Forest Software
Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business
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Last updated on November 18th, 2011 at 03:34 pm
How many of you have heard the quotation “If you build it they will come” from the film Field of Dreams?
Recently I have come across lots of people that seem to think that if they build a website visitors will come, and if they pepper the website with low value articles and add adverts or affiliate links that they will be able to earn a living doing this. While it may be possible in some countries I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not possible in most of the western world where the cost of living is higher.
If you, as a website owner, think that it’s possible ask yourself some very simple questions :-
- Why would the search engines decide that your page is more important in the search results than the billions of other pages out there?
- If the search engines do decide your page is important why would human visitors decide that it is? If you are like me you have a mental black-list of sites that when they appear in the search engine results you ignore, possibly because the articles are poor quality / they are copies of other pages (scraped information) or maybe because all they are are listings on other sites where you can find the information.
- Once you have a human visitor why would they click on an advert on your page?
- Assuming all of the above, would you be able to generate enough visitors to your site? Taking a very good click-through rate of say 2% and a very good earnings of £1 per click ) that means that you would need 50 visitors to earn £1, so if you need £100 to live per day (don’t forget tax and things like hosting bills) you need 5,000 visitors per day. You should bear in mind that a 2% click through is ambitious and that many clicks may pay you much less than £1 meaning that the number of visitors needed would increase dramatically.
So, far from “if you build it they will come” you need to be thinking – “if I build it can I add value to the visitor?”, “Can I get pages of my website to the top of the search results”, “Can I build up a following?”, “Can I generate enough visitors to the site?” and possibly even “is this a valuable use of my time?”. If the answer to all of these questions is “yes” then you have what is possibly a business proposition, but personally I would start by building a website about your business or interests and then, if you run adverts on some of the pages any extra income will be a nice surprise for you rather than at the end of the year thinking “I spent a year working on my site and it’s not brought any money in – how am I going to pay the bills?”.
And finally…
Good luck with your website and what ever you do, please do not be taken in by adverts saying “earn £1000’s a day from your website for 1 hours work a day” – I can promise you that if you want to earn £1000’s a day it is going to take a great deal of skill and time (and ask yourself – if you could earn that kind of money would you let others know how to do it or would you spend another hour and double your money?).
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If you read the press you may often have come across the term “silver surfer” that is used to describe the older Internet users. Indeed there are stories in July last year about the death of the then oldest twitter user Ivy Bean with much being made of her age.
While 104 year olds may be the exception, as a small business you need to think about the older internet user – for example the second and third fasted growing categories of users on facebook are males and females aged between 55 and 65. This indicates that there are a lot of people that are older than the typical view of the online community that could be visiting your website and buying your products or services.
What does this mean to you as a small business with a website? Well, it is fact that eyesight tends to deteriorate once you get past your mid 40’s so have a look at the content of your site – is it easy to read, is the font big enough and is there enough contrast between the text and the background colour? How many of you have visited a site where the background is black or very dark and the text is a light grey – this is proven to be a bad combination with the best colour combinations for text and backgrounds being a light background and dark text.
One idea to improve this could be to allow your visitor to change the colours of the background / text and even the size of the text on your pages, this is done by allowing a change to the style sheet that controls the look of the page (and is something that we are actively considering here at Forest Software).
Another factor that you need to consider is the language used on the pages, the older person tends to appreciate well written and grammatically correct content without any spelling mistakes.
If you are using an external designer to produce a new website for you remember that the vast majority of designers are under the age of 30 and tend to think that they are the typical internet users, point out to them that there is a large proportion of the web world that does not have 20/20 vision or even fine control over mice and that this needs to be taken into consideration, for example I have visited sites where you have to hover over the navigation to allow sub-menus to slide out and the hover seems to be very sensitive.
And finally…
The main reason you need to consider silver surfers when you are thinking about your website is the profit motive. As a small business you will find that by opening your website up to the older generation you are increasing the number of possible customers and therefore increasing the turnover and profit. Oh, and I should declare an interest in the whole subject – on my next birthday I will officially be in the silver surfer category having been working with computers for the whole of my working life (and in the web field since the mid 90’s).
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As a small business owner (or even a large business owner) you may be interested to know that there are 4 surefire ways to grow your business.
These simple ways are detailed below, although when you read them you may think that they are obvious with just small improvements to any or all of then you should find your turnover and profits increasing.
Increase the number of customers of the type that you would like to have
Every business has two types of customers, those that you like to have and those that you could do without. The first group order regularly, pay on time, are pleasant to deal with and order items or services that you make a profit on. The second group may only order once in a blue moon, take for ever to pay their bills, are a pain to deal with (maybe needing more support or generally being unpleasant) and when their order comes in you groan (possibly the order is the minimum to get them free postage, or they ask for something special with every order).
Increasing the number of customers that you like to have means that one or more of the following is likely to happen :-
- you improve your cash flow because the customer pays earlier
- you make a larger profit as they are ordering items or services that generate a greater profit for you
- you shift more stock allowing you to get a better price from your supplier
Increase the frequency that you deal with your customers
Increasing the frequency that you deal with your customers can be a little more difficult to achieve but if you have customers that only order from you every 6 months why not contact them after 4 months? If you can get an order from them and “convert” them to every 4 months it means that you have an extra order a year from them, similarly if you have a customer that orders every 3 months try contacting them after 2 months and so on. The contact can be to send them a special offer (everyone loves a bargain) or just an update to tell them about new items or services, for example the author uses ebay to buy odd bits and pieces and one of his favourite sellers on there sends an email out once a month about new items that they have listed, this often results in another order.
Increase the average value of each transaction
Increasing the average value of each transaction will increase your turnover (and if you are selling items at a profit it will increase your profit – see our pricing your products article). The obvious, but counter-productive, way to do this is to increase your prices but why not look at what the typical customer orders and see if you can increase the value some other way. I am sure that you have seen online stores that say “other customers that brought this also brought…” or that you have been into stores like PC World, Comets, Currys etc and been asked if you need batteries or want to take out breakdown cover for the item that you have just brought – all of these are valid ways of increasing the value of each transaction.
Improve your efficiency
There can be many ways to improve your efficiency as a business for example :-
- planning delivery routes a little better and thus reducing the number of miles that you drive
- making sure that staff are on hand to take orders during the busy times of the day (have you ever queued at a bank or post office at lunchtime for example)
- ensuring that staff don’t spend time on sites such as facebook etc when they should be working
- making sure that the phone is answered within 3 rings rather than left to ring for minutes at a time
- use the phone to contact customers rather than spending time travelling to them – although it is nice to get out and meet customers once in a while as people like to be able to picture a face when they are on the phone for example.
As you can see from the short list above, efficiency covers many elements of the business – take a look at everything that you do and think “how can I improve this or make it better for our customers” – even small improvements can mount up over the year (take the reducing the number of miles driven as an example – if you can save even a couple of miles a day that is 10 miles a week or around 500 miles a year, if your delivery vehicle gets 25 miles per gallon that is 20 gallons of fuel that you have saved and at today’s prices that amounts to nearly £150 of pure profit – not much I know but it is still profit that you would not have had).
And finally…
There is no need to aim for big improvements on any of these four ways to grow your business, if you are old enough (or watch old tv programmes) you may remember Frank Spencers’ saying in “Some Mothers Do Have Them” – if you adopt this saying in your own business life then you can watch your profits grow. Oh, the saying… “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”
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As a small business can you reap the benefits of social networking by converting visitors to the social networking sites into paying customers?
First of all I should define what I mean by “Social networking” – these are sites that are online communities where visitors can interact with each other sharing opinions, thoughts, experiences and ideas on almost any subject matter. Probably the first site that spings to many people’s mind when talking about social networking is Facebook, but there are many others out there including sites like Twitter, Myspace, Plurk, LinkedIn, YouTube and even if you follow the definition the many forums that are around. If people are “into” social networking you may find that they belong to several such sites – for example the author has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn and several forums (these are related to his job, the vehicle he drives and his recreational activities).
As a business owner you can use social networking as part of your marketing campaigns by, for example :-
- Using it to strengthen communications with your existing customers
- Using it to reach new customers by :-
- Advertising on the social networking sites
- Publicising your business and products
- Publishing news items on the sites
- Using it to get feedback from existing customers
- Using it to get feedback from prospective customers
- Raising your profile
The important thing to remember though is that not all social media platforms are the same – for example Facebook seems to work best on B2C (business to consumer) rather than B2B so if you are an accountant for example you might not be advertising in the right place if you do so on Facebook – if you sell TV’s on the other hand it might be just the place to advertise.
You should also remember that social networking is not really like other marketing if you are going to do it properly – you will be expected to communicate with your customers, and to do so in a positive way. The fastest way to turn off people in the social networking arena is to keep pushing sales messages to people – the author has several times “unfollowed” someone on Twitter when the person that was followed kept sending out sales messges. If you use each site to it’s strengths you will find that the 140 character limit on Twitter is idea for short news updates and announcments of special offers while having a page on facebook means that you can leave much longer and possibly more stimulating messages.
