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One of my favourite people that ever lived was the majestic Frank Sidebottom. A bumbling 35 year old failure who was self delusional enough to believe he actually had a showbiz career, which he had to keep secret from his mum . Oh yeah, he also had a big head, that some people thought may have been made of papier mache. How rude. I’ve been a huge Frank fan since I was 15 and a few years ago I was lucky enough to appear on his TV show, easily the highlight of my professional life.

Well, at last someone is making a documentary about Mr.Sidebottom and his friend Chris Sievey. It’s being funded, as everything is these days, by the mighty Kickstarter. Director Steve Sullivan has reached his initial target of £20,000, so the film is definitely happening. But to make it as good as it can be, he needs more cash. If you’re feeling generous, then do pop a few sheckles in his metaphorical electronic pocket.

Ross Kemp is everyone’s favourite East End hard man. Well, after Danny Dyer. Of course. But you can’t fold Dyer’s face as easily as perhaps you’d like. The reluctant Mitchell brother, on the other hand, is far more malleable and looks wonderful when he’s all scrunched up. Just take a look at some of the wonderful examples on Kempfolds.

www.kempfolds.blogspot.co.uk

Like most people, I always leave my online Christmas shopping until the last possible minute, occasionally missing the postage deadline meaning my children don’t get any presents and we have to pretend we are Sikh and don’t celebrate it. If only there was a handy way of keeping an eye on exactly when Christmas was that I could check any time I was sat at a computer. Hang on a second, you mean THERE IS? Thank you Berners-Lee. THIS is what the internet was made for. Idiots like me.

www.xmasclock.com

Christmas is fine. That’s covered. We know when it is, sometime towards the end of December, and thanks to the previous site, we can accurately predict it. But the thing that makes me wasn’t to gouge my stomach out with a spork, is coming into work on a Wednesday only to be asked if I enjoyed pancakes the night before. ‘No, why would I’ is my usual response. ‘Because it was Pancake Day you massive has been loser, didn’t you know?’ I have missed Pancake Day every day for the last 32 years. And as we all know, these delicious flat cakes of the pan can only be eaten on this special day when we celebrate the Baby Jesus hunting in the back of the fridge for a squeezy plastic lemon left over from last year. Well, miss pancakes no more! Simply click on this next link every day until it says ‘Yes’.

www.isitpancakeday.com

I may have mentioned Axe Cop before, but to be honest, I don’t care. It is so good it is definitely worth another look. Basic premise, a young 9 year old boy (although he’s probably a bit older now. In fact, biology and aging would mean he definitely is) makes up stories about a gentleman called Axe Cop. He tells them to his older brother, who happens to be an excellent cartoonist. Older brother then makes one of the best comics based on the younger lads stories. The result is as mad and as brilliant as you’d expect.

www.axecop.com

Don’t click on this next link. This was considered hilariously funny back in the old days of the internet. I remember literally standing in a puddle of my own wee wee in 1999, thinking that we had reached the pinnacle of comedy and that we should stop trying to be funny.

www.findmyhosting.com/web-hamster

Finally, who doesn’t want to look like Kenny Rogers? If at least one of my boys doesn’t end up with silvery hair and a bushy beard just like the Islands in the Stream superstar, then I will have failed as a father. Just imagine how proud the parents of these gentlemen must feel.

www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com

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That’s it for now. Do please keep sending me your websites. I don’t have a proper job so I need something to keep me off the streets. Pop along to www.facebook.com/iainleeofficial

You can read Iain Lee’s very own take on the internet here on the 123-reg blog every third Friday of the month.

A familiar face on television since he got his first break landing the job hosting Channel 4’s thrice weekly topical comedy show the 11 O’Clock Show at the age of 25, Iain is also an award winning radio presenter, top podcast creator and a genuinely funny guy with an eye for the bizarre.

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It’s often the little things that make the difference between someone choosing to buy/enquire or bouncing off your website never to return.  This is particularly significant in today’s world in which the customer is becoming ever more careful and critical in their choice of supplier.  Customers are looking for increased value along with proof before they part with their money.  In fact, going the extra mile is now the norm – to really excel we need to go an extra two miles.  So, here are three more ideas to help you prove your value and win more online business.

