Devour The Web

Accessibility: Is your website causing you to loose potential clients?

With millions of people going online everyday the potential for your business is almost unimaginable! However, the great challenge is creating an environment that is positive, effective, and accessible to all of your potential clients.

No two people see everything exactly the same way. In addition to our own paradigms that shape how we interpret things presented to us, there are also very real obstacles that affect many people surfing the web. By removing barriers to accessibility and addressing these obstacles you open the door to new business and greater success.

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” - Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director (Web Accessibility Initiative)

The most common obstacles facing many individuals are auditory and visual. This includes people with various levels of hearing, language barriers, color blindness, visual perception, level of sight, and complete loss of sight. Any of these challenges can render your site potentially useless to a visitor and potential client who may simply be unable to distinguish the color variation of your text on your background.

Sponsored Links

Thanks to a unique algorithm that produces most relevant results to any given query, Google has become, indisputably, the best search engine on the Internet. On the last count, Google has indexed over 4 billion pages and tackles around 200 million searches a day! A cluster of 100 thousand servers are used to store, crunch and spew out the query results with lightning speed that you are so accustomed to see.

This phenomenal growth has made Google from a garage startup to an Internet behemoth faster than any company has done before. The prodigies behind this unique search engine, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the process already got enlisted themselves in billionaire club.

Google is no longer a mere search engine! It is increasingly broadening its offerings to include great new services and excellent tools. Among these services, most notables are News - a news aggregation and searching service, Blogger - an online journal-keeping solution, Froogle - a marketplace for comparison shopping, Groups - online discussion groups, Answers - a place to get hard-to-find information for a price, etc.

Copyright © 2004 Priya Shah

The question of the day is “Should you start a Blog?”

People all over the planet are blogging. Companies, CEOs, lawyers, journalists, stewardesses. Even dogs and babies.

Why? Because they can. It’s that simple.

Blogging requires little or no learning curve. If you can type, speak into a phone, bark, chew, record a holiday movie, you can blog.

Blogs have taken publishing out of the domain of those who know HTML and designing, to make this powerful tool available to the rest of us.

That holiday in the Far East, your grandma’s birthday, you company’s latest product offering, your new recipe for rum cake, your daughter’s first step, your pet’s antics, what you thought of the Garfield movie - you can blog all this and more.

A blog is an online journal or diary. Which makes it ideal for voicing your opinion, recording your pregnancy blahs or announcing your company’s latest acquisition.

People are using them to communicate with family, for education, for business, and almost anything else you can think of.

But one thing not all blogs get is a readership.

Information Overload

With information overload rapidly killing traditional forms of online advertising - today the key to effective marketing is relevancy.

Smaller businesses with a niche or limited product range are more often than not focused by default but for the larger company with a diverse product range the ‘all things to all men’ approach to advertising is becoming less and less effective.

Monthly newsletters may have worked in the past but with the online marketing juggernaut churning out newsletters after newsletter along with countless other marketing material the newsletter is loosing its punch.

With over zealous spam filters and the sheer weight of marketing material it is not enough that a newsletter is well written and well presented it has to be wanted, and to be wanted it has to be relevant.

How confident can a newsletter editor be that if a subscriber did not receive their regular copy that the subscriber would look to see why; how confident can anyone be that the subscriber would even notice?

For the larger supplier who has a diverse product range the websites and newsletter has to become ‘intelligent’ and move away from the ‘these are the answers to everyone’s problems’ and develop the individually customised websites and newsletters that says ‘these are the answers to your specific needs’.

Here’s ten simple yet POWERFUL ideas for you to reflect on. This will help you adjust your marketing strategies…which will have a GREAT effect on everything you sell.


1. You don’t make people feel safe when they order.
Remind people that they are ordering through a secure
server. Tell them you won’t sell their e-mail address
and all their information will be kept confidential.


2. You don’t make your ad copy attractive. Your ad
lists features instead of benefits. The headline does
not attract at your target audience. You don’t list any
testimonials or guarantees included in your ad.


3. You don’t remind people to come back and visit.
People usually don’t purchase the first time they visit.
The more times they visit your site, the greater the
chance they will buy. The most effective way is to give
them a free subscription to your e-zine.


4. You don’t let people know anything about your
business. They will feel more comfortable if they know
who they are buying from. Publish a section called
“About Us” on your web site. Include your business
history, profile of employees, contact information etc.


