The 15 minute alarm

Further to yesterday's post about time logging, I found some code for the EEE PC which pops up a neat window every 15 minutes and asks, "What are you doing?" It is a good question much of the time, and it appears that my attention span at times can be less than that on the job I am supposed to be doing! It enters my response into a text file which allows me to see what the hell I have spent the last 8 hours on. I'll post the code here for anyone who wants it later, but it has prompted me to add a list of features required in my time logging software to a half-composed email to the developers of the one I am currently using.
* A pop up alarm clock demanding me to account of myself
* A calendar that shows all the up and coming deadlines, as well as those past due, and the work required
* An easy way to show not just jobs done, but percentage completed from the estimate given to the client, and therefore how much time is left to finish the task
* This would then show me in print how far out the time estimates have been over the years, and why I am still skint, and my clients are doing just fine on all the unbilled hours I have had to put in.

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Website Designers' Big Mistakes - keyword inclusion

Gordon Bennett - New York Times journalist, so I am told by my temporarily resident aunt, who is breaking the back of turning the house into a habitable domicile after 5+ years of it not being by sanding, painting and scrubbing - it all puts my efforts to shame. I digress....

Why, oh why, do website designers insist on spending weeks coding up an e-commerce site with full functionality, preparing it for launch, and only then come to the Web PR people? Today, I have battled with a live website, trying to get some SEO and user friendly features on to it.

Keywords? Pah! Barely a one in sight, or in site. "Did you ask the client for a list of keywords before you began?"
"No, they said they'd write the text."

Yes but, guys, the keywords don't just go in the text. That's the whole point.

So, armed with my own list of keywords, painstakingly gathered over the last few hours by indexing the client's own site, searching Google for their competitors and nicking some of theirs, Wordtracker, Google Adwords, Overture etc, I am now working through page titles, META tags, alt img tags, filenames, headings and of course, the visible text, to try and put in some of the keywords that are vital to getting this site found beyond the single keyword phrase the client and designer thought was all that mattered.

Then there are the missing calls to action, the lack of interactivity, CRM, content and all the other things that are required to put a halfway decent Web PR strategy together.

If you are a site designer, or know one, tell them that before they start designing anything, all those important keywords need to be built into their process. Every filename should be keyword rich, and hence every HREF tag, every image needs a keyword rich alt img tag, every heading needs to include keywords, etc etc. Let alone METAs and all that bog standard SEO stuff.

Because after all, those keywords are what your visitors searched upon in the first place. When they arrive on the site they want to know WIIFM (What's In It For Me) and that they are in the right place for they want. And that they haven't just landed on a site whose designer thought a bit of black hat SEO would do the job.

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More good sites out there. We found rather a lot today! Check out our delicious site for more weird and wonderful sites.

Time tracking. Always a problem when you are working on a variety of projects, often made up of many tasks, that build up into a billable whole. After some looking around, I have opted for the 30day trial of Easy Time Tracking. This is going to cause minor problems when work is done on the EEE PCs or the Mac but it does mean that tasks and projects can be more easily tracked.

Why this one? Well, mainly because it has a desktop widget that means you can easily click a task and client and start and stop the timer, without having to manually enter anything in a separate program. Now, if it had an alarm that went off every 15mins and asked, "What are you doing?" to force you to fill it in (and re-focus if you have suddenly found a great displacement activity to distract you!), it'd be perfect.

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WikiHow

This site is just great. Wikihow. It is an ever-growing online manual of how to do things. All sorts of things from how to make a network cable, through to poaching an egg, solving back problems with Pilates, in fact, you name it, it's here. Or will be soon.

If you want to market your website, and your products, then you'd do well to consider what you could put in Wikihow that might pull in some new customers. This is another site that shows the power of user-created content. You can put URLs in to a page, but expect them to be edited out over time if you are just blatantly self-advertising and not creating a useful article to help people in their daily lives. You can however create a useful how to article that contains keywords that tie in to your PPC campaigns so you are showing as a paid listing both at the side and below the articles.

And you can use it to complement your FAQs. Why write them all yourself if there is a huge number of people out there willing to help you do the work!! Links to sites such as these, which have the potential to become one of those great resources on the Internet over time, will give you street cred. Spend a few minutes on wikihow today and think what you could do there that might enhance your business vistors, brand awareness, product FAQ etc.

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My Business card or yours

Networking is the big thing. Many people attend networking events, or are part of an ever-growing number of social networking sites online. Savvy businesses are using social networks to promote their goods.

Networking allows you to push your business, products, or to make contacts in the supplier/customer chain.

But whose business card is the most useful? Yours or theirs?


Think about it.

You have a stand at an exhibition. Everyone who visits, you press a business card into their hand. They leave.

What happens to your business card? How do you contact them to see whether the discussions on the stand could lead to a successful, and hopefully profitable business relationship?

Did you ask them for their business card? How do you follow it up? Will they remember you, or will you be consigned to a spam filter's deathbox? How long do you leave it before you follow up on their business card? How do you make sure you are remembered?

Exactly the same is valid for your website. Every day, x number of visitors come to your website. Do you ever acquire their business card? Find out their contact details? Establish a personal relationship with them so that when you phone out of the blue they know who you are? (If you have a contact number for them even....)

This week's key conundrum is how to make personal relationships with your customers through your website. How to contact them, after their visit to your site, and engage them in a return visit or a return purchase.

So, today, think about how you ensure you get their business card during their visit to your website. How do you create opportunities to do so? How do you then contact them in a manner that is not spam, or unwanted intrusion? How do you build a customer to your website into a 'customer for life'?

