With such a fiercely competitive network of websites and blogs out there, getting your website onto the screens of your customers and keeping it there is a tough job. There are many ways in which to help your business become more popular and more profitable if you own a physical store on a high street – doing things like regular advertising, improving the appearance of your shop front, placing special offers in the window and being friendly and courteous to your customers.
Similar concepts can be explored and utilised in the online environment to help your e-business become a success:
Unique Content
Having unique content on your website is a very important thing for two reasons. One reason is that when people come to your website they don’t want to see the same thing over and over again, they want to see something new and interesting to make them want to come back. Another reason is that search engines want to see that you are constantly updating your website. This will be a factor in how they rank your website in their search results.
SEO
This brings us on to search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the art of improving websites rankings in the search engines – thereby getting more potential customers to your website – through a series of techniques such as on-site optimisation, link building and keyword analysis. By employing a sustained SEO campaign your website can be swiftly moved up the search rankings and find you more new customers.
Pictures
Having created some awesome content and optimised your site for search engines, you don’t want to scare your customers off with some poor quality, pointless photos which don’t do you or your products justice. A good photo can be the difference between a customer staying or not.
Involvement Devices
An involvement device is a tool which immediately grabs your customer’s attention as soon as they reach the site. Not just verbally, but with something they have to interact with which encourages them to stay on the page and invest their time and attention on you.
Attractive
Having a well designed site is not only important for usability, but is something which people subconsciously look for when they touch down on your website. How many times have you arrived at a webpage only to not find anything working, not know how to find out what you want and not like how anything looks? This is what you want to avoid with your site.
Have a good look at your website and really go through these important points and tick off each one that you could do with addressing, then act!
If you are a business owner, you will likely have aspirations of high sales figures, loyal customers and growing budgets. One way of helping you get your business heading in the right direction, and in this case online business, is to look up to businesses which currently captivate and entice millions of people around the world to invest in, log on to and buy from their websites. By taking a look at the heavy hitters out there you can see what makes them an online success and what advice you can take from their example to help your business improve.
If you are in business these days it is almost essential to have a smartphone. With all the mobility of a…er…mobile, and all the handy application usefulness of a computer, they go with business like bread and butter. They are particularly valuable for small businesses and can act as an entire office for some one man companies. If they could find somewhere to keep the mugs in a smartphone they would no doubt do coffee too.
The Networked Nation Manifesto published on 12th July 2010 highlighted the number of people in the UK who are missing out on opportunities that the internet brings. The UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox produced this manifesto and has announced plans to try and get everyone in the UK of working age online by 2015. This is spurred by the fact that if everyone who is not online took advantage of the opportunities the internet can bring, in the shape of access to jobs and consumer savings it could in turn save a lot of money for the UK economy. For example if just 3.5% of UK unemployed gained employment this would save £560m, and with 90% of jobs now requiring basic internet skills, getting everyone online could be an easy way to save some money.
With the launch of new technologies such as the iPhone 4 and the iPad, it’s easy to forget that not so long ago there was a time when the most advanced technology in an office was the telephone: A simpler time when pen and paper, or maybe a typewriter, along with the postal service and a filing cabinet was the basis of all work and communication. A time when salesmen went out and about to do business on the road and when computers were closer to abacuses than today’s superfast nanotech marvels.
Browsing the web on a mobile has never been easier. There are more than 68 million mobile internet users worldwide and this number is growing. Since the development of Smartphones like the iPhone and Android platforms, getting online on your phone is an increasingly seamless and daily occurrence. Also, next year sees the launch of 4G internet. Much like the 3G internet currently used by mobile surfers but up to 20 times faster. With this in the pipeline you can be assured that mobile commerce is going to be a big part of the future of business.
Social Media is big business and with the right plan of action and a delicate touch any site can utilise people power to improve their ecommerce. Here are a few brands which have made a big difference to their ecommerce growth using social media.