Internet Word Magic Blog

A New Approach to Local Marketing

The Internet is the first choice for most people when they are trying to locate information about a local business. What time does the store open? Where is the closest dry cleaners that does alterations? Where can I get the best price on office chairs? Where can I find a local plumber?

If you have a business that relies on "foot traffic" instead of "Internet traffic," you still need a website, but the website needs to be positioned a bit differently. Your website is not selling a product; it is a promotion tool for your business. As such, you want to reach consumers at the various stages of the purchase process with an online marketing strategy that blends online advertising with offline advertising.

Who Is Your Audience?

The best way to reach your audience is to know who they are and how they buy. Are your customers a younger crowd who are familiar with social media like Facebook or Twitter? If so, you might consider promoting your brand in the social media and social networking sites.

According to David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy, 360i, "Digital word of mouth – where a brand actively reaches out to website editors and bloggers to promote the distribution of the brand's assets – can also drive traffic and high quality inbound links."

How Do They Search?

How your customer searches is a key component in knowing how to optimize your website for the searches. Once you know how your customers behave in each stage of the sales process, you have a better understanding of how to put together an online and offline campaign to attract the right audience.

Noah Elin, VP of corporate strategy, Steak Media, has this to say on the subject, "Once you have a good sense of who your customers are and how they behave, develop and optimize content to meet their differing needs. This includes everything from keyword identification and expansion, optimization of digital media (images, video, news, etc.), content network selection (site targeting and ad network optimization), social marketing and coordination of activities between online strategies and offline placements."

Use Offline Techniques Online

Banner ads or Pay-Per-Click ads are not the only way to drive traffic to a website. Consider placing inexpensive ads in publications that are read by your audience. These ads can be used not to sell, but to drive traffic to your website.

Another simple technique is to use digital coupons. Coupon aggregation sites such as RetailMeNot.com, CouponChief.com, CouponCuisine.com and Savings.com offer coupons from many different brands and make it simple for consumers to find the coupons they want to use. Facebook also lets you use an application from Coupons.com on your profile. With the application, users can download new coupons each week and share with their friends.

"Coupon site visits were up 33% in October 2008, according to ComScore, with 16% of shoppers saying that they don't buy in general unless they can find a coupon. Three out of four adults are more likely to return to a store that offers coupons."

Conclusion

As a "brick and mortar" business with a local reach, you can still take advantage of the Internet as a powerful marketing tool. Take the time to really know what your audience wants, when they want it and how they want it. Then use clever online marketing techniques combined with offline techniques to reach your audience.

Using the "Palin Effect" to Boost Sales

Thanks to the 2009 presidential race, online business owners can use a clever and highly effective marketing technique to boost sales. I call it the "Palin effect:" an instant, passionate, emotional connection not based on reason or logic.

You'd probably like to think that someone purchasing your product or service is making the decision based on logical reasons such as price, the selection, the warranty, or the testimonials from satisfied customers. Unfortunately, you'd probably be wrong.

Why people buy is largely an unknown factor because it's often a personal decision that's usually based more on emotion than facts. Good advertising campaigns are specifically set-up to play on people's emotions. It's not the facts that are important, it's how you make people feel that matters.

2009 Presidential Election Campaign

A good example of this is what we are seeing with the 2009 U.S. presidential election campaign. When Republican presidential candidate John McCain selected "hockey-mom" Sarah Palin as his running mate, he saw a huge boost in the polls. In fact, according to Newsweek magazine, "With Palin on the ticket, 71% of McCain voters now say they support the ticket strongly, up from 39% before the convention."

So how did Palin cause this big jump in the polls? Simple – she touched an emotional button with the American people. As Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says, "Palin is a great story."

According to historian Michael Beschloss, "A good part of Sarah Palin's appeal is her life history, the choices she made, things that let voters form a bond." She comes across as an average mom, a working woman who just happens to be governor of Alaska
and now the Republican Vice President nominee. People identify with her story and it makes them feel good.

