Posted by Lukevdp on June 5, 2009 under Freelancing, Small Business | 
A lot of talk and emphasis goes into making more money by generating leads. Everyone does it, I do it, in fact, half this blog is about Adwords and SEO and lead generation etc.
Once you’ve got some work, more effort should go into streamlining your business processes so that you can handle even more.
When my business first started growing, I was spending a lot of time on the business and not doing work. In fact, I think this happens to all freelancers. The sorts of things you end up doing are drawing up proposals, making invoices, following up payments and other tasks like that. Instead, it’s much better if you can get more billable hours in. If you could do 10% more billable hours, that’s a payrise for you without raising your rates.
Some tasks that can be, and should be automated.
- Streamline your lead generation process
- Streamline your sales process
- Streamline your project management process
- Streamline your billing, accounting and receivables process
The best thing about streamlining your processes, is that it frees up more time for you to grow. If you’re efficient, you can fit in a lot more billable hours. If you manage projects and delegate a lot of your work, you can manage more projects at once by having streamlined systems.
Not only that, but having automated systems makes it easier to be in business. Tax time comes around and you can just fill in the boxes and be done with it. A new lead comes in looking for information and they can slip into your automated education program.
Documented processes are what allows businesses to expand. Documented processes make it easier to sell your business should you ever want to do that.
I was reading the Web Design Business Kit by Brendan Sinclair (if you haven’t already bought it, go and buy it, it’s a great book), and when you get down to it, the whole book is about his systems. What systems he has found work best from 10 years in Web design.
For someone starting out in business, as I did, it’s actually quite hard to come up with systems and processes, because it’s impossible to know what works best. That’s where it becomes important to draw on resources.
It is hard to find good resources. Every business is different, and there aren’t many people out there that are giving away these sort of secrets. All of the software that’s out there focuses on project management, which is great, but what it is missing is business management. If you want a good suite of tools, you need Basecamp + Salesforce + invoicing software. You’re up for a lot of $$$ for all of those products.
And that is precisely why I’m announcing a new project that I’ve been working on. The product is called Freelance Total, and it is something I have wanted as a freelancer for a long time. Instead of focusing on the tasks that you do as a business, it is a framework that encourages the use of best practice systems to streamline your business.
It focuses on taking the legwork out of mundane business tasks, so you can focus on making money.
It’s a product that will be developed to proof of concept very quickly, and we will be using it at VDP Websites while we’re building it. As soon as it’s ready to use, I’ll be letting people get access to it.
So, if you’re a freelancer, sign up on freelancetotal.com to get notified of updates. It really is going to be great management software.
Posted by Lukevdp on June 2, 2009 under Search Engines, VDP Websites |
An SEO firm has opened a base in Shepparton (where I live), and has recently been optimising their website for search engines.
Their efforts included making some videos and linking back to their website.
Looks like they got a bit too eager and started posting links to it where they shouldn’t have, and now when people search for their keyword, one of the first results is a link to a page where they were banned for spamming. Also on the page are comments from a bunch of people that are clearly annoyed by the spam.
5 years ago, SEO used to be about how many useless links you could get. Now it’s all about relevance and authority.
Posted by Lukevdp on June 1, 2009 under Adwords, Marketing, Websites |
These aren’t just numbers that I plucked from thin air, like how you hear people say “This is how I made $12,785 in 3 days”. This is a real case study of one of my clients that we setup an Adwords account for.
The great thing about Adwords is that you can setup an account that is profitable, and once you’ve done that, you can improve it exponentially. I’m going to detail exactly what we did to get these results.
The campaign is split into 6 ad groups with about 10 keywords in each group. It’s a niche industry and the ad groups and keywords are targeted and the campaign is well setup like you would expect.
The campaign structure stayed the same the whole time. The only thing we did change in terms of the keywords was the bid amounts.
We’ve run this Adwords campaign three times for a period of a month or two each time. Let’s have a look at the results of each campaign, and what was difference between them.
Initial Campaign
In the initial campaign, we sent all traffic to the home page of the website.
Adwords Campaign 1 Conversions
Second Campaign
For the second campaign, we changed a few bid amounts, but that was the only thing we changed in the Adwords account.
What we did do was create a landing page. We used the same methodology as we did in the article I wrote about designing landing pages.
