I had a client call us this morning excited about getting their first order from their site - they were excited about getting it, but were wondering how someone found them when the site had been only open for a day.

My response to her was to ask the client. Just explain that you're doing market research and ask them how they found you. Some folks won't remember exactly how they found you but others will.

Till tomorrow,

Have a wonderful day. Tim

Hopefully everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving - we had a great time eating turkey, watching football and playing with my daughter Haley, so needless to say we had a very enjoyable time.

This week I'm not sure exactly what we're going to talk about yet, so we'll play it by ear.

Tim

We've had some computer malfunctions this week - a reminder if you haven't done a backup recently then don't forget to do it... today, right now!

We'll resume our posting after the Thanksgiving holidays - just want to take a moment to wish you and yours a safe, happy, fun holiday.

Tim and Lisa

It's Monday - hope your email is bustling with those holiday orders. Seems like the holiday shopping season starts earlier every year. Have you made your site shopper friendly -if not, or if you're in doubt make sure to check out the archives. I can't believe that Thanksgiving is next week.... Not sure yet what exactly we'll be talking about this week but hopefully it will be something useful.

Take care,
Tim

Hope you had a good week. Big news this week is Microsoft unveiled their "new" search engine - check out how your sites ranking for the keywords at the link below.

http://beta.search.msn.com/

Have a great weekend.

Got this article a couple of days ago and it's pretty interesting.


Do I Need an RSS Feed?
By S. Housley
RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS provides headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.
Benefits for Publishers
1.) Avoid Spam Filters
Statisticians estimate that 70% of the email transferred each day is spam (unsolicited email). With that statistic, even opt-in users risk losing valuable messages in the cesspool of spam. RSS feeds effectively nullify spam as an issue. Requesting feeds allow users to maintain complete control over the content they view. Users can easily opt-in and out of feeds that provide content of interest or importance.
2.) Expanded Reach
RSS allows publishers to reach a number of new and different markets that typically are less crowded with competition. Many small businesses are often slow to adopt or learn new technologies, giving businesses that lead the way a competitive advantage.
3.) Content Syndication
Syndication of feeds increases exposure.

4.) Repeat Visitors
RSS is all about repeat visitors. Users who have previously visited a site often have a stronger connection to the site and are more likely to purchase or trust the information on the site.

5.) Free web traffic
As the internet has evolved, many webmasters have found that what was once free traffic must now be paid for in order to sustain decent visitor statistics. RSS is in a unique position to bring free traffic because they are content-driven, and if they include interesting or valuable information, will pique the curiosity of web-surfers and entice them to visit a particular site.

6.) Less Effort
Newsletters and E-zines undeniably bring visitors, but the effort involved in creating, distributing and maintaining a newsletter can be a burden. Maintaining the list, ensuring the list is clean, growing the subscriber base, updating and removing bad e-mail addresses, all take time. RSS feeds are not burdened with those issues. There are easy-to-use RSS feed creation tools that require little effort, allowing publishers to recycle content, often simply cutting and pasting into RSS feed creation software.

FeedForAll RSS feed creation - http://www.feedforall.com

Consider supplementing existing communication venues with RSS. Place the contents of newsletters into feeds and measure the results. You might be surprised at the added traffic.
Examples of various feeds with different intended purposes -

RSS feed - http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog-feed.xml

Establishing expertise in a specific field.
Business Feed - http://www.notepage.net/blog-feed.xml

Contains product and industry information.
Marketing Feed - http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/blog-feed.xml

Builds relationships, endorses products in industry sector.

RSS has potential to help companies develop strong relationships with consumers and creating brand loyalty with customers. While the world will not end tomorrow, nor will business come to a screeching halt if you don't use an RSS feed, there are a number of reasons online businesses should consider using RSS feeds.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com .

We talked about Firefox a little last week - Search Day is doing a series on the browser - you can check it out at the following link.

http://searchenginewatch.com/

Also another good article on some obvious web design mistakes.

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_11_08_navigation.htm

Have a good one.

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I'm not sure exactly what we'll be talking about this week. I guess we'll play it by ear.

I am horrible at copywriting - if you're in the same boat you may want to check out this book from Ken Evoy and crowd -


http://mycps.sitesell.com/blitzpromotions.html

Till tomorrow - we hope you have a wonderful day.

A few days ago we talked about making sure your site looks good in any browser, below is some evidence to back that up.

http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/websitemgmt/story/0,10801,97176,00.html?f=x259

Now may be a good time - if you haven't already - to see how your site looks using Firefox.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.

Tim

A while back there was some discussion about a three click rule - basically it was assumed that your customers would click three times and then leave. Does that rule still apply. Click on the link below for some nice discussion on that subject.


http://www.uie.com/articles/three_click_rule/

Till tomorrow,
Tim

So how can you make your site comfortable?

1) Make sure everything is spelled out - make sure they know things like -
a) when will there order ship.
b) exactly what is your refund policy.
c) can they track their order.
d) make sure they know you'll be sending them email - filters etc. block out a lot of mail, make sure that they know the email address you'll be using.

2) Use good descriptions / images for your product. Include the exact size / color / of the product.

3) Make sure you have all your contact information on each page.

4) Explain exactly how the order process will work.

Sorry for the non posts a couple of times last week. Tomorrow don't forget to vote - doesn't matter who you vote for - just do it. We won't be posting on the blog tomorrow - we'll resume Weds. with some things that we missed last week.

Till then have a wonderful Monday.
Tim