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10 Essential Tools for your Online Business

In this day and age as the owner of a small to medium business it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything.

What is going on with the online world?

What is going on in the offline world?

It makes it crucial that you are able to work smarter so that you can get more done in less time.

Here are 10 tools that I use everyday to manage my activities so that I can at least try to keep up with everything.

1. Google Analytics

It is vital that you can see exactly what is going on with your website very quickly. There are some paid packages out there that do offer more than Google Analytics, but this is FREE and it tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

OK. I am not on the Google payroll for pushing their applications but they do have some good stuff. Want to know what search terms you rank for, how many links your website has, how often the Googlebots crawl your site, do you have any errors that need attention. Again this tells you pretty much everything you need to know about your website.

3. Social Twist

Tell-a-friend by Social Twist lets you share you and your customers/readers share your content in the social media world quickly and easily with only 1 button. I must say that I love this widget and the traffic to a couple of my sites has gone up 1000% since I started using it. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon - they are all there and more. If you want more referrals to your website from social media you have to be using this.

4. Blogger

5. Wordpress

I have said it before, and I will say it again. You must have a blog for your business.

If you are going to use an offiste blog then use Blogger. If you want your blog onsite then I would use Wordpress. Not sure if you want your blog onsite or offsite then check out my post about onsite blogs vs offsite blogs.

6. Evernote

If you are like me you probably get 1000's of ideas every day. And it is hard to keep track of them all. Using Evernote is a great way to keep track of those ideas. Jot them down, attach a couple of relevant tags and you can easily go back and find them when you want them.

Saves you racking your brain trying to remember that great idea you had yesterday but can't remember now. Happens to me all the time.

7. Deskaway

Have you got a bunch of projects that you are working on. Maybe you are part of a team working on projects. Deskaway is a great way to manage your tasks and projects so that you can keep track of what needs to be done when and by whom.

I use it because it helps to keep me focussed on what I am supposed to be doing at the moment, and it gives me a clear picture of exactly what I have on my plate at the moment.

If you ever find that you spend a lot of time thinking about how much you have to do and not so much time actually doing it, then Deskaway is a great way to get focussed on doing what needs to be done.

8. FeedDemon

Keep track of what is going on in your niche or industry quickly and easily by using FeedDemon. This allows you to monitor the relevant blogs in your industry from 1 platform. I use to set up the RSS feeds from the blogs I liked to look at straight on my iGoogle home page. But then I found there was too many. So, I started to use FeedDemon. You can see which blogs you look at the most and which you don't look at so much.

Part of being a business leader in your industry is staying tuned to what is going on in your industry. Keeping up to date with the latest trends is a big part of your success and this is a quick and easy way to do that.

9. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another way that I monitor the web to find out what is going on in my industry. You can set up alerts for specific keywords and phrases and then Google will monitor the internet and send you an email when something new that relates to your keywords is published on the web. I get about 4 or 5 alerts daily and I can then click on the links and see quickly what is being published.

10. Firefox

Part of being efficient on the internet is having a great browser. I use Firefox because I find it has less quirky bits than Internet Explorer and there are a whole bunch of great add-ons that you can use with it to further enhance your browsing. Stay tuned for a post next week about Firefox add-ons for your business that you should be using.

I know when you get used to something it can be hard to change but if you have not tried browsing with Firefox I would definitely go check it out.


OK, so you probably already knew about most of these tools. My question for you is - How many of them are you actually using?

Knowledge without Action is just a waste of knowledge. Take your knowledge and put it into action to enhance the success of your online business and your lifestyle.

Have you got online tools for your business that you use everyday that you think are vital to your success? Would you like to share them?

10 Essential Tools for your Online Business

Are customer error's costing you business?

Let me give you a little tip.

Not all of your customers are as computer savvy or internet savvy as you.

Let me give you another tip.

You probably have some links on your website that are broken.

So what happens when one of your potential customers tries to navigate to a page on your website that does not exist?

What happens is that they see an error page.

And what most business owners do not realise is that you have complete control over the page that they see.

Yet if you don't take control of this then they will see a default page that will look like one of the pages below.





















These are just generic error pages that browsers display. They are usually just a collection of links to other websites.

Before you go any further with this post, go and test your website and see what kind of error page you get. Just type in an address for a web page that does not exist on your website and see what comes up.

Customers that see your error page are at a defining point in their relationship with their business. They will do one of two things.

1. They will leave your website and go somewhere else. This is the most likely option.

2. They will hit the back button on their browser and hopefully go back to the last functioning page on your website they visited.


You do have control over the error page that people see on your website.

Take a look at the Amazon.com error page. Quite simple, but with a prominent link back to the Amazon home page. This sends a message to the customer that Amazon want them to stay on their website.



Is your error page costing you business and losing you customers?

You do not need a fancy error page. You just need something that keeps people on your website so that you can build a relationship with them.

What does your error page look like?

Are customer error's costing you business?

Do you really know what your Website Really Looks Like?

Do you really know what your website looks like?

Sounds like a silly question doesn't it.

Maybe the question needs to be what do your customers see when they look at your website.

If you want the fancy web developer term, what I am talking about is 'cross browser compatibility'.

What that means is the same website will look different depending on what browser your customer uses to look at it.

Sometimes the differences might be just subtle. But sometimes certain elements of your website might not work at all!!

The difficult part of testing this is having access to different computers running different versions of the different internet browsers so that you can see what your website looks like on the different browsers.

Well, the good thing is you don't have to worry.

Head across to browsershots and you can have a look and see what your website looks like in the different browsers.

Enter the URL for your website and the browsers that you want to check and away you go.

You can also specify the screen size (not everyone has the biggest screen in the world), javascript, flash and colors.

This will allow you to see what your customers really see when they look at your website.

What browsers should you check?

If you have Google analytics installed on your website you will be able to see from your stats what browsers people are using to look at your website. This is the first place to start. Check these ones first.

W3Schools will also give you stats about the browsers people are using to surf the internet.

For March 2009, 17% of people on the internet are still using Internet Explorer 6. 25% are using IE7 and only 1.4% are using the most current version IE8.

Nearly 50% of people are using Firefox. Test the latest version of Firefox and the next to latest. As a general rule, people that use Firefox keep their browser up to date because Firefox tells you when there is a new version available.

A little over 4% are using the new Google Chrome browser and a small percentage use Safari and Opera.

What do your customers really see when they look at your website?

If you would like a list of the browsers that I check please send me an email and I will send you the list that I use.

If you find you have issues with how your website looks in the different browsers drop me a line and I will help you sort it out.

Do you really know what your Website Really Looks Like?

My Formula for Online Business Success

Are you looking for business success in the online world?

Do you feel frustrated by a lack of success in the online world?

I have a simple formula that I use to consistently produce success online, for both myself and my clients.

RESULTS = TRAFFIC * CONVERSIONS

OK, so there it is.

When I work with a client or with one of my own websites and I sit down to assess how the website is performing currently I ask myself 2 questions to start with.

How much traffic is the website getting?

How well is the website converting this traffic?

So, how are you doing so far.

Let me give you a couple of common scenarios. Maybe you can relate to these.

Scenario 1 - No Traffic

This website has very little traffic.

It doesn't matter how good your website is, if you are not getting very much traffic to your website, your results are going to be limited at best.

The other challenge for a website that doesn't get much traffic is that it is difficult to get any meaningful results on testing to improve the website.

For a website that is not getting very much traffic there are a couple of things that I look to do to help to fix this.

Make sure that the website content is optimised so that it will feature in the search engines. Check out my post on seo for your website for more information.

Create content or use the existing content and submit it to article directories to create links and bring traffic. Once you get known in the article directories larger websites will often pick up and republish your content which will bring you more traffic and links.

Share your content in the social media world with twitter, facebook, digg, delicious, and reddit just to name a few. I use a little gadget called tell-a-freind by social twist.

Check out my posts on using social media to drive website traffic.

Buy traffic from google adwords.

It can take some time to bring traffic to your website. Buying traffic is usually the quickest way to bring traffic to your website. How much it costs will depend on your industry and how competitive your keywords are on Google adwords or Yahoo search marketing.

Scenario 2 - Poor conversion rate but plenty of traffic

This is perhaps the easier of the 2 scenarios to deal with.

How would I deal with this scenario. In a word split-testing

The first question you have to answer in terms of conversion is what is your website for? What is the end goal of your website.

The next question you need to answer is what is your current conversion rate.

If your goal is to sell something (e-commerce) and you get 100 visitors to your website and 1 buys your product then your conversion is 1%. If you can double your conversion to 2% then you have doubled your sales with no increase in traffic.

There are many elements on a website that affect conversion. Testing is really the only way to figure out what works best. I use Google Website Optimiser for my split testing. You need a Google Account to use it but it is free and it will tell you what you need to know.

In a nutshell what you do is you have 2 webpages that are slightly different. You might use a different header, different layout, different colors or different wording.

Just remember, only test 1 thing at a time.

Run a test over a few weeks or a month. You find that webpage 1 converts at 3% and webpage 2 converts at 5%. So, you use webpage 2. This then becomes your reference page. Test another page element against your reference.

Over time you can make a significant improvement to your conversion rate which will have a huge effect on your online business success.

So, what do you need to focus on. Traffic or Conversions?

If the answer is both, I would focus on traffic first because the more traffic you have to your website, the more quickly you can run tests in Google optimiser.

