Create an Awesome Home Business

1 Easy Way to Improve Cross-Browser Compatibility

Martin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:39:17 +0000

For those who build websites by hand (rather than on a platform like WordPress or Joomla) one of the hassles is making sure your sites render consistently in different browsers.

Internet Explorer is notorious for screwing things up, mostly because in the past they’ve never adhered to the W3C standards. That said, IE8 is better than previous versions.

However, there’s an easy step you can take that will address a large proportion of cross-browser rendering problems.

It’s not a complete fix, because some browsers still cannot handle some CSS attributes. But it will address most layout and spacing inconsistencies.

Assuming you create an external stylesheet to define the style and layout of your sites (and if you’re not then you should be), you can add this code right at the top:

Here’s the link to the text file containing the code, so it’s easier to copy.

What that does is reset all the default browser CSS values to zero, but only when it’s displaying your pages.

That means that the margins, borders, padding and other attributes you set to define layout and positioning will render consistently because they’re all starting from the same base (0 pixels).

It removes the problems caused when browsers have default CSS attributes defined. When these are defined they are added to any attributes you define in your style sheet when the page is displaid.

So if you set the right margin on images to be 10 pixels and the first browser has a default of 5 pixels for image right-margins, your images will render in that browser with 15 pixel margins to the right.

The next browser may have a default of 10 pixels – you can guess the rest.

As I said earlier, this is not a complete fix for cross-browser compatibility problems, but it will definitely help to make layout and positioning render consistently.

Cheers,

Internet Marketing Basics for Small Businesses

Martin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:59:26 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up two new contracts recently for web design services for small companies in a totally non web-related industry.

And, in both cases, the current providers have been giving a poor service.

Understandably, their customers (my new customers) are totally unfamiliar with the web and the basics of promoting a business online.

But sadly, instead of providing support and guidance, and being open and transparent with what they’re doing, the service providers in question have been doing the opposite.

So for small businesses who are thinking of marketing online, here are some basics which it’s well worth getting your head around.

Take the time to understand these things, at least at an elementary level, so you can ask the right questions of your service providers.

You need to know enough to know when you’re being taken for a ride.

Basic Elements for Small Businesses Operating a Website

A website designer/builder

You’ll need a website – your online shop window. Find someone who offers W3C compliant sites (the World Wide Web Consortium – the body that sets the standards for the web) to design and build it.

They should be able to show you a W3C badge on their site as proof.

Avoid people who use Flash heavily. Flash, while capable of producing beautiful looking sites, is not good for the search engines because they can’t read it.

And if the search engines can’t read your site you won’t do well in the natural search results.

For a small business, with a new site, you need to be able to do as well as you can in the search results, as early as you can.

Make sure you get some sort of service level commitment out of them.

As a starter, I offer simple SLA’s to my new customers. These relate to the time I’ll take to get new updates published, but you can ask for any SLA you like depending on your needs.

A domain name

This is your address on the web, like www.google.com. It will probably cost you somewhere between US$7 and US$15 a year, depending on whether it ends in .com, or something else.

Ideally it should be your company name or it should be based on a keyword relating to your business.

Hosting

This refers to the server that contains (hosts) your website code and makes it available to people searching the web.

It will cost you anywhere from nothing (free) to around US$20 a month. You can get some really good deals (quality hosting at a good price) at around US$10 a month.

Free hosting should definitely be avoided if you’re promoting a business.

SEO

Does the person who’s going to build your website understand Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Make sure they not only understand it, but they can describe it to you in a way that you can understand.

(SEO is a bunch of best practices for getting your website to feature well in the search results).

They don’t need to be SEO wizards, but they do need to understand it well enough that they can describe it to you in clear, simple language and set up your site properly.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions to clarify anything. The bullshit-baffles-brains approach is used frequently – don’t be intimidated by it!

Build from scratch or on a platform

Find out whether they plan on building your site from scratch or on a platform (like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal).

Building it on a platform is good because that means you generally only need to worry about the styling, but make sure it’s not proprietary.

