Coaching For Success
Web Design
Set Your Web Site Up To Succeed Internationally
Mar 28th
Regardless of where your internet business is located, being found by searchers on search engines anywhere in the world is important when it comes to expanding the reach of your business and possibly improving your financial situation.
Make It Easy For Searchers To Find You Globally
One thing that most people crave is information, so it’s not surprising that search engines attract so much traffic. Regardless of what type of business you run (informational, blog, e-commerce), it’s important to appeal to searchers across as many search engines as possible by researching trends and the keywords used in searches.
But, since the internet has no boundaries, it’s equally important to understand that there’s tremendous global potential for your business. So, instead of just targeting the audience and topics associated with your particular geographic location, you should also look at international news and trends and the kinds of information people are searching for, and research keywords relevant to those topics. In this way, you can get your brand exposed to potential customers worldwide.
Sources Of Global Information
To find what’s causing a buzz on the worldwide (literally) web, here are some sites that will provide you with sources of information on various global topics, including entertainment, politics, news, social trends, sport, etc., giving you ideas for creating content and describing your products to expand your reach to an international audience.
These sites can provide valuable data and insights into keywords and phrases being searched for throughout the world, enabling you to craft your web site’s content to transcend global boundaries and cultures. So, let’s take a look at these resources and how they can benefit you and your business.
1. BBC.co.uk
The BBC is a fantastic source of global news and entertainment information, and, while the majority of the traffic comes from the UK, it also has a massive worldwide following.
2. Reuters.com
Another great news source that you can access by browsing the tabs and using a translation option to find out what the hottest trends are.
3. Twitter.com
One of the world’s most popular web sites, this is a great source for news and to find out what the latest hot topics are. To find out what’s happening elsewhere, use the “Trends” option sorted by region and country.
4. Blogger.com and Tumblr.com
While tricky to navigate and find what you want, both these sites are well respected and highly trafficked by the international community. Setting up a blog is easy on these sites and will get your content in front of a sizable international audience.
5. Reddit.com
This site is a bit offbeat and humorous but again has a good-sized international audience and provides sortable categories for politics, news, etc., making it useful for identifying trends.
6. CNN.com
Another great news source, popular mainly in North America, but CNN International is useful to check international trends and CNN’s Facebook page can give you a good idea of what’s important to your network.
Using these resources can help you extend the reach of your internet business internationally by capitalising on the trends that are popular amongst the international community.
A UK internet business coach will work with you to establish your business’s presence internationally through the use of the above resources along with many others you may not be aware of.
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.
Plug-Ins To Help Split Test Your WordPress Blog
Dec 13th
As part of your internet business‘s search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, it’s highly recommended you have a blog to help drive traffic to your main site. There are many options available as to the platform you choose, on which to build your blog, but one of the most popular, most powerful and most versatile is WordPress.
So, let’s say you’ve created your blog using WordPress, and you’re not getting the results you want in terms of conversions. You decide you need to make changes to your site to try to improve your conversion rates, but, as with changes you’ve made before, it’s a bit of a hit-or-miss affair since you’ve no way of testing which of the options you’re considering might work best.
What do you do?
Test To Discover What Works Best
Instead of making changes to your blog and publishing them only to discover they don’t work, or, at least, don’t give you the results you’re looking for, a better alternative is to perform split testing to find out which of your choices would work best.
It’s surprising how little consideration is given to the idea of split testing where WordPress is concerned. If you don’t perform any testing, how can you know the answers to questions like, “Are the headlines in my posts receiving clicks?”, or, “What’s the best location on a screen for my calls to action?”?
Help Is At Hand
Fortunately, taking care of the task of split testing has been made a lot easier thanks to the availability of several WordPress plug-ins.
1. Headline Split Tester
An interesting, enticing headline can make the difference between whether a visitor reads the rest of your post or clicks through to another web site. This new plug-in lets bloggers test alternative headlines for every post. Each headline is displayed and alternated with the other in random sequence up to a maximum number of “headline views” and the number of clicks each headline gets is tracked. The headline that receives the most clicks is then declared “the winner” and used as that post’s headline from that point on.
2. SES Theme Split Test
Almost as important to the success of a blog as the headline is the theme, or template, selected to represent that blog. With this plug-in two templates can be alternated along with the various elements within the template that may help affect conversions. The results of user on-page activity are tracked through the use of custom segments available within Google Analytics.
3. Visual Website Optimzer
This is a commercial plug-in which allows blog owners to connect to their VWO account to create and test several versions of their blog, each with different activities users can do, to see how each fares as far as web site traffic is concerned. There is a fee associated with this plug-in, but a 30 day trial version is available that allows testing of up to 1,000 visitors, but which can only be run once.
Armed with these plug-ins, you’ll be able to test most of the features of your internet business‘s WordPress blog and take the guesswork out of what works best.
You can take advantage of a UK internet marketing service for help installing and using these plug-ins and for any WordPress-related help you may need.
Joomla Extensions That Will Make Your Web Site Shine
Nov 19th
If you’re a brick-and-mortar business owner looking to become an internet business owner as well, the first thing you’ll need is a web site. Fortunately, nowadays there are many options available to an individual or company just getting started on the internet.
Many Options Available For Developing A Web Site
One of the most popular is WordPress, which is free and is a very powerful CMS (Content Management System) used mainly for blogs, but it’s also preferred by many businesses as the platform of choice for their company’s main web site, since it has so many powerful widgets and plugins available to help tailor a site to be and act just how you’d want it.