5. You don’t give people as many ordering options as
possible. Accept credit cards, checks, money orders,
and other forms of electronic payments. Take orders
by phone, e-mail, web site, fax, mail, etc.


6. You don’t make your web site look professional.
You want to have your own domain name. Your web
site should be easy to navigate through. The graphics
should be related to the theme of your web site.


7. You don’t let people read your ad before they get
your freebie. When you use free stuff to lure people
to your web site include it below your ad copy or on
another web page. If you list the freebie above your
ad they may never look to see what you’re selling.


8. You don’t attract the target audience that would
buy your product or service. A simple way to do
this is to survey your existing customers to see what
attracted them to buy. This information will help
you improve your target marketing and advertising.


9. You don’t test and improve your ad copy. There
are many people who write an ad copy and never
change it. You have to continually test and improve
your ad copy to get the highest possible response
rate.


10. You don’t give people any urgency to buy now.
Many people are interested in your product but they
put off buying it till later and eventually forget about
it. Entice them to buy now with a freebie or discount
and include a deadline date when the offer ends.

When I coach my clients on how to get more business from their e-zines, I’m delighted to see that they spend time on creating content that builds a relationship with their readers. But I see many of these publishers overlooking the very beginning of their valuable relationship with their subscribers. For example, the “thank-you” page. If I sign up for your e-zine at your site, where am I taken afterwards? I hope it’s not a page that only says something vague like “form received” or even worse, nothing, leaving me wondering whether my signup was successful. Create a thank-you page where new signups go to right after they complete the form. On this page, be sure to:

If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important are the search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere.

Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of the most powerful search engines in the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out the search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com .

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors ? a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

This old saying which addresses the variability of the weather in Montana is also applicable to the market dynamics for an online business. If there is one thing that is certain about the future of online marketing, it is that it will continue to change.

A generation in Internet marketing seems to last 12 months or less and therefore it is very important for online marketers to reassess their marketing plan frequently. It wasn’t too long ago that popups and banner ads were all the rage and now they’re about as welcome as a telemarketer or a lawyer.

In earlier times, just getting traffic to your website could spell success. That just is not the case today. In the current environment, Internet marketers have many tasks before them including increasing traffic, maximizing traffic quality, and improving conversion ratios. Much simpler said than done, but the key element is to understand that we are dealing with a dynamic marketing landscape where change is almost a continuous process. A successful Internet marketing campaign will always be a work in progress.

A dynamic internet marketing campaign will be a continuous process of monitoring & analyzing, followed by tweaking & experimenting, followed by measuring the impact (more monitoring & analyzing) of the changes made.

Do you want to create a passive income? Are you bewildered by all the educational Marketing products out there? Are you on a low budget or trying to escape from a huge debt load?

Well, I answered a big “Yes!” to all the above, especially, the last one

My job sucks. I can barely make ends meet and I have some medical problems which make a “normal” working lifestyle very difficult.

That’s why I become an Affiliate. I refer people to a merchant’s site and make a decent commission. I run ads on Google linked to the product.

It is a really easy way to make money but there is a learning curve involved. Without a solid understanding of Internet marketing, pay-per-clicks and affiliate programs you could waste a lot of money. I did. At first. But, then I discovered a way to get a free education. You can do it, too.

Five Simple Steps to Valuable free Information

1. Search the net for marketing products in the areas you are interested in ie: Affiliate programs, Search Engine optimization, Keywords, website building etc.

Website owners and webmasters who are trying to improve their search engine ranking by trading links with other sites should beware of being cheated. Beware of link cheating. What is link cheating?

Link cheating is when the other party in a link exchange does not live up to the bargain and does not add your link to his site. Link cheating can happen when you add someone else’s link on your site first, then submit your link info, and assume that they will reciprocate and add your link to their site. What often happens is they don’t add your link. And you end up with a one-way link, giving a link and getting none in return, improving someone else’s search engine ranking and not yours. Link cheating. Even worse, you end up wasting a lot of your valuable webmaster time and energy for nothing. And, often, you won’t even know it. You may not know you are the victim of link cheating or may not find out your link was never added to the other site until weeks or months later! Because link cheaters don’t email you telling you your link has been added to their site and they don’t email you telling you they have decided not to add your link (for whatever reason). They will just take advantage of the one-way benefit of you linking to them. Link cheating.