If it’s a proprietary platform you risk being locked in because other potential service providers won’t know how to, or won’t be able to access it.

Make sure you’re happy with the styling before handing over the final payment.

PPC: Pay Per Click advertising

If you look to the right or top of the results page next time you type a search into Google or Yahoo you’ll see some entries under the heading ‘Sponsored Results’.

These are Pay Per Click ads.

As an advertiser, you pay each time a searcher clicks on your ad and gets directed through to your website.

PPC can bring you quick returns but it can be expensive. Extremely expensive, if it’s not set up right.

So be sure to get someone who understands about relevance, targetting and quality scores in Pay Per Click advertising to set it up for you.

And make sure that, if they talk about Search Engine Optimisation, they’re not trying to persuade you that being top of the Sponsored Results indicates good SEO.

It doesn’t.

Social Media

This is about promoting your site through places like Facebook and Twitter. It can also involve you setting up a blog on (or linked to) your website.

When it’s working well, Social Media is a highly cost effective alternative to PPC but it takes time before you see results. It also takes time (every day) to keep your blog, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts regularly updated.

A social media campaign is a lot of work if you want to make it successful.

A good, balanced promotion campaign for a new website should contain both PPC (or other paid channels) and Social Media elements – make sure the company you’re talking to understands this and offers it.

Hacking

This is when someone accesses your site illegally and adds spam code to it. If this happens the search engines will find out very quickly and your site will be removed from their indices. This will, literally, trash your visitor traffic.

Make sure you have backup copies of your entire site stored locally (on your PC) because the best (and often the quickest) solution when you’ve been hacked is to delete your entire site from the server and re-upload it.

Make sure you keep your PC clean and free of viruses. A keylogger inserted onto your PC can capture your FTP login details and transmit them to the person who inserted it.

That will enable them to get access to your site code and do bad things.

Backups

As with any data, you should always have a recent back up copy – an exact copy of the data on your site.

Make sure you understand (and are happy with) the backup routines in place through your hosting company or the person setting up your site.

Create your own back ups if you’re not sure.

Summary

If you’re a small business considering advertising online for the first time, those are some of the primary things you’ll need to think about.

You should also ask your service provider (website designer/builder, Marketing guru, etc) to explain anything you’re not clear on.

Make sure you cover them all with whoever you hire to set up your site so that you understand what you’re paying for, and you pay for what you’re getting.

Like I said at the start: you need to know enough to know when you’re being ripped off.

If you don’t want to take that level of interest in your online marketing you probably shouldn’t start in the first place.

Cheers,

Persuade Readers to Stay Longer Without Locking Them Up

Martin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:03:44 +0000

Bear with me while I set the background…

A little over a year ago I wrote an article setting out how to install and manage widgets on WordPress.

Two weeks later, WordPress released version 2.8 which completely invalidated my article because they changed the way widgets were managed.

So I wrote an article on widgets in 2.8, put a link to it from the first article, and didn’t think any more of it.

Then, about 3 months ago, I noticed that traffic to the original article suddenly started picking up. Having virtually ignored it for nearly a year, Google suddenly seemed to think this was the solution to people’s search queries on widgets in WordPress.

Heaven knows why it took them a year to figure that out – and then get it wrong..!

Despite the link that I’d put to the second article, however, nobody was clicking through.

This worried me. My visitors were not getting the information they needed and they were leaving the site with a negative impression.

So I went back to the original article and updated it with a paragraph right at the beginning, headed ‘Important Update’.

I referred to the change in the way widgets were managed in 2.8 and gave them a prominent link to the later article.

Still Google kept sending visitors to the original article, and still no one was clicking through to the later article.

So I expanded my ‘Important Update’ paragraph to say that widgets are managed the same way in WordPress 2.9 and 3.0 as they are in 2.8, so if they were using 2.8 or later they really should click through.

That did it. Now almost everyone that Google sends to the original article clicks through to the later article.

On the surface, then, I’m now getting double the page views per visitor to the original article – and since Google is currently sending quite a few visitors to the original article that’s good news.

But the real results go beyond that. Many of the people who read the second article stick around and explore further.

