Having a website for your business is one thing, but getting traffic to it – the right kind of traffic – is something that many small business owners find daunting.
If you’re keen to discover new ways to get all the traffic you can handle to your website then the World Traffic Summit is worth getting along to.
This 3-day seminar will focus solely on traffic generation for your website(s) or online business, with some of the best-of-the-best from around the world traveling to Australia to share their tips and personal traffic strategies.
When: Friday August 27 – Sunday August 29, 2010
Where: Gold Coast, Australia
For more information and to register – World Traffic Summit
When something doesn’t work the way it should or things don’t go right in one way or another, it’s easy to immediately play the blame game. We’ve all been there, I’m sure.
- You visit a website and get a ‘page not found error’ so you start blaming the site owner for mucking up their URLs.
- You click on a link within a document or page and a blank page opens, so again, the site owner or whoever put this page together has stuffed up.
- An email or fax you were expecting still hasn’t arrived, so you jump up and down at the unreliable so-and-so who promised they’d send it straight away.
When you manage a business and have other family, community and social commitments you often find yourself rushing to do things. But when something doesn’t work and your first thought is to immediately phone or email the person or company concerned, who has obviously stuffed up somehow, take a moment to stop to think about whether the problem actually lies with you (shock, gasp!)
Or perhaps not necessarily you, but maybe your computer, software, fax line, email program.
For example, in the case of a web page that doesn’t exist, are you sure you entered the web site address correctly? If you clicked on a link, did your email program break the link? If so, you should be able to access the web page by copying and pasting the entire address into your Internet browser’s address bar.
When you’re having trouble connecting to a particular web site it’s a good idea to check some other sites to determine if it’s just this site you can’t connect to or all sites, which may indicate a problem with your own Internet or modem.
If you clicked on a link within a web page and the new page or document didn’t open or opened as a blank page, perhaps there’s a setting within your Internet or security settings that is preventing it from opening. Or it may be that your firewall or anti-virus software is blocking it for some reason. Could it be that the document that should open was created with a program that you don’t have on your computer? Or maybe you need to get the latest updates for one of your programs, such as Flash or Java.
My examples here are predominantly focused with technology, but other factors can also be the cause of things not going the way they should. That’s okay … the point I want to stress here is that sometimes the ‘obvious culprit’ isn’t actually the cause of your frustrations.
So before you start blaming others (and perhaps embarrass yourself in the process) take a few moments to look at the entire situation in order to solve the problem. Then, if you can’t find a solution, contact the person or company concerned and – rather than telling them they need to get their act together – politely let them know that you’re having trouble accessing abc or you still haven’t received the email/fax/phone call/payment, and do they have any suggestions as to how you can resolve this.
Last year I came across a HTML editor that’s really easy to use either for creating web pages from scratch or editing existing HTML pages, such as website templates.
I’ve been ‘playing’ with PageBreeze for a while and have been quite impressed by how easy it is to use. You can create and edit pages in the HTML or ‘normal’ (WYSIWYG) view, preview how it will look when published to the internet, easily add page title, description and keyword details and publish with FTP.
It also has a form editor which makes it easy to create forms if necessary.
Best of all … there’s a free version or a more advanced ‘cheap as chips’ version.
The basic Pagebreeze software is free for personal, not-for-profit and educational use. Or the more advanced version for business (or ‘for-profit’) use is only a one-off payment $29.95.
Free HTML Editor
If you don’t really need web development software with all the bells and whistles, it’s worth giving PageBreeze a try.
I get a lot of people asking me how they can watch online videos without them stopping and starting all the time.
First, it helps to understand why they stop and start. Depending on various factors, including your internet speed, it can take a while for videos to download. Often you’ll start to watch a video but you’re viewing it quicker than it can download.
So … simply press ‘play’, then pause and give it a minute or two (longer for very long videos) while it downloads.
Then press ‘play’ again and you should be able to watch it nice and smoothly.
Do you ever submit a support ticket, anticipating the quick reply to some issue that you’ve tried in vain to solve yourself … only to be disappointed with the reply? Perhaps they didn’t fully answer your questions or they replied with more questions?
I’ve encountered some pretty dodgy support desks, but I must admit, 99.5% of the support tickets I’ve submitted have been answered promptly, friendly and – most importantly – they’ve solved the issue.
But there are a few key pointers in HOW YOU ACTUALLY ASK FOR HELP that will assist in you getting a useful reply:
- Be as clear as possible and give all the necessary information, including relevant URLs or site names. For example, “I can’t get the HTML to work right!”, or “Keep getting error messages with my website” don’t give enough information. Although you know exactly what website or task you’re referring to, the support staff reading your message may not know. The only way they can help you is to find out precisely what the problem is.
- If you receive a specific error message or number, include this in your support request.
- When you have multiple questions, begin each question on a new line, or even leave an extra space between lines. When you have several questions one after another, all in the one paragraph, it can be difficult for the support team member to read and questions can be easily missed.
- Keeping points 1, 2 and 3 in mind, don’t ramble. Keep your request as concise as possible while giving the necessary and relevant facts. Quite often, dot points or bullet points are fine, so long as all the information is there.
- If you need to register your email address in order for the support ticket response to be sent to you, please check that you’ve entered the correct email address. Then double-check it! It’s incredibly frustrating when someone asks for help and you give it, but then the email notification that their ticket has been answered bounces back.
- Although you may be frustrated by something that’s not working the way you think it should, support staff are there to help you … not bear the brunt of your frustrations. Try to remain calm and work with the support team to resolve the issues at hand.
- Before submitting your support ticket, check that you’ve followed instructions correctly – sometimes we try to do things quickly and mis-read the instructions. (Or think it’s so simple we don’t need to read them). It’s also possible to miss the fact that there even are instructions available. Often you’ll find sites will have tutorials or ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages available. Remember to check for these first as you may find the answers here quicker than waiting for a support ticket response – particularly if you are looking for solutions outside of business hours.
An additional tip … remember that support desks are staffed by people, not robots. Politeness and ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’, while not essential, are usually smiled upon. It’s also nice to be able to address the reply to a specific person, so please remember to sign off with your name.
It seems that membership sites are all the rage at the moment … and rightly so. Whether they’re free or charge some sort of fee, if set up and managed well they can be an excellent way to provide online teaching or bring a group of like-minded individuals together.
If running a well-maintained membership site is something you do, or would like to do, here’s an interview that I’m sure you’ll find helpful.
This interview is with professional high-profile blogger, Chris Garrett, where he discusses the membership site advice he wishes he knew before he began building his membership sites, along with pricing strategies, software and how to use “The Bikini Concept” (you’ll have to listen to the interview to find out what this is!)
You can download or play this interview for tips on how to create a successful membership site for absolutely no cost.
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Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate