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Word of Mouse matters

Customer Service Online - are you doing it?

When someone visits your shop, you will often make an attempt to engage with them, develop a relationship, find out who they are, encourage them to come back by telling them there is a sale on next month, acquiring their contact details - perhaps by signing up to a mail order catalogue, or finding out what they are looking for, and offering to find them that item.

Those shops which do not do this are reliant on non-personal relationships, huge marketing budgets, and cut-priced items to beat the competition. But in this world where personal relationships in commerce matter....
it is the shops who say, "£20.05. Oh, make it £20, we won't go bust over 5p" who actually manage customer retention successfully. It is the shops who have staff who ask, "Can I help you find what you need?" in a non-demanding or non-aggressive style who discover that they can provide exactly the service that customer is looking for, and potentially you have a customer for 'life', as well as some great PR. It is the shops who say, "You live down Acacia Avenue, don't you? Did you know we deliver free of charge there every day/Thursday/once a month? Would you like us to bring your magazines/meat/veg/parcels
etc on our rounds?"

These type of activities are what build a customer list of happy, satisfied customers who tell others. Offline, we call it word of mouth recommendations and online, it is called 'word of mouse'. It is important to understand it.

Now, look at your website. Do you provide the same standard of customer care there as you expect on your sales floor? Do you have any mechanism for approaching the visitors to your website live? Or letting them contact you easily? Or keeping in touch with them, long after they have left your store? Or do they visit, look around, and leave without you being any the wiser who they are and what they want than an anonymous IP address in your traffic stats?

Let's use Lulu.com as a first example of how to get it right. Lulu.com offers LiveHelp. You click, ask your question, and a real person responds in real time. You don't need to pick up the phone, visit the store, or make a great effort. Your question is answered promptly, and quite often, there is a follow up email which provides extra info. All of this adds in to the user experience. I, for one, am now one of a growing virtual sales force who promote Lulu at every opportunity, because they go one step beyond the necessary to deal with potential customers. It is far harder to contact Amazon than Lulu, and get a personal response.

Imagine going on to the BT site and finding that there is someone there, live, who is able to deal with your query, or find the answer, instead of spending an hour or more on hold to someone in India, and still not getting the answer? (This happened to me today and it wasn't the first time. I speak from a growing level of frustration with corporate customer service from consumers!)

When I come to your website, how do you deal with my enquiry? Do you have a customer enquiry form that gets sent to some unknown bod in an untitled department at some unknown email address? When will I get a reply? "We will respond to your request shortly" means nothing to a customer angling to find the right product and buy it today. If you do not offer an 'instant response' system, then you have probably just lost a customer. And they are unlikely to respond in future if they felt let down during their visit to your website, so having their email address may just make things worse in future.

Do you offer an FAQ? A freephone number? Teach them how to use Skype so they can make the call for free? Do you have video manuals for your products or for your website that help them through questions asked over and over again? (And if questions are being asked frequently, why haven't you addressed that issue with the documentation that comes with the products or on your product listings????)

If you offer free resources, such as white papers, do you ask for an email address, so you can send them further info in future? Or do you, as I found recently on a land sale agents' site, just let people download the land and auction details, without adding them to a list of people who might be interested in other similar land sales that might happen in future? In that case, it was worse than it seemed at the outset, because there was no correlation between telephone enquiries, downloads, and those who turned up at the auction. The land agent had no way of offering further land details to anyone at all except those who had telephoned in requesting the details to be sent. They could have been building a huge database of those interested in land, and bringing together sellers and buyers constantly. This would set them apart from other land agents, for starters.

If someone has found your site, spent time looking at your products, don't just let them leave without either:

1) harvesting their email address for future contact eg a newsletter with offers and competitions and upgrades.
2) persuading them to sign up for an rss feed (more anonymous and less intrusive than email). It is their choice if they access and read it but at least you know they may be reading info on your products
3) contacting them whilst on site. There are products that allow you to contact those surfing your site and ask directly, "Can I help?" This pops up in an unobtrusive window in their browser, which they can choose to ignore if they wish. However, many people often find that websites are difficult to navigate, they can't find what they are looking for, and that a little personal assistance is appreciated.
4) offering a free sample or white paper that they can receive in return for their email address and permission to market to them in future. This doesn't have to be onerous on the customer and many people seek out free samples and can be your best sales force when they post to many other sites saying, "I got this and it's fab." This has the benefit of increasing the number of links to your site and thereby your search engine rankings, as well as getting the word out to others who may be interested in your product range.

You can follow up this type of person with a number of autoresponses, sent out for free, which encourage them to promote you further. This is really worthwhile if you also run an affiliate scheme, whereby they earn commission for every sale that comes from a recommendation by them.

On that note, it is worth realising that a virtual sales force, who have been provided with the necessary marketing materials so they are on message for your product(s), is invaluable. If the commission is commensurate with the amount of work they need to do to see a return, then you will find that affiliates (and especially super-affiliates) are worth their weight in gold. A small company can double or treble its sales force for very little expenditure and reap dividends.

So, to sum up. When ANY visitor comes to your website who is interested in your products, you should be looking to acquire contact details from them. (Ditto for your shop, store, exhibition stand etc in the 'real world'.)
Treat people courteously and with respect. Even if all you do is refer them to a 'competitor' who does stock the product they are looking for, they are likely to remember you positively, and recommend you,even if they didn't buy from you.
Market to those who you know. Existing customers are cheaper to maintain than acquiring new ones. But don't miss an opportunity to acquire new ones and look after them!
Think out of the box.

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