In this election year, Americans seem to be making decisions based on emotion, rather than reason and knowledge. The election campaigns are the same as a well-planned sales campaign using emotion as the hook that persuades consumers to make a purchase. But what really is predominant in this election campaign is the use of "the story" to make the emotional connection with the buyer.

Use Your Story

As an online business owner, you can also use "your story" to boost your sales. Especially if you are an information marketer, your story is gold; this is how you can stand out from the crowd and make that emotional connection with your buyer.

Two good examples of highly successful online business owners who have a great story to tell are Alexandria Brown and David Neagle. Both these multimillionaires have a rag to riches story that is memorable and persuasive. When they tell their story, they come across as personable, truthful and most of all – convincing.

Conclusion

Everyone has a story to tell. What is yours? Take a look at how other successful marketers are using their story and put your own story together. Use it as part of your sales campaign and make that emotional connection to increase your sales.

Smart Marketing Tips for a Slow Economy

The other day I went to buy groceries and standing outside the store entrance was a young lady representing a nonprofit that collects food for a local food bank. I glanced over and saw that she already had two shopping carts filled with food items. She handed me a bright blue plastic bag with a flyer about her organization and asked me if I would consider buying some food items for the nonprofit while I was shopping today.

I think I took her by surprise with my enthusiastic response. "What you are doing is absolutely brilliant," I remarked. "What a great idea!" Rather than asking me to donate money, she asked me for what she really needed (food) and then positioned herself in a location where it was easy for me to deliver what she needed (food).

I was happy to donate to her cause because she made it not only easy, but a "no-brainer" for me. All I had to do was put some food in my bright blue bag while shopping and hand it to her on the way out. I didn't have to drive to another location or call a phone number to have someone come to my house for a pick-up. I walked in, I walked out, and I was done.

This story proves that marketing doesn't have to be difficult or complicated. The techniques this nonprofit used to successfully collect food can be can be broken down into very simple steps that anyone can use to effectively market online:

Know Where to Find Your Audience

People coming to a grocery store have money and are prepared to buy food. Where does your audience go when they have money and are prepared to buy?

People are always in various stages of the buying cycle and it's easier to make a sale when they have already made the decision to buy, and are now ready to choose which widget to buy, rather than should they buy a widget.

One of the most overlooked opportunities to make a sale online is after you've just made a sale. Instead of completing the sale with a thank you page, offer them another opportunity to buy when their credit card is out of their wallet by creating an upsell page with a product or products that might be of interest to them. "Now that you've bought this, how about buying this?" It's the old, "Would you like fries with that?" technique and it works great.

Show Proof of Success

People like to feel secure that they are making the right decision. Seeing that other people have made a successful decision on the same product as you is a wonderful encouragement for them to buy.

When I was approached by the nonprofit representative outside the grocery store, I saw that many other people had donated food and it made me feel confident that this was a good cause.

On a website, if you can set up a place for people to post reviews of your product, it will increase your sales. It also increases your credibility with your potential client. The fact that you are willing to post all reviews of your product, (both good and bad), shows that you have confidence in your company, as well as your product.

Another technique is to have a short demo video that shows someone successfully using your product. Seeing how a product works is quite convincing for most people.

Make it Easy to Do Business with You

People may want to do business with you online, but they won't if you make it too difficult. Take at look at the number of steps it takes for someone to make a purchase from your website. If it is more than three clicks, you are probably loosing sales.

On a website, potential customers are looking for streamline purchasing. The easier you can make it for them to buy, the more likely you will close the sale.

When that nonprofit rep handed me the blue plastic bag I knew exactly what I needed to do and how to do it. For both of us, it was a positive outcome.

Conclusion

Deliver marketing information in a way that doesn't come across as a sales pitch. Although your audience wants product information, what they truly want is confidence that they are buying from a reliable source and that they are making the right decision.

Google Does It Again With Website Optimizer

Landing page, home page, or squeeze page; which is the most effective in conversions? One person swears by using a squeeze page to add contacts to his database. Another person tells you it’s a lousy idea and only brings you unqualified leads. Who's right and who's wrong?

Or, how about the headline on your homepage; should it be a question or an imperative statement? Should you use video on your homepage or would it me more conducive to use a set of bullet points to promote your new product?

Knowing what information to put on your website and where to put that information is often a confusing challenge for small business owners. A website design is more art than science and therein lies the problem.

Website Design by Audience

You may have specific guidelines to follow regarding good website content and design, but the final result depends on how your target audience reacts to what you've created. Both the content and the design of a website should meet the needs of your target audience.

It doesn't matter what you think is best; what matters is what is best for your target audience.

Unfortunately, most websites are created in somewhat of a vacuum. The designer creates the website based on what the client wants and the content is written based on what the client wants. What's missing from this equation is what the customer wants.

The customer's needs should be considered in every aspect of both design and content creation on a website. A simple way to find out if you have a website that is meeting the needs of your audience is to test the pages to see if they could be improved by changing a headline or changing some graphics.

Increase Conversion Rates by 40%

According to Marketing Sherpa, "Getting landing pages built and tested is one of the top five challenges faced by B2B marketers. The top reason people don't create landing pages is that they don't have the time or resources. However, using and optimizing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more."

Google's new free tool, the Website Optimizer, is exactly what you need to test out your ideas and to create a page that has better conversions. With the Google Website Optimizer you can find out if you have the right content for conversion. Instead of relying on gut feeling to write a headline, you can now test new headlines to see which one converts better.

The time was, not too long ago, that only big companies could afford the resources to do split testing for a website page. With this new tool, small business owners have the ability to dramatically increase conversions without additional expensive resources.

How to Use Google Website Optimizer

Using the Google Website Optimizer, you can create two or three different versions of the same website page, customers are sent randomly to one of the versions and Google technology tracks it for you. Wait about two weeks to get the results. Whichever page performs the best is the one you should be using for your website.

When making changes to your website page keep these key points in mind:

• Test a small number of variants. Maybe change a graphic or a headline, but keep it simple so you can see if the changes are the reason for increased conversions.
• Test only bold changes on your page, such as headlines, colors, graphic placement, etc.
• Don't jump to conclusions. Study your statistics and make sure your decisions are based on fact. If you need to run the test for more than two weeks, run it longer.

Conclusion

According to Tom Leung, of Google, "Bad pages are where clicks go to die. Testing is not about technology – it’s a process you have, to come up with solutions." Don't be afraid to make changes to your website pages. The Google Website Optimizer tool is easy to use and with testing you can make the right changes to double your sales.

Four Curious Reasons Why People Leave Your Website

The rule of thumb is that you have about four seconds to capture the interest of website visitors before they click away. That being the case, have you ever analyzed your website to consider why people would abruptly leave your site?

Let's take it one step further and really get to the heart of problem by asking yourself, "Why would my target audience leave?" If people who aren't your target audience leave, you shouldn't care. They aren't your potential customer. However, if your potential customers are quickly leaving, you have a serious problem.

Another way to view the problem is to look at your customers' experience on your website.

Here are four reasons why potential customers might abruptly leave your website:

(1) Wrong Intent

Are you giving your customers what they want? Is your website full of educational resources and your audience doesn't care about learning, they just want to buy?

Or maybe you have a website with many products with little explanation. If your audience needs more information before they can make a decision, they'll probably leave your site to find the information they need somewhere else.

In both cases, the website has the wrong intent for its target audience. To avoid intent mismatch, take the time to thoroughly analyze the needs of your target audience. Figure out what would be the best approach to meet their needs.

(2) Personality Mismatch

Your website has a personality, and just as some personalities get along and some don't, your website's personality could be a mismatch for your target audience.

For example, is your website filled with too much text, dancing animation, multiple navigation choices, and flashing banners, but your target audience is new to the Internet? A website with so much going on would scare off an Internet newbie.

Or maybe you've created a website that is clean and simple, but your target audience is teenagers. They would think your site is boring without sound and animation.

A successful website is a good personality match with its target audience.

(3) Website Usability

How easy is it for your customers to find things on your website? Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and visit your website through the customers' experience.

Start by asking yourself what would be the most common problem they would be trying to solve. And then follow your website's navigation trail to see what they experience.