Just by creating a good landing page and directing traffic to that, it increased the conversion rate by 230%
Adwords Campaign 2 Conversions
Third Campaign
This latest campaign has just finished. The client is in an industry that has been hit hard by the recession.
So we created a special, time sensitive offer on the landing page.
The offer was a bundled package that is a bit of a “taste test” for potential customers.
Adwords Campaign 3 Conversions
The customers loved it. Conversions shot up even more, conversion rate went higher, cost per conversion came down.
All without changing the Adwords Account
These results came without even changing the Adwords Account. The only changes we made to the campaign, were to the page that the Adwords was directing traffic to.
I think that really illustrates the effectiveness of being targetted, and testing your landing pages.
Posted by Lukevdp on May 30, 2009 under Branding, Marketing, Websites |
I have a friend who I’ve known for a long time that has been looking to build a house. Like a lot of young people, she spends a lot of time on the internet doing research.
She looks at all the different floor plans.
She looks at lots of pictures. The colours, the inclusions, the facades… everything.
She spends lots of time looking at all different aspects of the houses.
While observing her, I noticed a few interesting things
- The more complicated the buying decision, the more information your website should have
- Local builders are just not even in the ballpark when it comes to their website.
- Your online reputation, ie. recommendations and 3rd party reviews are really important.
National builders blow local builders away
National builders have so much useful information on their website. Nobody expects a local builder to have 4 different ranges of homes with 16 options from each range, but still, there is a huuge difference between the websites. (When I say national builders, I don’t mean the company, I mean builders that build all over Australia)
The national builders have websites that look nice. When you go to them, you think, “yeah, these people look like they could build a nice house”. The colours look good, the images are all really nice, some have a bit of flash, and they just make a good impression.
You go to a local builders website and they’re just terrible. The designs look shoddy and you begin to wonder if their website represents their level of quality or service. The colours are terrible, the pictures aren’t highlighted and the website doesn’t have any specific information on what they can do for you. Worst of all, the local builder’s aren’t leveraging the one thing that makes them better than a national builder. Their “localness”.
As a small business owner, I am a firm believer in supporting local business. I will happily pay more for things from a local business.
But for some reason, this industry doesn’t get it.
Local builders should be leveraging their local knowledge. I mean, they should be able to tell people where is the best place to buy land, which direction houses should be facing, customise buildings for the local climate or conditions, etc. Also, they should be able to offer personalised and local service that everyone loves.
We all know the benefits of a local small business over a large chain, but more and more people are doing research on the internet. Here are my thoughts on how local builders can get the power back. These tips don’t just apply for builders, but really for anyone selling complex products. It’s simple really, find out what you’re customers want, and then give it to them.
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Have lots of information
- There should be lots of information on houses. Each house should have an overview, photo gallery, floor plans, inclusions and options. Most importantly, there should be some indication of the price range. Everyone knows building materials change all the time, but still, customers need a baseline to compare options against… and a ballpark price does exactly that. If there are display homes, there should be information about them. There should also be a quick way to contact the right person.
- Lots of information about the local area. What estates are going up, where land can be bought, etc etc.
- Lots of content that will help your target market. If you build homes for first home buyers, put some information there about the first home buyers grant. If you have specific packages for first home buyers, draw attention to them and educate your visitors.
- Get reviews and testimonials, and don’t edit them. Customer’s aren’t fooled by fake testimonials. Post real testimonials, with real pictures. Put dates on them and keep adding new ones.
- I understand there’s never going to be the resources that the bigger companies have. But the information I’m talking about here, is information that builders go through with customers in the normal sales process anyway. All good builders educate their clients. Why not do it in a way that makes it easy for them, while they’re in a place that’s convenient for them.
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Look good
I can’t emphasise this enough. If you want people to trust you, you have to stun them with a great looking website. You have to stand out. You can’t just slap the information together haphazardly. Templates aren’t going to do the job. The amount of dodgy “Joomla website developers” that think a template design counts as a website is amazing. Customers aren’t fooled. If you want to stand out, your site has to be your site, it has to reflect what you do, and to do that, it has to look great.
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Optimise for search engines
It’s easy to beat the big guys in local search results. A website dedicated to a local area is always going to show up higher (provided it’s optimised properly. See my articles on getting on the google map and my 3 part series – optimising for local search).
