What Does Your Web Site Say About You?

This is the question that every business owner needs to be asking them selves during the current economical times. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find, secure and retain good clients. That’s why business owners need to work on their marketing a bit more to secure better clients, and this is where your website comes into the mix.

Many business owners today have the misconception that websites don’t do much, but in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite to that.

Here is a list of things that your website can convey to your customers 24/7/365;

1. Creditability
Customer testimonials are extremely important as it is one of the strongest ways to convey credibility through a website. Conveying credibility through a website is a challenge we all face. If you properly convey your credibility your visitors will be eager to contact you.

The more others speak of your past services the more likely you are to get hired. This can seriously help gain credibility and trust, which can be difficult if the client doesn’t know you.

2. Build Authority
An authority is someone who has developed specialist knowledge and because of sharing this knowledge, has developed a reputation as an expert in the field. Your website must portray an image of yourself as professional in your field. Looking professional can be done in several ways, the most important of which is customer testimonials.

Building authority is all about establishing yourself as a market leader in what you do, a pioneer if you will. The end result is that if you’re an authority and leader in your field, then you have the opportunity to get more clients, and charge more for your work as well.

3. Share your Personality
No matter what your business, if you expect to make an impact, you’ve got to create and maintain a business personality. Your website really can reveal a lot about your personality. It can really show off your sense of style, your creativity, and also your flair. A nice website can give your visitors a general picture of you as a person.

This is the question that every business owner needs to be asking them selves during the current economical times. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find, secure and retain good clients. That’s why business owners need to work on their marketing a bit more to secure better clients, and this is where your website comes into the mix.

Many business owners today have the misconception that websites don’t do much, but in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite to that.

Here is a list of things that your website can convey to your customers 24/7/365;

1. Creditability
Customer testimonials are extremely important as it is one of the strongest ways to convey credibility through a website. Conveying credibility through a website is a challenge we all face. If you properly convey your credibility your visitors will be eager to contact you.

The more others speak of your past services the more likely you are to get hired. This can seriously help gain credibility and trust, which can be difficult if the client doesn’t know you.

2. Build Authority
An authority is someone who has developed specialist knowledge and because of sharing this knowledge, has developed a reputation as an expert in the field. Your website must portray an image of yourself as professional in your field. Looking professional can be done in several ways, the most important of which is customer testimonials.

Building authority is all about establishing yourself as a market leader in what you do, a pioneer if you will. The end result is that if you’re an authority and leader in your field, then you have the opportunity to get more clients, and charge more for your work as well.

3. Share your Personality
No matter what your business, if you expect to make an impact, you’ve got to create and maintain a business personality. Your website really can reveal a lot about your personality. It can really show off your sense of style, your creativity, and also your flair. A nice website can give your visitors a general picture of you as a person.

Is your site unorganized? Is it cluttered or over packed with info? Does your website read like a face to face conversation or an encyclopedia? Is your color scheme loud or relaxing? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself.

4. Know Your Clients
There are many things to be learned by getting to know your customer. We all would love to strap our customers to a chair and ask them a 100 questions about why they do business with us. But, this would not be good for repeat business. And we can't necessarily find out what people want by asking them directly. We therefore as business owners we need to do a lot of observation.

Through your website you can observe your customers through email, chat, blogs, surveys, polls, web traffic and page views. These are just some of the tools that are available to you. Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to persuade potential and existing customers that buying from you is in their best interests.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles that I have written here and they have made good money for me. You can also join our fan page on facebook.

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice.

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice.

DO NOT GET SUCKERED

I feel like such an idiot right now that I had to share this experence with you with the hope that you do not fall for the same scam. I'm talking about the sites and blogs out their that you can make thousands by posting Google ads.

My name is virgil, and I'm a web designer by profession. l do most of my marketing off-line. I recently decided to get serious about my online marketing and capitalize on my knowledge (or lack there of in this case) by putting more effort into social marketing or reationship marketing. In order to do this I ave been writing a lot of original content, reading blogs, and posting to forums.

So, this morning I run across an hub page that is titled something like college drop out makes $9000 a month posting links for google. Now i'm not a fool and i understand that 99% of ads over embellish their products. But my thinking was, they are only asking for $1.97. That is not much and if it is Bull ****, it was $1.97 worth of internet tuition.

So, it was a great ad copy, so much so that I did not do any do diligence. I read the complete ad and pulled out my PayPal card. You guessed it. Here comes the Bull. You are probably asking why I am so pissed.

This is why. I am no newbie to the internet and when it comes to risk I keep it at a minimal. n this particuar situation, when I submmited my payment info I received an error message telling me that I had entered in the wrong 3 digit verification code. So I tried again and again, about three times. STILL BEING MOTIVATED, I pulled out my other PayPal account card,( i have differnt accounts for differnet online businesses) and proceeded to process the purchase again only to recieve the same message. "you have entered an invalid code". So at this point i'm like screw it.

Then the bells went off. I decided to check my account, the first one I used. And sure enough there was a charge for $1.97. So immediately I switched accounts. And wouldn't you know it, another $1.97. So i'm pissed and embarrassed at my stupidity. What I should have done is what Kellysgirl did(Google Start-up Kits – IT’S A SCAM).

So now i have to did with PayPal, and if you do not know that can be a process. So PLEASE LEARN FROM MY HASTE. Do your home work first. Glen wrote a good article " 10 ways not to get scammed online ".

I hope this real story has enlightened you. I did not write this article to enhance your fears about online transactions. I wrote it as good advice.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles (hubs) that I have written here and they have made good money for me.I have a blog named "All About Small Business" that offers free tips on making money online. You can also join our fan page on facebook.

Reactions to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Reactions to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Google Startup Kits - Scammed me twice

DO NOT GET SUCKERED

I feel like such an idiot right now that I had to share this experence with you with the hope that you do not fall for the same scam. I'm talking about the sites and blogs out their that you can make thousands by posting Google ads.

My name is virgil, and I'm a web designer by profession. l do most of my marketing off-line. I recently decided to get serious about my online marketing and capitalize on my knowledge (or lack there of in this case) by putting more effort into social marketing or reationship marketing. In order to do this I ave been writing a lot of original content, reading blogs, and posting to forums.

So, this morning I run across an hub page that is titled something like college drop out makes $9000 a month posting links for google. Now i'm not a fool and i understand that 99% of ads over embellish their products. But my thinking was, they are only asking for $1.97. That is not much and if it is Bull ****, it was $1.97 worth of internet tuition.

So, it was a great ad copy, so much so that I did not do any do diligence. I read the complete ad and pulled out my PayPal card. You guessed it. Here comes the Bull. You are probably asking why I am so pissed.

This is why. I am no newbie to the internet and when it comes to risk I keep it at a minimal. n this particuar situation, when I submmited my payment info I received an error message telling me that I had entered in the wrong 3 digit verification code. So I tried again and again, about three times. STILL BEING MOTIVATED, I pulled out my other PayPal account card,( i have differnt accounts for differnet online businesses) and proceeded to process the purchase again only to recieve the same message. "you have entered an invalid code". So at this point i'm like screw it.

Then the bells went off. I decided to check my account, the first one I used. And sure enough there was a charge for $1.97. So immediately I switched accounts. And wouldn't you know it, another $1.97. So i'm pissed and embarrassed at my stupidity. What I should have done is what Kellysgirl did(Google Start-up Kits – IT’S A SCAM).

So now i have to did with PayPal, and if you do not know that can be a process. So PLEASE LEARN FROM MY HASTE. Do your home work first. Glen wrote a good article " 10 ways not to get scammed online ".

I hope this real story has enlightened you. I did not write this article to enhance your fears about online transactions. I wrote it as good advice.

Virgil Griffin, editor
All About Small Business

Feel free to explore some of the best articles (hubs) that I have written here and they have made good money for me.I have a blog named "All About Small Business" that offers free tips on making money online. You can also jion our fan page on facebook.

5 Steps to a PROFITABLE BLOG

Blogging Tips

Want To Get Started Making Money Online But Unsure If It Is Profitable Or Not? You can get just about any kind of blogging advice from anyone out there. Ten Rules for Profitable Blog Startups ( by Darren Rowse) is a great place to start. This is a valuable set of 10 blogging tips that will be of interest regardless of whether you are a Pro Blogger or an aspiring Pro Blogger.

1. Keyword research

If you have created a blog and are interested in drawing large amounts of traffic to it to make it a profitable blog, it is absolutely essential that you engage in keyword research. Selecting the proper keywords can be considered the most important step to profitable blogging. there are some easily accessible tools to help you determine the best keywords to use. I have found a key word research tool for you to use to help you out. With Google's AdWords Keyword Tool you can find out how often people search for particular terms and see what may be most relevant to the subject of your blog.

If you spend the time it takes on keyword research, carefully building your list, the rest of your SEO efforts will come together much more smoothly and your results will be immeasurably better.


2. Purchase a domain name and setup hosting account

Domain names are generally not expensive - $10 or so for a typical name.

* Web hosting provider - GBN-Hosting
GBN - Top rated web hosting provider

3. Add content to your site.

This part will depend on the sort of content you are providing. It may well just be text, but you might also have chosen to include photo galleries or video-blogging as your theme or niche. It may also be that you just add content once and leave it, or you may have gone another route and be adding content all the time.

4. Create backlinks

Backlink building is a bit like drug taking in professional sports. Everyone else is doing it so you have to as well. In a perfect world, the best-written content would naturally generate the most incoming links and all my pages would be the highest ranked pages on any given subject.

5. Rinse and repeat

No kidding - once you find a profitable niche and/or approach - do it again. And keep doing it until you find a more profitable approach.


Virgil Griffin, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.
708-359-0701

What Marketing Works Best In Recession Times

Even with tough times as what we are experiencing right now, marketing should not be put in the back burner just so you can save in your budget.

This is the hard fact: you need to market in order for your business to survive in these trying times. This is precisely the right time for you to double your marketing efforts especially when everybody seems to be thinking the same thing – that of trying to cut back on promotional campaigns in order to save on costs.

There is one reasonable and practical way of marketing that will not need for you to break the bank just so you can promote adequately. What marketing strategy will work in these tough times?

for tI believe it is important for business owners to review what has worked for them in the past and refine it. Often times we as business owners neglect what has worked steadily in the past for the new fad. Everyone is into social media craze now.

Yes this is good to be up to date. But it is still important to network, pass out business cards, shake hands, look a prospect in the eye.

You think?

Mrvegriff, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.

Are People Making Money Online?

can you make money online

Today it’s quite difficult to keep track of the many different business opportunities that are popping up here and there. It seems every tom, dick and harry is trying to make money on the internet. But if you stick with the time tested ones you will have a easier start. The best thing about making money online is that once you've done enough up-front work, it will be easy to continue.

Truth be told, 98% of people who try making money online will not, and most of the 2% that does make money will do so by selling useless advice or products to the 98% that failed. There is no easy money to be had online. If you think there is, you are going to fail. I spend an average of 60 hours of week online, researching, writing, marketing. And then I spend another 15 hours servicing the clients that the first 60 hours earned me. Now before your mouth drops. please understand, it use to be worse. But the ultimate goal is for it to be reversed. Then I'll spend more time servicing my customer and less marketing to them.

The main thing you have to understand about Internet is it is just a communications medium. It's an opportunity to discover people interests and problems. Then to solve them and earn an income from solving their problems. A lot of people who are looking to make money online may choose to do so by blogging. You are able to literally make money from a variety of income sources when you decide to earn money online by blogging. The reason that blogging can be so popular is simply because it's so versatile. The direction you choose will partly depend on your skills and interests.

If you decide to start your own blog, there is one rule you need to commit to. CONTENT IS KING; This is a very common expression in the online world. Content means just that – the content of your web site or blog – words, videos, music clips, whatever. If you do good research on a subject and write witty, informative work that people enjoy reading and linking to you will soon start making money online with your blog.

Marking Money Through Adsense
Adsense is a big part of a lot of bloggers income. There is really little doubting that there are amazing incomes currently being made on Google Adsense and the really interesting thing is that even relatively small sites and blogs are finding new ways to make money from their Adsense sites every day.

Making Money Through Paid Posting
If you do paid posting, paid forum posters don't make great sums of money, but they are paid for doing something they already enjoy. If you enjoy browsing through and participating in topics that interest you in various forums, perhaps its time you looked into paid forum posting.

There are two primary ways to be paid through forum posting, and sometimes they overlap.1. Building up New Forums: Many webmasters start a forum and then need to make the forum appear active to attract more visitors. These webmasters seek out individuals with knowledge on their particular topic and pay for each post the individual makes. 2. Marketing through Forums:The other method of forum posting is to help promote and market web sites in relevant forums. If you participate a great deal in particular forums, you can sell your services or a spot in your signature to those who are looking for extra publicity in that market.

Making Money Through Affiliate Links
You can also make money through affiliate links. Marketing and selling someone else's product through a link is affiliate marketing. The seller, called the affiliate, signs up with a company such as eBay, Amazon or and of the thousands of companies and individuals that have affiliate marketing networks in place. The affiliate is then given links to sell the product and may be given banner ads and other promotional items that will help them to make sales

This does not cover all of the ways to Making money online, but it does cover a lot of the more profitable ones for beginners to make money online. Blogging is not the only way to make money online, but it is one of the easiest, cheapest and popular ways of doing so.

There is nothing easy about making money online, but with hard work, patience and an understanding of the business you can make some nice money on the internet. Don't focus on make money initially. Focus on the value of what you have to offer, whom you will offer it to. To summarize, the key to earning money online is to stay enthused and dedicated.



Virgil Griffin, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.
708-359-0701

What Do Your Customers Expect From Your Business?

Find Out What Your Customers Want And Expect...Before Your Competitors Do

Coming up with your own competitive advantage is not easy. A good place to start is by asking, "Why do people use your business now?" You can write down several reasons that come to mind, but you should also ask some of your regular customers why they keep using your business. Their answers may surprise you, and give you some ideas on how to keep them coming back and attract new customers as well.

Satisfy your customers or someone else will. Your prospects and customers can give you important feedback, both directly and indirectly. Customers are looking for 4 things when they engage in business:

1. All Customers want prompt and friendly service. This means having a frontline person who is friendly and who can give them what they need right away.

2. All Customers expect their problems solved. Your customers come to you because they have a problem that needs fixing. They need help. It is a common-sense that they will not need you if they do not have any problem, right? You get paid for your efforts.

3. Most Customers expect you to have flexible policies. Do not tell them “Sorry, it is company policy,” or “Sorry, we cannot do that.” That is the quickest way to lose your customers. Your clients would want to hear instead that you can be flexible – enough to give them what they need.

4. If you make a mistake, Customers want you to fix it and give a little extra in return. It is not just taking care of your customers when you make a mistake. If you want them to come back, you need to go one step further and do something extra for your customer.

Customer service is not just about face-to-face business. Is your Web presence a liability or an asset? The answer may surprise you. A recent survey determined that Web-based customer service is severely lacking. The main two complaints by customers are:

Emails from customers went unanswered.

Not many web sites offer live chats with customer service personnel.

When it comes to selling yourself on the Internet – and let’s face it, before you can sell a product or service you have to sell the customer on you – there are a few key points that can tip the scales in your favor with online customers.

Here are the 9 most important things experts say customers want to know about you.

How your business is unique. Answer the question "Who are you?" as interestingly and compellingly (and honestly) as possible. Be concise too, "You don’t need to write a novel."

A clear sense of what your company offers. It’s incredible how many sites you visit and you’re not sure what the company offers. Make it a priority on your home page to provide at least general information about your products and/or services, with links to specifics on a Products page.

Contact information, including a phone number and physical location. Many internet based business are purposely vague about their business location. By showing a physical location to your business, even if you will never see customers there, comforts potential customer that your business is real and legitimate.

Third-party validation. Potential customers want to know whom you have done business with in the past, and what current customers have to say about your business. Also, having a blog or presence on social networking sites, especially those catering your industry. This is an increasingly popular form of validation for today’s customers.

Ease of use and navigation. If people can’t find it, they can’t buy it. Keep your sites crisp, clean, and easy to navigate.

Clear guidance on your processes. Let customers know, step-by-step, important things such as how to order—and where to go and what to do should something happen out of the ordinary.

An ability to give feedback. Encourage feedback about your products and services, your ordering process, and your site in general, by providing a feedback mechanism—either feedback forms or e-mail links. You might get some good stories to feature on your site or in your blog.

Clear calls to action. Give your customers clear call to act, be it "Buy now" or "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Click here for more information." Many web sites miss the opportunity and do not provide calls to act, or they don’t present them clearly enough.

Special offers and personalization. By personalizing a sale with a coupon, special offer, or incentive, you can gain the edge on bigger companies. Having a personalized touch, is something you can do that many big businesses can’t.

