Find My Website! – The Official Mantis Technologies Blog

So you just got your new website up and running. It’s now been a day, a week or even a month and things seem to have not got off the ground. You search for your site in Google and can’t find it, you barely (if at all) get any sales or leads and you start to wonder if having a website is all it’s cracked up to be.

For many start up businesses and those new to running their own website, the most obvious and easy ways to promote your site are not always that obvious. Running a successful website is not as simple as paying a web designer to build and launch a site for you then sitting back and waiting.

Once you launch your website, that should only be seen as the start of the process of running a successful website. I have outlined below my top 5 tips for promoting your website and getting it kick started.

1) Submit your site to Google.
This is a free resource and is a way of getting your new website noticed and out there. You can do this by going to http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html. Make sure you not only submit the URL (website address) of your website but also make sure you list your business in the business directory.
The business directory is used when people are searching Google maps and Google even uses the business directory to show the initial results when searching locations (eg. searching for solicitors in nerang, qld, Australia)

2) Signage
Do you have a shop front or office with signage? If so it is absolutely essential you update your signs to include your website address. You never know how many people passing by will take your website address down to check out later and even contact you.

3) Email signature
It is absolutely essential that all of your emails should have a signature which is basically your name, company name, phone number, email address and website address. This way people receiving your email (or even receiving emails forwarded that you had originally sent) can easily find your website.

4) Search engine optimisation
Just listing yourself in Google will not get you on the first page of results. It is best to either do a course on search engine optimisation or hire a professional such as Mantis Technologies to do the work for you. This could mean the difference between being in the top 3 of searches or on page 30 where no one will find you.

5) Facebook
Many of us now use Facebook to catch up with friends and family and stay in touch with people all over the world. Facebook has a great feature called ‘pages’ which allows you to actually set up a page for your business. This allows you to invite people to become ‘fans’ of your business and automatically be updated when you post comments, news, photos or any other relevant information to your business page.
This is a free, easy to use and very effective service.

For more ideas on how to promote your website and harness the power of the Internet for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us at http://www.mantistech.com.au/contact_us.aspx

Why is it that some ecommerce websites seem to be raking in money while others struggle to make a sale?

In this months article, we explain the top 5 tips to help you avoid common mistakes and really get the most out of your ecommerce website.

1) Keep the process simple
When customers visit your site, they have one purpose.. they want to be able to easily find the products they want, add them to their shopping cart and check out when they are ready.

The customer should be able to select a category, brand, style, etc, or search for a product, click on it to view more details, add it to the cart and then have the choice of checking out or continuing to shop. Our research shows this is the most intuitive way for people to shop online.

2) Freight charges and options
The number one cause of people abandoning shopping carts and not completing the purchase is how you handle freight.
You should always make it clear how much freight will be so when the customer is completing the purchase they are not stung by an unexpected freight charge. This can make the customer feel that the bargain they thought they were getting is no longer a bargain.

You may choose to offer a flat fee, free shipping if an order is over a certain amount or work off Australia post or courier rates. If you decide to go with a flat fee or free shipping if the order is a certain amount, then this should be advertised heavily in your site by mentioning this on your home page, checkout page and even in the header section of the site.

If you decide to use Australia Post or a courier that works off the size and weight of the order, then you should have an easy to use postage calculator that enables customers to easily put in their postcode or country and estimate how much their freight will be before adding the product to their shopping cart.

Where possible, you should also offer ‘standard’ and ‘express’ freight. The budget conscious will choose standard freight to feel they are saving money and others will choose express freight because they don’t mind paying a little bit more to get their delivery quicker.

3) Discounts and Promotions
Discounts and promotions can offer great incentives for customers to buy now or buy more items.
Experiment with offering a free freight if multiple items are purchased. You could try giving a discount if a certain amount is spent, even offering a promotional code to use on the next purchase to get a discount.
Discounts and promotions are great ways to sweeten the deal and encourage customers to step over the line and make the purchase now.

4) Tap into your own customers
One of the biggest mistakes we see by ecommerce websites is that they are constantly hunting for new customers while ignoring those who have purchased before.
The most successful ecommerce websites take advantage of their ever growing customer database by regularly contacting them with special offers, new product news and other promotional material.