As a small business you need to dedicate the time to social networking, and make sure that the person that is responsible for the updates to Twitter / Facebook et al both understands your business and products and that they also understand that using these sites during work time is purely for work purposes – a useful tool that the author uses is something called Tweetdeck – this monitors both Twitter and Facebook so that he doesn’t have to spend all day watching the screen just in case some thing comes in that needs a response.
Finally, don’t forget that you need to keep track of the time and effort that you “invest” in social networking, by doing so you can work out if things are working for you and how effective it is as a marketing tool for your business.
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Last updated on March 25th, 2011 at 05:32 pm
Having just taken a good look at the small office that we use here at Forest Software I recognised that there is a problem with electric and data cables laying across the floor – like many other small offices ours has sockets on the walls and desks in the middle of the room.
Fortunately we have not been in the position of having anyone trip over the cables (they are taped to the carpet where they cross the floor) but I have decided to look at sorting out any possible hazards on the next day or so.
There are two elements that I plan on addressing, the first is to get a rubber cable bridge so that the cables are safely tucked out of the way between the sockets on the wall and the edge of the desk. The next element is one that many small business owners might forget about, and to be honest it’s not something that has occurred to me until recently when my foot hit a cable under the desk – this is the idea of bundling the cables together into a single “string” using a cable tidy. I have seen these in several hardware shops in the past, normally sold for AV equipment, but looking online it seems that I can buy a cable tidy from Amazon, one of my favourite online shops (as you may have realised from previous posts).
Researching a little more online it seems that to be ultra-safe it is best use two tidies, one for the mains cables and a second for the data cables (monitors, network, usb etc). By doing this it reduces the risk of the mains cables generating interference in the data cables – I would have thought that all the cables would have been shielded, but in my view it is better to be safe than sorry.
So, it’s out with the company card tomorrow and place an order for several cable tidies ( at least two for each desk depending on the length ). This will have two benefits, the office will look tidier with the cables bundled together and it will also be a safer environment to work in.
I may even suggest this to a client that has a phone and data patch panel where the cables are always in a mess – a short length or two of cable tidy could sort out the wiring leading to their panel and make it easier to use.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
If you work from home did you know that one of the ways of working more efficiently is by using the right lighting?
Your home office really needs three kinds of lighting, not counting natural daylight (which at some times of the year is hard to come by). First of all you need a directional light over the working surfaces, this can be a desk light, although if you can find one that has a clamp fitting so you can attach it to the desk it will free up work space (and if you are like me, desk space is valuable). Secondly you need to light the whole work area in a more gentle light – this “mood lighting” helps to soften the contrasts between light and dark areas. Thirdly you need to light the entire room in a fairly weak background light – often done by using an up-lighter or a ceiling light.
Strangely when looking at a desk light you need to remember that the brightest light is not always the best (although if you are older than about 40 you will find that your eyes need a brighter light to read than they did when you were younger), if you work close to the light then a bright light may be too hot or even have the wrong colour balance – the author has a desk lamp that used a compact tube that is colour balanced to daylight (5500K for the technically inclined) and finds that this is the best for him.
If you work with computers (and many home offices do have a computer) it is important to make sure that there are no reflections on the screen. The best way to do this is to turn the screen so that it is at 90° to the window and light the wall behind your seat so that there are no harsh shadows. Also look at the shade on your desk lamp, an asymmetrical shade or reflector (one that is deeper on one side than the other) spreads light to one side so that the lamp lights the desk and keyboard but not the screen.
Another valuable tip is to place the desk lamp so that you are not putting yourself in the shade, this is very easy to do if you are right handed put the lamp on the left (and vice-versa if you are left-handed).
Due to EU regulations it is very difficult to buy “normal” light bulbs now so you really have the choice between energy saving bulbs, fluorescent bulbs and halogen bulbs. Each of these have their own benefits and drawbacks :-
- Energy saving and fluorescent bulbs use very little energy and last for a long time so if you have your lights on for several hours a day they can work out cheaper in running costs. The new energy saving bulbs also come in an wide variety of sizes, fittings and wattage’s meaning that there is likely to be one to match your needs. However you need to remember that all of these take a few seconds to fully light up and as they get older the light from them starts to dim.
- Halogen bulbs give out twice as much light as light from standard bulbs of the same wattage and reporduce colours very well. However they can get very hot and are not recommended for fittings where there might be a risk of fire (if the holder falls over for example or something is draped across it).
By the effective use of natural and artificial lighting you can make your room look functional, relaxed or warm and cozy, try experimenting with different bulbs and positions of the lights and you will be amazed the difference you will notice in your home office and once you find the right balance of light it will help you to work more effectively as well.