Are you Leveraging your Guru-ness through Email and Social?

In the early days of writing my newsletter I often received a less than overwhelming response. It made me wonder if it was worth all the time and effort.  Fortunately, now and then, someone told me they read every article I published, or that they loved a particular article and they ended up buying something because of it. Even if I got no immediate response I knew my efforts were generating business. Go Social … With the growing trend towards social media, people wonder what the future of email marketing is. Well, email marketing is going nowhere. It’s been around

Continue reading

Simplifying Spam Checks in Online Forms

I visit a lot of websites and when I fill in a form, I regularly have to put in a code so the website can verify that I am a human being and not a machine. Those codes are just so hard to read sometimes, and I regularly get it wrong. I get even more annoyed if I get the code wrong and have to re-enter all or part of the information I’ve already typed into the form. How unfriendly is that? Sometimes I get so annoyed I just give up. Forms that are difficult to use are sometimes the

Continue reading

Features Tell, Benefits Sell

Our friend Susie, who we met browsing online for sports tops, is a busy person and shops online whenever she can. For her mother’s birthday, she went shopping for a nice pair of earrings. The first site she went to had a product description that read something like this: The perfect everyday diamond hoops! These 18ct yellow gold earrings consist of a single row of round brilliant diamonds, claw set on the front of a hinged two piece mount.  So did the second. The third site was only slightly different. Now earrings are a bit different from sports tops and

Continue reading

Malware – Install It With the Click of a Mouse

Sue is a teacher and her class is making a short video which is a send-up of a scene in a popular movie. Sue has the original movie on DVD and wants to use a piece of the audio from the movie in the video. ( Let’s set aside any copyright infringement in Sue’s actions for a moment). Sue searches for some software that will rip the audio and finds what she wants. Sue starts the installation and when the process asks her if she’d like to install a mywebserach toolbar, she ticks the box. because it seems like something

Continue reading

5 Ways to Engage on Facebook

We have just created a Facebook page for a client, so it seems timely to write an article on the challenge of engaging people. Let’s face it, there are only a few small business who have the sort of product or service that just naturally encourages people to comment and share. You might be able get people to LIKE your page, but that’s not the same as getting them to ENGAGE. Engaging means liking posts, commenting and sharing, and people will only do this if the content is enticing. So if you’re not one of these lucky businesses who just

Continue reading

Are You Losing Sales Because of Your Google Maps Listing?

I don’t know about you, but when I want to find where a business is located, I go straight to Google Maps. It’s so easy to use and gives me everything I need. I don’t bother with the online White Pages at all these days, because I find it clunky in comparison. And as for the book, you need a magnifying glass to read it. With Spring approaching, I decided it was time for not just a spring clean but also a spring makeover – starting with new curtains.  I knew the names of a few local businesses and decided

Continue reading

5 Website Errors to Put People Off Buying From You

One day a resident of Feilding was reading a newspaper when an article about a local retailer caught her eye. In the article Feilding, was referred to about six times and each time the town’s name was spelt Fielding. Now Feilding does have a unique spelling that contradicts the English Grammar rule of “i  before e” so it’s an easy mistake to make, and not one a spell-checker is likely to pick up. This reader though, was understandably annoyed about seeing her town’s name misrepresented in an article she really wanted to read.  Consequently, the credibility of the article went

Continue reading