Where are you?

Where is your business, how do customers get in touch with you? Going back to fundamentals - the internet is not for a bunch of geeks and hackers, its very much mainstream and its a communication highway.

Communication is a two way thing. You may be communicating with your customers via your website, or at least you are providing a message, how well you do that and the response you get turns it from a message to communication. One of the simplest, easiest things you can do to encourage communication on your website is to make your contact details easy to find.

Email, fax, telephone or even a letter - each person, each of your customers will have their own personal preference for contact. You could put your contact details on every page or you could have a prominent link in your menu/navigation that says something simple like "Contact Us". Use a phrase like "Location" or "Info Centre" and you could confuse your website visitor and make them stop and think about how to contact you - in that moment you may lose them, another business like yours is only a click away. Use a phrase that everyone understands like "Contact Us" or "Get in Touch" a phrase so common on the internet that people don't need to think about it and you are the business that receives the lead.

Having all your contact details on your website and making them easy to find enables more people to communicate with you - more leads from your website which in turn leads to more sales.

Shorten your email links

How can you help the person receiving your email, who may be your next customer, to follow a link and find a page on your website?

If the URL's on your website look like this http://www.mailroom.co.nz/Default.aspx?page=1597 - what a mouthful! Then you have what is commonly called a CMS or Content Management System. A CMS is great for updating your website but those links are awful - .aspx? - what is that!

If you want to shorten a link you are sending out by email thus making life a little easier for your customer, try one of the websites that create short aliases from long URL's, like Tr.im - http://tr.im .

The Tr.im website generates a short URL for you, from a long URL that you enter into the website. For example the longish mailRoom URL above was tr.immed to http://tr.im/lDzl & tr.im/jxZZ will redirect you to the homepage of the Spiral website.

The service is free.

PS. If you get bored you could try tinyURL-whacking - placing random letters and numbers after the forward slash in an attempt to hit interesting sites without knowing in advance what they will be.

Blogging for small businesses – are you missing out?

Business blogs can be very effective for marketing, PR and branding purposes. They help differentiate you in a crowded marketplace – especially if they create buzz, eliciting feedback and comments.

To promote your business, write about something you are passionate about, something related to your business, perhaps trends, latest releases or "how to" tips, this way you position yourself as the expert in your field. Write in a personal, maybe casual manner so that you can impart some of your personality through your blog then if people like what they read they will contact you for information or to leave feedback - now you’re doing business! Just remember to put your contact details in your blog profile.

You can write about anything you love - short stories about how you got to where you are now, case studies, snippets from your everyday experience in your industry, these all help establish your brand and promote your business.

If blogging sounds like something for your business you can be up and going in just minutes with the help of either of these two popular, easy to use websites - www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com. It’s free, you can do it all online, there’s no technical stuff to get your head around and in just a few minutes you could be increasing the profile of your business – wouldn’t you like more buzz and customers!