As you plan for 2010, ask yourself these questions:

1. What do my best customers want most?
2. What does my company do best?
3. How can I discover these things?
4. What is the first step I/we need to take to answer these questions AND put those answers into action?

In the end be prepared to possibly be taken back from what your customers truly want. Sometimes they request either very odd things from you, or simply request things that you just can not even comprehend. Just do your best.

Virgil Griffin, CEO
GBN Web Development, Inc.
708-359-0701

Free Manual Search Engine Submission Service

Free Manual Search Engine Submission Service

I spend a lot of time surfing the net and occasionally I come across a FREE service that is great! We all know that you rarely get something for nothing, but I think you will like the company I’m about to tell you about.

Promoting your site takes a lot of time and may involve waiting several weeks or even months to get into certain directories and search engines. You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you substantial amounts of traffic and affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.

Your website’s visibility on the internet is the best marketing tool you can invest in, but when done improperly, it can render your business invisible to potential customers. At Website Promotion Ranking Services, they provide free manual search engine submissions to 550+ major search engines, specialty sites and directories. And unlike the other companies, they do not abandon you after the first search engine submission.

Some of the Benefits of Using Website Promotion Ranking Services
1. It’s free, and they do all the submission work
2. Increased visibility and web traffic
3. Focused targeting of visitors to your site
4. Manually submission of your site to 550+ legitimate search engines and directories
5. Submission to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Dmoz, and MSN

They submit your site only to Legitimate Search Engines & Directories - Strictly NO to SPAM, FFA Links and Link farms

Don’t fall to the trap of submitting your website to 6000+ or 60,000+ search engines. There are not thousands of search engines and directories, and this type of mass submission may damage your ranking in major search engines.

A large portion of the search engine lists provided by these services consists of link farms and FFAs (Free for All Pages). Major search engines such as Google label the links generated by link farms and FFAs as spam. Do you really want to damage your website’s visibility within major search engines?

At Website Promotion Ranking Services, they focus on the most important search engines that really deliver visitors to your website. their experienced SEO professionals will submit your site to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Dmoz, and MSN.

Their experienced SEO professionals will manually submit your website to major search engines and directories. They carefully follow website submission guidelines to ensure that your website will be correctly listed. A manual submission of your website not only makes sure that your site is listed properly, but it also increases your website’s visibility and traffic on the internet.

Choose to maximize your visibility within major search engines and directories. Their service is free. They only ask that you provide a text link back to their site in return for their service. Please note that, you will get complete submission report in 4 working days.

So if you’re really serious about increasing your sales and profits with no effort from your part, you can’t wait. You need to take immediate action.

Thanks for your precious time.

Virgil Griffin
www.GBN-Online.com
www.GetYourCompanyOnline.info

Get Your Business Online

The U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Commerce suggest that more and more end users have access to and shop on the Internet. In 2000, 51% of the U.S. population had a computer, and 41.5% had Web access (U.S. Census 2000). Your customers might be googling for you online, also.

Websites are conceivably the most overlooked vehicle of advertising for local, owner-operated businesses. Yes, every businessperson needs one. Every dentist, lawyer, accountant and minister needs one. Every cafe, restaurant, coffee shop and nightclub needs one. Every wholesale supply company needs one.

I'm not {proposing or even suggesting that all these businesses need to absolutely transact business online. I'm only saying that everyone cataloged in yesterday's Yellow Pages needs to also be accessible on the internet today--it's where your Clientele expect to find you.

Your decision to use technology tools should be predicated on who the target market is and your confidence of which tools are the best to saturate that market. A Web Presence can make you accessible to your customers 24 hours a day from any location. Bear in mind that a key factor to having a flourishing business is that your undeveloped customers can find you and get their questions answered.

If you decide to have a Web site, you need to consider the factors that make a Web site an effective marketing tool.

Here is 5 quick answer of why,

* It is cheaper that advertising, and it stay there almost forever.
* You can use the website to interact with your prospect or your customer.
* It is a trend today where people will search on the web before they make up their mind about the purchasing decision.
* It gives you far better reach to the customer that is outside of your local area.
* It is easier to get people to visit your website and understand about your business, than pick up their phone or visit your store personally.

Think of your Web Presence as an electronic business card. Key elements should encompass information about your product or service, contact information, business hours, and in some cases location.

For more information check the following resource:
www.getyourcompanyonline.info
www.GBN-Online.com