The government will be starting back the ARC loans (more info) which will given struggling businesses up to $35,000 to borrow interest free.

ARC loans are supposed to help the small businesses which are stuggling due to the economy and thus the fact that there are fewer customers, and the customers are buying less.  ARC loans are to help bridge that gap in income, and help you remain solvent while looking for new opportunities.

Many businesses are turning to the Internet to find new customers, but they are sure how.  Evidence of that is the fact that 90% of small and medium businesses quit using pay-per-click and related on-line ads after only 6 months. If you want to use your ARC funds to help you expand your business, you need to work with someone who specializes in small businesses.

This is because many business owners, while excellent at what they do, do not know how to properly set up and run their website, and many web designers, don’t know how to help clients once the website is launched.  I work exclusively with small businesses to help them be successful, often staying with them months after the launch to make sure the website is doing what it needs to do to help them be successful in getting new customers.

Likewise, some companies try to work with anyone, small, medium, and large, and they treat them all the same.  I only work with small businesses and I am a small business, so I understand the need to be quick to change, cost effective, and how to create that personal experience on-line.

If you need, I can help your business make more money on-line through my experince in Search Engine Optimization, website optimization (both speed and customer experience), pay-per-click campaigns, and more.  Contact me if you need help.

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Previously, I’ve talked about optimizing your website to improve how fast it loads.  This not only improves the perception of your site, but also how likely it is for people to stay and make a purchase, or request more information.

Optimizing your site for sales isn’t as easy as optimizing your site for speed. When we want to increase speed we know many ways to improve the performance.  We can modify files to be smaller, have files load in a different order, move the server to a faster computer, etc.

However, modifying your site to increase it’s sales requires knowing your users and testing assumptions.

Recently I was helping a client test her website to get more conversions. While using the same traffic gathering methods previously used, she noticed  a whopping 500% improvement in lead generation during the first month alone. Another client saw improvements of over 40%.

So what do you change?

There are several things which you can easily change to find improvements.

• Improve your site speed – whie not directly related, Google  notices a 20% drop in usage for every half a second slower their web page is.  If your users leave early, they cannot buy from you, or contact you for more information.
• Change headers – the client who noticed a 500% improvement, tried three different headers. Her original, and 2 new headers on the conversion page. One header did worse, and was pulled half way through the test, the other blew the first out of the water.
• Change images - pictures can tell a thousand words -  so picking the right one is important. The client with a 40% improvement got it from picking the right images to let his customers know about additional items for sale.

There are of course others, such as the call to action, guarantees, opening paragraphs, etc. When you test these, you can see improvements in how much and how often you sell.

If you need help with optimizing your site, contact me and we can start working on your site.

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I live in Central Florida where we’ve been hit hard with the recession that is going on. Lots of my clients, and the people near me, are hurting. I know that some of my clients are fighting to stay alive, and I’m trying to help them. However, not everyone is so bright. Here are a couple of examples.

The Good

One of my clients is offering a year of discounts and promotions as he likes to call it. Each month a different promotion has been offered to his clients. This March he is offering free shipping on most of his products (up to $20/per product with no limits), last month, it was a price reduction. And while this means his profit margins have gone down, he is still in business and doing business.

The Bad

Enter our local road toll agency: the Expressway Authority.  Because of the economy, the agency has been seeing a decline in the number of travelers, and thus a reduction in revenue. Their solution is to raise the tolls, which will further price them out of the range of many users.  Does this make sense? No of course not, but how often do we see this.  I’ve seen it happen to several business – now is a time to help your customers not hurt them. Because as you drive up your prices, fewer will be able to afford your products and services.

The Ugly

The ugly news is that everyone is hurting. We can either hurt with them, but help them along, or we can try to act like nothing is happening, and hurt our customers and ourselves. Personally, I’ve been looking for ways to help my customers in ways such as:

• Not increasing my rates – I normally raise my rates about this time of the year to reflect cost of living increases, and productivity increases, however not this year.  I need to remain affordable.
• Adding Services – I’m sending articles which might be of interest to my clients, adding services like website optimization to optimize not only the speed of the site (which I’ve done for years) but also improve the conversion of browser to buyer.
• Helping with Marketing – helping design marketing emails and landing pages to deliver new deals to existing customers, and introduce new customers to their services.

We can choose to keep going as we have, and risk getting knocked out, or we work together to continue to survive and even grow. Because of some of these efforts, I’ve actually seen an increase in the demands for my services as people look for alternatives to grow their business in these tough times.

These times are tough, but they don’t have to be as tough if we stay in touch with our customers’ needs.

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