Why do so many companies fail to make money online? Here are three of the biggest mistakes they make… read on to discover what they are and how to avoid them. Have an amazing day! Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Why Companies Fail Online

Although the internet is a massively powerful marketing tool, too many companies still struggle to achieve any kind of meaningful success. Where do they go wrong? And most importantly, how you can you avoid making the same mistakes? 1. They don’t understand the importance of the ‘opt-in’ list Your ‘opt-in’ list contains the email address of people who want to hear from you, who have asked to receive emails from you. Never stop compiling it. It’s hard but it’s not complicated. You should ask every customer to join your list and ask everyone who visits your website to join your list. You should ask for it wherever you possibly can because the list is the key to success on the Internet. 2. They don’t communicate with their list People on the list have indicated they want to receive more information. You must send everyone on your list regular short emails (about a half page long) with a fascinating subject line. You should have a hyperlink on that email through to your website. Your website can be as long as you want it to be. Don’t make it too short however because visitors won’t feel they have sufficient information to make an intelligent purchase decision. 3. Their website is poorly designed or maintained Most websites fail because the business owner hasn’t planned it properly. You have to ask yourself: “What do I want on my website? Do I want to sell things? Do I want to provide information? Do I want to direct people to my showroom?” The content must be compelling so that visitors stay and want to return in the future. Make it interesting enough so that they refer other people to your website. Although your website shouldn’t be weighed down with snazzy graphics (because they take too long to load), the design of your website is crucial. People spend a matter of between three and five seconds looking at your website and then decide whether to stay or leave. The design is what helps them to make that decision. Provide opportunities for people to register and participate on your website. It might be to take part in a sweepstake, to register for a newsletter or to sign up for a special report. Use auto responders so that you can follow-up requests from your customers or potential customers in two hours or less. When you put a website up, it is invisible and the only people who know it is there are the people you tell. You must promote your website offline as well as online. A website needs constant nurturing, updating and attention. Conclusion If you pay attention to the three key elements you’ll make money on the Internet and you’ll spend hardly anything. The keys to success online are the quality of your opt-in list, the quality of your content, the speed at which you get back to people, the change that people see in your website and the personalisation. Look after these key areas and watch your sales soar!

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What price should you ask for your product or service? If you want to set a pricethat brings with it a healthy profit… something that will most definitely keep that wolf from howling at your door (and the bank manager at bay)… read our ‘4 Key Pricing Strategies’ below. Thankyou for your feedback yesterday! We love hearing from you and appreciate all of your serif and sans serif comments! Here’s to your accelerated marketing success! Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

4 Key Pricing Strategies

There are at least four ways to calculate your pricing structure:

1. Cost-plus pricing is calculated on the cost of producing your product or service plus an amount that you need to make a profit. This is usually expressed as a percentage of the cost. It is generally more suited to businesses that deal with large volumes or which operate in markets dominated by competition on price.
2. Value-based pricing focuses on the price you believe customers are willing to pay, based on the benefits your business offers them. It depends upon you being able to clearly define and demonstrate the benefits your product or service provides to customers.
3. Target-return pricing involves setting a price to achieve a target return on your investment.
4. Psychological pricing takes into account your customers’ perceptions of your price, including positioning, popular price points (the point at which they are more willing to make a purchase), and fair pricing (what they consider to be ‘fair’).

Pricing Tactics Discounting Discounting can be a powerful short-term measure but it does carry some dangers too. You could use it to get rid of old stock or to encourage large orders. Consumers may balk at paying full price in the future or begin to perceive your product or service as somehow inferior to competitive brands. Discounting may send a signal to consumers that price is negotiable and that value can be given away. Trying to sweeten the deal by bundling additional products and services with the core offering can drive up costs (and decrease profits) and teach consumers that the product or service is not valuable. Odd Value Pricing If your consumers buy primarily on price, you can offer your products at a penny or two less than normal on bulk orders. Low Pricing To Attract New Customers You can sell a product at a low price with the sole aim of winning new customers. Skimming If your product or service is unique in the market, you can sell it at a high price. There’s a danger that you could just price yourself out of your market. Penetration To gain market share, you can sell your product or service at a lower price and gradually raise your prices. Conclusion However you price your product or service, take time to measure the impact it will have on consumer perception and demand and of course, on your company’s long-term profits.