So people who previously would have landed on the original article and immediately left with a negative impression of the site, are now getting what they came for, staying, and reading at least 2 pages, sometimes more.

Very satisfactory.

And the message?

If you write ‘how to’ type articles, or articles where things change, it would be well worth reviewing them to see whether they’re still current.

If not, write a second article and place a very prominent explanation at the beginning of the original article as to why your visitors should click through to the new one.

And keep working on your ‘click through’ message until you can see in the stats that it’s working.

Here’s how I did it in my original widgets article.

The benefits are many:

You’re giving your visitors current information
You’re keeping visitors on your site for longer
Visitors see that you’re concerned they get the right information and so start to trust you
You can capture and maximise traffic that the search engines may be sending to outdated articles

Cheers,

How Not to Do Business Online

Martin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:15:41 +0000

Renewing an existing subscription should be the simplest possible of online transactions, so it’s amazing how consistently AVG manage to screw this up.

I have two PC’s, both currently running AVG Internet Security. I moved to AVG from McAfee because it doesn’t slow down the PC performance as much.

But two things where McAfee was great were customer service and renewing subscriptions.

AVG, by contrast, consistently make this an extraordinarily difficult and frustrating experience.

The subscription for my desktop expired last January, but when I tried to renew it the system told me my licence key was invalid. And when I tried to log in to my account the system kept returning me to the login in screen.

No joy there. At all.

I did eventually manage to get AVG sales to respond to my emails and after a week or so my renewal went through.

At the time I took careful note of the licence keys for both my laptop and desktop and assumed that when the time came to renew my laptop licence I wouldn’t have the same problems.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions..!

Sure enough, my laptop licence comes up for renewal next month and 3 days ago I received the renewal reminder from AVG.

And, once again, the system told me my licence key was invalid.

This time I was, at least, able to log in to my account to raise a trouble ticket, but the drop down menus for specifying my problem didn’t have any options for renewal problems.

So I picked the one that said ‘licence key not working’ and got an automated email that came nowhere near solving my problem.

So far I’ve emailed sales at AVG, renewal at AVG and followed up on the automated response to my trouble ticket and I’m no nearer renewing my subscription than I was this time last week.

Not even the courtesy of a reply from either of the two email addresses.

How can companies make it so difficult for me to give them money..!!??

As I said at the outset: renewing a subscription has to be the simplest of all online transactions and they’ve managed to turn it into the most frustrating experience imaginable.

So I’ve researched other Internet Security Suites and will be canning AVG for something with better service. (If you have any recommendations let me know – leave a comment).

And the moral of the story?

When you’re transacting online make sure you understand very clearly the journey you’re expecting your customers to go through.

I always do a flow chart when I’m setting up new sites to sell stuff online.

Being able to see the customer journey on a flow chart highlights points that will cause frustration to your customers, so you can correct them.

I also always test out my customer journey thoroughly by going through it myself and seeing what happens – including if a fault or error occurs.

For example, I’ll click submit before filling in all the required fields, or I’ll put a date in an address field, and see what happens.

Finally, I also describe clearly to my visitors on each screen what they have to do, what will happen after they click the ‘Next’ or ‘Submit’ buttons, and what to do if the expected result doesn’t happen.

It may seem like the screamingly obvious to you, but it’s the first time your customers have seen your sequence of screens and, possibly, the first time they’ve bought anything online.

So you need to give them as much confidence as possible because, if they lose confidence, you’ll likely lose a customer: they’ll simply abandon their shopping cart.

Keep things simple, make sure you know what you’re putting your customers through and make sure you explain, at every step of the way, what they should do and what they can expect as a result.

If you have a favourite Internet Security Suite let me know in a comment.

I’m currently considering Norton Internet Security 2010, Webroot Internet Security Essentials 2010, Security Shield 2010, Kaspersky Internet Security and Trend Micro Internet Security 2010. (And if you’re an affiliate for whatever you suggest, please let me know – thanks!)

