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Affordable Websites for Independent Retailers
Free trial of e-commerce solution
Multi-channel commerce is increasingly important and relevant for independent retailers, especially at this time of year when many consumers turn to the Internet to do their Christmas shopping. But without expertise and knowledge, building an e-commerce website can be a minefield as you struggle to find an option that best suits your business, let alone one that is affordable.
With many years experience in designing websites, Kevin Flannigan has set up a 30 day free trial for independent retailers looking to test the water for a new or improved site. The trial also gives you the opportunity to see how much you can do yourself, and how much help you need to get started. The trial uses Magento Go, a scaleable e-commerce package that includes hosting and technical support.
Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched in 2008. At the start of 2012 it had surpassed 4 million downloads worldwide. In fact, the software is so good, in 2010 eBay announced it had made an investment in Magento and by 2011 it owned the software outright.
Magento Go is a streamlined version of Magento. It’s trusted by more than 125,000 businesses worldwide and offers the power and flexibility of Magento at a price that every business can afford. The beauty of Magento Go is the fact that it’s a totally scaleable, hosted e-commerce solution. In times of austerity, having a scaleable ‘one stop shop’ that can be amended very quickly is a great way to control costs.
Kevin recently built and launched the website for Miss Milly, a new supplier of affordable, quality jewellery, and has also worked extensively on retail websites for the fashion, health and beauty industries.
“Miss Milly wanted a reliable platform that showcased its products beautifully with good search facilities whilst also being straightforward to use,” explains Kevin. “Even though the company is a wholesaler, it wanted to have an aesthetic retail feel, which I think we’ve achieved.”
Once you have played around with the trial website, if you wish to go ahead and develop it further, there are different options available from just £9.99 per month. And you will not be left on your own as Kevin offers a variety of design and e-commerce support packages from helping with new branding and logos suitable for online use, to building a website optimised for search engines, setting up a payment provider, and pre and post launch training and support.
With the www.missmilly.co.uk website now live since late August, the company’s managing director, Sarah Watmore, is delighted with the functionality. “Kevin was hugely supportive, creative and proactive throughout the design, development and launch process. He really understood our brief and took a real interest in the business, which has resulted in a fantastic showcase for Miss Milly.
“And with his help, hard work and advice, it has only taken us six weeks to reach page one on Google search for our priority key phrase.”
To start your no risk 30 day free trial, go to www.kevflannigan.co.uk/trial or contact Kevin on 07813 206786 or by email to info@kevflannigan.co.uk for further information or design and project management quotes.
Top 3 Ways to Turn the Right People Away and Stop Wasting Time & Energy so you can Boost your Revenues
- When you network/market online or offline, know who you want to reach. If you don’t take time out before you start networking or marketing online you may find yourself just talking to people and ending up making no real business connections. After all, if you don’t know who you’re looking for, what qualities you want these ideal clients to have, or what problems you want your ideal clients to have, then you’re going to have a difficult time finding the “ideal client”. As a result, it is quite likely that your website content will reflect this indecisive thought process, and come across as if you are trying to be all things to all people; not pinpointing an exact issue that visitors to your website can read, picture in their minds, and think “oh, you do this? Well, I have this problem….maybe this company can solve it” or “oh, my friend Mack is having this exact problem! Maybe this company can help…I should tell him about it.” If you don’t communicate clearly what characteristics your ideal client has, people can’t form pictures or pretend scenarios in their minds as to what you do and how you help people, and you end up missing opportunities to build new business relationships. If you communicate clearly what the problem is that you solve and why your ideal client should try you and your company, you end up increasing the likelihood that you will boost your revenues.
- When you are marketing and you meet someone – either in person or in an online chat group like linked in or Facebook – pre-qualify your ideal client when you first communicate. And by “pre-qualify” I mean go beyond the basics of asking the person’s name, where they work and whether they need what you are selling. The danger of not pre-qualifying your ideal clients beyond the basics is that if you leave your qualifying questions to those three mentioned above, you are setting yourself up for disappointment down the road when the prospect goes and tells you that – after you have spent time and energy trying to make this person a client – your solution wasn’t really a fit in the first place because of this, that or the other excuse. It is better to ask too many questions up front and find out early on in the sales game that you are not a match, than to spend lots of time and energy communicating with someone who is not a true ideal client (which is very easy to do – especially in this slow global economic recovery we are all experiencing right now). So what kinds of questions do you ask to find out if this new-found friend is indeed an ideal client? Read point three to find out!
- If you decide to have a needs analysis meeting, know what questions you need to ask to get the answers you want. So how do you know that? There are typically three things you want to find out from an ideal client:
- What are their needs?
- What are their preferences?
- Where do their strengths/abilities lie?
If in the meeting you discover – for whatever reason – you cannot help this prospect, be up front & tell them. It annoys people to be lied to, deceived or misled, and they could badmouth your company, ruin your hard-earned reputation or worse. In addition, it improves your reputation if you are seen by others in the business community as a trustworthy truth-teller who directs not-so-ideal-clients to others you know and trust that can help your current prospect. If you discover your services/products are a match for what this person needs, give the person 2-3 easy, low- or no-risk ways to move forward and try your product/service. You may be thinking “why do I have to give a prospect the easy way?” The answer is simple: business is built on relationships. Many business owners and executives are too busy with their days as it is. If they become dissatisfied with a current supplier, they may feel uncomfortable that the relationship with that supplier has come to a close, and also may feel stressed by the difficulty of trying to find a trustworthy replacement who is worthy of receiving his hard earned business dollars. Add to this the simple facts that many people in the market-place today do whatever it takes (including embellish the truth or out-right lie) to make a sale, and that many people have been “burned” before by characters who say one thing and do another in attempts to earn a buck, and the consumer is left feeling jaded, probably nervous, and unsure of whether this new business person can be trusted. If you remove some or all of the risk of trying your product or service and you deliver a winning sales presentation, the prospect is more likely to try your product or service to see if you can indeed follow through on what it is you say you will do.
Did you like this article? Was it helpful? Do you want to learn more about how to write sales content that attracts only your ideal clients and convinces them to start sales cycles for you? Do you want to learn more about how to customize qualifying questions so that you can properly filter your prospects list and only deal with truly ideal clients? Book your complimentary 60 minute coaching call – regularly priced at $150, but it is yours for free if you call in the next 3 hours!
About the Author: Alison Silbert is the author of Boost Your Revenues by Turning People Away. When not running her business Passionate Web Creations, she is a mentor, coach, and teacher, supporting individuals in living their dream of having a successful online business. For more details about the book, email us at info@idealvisitor.com; to order copies of the book go from Amazon.com, Barnes & Nobile and http://idealvisitor.com/idealsite/book-2/.
Blogging for Business: 6 Ways to Get More Paying Clients
How do you turn blog visitors into paying clients? Although we are moving away from using terms like marketing and client and moving toward relationship building and making connections, you are still in business to make money from those connections and relationships, right? Your blog can actually help you do that, despite what you may be hearing about it.
If you are starting to worry about whether your blog is helping your business, read on for 6 easy ways you can turn your blog into a valuable, profitable tool for your business.
Remember that the purpose is to attract and convert potential clients
If your approach to blogging is a free giveaway for all who want to receive, that is what your blog will become. Similarly, if you create a newsletter and put an opt-in form on your blog to try and catch as many fish as you can, whether or not they are interested in paying you for the time you will spend writing to them, that is what you will get.
It’s true that marketing is a game of numbers, and the wider your reach, the more clients you will end up with. But, smart bloggers don’t take their chances with that. The best strategy is to develop a well-defined goal for your blog and focus all of your energy on it.
1. Describe Your Services in a Prominent Place
You should create pages that talk about you and about your work. Always be sure to include an About page. Then, use additional pages for the main services you offer (it’s best if you can group them into 2-4 pages). Be specific about these services (don’t use cheeky or clever titles, just be direct). For example, if you are a real estate agent, your services pages could be titled “Sell Your Home” “Buy a New Home” or “Relocation Assistance.” If you are a salon and spa club owner, your pages could be called “Massage Therapy” “Salon Services” and “Club Membership,” for example.
Create categories that have the same titles as your service pages, and be sure to organize your posts using these categories.
2. Talk About Your Clients
One of the common misconceptions about blogging for business is that in order to attract readers, you should only write about your field or industry, but not about your specific services or your work. What ends up happening is that your blog becomes stuffed with information also found elsewhere and other, more experienced writers are doing it better. If your blog focuses on information that can only be found there, you will have much less competition and increase the likelihood that people will start talking about your blog.
Your potential clients want to know you before they hire you (usually), so talk about what’s going on with your business. This is your opportunity to showcase work you’ve done for someone else. Whenever possible, appeal to people on a human, emotional level – try talking about a particularly challenging case or ask a client if you can share their story.
