Verizon Websites offers you the ability to choose from over 2,000 different templates to build your site from. Verizon states that it is as simple as drag and drop to build your website. You can change out photos, logos, text, etc. You can also easily drop in Paypal shopping carts and maps to your business. Verizon Websites also allows you to use Intuit’s WebListings program which adds you to over 100 web directories and search engines.

Now on to my concerns. I have not be able to find a website that is currently using this service and with no free trial service, I have not been able to test it out myself.

I am first concerned with the search engine optimization of these templated sites. As I stated in a previous article, having a web presence is important, therefore I am sure this is better than nothing. I would be interested to see if the links are clean and the site is designed to be easily read by the search engine spiders. In relation with SEO, when you choose a template from your industry, they text is already filled out for each page. They encourage you to change the parts you need to to make it your own. A big issue is that everyone else using the same content that you are using. This means search engines will not see your content as being original and may not rank your site as high. You can always overwrite their text with your own, however I fear most small business owners will not.

Another concern I have is on the legal ownership of the website itself. Working with past clients that have used business website services, such as this one, they had a hard time getting their domain transfered to their control. This is needed should you later decide to hire a web design firm to develop a custom website for you. Again, this service is new and I have no way of testing this, so I am looking for anyone that uses this service to correct me.

One last concern is that small business owners may use Verizon Websites in place of hiring a web design firm, even when they can afford one. These type of sites make everyone a designer. I am sure many of us have been to websites that have been developed by someone that was not a designer and it was blatantly obvious. If you use a service such as Verizon Websites, be sure to keep your site looking professional. You do not want to chase off the customers you worked so hard to get to your site because of a bad design.

Overall, the price is great for the “Starter Package” of Verizon Websites. At $4.99 per month, they give you a 5 page website and domain name. They do not give you a lot of space or bandwidth, only 25mb of storage and 5gb a month of transfer, however for a small 5 page website, this should suffice. Verizon Websites pricing for the “Gold Package” is $19.99 per month. This package offers up to 100 pages across 3 websites and gives you 5gb of storage and 100gb a month of transfer. At this rate, I do not believe it is worth your investment. For a website of this size, you really should be looking at hiring a web design firm to develop a custom website for your business.

Polling your customers does not have to be a hard or invasive task. In this article, I will go over a few simple ideas that most small businesses can easily do. These ideas are just that, ideas. Each small business owner will know what works and what does not work for their type of business.

Common Ways People Find Your Business

You will want to keep your list short yet still helpful to you. To do this, ask for only a broad range. For example, instead of asking which radio station they heard you on, you may want to just ask if they heard you on the radio. Also if you are doing any special marketing such as business referrals, you may want to add that as an option to your poll. Some of the commons options are as follows:

• Search Engine
• Mobile Phone Search
• Word of Mouth
• TV
• Radio
• Print Ad
• Billboard
• Website Referral
• Drive-By
• Other

Make It Part of Your Checkout Process

The best way to poll your customers is to ask during the checkout process. As your employees and yourself checks out a customer, simply ask them how they heard about your small business. As long as you are friendly when you do this, the customer should not feel as if this question is an invasion of their privacy. As the customer answers, just pick which category you feel their response would fall under.

There are several ways to log these responses. One of the easiest and quickest ways is to have a tally sheet and just mark off each customer as they answer. Another way to do this is to build the poll into your checkout system. This method may require custom programing to make it happen, however it also may allow you better benefits later on such as advanced reporting.

Create a Survey Card

Another method for polling your customers is to create a survey or comment card. This method easily allows you to add more questions than just the one. It is important to keep this survey short, or your customers will not take the time to fill it out. The major problem with with this method verses the previous method is that you will have to rely on customers choosing to take the time to fill out this card. This may limit your responses.

Postcard Mailing

Another method, which is the most costly, would be to mail out a thank you card to each of your customers, thanking them for taking the time to visit your business. In this postcard, you can place a link to an online poll or allow them to mail this post card back with whatever questions you place on it. Because this method has the customer having to perform an action after they have left your place of business, this method will get the fewest results.

Tabulate Your Results

After you have collected your data, be sure to tabulate your results. If possible, also run a report that shows how much money came in from each type of media. With this information, you should be able to see where you should continue to put your marketing dollars.

