2. It’s hard to place an order

Have you ever left a checkout line because it took too long? Or have you abandoned an online shopping cart out of confusion?

So have your customers! If your shopping cart system is difficult or hard to use, you’re losing sales.

Gather some data

Most popular e-commerce systems have some valuable data that you need to examine. You should be able to see shopping carts that your customers abandoned.

If you don’t know how to view this information, contact your support team. They’ll help you find out.

With this data, you can tell if your ordering process is turning customers away. Some customers might abandon carts due to other reasons, but a portion of them can be attributed to your order process.

Clear instructions

People hate guessing when they’re trying to buy something. They put their thinking into the purchase decision. If you make them think too hard during checkout, they’ll just leave.

Make sure each step of your checkout process has clear instructions. Walk the customer through it in plain English, even if it seems really easy to you.

Friendly errors

Cryptic error messages just confuse buyers. Unless they’re really motivated to purchase right now, they’ll probably give up.

Since there are lots of errors that could happen during checkout, make sure the messages are friendly and informative. Give the customer directions on how to fix the error. And if possible, provide an alternate order method, such as a toll-free phone number.

Few steps

People like simplicity. You can’t draw out the order process over too many pages. But you also shouldn’t put every field on one page.

Strike a nice balance of 2-3 order pages. But also provide a visible key that shows the customer what step he’s on and what is left. People like seeing the big picture.

Always confirm

Data can get lost or mangled before it gets entered in your system’s database. That makes the process uncertain for the user.

To put your buyers at ease, confirm their information before the order is completed. Show them the address they entered, their total, the payment method chosen, etc. Make sure they’ve entered everything correctly.

How can you improve your order process?

1. You Don’t Accept the Right Payment Method

How many payment methods do you accept? One or two? You’re losing sales!

What happens if a store doesn’t accept the payment method you want to use? You don’t buy from them. It’s not a coincidence that most brick & mortar stores accept cash, credit cards, and checks. These are the common payment methods!

What’s in your e-wallet?

Which payment types does your website accept? Sit down right now and make a list. Break it out as detailed as possible, including which types of credit cards, etc.

If you only accept 1 or 2 payment types, you’ve got work to do. If you accept 3 or more, you could still benefit from adding a couple new ones.

Let’s go through payment types you should be accepting.

Credit cards

This one’s a no-brainer. People use credit (and debit) cards to shop online. But are you accepting enough brands?

At minimum, your website should handle Visa and MasterCard. To gain more sales, try adding Discover and American Express.

Electronic checks

Not everyone has a credit card. And some people might just prefer to pay straight from their bank account. Using an e-check makes that possible.

An e-check uses the account & routing numbers from the purchaser’s checks to send a payment to you. Your shopping cart system will ask the purchaser to simply copy the numbers from an actual check. It’s easy!

PayPal

Frequent online shoppers typically have PayPal accounts. This allows the buyer to have a single online method of payment wherever he goes.

PayPal has been around a long time, and it’s not going away. In fact, PayPal even supports mobile phone payments!

Bill Me Later

This option enables buyers to pay you without a credit card or any other online account. Buyers simply select Bill Me Later at checkout, and they’re done. They obtain a credit line from Bill Me Later, and you get your sale today!

Any more?

Since you probably shop online, think about payment methods you’ve run across. Perhaps you even use them. Offer those on your website!!

What good online payment methods did we miss?

What are supplemental results?

Google has two content indexes. Supplemental results are the B-list. As Google explains, there are fewer restrictions on the supplemental index.

But supplemental results show up after results from the main index. Also, Google doesn’t regularly update the content in the supplemental index. In other words, it’s not somewhere you want your pages.

Jim Boykin even coined the term “Google Hell” for this index. We clearly want to keep your pages out of there.

Are my pages in supplemental results?

A quick way to check your site is to enter this search at Google (instead of “example.com” enter your site’s name, such as “google.com”):

site:www.example.com * -asdf

You should now see some pages that say “Supplemental Result”

How to get out of Google’s Hell

Link to your pages. A page without a link to it is considered “orphaned,” and Google doesn’t look too kindly upon that. Spread the link love around your own site and get links from other sites. Don’t just focus on the home page, since every page needs its own Google juice. Google’s own Matt Cutts claims this is the best way out of supplemental results.

Remove duplicate content. To be on the A-List, you need unique content. If you stole somebody else’s content, shame on you. If you’re duplicating your own content, stop. WordPress users should use post excerpts everywhere.

Hunt down copiers. Somebody else might be duplicating your content, getting their own page in the A-List. You can use a service like Copyscape to find infringers and shut them down.

Put your robots.txt to work. This file talks to search engines. It can tell Google not to index parts of your site that might contain duplicate content, such as print versions of articles. In addition, there are several WordPress pages you might want to block.

Add more content. Pages with little or no content can end up in supplemental results, because Google doesn’t think they’re valuable. Beef up the content, impress Google, and provide more value to visitors.

Direct all requests to www. For most servers, “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” bring up the exact same page. Google could consider this duplicate content, since two URLs bring up the same page (for your entire site). A simple server tweak can redirect all requests to either www or no-www.

Write unique title and meta tags. If every page of your site is titled “My Site,” you’re not as well positioned for the A-List. Tailor every title, description, and keyword tag to the actual content for each page.

Make your site shallow. How many levels deep is your site? In other words, how many clicks away from the home page does it take to get to the lowest peon web page? If it’s more than 2 or 3, you’re not passing enough link juice to your pages. Simplifying the architecture will please Google and your visitors.

Use search-friendly URLs. Google isn’t a fan of long, complicated URLS. Make them reasonably short and actually readable. Instead of “domain.com/?adfasd=09098″ use “domain.com/page”

Report a page to Google. Andy Beard took an interesting approach to supplemental results. He reported one of his own pages to Google as a paid link. It ended up pulling all his pages out of supplemental results.

Create a sitemap & submit it. You’ve got to tell Google where your pages are, especially if you’ve changed things following these tips. Make a new sitemap and submit it for Google to index. You’ll find the webmaster tools helpful with this.

Any more questions?

What have we left out of this guide? Is something not clear? That’s what the comments are for.

We’d love to talk over issues you might have and help other people with supplemental results problems. Let the conversation begin.

One of my favorite tips is about usability & navigation:

Click here: Why? Change this phrase everywhere on your site. It doesn’t make sense out of context. The user has to read the whole paragraph (which they probably won’t) to understand why they should click there. Consider phrases like “Download the profit/loss graph” or “Listen to the podcast entitled food for thought.”

Not only does “click here” confuse users, but it also doesn’t help the search rankings for your site. Using keyword phrases in your links will enable quick navigation and improve your site’s search traffic.

Be sure to check out the other 24 tips from Fadtastic and see which website improvement ideas you can implement.

Plexis POS Review plus lots of information on other POS software packages.

Does your website show up in search engine listings? If you can’t find it, neither can your customers. Lucky for you, there are easy steps to take that will solve this problem.

This is Part 1 in a series on the basics of search engines and what you can do to make your site findable. It’s easy; I promise.

Where is my site?!

I was recently contacted by a panicked organization. Their website did not show up in search engine listings, but their competitor did. In fact, if you searched for the group’s site, you found the competitor.

After a little investigation, I explained the problem. Their site was not developed with any consideration for search engines. It looked nice and had good content, but it wasn’t findable.

If you’re in a similar boat, keep reading. Search Engines 101 will teach you the basics to get your website on the map. It’s written in plain English with thorough explanations. Let’s get started!

Think like a robot

Search engines are robots. They’re increasingly smarter, but they are still dumb compared to humans. Your website must spell everything out for them.

More importantly, these robots can only read text. Images and fancy animations get ignored by search engines. But that’s OK, because we’ll go through the key things your website needs.

