Building a business online, not just a website

Customers are not just for Christmas.  They need to be loved, looked after and appreciated long after the wrapping has been taken off.

Loyalty can never be mis-underestimated but it often is.

It is a proven fact that it is much cheaper to re-market to your current customers and costs less in time and money to resell to them than to find new customers.

Why do you think mobile phone service providers bend over backwards with discounts when you are threatening to leave them?

I’ve suddenly been offered amazing tariffs when I said I was going to go to their rivals.

(Note: in the end I did as it was too late and I wanted an iPhone at the time and they didn’t have an agreement with Apple to provide iPhones and tried to tell me that the Nokia 95 was a better phone than the 3G handset… that’s a debate for another day and was back in 2007 anyway).

But how do you keep customers and keep them keen.  Here’s a few tips that might help you:

Listen to your customers

The more you know and learn about your customers the better.

User test how they interact with your product and watch them use it.  Meet them and ask them questions about how you can make your product better to help them.  Pick up the phone and call them.  Listen to their problems and build a product or service to solve these problems.

You’ll end up with a more refined customer base who will end up turning into long term customers and promoters of your great product to others in their network.  Afterall, if you build what they want, they’ll probably have other friends who have the same problems.  People tend to know other people with the same problems and in the same situations.

Add value

Be there for your customers and deliver a good quality product with features that they actually want.

It’s not all about how cheap it is, there are more important things for customers. Price is only around 3rd or 4th on the scale of decision-making factors.

Are you there to answer phone calls or emails when they need support?  Are you active on your support forum? Do you do extra work such as logo design or brochures on top of website design?  Can you SEO the site for when it launches?  Do you give away an ebook on how they can sell more?  Do you throw in a couple of email marketing templates too?

There are lots of things you can do to add extra value to the purchase a customer makes other than just a discount.

Loyalty schemes

A successful loyalty scheme can encourage frequent purchases from customers over time.

Ideas might include yearly discounts on your SaaS app over the monthly price; buy 5 hours of changes for the price of 4 if you are a web designer, and even coupon codes at Christmas or other times of the year for downloading your software.

Be creative, reward loyal customers and they’ll keep coming back for more and even turn into your advocates.  When that happens, you won’t be able to handle the work that comes your way.

Customers are God

In Japan, customer service managers train their staff that “customers are God”.

Not like in Desperado.

Customer service is very important for your brand, business and customer loyalty.

Make sure you handle complaints effectively, manage their expectations and answer any questions promptly.  Give bad news quickly and drip feed good news over time.

The biggest problems for small business owners can often be managing expectations.  My advice is to always under promise and over deliver and you’ll do just fine.

Communications

If you keep communications hot with customers then they will more likely be in a position to buy from you in the future.

Nowadays twitter offers a good platform, although a little public.  Email is still good for building relationships as well as the dog and bone.  Other ways include creating a support forum or ticket contact system for handling customer and support related enquiries.

Blogs, email marketing campaigns or even printed newsletters are other great ways to build relations and a customer audience.

Keeping in touch is key as the buyer goes through different buying cycles and decisions.  By giving them information on the latest skills you’ve acquired or latest technologies included in your latest product range, they may just want that upgrade too.

The Takeaway

Whether you think your customer is a God or have a strict policy to answer all support emails within 24 hours, or a telephone in 3 rings (yes that happens in Japan) there are lots of things we can all do to improve our customer relations and ultimately our bottom line.

Happy customers equals loyal customers.  And, loyal customers equals healthy business.  Isn’t that what you want?

Try and keep them beyond Christmas.

Image by kennymatic 

It’s all about the 3Cs: content, content, content.

I’m often telling clients the same thing. Go out there and create good content, do good work and the rest will follow.

Of course as a matter of doing good work, designers or developers will probably always create a site that adheres to web standards.  This makes sense and is part of doing a good job.  Latteperday websites for example always use web standard W3C code whether it’s in the HTML or CSS – and this is something to be proud of for sure.