I have seen a lot of builders advertising lately. They are trying to keep themselves going in this recession. The craziest thing is that to implement a great website is a fraction of the cost of all of this other advertising. Some builders are making huge offers, like Metricon is offering $13k in extras for free, and advertising it on radio, tv, newspaper, and probably other places. That’s all great, but people always do their research. And more and more people are researching online. For a fraction of the cost that Metricon is spending, a hell of a lot of information and education can be given to customers that are looking for it.
Summary
When you go out and buy staples, you just go to the shop and buy staples. You don’t care what brand, you just care if it fits and that it works. You don’t research the decision, and you don’t care about it much because even if you’re wrong it only costs you $3.
When you’re going to buy a house, or a car, or build a website, or make an investment, you want to know everything about it before forking over the cash.
Just from my experience helping my friend look at houses, I can see there’s a huge gaping hole when it comes to websites for builders.
About the author
Luke van de Paverd is the founder and manager of VDP Websites, a firm in shepparton offering web design and internet marketing services. More info about Luke or visit VDP Websites.
Posted by Lukevdp on April 18, 2009 under Adwords, Marketing, Search Engines |
I’m writing this post because I read a very interesting post on human behaviour in search at Vastplanet Blog by Michael Vorel, and wanted to add my 2c. When my 2c became 5c, I thought it best to write it here rather than in the comments over there.
In the post, Michael talks about whether people search in the plural (eg. “cars”), or the singular (eg. “car”).
In his post, Michael summarises with
“In summary, most people are singular in nature and go to Google to solve an individual problem or inquiry.”
My initial reaction to this was that it was wrong, because in my own experiences with Adwords I found that plurals was getting higher search volume than singulars.
So I did a bit of research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and found that we were both right.
Plural vs singular in the USA
In the USA, just over two times as many people use the singular over the plural in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
number of searchs of car vs cars in the usa
Plural vs singular in the UK
In the UK, almost three times as many people use the plural over the singular in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
Number of searches of car vs cars in the UK
Plural vs Singular in Australia
In Australia, we are very close to the UK and almost three times as many people use the plural over the singular in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
Number of searchs of car vs cars in Australia
“Oil painting” vs “Oil paintings”
Adwords went down for maintenance before I could check on the numbers for this search, but I want to throw another spanner in the works here and suggest that search volume alone is not enough to base a decision on. Your conversion rate should be taken into account as well, and profit should be the driving factor.
In the example of oil painting vs oil paintings. I’m making guesses here, but if I was selling oil painting supplies, or lessons on how to do oil paintings, my conversion rate would be higher for “oil painting” than “oil paintings”. The reason is that “oil painting” can also be searched as a verb, as well as a noun, and would be popular among people looking for help with their oil painting skills.
Summary
I think Michael already touched on the main point for us as internet marketers to take away from this.
“However, unless you check you may be buying ads in the wrong place!”
Peoples preferences of plural vs singular will vary greatly between different industries, and even different countries and cultures.
As an internet marketer, we can take away what we already knew – do your testing for each campaign. Find the most profitable words, and go for that.
Posted by Lukevdp on April 11, 2009 under Lukevdp |
I’ve decided to make my blog a “dofollow” blog. That means that if you post a comment and put your website in the url box, you’ll get some page rank passed from this blog to your site.
I see it as a great way to promote discussion and also to give back to those that take the time to comment.
Posted by Lukevdp on March 29, 2009 under Marketing, Small Business |
I have written before about Birthday marketing because I think it is a really under utilised tactic. It’s not for every business industry, for example I don’t use Birthday Marketing as a web designer, however for consumer services and products I think it’s a great idea.
Heres an example I’ve written in the past (on a different blog)
Charles is turning 36 in two days. He still hasn’t decided what he’s doing for his birthday, so he plans on just taking a few friends out to a restaurant and have a dinner. Charles gets his morning mail, and in it is a birthday card. He opens it up and it says, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY! We here at [insert local restaurant] would love to see you here for your birthday, so as a present, if you bring four friends, you eat free!”.
Charles is almost certainly going to go to that restaurant. And, who knows, if the service is great and the food is great, it might just become his restaurant of choice.
That’s a hypothetical example, but now for a real life one.