Profit Fix # 4 – Implement a Call Me Back Form.

This is an incredibly effective mechanism to get your prospects to make contact.  It’s a form you can put on your sales pages with at least two fields on it; First Name and Telephone.  All your visitor has to do is fill in their details, click submit and an email is sent straight to your sales team for them to call your prospect back.  (Plus sales people love to strike whilst the iron’s hot and this is the perfect vehicle to ensure that.)

We tested sites both with and without this form and found that there was a marked increase in enquiries when the form was visible.  It’s a really useful feature to add and a quick marketing win which shouldn’t take your web designers more than an hour to put live.

Profit Fix # 5 – Get Some Testimonials.

Testimonials can be one of the most powerful features of your website.  They do two very important things; first, they create a sense of confidence about what you do and second, in raising your visitor’s confidence they will naturally read your website with more care.

However, one of the drawbacks of a written testimonial is proving its authenticity.  In other words, how do you prove to a sceptical audience that you didn’t just make it up?  Well, there are a couple of techniques you can use that will flatten those concerns.

The first is adding an audio testimonial to the written one.  So, not only can your visitor read it but they also get the chance to listen to your customer discussing it.  The little ‘podcast’ of your customer could provide much more detail on how good they found your service to be – it could even be a full-scale interview or alternatively just the testimonial as it was written.

The second is to video your customer saying it.  Admittedly this takes a little more preparation but the results are incredibly powerful as visual evidence from a customer of your company’s value offers the greatest social proof and can clinch the deal.

Profit Fix #  6 – Offer Your Customers Some Guarantees.

Along with testimonials guarantees are one of the most effective ways of increasing your conversion rate on your website.  A guarantee in marketing language is known as a risk reversal.  In other words, you are taking the risk away from your customer when they buy from you.  Let’s face it, the customer takes the majority of the risk in most business transactions as they often have to part with their cash before receiving the goods.  So, if you can reverse the risk you eliminate one of the major buying objections your potential customer may have.

You could offer a money back guarantee, a lifetime guarantee, a free trial and so on – there are lots of options.  The key thing to remember is that by taking the risk out of the purchase your prospect is far more likely to become a customer.

So, be proud of your guarantee and make it obvious everywhere on your website.  If you’re running an ecommerce site consider putting your guarantees on your basket page.  This adds reassurance to your customer and can tip the balance between them continuing to the checkout or moving on to a competitor’s website.

And finally, take a quick look at your competition’s websites: If they are doing the things I’ve suggested then you definitely need to do them too and if they’re not then you’ve got a huge opportunity and still definitely need to do them!

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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Did you know that the average website only converts about 1% of the traffic it receives into leads or sales?
Pretty scary isn’t it! So, it probably makes more sense to improve the conversion rate from your website before increasing the traffic to it. Here’s why:

If you wanted to double your online business you may logically start by doubling the traffic to your website. Generally speaking you can do this through any combination of Google AdWords (pay-per-click advertising), Search Engine Optimisation activity or social networking. However, whichever you choose you’ll probably end up spending a fair bit of time and money doing it. BUT, you’ll still only be converting 1 in every 100 visitors into customers.

If you’re already getting any decent volume of traffic to your website it makes more sense to focus on increasing the conversion rate rather than traffic especially as it costs you next to nothing to improve your website (assuming you have a decent Content Management System).

In other words you can double, treble, quadruple your profits simply by making a few tweaks to your website (at next to zero cost).

So, let’s take a look at 3 Profit Fixes that can immediately help you increase your conversion rate.

Profit Fix # 1 – Make a Splash with Your Homepage

Statistics show that you’ve got about 8-15 seconds to impress your visitor before they leave. What’s on your homepage will entice your visitor to stay longer and get them take the action you want them to. Here are 5 things you can do to engage your visitor and compel them to stay:

1. Have a clear, bold headline that makes them stop and think!
2. List the key benefits of using your business
3. Use the power of video to spark their interest
4. Give away some free information to help them (10 Top Tips…, 7 Secrets of…, etc.)
5. Collect their email address in exchange for this free information

Now take a quick look at your homepage and see how many of these 5 things you are already doing.

Profit Fix # 2 – Be Contactable

Make it easy for your customer to make contact with you. Put your telephone number on every single page of your website. (I appreciate that for some businesses not showing their phone number is a policy but it’s a bad one!) Add contact forms, call me back pages and even live chat. Employ every technique you can to get your prospect to make contact with your business so you can begin the sales process directly with them.

Profit Fix # 3 – Be Fresh and Current

What’s out of date on your website?

The biggest offender on most websites is the News page. Having a news, blog, articles section or Twitter/Facebook feed that stopped some months ago sends a message of staleness. However, if your website is updated regularly then your visitor will feel that they are engaging with fresh, useful information. It also delivers the message that you’re a vibrant, active company with something to say about itself and that can only strengthen your prospect’s perception of you.

Another thing to check is that any information with a date against it, is properly maintained. There’s nothing worse than visiting a website only to find that the pricelist is last year’s. The same principle also applies to special offers, sales and vouchers.

Next week I’ll show you three more super-simple techniques you can instantly employ to increase the numbers of visitors who convert to enquiries and sales.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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The other day I received a call from a recorded message which began “Please don’t hang up”.  I hung up.

A few days later I received another – [long pause… recording begins] “This is an important call”.  It wasn’t, I hung up.

And yesterday I received two items of post; one plain manila brown envelope and another white one with brightly coloured emblems and writing all over it.  I opened the brown envelope first.

Why did I do the exact reverse of what I was being asked to do?  Is it that I’m naturally rebellious or perhaps I’m just bloody-minded?  Well, the truth is neither (unless you speak to my wife).

In fact, I have been programmed to respond this way – most of us have.  And do you know by whom?  By the very people who want us to listen and read their messages!  How ironic is that?

So what’s really going on here and what’s it got to do with helping you sell online?

Well, my examples illustrate that the more something unimportant screams for your attention the less likely you are to respond to it.  This psychology is particularly important when it comes to email marketing.

These days our inbox is crammed with emails all demanding our time and because we receive so many our brains make judgements as to which ones are really important and which are not.  This means we have each devised a filtering system (aka the delete key).

You will typically automatically delete emails from people you don’t know and emails that look like they’re selling something (and people you don’t know are usually selling something).  So, what do the people sending the sales emails do?  They make their emails brighter, more colourful with bigger text and lots of pictures.  In other words they scream the message louder.  (These are often known as HTML emails.)

However, all they are doing is shouting even louder that they are a sales message and so get their message deleted even faster than before.  Genius!

That’s the heart of the problem with junk mail, junk telephone calls and junk emails: once your brain knows their marketing tactic it filters out their message.

But what if you want your sales emails read because you know that you can help the recipient?

The answer is easy, think about the messages that you do read.  The common factor is that they are all text – no graphics, flashy fonts or buttons, just plain old text.  These are the messages that your friends, colleagues, suppliers and customers send you.  Your email will stand a better chance of being read if it’s in that format than if it’s putting on a visual song and dance!

So, forget the flashy HTML emails and simply write your sales emails in text.  Just remember to offer your recipient lots of help and great information so they can feel the value of your business.  That way they will open, read and (most importantly) act on your email.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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Want to hear my geeky news this month? I am downgrading my phone and I actually bought a Nokia 3410 to replace my iPhone 5. It’s brilliant. It doesn’t even have Bluetooth, but it does come with the Snake app preloaded.

