Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Great article over at Mashable about turning your social customers into evangelists of your brand.”With the advent of social media channels, customer service has forever changed. Consumers are no longer willing to sit and listen to classical music on hold. In today’s age of hyper-responsiveness, customers expect instant responses from support reps on very public online platforms.

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A typical new visitor to your website will determine whether to stay or leave within the first 15 seconds. Since the web got infinite alternatives to your site, it’s crucial that you immediately instill a sense of trust. So without further ado, here’s 10 to make your site seem more trustworthy at first glance.

1) Invest In Design

An aesthetically pleasing site will show the visitor that you’re serious and didn’t just hack something together in the dark hours of the night.
A well-designed site (not to confuse with over-designed) shows that you’ve spent time and money on it, instilling trust.

2) Show A Pulse

It’s important to show new visitors that the content they’re seeing isn’t on some old abandoned site left for the eternal Internet archive.
Display some recently updated content (with a date) to show that your site is up to date. Having a blog or an embedded Twitter feed are great ways to show your site and people behind it are still active.

Australian online shoppers are set to spend as much as $21.7billion in 2015, up from $13.6 billion this year.  Some 44% of that is expected be spent at overseas web-sites. Managing Director at Frost & Sullivan’s Australian operations, Mark Dougan, said that the data in its new research report suggested the average Australian will spend around $600 online this year. Published in conjunction with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) ,the report estimates that, over the next four years, the Australian online shopping market is expected to grow at around twice the rate of the retail sector overall.
In numeric terms, the report suggests a 12.6% compound annual growth rate for online shopping expenditures over the next four years.

Commonwealth Bank analysis reveals Australian online shoppers spent $9.5billion in 2010.
A research report prepared by the Global Markets Research team at Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank (CBA), has calculated Australians spent some $9.5billion at online shops last year with some $4.2 billion of that spending at international retailers. The calculation is believed to be the most precise in Australia to date because it is based on the actual spending of Commonwealth Bank card holders.
“More than a million CBA cardholders are actively spending online for retail purposes” said the report.

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Using Facebook as a Fan Page

This is by far one of the most powerful changes, in my opinion, to fan page functionality. Why? Before this change, there were only a few ways to share your fan page with people who are not a fan of your brand on Facebook. The first was by sharing the page directly with your personal profile’s contacts. The second was by hoping that your page’s fans would share it with their contacts. And the third was by spending money with Facebook advertising.

Now, with the option to use Facebook as your page, you can do something that reaches out to Facebook users in your targeted audience for free. Here are easy steps on how to get your brand in front of a larger Facebook audience.

How to Use Facebook as Your Page

Smart article over on Small Business Bliss. You’ve probably heard it all before in a dozen different places, but maybe never as succinctly. Here are the basic reasons a blog solves all of your major online marketing needs in one simple, compact package. If you want to know why a blog must literally be the beginning and end of your basic online marketing approach, look no further.

Those clients of ours blogging successfully will know how important this strategy is, and those readers who arent clients of ours but blog successfully will also know. It really is the basis of your social media platform and essential.

Read the article in detail and talk to us about setting up a successful blog strategy.
5 reasons your business needs a blog.

UserEcho is a web-app that provides a useful way for companies to solicit feedback from customers online. Businesses of all sizes can get feedback from their clients, customers, and followers, and then respond directly to people who submit particularly interesting comments or insightful ideas. Companies that use UserEcho can interact with clients directly and potentially get help generating a few innovative business ideas in the process.

Interesting read for those clients of ours with Facebook pages (which is nearly everyone!). This PDF file was released by Facebook themsleves and contains a wide range of tip and tricks and ideas to get the most out of your Facebook business page.

Follow the link to the PDF below via the Facebook site…

Building your business with Facebook page

When you run a web-based business, customer satisfaction is key. Users who have an unpleasant experience on your website are unlikely to return or recommend the site to their friends, which is why a web-app called Feedbackify has come up with a system that lets online entrepreneurs get feedback on their websites in real-time. Visitor feedback that’s delivered through Feedbackify is private and quick, just the way it should be.

Sign up for Feedbackify and get started creating your very own feedback form using the web-app’s form editor tool. In addition to adding written questions, you can also add ratings-based questions that encourage visitors to rate certain elements of your website on a numeric scale. Create question categories, reorder those categories until you’re satisfied, and then upload your company logo to give your Feedbackify form a custom look. When you’re ready to deploy your new form, you can use Feedbackify’s feedback tab configurator to make a custom tab to appear on your existing site. When visitors click the tab, they’ll be transported to your Feedbackify form, where they can let you know how your site is functioning and whether there’s any room for improvement.

Interesting post at The Find about the effects on the bottom line of internet retailers who offer free shipping.

See the post in detail here

Came across this informative article over on All Facebook about marketing your business page on Facebook.
Do it well, the benefits are:

• Engagement: Greater interaction
• Visibility: Facebook shows your posts to more of your fans
• Free fans: You get more fans for free — one Fortune 1000 company combining good advertising and engagement tactics got more than half of their fans for free.
• Testimonials: Your fans become so positive that they give spontaneous testimonials which convince fans who are still just prospects how great you are
• Reputation protetction: Overwhelming positivity on a fan page wards off negative attacks from critics and provides volunteer defenders

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If your business isnt already on Facebook, you are potentially missing out on a valuable free marketing channel. Talk to us today

Selling online is getting harder these days. As more and more big-box retailers shift their focus to ecommerce, remaining competitive takes more than low prices and a website. This is especially true if your products are not unique.One easy way to break out from the pack is with a blog.