I know several companies that have taken this approach. One was spending almost nothing on website marketing, however they were spending around 1,000 a month on radio advertising. After polling their customers, they found that only about 1 customer a month was coming from the radio advertising. They found that most of their customers were finding them via their website. They found that out of the 12,000 dollars they spent over a 12 month period, they yielded less than 12 customers, most of which had spent low amounts.

Remember that one method may work great for one industry, it may not work so great for yours. By knowing where your customers are coming from, you will know where to stick you money

Here are the emails below that my client received from them:

Email 1:

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in China, have something need to confirm with you. we formally received an application on August 15,2010.  one company which called “Brazil Kniko Investment S.A” are applying to register “xxxxxxxxx” as Brand Name and Domains.

xxxxxxxxx.asia           (Asia)
xxxxxxxxx.com.hk            (Hong Kong)
xxxxxxxxx.com.tw            (Taiwan)
xxxxxxxxx.hk            (Hong Kong)
xxxxxxxxx.tw            (Taiwan)
xxxxxxxxx.co.in            (India)
xxxxxxxxx.in            (India)
xxxxxxxxx.org.cn            (China)
xxxxxxxxx.net.cn            (China)
xxxxxxxxx.com.cn       (China)
xxxxxxxxx.cn            (China)

But we found that “Brazil Kniko Investment S.A” is not the original owner of the brand and trademark in the checking period,which  belong to your company .I need confirm with you whether your company authorized that company to register these domain name.If you have done that ,We will finish the registration for them and link to their website.

If not ,please let me know ASAP.In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit for dissent application is 7 workdays. If your company files no dissent within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application.

Best Regards,Peter Yan(Mr)Auditing  Consultant
Tel: +0086-566-2629-555     Fax: +0086-566-2629-666 Address:Room205, No.D4 Qingxi South Garden, South-ChangJiang Road,Guichi Shi District,Chizhou,China

Email 2:

Dear CEO & Manager

We are a domain name registration and dispute organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet Intellectual property right protection in Asia. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.

On August 16,2010, we received an application formally. One company named ” QHD company” wanted to applied for the Network Brand “xxxxxxxxx” and some domain names through our body.

Now we are handling with the registration of these domain names and find that these domain names and Network Brand is identical with your company’s. So we have to confirm with you at two points:

1. If your company consign QHD company to register these domain names and Network Brand, we will send application form to them and help them finish the registration at once.

2. If your company have nothing to do with QHD company, they maybe have other purposes to register these domain names and Network Brand.

I want to confirm that are you the corporate representative of this company? If you do, I will feedback some problems to you; if you do not, please send my words to your company’s corporate representative or lawyer. We need your answer of force adeffect. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Eric

Auditing Department

Tel: 00852-81359178

Fax: 00852-81359278

Email:  Eric@bestnet.hk

Website:  http://www.bestnet.hk

Most of the time, these emails advertise a website they are from. I have looked around to see what some of the website addresses they use and they are as follows:

As you can see, there are MANY different domains they use to get at you. Most of these come from the following TLDs: .cn / .com.cn / .net.cn / .org.cn / .hk / .tw / .asia. Be careful not to ever fall for these types of scams. These domain name scams often try to take advantage of those small business owners who do not fully understand how the domain name business works.

Creation, Design and Sending

MadMimi has developed their software to be simple and easy to use for those that are new to the business of email marketing. This allows you, the business owner, to run your own email campaigns. The design of the site is bright and fun. You often forget as you are designing your email that you are actually working. Everything is quick and easy to get to and uses terms that the average Joe will understand.

MadMimi allows you to create your email with their WYSWYG editor which makes designing your email the same as if you were using Microsoft Word. You can easily drag and drop photos, text, titles, headers and other items right into your email. If you can drag, drop and type, you can create a professional looking email. On top of being able to design your own email, you can also use their many templates they have available. These have been designed by the MadMimi staff and are free for you to use.  I have often found it is easier to find a theme similar to what I am looking for then customize it to meet my colors and look that I want.

Once you have created your email message, sending it is just as simple as creating it. You follow the easy instructions at the bottom of the page which end up taking you through a small wizard. Through this process, each page will offer you different options with a simple explanation of each. You will then be displayed a page with check boxes allowing you to choose which list you would like to send the email to. After clicking send, you can either exit out of the page or sit and watch as your emails are sent out at a very quick rate. I have noticed that when I send out to around 1,000 addresses, all emails are delivered within 4-5 minutes of clicking send.

Some of the other options that you have when sending your email is the ability to schedule,  save your campaign, publish to web and more. Scheduling is a great feature which allows for you to write your campaign today and have it send next week. You can also save your campaign and resend it at a later time if you wish. The publish to web feature is great for those who have email addresses that do not always play nice or for you to post a link on your website to your promotion. This provides a URL that takes you directly to your email promotion in your browser.

Managing Your Lists

MadMimi makes it quick and easy to manage your list of contacts. MadMimi does not limit you to a certain number of lists allowing you to easily organize all your contacts. Adding contacts to these lists is easy. You can manually add them one by one, in bulk from a spreadsheet or you can create a simple web form using their form generator allowing your visitors to easily sign up and pick exactly which lists to be on. When adding contacts by spreadsheet, Madmimi attempt to add these automatically and if they can’t, one of their staff will come in and find a way to make it work. This is a feature that their competitors do not normally offer in their base charges.

Once you have created your lists, management of these are quick, simple and easy. Madmim automatically tracks all unsubscribe notices, multiple bounce backs and old email addresses and then will remove the ones that need to be removed. All these lists can be managed from one page with simple to use instructions on what you need to do.

Reports, Statistics and Tracking

You will learn as you read articles on 708 Media we are big on you tracking your efforts so you know what is being successful and what is not. Madmimi offers a very nice tracking system and is continuing to improve upon it. Currently, at the time of writing this, Madmimi has real time tracking where you can track how many emails have been sent, opened, bounced, and how many times links within these emails have been clicked. This is helps you to realize the best way to build your next promotional email by seeing what promotions in the past had more interest. You also have the ability to integrate your Google Analytics code into your promotions so that you can track how many sales are generated from each promotion.

Bottom Line…The Cost

All of the above may sound great but lets be serious here. The biggest thing to any small business is how much will the ongoing cost be and how much will I have to invest upfront.

This is why I love MadMimi so much. Their price is amazing. For your first 100 contacts, Madmimi allows you to pay nothing. Thats right, its completely free! Unlike other services, Madmimi gives you access to ALL features (except support) and allows you to send out as many emails as you want to those first 100 contacts for free. The cost after your first 100 contacts is very reasonable and you can pay as you grow. Unlike other services, Madmimi charges by total unique contacts in the system. This means if you have 1 person signed up to 10 different lists, Madmimi only counts that person as 1 towards your total contacts rather than as 10 towards your total. You also are not limited on how many promotions you send out each month. You could send one a month or you could send one a day. Its is fully up to you.

Support

Support from Madmimi is top of the line. This company does not have you talking to someone who took a 2 hour training coarse, given a book and told to support their customers. Their support team is the actual developers of the software. When your talking to support, your talking to someone that really knows the way the system works. The owner of the company is also easy to talk to and will sometimes assist with the support team as well.

The only downside to support is that you can currently only contact support via chat or email. There is no phone line currently to call. Their chat support is opened during normal business hours and their email is 24/7 support. For after hours support, my emails have normally been answered in less than an hour. My understanding is that they are working to open a phone line in the near future.

Click here to visit MadMimi’s Website

We went by Godiva Chocolate and were told about their Rewards Club. All you have to do is provide them your email address and you are given a key chain card that entitles you to some great rewards. These rewards are:

• FREE piece of chocolate every month
• FREE gift each month you spend $10 or more
• FREE standard shipping for one online order
• EXCLUSIVE online special offer every month

Their flyer states that you will be sent their monthly newsletter with member-only offers and new product announcements.

I wanted to point out this company because they are a perfect example of what I was talking about. They make you feel like a VIP and provide you with a reason to sign up for their list. They take it a step beyond that and give you a reason to stay signed up for their email list, which I find to be an awesome idea. This allows Godiva Chocolate to keep their customers coming back to their online and brick and mortar store.