Why am I taking this stand against technology? Well, I think I may be an internet addict and the only way to overcome this terrible illness is to not walk around with the entire WWW stored in my pocket. It’s hard work, but I’m comforted by knowing I am not the only one. Internet addiction and the terrible downer that comes with going cold turkey is now a recognised condition. Don’t believe me? Have a butchers at this –

‪http://thedrum.com/cGW 

Now, if that hasn’t scared you off, let’s get on with this shall we? Why the hell is the internet full of cats? Are they trying to tell us something? I have always thought they were of a far superior intellect than dogs, but it can’t be our feline friends filling the web with cute pictures, can it? To be honest, even if cats were running the old http, I don’t think they could have been insane enough to come up with Sports Balls Replaced By Cats. This has to be the work of their evil nemeses, dogs…

sportballsreplacedwithcats.tumblr.com/

Ooh, speaking of cruelty (although, before the Daily Mail jumps on me again, none of the sites I write about are actually cruel, what do you take me for? No, the cruel ones are just stored under my favourites in my web browser) here is a brilliant tumblr page for those of you with kids. Only a parent would get the sheer beauty of Reasons My Son Is Crying.

www.reasonsmysoniscrying.tumblr.com/

How can I explain One Tiny Hand? Er, it’s pictures of famous people, Spiderman, the cast of Mad Men etc., with, well, one tiny hand.

www.onetinyhand.com/

My dad passed away recently and I miss him every day. I really do. I have so much I want to say. If only there was a way to get messages to our deceased relatives, wouldn’t that be wonderful and completely non-exploitative. Sorry? There is? A company are delivering telegrams to the dead? Well that is fantastic. How much does it cost? $5 a word…hmm…a bit pricey, but if it works, why not? Check out afterlifetelegrams.com but perhaps start with the slightly wishy washy FAQ’s.

www.afterlifetelegrams.com/AFTERLIFE/

Described as ‘flotsam and jetsam from around the world’ The Urbanaut is just that – a collection of nonsense, rubbish and stupidity from the 4 corners of the globe. And all of it is very, very funny.

www.theurbanaut.net

I had literally hundreds of emails this month* from people complaining that I don’t represent the cloud lovers of the world on this page. I am sorry, and I promise to rectify that in the next link of this article.

www.cloudappreciationsociety.org

If you are under the age of 35, well then you disgust me. No, hang on. Not disgust. Arouse me, that’s it. Anyway, you probably don’t know what a ZX81 is. Shame on you. Forget all of you kids pretending you don’t like Margaret Thatcher when you can’t name one thing she did (she invented Mr.Whippy style ice cream – FACT…. ish) you should be reading up on your computer history. The ZX81 was one of the first ever home computers, and even in its day (1981) it was considered pretty pony. Have a look why.

www.zx81museum.net

I may know a lot, but I know very little about glue. Gluing fabric to glass? Is that even possible? Why would anyone want to do it? If they HAD to do it for some deviant reason, how would they know which glue to use? They would go here, of course –

www.thistothat.com

Finally this month I have a rare treat for you – Tom Selleck, waterfalls and of course, sandwiches. Enjoy!

www.selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com

*I had literally no emails regarding my under representation of clouds.

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That’s it for now. Do please keep sending me your websites. I don’t have a proper job so I need something to keep me off the streets. Pop along to www.facebook.com/iainleeofficial

You can read Iain Lee’s very own take on the internet here on the 123-reg blog every last Friday of the month.

A familiar face on television since he got his first break landing the job hosting Channel 4’s thrice weekly topical comedy show the 11 O’Clock Show at the age of 25, Iain is also an award winning radio presenter, top podcast creator and a genuinely funny guy with an eye for the bizarre.

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How many emails do you get a day? According to Radicati’s recent report the average is about 78 and typically costs workers 2.5 hours a day just managing them all!

So it’s safe to say that there’s quite a lot of pressure on the inbox which means from the marketing perspective it’s getting harder to differentiate yourself. Just use your own circumstances as an example. Count how many sales and marketing emails you get a day. Now count how many you actually read. If you’re anything like me you spend more time hunting for the “Unsubscribe” than reading their message.

And, of course, the situation is getting worse as more businesses use email because it is practically free and instant. This means that our brains are being programmed to filter out ‘junk email’ more aggressively and that means any marketing email either has to carry an extraordinarily powerful message or be from someone we already know and trust. (I think the latter is more easily obtained than the former, but how?)

Well, trust (and, therefore, interest in what your email has to say) is gained by your recipient requesting to receive your email rather than just getting it out of the blue because you bought a database with their email address on. (This is called ‘permission marketing’ and you can read all about in Seth Godin’s game-changing book of the same name.)

