I’ve been online a long time. At least *cough* 12 years. Back in the early days “netiquitte” was taken really seriously.

The basic rules include:

• YOU DON’T SHOUT,
• You don’t quote slabs of text,
• And my favourite, you check, and correct your spelling and grammar.

I always took the approach that online you are judged by your written word, in the same way that offline you’re judged by your appearance. Would you wear crumpled, dirty clothes and unpolished shoes when meeting with a potential client? I suspect not. So why write an email with no capitalisation, no punctuation and definitely no spell checking?

Now I don’t mean to be uptight, and I do appreciate that online communication is far less formal that the old written letter (thank heaven’s), but in my opinion if you can’t add an apostrophe to a word, or end a sentence with a full stop, I’ll suspect you don’t polish your shoes either.

Keep in mind a few minutes making sure your written words are “polished” could be the difference between a sale or no sale.

A client recently asked my opinion of online newsletters. While blogs seem to be the main focus these days there are still benefits of offering a newsletter. It can be a great way to keep in touch with your clients and can help your prospects get to know you, and your business, better. You can use it to announce company news, new products and services or offer advice.

If you’re considering offering a newsletter keep in mind the following:

• What’s in it for your readers? How do you make it compelling so that they subscribe - and read it regularly?
• How often are you planning to send it out? Weekly, fortnightly or even monthly? Whatever you decide remember if you send it out regularly, and on time, your readers will come to expect, and look forward to it.
• Make sure you give your readers the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe easily.
• It’s vital you include a privacy policy. Make sure it’s easily seen and understood by potential subscribers.

Newsletters can be a great communications tool. Just remember your readers have chosen to read your newsletter so make it easy to subscribe, be informative and treat your reader’s details with respect.

Business cards are an overlooked marketing tool. As well as providing your business details they can be used to promote what you do. In fact I often like to suggest to clients that adding information about their business and/or products and services can be a great way to remind prospects who you are 6 months after they got your card.

One of our members at Cre8asite, Patricia, has taken this one step further and asked whether a business card is an appropriate place to add a promotion. Liz, one of our mods,  has grabbed this idea and run with it questioning the benefits of adding your URL (website address) and a reason to visit the site.

It’s an interesting discussion so feel free to drop in and add your thoughts.

You’ve got about 3 seconds to capture your prospect’s attention. That’s it.

In that time they have to work out what your site is about and what’s in it for them. The more complicated your message the more difficult it is for them to work it out - and the easier it is for them to hit the back button.

A few tips:

• Design each page to have one main objective. Make it big, make it bold.
• Keep your navigation labels (Services, Contact Us etc) simple and self explanatory. This is probably a little outdated these days (well I hope so) but don’t use obscure  images in place of text. We call that mystery meat navigation.
• Make it easy for your prospects by making sure clickable links look like clickable links. Online, an underlined word signifies a link. If it’s not a link don’t underline it.

There’s enough competition out there without putting your prospects off before they’ve had a chance to become your customer.

A new study by Queensland University of Technology, in conjunction with Pennsylvania State University, has determined that business and e-commerce have trounced sex and pornography searches online.

Their research analysed “up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile.”

Alta Vista? Excite? Dogpile?

Now I’m all for online commerce, and I do know it’s on the increase, however one can’t help but wonder if the vast majority of those searches are from automated ranking reports run by by scammy SEO firms for unsuspecting clients. “Hey John, we’ve ranked you #1 on Alta Vista for red widgets melbourne australia!” Right.

You walk into a little bricks and mortar boutique to find the perfect widget. Suddenly you notice all their products are either broken, dusty or both. What do you do? Most likely walk out and into the next boutique.

It’s the same online. If you want people to purchase from your e-commerce store make sure the product photographs you display are enticing. Make sure the resolution is decent and the photo has been colour corrected to display accurately - and look good. In a bricks and mortar store you can pick up a product for a closer look. Online make sure your prospects can enlarge a photo. Perhaps even offer them different views - front, back, sides etc. If a product comes in different colours you may want to allow people to view it in it’s different colours.

Online it’s far easier for a prospect to hit the back button and visit the next site - your competitor. It’s up to you (or your web designer) to ensure you display your products in the best possible light, so they don’t.

In the last week or two I’ve chatted to a number of website owners about the lack of sales on their website. In each instance their first thought was to get more traffic.

I explained to them that just throwing more traffic at the site would not necessarily increase the amount of sales, at least not significantly. If you’re already getting traffic and no sales I’d be looking at why your prospects aren’t buying. Some issues to consider:

• Your traffic isn’t targeted
• There’s problems with your website

Targeted Traffic

Is what you’re selling what you’re visitors are after? This is a good time to review your search engine optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and other marketing initiatives to make sure you’re targeting the right people. Perhaps your visitors are expecting “genuine widgets” and you’re offering “generic widgets”.

Website Issues

Is your website compelling? Does it provide your users with a reason to buy from you? Is it easy to buy from you? Are your product/service descriptions informative? Are your product photographs of high quality? How does your site compare to your competitors?

Take the time to really review your website. Focus on the design, usability, your unique selling proposition (USP) and your copy.

Merely throwing more traffic at your site does not necessarily mean more sales. And let’s face it, if you’re getting 5 sales for every 1000 visitors wouldn’t you rather get 50 sales for every 1000 visitors. Then an increase in traffic will bring an even larger increase in sales.