But to clients though, this isn’t important.  It’s often too technical to go into the details and knowing that a site is constructed the right way is enough.  Knowing that their site will look great on an iPad or iPhone, work consistently across browsers and computers and be easier for people and search engines to access and “read” is the benefit of creating a site using web standards.

Sometimes site owners and clients can get too narrow-focused on the minor details of the code for each page and making sure each ounce of SEO juice is squeezed out of every page as possible. “am I using the right title tags” or “shouldn’t this code but done in a different way”.  This is fine, but as I said, most designers worth their salt will make sure this in place from day 1 anyway.  Not everyone does this though so we like to tell people about it.  But it’s not really the most important thing.

The most important thing

What’s more important is creating great, useful content that adds value to people’s lives.  Content that gives people the information they need and when and where they need it.

That’s Google’s job afterall.  Their business aim is to give people the information they need.  They right information and quickly.  If they don’t or can’t, they have no business.

If your site doesn’t have any relevant or useful information on a particular topic, they’re not going to serve that page to their client – the web searcher.  It doesn’t matter if the site is well coded in W3C or Klingon.

What does matter is pure high quality content which is well written and valuable.

Great examples would be news sites, well made blogs and information sites.

In the same light, poorly designed sites with SEO mistakes can rank really well with fantastic content as Matt said in the video. And, likewise, greatly designed sites with poor content can have a low rank.

The Takeaway

Content is King for ranking well in Google and Co and don’t underestimate it.

Sure speedy rock solid and reliable hosting; web standard code; great design; on site optimisation all help and latteperday makes sure all sites have this as standard.  This gives people a great head start and foundation to build on from day 1.  So when you build your site, make sure you have all these elements in place.  Ask your designer about it.

As time goes on, it’s the sites that also have the great content that will float to the top.  This is your job as the site owner.  You know your business and field of expertise the best so go out there and put great content on your site.

Great content combined with these other elements will ensure you have a rockin’ well ranked site.

If you have a business that’s based around the internet (small businesses owners, single founders or startups take note here), basically there’s only two metrics that matter:

What’s the cost to acquire a customer?

What’s the lifetime customer value?

If the lifetime customer value is higher than the cost to acquire, you’ve got a business.

If it isn’t, you don’t.

The Takeaway

Start measuring these numbers today and make sure you lifetime customer value is higher than you customer acquisition cost. Simple but so often overlooked and underestimated.

Be careful of vanity metrics (things like registered users, *free users*, downloads, raw pageviews, email subscribers etc). These numbers while can be quite high in some cases don’t necessarily make you any money or keep you in business for an extra day.

If you’re going to measure metrics (which you should) be sure to be measuring the right ones.

 Share a file to the cloud in seconds 

That’s the idea behind this great tool.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine (great product designer) asked me to make a quick step-by-step video on how to update one of his client’s websites.  I made it with annotations and click tracking and it looked cool and was a Quicktime .mov file.  It was around 35MB compressed so email couldn’t handle that kind of transfer.

What to do?

I’m a big fan of Dropbox and absolutely love it.  It’s awesome.  Great way to sync files across multiple computers and folders.  I just wanted to send my client this one video and he didn’t have a dropbox account to sync to the file (easy if he does) and I put it in my public folder and sent him a link but it didn’t really work out.

Then I remembered yousendit and I have a login somewhere but couldn’t remember the login and even if I did, my client would have to create a yousendit account to download the file.

An easier way

There must be a quicker easier way that doesn’t require downloading any software, registering for any service, is quick to upload, gives me a link I can paste into my email to send to my client, that he can then click and quickly download.  And it also needs to be safe, keeps the file secure and is just so simple and with no hassles.

There’s always an easier and better way

….

Introducing ladybug

Ladybug does exactly that.  She loves delivering your files wherever you want them to go (to a client in an email, in your twitter stream to followers, on your facebook page for fans to download your latest .pdf accomplishment). Whatever and wherever you want.

It really is that easy sharing files with your clients and colleagues

She’s:

☁ Safe, quick and doesn’t mess around or require a login 

☁ Easier and faster than Dropbox, yousendit and the rest of ‘em

☁ Keeps things plain and simple to help the rest of us share files.