But how do you get someone to give you their email address in the first place?

The answer is to give them something of value on your website. So, let’s imagine that you sell TVs. People are coming to your website wanting information about TVs not just to see what you sell. However, some of them won’t know a lot about the products you offer and will need help. This is your perfect opportunity to give them some useful information in the form of a ‘buyer’s guide’ PDF document which explains all about modern TVs and how to choose the right one. And, you’ve guessed it, in order to get the download they have to give you their email address.

So the simple way to get prospects to leave their email address is to give them some information of value for free. Once they do that the email gets automatically sent by your website and they will open it above all the other marketing guff they’ve received that day because they asked to receive it.

Now the trick is not to stop at that one email (because they will have forgotten all about you by tomorrow!) but to send another email a few days or a week later. Again the email you send gives them some great information which makes their life a little easier – by making life easier you also make it easier for them to buy from you as you’re being helpful and not just ramming your latest offer into their inbox. (You’re also differentiating yourself as an expert in your field which marks you out from the competition.)

Now you are sending out several emails all helping your prospect by giving them useful and valuable information which gains their trust – and once you have their trust sending out a more sales oriented email will have a far greater effect.

This is a winning technique and yet few businesses do it (and of those that do few do it well). If you follow this strategy you will find your emails read, absorbed and acted on and not just received and deleted!

Getting this right on your website can be the difference between having life-long relationships with commercially productive customers or having anonymous visitors bouncing off your website never leaving their details. So this is a critically important technique to be testing in your marketing.

If you’ve got a question on this subject the post it in the Comments below and I’ll reply as soon as I can (only for the next 7 days).

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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According to SocialBakers there are 31 million active Facebook users in the UK. That’s just over 50% of our total population. The largest group are the 25-34 year olds and the male/female split is about 50:50.

On the surface this looks like the ideal place for every business to be because it gives access to an unprecedented volume of potential customers. The natural effect on many businesses is that they feel a pressure to join and attempt to sell through Facebook simply because 31 million people can’t be wrong. Or can they?

Well, just because Facebook has some big numbers doesn’t mean that as businesses we should be impressed or beguiled into joining because it’s free (an attractive option for any business).

Let’s look at Facebook for what it is – an online space in which people (and businesses) can create profiles of themselves and network with their friends. It is a personal and social space. Now have a think about other personal and social spaces we inhabit; our homes, the pub, restaurants, the gym, parties and so on. What you notice about them is that selling in those spaces is almost always confined to products and services relevant to the individual not the business they work for. For example, it’s far easier to sell cosmetics at someone’s home than it would be sell them stationary for their business.

In other words the ‘environment’ that the selling takes place in is very important. Just because you can sell from an online space (Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate. (Few consultancies, for example would try to sell their services on Ebay.)

So what about Facebook?

Well, people in the act of Facebook-ing are typically not in the mindset to receive sales messages about their business because at that point they are mentally not at work. Consequently it becomes quite difficult to sell them products and services related to their work. It would be far easier to sell consumer based goods which help them on a personal level.

Broadly speaking if you sell business to business then Facebook may well be hard going because you’ll be dragging people back into a work mentality when they’re in a social mentality. However, if you sell business to consumer then you’re in with a much better chance and the more personal the product or service the greater the chance of a sale. (Which business do you think would do better on Facebook; selling brake shoes to the automotive industry or an ironing service? Obviously, the latter is more suited to Facebook because it is a personal service that can harness the power of recommendation through friends, likes and referrals.)

It’s worth remembering that in marketing you can only ‘know’ what you can prove with real data. Meaning that if you are still not sure whether Facebook is a worthy marketing platform then run a small scale test to find out (but do make sure you have a means of monitoring the result).

Finally, before you embark on building your Facebook community have a think about whether it is an appropriate selling space for you and remember that for most businesses commercial success is measured in pounds and pence and not just in likes and friends.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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Your website sells 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. It is accessible to over 2.4 billion potential customers. It never gets sick, has a holiday or asks for a pay rise. It always presents itself consistently and is at its best 100% of the time. It can even take money from customers you never meet while you sleep.