How many times do they need to click to get their problem solved? How far down on the page do they need to scroll to get an answer? Can they easily navigate back to the homepage or do they find "dead ends" that trap them on a page?

Make your site as user friendly as possible, based on the needs of your audience.

(4) Visual Layout

The design of your website should be based on what you think will influence your target audience to do business with you.

For example, is your target audience more of an analytical mindset? Then make sure you have tables and graphs, as well as more detailed information.

If your target audience could be described as people oriented, then include pictures of people on your site, as well as happy testimonials from satisfied customers.

Analyze your audience and use design as a persuasive sales technique.

Conclusion

Needless to say, there are many more than these four reasons why someone would abruptly leave your site. (I didn't even touch on the content disconnect.) My hope is to inspire you to simply rethink the problem and come up with innovative solutions that are right for your website.

Does Your Website have Too Much Information?

Have you ever gone to a website that is full of good information, but you aren't motivated to do business with the company? Why do you think this happens?

One explanation is that the company's website is what I call feature-driven. What I mean by this is that the company concentrates so much on giving you information about what they do or describe the products they sell, that it's like reading a parts catalog. (Which is fine if you want your website to read like a parts catalog, but I can guarantee you that you're going to make very few sales or generate very few leads.)

Company Centric

Unfortunately, many companies make the mistake of wanting to talk about what they do, their mission statement, and how many awards they have won. They sincerely think that this information is important to their customer because it is important to them.

Or a company gives you all the details about their services or products and expects you, the potential customer, to use this information to make a decision to do business with them.

This type of approach on a website is detrimental because the marketing message is from the viewpoint of the company, and is not looking at the situation from the viewpoint of the customer.

Benefits Please

The customers are looking for benefits. When they come to your website, they typically are trying to solve a problem and are looking for answers. So, yes they certainly do need the features information, but they'll be getting that information on all the other websites that are in competition with your website.

How you stand out, or differentiate yourself, from the crowd of millions of websites is to present a marketing message that is benefit driven. Tell your potential customer how they can benefit by using your product or service. Be specific and don't assume they will be able to figure things out by themselves.

"Don't make me think," is one of my favorite sayings about customer behavior online. Your potential customers need information that makes it easy for them to make a decision as to whether they should stay on your website or click off in search of more information. They don't want to take the time to read through a detailed description of a product or service unless it is immediately obvious to them how they will benefit from this product or service.

Emotional Thinking

The biggest problem with a feature-driven website is that you are not creating an emotional connection with your potential customer. People aren't typically logical when they make a purchase, they are emotional. Logic doesn't sell the product, emotion does.

In fact, there's a new book out called "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely that talks about how people make different decisions about the same situation depending on whether they are thinking rationally or emotionally. Participants were asked the same question in a "cold, rational" state and again when they were emotional. Their answers changed dramatically.

Use Bullet Lists

A simple approach to this problem is to use a headline of "Features" with a bulleted list of important features customers would want to know about, and another headline of "Benefits" with a bulleted list of the benefits the customer will receive by using your product or service. An excellent example of this approach is the website www.FreshBooks.com.

Use Video

Putting video on a home page is really hot right now. I could write a whole article about using video on your website, but let me say that it is the best way to easily promote the benefits of your product or service. Because people are drawn to motion and sound, they will automatically click the video and be engaged immediately by the person in the video.

Two good examples of using video to promote the benefits of a company's service and product can be found at www.ToolsToLife.com and www.OCShephard.com. Take a look at both these sites and you'll see how powerful it is to use video on a website.

Integrated Approach

Another technique often seen on websites is to integrate the features and benefits into a paragraph format that tells the story. For instance, if you were a service provider, one sentence can explain the different features of what you offer and then in the following sentence or paragraph explain the benefits to your customer.

An example of this integrated approach can be found at http://soft-source.com/PAGES/Fulfillment.html. Notice how the company talks about what it offers (the features) and then it talks about how this is advantageous for the customer (the benefits.)

