open source e-commerce tools – free and online

Looking for an e-commerce solution to help you sell your stuff online? Here’s a web page that highlights 16 open source e-commerce tools — including a popular New Zealand-developed e-commerce tool for WordPress blogs.

web page make-over!

Expert and real-world advice here on how to make a landing page really work on your website.

The experts at the Copyblogger site take a sales web page of a struggling small business and give specific advice on how to improve it and attract purchases from it.

Tips on everything from the text and images on the page to shopping cart placement and getting the right emotional hook. You’ll learn a lot from these guys.

how to boost your blog using Twitter and emails

Blogs are a powerful way to pull readers to your website, to educate and entertain them and lead them to action on your website. But how do you attract readers to your blog?

Compelling and useful material is, of course, essential. But other communication tools can also be useful to advertise your blog across the web.

We look at Twitter and the good old email.

Email: The Copyblogger site recommends pushing people to your blog using an email newsletter. Copyblogger says email your blog’s RSS feed as a newsletter; start a simple opt-in email newsletter; link back to your blog; and place newsletter subscription tools everywhere.

Twitter: Put up an appealing Twitter post (aka a Tweet) about each blog post you make, and link back to your blog post. Heaps of readers will see the Twitter Tweet (especially if you have built up a group of Twitter followers) and so will be able to visit your site if they are attracted to your message. If you search and monitor the Twitter traffic, you will easily find people with an interest in the information on your blog ands can tailor your Twitter messages to attract them.

three ways to quickly compare your site with your competitors’

Easily compare sites’ social media presence, traffic and Google rankings with some great free tools, suggests Ann Smarty (great name!) at Search Engine Journal.

seven key steps to keeping afloat in a recession

Helpful article from the NZ Herald here looking at how to survive a recession, with tips on cashflow, debt restructuring, customer care, staff and stakeholder communication, and more.

And also from the Herald, marketing in tough times – how to avoid waste.

And from the National Business Review: ‘In a prolonged recession, what is the best strategy for business survival?‘

hello, hello – internet phoning for small business

Two new, free phone services announced recently hold heaps of promise (and cost-savings) for small businesses.

Yellow (the Yellow Pages people) has announced free Skype calls to any of its listed businesses.

(If you haven’t tried Skype, it is really dead simple to use and includes inbuilt video calling. Download the free Skype software and then all you need is a web cam and a mic, plus headphones if you don’t want anyone else to hear the person you are talking to. Visit Skype here.)

And, in the U.S (though not yet in N.Z), Google has announced a service that offers dirt cheap calls but best of all its sweet range of fancy high-tech features — such as a single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones; a central voicemail inbox that accessible on the web; text transcriptions of voice messages; and the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail.

A video explaining Google Voice is here:

fast web pages, happy customers

Some pages on retail shopping sites take almost 10 seconds to open, according to a new Nielsen Online study of major shopping sites. Woah, that’s way too slow … g0odbye customers!

Don’t be like Noel Leeming, which in the study came  in slowest at a time of 9.57 seconds. Make sure your site’s pages open fast before you scare off visitors.

One way to do this is to have keep data-heavy information on the page to a minimum. That means, for example, ensure all your photos are optimised to good web sizes and stay away from too much animated Flash content.

Also consider, if many of your clients are overseas, basing your website on a web server in the country where most of your clients are, or have specific sites for each country. It’s cheap and easy to have your site hosted with an overseas web host, And the closer the site is to its customers, the faster the site’s pages will open for those customers – keeping them happier and more active on the site.

Nielsen Online general manager Ivan Fuyala was reported saying that the accessibility and viability of a website is a key business success metric.

“If consumers can’t reach you quickly online, it won’t take long before they start looking to competitors instead.”

changing the way people find your business online

Two new developments in online search and advertising could mean big changes in the way people find your business online:

• Google is introducing technology that tracks people’s use of their favourite websites to understand their individual tastes and then package ads falling under the same areas of interest.
• And, a new search engine – WolframAlpha, that goes live in May – can reportedly, understand written questions and then compute the answer to it, as opposed to current search engines that simply look for text that matches the text in your search request.

the Google cloud with the not-so silver lining

A glitch saw a small number of private Google Docs files stored on the net made public – and could put a big dent in people’s confidence in ‘cloud computing’, the National Business Review comments.

And we would have to agree at this stage. Huge potential for small businesses but not enough transparency or control around data security at this stage, especially considering it is the second reported glitch in Google’s service in only  a couple of months.

nz’s ‘first ever’ international social media conference

In April, Wellington hosts a training and education event on social media and online marketing. Leading international experts will take workshops on topics including social media, SEO, online communities and content marketing.

The two-day event is to be held at Te Papa on April 15 – 16. Attendees will leave with “actionable strategies” to implement to their businesses, says the blurb for the event. Find out more at Marketing Now.

Watch out for Chris Brogan and David Meerman-Scott in Wellington next month.