Wharton Website Marketing Blog
Website and Internet Marketing
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 20, 2009
I love this article posted today by David Meerman Scott on his blog Web Ink Now entitled:
It really proves the point that you can’t just put up a website and hope people will come to it. You have to give them a reason to visit and treat them right when they get there!
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 18, 2009
Recently we posted information about a survey that indicated that most Americans believe small businesses will lead the U.S. to a brighter future. We then referred you to a great blog post by Direct Capital with ways that businesses could benefit from the stimulus package. Well, Direct Capital has taken it one more step and posted tips for small businesses in creating a recession strategy with the warning, “Ignore these tips at your own risk.” Here is the article:
Photo by Rocketeer
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 12, 2009
Thanks to David Criswell from Direct Capital for pointing me to a great article that I would like to share with you. In a previous post we discussed how a recession drives small business innovation. Small Biz Trends published a great article based on a Zogby poll that concludes
Most Americans are putting their faith in small business owners, entrepreneurs and science and technology leaders to lead the U.S. to a better future.
Check out the poll information at Zogby and the article by Small Biz Trends
Photo by lndhslf72
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 11, 2009
I came across this blog post from Direct Capital highlighting opportunities for Small Businesses from the Economic Stimulus Package. Hope you can find some opportunities for you business here:
9 Ways your small business can benefit from the Stimulus Package
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 6, 2009
Once you’ve decided to sell your product online, there are a few things you will want to work on.
You site should have a professional appearance. When you are asking people to trust you enough to give you credit card information to purchase products online, a professional appearance is very important. You want to make you customers comfortable.
To add to the comfort of your customers it is a good idea to include a return policy, a privacy policy and a security policy. Let them know that you are serious about protecting their information and following through on your commitment to serve them professionally and courteously.
When you are planning an e-commerce site, take the time to plan and execute carefully. A bad experience for your customers due to lack of planning on your part can be a costly mistake.
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 5, 2009
Yesterday, we looked at the advantages to selling online. Today, we’ll look at some of the obstacles facing businesses that are considering selling products online.
The first obstacle is cost. If you already have an existing website, obviously that will help some, but, if you plan to sell more than just a small number of items, and, you are not a tech company, you will most likely need help to do this. You will need a way to keep track of the inventory as well as the internet marketing components of the e-commerce site.
Another obstacle is security. In order to process credit card payments online, you will need a secure server. Of course, you could always opt out of accepting credit cards but some statistics say you will be turning away 80% of your business. Not a good choice.
The last obstacle we will discuss here today is customer service. You will need a way for customers to contact you with questions and a system that ensures that you respond in a timely manner. Because customers are buying from you online, they never have the opportunity to meet your friendly sales clerks, so, you have to find a way to give them a friendly feeling experience online.
Obviously, there are ways to overcome most of these obstacles and give your customers a great experience from buying from you online. The investment in doing in right could add a whole new customer base to your business.
Posted by Christi Wharton on May 4, 2009
Ever thought about selling your product online? There are a lot of things to consider. Today, let’s look at some of the advantages.
These are just some of the advantages of selling products on line. This week we will look at e-commerce - advantages, disadvantages and some tricks of the trade.
Posted by joebwharton on May 1, 2009
We use the Firefox browser a lot in our business. One of the reasons is that it is open source and thus allows for add-on extensions. There are add-ons for just about anything you can imagine. Some of the categories of add-ons are: Alerts & Updates, Dictionary & Language Packs, Download Management, Photos, Music & Videos, Plugins, Privacy & Security, Social & Communication, Toolbars, Web Development and several others.
Some of the add-ons we use in our business are:
SEO Workers Analysis Tool: SEO Workers Analysis Tool extension allows you to perform a basic analysis of the page in your browser with a single click. The results from the SEO Workers Analysis Tool are structured into the following useful groups: General status, meta tags listing, meta tags analysis, the pages displayed within search engine results, keywords found in the anchor tags, keywords found in the image “alt” attribute text, keywords found on the page, URLs found in the page, headers returned from the server.
SearchStatus: SearchStatus displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
TinyUrl Creator: With TinyUrl Creator you can easily shrink any long URL or link in the page to something you can email or Twitter using the TinyUrl service with a single click in your browser.
Let us hear your comments on what your favorite add-ons are for business and for fun.
You can download FireFox at: http://www.mozilla.com and you can view add-ons at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox .
Posted by joebwharton on April 30, 2009
You can use favicons to help with your company’s branding. Favicons are the 16 x 16 (or 32 x 32) pixel square icons associated with a particular website (or web page). Browsers that provide favicon support usually display a page’s favicon in the browser’s Address Bar and next to the page’s name in bookmarks.
There are several Favicon Generators out there. Just search for ‘favicon generator’ on google and make a choice. Once people get used to your favicon, they will quickly recognize when they are on your site.
Posted by joebwharton on April 27, 2009
Blogging can be a great SEO technique. Why? Because every blog article adds a new page to your website. Search engines love fresh content. And every blog article gives you the opportunity to focus your message on one subject or keyword phrase. Search engines like focused pages.
One thing to remember when setting up your blog is to have it as part of your company website. It should be either a sub-domain of your company website (e.g. www.myblog.mycompany.com) or a folder on your company website (e.g. www.mycompany.com/myblog). Don’t use one of the free blogging sites such as typepad or wordpress. You can use their free software, just not their site to host your blog. Your blog must be part of your company’s domain in order for your company’s website to benefit from any so called “google juice”.
