Start optimizing your content (both visible and hidden)
• Review content and revise according to target(s) based upon researched keywords (Please note: this can be challenging because you will want to retain the appeal of your copy, but at the same time will want to reap the rewards of search engine optimized text.  Take your time and tread carefully, rushing this can be disastrous to the marketing value of your copy).
• Ensure that “hidden” content is optimized based upon optimal search keywords (e.g. page titles, image “alts”, link “titles”, etc.)
• Ensure that your meta tags are optimized for users (the wording used in your META tags are typically used as the description in search results, more enticing text can easily triple or quadruple targeted traffic!)
• Determine if you want to separate your content by product/service or by target audience.  Outline cross-sell opportunities and ensure that they are linked together

Step 4: Plan connections

• One of the most important aspects of your search result ranking is calculated based upon who (and how) websites link to yours in order to determine your rank in search engines.  One-way (non reciprocal links) are important and ensuring that the keywords used within the links are chosen carefully to help increase your rank can go a long way.  On the other hand, being linked to from websites that carry negative reputations can penalize you and possibly even blacklist you from search results.  Don’t hire SEO “experts” that cannot provide testimonials  that you can actually verify; if they use techniques not sanctioned by search engines they can do more harm than good!  My best advice here is to take your time, write some quality articles (that include a link or two back to your site) and post it on relevant article websites; communicate and provide value to individuals in forums that are relevant to your industry, ensuring that your forum signature always links back to your website and add your company to industry listing sites that are geographically and/or industry relevant.  If you only add 5-6 links a week you’ll quickly see this exercise alone resulting in your rank increasing methodologically and as your momentum picks up you’ll be unstoppable!

So, what’s the big secret that most search engine optimization “experts” don’t want me to know?

It’s all of the above.  Once you know how truly complex and how much work there is to do when optimizing a website for higher ranks in search engines, you will realize that there’s no easy way to automate this as a service.  Most SEO “experts” will simply target a few keywords based upon the content that’s already on your site, the layout of your site won’t be optimized and if they offer any of the services identified in the 4^th step above, they’ll post to the same websites, directories and forums each and every time they offer the service to a client.  They’ve automated it to optimize their profits while keeping your cost down, at the expense of providing you a search engine optimization service that may increase your traffic but not your profits because they are not targeting your demographics appropriately.

What’s the use of that you say? Well you’re no different than the hundreds or possibly thousands of clients who’ve said that to me already.  High quality search engine optimization that delivers lasting results takes time, patience and ongoing dedication but if your customers cannot find you, or they find your competitor first – what is the true cost to your business?  Only you can answer this, only you can change the future of your company, be proactive and do something about your search engine ranking today.  Invest a bit of time each day, believe me, it’ll pay off in rewards that are faster compounding and more consistent than investing in stocks, real estate or any other asset in the world.

Conclusion

I hope that you find this article informative and useful.  While I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg, my goal is to give you an overall understanding so that you can choose your next steps.  If you choose to attempt your own search engine optimization, then I strongly recommend you check out Amazon (or your favorite online bookstore) and pick up a book or two that is highly rated and has been published within the last 6 months to ensure that the techniques taught are still current.  Most of all, my goal is to ensure that you don’t do anything to hurt your search engine positioning by making a mistake in your efforts.  So many important lessons apply here but the most important one is to take your time and do it right.

–

Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca

Ottawa search engine optimization (SEO)

Over 70% of the world’s population now have a mobile phone, that’s over 5 billion mobile subscribers¹, and in places like the US, it’s 9 in 10 people. With children now more likely to own a mobile phone than a book, with 85% of kids owning a phone as to 73% having books! Now that’s a pretty crazy statistic!

Smartphone sales in 2010 totaled 1.2 billion worldwide!  In 2011 the industry is on target to sell a whopping 1.6 billion²!  These statistics only encompass smartphones.  Mobile tablets, an industry that’s only a few years old, is already on target to sell 1 billion within the next 5 years³!  Morgan Stanley has published a detailed report⁴ based upon in-depth statistical analysis of the sales trends of mobile devices over the last few years and the truth of the matter is that mobile Internet usage will at least double the size of the desktop Internet usage within the next 3-4 years⁵!

As you can see, more and more decisions will be made while individuals are on the go, by using the mobile devices and it’s going to reach a point that it’s critical that consumer-facing companies have made the transition.