If it were an actual person they would be your dream employee!

You would also want them to operate at peak performance to maximise their potential and to make that happen you would invest your company’s time, money and resources.

The reality is your website could be your best salesperson.

However, for many businesses the reality is far from the potential, but just why is that? I think it’s partly because businesses often view their website as a ‘thing’ – a machine that is on a par with the photocopier (but visited less by the staff). Even worse it’s an invisible machine because it’s not actually in the office but instead floats around in cyberspace.

And the blame for any website’s underperformance is frequently levelled at the design or the web developers or a lack of traffic or some other external factor. Rarely does a business admit that the failure is down to how they thought about (or behaved towards) the website. Such businesses look to improving their online presence by firing the current website and building another – only to suffer the same problem a couple of years later which they try to solve by firing the website again. Obviously, you can’t solve a problem by repeating the mistake which caused it in the first place.

As you can tell viewing a website as a ‘thing’ which exists outside the business and fails because of external reasons beyond perceived control is pretty negative and usually results in underperformance. But read that first paragraph again. Doesn’t it fill you with hope and excitement that your business could have at its disposal such a powerful selling tool? One which could change a business’s fortunes, help it grow through a recession or add a fabulous new profit stream.

To make that happen it requires the business to change its view of the website from a ‘thing’ to being a ‘person’. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• A) How much time do you spend working on your website? B) Is it less than the amount you would spend with one of your staff?
• A) How much money have you invested in your website? B) Is it less than you would expect to pay for a salesperson?
• A) What resources have you given to your website? – for example, hosting, training of staff, investing in web specific content (videos, PR, etc.), payment systems and so on. B) Is it less than the resources you might give to a salesperson?

If you answered “Yes” to any B questions then you may want to rebalance your efforts.

How much you give to each is up to you but be flexible and be guided by your circumstances. For example, if you’ve not got much money then increase time and resources. If you’ve lot pots of cash but little time, buy in people to spend time and develop resources for you.

Viewing your website as a person requires a fundamental shift in thinking but it also means you will become the website’s advocate, mentor and assistant. The consequence of this is your business will value its website and a valued website will become a valuable website securing its ability to sell for you now and in the years ahead.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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In my last blog I gave you 5 of the Golden Rules for Ecommerce Websites. Here are the remaining five all of which are focused on increasing your sales or saving you money. Let’s start with the latter…

#6 DON’T BE AMAZON

If you are just about to start building your ecommerce site then don’t, like many website owners, be tempted to add features like, “people who bought this also bought…” or customer reviews, wish lists or star ratings systems. This largely happens because people see this functionality on Amazon and believe that replicating those features will result in more sales. Honestly, it won’t. There’s nothing more of a turn-off for a consumer than to see ‘no review’, or ‘no rating’ because the traffic isn’t there to create it. It’s best to focus on creating an easy-to-buy interface which gives great information and compels the user to act through sincere, focused marketing. Avoiding these complexities will cost you less and get your website completed earlier.

#7 INCENTIVISE, INCENTIVISE

Nothing motivates people more than the feeling that they’re getting a bargain. This is a powerful psychological buying motivator which any good ecommerce site should instantly take advantage of.  Simply, make people offers, show them discounted ranges, offer additional services as part of the purchase, run a sale and so on. The options are endless.

#8 UP-SELL

Here’s an example of an up-sell – A few years ago in America McDonald’s staff asked EVERY customer if they wanted to ‘SuperSize’ their meal for an additional cost. As a result they increased their profits by 25% in the first week. In fact, it became a statistical probability that 11% of customers would say “yes” to the question that cost McDonalds nothing to ask!

An up-sell is one of the fastest ways to instantly increase your profits. Simply, find something that sits with your customer’s purchase and, at the point they buy, offer them an up-sell. Here are a few examples…

• Camera Equipment… Up-sell; Memory Cards, Batteries, Lens Cloths, etc.
• Software… Up-sell; 1 Year’s Upgrades, Maintenance, Related Products, etc.
• Baby Pushchair… Up-sell; Blankets, Toys, Baby Car Seat, etc.
• Any product that needs batteries…Up-sell; Batteries!