Another popular CMS that’s also free is Drupal, which offers rapid web site development, but is often criticised as being too difficult to use for the average person who’s not necessarily technically proficient.
Joomla is yet another free CMS that doesn’t get as much attention as the aforementioned CMS’s, but, when you look at some of the extensions available for Joomla, you may well wonder why that is.
Powerful Extensions Available
Let’s take a look at some of the more powerful extensions that may help Joomla get the kind of recognition it deserves.
1. sh404SEF
Believe it or not, that is actually the name of this popular extension that allows users to manage URLs, amongst other things. You can see your Google Analytics dashboard, develop URLs that are SEO-friendly, remove duplicate URLs, customise page titles and description and many other powerful features, including providing some level of security by protecting sites from such things as malicious page requests, robot spamming, etc.
2. Xmap
Every site needs a sitemap to enable spiders to scan the site’s pages easily and quickly so they can appear in the search engine results. This extension uses your Joomla site’s menus to create a sitemap, and allows the creation of more than one sitemap. Other features include XML sitemap compression and a cache system that allows a sitemap to be generated more quickly.
3. Disqus
Most web platforms feature this extension, which facilitates the use of comments, offers tools for administration and moderation and connects automatically to the wider discussion community, which means greater readership of and exposure for your Joomla site.
4. Page Peel Banner
With this you can add another banner format to the upper right hand corner of your pages. It supports statistics for clicks and impressions and allows an alternative image and link to be displayed provided it hasn’t been published.
5. Breezing Forms
Every site must have a way for users to contact the site’s support staff, and, with this extension, doing so couldn’t be easier. The list of features may astound you, such as AJAX file uploads complete with progress bars, ability to pay for downloads (comes with PayPal support built-in), 3 form editors (EasyMode, ClassicMode and (QuickMode) and much more.
6. Kunena
Forums can provide your business with search engine results that are just as impressive as those provided by blogs. Kunena is a very popular Joomla extension that has been improved to include a template system that is centralised and includes installable templates as well as integrated polling.
Turn Your Joomla Site Into A World-Beater
Joomla itself is a powerful CMS that can be turned into something that can make your internet business site a thing of beauty and power that will please not only the search engines but your visitors, which, at the end of the day, is what search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about, potentially resulting in improved rankings in the search engine results pages.
For help getting your business online and with implementing Joomla along with these powerful extensions, contact a UK internet business coach, who’s well-versed in Joomla and using it to set your web site up for long-term success.
Make Your Web Site Come Alive With WordPress Plugins
Nov 12th
The popularity of blogging has practically gone through the roof, with everybody from kids to internet businesses blogging about everything under the sun. In fact, if you have an internet business that you aren’t blogging about, then your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts could be suffering, because having a blog is regarded as one of the major components of a well-rounded search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Many people and companies use blogging for e-commerce purposes, whether through affiliate agreements, digital merchandising, services or actual physical products, but, according to Technorati, very few are actually making money, with a full 72% regarded as hobbyists making no money at all.
Spruce Up Your Blog
If your blog’s conversion numbers aren’t all they could be (and a conversion could be the action of clicking through to your company’s main web site, not just making a purchase), it could be that you need to make your blog a bit more snazzy.
A lot of bloggers use WordPress as their platform of choice due to its flexibility and expandability which comes from the ability to incorporate widgets and plugins into a blog, giving a once boring blog the appearance of the inside of a Las Vegas casino.
Grab These Plugins
Here are some plugins that are a bit more unique and can perform a complete transformation of your current blog into something virtually irresistible.
1. WP-Cumulus
When you first encounter this plugin, you may think you’re dealing with a custom-built widget, but that’s not the case. All the more reason to try it out; it uses Flash video to rotate your site’s categories and tags, all in 3D. So stimulating visually and guaranteed to mesmerise your visitors.
2. Sexy Bookmarks
What a great name for something as mundane sounding as a plugin. And the good news is, it lives up to its billing. It allows visitors to syndicate the content of your site to more than 50 portals and allows sharing via RSS feed and e-mail, all done very elegantly and economically. Another really sexy feature is the massive amount of customisation options available.
3. Explanatory Dictionary
This plugin gets rid of the need for inline text ads by providing explanations of words or phrases that may be hard to understand for the average visitor. You can use this on your site to provide your visitors with more information while avoiding the danger of information overload.
4. Custom Login Page
Make your login page stand out from others with this plugin, which allows you to change the colour and background image of your login form, the background image of your site’s login page, the primary image of your login page and you can even add customised CSS. It all sounds a bit tricky, but the great news is that you’re able to make all the changes using a simple interface, so you don’t have to be a super programmer to take advantage of this plugin.
5. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
Has your blog been the victim of spammers posting rogue comment blasts? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the horror stories about the effects of spam on web sites and know that it’s something to be avoided. This plugin helps you do just that by allowing you to add CAPTCHA to any or all forms on your blog, including your comment form, while still allowing trackbacks and pingbacks. It can also be hidden from administrators and users who are logged in.
Whatever the overall goal of your internet business, having a blog that converts visitors to get the results you want is essential, so anything you can do to make your blog stand out from the crowd will be helpful.
To turn your blog into a veritable conversion machine, contact a UK internet business consultant for help implementing the above plugins and more WordPress options.