When To Use It

You have to be careful with email marketing and with what you are sending out. You do not want your customers to start thinking of your company as spam. We all know those companies and I am sure most of you do not even open their email but rather just delete the right away. You do not want your company to become one of those emails.

Special Sales and Promotions

Email marketing is the perfect way to let your customers know about your special sale or promotion that you are having. This is one of the most common reasons that both small and large businesses use email marketing. Be sure to make the focus of your email to be on the actual sale or promotion and try to include it in your subject line. Be sure when you send these out that you let your customers know the dates that the sale is valid through. You also want to make sure that this email is sent out within a week of the sale starting. If you send it out too early, you run the risk of your customers deleting the email and forgetting about the sale.

New Products or Services

Send out a campaign when you introduce a new product or service. Be sure in your email campaign to make this new product or service your main item and then compliment it with products or services that you currently offer that would go along with this new product or service. This is a good time to show that your keeping your small business fresh and up to date and yet at the same time gives you an avenue to push your older products and services.

Major Announcements and Awards

This is when you can use your email marketing lists to boast about your small business. Did your small business just receive a recent award? Did a newspaper write a positive article about you? Did you small business help a charity? This is where you can really boast about your small business and let your customers know about it. Other information should send out are things such as new locations, change of business hours, unexpected closures, etc.

VIP List or Premier Customers

Use your email marketing lists to make your customers feel special. You can call this list whatever your want, however it makes your customers feel like they are part of your elite customers. Be sure to send them updates of the business and also send them “rewards” for being such a great customer. These rewards can be anything from a coupon, free item at your business, special discounted rates, etc. By keeping a list for these customers, you can bank on when they need a product or service that you offer, that you will be the first company that comes to their mind.

How to Build Your List

This is where you need to be very careful. Be sure you only put customers on your email list that want to be on it. If you place someone on your list without their permission, it could put a negative reflection back on your small business.

Building your list with opt-in customers is easier than you think. You can use a email marketing service that allows for you to create a sign form right on your website. This will allow customers to come to your website, enter their email address, select their lists and be a part of your email marketing campaign. Another option is to create a sign up list at your place of business or ask your customers at time of checkout if they would like to be on your email marketing list. You can the manually input these addresses into the service that you choose.

In order to encourage customers to join your email marketing list, you may want to try and offer them an incentive for joining your lists. One such way is by offering them special coupons or even a raffle for joining your email marketing list. Be sure to let your customers know exactly what types of emails they will be getting from you and also be sure to let them know that you will never give or sell their email address to any one else. This will make them feel better about giving you their email address.

Legal Obligations

Before you start sending out your emails, you need to know about the CAN-SPAM act of 2003. CAN-SPAM is an acronym for the full name which is Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act. This was a bill passed in December of 2003 that provides rules and punishment for marketing emails. This act gives you rules you must follow in order to avoid fines of up to 16,000 dollars. The FTC is in charge of enforcing this and they have a website that explains everything in detail. Click here to view that page.  I would suggest you read that page prior to sending out any emails. I have listed a summary from Wikipedia of some of the bigger parts of the bill below:

Unsubscribe compliance

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

Content compliance

• Accurate from lines (including “friendly froms”)
• Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
• A label is present if the content is adult.

Because of all these rules, it is best that you use an email marketing service to send your emails through. These companies often make sure that your email is within the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act and that you are in compliance. I focus on one service known as MadMimi in our Business Spotlight.

First and foremost, the blog is to compliment and not replace your business website. A blog will help your business website grow in both viewers and in creditability.

One of the main reasons to create a blog is to show that you as a small business owner knows your industry and your product. It shows that you also have passion for your business. Blogs are more personal as many are written in first person. When your customers see you blogging about your industry, they realize that you are the real thing. This gives you one up on your competition showing that you are ahead of the curve and a true authority in your industry.

Another great reason for a blog is it allows you help promote your product. You can share new ideas and new ways for customers to use your product. You can also share valuable information and inform your potential customers of why they need to purchase your product or service. This is also a great spot to talk about recent events or news that involves your industry and how your product or service relates to these type of events. If you company receives an award or recognition, this is the perfect place to boast about your accomplishment.