To keep things simple you can share these kinds of typical files which work for most small businesses out there:

✓ images (jpg, png, gif)

✓ videos (mov, mp4)

✓ documents (pdf, doc, rtf, xls, ppt, txt)

So that includes Microsoft Word docs, Excel docs, Powerpoint docs, photos, videos, PDFs (invoices, reports etc).

She also limits the file size to 100MB for now.  This should be enough for most situations. If the files sizes or types need to be increased, then get in touch and she can consider it ; )

It really is as simple as 1-2-3.  Just “upload file” (select file from your computer like adding an attachment to a mail) and click “ok”.  Copy & paste the resultant URL and send it to the recipient via email or social media links (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).  They then click on the link and are taken to a page where they have the option to download.

Files expire in 1 week and also include a shortened URL for easy sharing.

This might be extended beyond 1 week if more people request it but it should be enough time to share what you have.

This is really about scratching my own itch.

I want my clients to use it with me but I also want you and anyone else to be able to quickly share files with their clients, colleagues or anyone else in a quick and easy way.  Deliver your invoice, project files, project outline, anything.  There must be other people with the same problem as me.  This must be a common itch. Please help share this tool with people you know if you think they also need to scratch this itch.

Ladybug is completely free to use and will hopefully make your small business life better.

Why use ladybug even for small attachments in email?

I agree with Shortmail that attachments basically get in the way in email and often mean messages bounce with email or are even undelivered due to SPAM filter blocking due to the file title or just being too big for the mail client to handle it.

Using ladybug in conjunction with your email will really increase deliverability and make sending and receiving email much faster for everyone.

Sending attachments via email really needs improving in general and this could be one way of doing that.

Go ahead and today start sharing and receiving files from clients in seconds.

If you need a quick and easy way to create awesome HTML5 forms in seconds then you’ve come to the right place!

Easy web form builder does just that. It’s a simple and quick way to create very beautiful HTML5 web forms to embed in your website.

These are ideal for web designers or developers who code a lot of websites and want to save time.  It is also a great tool for any entrepreneur, single founder or online business owner who wants to create a quick form and doesn’t have the time (or knowledge) to create it from scratch.

Just drag ‘n’ drop, export and upload. Voila!

Why is this awesome?

• The interface is really intuitive with drag ‘n’ drop and all fields are a click away
• There’s cool HTML5 fields and all major field types like Text, Text Area, Radio Buttons, Password, Date and more more
• You can use one of the included themes or edit the CSS after export to style the form exactly how you want to embed it smoothly into your current web project design
• Fields have validation attributes so that users enter the right data into your form
• You can export as a zip file or opt to just get the source code for each file to copy&paste into your project site
• The forms created are compatible with all browsers including that well know 10 year old browser : )

How can I use this?

Easy web form builder - go and build yourself a form today

Go to easy web form builder and build yourself a form!

Just click the (+) button next to the form element you would like to add. To edit an element, click the edit button and edit the validation or title of that element.

Any form element can be deleted by pressing the delete button (x).

You can test your form by pressing the preview button and clicking download to download your form when it’s ready to use and how you like it.

How does this work with my site?

After downloading the zip folder of your final form, unzip the contents and upload them to where you will be using the form.  Link to the index.php file in the form folder and that’s it. Your form is ready to go go go.

Alternatively, style and embed the form into your existing design. For styling the form you can use your own CSS styles or the Uniform Plugin as used with this tool.

Validation is done on the form automatically and uses the  jQuery Tools Validator.

For implementing the processing logic of the form, please edit the process_form.php file if you want the form to send the information to a database, email the form to an email address or redirect the user to a new page upon completion of the form.  There are examples of how to email the form and redirect the user within the process_form.php file.  Just follow the instructions included in the file once you have completed and exported your finished form.

Problems?

Usually problems with the forms are easy to diagnose.  The sample form uses the basic mail() function, which is built into php. If you’ve entered your email address correctly and you aren’t getting any errors then the email will be sent correctly.