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Imagine going to all the trouble of writing a great advert or sales letter and then unwittingly ruining it… You’d be surprised how many business owners make this simple yet costly mistake… They write an advert or sales letter, taking great care to craft it for maximum impact and then absolutely destroy its chance of being read. How? They select the wrong typeface and with that one decision, make their advert or sales letter virtually unreadable. So… if you want to avoid utterly destroying your advertising or sales letter read on to discover the Best Typeface For Your Advert Or Sales Letter. To your success! Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

How To Ruin Your Advert

Body copy – the main text of the advertisement or direct mail letter – should always be in serif type – never in sans-serif type, says copywriter Michael Masterson. “Sans-serif type strung together is far too difficult to read,” he explains. “And the last thing you want to do is discourage your prospect from reading your advertisement or letter!” The two most popular typefaces in direct mail body copy are Courier New typeface and Times New Roman typeface. Employ graphic enhancements such as underlining, bold text, and uppercase lettering, wherever it’s appropriate, advises direct marketing expert Ted Nichols. “Dramatising specific words and phrases causes readers to give these words special attention and importance. “Make liberal use of options like super-headings and sub-headings to accentuate your main headline. “Take advantage of large type sizes, bold type, text boxes, and other choices that fit your message. Remember however, to use these tools with a reasonable degree of restraint. “Setting a frame off to the side can help draw the eye as it appears out of the ordinary. I’ve created sales letters for clients where only the offer was highlighted within the frame itself. The rest of the headline remained outside the box, but as the largest section of type. The strong offer fit it well and deserved attention all by itself.” Printing When printing, choose only light-coloured, or white paper stock, with black or another dark ink. Talking of printing, there is a fine line between design enhancements that attract the eye, but make the copy hard to read. One very common example is reverse type (white text on a solid colour background). Your readers will definitely ‘see’ and react to the colour, but they won’t read the words. Nichols says he’s conducted tests with reverse type that shows reverse type lowers response rates.

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Want to attract more visitors to your website, more leads and more customers? Start your own blog… Ed Rivis, the UK’s leading web marketing expert for small business owners, explains why a simple company blog can transform your business. Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Why Writing A Blog Will Build Your Business

Ed Rivis is the UK’s leading web marketing expert for small business owners looking to use the web to dramatically increase sales and maximise profits. He spoke with Jonathan Jay, SuccessTrack’s Founder, about what business owners can do to ensure their websites attract more visitors, more leads, and more customers. Jonathan Jay: Is writing a blog a good way of getting traffic? Ed Rivis: “In the past, you’d put up a website and change it every so often. People would visit your corporate website and read it and they might have responded. “Blogging is interactive – it’s almost like a community website. You get visitors on your blog and you might be talking about your products or services, making comments about the industry you work in, quoting facts or figures or talking about third party research and so on. It’s really like an ongoing conversation. “Blogs are fantastically powerful for building and increasing customer loyalty or customer retention – you’re involving customers and inviting their feedback. “It might not be for everyone – you have to have time to blog or you might want to delegate it to someone who is very good at writing and who knows your industry inside out.” Jonathan Jay: We’re always being told that we’ve got to refresh the content of our websites and it’s quite hard with a ‘corporate website’ to change that ‘welcome to our website’ bit at the beginning. With a blog, you can do that easily. The great thing I found about blog software is that it is almost always free, it’s very easy to use, which means that the content is self-managed and you don’t need a web designer once it’s been set up for you. I used to phone a web designer and say, ‘Could you please change the date on that piece there, could you add this, and put in a new photo’ and they’d say, ‘Of course we will and that will be £100 – send us the money and we’ll make the changes.’ But with blogging software it’s designed for everyone to use so you can do all that yourself – all the instructions are there – so that means it saves you money and it gets you better ranked in the search engines. It’s far more modern to have a blog website than it is to have a standard static site. And you can change it on an hourly or daily basis – you’re completely in control. Ed Rivis: “One of the best ones is WordPress – it’s a superb piece of software. I should say this is something called Content Management and you can get Content Management Systems so you can edit corporate websites but with blog software you can have the best of both worlds. “One of the best things about blogging is that it can fuse the front end marketing – the acquisition of new customers and clients with ongoing dialogue with back end customers and clients. Rather than email marketing which only goes out to people on your list, with blogging not only do your existing customers and clients get those communications but brand new customers and clients who haven’t yet done business with you can go to your blog and read about the latest special offers and innovations. It’s one of my favourite aspects of blogging.”