The last reason I want to cover is the fact that a blog is pure content. If you read some of my articles in the Search Engine Optimization category, you will see that content and keywords are king. A blog allows you to create a massive amount of keyword rich content that will help bring some of those specific and detailed search results to your blog. From here, they will see your passion and knowledge for your business and navigate into your sales page. The more you blog, the more search results you can pull in, and hopefully the more sales you can make.

Creating a blog is simpler than you think. There is a lot of different websites that allow you to blog as well as free software that allows for it. The software I use for this site is WordPress. WordPress is easy to install on your server, or can have a free hosted blog from WordPress’s company website. Many webhosts have the ability now through your control panel to do a one click install. Once you have installed the software on your server, it is as easy as picking out a template from MANY free ones, organizing a few items in the simple to use WordPress control panel and publishing your first post. WordPress also allows for you to blog straight from your iPhone, Android or Blackberry device, making it easy to add postings on the go.

The new phonebook is the Internet, more specifically the search engines of the internet. Most people and businesses now visit their favorite search engine, Google for example, to find their products and services. For businesses, this is a more effective way of advertising their small business and can be a lot cheaper than using the phonebook. This only works for your small business if you have a presence on the internet.

Many search engines offer up their own phonebook style listings. Google for example offers Google Places, which is integrated with Google Search. When someone searches for a service or product, it will display 10 locations that are in the general area of the person performing the search. Your goal is to have your small business that offers this service or product is one of those.

Google allows for you to place your business into their directory regardless if you have a website or not. Just visit http://www.google.com/local/add to add your business. When adding your business, you can specify addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, categories, payment options, business hours, service areas, descriptions and much more. This is the first step to driving more sales into your small business.

The biggest step that I still find to be the best step is to have a website. Most people these days would prefer to sit in the comfort of their living room and surf the internet to find the best company offering their product or service. If you have a listing on Google Places, that helps them know that your business is there, however, potential customers want to know more about your business. Many people have a mentality that good solid businesses will have some sort of website online. If your business does not, they are more likely to visit the website of your competition and take their business there.

Having a website for your small business is what will give you the ability to stand out from the rest. Using this site, you can advertise your weekly specials, holiday hours, updated pricing, and more. This is a lot more than you have the ability of doing with a small phonebook advertisement, and if done right, a whole lot cheaper too.

For tips & articles on what your small business website should include, please check out our Business Website Tips category.

Search engine spiders crawl the web following every link they can find.  Most spiders can not read complex flash menu systems. If you are using one of these types of menu systems then its possible search engines can not find your sub pages.

To solve the issue of menu systems you can do one of two things. The first thing you can do is create a separate navigation that is based of text links. This should be listed somewhere on your homepage such as at the bottom of your page. You can also just place a text link to a site map that list links to all the sub pages within you site. Although this will help all sub pages be found I highly discourage the use of any Flash menus.

I would like to suggest using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short) for creating your menus. Using CSS you can create drop down menus and other advance menus systems while still using plain text links. This means that the search engine will see the text link and where it points to and your users will see something that looks pretty spiffy. To learn how to create CSS menus just do a Google search to find out. Trust me…they are not to hard.

The first and easiest part is coming up with the obvious keywords. These would be the keywords that are related to your site, product, service or anything else you have on the site. With this information it will be easier to develop the rest of your keywords.

Once you have picked out the keywords that aver obvious then its time to do the related terms. These related terms are important when trying to theme your site and also when you are trying to work with link popularity and link relevance.  Related terms should be words that are similar to your website. This may not be your main content but may be something your site touches on. Going back to our “Lava Lamp” example, you may want to include in your related terms “novelty lamps”. This term is similar to your site. Be sure not to forget to develop some content around these related terms.

As you come up with keywords be sure not to jump on the most popular keywords out there thinking you will get a lot of traffic. An example would be if you choose a keyword that gets 100,000 searches a month but only 5% of those are actually looking for services or products you offer, then that’s only 5,000 visitors you will receive. Instead you need to look for your niche in the market. You want to find the keyword that is almost fully related to your site. If only 20,000 searches a month are done on a keyword and 70% are looking for services or products you offer, than that’s 14,000 visitors to your website.

Please see my article on Keywords That Work to find out the do’s and don’ts for picking keywords for search engines.