By Susan M. Totman, MVA

So you have an online business. You're not getting many "hits" and even on those you are, you are not getting inquiries about your services or products. Why? What have you missed? Let's take a look.

1. Professional Website

Some of the most common mistakes I see online are sites that are "under construction", have links that don't work, scroll both horizontally and vertically, are poorly laid out, have so much garbage on the front page such as huge images that they take forever to load, have hard-to-read fonts which are inappropriate for a business site, or have a flash intro page that has no circumvent. Most of these issues cause viewers to run as fast as they can to a more user-friendly site.

Under Construction - NEVER put your site up under construction. This tells potential customers or clients that you are not prepared to run your business properly. It indicates unprofessionalism. When you are ready to really "run" your business, putting your site up fully functional is the only way to go. You can always add new functions later, but don't put them up non-working.
Non-working Links - Make sure your links work and you check them frequently. If you have external links, you can never be sure when those you are linking to will shut down and then you will have dead links, which is very frustrating to people browsing your site.
Scrolling Issues - Ensure that when you get your site up, the scrolling is only vertical. Most people don't mind scrolling downward and most "mice" have scrollers nowadays. Scrolling horizontally is an inconvenience that will cause many people to move on to an easier site to access.
Too Many Images - Having images is perfectly fine if they are optimized and load quickly. There are many sites out there that take over a minute to load because of the huge picture sizes on the front page. Most people will move on to another site if they must wait this long.
Hard-to-Read Fonts - When designing your site, keep in mind the viewer. Is the font a common one? If not, some browsers will change the font when the viewer logs onto your site, which renders the page totally different from that viewer's perspective. Use common fonts that are easy to read. A couple of examples are Verdana (made specifically for the web) and Arial. Also, "cutesie" fonts such as Comic Sans or Bazooka are inappropriate for the general content on a page, but can look terrific in a page title or header.
Flash Intros - Are absolutely terrific and create a tremendous impact if done properly; however, not everyone wants to see it or more specifically, wait for it to load. Many people don't want to "waste their time" looking at your beautiful flash intro. Make sure it can be circumvented with a fairly obvious link to internal pages of your site. Also important is to make sure you have great meta tags within the flash page, because any text within the flash presentation is perceived as a picture and overlooked by search engines.

This does not have to be tremendously costly. You could buy a template and build it yourself if you are familiar with basic html, use one of the many free or inexpensive html editors available out there or hire a web designer to build you a professional site.

2. Website Optimization

In order to get targeted hits on your site, you need to optimize your site with the appropriate keywords as well as promote your site in the appropriate venues.

Keywords - Though it is becoming increasingly less important to focus on meta tags, they are still important in getting the attention of certain search engines and cannot hurt in any case. Using single words is not as useful as using phrases (up to about 3 words per phrase). There is also quite a controversy as to whether there should be commas between keywords and phrases, because it is believed that some of the search engines now will combine the words within the tags in any combination if there are no commas, just a space between words. No matter how you do it, you need to have these tags. More important than the keyword tags, is the page title apparently. Your page titles should have keywords in them. It is my understanding that having a keyword rich url helps, so when you are thinking about naming your domain, consider what words you would expect people to search out when they type into a search engine and try to include that in your domain name, if possible.
ALT Tags - Most logos are images. When adding your image to the page, add in your alt tags keywords, similar to the creation of your meta tag. This increases the visibility of your keywords to the engines.
Incoming Links - Incoming links to your site are picked up by search engines. Also, the alt tags connected to those links will be picked up as well. Get your site onto other sites, particularly high-traffic sites. The best sites to link from are ones that relate in some way to what you are selling - otherwise you'll probably get hits that count on your counter, but are fairly useless in the overall scheme of things. Understand that most sites will require a reciprocal link and most require that it be visible and linked directly from your front page. Not necessarily required to be on the front page, just able to be found from there.

3. Advertise

Online - Advertise wherever you can for free. Free ads are getting harder to find, but if you do some serious searching, you can still find them. Whenever you do work for someone, ask if they will link to you, even if it's just a text link. Find associations pertaining to your specific industry. If you can afford it, join them. These sites get tons of hits, most directed at what you do. Nine times out of ten, you will get free linking to your site from their member section and sometimes free banner ads, etc. Find small business organizations such as (http://www.evpa.net), (www.smallbusiness.com), (www.webchamber.com), etc. and join them. Most are relatively inexpensive and offer tremendous benefit to your business that otherwise would cost you significantly more. Even if a membership costs, you usually will have incoming links to your site from the members section. You also have options to get really inexpensive advertising on the front page many times or the opportunity to be profiled. Most online organizations offer the same. This is much less expensive than placing ads in newspapers, for example, are usually for a period of one month or more, instead of daily pricing and are a tremendous bargain for the amount of exposure you're getting for that initial membership fee.
Offline - Find out what those who you are targeting read. If they DO read the daily newspapers, then by all means, advertise, but try to get into the sections they read (i.e., financial section for an accountant). Get professional business cards and hand them out to EVERYONE. Leave a bunch EVERYWHERE you go. Print brochures and give them out, keeping them to the point, not too full of text that people feel that they're reading a book - believe me, they won't read it all if it gets too tedious - they will put it down and move on. Keep it simple! If you have a special, print flyers and put them anywhere that it's legal to put them. Though these things cost a bit of money, if you get one good customer or client out of every 500 you put out, you've just paid for the average cost of printing*. Prepare a press release or have a professional prepare one for you and submit it to your local newspapers. Many newspapers love to do features on local people, particularly entrepreneurs.

4. Talk About Your Business

Tell Everyone - Tell them what it is you are doing and what you're offering for services or products. Word of mouth travels faster than any other method of advertising. When you give out a card, give out two or three so they can pass them on. When you get a client and they are happy with your services, tell them to pass on that information to someone else who might need you.

5. Network

Connect - Find discussion lists and organizations appropriate to your industry and join them. I cannot express how much information and resources can be gleaned from this type of networking. Attend free online seminars on promotion and growth for your industry - if you look, they are everywhere waiting to be found.

6. Delegate

Do what you're good at. Outsource the other stuff to other virtual professionals. You need to be available to promote your business. You will enjoy your choice to be a self-employed virtual professional if you allow yourself the pleasure of promoting and providing your services while allowing someone else to handle whatever you consider "drudgery". Admittedly, this is a tough one, especially when things are just starting out. If you are initially unable to afford to do this, try bartering. There are lots of other people out there in the same boat in different virtual professions who would be glad to work out a deal.

If you're not up for the task of performing some of these functions, EVPA provides many of these services to our members at a reduced cost as part of our commitment to the growth of the virtual professional industry.

© 2002 Susan M. Totman, MVA

Susan Totman is co-founder of Virtual-Professionals.com, and a Certified Master Virtual Assistant. Susan currently owns a document and web template business, Elite Small Business Forms and Templates (http://www.smallbusinessformsandtemplates.com) web design business, Elite Web Studio (http://www.elitewebstudio.com), a FREE Worldwide Listing Service for Virtual Office Assistants (http://www.eliteofficesupport.com) and works with clients worldwide in helping get their image out to the world in an affordable, professional manner.

Article may be reproduced provided entire article and copyright remains completely intact.

*This based on Elite Small Business Forms and Templates' pricing structure for brochures and flyers.

Parts of this article were taken from Susan's upcoming e-book, "Elite Office Support's Guide to Managing Your Online Business", soon to be released.

NOTE: Do NOT remove copyright information for any purpose whatsoever.

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