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Ever wondered how successful business owners achieve all they do? Want to know their secret formula? Do you want to know how to free up your time so that you too can focus on the important stuff in your business? We reveal the way you can take control of your time and get more done more easily and more efficiently. Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Save Yourself Time: Delegate

The first time that solo entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown delegated work to another person, the relief was so intense that she burst into tears. “I needed to get help with the administration,” recalls Brown, aka The Ezine Queen. “I mistakenly thought I could do it all by myself but I couldn’t. I was good at writing and I’d wanted to have my own writing firm and suddenly I was a business owner, trying to deal with dozens and dozens of other jobs that went with that role. It was overwhelming. I felt like a failure, like maybe I’d made a mistake.” On the advice of a business coach, she delegated the administrative side of her business to a Virtual Assistant (VA). Virtual Assistants are home-based professionals who perform a wide range of office functions for one or more clients without setting foot in the client’s office. Brown says delegating the administrative tasks to a virtual assistant transformed her business. Freed from the administrative tasks, Brown was able to focus on what she was best at – marketing, innovation and creativity. “I was in a completely different place of great energy because I wasn’t doing the tasks that drained me. I had more time for marketing, which is the most important thing.” Now a business coach, Brown says her mistake – trying to do everything – is something she sees many other business owners make. “The only way you can really grow a business is by building systems and building a team. It’s hard for solo entrepreneurs to embrace this idea – they’re scared to spend the money and lose control. When I coach people, I tell them, ’You should only be spending time marketing, working with your clients, and generating new products and income streams. You should not be doing any administration at all. You should have people for anything and everything you can delegate.’” If you don’t have staff and are overwhelmed you can follow Brown’s example and hire a VA to take care of your administrative work. If you do have staff, then delegating tasks will not only free up your time to focus on marketing but also demonstrate your trust in the people who work for you. Asking for their help will show them how much your respect them. That’s a powerful motivator and will help to build your team. Think of those tasks that take you away from working on building your business and that someone else may be better qualified to do like accounting, website design, deliveries, graphic design, travel arrangements, HR functions, and payroll, as well as activities like photocopying, data entry, data collection, report preparation, and even fact-finding assignments. Once you’ve clarified what job, task, project or activity is to be delegated, choose someone who will be capable of completing it. You may need to train or even supervise the person you’ve chosen until it’s clear that they are capable of completing it on their own but this short-term training will pay long-term dividends.

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Want a low-cost (virtually no cost) way to build your business? One that will drive traffic to your website or online store, increase sales, and build your clients’ trust in you and your business? We reveal how you can do it (and it’s something you can start today!) Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

How To Use Emails To Grow Your Business

A permission-based email programme can drive traffic to your website or online store, increase sales, reinforce familiarity with your company, and build trust and loyalty. It’s no wonder that internet marketing experts say email marketing can be one of the most cost-effective marketing tools in your arsenal First Build Your List If you don’t already have a list of customers, then now is the time to start building one. You need to find the names and addresses of people who are interested or could be interested in what you have to offer. So, building your email list entails three stages:

1. The acquisition of the email addresses (where and how you collect them)
2. How you welcome your new subscribers
3. How you behave once your subscribers have opted in (how you manage your list)