Put up a big sign

Brick and mortar businesses have big signs, right? Your website needs one!

Look up at the top of your web browser and read the text that is displayed in the title bar. This is called the “title” for the page. You can change what it says. Sadly, many website designers forget this important step. The title might be something like “home” or jibberish letters.

Your website’s title should contain something like you’d put on a real-life sign. You’ll want your website name, along with a short description or witty slogan.

Here’s how you change your website’s title. You can open your page in an HTML editor and change the title with the menus (FrontPage instructions). Or you can simply edit the HTML directly, by pasting this code in between the “head” tags (they should be at the top of the page):

<title>Your Title Text Goes Here</title>

Remember that every page on your site has its own title, so you can customize the title for each page’s content. In fact you should do this. Tell the robots what that page contains!

Describe your content

After your sign is in place, you need to give search engines more information about each page. This info is put in “meta tags.” That’s just a techie name for little descriptors of your content.

There are two descriptors for every web page. First, you need to write out an actual description. Make it a simple sentence or a couple phrases. Maybe something like, “Bob’s Doorknob Shop sells custom and special-order knobs in Richmond and Henrico County.” Easy, right?

The second descriptor is called your page’s key words. These are words and phrases that describe the page’s content. To help think of these, put yourself in a potential customer’s position: what terms would you enter into a search engine? Make a list of key words and phrases, including different spelling variations. Don’t forget geographic terms that might be important, like cities and counties you serve, etc.

Your website editor can now update your “meta tags” for you, or you can edit them yourself. You should add this code directly below your “title” tags from the previous section:

<meta name="description" content="Your Description Goes Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your Key Words Go Here, Separated By Commas" />

Just like every page has its own title, they all have descriptions and key words as well. These will definitely help you be found.

Feed the robots text

The search engine robots are hungry for your text. Like I mentioned, they ignore images and animation. If your content is all done in Flash or graphics, the robots can’t find it very well, even with your titles and descriptions.

The best way around this is to make the heart of your content plain text. You can spice it up with colors and different fonts if you want, but keep the foundation basic.

Now it’s time to make sure your site is designed in this manner. If it’s not, you can always add some extra text at the bottom of the page that describes your content. Don’t go overboard, but a little bit can help. Just make sure to integrate your additions into the overall site.

Stay tuned for more

Now you’ve got a great start on making your site findable. What you’ve done so far is considered part of the “on page” optimization process. It’s about making sure the site itself is ready to be found. In Part 2, we’ll start looking at things you need to do in other places.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed, so you don’t miss the next installment!

For those of you who still buy TV advertising on a regular basis, try this tip. Next time you talk to your account representative, ask him/her about unsold spots. What do they do with those spots?

If they are like most TV stations, those unsold spots are usually at nights during the week, and they have either no commercials due to lack of interest, or they give away commercial spots to non-profit organizations!

You are already a client, and already spend money with this TV station, shouldn’t you get something out of the deal? Free advertising for sure!

Tell them you’d like to try to get a few free spots during the week at off-peak times and see how well that converts for your market. You may find a new demographic that consists solely of night owls ready to buy!

He said that he had been going business to business (B2B) trying to get appointments with buyers to buy his software. This software was productivity software, and was less than $20 per computer. Most of his target companies had 5-10 computers. This would have only cost them $100-200 total!

However, he had trouble getting anyone to ever listen to him. He started designing a flyer, good old fashioned paper flyers.

On his flyer, he still hand delivered them, but the flyers were what made the difference. His flyers listed what his software did, but in big bold letters at the bottom he had the price, $22 per computer. More per computer, but it was still inexpensive.

He then began handing these flyers to the secretary and said, “This is for whoever buys the computer equipment.”

Then he would just turn and walk away. He didn’t ask who it was, or if he could talk to the decision maker, just dropped off the flyer and left.