Where do you need to focus your efforts?

My Formula for Online Business Success

Split Testing - Taking the guesswork out of website design

Most business owners I know work very hard at getting the best results from their business efforts.

But, largely it can be a real process of trial and error.

Try this. No I think that worked better. Now try this. And so on. Often you can feel like you are running around in circles and getting nowhere.

Marketers have been using split testing for many years as a way to actually determine which headline or which graphic works better in their sales copy.

You can use the same process with your business website.

The tool I use for split testing websites is the Google Website Optimiser tool.
It is free and easy to use, and you get meaningful results.

The first question that you have to answer is 'What is the goal of my website?' What do I want people to do when they go to my website? Do you want them to buy something? Or do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Do you want them to download something? Or do you want them to click on an affiliate link?

When you know what your goal is you then use this to determine the results of your split testing.

What kinds of things can you split test?

Headlines

Graphics

Page Layouts

Colors

Fonts

Sales Copy

there are many different things that you can experiment with to improve the results of your website.

The Golden Rules Of Split Testing.

1. Only test 1 thing at a time. As you get more skilled with this process you can start testing multiple things at a time but to begin with only test 1 thing at a time.

2. Wait until you have a meaningful number of tests before drawing any conclusions. How long this takes will depend on your website traffic. On a website getting 50-100 hits per day I would run a test for 1 month. That way you have meaningful data before you draw any conclusions.

3. Always be testing. Constant Improvement is what we are looking for. I know in the past I have been guilty of trying to hit a home run, but often life and business are not like that. Gradual improvement on an ongoing basis is far more realistic.

Ramp Up Your Split Testing

If you have a budget that supports it, the main way that I increase the power of my split testing is to buy traffic using Google Adwords. If your website only gets a few hits per day because you are just starting out it can be difficult to do any meaningful testing.

The best way around this is to invest in some Google adwords and buy some traffic to your website. That is a subject for a whole other post but if you would like some info on Google adwords please drop me an email.

By picking the right keywords, for an investment of $10-$20 per day you can get enough traffic to your website to do some meaningful testing. Reinvest the improvements from your site for the first few months into more adwords and more split testing and before you know it you will be getting enough free traffic to your website that you may no longer need adwords.

The biggest mistake that most business owners make is that they have a website that remains static until they get tired of it and decide to engage someone to redesign it. And when it comes time to redesign their website they don't know what really works and what doesn't work on the current site.

Rule Number 1 - Always be Testing.

Rule Number 2 - Refer to Rule Number 1

Split Testing - Taking the guesswork out of website design

Duplicate Content Penalty - Is it just BS?

OK. So here is my thought on the subject.

The Duplicate Content Penalty is BS.

So, some of you might be saying 'What is this Duplicate Content Penalty?'

The duplicate content penalty is something that has been tossed around for years that says that the search engines will penalise you if you have a piece of content on one of your web pages that is the same as a piece of content on a web page on another website.

It doesn't happen.

If it did happen, article directories like ezinearticles would not exist. I have many articles on ezinearticles that are also on my web design website. I have posted these articles on other article directories as well.

I don't see ezinearticles suffering too much from this duplicate content.

If the duplicate content penalty existed I could quite conceivably put the article directories out of business by posting my articles to as many of them as I possibly could so that they all got hammered by Google for having duplicate content. Ridiculous.

On a number of occasions I have had one of my articles picked up by manta. I like it when that happens. They are a PR6 website with about 5 million unique visitors per month. So, they get one of my articles of ezinearticles and republish it on their website.

Doesn't seem like they are too worried about a duplicate content penalty.

So, if you have some really good content and you are worried about putting it out there because you don't want to get penalised for duplicate content - TAKE OFF THE HANDCUFFS.

There is a whole lot of link love you are missing out on. I regularly use 4-5 article directories for each article I write. I often put content up on Squidoo as a lens. I write eHow articles from my content. I put content on my blog that is on my website and vice versa.

If you have been holding yourself back because you have been worried about getting penalised for duplicate content - STOP. It won't happen.

The Real Duplicate Content Penalty

OK. So here is what you don't do. Create a website with 100 pages, 1 page of unique content and 99 pages of copy. Google won't love you.

That is the duplicate content penalty.

It is generally accepted that the Google algorithm takes into account the size of your website. It stands to reason that a 1000 page website would have more authority than a 1 page website.

Now, don't get me wrong it is entirely possible to get a 1 page website to rank well in the search engines.

But, it must be unique content. That is what duplicate content is all about.

So, use your content. Submit it to article directories. Make a squiddo lens. Write some eHow articles. Make a blog.

Use your content to create links back to your website to bring traffic and to help you rank better in the search engines.

Create some link love for your website.

Duplicate Content Penalty - Is it just BS?