Coaching For Success
Success Online
Help to make your internet business successful
Wish You All a Very Prosperous New Year
Jan 1st
As we see in the New Year, The Internet Business Coach would like to send everyone blessings, cheer, joys galore and wish you all a wonderful year in 2011.
Every New Year promises a fresh start and fills all hearts with hopes and aspirations for the coming year this is true of individuals and of business owners.
As the new year takes the flying start, may you achieve the internet business success you deserve in every facets of life and all your heartfelt wishes comes true.
The New Year is a time to unfold new horizons and realise new business dreams, rediscover the strength and faith you have within you for your business endeavours and gear up for the new challenges that 2011 will bring.
Embark on a fresh start for your internet business this New Year. Best wishes for a happy New Year from all at The Internet Business Coach.
Bring Your Web Site Photos To Life
Dec 22nd
It’s hard enough getting visitors to your internet business web site in the first place, but actually engaging them and keeping them there and getting them to interact with the content on your site is another matter altogether. Adding videos to your site certainly helps, but that takes time and planning and you may not be in a position to create videos right now.
If you have photos on your site (and how many sites don’t have at least a few photos on them?), they may engage your visitors but aren’t particularly interactive. However, that can change now, thanks to Phlook (pronounced “flook”), a web site that takes any photo you care to upload and converts it to an interactive version of the same photo.
What’s It All About?
It’s about giving your visitors more opportunities to interact with your site by making the photos on your site interactive, thus allowing your visitors to interact with them, thereby engaging them more and potentially leading them to take the action you desire. It’s a proven fact that when visitors enjoy being at a web site and spend time there, they feel more relaxed and so are more inclined to buy a product or service, supply their e-mail address, recommend the site to friends, etc.
Phlook now provides you with another avenue for you to extend your visitors’ time on your internet business web site and make more of them feel comfortable with your site so you can eventually get the outcome you desire.
How Does It Work?
The service couldn’t be any easier to use. First, you register for the site (it’s free) and then you’re ready to start converting your photos. Just follow these simple steps:
- Upload a photo
- Enter a description, select a category and enter tags
- Save the changes
- Copy the code to embed the photo into your site
Once the photo is on your site, your visitors can then interact with it by hovering their mouse over it, at which time several options become available, including adding a note to the photo, voting for the photo as a favourite, zooming in and out and e-mailing the photo to friends.
To Interact, Or Not To Interact?
While this may not be suitable for all internet business web sites (even though the more you can interact with your visitors, the more successful your conversions are likely to be, but that would be a business decision for your company), there’s little denying the benefits it could bring in the form of potential conversions, or at least return visits (how many people aren’t curious to see whether or not their comments spurred any further discussion?). This gives people the chance to be heard, and it could also help generate feedback for your web site design and its content while helping to develop a sense of community for your site and your brand.
Engaging and interacting with web site visitors is becoming more important as the social side of the internet looms larger in people’s daily lives, so taking advantage of tools like this can only be beneficial to your web site and your overall internet marketing strategy.
The Power Of Testing Your Web Site Can’t Be Underestimated
Dec 19th
As an internet business owner, it’s vital your web site performs at the highest level possible in order to attempt to ensure maximum profit potential for both you and your business. One of the most important things you can do to try to ensure your web site is functioning at its best is to conduct split testing, or A/B testing, on your site.
Introduction To The Concept Of Split Testing
OK, we’ve told you what you need to do to try to achieve maximum results from your web site, but perhaps the whole concept of split testing is new to you, so a few words of introduction might be in order.
Split testing refers to running 2 or more different tests to determine which one would work best when implemented. So, let’s take a simple direct mail example to show how it might work. You send out two sets of postcards to different consumers, one set blue, the other green, and see how many of each you get back. If the majority of cards returned to you are blue, then blue would be the winner in this test and would be said to have the most “pull”, and would be the colour you would use going forward in your actual direct mail campaign.
The same concept applies to online marketing, running 2 different tests at the same time, but the results are much more immediate and you can act upon them much more quickly and implement any changes needed very rapidly.
Web Site Testing Providers
SiteSpect is one of the forerunners in the web site testing field, and they recently worked with the online travel/destination site, Vegas.com, to turn its mobile strategy around. They had been losing money but with a few simple tests courtesy of SiteSpect managed to turn that around within a month and a half. SiteSpect provided a mobile strategy that increased ROI and revenues and continues to do so.
In addition to A/B testing, SiteSpect provides other tools to analyse statistical data for best results and charges fees on a cost per case basis.
