I confess, I’m a member of the mobile generation. I’m not one of the annoying types who answer their phone at restaurants or during meetings, but I do carry my mobile everywhere and thanks to Telstra’s NextG service, I’m continually connected to the internet.

There are a growing number of constantly connected consumers, who, just like me, browse the web from their mobile phone, on an exceptionally small screen. We are a frustrated lot too, because most websites are not built with small screens in mind.

Many people don’t believe their website will need to be adapted for mobiles, but if your business does financial transactions over the phone, or have a retail store, chances are a percentage of your customers are already trying to find you. Here’s a couple of real life examples of how someone with a mobile might be interacting with your business.

Restaurants

While enjoying an afternoon out of the house, a couple decide to go to a restaurant for dinner, but aren’t near a phone book. They look up the restaurant’s website on their phone to find the phone number.

• Quickly seeking a phone number is currently the most common reason someone might use their phone-based internet provider.

Real Estate

While driving past an interesting property, someone might notice a For Sale sign out the front and look up a real estate’s website to find out the price of the property.

• Looking for specific information on a business website outside of operating hours is realistic, and will rise as customers become increasingly time poor.

Retail Stores & Attractions

While out and about we might want to check the closing time of a particular store, or opening times of an attraction.

• Easy to find trading hours is an essential asset on websites.

Accommodation

On the way for a weekend getaway, you forget how to get to an accomodation property. You whip out your trusty mobile phone and look up the website for directions, or just for an address to enter into your GPS unit.

• Driving directions and addresses are handy additions to your website for customers.

Your web designer should easily be able to adapt your website to create an easy to read version for a mobile phone in 30 minutes - 2 hours, but having all the information a mobile user might require is important in the first place.

The next time you see a friend with one of those fandangled-looking mobiles that can surf the internet, ask if they can look up your website and have a go at browsing it, or finding specific information. You’ll be suprised how it looks!

A couple of people in my office have recently been searching for a new home, and have both lamented at how the real estate agents haven’t quite embraced the web as well as they could, especially considering they’re such an ideal web-based business. The frustrations they’ve experienced are echoed worldwide in other industries too.

Here’s how we think real estate agents could stand out from their competitors:

Detailed and accurate information

The biggest thing driving us mad are the things wasting our time. Finding out the property doesn’t match the description written in the listing is big on the time wasting list, but also needing to call the agency to ask for an address is driving us insane.

The primary reason customers turn to the internet is to save time researching. Agents compound this problem with boring, short descriptions that provide very little information.

Agents need to carefully consider the suitability of properties to particular target demographics and consider the questions that demographic would ask when seeking a property.

Take great photos

We’ve been giggling about the abundance of awful photography. Some are photos are date stamped 2004, there’s a great kitchen shot with a big FLU INJECTION reminder tacked onto the fridge, and someone tried to rubber stamp something out of the back yard and botched it up. Many listings have no photos at all!

Photos will do more of the selling than any words you write, so ensure they’re clear, in focus and recent. Have a peek at my previous post on taking photos for your website.

Real estate cliches

There are so many sayings that need to be erased from the agent’s vocabulary. Here’s the shortlist of ones making us shudder:

• Neat as a pin
• Location, location, location
• Properties like this do not come up very often
• If you sleep on it, you won’t sleep in it

Don’t these just get your goat? OK, enough with the cliches.

WEB 2.0 is a trendy new IT term glossing the front page of business magazines. While I usually detest the use of jargon, web 2.0 is exciting, has intelligent business applications, and is a whole lot of fun.

Most of us have already had some involvement with web 2.0 websites. As far as definitions go, consider a web 2.0 website to be an interactive one. It encourages collaboration with its visitors, usually by allowing control of content. At a grassroots level, web 2.0 allows for everyday people to have more power on the internet by openly sharing their opinions and creative endeavours.

Social networking

These websites have changed the shape of how people use the internet through mass interactivity. Many users swear by these tools and believe they’ve helped them organise their life. Many businesses also believe they waste a lot of time, but that’s
another article altogether.

The two biggest social networking websites are facebook and MySpace. Essentially, both websites allow you to create a profile and then control the information that exists on these profiles. LinkedIn is a similar concept, but concentrates more heavily on the business community.

If you’ve never looked at facebook before, now is a good time to start as it has begun allowing businesses and organisations to have profiles. This can give outstanding exposure to your events, new product releases or other interesting developments happening in your organisation. Best of all, it’s free.

Photo sharing

Now that most people own a digital camera, we wonder what to do with all those pictures we’re taking! Picasa and Flickr try to address this problem.

Both websites allow you to manage and upload your digital photos and display them publicly or privately for others to view. There are great benefits here for sharing with family and close friends but for some selected businesses, there are marketing opportunities as well.

These photo tools are great for travellers researching holidays and you can bet there are people searching for ‘Cairns’, ‘Great Barrier Reef’ and ‘Port Douglas’ to see other people’s holiday snaps.