Cheers,

3 Timeless Tips for Internet Marketing Newbies

Martin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:52:13 +0000

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a nice new contract, setting up and maintaining websites for a group of 6 restaurant/bars here in Hong Kong.

As a result I’ve had a frantic week and I haven’t had time to research and produce my normal second article.

So, instead, I’ve spent some time looking back over articles I’ve written before, finding ones that I think are timeless and relevant to people starting out with Internet Marketing today.

Here they are (3 of them) with a short intro to each:

How to Succeed

My first (and short-lived) entry into Internet Marketing was trying to sell Clickbank products through Adwords. That was tough and didn’t last long, but I learnt a lot!

After licking my wounds, my next entry was a Direct Sales/MLM business.

I did recover my investment on that one, which was good, but the business owners turned out to be flakey and I pulled out of that one too, when it was obvious the business was dying on its feet.

But that business prompted me to start this blog (my first one), in order to provide a resource for people in my downline.

And one of the articles I wrote at the time, that still carries importance today, is this one:

How to Succeed with G.A.P. (But please make sure you read the update at the bottom!)

What are You Selling?

This next article carries a very simple message that’s missed by many of the MLM/Direct Sales businesses like G.A.P. (that I referred to in the previous article).

The emphasis in G.A.P. was on signing up new members – it was called a ‘system’ sale.

Basically, new members paid a healthy chunk of money for the right to persuade others to invest a healthy chunk of money.

But real products that brought real value to someone? A lot of talk (in that business) but never any real products – which was the reason I left.

This article talks about products and how to get hold of one to sell. Because if you don’t have a product you don’t have a business:

If you want to make money online sell something.

Blogging

One of the things you hear when you start Blogging is that you must post regularly. Every day, if possible, or even more frequently.

And the reason you need to do this is that the search engines ‘love new content’.

I don’t agree.

They love good quality content that lots of people link to. They don’t love trash just because it’s served up twice a day.

I touched on this back in the dark days of December 2008, when everyone was still in shock at the Global Financial Crisis.

I wrote an article setting out some principles I was going to follow with my blogging in 2009.

Now, 18 months later, I can say that I’m following those principles. But it wasn’t always like that.

To paraphrase: there’s enough junk on the Internet already – it certainly doesn’t need any more.

Here’s the full monty:

What am I going to do in 2009.

I hope you like those articles – I think the messages in each form solid principles for people new to working online.

Cheers,

Do Better on Google: Speed Up Your Site Load Time

Martin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:30:09 +0000

With Google now including site load times in the factors it uses to rank sites for the natural search results, a recent article on the SEOmoz blog giving 7 ways to speed things up caught my attention.

Some of them I was already using but one that I wasn’t was Gzip compression, so I dived right in.

Compressing your site files before they’re sent from your server to the browser that’s viewing them reduces the amount of data that has to be transferred. And that speeds up site load times – a lot.

It’s like using Winzip to compress Word or PowerPoint files before you email them.

As long as your server is running Apache you can follow these steps to activate compression and speed up your site load times:

Step 1:

In your WordPress root folder (the folder where your WordPress files sit) find and open the .htaccess file.

You may need to do this with your FTP client because some hosting provider file managers hide this file.

Here’s what it looks like using FileZilla:

Right click on the .htaccess file and the third option down is ‘view/edit’.

Step 2:

Select ‘view/edit’ and FileZilla will download and open the file with Notepad.

Step 3:

When the file is opened paste this entire block of code into it:

Click here for a copy of the Notepad file contents to make it easier to copy and paste.

Step 4:

Once you’ve pasted that code into the file save and close it.

When you’ve closed it, FileZilla will ask if you want to upload the changed file back to the server:

Step 5:

Click ‘Yes’ to upload it back to the server.

Step 6:

Once the file has been returned to the server you can click View>Refresh to see that the new file has been successfully uploaded.

Make a note of the file size before refreshing. After refreshing it will be around 500 bytes larger.

Step 7:

Disconnect from the server and close FileZilla. You’ll see a message that claims an edited file is still open and warning that if you close FileZilla your changes will not be saved.

As long as you verified that your updated .htaccess file has been updated (step 6) you can ignore this warning.

That’s it – you’re all done and your site visitors (and Google) will have a big smile on their faces.

Cheers,

I’m Switching From Twitter to Facebook

Martin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:58:09 +0000

If you dropped into this site around a year ago you’ll have read that I was a big fan of Twitter for attracting readers.

But over the past year my love for Twitter has withered.

Why?

Firstly: The search function no is longer as effective as it was.

I used to search for people asking questions about WordPress, but these days the results often don’t even contain the word ‘WordPress’!

Secondly: The efficiency with which I’m able to use Twitter is therefore a lot less than it was.

There’s a lot of information flying around on Twitter and if you can’t filter it effectively it becomes a pretty inefficient way of finding the stuff you need.

For sometime I’ve known that I should be exploring Facebook as an alternative. But, frankly, I find Facebook to be one of the least intuitive systems I know!

None-the-less, a recent article by Darren Rowse on how to set up a Facebook page, which followed one on how he’s now driving traffic with Facebook have shamed me into action.

And I now have a Facebook page for this site.

It’s a brand new page – set up yesterday – and I’ve got about 2 Likes so far. So if you happen to hop over there feel absolutely free to ‘Like’ it too!

And if you have a Facebook page leave us its URL in a comment so we can reciprocate.

Cheers,

Are You Making the Most of Description Tags?

Martin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:30:05 +0000

There’ve been quite a few discussions recently about the use of META tags as part of on-page SEO.

Keywords, it seems, are out (at least for Google, and at least for now), but Titles and Descriptions are in.

Just to be clear, this is what I mean by Titles and Descriptions:

Let me say upfront that, despite everything Matt Cutts said in that video, I still create keyword tags on my pages and articles.

Why? Because I don’t know that all search engines have stopped using them.

However, I also don’t spend hours agonizing over which keywords to use and I only use two or three at most.

That’s not to say keywords are irrelevant.

To get the best search engine results for an article you still need to know what question you’re answering when you write it, and to optimize it around a relevant keyword (or search term).

And the best way to find a relevant search term is to use a keyword tool to see what people are typing in to find what you’re writing about.

Then use that term in the Title and Description tags, as well as your H tags and content.

But one tag that’s rarely used to its full potential is the Description tag.

You can type almost any search term into any search engine and in 95% of the results you’ll find that the description beneath the title link is simply an excerpt from the article.

It’s whatever the search engine thinks is appropriate.

And while the description they pick is probably relevant to the search term, it almost certainly does not have any call to action in it.

If you’ve done any PPC advertising you’ll know the importance of relevance and calls to action to achieving a high click through rate.

The same principles apply to natural search results and the way to do it is through the Title and Description tags.

In PPC it’s important to have your keyword (the search term you’re optimizing for) in the title. Same in the natural search results.

In PPC it’s important to get your visitor to click through to your site through the use of benefits and a call to action. Same in the natural search results.

In both PPC and the natural search results I use the AIDA formula as much as I can:

A = Attention

I = Interest

D = Desire

A = Action

So rather than thinking of the Title and Description tags as two separate tags, think of them as two components of a single advertisement for your site or article, and apply the AIDA formula across them both.

Typically your title tag should catch the Attention, and the Description tag should create the Interest, Desire and Action.

Like this:

The term I’ve optimized this site for is Internet Marketing Tips – the first phrase in the title.

The first part of the description creates some interest (Effective Internet Marketing Tips for your small business), the second part triggers some desire (… products that get results) and the last part encourages them to visit (Hundreds of articles here).

Creating a descriptive, AIDA-based description tag will give you the edge over the site next to yours in the search results that simply uses a search-engine-defined snippet from its page.

Cheers,

Losing the All-in-One-SEO Plugin

Martin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:30:29 +0000

When Thesis 1.7 was released I reviewed it and bemoaned the fact that I couldn’t make use of its SEO features and drop the All-in-One-SEO plugin.

The reason was because removing the All-in-One results in all the META tags on all the articles on the blog being removed as well. That would mean I’d have to go through all 270+ articles and manually re-set them.