3. Make It Easy to Contact You
Your contact information should be plainly visible either on a Contact page or at the top of your sidebar. Always include your email address in additional to a form people can fill out and submit online. Somewhere along the way, people stopped displaying their email addresses because of spam problems. By the time your site gets so many hits that you start seeing a huge influx of spam, feel free to remove your email address and just include a contact form. But for now, you really should display your contact information plainly for people to see. If you’re still very concerned, simply write out your email address, such as email: tia at bizchickblogs.com. Some savvy web users will understand that, but many won’t, so you’re taking your chances by doing that.
If you are a local service provider, you should always include a phone number.
4. Write for Your Clients, Not Your Colleagues
Many of you are becoming adept at blogging and using Facebook and Twitter, and that is excellent. However, unless you’re planning to launch a career in social media marketing, remember that your clients are not as interested in your marketing methods as you are. If you are itching to talk about that stuff, join a forum. But your clients want to hear about them and what you can offer them, so use your blog for that.
People who sell social media services want you to believe that everyone in the whole world is a social media maven and addict and that’s all anyone anywhere is talking about. That’s just not the case, and even if it was, people looking for social media information aren’t going to be coming to you for it, so there is not point in talking about it at length on your blog. If you are a massage therapist, focus your content on massage therapy, not on how your Twitter account is going. If you operate a children’s advocacy program, talk about that, not about Facebook. If you are a carpenter, talk about your latest projects and how great you are at being on time and under budget, rather than about how other carpenters can set up a social bookmarking account.
It’s not that you shouldn’t be real or yourself on your blog. It’s that your blog is a tool, and it serves a purpose. Every minute of time you invest in your blog translates into dollars, so be sure that what you spend your time doing is inline with your goals.
The more content you have that revolves around your services, the more likely it is that people will find you in search engines when looking for your services in their area.
5. Don’t Just Link to Your Website, Integrate It
Your blog should be your website. Your blog is likely to attract many more visitors than a static website, especially if your content is great and you promote your blog well.
Integrate your blog into your website or vice versa. Keep whichever URL currently has more traffic and links, and then move the other to that one. For example, if your website has been around for 12 years and gets 300 unique visitors a day, and your blog is 6 months old and gets 5 visitors a day, move your blog to your website to leverage the existing traffic.
When you connect your blog and website with just a link, you take the chance that people aren’t going to click it just because you tell them to.
6. Be Open for Business
Are you looking for business? Really? Can you tell that by browsing your blog?
It’s OK to use language like “Work with Me” and “Hire Me.” Trust me, it will not offend people who are actually looking for someone to hire or work with. It may come off as pushy to the casual reader, but that’s not your target visitor.
If you’re not looking to get clients from your blog, leave that out. But if you are, be sure to include something like that. It will make a difference, and you’ll notice that page getting visits because people will want to know how to hire you/work with you.
Your Turn
What works for you? Is your blog working for you or is it starting to feel like a waste of time? Lemme know! 
See this post as it was originally published on BizChickBlogs.com.
Canada Opens up Doors to International Investors…Defining Moment… Go Canada Go
Go Canada Go 
Canadian Federal government eliminate Section 116, pertaining to venture capital and private equity industry, removes tax barriers, welcoming the flow of capital across Canada’s border. Its removal provides an important signal to international investors that Canada welcomes their contributions to growing companies. Canada is open for business!
This gives Canadian companies across the country tax law changes to give them the advantage to compete on the global stage. By amending the definition of “taxable Canadian property” to exclude shares of Canadian private companies (where not more than 50 % of their value is derived from real property in Canada, Canadian resource property or timber resource property), the government has significantly reduced administrative and, in some cases, economic barriers to international investment in Canadian-based innovation and technology. The changes in tax legislation are among the most significant changes to capital gains taxation since the introduction of taxation of capital gains in 1972. This change puts Canada at the top of the list of places to invest globally.
The following describes the tax barriers that were removed and that are no longer preventing international investment in Canada:
Withholding and Section 116 certificate process — The majority of foreign VCs are not subject to Canadian tax when they sell an investment. However, they may face a delay of many months to work through the Section 116 tax clearance process until funds can freely flow to them. Many foreign VCs are structured such that each of the investors in the VC — sometimes hundreds or even thousands — is subject to this clearance process as if they held the investment directly. This delay results in lower returns and frequently causes direct financial loss to investors.