In order to help you visualize this reality, I’ve asked 100 of my family and friends to identify the reasons for using their mobile devices’ browser on a daily basis, here are some of the most common responses:

• Finding and choosing nearby entertainment (e.g. restaurants, nightclubs, gyms, spas, etc.)
• Researching a specific product they hear about from a friend, radio ad, etc.
• Watching movie trailers and purchasing movie tickets
• Reading current news
• Researching TV shows, etc.
• Watching porn (sorry, this was a common answer so to be fair I won’t remove it from this article, if it offends you, close your eyes)

As you can see, mobile devices have given individuals answers at their fingertips.  People are more informed by the readily available information on their mobile devices and easier influenced by collective decision-making influence of their cliques.  If your company sells a quality product or service and you’ve adapted to ensure that your information is both readily available and efficiently delivered to your target customers, you will reap the rewards of being a company that is as connected as the consumers that you serve.

It has also given companies the ability to deliver (or push) information to their customers with the click of a button!   If your company hasn’t started to leverage these methods, stop what you’re doing and take a look at your competitors, they’ve probably started to do some of these already:

• When individuals are within the neighborhood, they get notifications from businesses about  sales
• Advertisements in magazines and on radios cite websites, include QR codes and emphasize social media presences
• Relevant local news stories pop up several times daily on devices everywhere
• …and there’s more!

The possibilities are limitless, and the more connected our society becomes, the more expectations people have that companies will simply adapt and deliver information in a manner that consumers demand.  Those companies that don’t will feel the squeeze, experience a loss of loyalty, a disconnect from their customers and an inability to ward off their competitors.  Ultimately, companies will adapt or will suffer similar consequences that the music sales and video rental industries have already witnessed.

It always surprises me how slowly companies adapt and when they finally pull the trigger it’s too late!  Now it’s time for you to sit down, assess your business and ensure that you have a clear understanding of where it’s headed in the next several years to come.  Take a look at the big picture.  How do you sell your products and services today?  How is that likely to change?  Where do you need to adapt?  Now start… be on the leading edge.  Don’t let your competitors lead the way or they’ll be the ones who reap all of the rewards.  The world is changing, is your business adapting?  You have a family to protect, not just the one that’s within your home, but an extended family that’s under the roof that houses your business.  Where do you want to be in 5 years from now?  It’s up to you…

I hope this helps open up the eyes of business owners.  As people age, we tend to become complacent, it’s not our fault, we’re psychologically wired to do so.  It’s the very reason that leading edge technology companies are replacing executives everywhere faster than ever before.  It’s not done because an executive is not qualified, it’s done because it’s become essential that companies remain agile and competitive within their industries and in order to do so, adaptation of change is essential.  So do yourself a favour and start today.  Every day that passes is yet another day of procrastination under your belt, and you’ve got enough experience in that, haven’t you?

Brent Mondoux

CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive

brent@betterwebsites.ca

Professional iPhone & Android app developer/development

References
1: http://bit.ly/tE0UDq
2: http://bit.ly/v90N4I
3: http://bit.ly/ujLmLK
4: http://bit.ly/tDK155
5: http://bit.ly/u4eZOC

Most times when I start a consultation, my client will ask me for the “quick fix”.  Despite being taught over and over again, learning the lesson the difficult way that there are is such thing as quick fix, it’s amazing that people are still looking for that elusive gem, the one that’s going to change their business overnight… but it never happens!

Today I’d like to show you why fixing a website is never just as simple as a “quick fix”.  In order to show you why this is the case, I’m going to walk you through a scenario.  Now it’s important for you to visualize this so that you can truly understand what I’m talking about:

Regardless of who you are and what business you’re in, imagine you’ve moved to another city.  Assume that you’ve sold your business and retired.  Remember this: the service that you’ve offered for years no longer exists.  Now that I’ve brainwashed you into believing this (if you don’t yet, re-read this paragraph until you do), ask yourself these questions:

For this scenario to be easy to understand, I’ll use an example so that you can follow through the exercise:

Q: What products/services are you seeking and  in what city?
A: Accounting in Ottawa, Canada

Q: More specifically, what specific products/services will you be seeking in the next year?
A: Tax preparation, financial planning and cash flow projections

Now with the information outlined above, let’s walk through a typical user’s online decision making process.