A note of caution: Before you even add any email address to your database, make sure you obtain the owner’s permission. How To Acquire Email Addresses Online Place a sign-up form on each page of your website. Demonstrate just how valuable signing up will be for them by providing examples of the emails you’ll be sending their way, along with testimonials from some of your happy customers. Use paid search to reach higher positions in the search engines and post the link to your sign-up page prominently on the landing page. Advertise your website address in other companies’ ezines (that reach your target audience). Entice them to take the plunge and sign up by offering free downloadable or mailed reports or future discounts that are only available for online subscribers. Make sure that you place opt-in boxes on your special reports and any registration forms. This has a major impact on conversion rates. Optimise your website to ensure your receive a high ranking on the search engines. Optimise your newsletters to increase traffic and the number of subscribers. If you are paying for search services like Google Adwords, include your email subscription details on the landing page. You’ve probably seen ‘Send this ezine to a friend’ buttons on the newsletters you receive. They help to generate leads with little effort on your part PLUS people are more likely to open messages from someone they know than someone they don’t. When someone buys your product or service, use it as an opportunity to promote your sign-up box and add a link to your opt-in page. Make sure your email signature (and those of your employees) includes information about your email newsletter with a ‘sign up now’ link. If you can write free articles for online article sites or for offline newsletters, magazines or newspapers, make sure it includes mention of your ezine and a link to your site. Your First Encounter Begin by explaining on your sign-up page the wonderful benefits your emails will bring. If you’ve done your research, you’ll know exactly what triggers to pull, what buttons to push, to get your potential customers interested, even excited about your emails. When you ask for their details, keep it simple: ask for their email address, first name, last name and what format they prefer (HTML or text). Make sure you include a ‘thank you for subscribing’ page. Send a confirmation email to validate the address you’ve been given (a double opt-in – an email that says “Click on this link to confirm your subscription”). It can also repeat and expand on the benefits you’re offering to your subscribers. Keeping The Relationship Fresh If you’ve promised to provide useful information, you must deliver it. If you don’t, you’ll receive a whole load of ‘unsubscribe’ notices and know that you’ve let your subscribers down.

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Do you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? Dr Ken Blanchard, world-renowned leadership and management expert and the co-author of The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur describes the crucial mindset you must have to make it as an entrepreneur in today’s business climate. Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Dr Ken Blanchard Explains What Every Entrepreneur Needs

Dr Ken Blanchard is a world-renowned leadership and management expert. He is the co-author of The One Minute Manager which has sold upwards of 12 million copies as well as 40 other books including Raving Fans, Gung Ho! and Whale Done! He and Don Hutson, the CEO of US Learning, wrote The One Minute Entrepreneur. What attribute do you consider the most important for an entrepreneur? Ken Blanchard: One of the key things is to be a visionary: to have a vision of a business, a vision of an opportunity, and a vision of what customers need. I had the wonderful delight of interviewing Richard Branson at a big customer service conference in London and I asked him how he decided where to go with his Virgin brand and he said that he chose industries where the customers weren’t being taken care of. Being optimistic is really important… to feel that you can do it. It’s very important to have insight into your strengths and weaknesses. If you gather people around you who are just like you, you will just compound your weaknesses. What you need to do is to make sure you have all the bases covered. For example, there are two parts to the area of leadership: one part is the visionary, directional part (What are we trying to accomplish? What do we stand for? Where are we heading? What do we believe in?) I’m pretty good at that. The second part of leadership is implementation (How do we accomplish our goals? How do we live according to those goals?) My wife is much better at doing that. Why do you think most new businesses fail? Ken Blanchard: Two main reasons they fail: one they are bad at financial management because the reality is sales have to exceed expenses. Sounds simple but a lot of people forget that and they spend all kinds of money on product development and don’t have any customers. The second key reason they fail is that they don’t know how to manage people – both their own employees and their customers. You’ve said that when you and your wife set up the business, neither of you really had a grasp of finances – that neither of you were very good at even balancing a chequebook. How did you manage to create an international business? Ken Blanchard: That again is about recognising your strengths and weaknesses. We got a good financial team gathered around us and we have had the same accountant for 30 years and we hired a good financial officer right away, somebody who knew about it. Marjorie’s brother came onboard and that’s where his strengths lie. We have been willing to bring in people to cover that strength and we are still not any better at managing finances than we were before but we’re not in charge of that side of it.

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Are you making these mistakes with your marketing? They’re the 11 most common traps business owners fall into with marketing… and if you’ve been tripped up by one of them, you could be destroying your chances of success without even realising it… Best wishes, Marie-Louise Cook Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