My girlfriend gets her eyebrows waxed probably about once a month. If it were me, I’d find a place I like and go there all the time, but for some reason, she is constantly trying new and different places to get her eyebrows waxed.
Anyways, a week before her birthday this year, she receives a letter with a $10 gift voucher in it for an eyebrow waxing. Since my girlfriend already wanted to get an eyebrow waxing (she wanted to look good for her party), it’s obvious where she was going to get them done.
It’s always a bit foolish when I try and predict what my girlfriend is going to do, but I can go out on a limb here and say that she is quite likely to go back to that place.
The shop builds up a relationship, gets repeat business, my girlfriend gets a cheap eyebrow wax and everyone is happy!
It doesn’t have to be expensive either. The gift voucher was a black and white print that was cut out with scissors and her name was written in Pen. Aparently the store has a big birthday book where they keep everyone’s names, and manually send them out every day.
Since I like lists so much, I’m going to outline some benefits of Birthday Marketing.
- You can call your coupons a gift voucher
- You cut through marketing clutter because everyone loves when people remember their birthday
- You form a positive relationship
- Low cost and I assume the response rate would be pretty good. Even if the initial offer you send doesn’t get used, you’ve got your business at the top of the customers mind
So how do you go about implementing it?
For small customer bases, the manual option isn’t a bad idea. The whole process feels a bit more personalised for the customer as well (knowing that it isn’t just computer generated).
For larger customer bases, it might be worth looking at software like Aweber to do the job. It has a birthday marketing feature. The downside is that it is just an email based system, however you could set it to give you reminders and then you manually send out letters.
Bigger companies would want to look at something like Impact Data. They have a range of different software packages available, and have a lot of different ways to keep in contact with customers, birthday marketing being just one of them.
Posted by Lukevdp on March 17, 2009 under Marketing, Small Business, Websites |
One of the biggest mistakes I see on e-commerce websites is the lack of a phone number. When a user can’t find a phone number on a website, they immediately think:
- I can’t trust this website with my money
- I can’t get a quick answer to my question
- What if things go wrong, I have no way to contact them
I can say from experience that a large part of sales from an online shop’s sales will come through the phone. The exact ratio will depend on the industry, but I’ve got clients who have online ordering systems and they receive almost all of their orders over the phone. Another client gets about 50/50 calls/online sales, and my experience managing an online electronics shop was about 25% calls and 75% online orders.
I’ve found some other people on the Webmaster world forums with similar experiences. These are all quotes from the thread:
- “Toll free phone number + quality salesperson = Increased sales. Period.”
- “We convert 75% of calls into sales there and then, if we could do that with “pure web traffic” I’d be posting from somewhere far more exotic than I am now
”
- “I believe that if you are trying to convert big-ticket sales (over $500), it is necessary to post the phone number to give people that “warm, fuzzy feeling”. We take about half our orders over the phone, from people who called us and saw the number on the website. Many tell us they wouldn’t have ordered from us if they hadn’t been able to reach us by telephone first.”
I also found a blog post by Derek Gehl that shares his positive experiences of having a phone number.
Add to this the fact that still some people don’t feel comfortable ordering online, and you’ve got a compelling reason to have a phone number. In fact, if you don’t have your phone number on your store, you’re probably costing yourself a lot of money.
What if you’re not available to answer the phone all the time?
This is a really good point, after all, a lot of ecommerce shops are part time affairs, with the owners running them for a bit of extra income whilst still working full time.
This is the exact case with Clock Central – an online clock store that is looking to dominate the high quality clocks and instruments niche in Australia.
What did we do?
Well I’m a firm believer that even if you can’t take the calls, having a phone number gives visitors a reason to trust you. We set up a Skype Voicemail account, which has it’s own phone number. We created a memorable and unique answering machine message that is lively and friendly. I think this is an important – nobody wants to leave a message on your phone if you just say “Hi, this is Luke, leave a message”. Instead, we created a message that makes the customer feel like they should leave a message.
So while Clock Central can’t answer the phone during the day, they’ve got a phone number on their site (instantly increasing their conversion rate), and a great message that will allow them to follow up leads that they would otherwise have left.
So… if you don’t already, get a phone number on your website. Even if you have to create a new phone number… it is worth it!