Conclusion

To make a sale on a website or generate a lead on a website, you have to have an emotional connection with your potential customer. A simple exercise to improve your website is to take a piece of paper and make a list of all the features of your product or service and then right next to the feature, write the benefit. Use this information to improve your website and make it the marketing tool that it should be.

Removing Website Obstacles

When someone lands on your homepage, how clear is your marketing message? Is it easy for them to decide to do business with you or do they have to maneuver through a series of obstacles on your website to get the information they need?

Let's take a look at some of the obstacles on a website that sabotage the sales process:

Confusing Navigation

How many times have you gone to a website, ready to buy, and then can't figure out where you need to go to make the purchase?

One of my first clients hired me to write sales copy for her website because she had written the copy and she felt it was not doing a good job converting sales. So I went to the website and pretended I was a customer to experience what her customers experience when they go to the website.

I actually spent over 10 minutes trying to figure out where I needed to go to buy her products and the only reason I didn't give up is because I had been hired to solve the problem of poor sales.

What I discovered is that her biggest problem wasn't the sales copy, it was poor navigation. First we had to solve the navigation problem and then I rewrote the copy for her products. And you know what happened? Literally hours after the website went live with the new changes she started selling products.

Confusing Jargon

You may be an expert in your field but what about your customer? One of the biggest problems I find with website copy written by the business owner is that it is too technical. The content tends to be filled with jargon or words that would be unfamiliar to a potential customer or client.

A few years back I was working on a website for a client who did remodeling for commercial buildings. He insisted that the website content include construction terminology that only a builder would understand. I asked him who his customers were and he told me they were store managers (who may or may not be familiar with construction terms).

It never occurred to him that the website content needed to be written using words that would be familiar to his customers and to leave out the jargon.

Confusing Marketing Message

When someone comes to your website they are looking for information to help them solve a problem. In order for them to get an answer to their problem, you need to make sure the answer is not hidden on your website or completely missing.

Since most people who come to your website will land on the home page, it's vitally important that you have bold headlines that clearly express your marketing message in a way that is easy to understand.

It doesn't matter whether you are selling a product or selling a service, what's most important is that people can immediately figure out what to do without having to think too much. If you make them think, they will leave your site. No one has the time to read through long paragraphs and long sentences.

You want to present a simple headline, easy-to-understand benefits and a clear value proposition. By scanning the headlines on the home page, the reader should immediately be able to make a decision about whether they want to do business with you or not.

Conclusion

Simple language, clear direction and benefit driven content are key to a successful website. If you want to increase the sales on your website, maybe you just need to remove the obstacles that sabotage the sales process.

Is Website Optimization Necessary?

Should you optimize your website?

Having a website is one thing, but getting people to come to your website is quite another. Many online business owners are under the false impression that all they needed was a website and manna will fall from heaven.

So, the question becomes, "What exactly do you need for a website to be a productive marketing tool for a business?"

Three Tools for Success

Basically for a website to be an effective marketing tool you need to have three components: a professional website design, well-written website content that clearly communicates your marketing message, and a website that can be easily indexed by the search engines. All three components need to be part of a website marketing plan or the website will fall short of the company's expectations.

Professional Website Design

Nothing screams amateur more than a homemade website. If you are a small business owner and you want to compete with "the big guys," you've got to invest the money in a well-designed website. Expect to pay at least $3000-$5000 for the design of your website. It will be the best marketing investment you can make in your business.

Your company will be judged by the way your website looks. If you try to cut corners and save money by a designing the website yourself or having your high school nephew do it for you, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You will end up losing more business simply because a poorly designed website makes your business look untrustworthy.

In choosing a website designer, look for someone who understands that a website is a marketing tool, not just an electronic brochure. A website designer needs to be more than a graphic designer. One of my clients learned this the hard way. A few years ago she paid thousands of dollars for a website that looked good, but because of the way it was constructed, it could not be indexed by the search engines. So her website doesn't exist according to Google. Now she needs to pay more money to have the website redesigned in a format that can be indexed by the search engines.

Website Content

A professionally designed website is a good start, but without effective communication of the marketing message, a website becomes a dismal failure. The website will not generate leads, build a relationship with the customer or make money for the company if the written content is unclear or poorly organized.