11 Message Killers You Must Avoid In Marketing – Part 1

When learning from others, one of the best things to learn from them is their mistakes. The following is a list of the 11 most common mistakes made by marketers everywhere. The #1 Killer – Stressing Image Over Substance Image advertising is all about you and your business. How great you are, your qualifications, years in business, full-service product line, etc. But your prospects don’t care about you, they care about themselves. Anyone reading or listening to your ad has one question in mind: “What’s in it for me?” Simply put, an image ad has no way to track results. Its goal is to keep the company name in front of the public and often tries very hard to be clever. Watch any beer and soft drink commercials and you’ll know what I mean. By contrast, a direct response ad is trackable using “coded” responses like: “ask for John Miller”. Your business knows exactly which ads their prospects are responding to. This helps you measure the effectiveness of each ad. Killer #2 – Not Taking Time To Educate Your main objective should be to educate your prospect using several steps. Your first ad could be to get their attention and spark their interest enough to contact you. Your next may be purely educational. If your prospect still doesn’t bite, your next step should be to provide more information using follow-up marketing techniques. High-ticket items require an extensive one-on-one educational and sales process. Your prospect needs to be educated about the benefits of your products or services, their options, why yours is better than your competition, why you are charging the price you charge, and a host of other things. Lower-priced items can be sold in a one-step model and in many cases they have to be because the dollars just aren’t there to support an extended multiple step marketing campaign. The trick is to give your prospect a reason to continue investigating your offer in the first advertisement.

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To produce an RSS feed, all you need is the content or the article that you want to publicise and a validated RSS text file. Once your text file is registered at various aggregators (or ‘news readers’), any external site can then capture and display your RSS feed, automatically updating them whenever you update your RSS file. 1.Create a file for your feed. Using a certain format, you’d have to create the XML version of your feed. It should include the title or the headline, the body’s short description, and the link where it can be read. There are a lot of different RSS web channel editors you can use for this. Some programmes just require you to write news and articles down on a notepad and when placed on the editor, it will show up with the necessary formatting ready for upload. It would be advisable to make at least 10 articles for your feed. 2.Save and Upload the file. After creating your file, save your work as an XML, RSS, or an RDF file. Then you are ready to upload it. Upload the file using your FTP programme and place it on your web server. This process now makes the file readable by RSS news aggregators. 3.Validate the file. Make your RSS programme error-free. RSS is programming, so errors could lie unseen. Again, there are different programmes that can assist you in this process. You just need to place the saved and uploaded RSS file for the programme to test it against wrong and missed code and tags. It is essential for you to check your work. This way, you can be sure that what you have is readable and usable. 4.Create a directory. Now that you have created the file, saved it, and made sure it works, you are ready to let other people see it. The main purpose of an RSS feed is to broadcast it to all RSS-enabled sites. So go ahead and look for a directory where you can place your feed. Some may require fees for uploading a directory. Some offer it for free. Scout around and round up all the free sites you can and place it there. If you have some marketing budget, you might want to subscribe to sites that charge a minimal amount. Don’t forget to place an icon of your RSS feed on your website for those people who visit you directly. 5.Update regularly. With RSS, you know that the feed changes automatically every time you change the main file. Don’t let your RSS feed sit there for a month without modifying it. Maintain it. Add new articles. The more exciting your topic is, the more people will check your feeds and visit your website. Creating an RSS feed for internet marketing is made very simple nowadays. Even people who are not computer savvy can create RSS feeds, based on the steps provided above. The applications that were created for RSS are the ones that make it easy for everyday computer users to make an RSS feed. All you need is familiarisation with the process. Start creating your own RSS feeds today. RSS feeds give your website more traffic than usual web hosting. And web traffic means more people seeing your products. Add strength to your marketing strategy. Make RSS feeds and be ready to sell.