Posted by Lukevdp on March 15, 2009 under Websites |
Recently I’ve been setting up a few ordering systems and as part of that I’ve done quite a bit of research about accepting credit cards and setting up a secure site. This post has a few tidbits of information I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll be writing a more detailed post about accepting credit cards over the next few weeks.
The Green Bar
A few years back, the average person was trained to look for “the lock” to make sure that a site is secure. Now it is going a step further and people are trained to look for “the green bar”. Basically in browsers, at secure sites, the address bar turns green to show that the website is secure.
As a small business website owner, this is pain, because the cost of an SSL certificate with the green bar feature is 1000% more expensive.
Browsers are getting better at warning
Web Browsers are now pretty much blocking users from going to websites with self signed certificates. Have you ever been to a site and it said, “This site may not be who it claims to be” and you can click, “go back” or “proceed anyway”? That is the browser warning I am talking about.
Now this is great and all, and is probably a necessary feature. However, I have a client that uses a job tracking system, and he had a self signed SSL certificate on there just for an extra layer of protection. It wasn’t required because there were no highly sensitive details going through the system. However, with the current generation of browsers, his clients would go to login and be greeted with the warning that I mentioned above. The browser was warning them that the site may be insecure, when in fact it was more secure.
The solution was of course to get a 3rd party signed certificate, which we did, and it was fine.
An SSL certificate requires a dedicated IP
If you haven’t set up an SSL certificate before, it’s easy to forget that a dedicated IP is required.
Dedicated IP’s are quite easy to setup – simply ask your web host!
Through my webhost, Crucial Paradigm (who are great), dedicated IP’s are about $3.50 per month.
When you buy an SSL Certificate, you’re paying for the name
You don’t have to be a genious to figure this one out. All you have to do is look at Verisigns pricing.
Yes Verisign have the name and are trusted everywhere, but for those of us who have funner ways of wasting money (light their money on fire), there are cheaper alternatives.
For all my SSL certificates, I’ve used GoDaddy, who are the cheapest I’ve found but also have really great customer support. One time I had accidentally bought a single domain license when I needed a multi domain license, and I rang up and they fixed it up right there and then.
Posted by Lukevdp on March 4, 2009 under Websites |
They’re going to be everywhere in a few years!
1. Live people on your website
How would you like to talk to your customers when they visit your website. I mean actually talk.
The technology has been around for about a year, but for me it isn’t being used as much as it should be.
Here’s a website with an example it: http://bellmedia.com/
There are a few things I really like about this.
- People relate to people
- People buy from people they like
- It’s easier to listen than to read
- You can summarise your offer in a way that’s easy to understand
There are a few different providers that I know of in Australia that provide this service. Livelayers.com were the first to do itin Australia mid way through last year. Then Bell HD came along and do it even better.
There are some big companies that are already using this technology that include:
- Aussie Homeloans
- Iselect
- University of Southern Queensland
- Mecure Hotel
- Signarama
- EmbroidMe
I don’t think it will be long before more people catch on to the idea and every company has one.
If you have a second, try it out on your site. It’s pretty cool. Go to this address, and put your website address in the box: http://bellhd.com/
Look out for this on websites in the next few years, they will be everywhere.
2. Bell Me Buttons
Bell Me buttons are a new technology that helps convert browsers into callers.
It works like this. You put a button on your website that says “Free Call”. When visitors mouseover the button, it comes up with a little box where they can enter their phone number.
The customer enters their phone number, and instantly, their phone rings. They pick up their phone and it says “We are connecting you now”.
Then your phone rings. You pick up the phone and you’re connected to your customer.
It’s a very cool idea, and is being taken up by lots and lots of businesses, regardless of size. I’ve got one on my website. I think they’re a great idea, and will only get better as more and more websites take it up, and more and more web users become familiar with the technology.
3. Peel Away banners
Peel Away banners aren’t so new in the webmaster niche, however mainstream business has yet to pick up on the technology.
Peel Away banners are banners that site at the top right corner of the screen. The corner of the page is “peeled away” revealing a bit of teaser text like “click here” or “free shipping”. Then when the user mouse overs the banner, it peels away the page even further and displays the rest of the message.
This sort of thing is probably best demonstrated by an example: Check out http://www.digitalphotoframecentral.com.au/ and look at the top right corner of the page.
Peel Away banners are a great way to draw attention to specials that you might be running or to draw attention to new products.