But here’s why I love being part of the Thesis community: I learned how to copy the All-in-One tags, on every post, into the relevant fields in Thesis by means of a simple SQL query.

So, hey presto, another plugin bites the dust. What a pleasure!

Here are the links to the relevant articles in case you want to do the same:

The article in the Thesis Answers section that provides the SQL query code (you’ll need to log in to DIYThemes before clicking the link):

The SQL query code.

The step by step process you need to follow:

The step-by-step process.

Instructions on how to run the SQL query:

How to run the SQL Query.

Not being able to use the Thesis SEO functions for post and page META tags on this site has been bugging me since 1.7 was released, for these reasons:

I’m still on my drive to reduce the number of plugins I’m using
Plugins add bloat to your site, increasing its foot print on your server and, in many cases, slowing down site load times
The more plugins you have the more options there are for things to go wrong

That said, the All-in-One-SEO plugin has been a wonderful plugin and served me well. If you’re not running Thesis (or another theme that provides the same functionality) I’d say it’s a must-have.

But being able to remove it and reduce bloat, speed up site-load times and reduce the chances of things going wrong is too good an opportunity to pass!

I’m a happy bunny now

Cheers,

Schmoozing Yahoo

Martin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:30:05 +0000

I have an interesting problem that I’ve wrestled with for a while:

99% of my search engine traffic on this site comes from Google.

While I’m delighted that Google sends me a lot of traffic, there are two problems:

I’m missing out on the 40% or so of web search traffic that Yahoo accounts for
I hate being so dependent on a single source.

So I’ve been taking some steps to up my Yahoo traffic. I’ve focused on this for a while and, although I’ve seen a small uptick, it’s still very small.

I’ve made the mistake over the past couple of years of focusing on Google search traffic and, while I’ve been doing things that I believed were good, generic SEO practices, I may have inadvertently optimized my site for Google.

So a while ago I took a couple of steps to rectify this:

I registered and verified my site in Yahoo Site Explorer (Yahoo’s equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools)
I got myself a validation key for my XML sitemap generator plugin so that Yahoo is notified of new posts and pages (as well as Google, Ask and Bing)

However, I didn’t notice any perceptible change and after a couple of months (about 1 month ago now) I took a third:

I set up a low key Yahoo Search Marketing campaign

I thought long and hard about the YSM campaign. It’s the first time I’ve done anything that amounted to paying for traffic to this site, but here’s why I did it:

I have another WordPress site which is configured in exactly the same way as this one. Same XML sitemap plugin, registered in Google Webmaster Tools but not Yahoo Site Explorer, same SEO practices that I’ve followed with this one.

Yet on that site 49% of my traffic comes from Yahoo.

Why the difference?

That site has a sister site and they sit on the same domain name, but with two different TLDs – one is .net, the other .com

I’d run a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign for a while to drive traffic to the .net site, which was the first one I set up.

When I set up the .com site I deliberately did not set up a YSM campaign and yet Yahoo started sending search traffic to that site before Google did.

In fact, initially some of the traffic they sent to the .com site should have gone to the .net site. They got that sorted out after a while, and they now send natural search traffic to the correct sites.

I was surprised that Yahoo started sending search traffic so quickly to the .com site, and it’s still sending a smidgeon under half of all search traffic to it today.

The only thing I could find that was different was that I’d been running that YSM campaign driving traffic to the .net version of the domain name.

So part of my experiment is to set up a low-key YSM campaign to drive traffic to this site.

The purpose of the campaign is not about driving paid traffic for its own sake. It’s to find out whether using a YSM campaign helps to increase the natural (unpaid) search traffic over the longer term.

I’ve had this campaign going for a month or so and there’s been a miniscule upturn in natural search traffic from Yahoo (2% better than it was a month ago), but a noticeable number of visits from new traffic sources.

This is mostly from minor search engines that didn’t figure at all previously.

So I’m going to continue this campaign for a while and see what happens.

If anyone else has come across this problem I’d love to know how you dealt with it – let me know in a comment!

Cheers,