By Sean D’Souza Ok, so you’ve got someone to visit your website once. What if you wanted them to visit again, and again, and again? Ooh, that’s hard, isn’t it? Not really. Find out how to attract them back without begging with this simple internet marketing tool. First, The Myth Ask most web designers what is more important: a unique visitor or a repeat visitor? Most will choose, the former. I tend to disagree. Let’s analyse a unique visitor. They could just be browsing, like shoppers in a mall, or they could be a potential customer. Now, don’t get me wrong. Unique visitors might be important, because they are like new customers. However, with new customers, the onus is on you to prove your credibility. Existing customers already know what you do and how you do it. You do not have to prove yourself over and over again. Why Is It So Important To Retain Existing Customers? Because, it costs eight times as much to get a new customer than it does to retain one. That alone should make you want to keep them. Also, since you’ve developed a relationship with them, it’s now easier for you to do business, to re-sell, up-sell and get referrals (really, really important). If you play it right you can use your website (amongst other communication material) to stay top of mind with them. My Customers Have Already Seen My Website: Why Should They Go Back? Precisely! Most websites are about me, me, me and me! Ever notice how tons of websites have an About Us page. Frankly, who gives a damn about you? No one! Everyone who gets to your business or your website or reads your brochure wants to know what’s in it for them! Yet, all communication that goes out is based on me. Do something constructive. Put your ego in cold storage and start re-engineering your website and your internet marketing to give information to your customer. How Do I Go About Giving Them Information? The system is amazingly simple. You know everything (or rather a lot) about your business. Your customers will never know quite enough. If, you provide them with a steady stream of information, you are already two steps ahead of the competition. You are taking the time to educate your customers and you are keeping in touch with them. My website, for instance, is essentially a power marketing vehicle. With minimal effort it gets existing customers to have a look at it repeatedly, simply by giving them information that would help them in their business or their jobs. If you are a casual browser, your curiosity will be aroused, and you will find yourself wanting to read more. Once you’re through with the How To section, it’s almost natural to move on to the Client Results section. At this point in time, I am no longer selling. You have begun to sell the concept to yourself. How To Use Email To Retain Customers And Get New Business. Everyone needs to know more than they currently do. So, how about asking your customers if they would like some more information that will help them understand stuff better. In my case, I send out monthly articles to do with marketing and communication. Detailed, incisive insights that the customer wasn’t thinking of before. Then I ask them to visit the website so they can read other articles. It’s important to stop and see what we’re doing here. Many may not have the time today, but may have the time next week, or when your next helpful email goes out. The first time the action is done, and they benefit, they are hooked. That’s it. You’ve achieved visibility and top of mind consciousness. Sometimes it will happen instantly and at other times it may be several months later. What you can be sure is, that it will happen! Why The Website Is Such An Important Tool For Your Business. It’s dynamic, that’s why! Say, you printed your cards and brochures last month. You spent a small fortune on them. But now you discover you need to add something that will dramatically change what you’re communicating. You can’t throw out a thousand brochures or cards, but updating a website is easy-peasy! Simply tweak it, and you’re on your way. Remember, customers aren’t always willing to buy when you’re willing to sell. By keeping them informed and in touch with your website, they can reach out to you whenever they are ready! How To Match Information And Credibility. Credibility is important. So you definitely need to have the About Us factor. What you need to do, however, is to tailor it in such a way that the customer understands what you’ve done, why you’ve done it and how you can help them. You can still strut your stuff, just make sure you’re doing it with your customer in mind. That alone will change the way you write it and present it. It will make the difference between it being read or being ignored. If You Don’t Have Testimonials, You’re Missing Something. It’s brief, underestimated and really powerful. Remember, people are looking at your business from a monitor! They don’t know if you’re reliable, smart or just a dork. Obviously clues within the site will indicate these things, but why not go for the kill. Why not get yourself a testimonial and completely rid them of that niggling doubt? It’s pretty nasty if you don’t have testimonials but totally unpardonable if you don’t go out and get them! When you do a great job and the customer says, ‘Great work!’, ask for a testimonial there and then. It’s the best time and customers tend to gush more than 6 months down the line, when they can’t even remember what you did! A Word Called Discipline. No one said this was going to be easy. Having to update your website, sending out helpful emails, and keeping in touch is going to take time and effort. You will need to read more, so you learn more. Then you will have to write. And write reasonably well. You can do it yourself or get a freelancer to do it, but do it you must. Marketing your business must take precedence over everything else. When times are good, we tend to slacken on the marketing. If you disclipine yourself to read one book on your subject and write at least one article a week, you are now starting to build up content. It can be done. And as Nike says, ‘Just Do It’. It’s the only way. What you will need: 1) A totally updateable website. You should never have to learn html or a html coding programme. Your website should be such that you can update both pictures and text from a cyber cafe while vacationing in the Bahamas! 2) At least six articles that can help your customer. That’s a good start, but invariably you will have to write more and post them on your website and/or email them to your customers. If you can’t do it yourself, write down the points and get someone else to do it for you. But do it! 3) Minimal, fast loading graphics. If you have no time, neither does anyone else. Make sure your website is as lightning quick as possible. Check it out either by cleaning out your cache or by checking it out from different computers. If it’s not screaming fast, you have a problem on your hands. 4) A credibility section. Get your portfolio out there with the customer in mind. And get those testimonials! 5) Iron discipline. It’s your business. If you don’t do it, no one will. ©2001-2009 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Article written by Sean D’Souza. Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.