A percentage of customers will respond to your up-sell giving your website an instant pay rise!

#9 THE POWER OF EMAIL

Make sure you take every opportunity to get your visitor’s email address and when they give it to you (often though the purchase process) email them immediately and regularly thereafter. You can use this free marketing method to advise them of new products, new sales, deals and up-sell opportunities. The wonderful law of averages means that a proportion of those who you email will buy from you again – it’s exactly the same principle as the up-sell and a no-cost way to quickly increase your online profits!

#10 TO HEAVEN IN A SHOPPING BASKET

If 100 people begin a shopping basket with you it’s unlikely all 100 will complete the buying process. In fact you’ll lose some with every click from basket confirmation to registration to payment details to final confirmation. However, you can minimize that loss by improving each step/page.

This is a huge subject so I’m going to confine myself to recommending that you take a look at how the major ecommerce websites use theirs; www.play.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.johnlewis.co.uk, etc.. Get a sense of how they minimise customer ‘drop-off’ and try to replicate that on your own website. (Hint: The simpler the process, the more customers complete the purchase.)

Now you have 10 Golden Rules you can immediately put into practice and get instant results from. All that’s left for you to do it turn my words into cash in your bank.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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In the middle of economic mayhem here are some mind boggling numbers to cheer you up!

The average UK consumer spends £1,083 online (more than in any other major country) and our ecommerce spending is set to increase to £221 billion by 2016.  Currently there are over 32 million people spending their hard earned cash online in the UK accounting for £1 of every £10 that is spent!

So whilst the high street may be suffering the online world is on the up which means that if you’re considering building or updating your ecommerce site you couldn’t be doing it at a better time.  So, to help you towards online success I am going to give you five Golden Rules for Ecommerce Websites.

These rules are deceptively simple but absolutely vital to success. (You can even apply them to many non-ecommerce websites as well.)

#1 THREE CLICKS PLEASE

The most important part of your ecommerce site is your products. Yet (with a baffling regularity) many sites bury their products so deeply you’ll get repetitive strain injury clicking to find them. Keep your products at the ‘surface’ and no more than 3 clicks from your home page. Organise your navigation to get people to the point where they can buy as quickly as possible and cut out any unnecessary clicks on the way. You should always use your homepage to showcase your top selling products giving your visitor the fastest route to buy.

#2 GET INFORMATION RICH

A major reason why people ‘bounce’ off ecommerce websites is that they don’t get enough information about the product/service to be convinced to buy. So, give them everything; features, benefits, specifications, manuals, testimonials, case studies, pictures, and so on. The more you give upfront the more potential objections you knock out in the buyer’s mind making your site more useful and, therefore, better than your competitors. With all the objections gone your visitor will surely buy. This is a zero cost way to supercharge your sales.

#3 PICTURE PERFECT

A great photo can make the sale. (Equally a lousy photo can lose the sale.) Give your visitor the best photo you can, make it clickable so you can see a larger version and put up several photos showing the back, front, sides and detail (especially if it’s a luxury item).

#4 PRICE

In a recent Gartner survey price was identified as the most important information visitors looked for. So, don’t hide your price – be proud of it! Tell them how much they’ll get for their money, why it’s worth every penny and, if you can, offer a guarantee to back up the sale. (Don’t forget you can use ‘strike-through’ prices to show how much cheaper your price is against RRP. If you do use this method always show the amount in pounds and pence that you have discounted.)

#5 DELIVERY

Guess what came second in the survey as the next most important piece of information visitors want to see? The delivery price!  Quite a few sites hide their delivery charge which can cause a lot of frustration from the consumer’s side.  This is not good practice. A better approach is to show the P&P on the product page or at least show the range of delivery prices. If that’s not possible have a dedicated page accessible from the main navigation clearly explaining your charges. However, the best alternative, from your customer’s perspective, is to offer fee delivery.

Next week I’ll give you five more Golden Rules to help you convert more visitors into paying customers.

Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands.

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