Requirement to file Canadian tax returns by foreigners who don’t owe taxes creates hundreds of pages of unnecessary paperwork — Canada imposed tax filing requirements in circumstances where no taxes were payable by these investors. When a foreign VC sells an investment, each investor of the foreign VC has to file a Canadian tax return even if they don’t owe any taxes. This results in literally hundreds of pages of documents that are required for signature and processing for a single sale. This tax return filing issue also applies to certain Canadian public companies.
This change means Canada is s more welcoming environment for international investors. In the majority of cases, non-residents who were not taxable on the disposition of their investments in such shares due to Canada’s broad international tax treaty network, are now exempt from tax under Canadian domestic law without having to apply for treaty relief. As a result, they are no longer required to comply with the Section 116 tax clearance certificate procedure or file a Canadian income tax return. The changes also remove what were perceived to be barriers for many venture capitalists who considered the previous administrative requirements and economic delays for each investor to be strong deterrents to investing in Canada.
The removal of the Section 116 tax barrier is seen as a tax master stroke by the Canadian government enabling Canada’s emerging technology companies to access deep pools of international capital and the vast international customer markets to which those pools are connected.
There are predictions that over time this move will help propel Canada’s extraordinary technology into global industry leadership and will likely be viewed in the future as a defining moment for the Harper government in Canadian innovation. This amendment will have an immediate, positive and direct impact on Canada’s ability to grow the Canadian technology and innovation industry. Go Canada Go!
How to market on Twitter
I am not going to explain to you how to create an account, I am sure you are capable enough! Once the account is created with a nice profile and picture you can then start to add your “Tweets”.
You are allowed up to 140 characters and it is advisable to keep the tweets as short as possible, I will explain why shortly.
I know a lot of people use Twitter to talk about their latest night out or what they had for dinner but as a business person you can utilize Twitter to market your business.
The first thing to do is to find followers. You do this by using the search facility and searching for keywords that people, who are your target audience, would be using, either in their names or their tweets. As an example, “business”! You will have pages and pages of people talking about business and now you need to scroll down to choose who you want to follow.
Now, it is etiquette on Twitter that if someone follows you, you then follow them, not everyone abides by this rule but a lot do. As I am sure you have worked out by now; you will end up with people following you who are likely to be your target audience.
Be careful not to follow too many people all at once as, you must balance your follower/following ratio. So as not to bring down the wrath of the Twitter police, basically; you can’t follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you.
I would suggest that you follow 100 a day for a couple of days then wait until you have upped your following then you can go and follow more.
There is a great little website called, http://huitter.com/ where you can automatically un‐follow people who have not followed you. Don’t do this every day as you need to give people time to notice that you are following them but it is worth doing it about once a week.
OK, now you have a few followers it is time to do some marketing.
Obviously you can announce new items you are selling or services you are offering but the strength of Twitter is the relationships you can build.
So tweet stuff like motivational quotes or links to great blogs or websites that you think will interest your followers. Keep these short and remember to always add your website address at the end of the tweet. If you have a long address you can pop over to Bitly.com and get it shortened. You just enter your web address then hit “shorten” and it will give you a short version that you can use when space is limited.
Now I am going to tell you a secret trick that is so valuable that we need to keep this between you and me alone!
Find someone who is tweeting and is following you and who has a whole load of followers then find their website and take a look at what they do. Then come back to your Twitter account and Tweet an exceptionally wonderful complement about them. With luck they will see your Tweet and will then re‐Tweet it to their whole follower base, they won’t be able to resist it; we all love complements and can’t resist telling people that we have received them!
This is the reason your original tweet needs to be short, to enable people to re-tweet your comments. People do it all the time.
Here are a few tips you can do to simplify Twitter.
You can automate a message thanking people who follow you thus creating those important relationships. You can set this up at TweetLater.
You can go to the Twitter Yellow Pages, Twello, to search for people to follow.
You can download Sesmic Desktop to keep an eye on everything including, tweets, messages and mentions.
You can set up an RSS feed into your tweets so that even when you haven’t the time to tweet, something is going out for you.
The list is endless and I could fill another book but I think we have touched on the most of the important stuff here.
How does Twitter work with “The Image Attraction System”?
When you write a blog you announce it on Twitter, say something like: Great blog about Viral Marketing see http://www.patsutton.com you could shorten this link in Bitly.com if it’s too long.
People will then click through to your website and see you, your great profile and your product. Clever isn’t it?
You can also set up a welcome message through TweetLater directing them to your blog or product page or better still your profile.
Excerpt from “The Image Attraction System” by Pat Sutton