His flyer gave 3 ways to contact him, email, phone, or fax. At the very bottom was a small form that asked the prospects name, phone number and best time to call. Then a check box that asked if they wanted a visit, or just a phone call.

In one day he went to about 100 businesses and when he got home that day, he had 10 faxes, 5 emails, and 4 voice mails waiting for him! That is a 19% response rate, compared to his dismal 1% (approximately) that he was getting before the flyer creation.

Next time you need corporate clients, consider using the drop off as a marketing tool. Also consider hiring someone to do the deliveries. Many cities have companies that will handle that job for you!

That post got me thinking. How often do we sit down and evaluate the success of our company. If the company is making money, do we sit and think, “Is this enough money?” or “Should the company have grown by 3 employees and no additional revenue?”

I don’t often take a look at my total company figures…I need to more often. I would suggest that you probably need to as well. Get the info from your bookkeeper or you accountant. Whoever has that info needs to be passing it along to you on a regular basis.

For me, I am a picture kind of guy. I want to see charts and graphs and have the percent gains and losses for the previous month, quarter, and year.

If you are like me, find someone within your company to prepare these reports on a regular basis, put them in a binder and deliver them to you on the 3rd working day of the month. The 3rd working day gives them time to calculate the totals from the previous month.

If you find your company isn’t growing like you thought, make some changes and chart that progress as well.

There is more to business than just marketing!

In other news, Apple is turning 30 years old.

Your fact sheet should start with when the company was founded. This includes dates and places if applicable.

After this should come the founder information.

So your first two paragraphs should look like this:

Vooed Business Marketing was founded in the fall of 2005. Vooed made an immediate impact on the business marketing world starting from Madera, California where Vooed was founded.

Brandon Hopkins was the initial founder of Vooed, but Vooed now employees many additional part time employees. These employees make up the bulk of the company and Mr. Hopkins is the CEO of Vooed and takes part in the day to day activities of Vooed where he leads the marketing team.

That was simple and effective.

Moving on, the next part of your fact sheet should be where your offices are located if you have multiple offices.

For example:

Vooed is headquarted in Madera, California and has employees around the world. Vooed has US affiliate offices in Miami, New York, Denver and Los Angeles. Vooed also has a world-wide presence in Poland, India, and Mexico. With it’s diverse employee background and expertise, Vooed efficiently serves a multitude of companies in different geographic and cultural regions.

This isn’t exactly true, but it gives you a feeling for how to word your fact sheet, and how the information should flow.

The final part of your fact sheet should be mission statement then contact information.

Vooed exists to serve the business community at large, and businesses in their local communities. We prefer to work directly in the office of a company during the consultation. During this in-office phase we can assess your needs and exceed marketing goals based on your specifications.

For more information please contact Vooed at:

By mail:
Vooed Business Marketing
12345 Pine Street
Madera, Ca 93637

By phone:
555-123-4567

By internet:

http://www.Vooed.com

brandon@vooed.com

The contact section is important. It may look cluttered because we offer so many ways to contact us, but that is the most important part. Give your customers as many ways to contact you as they can.

This is also important for potential investors who are going to want to know if you can meet the needs of your customers.

Having a fact sheet readily available to anyone who is interested in a great asset to any business small or large.

For example, on the left menu you see a white box that allows you to signup for special articles that are only available to Vooed Business Marketing subscribers. This mailing list is free and doesn’t contain advertisements.

If you sign up, you can easily remove yourself as well.

The magic of this marketing is that you now have a list of people saying, “Please sell to me.” This method makes for great conversion rates and necessitates a softer sell.

As Joel Cheesman says, “I don’t see it as the pinnacle of marketing strategies either. It’s a piece.”

This is exactly true, email marketing can only be a piece of your overall marketing process.

If you don’t have an email mailing list, I would highly suggest it to every business, whether small or large.

There is a lot of free software to administrate your mailing list, or you can pay to have one set up if funds are not as much of an issue.

Instead of procrastinating any longer, put it on your to-do list then get it done!