However, sometimes it might get caught in a spam folder (check in there) or the address gets typed in incorrectly when the form is setup or your host may not all you to send email via php.  Check with them too! Firebug will show any php errors.

Is there an even easier way?

Yep, as there always is!

Want an easier way to integrate forms into your small business website with no code at all, no hassles and no styling issues?  Need something with the same drag ‘n’ drop ease as this but already built into your website?  Something where you can just edit the form elements without having to edit the code and back end stuff? Something where you can start collecting data today?

All latteperday customers get access to an incredibly easy to use form builder that is already built into their website. Here they can add unlimited forms, collect and store results in the backend of their site for later exporting, viewing or reviewing.

There are more dynamic field options included such as a better date picker, price field, address box laid out as per country idiosyncrasies (you select the country address format), it emails the form to as many recipients as needed for quick following up, it integrates into the newsletter sign up process for email newsletters using yuzoolmail.com, it can take payments or order details.

Some of the great uses for this latteperday feature include taking simple enquiries, receiving hotel bookings, booking consultation time, creating customer surveys, event registration, part invites, lead generation, bug tracking.. and so on. Get in touch for more details.

What to do next?

Go to easy web form builder and try and build yourself a form and upload it to your site. Come back here and post your feedback!

I’d love to hear how it made your life easier and work faster. That’s the idea and helpfully it improved your website and allowed you to capture enquiries faster and more efficiently.

Happy easy web form creating!

There are lots of great invoicing and billing online tools out there.  Some of them are free, most are for a monthly sum.  For people starting a business today and just want to send out a handful of invoices a month there might be is a better way.

Easy billing is a fast and free way to create an invoice right now. Today.

There is no need to signup, nor create an account, hand over any credit card details or anything else.

The idea is that a freelancer, entrepreneur, single founder, business owner, consultant <insert anyone else here who needs to invoice> can just load up the page in there browser, add the amount, the address and click print.  Stick it in an envelope and mail.  Or, export to pdf and email. Invoicing in minutes!

Why is this awesome?

1. It’s fast (takes 3 minutes if you can type quickly…)
2. It works
3. You can use any currency $ ¥ £ ₨ – enter it yourself manually
4. It prints and displays Japanese characters correctly and likely others too as it’s in standard UTF-8 coding format**
5. If you’re running a decent browser like Firefox the invoice will save in the browser’s cache and upon reload present the last sent invoice. Handy to avoid having to keep typing in your address
6. You can upload your logo
7. There’s lots of room at the bottom of the invoice to add your terms, payment details, thank you notes, reasons to love you and work with you again
8. It’s free to use
9. No login required
10. Exports pdf (have to use “print to pdf”. Macs have this feature built in and it prints great looking invoices. For Pcs, you need a print to pdf plugin installed.  Try dopdf if you don’t have one installed under “file”, “print” and “print to pdf” or “export to pdf”.
11. You can play with it from your iPhone or Android smartphone – haven’t sent an invoice this way before but it could be done on the road
12. You can access invoicing from any computer anywhere with any computer or any browser.  *Scenario* You go to a client’s office and forget to bring your invoice. Jump on a computer and quickly type one up before the meeting and print. Blushes saved and you can get paid.

**This was the main gripe and reason for setting this up.  A lot of the other *cough* invoicing apps printed out Japanese characters as question marks and other unreadable dingbat characters.  It was just unusable and so frustrating.  So, for anyone wanted to print in other languages with other characters, this should work for you.

Very easy to use

Easy small business startup billing - intuitive to edit

It’s very intuitive to use.  Just hover over the area you would like to edit and the editable area goes green. Click and type.

The calculations are done automatically and you can add or delete items by clicking on the plus (+) and minus (-) icons.

The currency is also editable along with the due date, invoice number and today’s date. It’s also possible to add deductions for things like discounts or if a deposit has already been paid on a previous invoice and this is just to address the balance remaining on a client’s account.

More features?