1. What would I search for if I were to look for these services?
   Ottawa accountants
   Ottawa tax preparation
   Ottawa financial planning
   …etc.
2. Once I have search results, what would I do?
   Typically I would open the first 5-6 links and within viewing each of these sites for 30 seconds or less, narrow down my consideration to 2-3 companies.
3. Why did I close down half the sites within 30 seconds?
   There are 3 common reasons for this.First impression – Possibly a poor first impression, even though we’re taught not to make first impressions, we all do and it’s subconscious. With so much information at our fingertips at all times, it’s easy to move onto the next option if we’re unsure.
   
   Unable to find information I was seeking – Possibly insufficient information about this firm’s financial planning services, or an alternate site contained better information about another firm’s capabilities in this area.  Alternately, the site was difficult to navigate and I couldn’t find the information, got frustrated and moved onto a better designed website.I was bored – Simply put, the website was plain, not visually appealing and left me with a bad impression.  If this company cares so little about their own image, then how much are they going to care about me and my company’s tax requirements?
4. How could I possibly evaluate the performance of dozens or even hundreds of employees within 30 seconds?Although most people would never ask themselves this question, I’ve included this question merely to force everyone to think about this.  The truth of the matter is that nobody has the time to assess each and every potential supplier and must use some discretionary measures when determining who they will do business with.  While I may have eliminated the single best accounting firm in the entire city, I will simply never even know it.  My selection in the end may not be what’s best for my company but I simply don’t have time to interview 5-6 candidates.
5. At this point, with my shortlist of 2-3 remaining companies, I’ll typically finalize my decisionOver the next few days as a result of a number of email and phone exchanges, interviews and assessments, I’ll finalize my decision.  If your company receives an email, it’s critical that a response is received within the next 2 business days or less (preferably same day response).  Remember, you won’t be the only company receiving my inquiry.  If a conversation occurs, meeting is scheduled or a relationship is established then most times you’ll already be too late as I’ve already established some trust and invested time into forging a relationship with one of your competitors.Your goal should be to successfully make it through the first 4 steps above and still be included on my short list.  If this were to occur the majority of the time, you’d have more leads than you could possibly handle and your business would reap the massive rewards of this.  Unfortunately, however, in most cases, you’ll be shortlisted before you even have the chance to communicate with me.

Time to assess your own business…

Now that I’ve walked you through the above exercise by using an accountant as an example, I encourage you to take the time to do the same for your particular products or services.  Let’s call this the “stop ignoring my weaknesses work”, if you don’t bother doing the exercise then you might as well stop reading this article now, because you won’t reap the true benefits from it.

Once you’ve completed this exercise, you will have a list of items to consider when looking at your own and of course your competitors websites.  It will become easier to prepare and execute a clear plan that will truly take your business to the next level . Don’t ignore your competitors, study them and learn from them, remember keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

You will realize the importance of transforming your online presence into one that is not just another site, but rather one that is an extension of your sales team, one that generates you leads, increases your loyalty with your clients and reaps rewards that you never thought possible.  You will realize that there are many areas that are critical in ensuring that your website successfully generates leads, but most importantly, if any particular areas are weak, you’ll find that if you could put your biases aside, you very likely may have removed your company from your leads’ shortly for of the following reasons:

• If your website did not come up in the top of the search results for the keywords you would have anticipated.  Your website is lacking critical search engine optimization; your target leads are unable to find you.
• If your website is not visually appealing (or as visually appealing as competitors), you may not make the short list
• If your website is not organized intuitively, it may be difficult to find the information you were seeking
• If your website does not have clearly identified calls to action, and your competitors’ sites do, they may simply get the call first and have the first opportunity to close the deal.

The reality is that if you don’t take the steps needed to improve your online presence, you’ll be doing your competitors a favor because they’ll be getting calls from clients that could have been yours.  Start today, do this exercise, document your weaknesses and commit to eliminating them one by one.  Don’t be afraid to hire a web professional along the way, once your planning is done and it’s time for execution, it’ll be a much more effective use of your time if you focus your skills and energy where you can make the best impact on your company’s success while the technical challenges are handled by someone who has years of experience dealing with them.

I hope that this helps many more businesses to get in the right state of mind when considering the importance and value of their website presences.  Once you’ve performed this exercise and reaped the rewards of improving your online presence, please send me an email and get to the back of the line, I want my thank you hug.

–
Brent Mondoux

brent@betterwebsites.ca
N-VisionIT Interactive

Professional design, development and marketing of websites,mobile applications and social media presences

What is social media?

How is social media different from traditional marketing?

Why use social media?

But where do I start?

I’ve started using social media to advertise my company’s products and services?  What next?