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When invisibility is not a superpower

So you have a great new site.

You have paid the bill and you are rightly proud. The problem is that nobody can see you. On the internet you are invisible.

Seem familiar?

Welcome to the biggest competition in the world! You are competing to be noticed in a space where there are currently 956,426,733 websites and growing by the second.

Yes, it's a challenge but it's not as bad as it seems and it really is possible to get your site noticed on the Internet search engines. It is my personal opinion that if you want to get your site listed on the "Holy Grail" of the first page of the relevant Google search then you have two simple choices:

• Pay money for sponsored listings and/or Google Adwords for virtually instant results
• Pay nothing and invest lots of time into back links, search engine submissions, social media, blogging and discussion forums. This takes much more time but with constant effort and excellent content you will find yourself creeping up the search engines organically.

As with life, organic is best. People are more likely to click your organic listing as they expect your site to interesting and match their search requirements. An organic listing takes time and attention to achieve and I think people have some respect for the efforts invested to be on page one. 

As an outline guide, I find that most clients who are committed to providing good content online through all the methods I have mentioned above will start to see noticeable improvements after around nine months and after eighteen months many have achieved page one listings. Most of these businesses have required some assistance, particularly with the back links, keywords and the background things that can help Google index your site but these skills can be learned easily through online tutorials. There are thousands of businesses out there who will tell you that they can get your site flying up the search engines, normally for a fairly sizeable fee - it is important to carefully research these businesses in detail before instructing them. So many of these businesses make big headline claims whilst offering no guarantee's or promises.

In some instances there are ways to get your content listed higher up the search engines while your actual website may be listed much lower. An online blog is very likely be listed very high with the web address (URL) of the blog and this can be a great way to get people to find your content while your own site climbs the rankings. Channels on YouTube together with cross-pollinating social media will also make a significant difference. 

I will shortly add a few tutorials from YouTube to this blog that will help you to start the building process and more in-depth information will be published very soon.

Thanks for reading my blog, please take just a minute to share and like it so that others may enjoy!

A great video from a business legend

Giving it away at what cost?

We all love something for nothing. We like to be able to try before we buy, to taste a sample, to use the product, to try the service without parting with a penny. The free offer is a tried and tested method of growing a business or increasing the profile of a product. 

It is not necessarily a simple promotion to get right though...

Giving something away will of course get people interested, the key is to ensure that the people interested are fully engaged and understand what you are trying to achieve.  I always think a free item should be just that - free. The old school tricks of "give us your credit card details now and just cancel if you don't like us" do not deliver customer confidence and can be one of the biggest turn-off's. 

I often see some examples of give-away's that leave me feeling exasperated at the lack of planning and consideration applied. A great example of this is a product I sampled recently at a local event. This product was available to taste for free. It was simply delicious and so original that I instantly purchased some. Within a month the bottle is empty and I really want some more. Can I purchase it in the town where I sampled it? No - I have to order it online with delivery costs that are higher than the product itself. What a disaster for this business - all this effort and investment to develop such an impressive product (with great branding too) and then to engage a local audience so well with your product but fail to ensure there is a local outlet willing to take advantage of the obvious sales that will ensue for such a brilliant new product.

This is a classic example of a business that has a great product, a great brand, a clear commitment to expanding the profile of the product but has not completed the sales cycle before pushing the product into the outside world. If this business had a strategy planned through from the initial brand to how the customer can access the product then I know with a product of this quality they would have seen far greater sales performance.

Sales advice and planning is so important and yet people do not give it the attention it deserves. SalesFriend really can help businesses like this, we do not charge the huge fee's of management consultants and in some instances we won't charge you at all while you are growing your business and funds are precious. The longer we work with you the more of an impact we can make and if we need to forget fee's in the early days we will!

We have many clients who simply use our telephone package that means we are always at the end of a phone to listen to your ideas and help you plan and make sure you have covered all the required steps to make your give-away a commercial success. We think for as little as £49 per month businesses would be crazy not to use our skills and benefit from our experience. 

A step into the known

Research done? Check. Thinking done? Check. Decision made? Check.

So where do you start?

There are no clear cut answers to this, there are a myriad of companies out there who can build you a website and create a brand for you. The key decision for you is whether or not you need them.

Getting a website live can be very simple and it can be very difficult. It can be free and it can costs thousands. It can be staggeringly quick it can be frustratingly slow and whilst I cannot make the decision for you I can give you some tips and facts I have learned over the years to help you decide:

• It is very rare for the first site you launch to be perfect. Only through having a site live and in use will you begin to understand what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. Do not be afraid to start small and test your conclusions. There are many providers out there who let you build your own site in a very easy way for only a few pounds each month. There are also some great template sites available that take only a few hours to get live with your content.

• Plan your site correctly BEFORE you start to either build it or ask for quotations. How do you want people to navigate around your site? How many pages do you require? Do you want to be able to change the content yourself? Do you want connections to social media on your website? Do you need any form of "live help" that allows you to chat with your clients online? If you are listing items for sale or products do you need to be able to edit prices, photos and descriptions yourself? Asking someone else to make the changes for you is never as fast as being able to do it your self.

• You WILL make some mistakes, you will very probably overestimate the potential in the early days. Making a website live is the easiest part - getting people to see it is much harder. I still meet people today who have spent thousands on a nice new shiny website, it is launched without any marketing plan and they remain confused after a few weeks when nobody has seen it. 

• Establishing a logo and brand is a fairly easy step but is best left to those with the skills and software to make something impressive. Again there are many providers out there that will design you a logo for as little at £10. I do this for free for most of my clients as it is a great way to start a relationship with the business owner.

• The content on your site is the most important element to get right. Yes, new clients like to be greeted by a nicely designed site that is easy to navigate but ultimately they will want to see or read about the item that made them come to your site in the first place. Writing text for a website is a skill and needs to be right so make sure you pay particular attention to this. Other sites can help you with effective ideas for content but you should never copy and paste the content from others. It is unprofessional, will not get your message across clearly and may well result in a little trouble if you get caught! Make your content interesting to read and informative and keep it fresh. 

• Before you open your site to the big wide world ask any many friends, family members and businesses associates to look at your site and comment. They will find things that do not make sense to fresh eyes, they will find errors and they will give you honest feedback.

The last piece of advice I can offer when it comes to this stage of opening your new online business is to be determined. It is rarely easy, there is lots to learn and it will not happen overnight. A new site needs constant attention, it needs to be fed with information and it needs to be nurtured. If your site is not offering products that change and is more service based or informative then making changes, updates and adding content daily is a must. If you let the content become stale then why would people return? Would you read book you read last week? This is where a "Latest News" section or social media connections can really help keep your content up-to-date and your readers engaged. 

Month one after launch is the learning zone, months two and three are the changing zone and months four to six is when you can start to enter the benefits zone. Perhaps you are lucky or have deep pockets but realistically if you work to these expectations then you will be well prepared for the online world.

I have met many people who can moan endlessly about the vast sums of money they have lost while trying to build an online business but I have never met anyone who spent a couple of hundreds pounds at the beginning and then moaned later. They either turned the business into a success or they lost very little in trying.