Increase your converstion rate by qualifying your customers

By tim | June 3, 2009

It is common for businesses to field a host of questions from our prospects who might be:

  • evaluating whether we are the best person for the job
  • looking for an inappropriate solution to their problem
  • doing background research with no intention to purchase

These enquiries are not genuine propects: enquiries such as these which do not lead to sales take time away from your engagement with customers who want to pay you.

Qualifying you customers means answering the entry level questions once on your site, whilst allowing you to make reference to more detail than you could convey on the phone.  It means promoting the appropriate solution to a client’s problem, which may even be directing them elsewhere to a service that you don’t offer.  It means giving away silently and instantly the information that a “product researcher” would otherwise suck out of your working hours.

In this respect, developing the content on your website falls into what Stephen Covey calls “Quadrant 2 activity” in “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”.  He oulines four areas of activity characterised by an intersection of Urgency and Importance.  Quadrant 2 is an activity which is important, but not urgent.  There is no deadline for this task, rather it is an investment in passively grooming your prospects.

By publishing this type of content,  you are sorting through your prospects en masse, so that those enquiries which pursue contact are highly motivated customers.

How do I get more serious customers?

Simple! Write a of articles posts specifically to your best customers!  Be really clear about what you offer, and be generous about publishing what you know.  If you’d give this information to an anonymous prospect on the phone, then you should give it to your readers, too.

  • Write highly targeted content which provides detail about your product or service.  If a prospect is undecided as to whether they’ll buy from you, you may ‘tip the balance’ in favour of a purchase if you deliver enough reasons they should buy.
  • Address Benfits rather than Features: this is about presenting a case which is deirectly relevant to your customer.  A feature list is about your product; a benefit list is about the outcome for your customer.
  • Create a Frequently Asked Questions page and carefully answer the queries which waste your time.
  • Ensure that you link content on your website thoroughly so that related material is presented prominently - this is known as making your page ’sticky’ - enticing readers to stay on your site rather than browse away.


Posted in Business, SEM | Tagged 7 Habits, Content Generation, conversion, sales | Leave a comment

Hosting your website

By tim | May 10, 2009


There are a multitude of very similar sounding plans available online, so once you’ve found a few hosts which meet your basic requirements, the choice comes down to reliability and expense.  Here as elsewhere it is very true that ‘you get what you pay for’.  That is to say that if you are creating a mission critical website which absolutely must be available without fail, you should handball this whole process to your IT department / webdesigner / pet geek.  If you want to get the ball rolling without the associated (significant) expense, read on.

For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

  • Provides PHP, and MySQL (required for Wordpress)
  • Fantastico Wordpress installer (completes a vanilla install of wordpress in about 4 minutes!)
  • Unlimited Addon domains (you can host multiple different sites with different domain names for the one cost)
  • Unlimited Subdomains (you can create subdomain1.mysite.com.au)

I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.

Posted in Business, In the Media, Tutorials | Tagged bluehost, hosting, wordpresss | Leave a comment

Overview of building a website

By tim | May 10, 2009

What do I need to get my own website?

Essentially, you’ll need:

  • A domain name - this is the equivalent of your business name online.  It is the link that users type in to their browser to visit your site, also called a URL (Universal Resource Locator)
  • A web host - To make your website available 24 hours a day, it needs to be hosted on a commercial server with a reliable connection to the net.  You might think of it as the stable which houses your thoroughbred website!

These two items are ongoing expenses which are required to make your site available to your customers.  Once you’ve got these covered, you’ll need:

  • A Content Management System (CMS) - of course there are many ways of publishing on the net, but by far the simplest (and most effective) is using a free CMS such as Wordpress.  It takes care of the technicalities of publishing your material, leaving you to concentrate on marketing your product.
  • A theme: this is the ‘look and feel’ of your site, and might be an ‘off-the-shelf’ template for free or at a premium, or it might be custom designed by your webdesigner.

You need content.

If you’ve got all of the above, and nothing more, there’ll be nought to see; if you’ve already got content, you need more!

Google drives traffic to active websites, so it is important to keep your site ‘fresh’.  Most folk seem to think that this is the easy part, and from a technical standpoint, they’re right!  It takes some time to write the material for a website, though, so some web publishing coaching can be really helpful.

Posted in Tutorials | Tagged CMS, domain name, hosting, overview, themes, web publishing, WordPress | Leave a comment

Microfinance - another way of spreading the love

By tim | May 3, 2009

Kiva Logo

Kiva is a non-profit organisation which facilitate micro loans to entrepreneurs all over the world. It inspires me each time I revisit the site and its reports. I was moved again today to support an internet cafe in Peru.. my US$25 contribution contributes the mere $625 Mr Yuri requires to get his business off the ground. Read More »

Posted in In the Media, WordPress | Tagged kiva, microfinance, video | Leave a comment

Custom Admin Branding: code update

By tim | February 24, 2009

I love the Wordpress plugin Custom Admin Branding by Josh Byers..  who doesn’t love seeing their shiny, official name at the top of their admin panel?

I noticed, though, that when when I updated the plugin to 1.3.5, my custom files were overwritten.. Doh!  It defeats the purpose of auto-update if we have to resurrect our settings afterwards, clearly, but every journey progresses one step at a time, and I’ve been rapt to have such a great plugin, complete with annotated photoshop templates.