If you have a business that can be showcased through great photography, consider uploading some of your best photos to further promote your products through this avenue.

Blogs

It seems even the smallest business has a blog these days. Essentially, a blog allows a business to add newsworthy snippets of information in a quick and easy to read format on a website.

For your customers, blogs provide a fantastic feature called a comment. This allows anyone to leave a message against your articles, ask questions or share experiences.

Many of these web 2.0 websites are large global ventures but there are plenty of small business applications too. The whole concept of web 2.0 surrounds giving your customers and website visitors more power through interactions. But to come up with great ideas on how your customers can interact with your products and services, you really need to stop being frightened of the internet and spend some time learning what other people are doing with it.

Some clever web 2.0 features I’ve seen:

Think Geek (thinkgeek.com)

Allows customers to add photos of themselves using the products they have listed for sale. Anyone who submits an action shot enjoys 10 per cent off their next purchase. Customers feel chuffed they got a photo on a website and of course, the company benefits from future sales generated through the discount.

Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com.au)

Encourages readers to leave comments on news articles to gauge public opinion on current affairs.

Taste (taste.com.au)

Website visitors post messages against recipes which provides fantastic feedback to future cooks on how to alter the recipe for new delicious versions. Its discussion forum also allows keen cooks to share ideas and is a wealth of information on family recipes and tips.

The benefits of allowing your visitors to interact with your product online are immense. Brand loyalty, customer satisfaction and viral marketing are within easy reach using web 2.0 concepts.

Having under construction pages on a mostly finished website is a clear sign of a disorganised business owner. While it’s tempting to make an under construction page as a self reminder to later write the text for that page, it doesn’t send a positive message to your customers.

Web surfers get frustrated when they click on a menu item and visit an empty page. Some people think that an under construction page will entice users to come back later, but honestly, we’re all just too busy to remember which websites might have a page coming soon.

Remember your visitors don’t know what pages you’re planning to add, so best advice is to simply leave these pages out. Don’t have them linked from the menu, and don’t give any hint that a new page is coming.

Just launch it, then advise with a great email newsletter.

I can’t be the only person out there who sighs at the size of her inbox every morning!

Being efficient on email is tricky for me because I get such a large volume of email email day, and I spend a large chunk of most days in meetings. It’s especially tricky if I’ve had a day off.

Here’s some tricks of the trade I’ve employed over the years to help reduce my email stress, and improve my customer service.

Leave only unattended emails in your inbox.

As soon as you’ve replied to an email, forwarded it to a colleague for action or talked about the contents in a phone call, move it out of your inbox. Either file it, or put it in a quick To Be Filed folder for processing later.

Don’t use your inbox as a task list.

As soon as you check your email, check for the ones which require you to do something which will take time, and put these on your task list.

Upgrade to Outlook 2007.

If you’re still on Outlook 2003, upgrade as soon as possible. Outlook 2007 has outstanding and superior search capability which is far quicker than it’s predecessors. This means if you need to find an email pronto, you can, no hassles. I’ve run Outlook 2007 since June 2007 and am very happy with it.

BCC follow ups.

If you know you want to follow up an email you sent, BCC yourself a copy as you send it. Leave this in your inbox until you receive a reply, and then file the reply and the BCC when you’re done.

24h turnaround.

We all inevitably get phone calls and follow up emails if we don’t get back to people quickly. I aim for a 24h turnaround with all emails to avoid the time wasting follow ups and embarrassing apologies. I am in the technology business after all, if anyone can reply to an email quickly, you’d hope it’s be me!

Have a good look at your statistics and examine the pages which contain a web form, most notably, your contact form.

It is important to know the number of people who visit these pages, because this is the number of your luke-warm customers. A percentage of these made it through the form and contacted you, and the rest didn’t.

Why didn’t they contact you?

One of the primary reasons people do not fill out contact forms is because websites request too much detail from a potential customer.

Long forms scare people. They look like they’ll take a lot of time, and Lord knows we all don’t have much.

Simplify your forms down to the absolute bare minimum of information that you require to conduct your initial enquiry with this potential customer.

For most businesses, you should ask for just the following:

• Name
• Email Address
• Comments

If you are a phone kind of person, consider also asking for a phone number. These three or four fields should be enough information for you to get the ball rolling.

This principle also applies to other web forms that are of an initial enquiry nature such as an availability request or quick quote.

For bookings and orders it is a given that you require much more information to complete the sale, and this doesn’t worry customers so much as they expect you will need more details.

Attract More Customers. Photo by Jungle Jim’s International Market

When you walk into a retail shop and sales staff immediate come over to you and ask if they can help you before you have a good look around. Do you get that awkward, uncomfortable feeling that they’re desperate to sell you something, and you just want to leave the store?

Well asking too many details in a basic enquiry gives your potential customers a similar feeling. Keep forms short and sweet.