Two new testing upstarts have recently appeared on the scene, namely Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely, both of which offer split testing at a cost dependant on the services required and both offer free trials.
Testing today is extremely efficient and cost-effective, something many internet business owners fail to take into consideration, and there are many excellent providers out there who can help get your web site set up for success in the future.
A UK internet business consultant will help you devise a testing strategy for your web site and advise you as to an appropriate provider for your A/B testing needs.
New Twitter Features Can Help Extend Your Brand’s Global Reach
Dec 10th
Are you and your internet business taking advantage of the incredible opportunity to promote your web site that Twitter represents? It’s now a widely accepted fact that, in order to extend the reach of your brand and to maximise your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, establishing a presence for your online business on the various social media platforms, including Twitter, is nothing short of essential.
Major Improvements From Twitter
The social media networks are constantly striving to improve the overall user experience and entice businesses to extend their reach and influence via a presence on their platforms. With this in mind, Twitter recently introduced a couple of major improvements to its platform, namely the addition of several countries and cities to both its Trending Topics and Translations features.
Since Twitter is a global communications platform, extending their services beyond just the scope of English-speaking countries and users is a logical extension and one that may be the first of many as Twitter seeks to gradually become more of the global entity it strives to be.
Extending Trending Topics
Trending Topics is a feature located in the bottom right-hand corner of the Twitter interface that shows the words and phrases that are the most tweeted in various cities and countries throughout the world. Now, in addition to the countries already featured, including Brazil, Canada, UK, USA, etc., thirteen new countries and six new cities have been added.
The countries added include Australia, Germany, India, Netherlands, and Venezuela. Amongst the new cities added are Detroit, Minneapolis, Sydney and Toronto. These represent some of the fastest-growing markets for Twitter, so the demand for the addition of these locations was extremely high, which means this will make a lot of users and business owners very happy.
This may not seem like a revolutionary change since trends were already being tracked in several countries and cities, but the addition of tracking trends showing repeated words and phrases from nineteen different global locations is a pretty significant increase in available data.
Tweets In Different Languages Now Translated
The other new feature is the translation of tweets now made possible through the use of Google’s Translation plug-in, which means more tweets will be available to more users. The translations will appear in the details pane of the Twitter interface, meaning that, if you’re a business owner, your tweets will be seen and understood by a whole new global audience. Now that’s quite an impressive extension of your brand’s reach and should be exciting news for your business’s global prospects going forward.
The increase in trends now available through the additional locations means there will be much more data available for you to use to identify trends your internet business can take advantage of. The translation service will make those new trends you identify available to a far wider global audience, extending your company’s influence to a whole new audience.
A UK internet business coach can help you and your business take advantage of Twitter’s new features and turn your company from a local to a global enterprise.
Use Yahoo! Clues To Discover Search Trends
Dec 6th
Knowing what people are searching for, the keywords they’re using, the search volume, etc., are important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) for any internet business. Up until recently there haven’t been too many tools that could be used to measure trends when it comes to search terms, other than Google Trends.
Discover Trending Information
That is, until now. Yahoo! has decided to delve into its massive database to provide a tool that not only supplies search trend data, but enhances it and takes it to a new level. Say “Hello” to Yahoo! Clues, Yahoo!’s new web based tool that can be used to explore trends in a visually appealing and interesting way. Using this tool allows you to discover trending information and then make comparisons using the data you just discovered.
Many Interesting Features
Not only does Yahoo! Clues provide search volume charts but it does so much more in addition, including displaying maps, demographic graphs and even searches related to a demographic group. In fact Yahoo! Clues is so all-encompassing it makes Google Trends look like child’s play by comparison.
Apart from the aforementioned, other interesting features include a time filter, which allows data to be filtered for 1, 7 or 30 days, comparison of two terms and various categories of information, including location, gender and income.
There’s More To Come
Yahoo! is working on more search tools, including a feature they’re tentatively calling “Search Flow”, which looks at search patterns and attempts to predict the next search term following on from a previously entered search query. You’ll also be able to see “related searches”, which will be a boon when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), which will go beyond “Search Flow” by providing related search terms commonly used across the entirety of Yahoo! Search.
Yahoo! Clues looks like it will be an excellent tool all around, especially the new “Search Flow” feature, which will provide data based on concrete evidence rather than mere guesswork. The only thing that might improve it is to provide trends for more than 30 days, preferably up to a full year. This will provide internet marketers with another fine tool to add to their arsenal to provide additional search engine optimisation (SEO) ammunition.
For help with all your search engine optimisation (SEO) needs, contact a UK internet marketing consultant, who will get your internet business web site optimised for success across all search engines.