Still, it would be great if the custom files survived an update, so I’ve had a fiddle, and come up with a crude solution… and while I was at it, I’ve added an option to change the Header background colour (which is simpler than using the custom stylesheet which is currently an option hidden in the code of the plugin).

I’m hoping that he’ll like the changes, and we might get another update soon!

Posted in Hacks, WordPress | Tagged Custom Admin Branding, customisation, php, plugins | Leave a comment

PHPlist link promotion method takes the cake

By tim | December 17, 2008

..err, excuse the pun :)  I’ve been using the great PHPList Form Integration by Jesse Heap, and have come across his really simple way of reaping some SEO benefit from all the work he puts into the free plugin.

What have Cakes got to do with Wordpress?

Jesse’s autoresponder notifies the folk seeking support that there are over 300 support requests in the works, and offers the opportunity to queue jump by linking to his site Pink Cake Box Wedding Cakes! Hats off to Jesse for the plugin.

There are a a few ways of showing gratitude to plugin authors for their work: making donation is the obvious one, but its possible to show appreciation on a tight budget, by rating a plugin at the Wordpress Plugin Repository.

Posted in SEM, WordPress | Tagged cake, phplist, plugin, wedding | Leave a comment

Internet Censorship in Australia

By tim | December 5, 2008

The Australian Government wants to implement filtering of the Internet, ostensibly to restrict access to unsavory illegal content.  Unfortuately, it will be ineffective (trials have shown that the filter blocks huge numbers of legitimate sites), expensive (costing over AU$44 million in the first year and AU$33 million per year thereafter).

Draconian? Maybe.  Effective?  Absolutely not. Please sign the petition to voice your rejection of their proposal.

The GetUp factsheet gives a good overview of the issue.  Here are some quotes from the factsheet:

Lack of transparecy

Senator Conroy has said that a number of western democracies already have a similar scheme in place. In fact, as Senator Conroy later admitted, no western democracy in the world has introduced mandatory server-level filtering. In countries where it has been introduced – countries such as Saudi Arabia, China and Iran – the schemes have not effectively done the job for which they were designed. In each of these countries, the filter can be easily avoided. No country in the world goes as far as dynamically analysing web traffic in real time, as Australia is proposing.

Australian connection would become 87% slower

The measures will make the internet up to 87% slower,4 which is bad for access to information, and terrible for e-commerce. The Government has invested $10 billion in the development of a high-speed broadband internet – an initiative that will be drastically undermined by this ISP-level filter.


Posted in In the Media | Tagged censorship, getup, internet, isp, petition | Leave a comment

Photoshop Bug: Ruler not aligned to Pixel Grid

By tim | December 2, 2008

Whilst zoomed in to pixel-level, my cursor doesn’t line up with the ruler, and I can’t move the ruler origin accurately.

Shows ruler origin bug in photoshop Shows Photoshop Ruler Bug

  • In the first screenshot, I set the ruler origin to the intersection of the guides, then am repeating the process as i take the screenshot.
  • In the second, I am hovering so that the dotted indicators in the ruler itself align with the guide… They should track the cursor arrowhead.

Please note that as i took the screenshot, I am zoomed in to max and snap is set to all: the ruler is clearly out of alignment with the pixel grid!  To clarify: I have not been able to accurately set the ruler origin to the intersection of my guides.  Period!

A proposed solution

It has been suggested that fixing other glitches with the Photoshop ruler can be accomplished by:

  • Setting the grid interval to 1px (Preferences > Guides, Grid, etc)
  • Setting View > Snap To: Grid

But unfortunately, that doesn’t work for me.

This issue seems related to the Shape Tool Anti-Aliasing bug, in so far as it relates to glitches with the ruler.

“When the PS is freshly installed and you switch on grid (set to 1px) and rulers and zoom to max, you can see that when moving the canvas left or right that the grid doesn’t match the rulers even though they are both set to ONE PX. They diverge…” Joey33

I mention that issue, as the links above are the only leads I could find which were even vaguely relevant.

I am using CS3 10.0.1 on Mac, but I do remember being bothered by this long ago, certainly well prior to the release of CS3.

So, this post is a cry for help: I’ve trawled the Adobe support forums, Googled, and checked Sitepoint forums, and am stumpled.  If anyone has a solution, I’m all ears!

Update and Solution..

After SirReddSir’s comment, I had another look at this and found that the grid must be visible for snap-to-grid to function.  So basic!  This seems consistent with other functionality in Photoshop: A layer will not snap to another layer (or a guide) of that object is not visible.  That was a very persistent gotch for me!  My lesson: setup the document with grid visible, position my guides, then I can hide the grid, and work to the guides.



Posted in Software | Tagged bugs, photoshop, screenshot, solved | 2 Comments

Add a Download link to the 1pixelout Audio Player

By tim | November 28, 2008

I love the Wordpress plugin Audio Player by 1pixelout, and highly recommend it to folk who want to present audio on their site.  I’d like to be able to offer the file for download too, though, so I’ve created a little download icon that sits beside the player.

Here’s a demo:

luscious-woman-afoot

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read More »

Posted in WordPress | Tagged audio, plugins, theme design | 2 Comments

Custom Header Image for Wordpress Themes

By tim | November 28, 2008

A client wanted to be able to set a different header image for each page or post on his Wordpress site, so I’ve written this function for him.

He can now set a custom image for each page header in a few steps:

  • upload the cropped custom images via FTP
  • set the custom field “header” in the relevant posts

Read More »

Posted in WordPress | Tagged customisation, functions.php, theme design | Leave a comment