Photo by Kenna Takahashi

Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of your goals when building a website. We get ties up by the visuals; where photos go, how logos are positioned, what shade of green should you use… those sorts of fiddly bits. But the important part, perhaps the most important part, is keeping focussed on the goals.

Each page of your website should be trying to kick some goals, and before you even start writing the text for your pages you should have a firm grasp on which goal you’re aiming for.

Here’s some examples of what goals your website should be targeting.

Home Page

• Encourage further exploration of your website
• Allow easily visible contact details
• Provide a clear path to the revenue stream of your website

Company Profile Page

• Raise credibility of the company and its key staff

Newsletter Archives Page

• Increase subscriptions to your newsletter database
• Provide great content for search engines

Contact Page

• Encourage enquiries

Usually your website will have many goals, with most having the ultimate goal of generating sales. Achieving your website goals will be infinitely more successful with the use of strong calls-to-action.

The anonymity of the internet allows businesses to easily hide behind a professional design and snappy text. Sometimes this can be a disadvantage though, with businesses coming across as stuffy, or bigger than they actually are.

It’s easy to forget that contact with small business is one the of the major advantages of eCommerce. I love buying from boutique and niche operators from places far away, and many others do too.

I am subscribed to a highly enjoyable eNewsletter written by Carol Dorman of Quill Writing Services. Carol’s newsletter is aimed at small-medium businesses and tackles communication and marketing issues. This article is extracted from a recent newsletter, I encourage you to subscribe.

Ever had a touch of the ‘bureaucracies’? A twinge of ‘official-itis’? You may not have heard of these conditions but, as a small business owner, perhaps you’ll recognise some of the symptoms:

A web page that tells visitors everything that the business does and how it does it using only words with a minimum of three syllables to demonstrate that it is sophisticated, knowledgeable about almost everything and will always know more than them even if it’s not in the business’ field of expertise.

Your web page should:

• Be friendly
• Make visitors feel welcome
• Be easy to understand while illustrating expertise
• Use bullet points and appropriate punctuation to enhance the reader’s experience.

These are pretty extreme examples but there is often the tendency to keep our selves out of our written communications with customers and prospects.

Why is this? Could it be that we’re afraid of being seen as less than professional if our customers see the human side of our business?

Perhaps it feels safer to hide behind: “Our office is obliged to remind you that payment is due” rather than: “I’d like to remind you that your payment is due.”

After all, isn’t it better if a client gets mad at The Office instead of me?

Let’s look at it another way. One thing that’s nice about living in a small hamlet is that business is always personal. The Post Office lady knows me by name, and I know her. The same with the couple who run the General Store. It’s never just about milk, bread and pop-rivets; there’s always a chat and a laugh as well.

What about you? Do you prefer a recorded message asking for your customer code when phoning a business or a real human being with a friendly welcome who asks how he can help?

It’s time to appreciate how great you are for your business. After all, it wouldn’t exist without you. So, let your customers in. Let them see who you are - the living, breathing, marvellous and fabulous being behind all the marvellous and fabulous things that you do.

Start with your letters. Write them from you instead of your office. Think of your customer as a living, breathing human sitting in a chair, holding your letter. Imagine her wearing glasses and reading by the light of an art-deco lamp. She loves that lamp; it’s been in the family for years.

Now write - to her.

You are the heart of your business. So let that heart shine through!

A call to action encourages someone to do something. Your website visitors need calls to action so they will do the things on your website you want them to do. Calls to action are extremely important for the success of your website.

Great websites use calls to action throughout their text to tell visitors what they should do next. This is especially important at the end of a page when you’re at the most risk of your visitor heading back to the search engine to further refine what they’re looking for.

You will recognise these calls to action from television:

• Call now for 12 free steak knives
• Vote for Danielle McKay to win Australian Idol
• Email a question to the ROSwall

Your website needs to emulate the calls to action of traditional marketing styled toward the goals you’re trying to achieve. Here’s some examples:

• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Learn more about fly fishing in Far North Queensland
• Contact us for a free quote
• Take a charter flight over the Great Barrier Reef
• Book today to receive your free bottle of wine

I’ve italicised the parts of these calls to action that should be linked. By linking to the content people expect to receive on the next page you increase the chance of them completing this action. It’s also very helpful for your search engine rankings to include good keywords within these links.

Have you got a links page on your website, or are you thinking of asking your webmaster to create you one? Don’t.

Links pages started as a logical place to store the websites you linked to in order to raise your search engine profile. I am not a fan of reciprocal linking as you might have read in previous posts, and ditching the links page is an extension of my distaste for this marketing method.

I never look at people’s links pages, and of the websites I monitor that have a links page, it is always the least popular page on a website. There are much better ways of linking to websites which your customers may be interested in.

Remember it is your customers who pay your bills. Make the website for them - not for the search engines.