It pretty much does what I want it to do at the moment. Fast, easy and straight forward billing.  Sure, there’s a lot of things it doesn’t do, but it doesn’t need to.  It works really well the way it is and will help a lot of people (and that’s the idea).

For latteperday customers, they get a different more purpose built invoicing app.  It will be able to handle taxes, have real export to pdf built in, allow for saving invoices, create and store client address details, record payments made and received, add project management files, get email notifications, share files with clients, chat on projects with clients, have client areas and so on.  It will be an app for managing client contact details, billing and project management and file sharing all in one.  Great for consultants, architects, interior designers, graphic designers, photographers… and loads of other great professionals.

For the other people who want to sell widgets and items through an online store (e commerce) they’ll have a shopping cart feature built right into their site.  For them, customers will come to their site, add to basket and checkout. The site will take the payment, add shipping, track product inventory and allow users to search, find, fulfil, cancel and refund orders all from a simple orders screen.

What should I do now?

Go and send your first invoice using easy billing. Be sure to come back here and comment on your experience, if it makes your professional life any easier and any other feedback you’d love to share.

Happy billing!

A great tip for using Twitter for your small business is to use Twitter as a search engine and see who is right now in need of your product or service.  It’s real time market research and great for building prospects, building connections and extending your network but also for testing products and market needs before you’ve even built or launched your product.

Hot on from the release of this tool yesterday, here are a few quick tips on how to best use twitter pie.

You are an accountant

Let’s assume you’re an accountant.  This is scenario #1. Apart from wanting to be a lion tamer, you want clients and books to check.

So, you go to twitter pie and you type in a variety of searches such as below:

• need accountant
• I want an accountant
• accountant asap
• can’t do my taxes
• need taxes help
• looking for accountant
• taxes need doing
• taxes deadline coming
• too many taxes
• business books messy
• messy accounts
• accountant referral
• accountant questions
• want accountant in [insert your town]

And so on!  Mix and match the above, create new ones.  Get in the zone and crunch out 25 or so phrases to search. Time to get creative ; )

A bunch of twitter results appear on the page.  If you leave the page for an hour or so it just keeps on going (refreshes every 2 seconds if your search is that popular and trending).

Try searching through users tweets (@ search) or the # keys (# search: users use these to categorise their tweets for search) or Custom Search keywords.  See which yields the best results for you.

Then, you reply to the tweet with a piece of free advice, a link, a copy of a spreadsheet that might help them solve their taxes problems or anything else that you can do to help them.

Ask for work

Then after they’ve said “thanks” or asked for more information or advice from you, you can just ask “hey, hopefully those resources helped. If you need me to work with you to save further headache in the future, here’s my details”. (afterall, if you don’t ask you don’t get shit).

You’ll be surprised what happens next.

You’ve found someone at the right moment in need for your help (product or service). Rather than spending time and money on magazine adverts that fail over and over again, this is a perfect example of using a tool to find someone in need of a solution right at this moment.  Your conversion rate will certainly be a lot higher than other ways of advertising. You politely and sincerely come along and give them some help and advice without being spammy or ramming your deals down their throat.

It’s like networking online.

They feel warm, fuzzy and appreciative and can see the expertise and value you can provide them to solve their current hell of a problem (it’s so hellish because they are telling the world about it right now). So, you offer them a way to banish this problem forever with your widget-o-matic and they bite your hand off.  Simple.

It’s one of the ways to approach these things backwards. Like reverse marketing.  You’re giving your solution to people in need for it right now rather than advertising your solution and hoping it finds people who need it.  You’re actively going out and finding them rather than waiting for them to come to you.

What can I do right now to action this?

I only want to provide value here and don’t want you stressing over finer details or reading something that isn’t going to take your small business forward.  So, we need to make this actionable today.

Go to twitter pie now, sit there for 10 mins crunching out searches and see what results start coming up.

When you see a bunch of useful tweets you can respond too, start responding.

Make a note of these searches, add the page to your bookmarks and then make the twitter pie technique part of your weekly marketing routine and do this for 2 – 3 weeks (3 sittings of 20 minutes over 3 days – just an hour a week so easy to fit into anyone’s schedule) and see what clients you can pick up, people you can connect with and help you can offer.

Any comments on how to maximise this strategy or improve on it, feel free to comment below!

Happy Tweeting and best of luck!

Twitter is a great tool to interact with potential customers, people in your network and friends or colleagues too. A lot of people don’t realise it’s a really powerful search engine and second only to Google(!)

It’s a really great way to spy on your competition, search for new customers, check business trends and find out who is looking for and in need of your product right now.

The Custom Twitter Search Tool

What’s the best way to do this? Using this new latteperday custom twitter search tool called twitter pie.

The idea behind twitter pie is to create an easy and fast way for you yo search twitter using the “@”, “#” or custom keywords.

Twitter Pie is awesome

Twitter pie refreshes and looks for another query of your search in every 2 seconds and adds it to the list.  Leave the browser for a few minutes and (if your search is popular) you’ll soon have loads of results to comb through in no time at all.

Go and give it a try now:  twitter pie

Would love to hear your feedback on the tool too: hello@latteperday.com

Happy Twitter searching!

It’s not often business books resonate well with small business owners.  They always talk about VC funding, selling your business, the gold at the end of the rainbow.  This ship rarely sails from the docks and more often than not small businesses fail.  And fail badly.

In section 6 of this business iphone app James makes perfect sense with relation to marketing online and how to correctly run a small business website.

Most small businesses who are not very savy when it comes to technology produce a website and then leave it there for 2 or 3 years, like they do with a brochure.  Whereas I think they should almost be reviewing their website evert month.”

This is completely true.  A website is a living, breathing marketing machine and is not a set and forget tool.  Every single month something happens in your business – good or bad – and your website is the perfect vehicle to show that to the world with as little cost and time investment needed as possible (vs designing and printing and then mailing a brochure for example. By the time it hits someone’s mailing address – it’s old news anyway).

James goes on to say:

Maybe you’ve won an amazing new customer, maybe you’ve had an amazing testimonial, maybe you’ve hired a new individual, maybe you’ve launched a new product.  Everything dynamic which is happening in your business should be visible through your website.  Because your website is your shop window.”

You don’t want customers walking by your window and not coming into your shop.

Your business has many amazing things going on so you should tell the world about them.

“My small business has nobody technical enough to make web edits”

Often small business owners don’t have the skills to make these technical monthly or regular edits to their website.  Or, they have the skills but not much time to go into the code and make cumbersome changes.

Latteperday makes it easy and simple to edit your website at any time you want without needing any technical skills in web design or help from a 3rd party developer or company.  The site can also be accessed from any computer with internet access running a web browser or even a mobile device running a web browser such as safari on the iPhone or iPad.

Open your site, login, add content (photos, text), click save, job done.  Simple as it should be.

No code, no programming, no hassle.  Just a clean, professional site that gives you the perfect and best looking window on the high street to give you the best chance of making sales and marketing as best you can to your potential customers.

James Caan iPhone app for small businesses

Thanks James for making perfect sense.

Saying thank you to your customers is vital.   A lot of companies get too big or too busy and don’t spend the time to say thank you to clients for their business.

Afterall, every single small business startup appreciates every single piece of business that they get.  They (you) should thank your customers for coming to you.

Small business startups need to build relationships early with a small group of initial customers so that they can build feedback, make iterations to their product line or services and create advocates out of their clients and customers.  This is completely true.  It can all start with a simple thank you.

Quick and easy thank you tool

Easy to say thank you

Using the thank you tool on the latteperday site you can quickly and easily type in a message to say “thank you” to a client, click to add your own logo, adjust the size of the note, then click the print button to either print it or export as a .pdf.

Uses

Get creative and there are loads of ways you can use this.

Write a thank you note and print one to drop into your invoice you send a client; or when you send out your product to them; or when you just want to drop them a line and get in touch.

However you use it, I hope it gives you an excuse to remember to say thank you to your clients, to stay in touch with them and build relationships.

Give it a try and let us know how you get on.

Thank you note>>