Again, in many instances, a small-business owner sees writing the website content himself as an opportunity to save money. After all, who knows more about the company than the business owner? It is true that the business owner knows the most about his or her company, but they may not know how to present that information clearly to a prospective customer.

Writing website content is different than writing off-line marketing materials like a brochure. Website visitors want instant gratification. They immediately want to know who you are, what you do, and why they should do business with you. They will quickly scan the homepage to see if you have a solution to their problem. If they can't find an answer within five seconds they will click away.

Your marketing message needs to be clear, concise and easy to find. If your visitor has to read through bulky paragraphs of information or to navigate to different pages to find information, they will get discouraged and leave.

How and where your marketing message is presented on the website is key to capturing your visitor's interest in keeping them on the website. The goal should be to keep them long enough on the homepage that they want to navigate deeper into the website so that you can generate sales and leads.

Search Engine Optimization

What makes a website such an interesting marketing tool is that you have two audiences for a website: the search engines and the human beings. The website construction and the website content need to be designed for both audiences.

The website needs to be designed so it is easy for the search engines to index or "read" the coding of a website. This coding includes keywords that someone might use to find a specific website. Where these keywords are found on a website is just as important as the keywords themselves. In addition, the content needs to be written using these keywords in such a way that the marketing message is clear without being repetitious.

Another consideration in search engine optimization is the amount of linking you have on your website both internal and external. Google will rank a website based on the amount of links it has. An example of a link within your website would be a text link on the home page that takes the visitor deeper into the website. An example of a link outside the website would be a press release about your company that is posted on another website with a link back to your website.

Conclusion

Think of your website as a way of using the Internet to start building a relationship with your potential customers. Keep in mind that everything you do with a website will always have the two audiences of the search engines and the human beings. To have a successful website you need to always keep your two audiences in mind.

Increasing Online Sales Opportunities

Are you aware that most of the people, who visit your website for the first time, will not do business with you? A website is really like a storefront. Many people will visit your store, and not everybody will make a purchase. However, your online sales can increase with just a few changes.

Create a Sales Path

Make sure your website is easy to navigate, and that your products are easy to purchase. Think about the way you have your products organized throughout your website. Starting at the home page, visitors need to know exactly what path they should take to purchase a product.

If you walk into an unfamiliar grocery store, and you want to buy a carton of milk, you would naturally go to the dairy section of the store to find a carton of milk. However, if you walked into an unfamiliar grocery store to purchase a can of pinto beans, it might be located in the canned vegetable section, a special section for vegetarian food, or maybe it's situated in the ethnic food section. So, instead of going straight to the aisle where the food should be, you end up wandering the store until you get to the correct isle.

Sometimes the way a grocery store is laid out makes complete sense to you. Other times, the logic to the organization of the store is confusing to you, and therefore the shopping experience becomes negative. The same thing can happen on a website.

If your website visitors cannot easily figure out what path they need to take to purchase the items they want to buy, they will become frustrated and leave the website without making a purchase.

The purchase path on a website needs to be simple and logical. Organize your products the way you customers will look for them. For instance, if you are selling skincare products, you might group them by brand or if you are selling just one line of skin care products, you could group them for men or women. The main point is to organize a logical path for the customer to make a purchase.

Offer Freebies

Maybe the visitors that come to your website are not quite ready to make a purchase. In that case, give them some other options to do business with you. One idea might be to ask them to sign up to be on a special mailing list so they can receive discount coupons only available to the mailing list. Generally, this mailing list is an e-mail database. However, if you'd like to start building an off line database for a postcard mailing, try to get their physical mailing address too.

An easy way to get a physical mailing address is to offer to send them a freebie through the mail. The product they receive is free and all they would have to pay is shipping.

Build a Relationship

The online marketing plan for your website should include e-mail marketing and autoresponder e-mails. Rather than making a sale as the number one goal for your website, your primary goal should be to gather as many customer e-mail addresses as possible. That way, you can continue to market to people who have already shown an interest in your business. What you want to be able to do is start building a relationship with your potential customers. You want to gain their trust and make it easy for them to do business with you.