If someone has purchased from you previously then they are obviously a qualified customer interested in your products and willing to spend money with you. By using an email marketing tool such as www.mantismail.com you can send regular email newsletters (we recommend once a month) highlighting any new products and special offers you have on.

Another great way to generate extra sales is through SMS marketing. It is well known that SMS marketing is even more effective that Email marketing and an SMS message gets to your customers there and then wherever they are.
Simply sending an SMS saying something like “24 hour sale starts now.. Check our website for great deals.. www.mantistech.com.au” can prompt your customers to visit your website quickly and start shopping.
Here is a bit of exciting news for MantisShop users. We can now easily integrate SMS marketing into your content manager. Contact us for more details.at http://www.mantistech.com.au/contact_us.aspx

5) Handle customer registration efficiently
You should never, ever prompt a customer to register their details before they can add items to their shopping cart. Customers will only ever want to fill in a form with their details when they are ready to make the purchase.

The flow of the shopping experience should be:

• Browse for products through categories, brands, etc. or through searching.
• Add items to the shopping cart.
• View the contents of the shopping cart and either continue shopping or choose to check out.
• Fill in the customer registration details (or just an email address and password if they are a returning customer). Ensure you only ask for the customers name, contact numbers and postal address.. don’t force them to fill out a survey.
• Fill in the delivery details (there should be an option to tick or button to press to choose to deliver to the customer’s address that they have already filled in or the option to put in another address to send the product to a loved one or colleague).
• Review the price break down of the sub total, freight, GST (if applicable) and the total.
• Choose a payment method (credit card, bank to bank transfer, fax credit card details and cheque / money order are the most popular payment methods).
• Receive an order confirmation on the screen and via email.

By following these tips, new customers should flock to your ecommerce website and start filling their shopping carts with your products!

Over the past 6 – 12 months, I have seen an increase in the instances of ’spam bombing’.

Spam bombing is the practice of spammers to find a valid domain name (sometimes through Google), generate random email addresses from that domain name and send out hundreds or thousands of email spam that says it is ‘from’ the addresses they have generated.

For example, say you have a domain name called ‘fredsbikes.com.au’. A spam bomber will then use software to randomly generate emails from ‘fredsbikes.com.au’ (eg. admin@fredsbikes.com.au, sales@fredsbikes.com.au, info@fredsbikes.com.au, etc.).

How can you tell if you have had your domain name spam bombed?
This is simple, you will notice within a period of a few hours up to 24 hours you will receive hundreds of emails saying they were undeliverable from your email accounts.

Why do spammers do this?
In the combat against spam, many mail servers now check incoming mail against mail records of remote servers to ensure the email coming in is from a valid email address. If it is, it will then allow it through. By spammers ‘tricking’ the mail servers by using domain names of legitimate businesses, they can get past these checks and get the spam through.

The rejected email you receive is simply the spam that did not make it through due to being sent to invalid or full mail boxes. You receive the email as the mail server sends it back to who it thinks is the originator.

How do I stop this?
Unfortunately there is no way to stop spammers from doing this as they are not actually sending email from your website or host. They are finding your domain name through public places and then sending the emails from their own servers or other servers they have access to.

You can however reduce the occurrence of spam bombing using your domain. The first thing to do is check if you have a ‘catch all’ email address. This is an email address that will catch any email sent to your domain.

You should instead set up individual email accounts for the actual addresses you use and then disable the catch all. This will then reject any invalid accounts and can stop some of the spam from being accepted by remote mail servers.

The other thing you should do is never publish your email addresses on your website. Spammers use special programs to scan websites for advertised email addresses to send spam to and also use for spam bombing others. A contact form is a better option as it hides the email address that the enquiry is being sent to.

2006/07 saw the arrival of the social media revolution. If you have heard of Myspace, Facebook, blogs, RSS or You Tube then you have heard of some of the elements of social media.
This article is an introduction to social media and how web site owners and designers can harness this technology to generate traffic.

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