A 2007 survey sponsored by RightNow Technologies showed that, "68% of consumers said they were prompted to browse a website after receiving an e-mail from a retailer." It may take weeks or months before someone is ready to make a purchase on your website. However, if you are continually marketing to them through a monthly e-mail campaign, the chances are quite good that eventually they will make a purchase from your website.

Another way to continue building a relationship using e-mail is to set up a series of autoresponders that come into play as soon as someone makes a purchase on your website. In fact, the 2007 survey by RightNow Technologies showed that, "73% of consumers said they would appreciate any post-purchase follow-up." Customers not only expect, but they want to receive follow-up from a retailer when they make a purchase.

Conclusion

A website is more than just a storefront for a retailer; it is the whole shopping experience. The more pleasant the shopping experience, the more likely sales will increase.

Designing Websites for iPhone Viewing

How would your website look on a hand held device? Is it easy to navigate? Is the most important information readily available to your visitors? Is your website "mobile Web" ready?

Ten years ago most small business owners didn't have a website and probably didn't see the need for one. Now, a business without a website is considered second rate at best. A website is a necessity for doing business in the 21st century. Also a necessity in the 21st century is a website that can be easily viewed on a hand held device.

According to the latest statistics, only 11% of Americans are getting their news and information using the browser in their mobile phone. That doesn't seem too impressive until you look at the enormous popularity of Apple's new iPhone and realize that "the times, they are a changing." In the next few years, the popularity of surfing the net on your mobile Web is going to skyrocket.

Hand Held Devices Are the Future

Mobile devices are the future of the Internet. According to a November 27, 2007 article in the New York Times, "More than 30 companies have signed up for the Open Handset Alliance from Google, which aims to bring the wide-open development environment of the Internet to mobile devices." If Google is getting involved in this effort to broaden the use of the Internet on hand held devices, you can be sure that this is not just a passing trend.

The incredible popularity of the iPhone is leading the way to a new website platform for businesses. As the Web technologies for mobile devices continue to improve, more and more people are going to be using their iPhone or Blackberry to connect to the Internet. However, even though the improved Internet navigation capabilities of the iPhone make it easier for users to connect to the Internet, there is still one big problem with mobile devices. Small screens make for difficult viewing.

Most Websites Look Terrible on a Mobile Device

Unfortunately, shrinking a website to fit on the screen of an iPhone or a Blackberry usually leads to difficulty viewing and finding information. A smart business owner will make sure their website can be viewed easily on both a desktop and a mobile device.

Here are some pointers in getting your website mobile ready:

• Don't use flash. The screen is too small and flash is just plain annoying. Besides, the iPhone browser doesn't support flash.
• Get a .mobi extension for your website. Available since September 2006, over 500,000 .mobi domains have been registered. Go Daddy and Network Solutions both offer .mobi registration (and mobile specific site building tools).
• Use easy to read fonts. Make sure your website uses Verdana or Ariel fonts. Also use black fonts on a white background; the greater contrast makes for easier viewing.
• Keep it vertical. Your website content needs to be set up so that most important information is centered within the website.
• Keep the costs down. Unfortunately, using a mobile Web is not a flat rate in most situations, so users are looking for information quickly. Help them out by using informative headlines, subheadings and bulleted lists. Don't make them go deeper into your website to get answers.
• Design for simplicity. A small screen is difficult to read, so you may need to reconsider the look of your website. A graphic dominant website is probably not a good choice for a small screen. Streamline the look of your website and concentrate on the message. Zero in on what specific information your customers need and give it to them.
• No second chances. On a regular website, you can move around with a back or forward button. On a hand held device you only have a stop button. So, you need to get it right the first time and make sure your website has the right answers.

Conclusion

Getting a website mobile Web ready may include redesigning the current site or completely building another site just for the mobile devices. Each business owner needs to valuate the situation and make choices depending on what they want to accomplish. But whether you make changes or not, the Internet is moving off the desktop into the hands of your customer. Now is the time to get a jump on the
competition.