Why a blog?

An ecommerce blog can really make a difference if it’s done right. That means keeping it updated keeping it fresh, and posting interesting and relevant material that your customers want.

How can a blog help your online store? Here’s 5 ways it can have an impact…

1. SEO SEO SEO

It’s no surprise that a blog can help with your search engine rankings. Google loves updated content. They also love content that is written in a way to be appealing to living, breathing humans.

Super interesting read over on iMedia Connection about the Facebook news feed algorithm (ranking of facebook news feed items).

“While the math and the rules behind the algorithm are a bit fuzzy, the premise is simple. Facebook doesn’t want any user bombarded with useless, irrelevant content. EdgeRank doesn’t just apply to user profiles. It’s also used for pages. The algorithm determines which users will see the content from the pages they “like.”

This may be news to many businesses marketing on Facebook, many must be thinking each and every status or page update they make is automatically displayed on their “fans” walls. Not the case. If you stop and think, some weighting or ranking has to apply otherwise a users wall would quickly fill up with not so relevant updates and be replaced with more updates before they could see the more relevant ones.

All commercial website owners want people to visit their site. Since you’ve gone to the trouble to produce a website, you have probably also made a little effort to learn something about how to get it noticed. In the course of your reading, you will have read about back links, but you may not know exactly what they are. This guide for building back links is intended for people like you.

Once you’ve published your site, you’ll then want to start the process of promoting it using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You’ll maybe subscribe to newsletters by SEO gurus in hopes of gaining some valuable insights. Like many beginners, some of the best advisers will be useless to you because they use terminology you don’t yet fully understand.

By now, it’s understood that social media networking and marketing are invaluable to business. It seems this may be particularly true for small businesses, who are now turning more of their resources toward online and social media marketing.According to a recent study conducted by eMarketer, more than half of all small businesses (55%) consider Facebook beneficial to their business. Other social media sites that were ranked as moderately or highly beneficial include Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. If you are a small businesses owner who has not yet ventured far into the world of social media, you may wonder, “Why do they consider these sites important?”

First and foremost? Businesses look to social media marketing to generate leads. Almost 60% of the small businesses surveyed said that “Lead Generation” was positively affected by social media marketing. Another top-rated and highly important benefit is keeping up with the industry. Any small business owner will tell you that it’s hard to compete when you’re not sure what the competition is up to.

Hows this for a low cost, easy advertising campaign that will generate buzz, create new customers, and develop new content for your products: the social photo contest. Create a photo contest campaign that includes your customers using/wearing/holding your product(s). It is inexpensive, easy to set up, and surprisingly effective. Talk to us today about how to go about this.

Converting visitors into customers is about more than just supplying great product information. It’s about more than a great design, simple navigation and customer service links. The basics–such as page design and content presentation are certainly necessary. But if you want to grow a loyal customer base for the long term, you have to reach even further.
Here are six ways to engage visitors and turn more of them into actual customers, bringing friends with them.

1. Serve up the ideal newsletter. Contrary to what some social media “experts” say, people still like to receive email from companies they love and from stores that carry items or product lines to which they’re devoted. By integrating useful tips and links to articles or invites to forums, you’re opening up a channel for conversation, of which customers will take advantage.

Just read an interesting post for those clients just getitng started with their blogs. Perhaps a bit basic not for the more advanced bloggers but I’m sure you will be able to find some takeaway points to assist you in getting the most out of this valuable social media tool. Its called “Best practices for a killer corporate blog” you can see the post over on Imedia Connection.

If you havent yet taken the plunge into the personal publshing world of blogs then get in touch with us today for a free consultation. Blogs form the basis of a successful social media strategy and will only get more important over time.

Just came across a great blog post with some inspirational email marketing campaigns for online stores.
Twenty Email Marketing Examples for Design Inspiration

Build Links to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings Introducing Wordtracker’s Link Builder Tool

The surest way to improve your website rankings in the search engines is to get quality links pointing to your site.

With Wordtracker’s powerful new Link Builder tool, you’ll be able to:

• Find hundreds of top quality link prospects
• Uncover your competitors’ linking strategies (and beat them at their own game)
• Analyze sites that rank well for a particular keyword
• Plan and create your own high impact linking campaigns
• Drive more traffic, sales and revenue for your business

This Link Builder tool offers 7 day free trial (credit card required), a 30 day money back guarantee and the cost is $59 per month, not much if you consider other forms of attracting traffic. And unlike pay-per-click improving your search rankings means you dont have to pay for every visitor delivered to your site. Yes it takes some time and effort but in the long term its a must to not have to rely solely on paying for visitors.
Follow this link to find out more info and/or sign up for the free trial

Checkout this free online resizing tool

As your business grows, each team member, senior or otherwise, will eventually have to stop wearing too many hats and specialize in order to be effective. Think of the efficiency of an assembly line – no person is multitasking. If you keep overloading your already overworked staff, something will have to give.

A sudden stoppage in online sales can be scary. Hopefully you haven’t experienced this scenario. But if you have, you know that empty feeling when your orders cease to arrive in your inbox. What to do? As in any time of crisis, take a deep breath, stay calm, and then get down to business in solving this disturbing puzzle in a systematic way.

Here are six areas to investigate.

1. Your Site’s Code Is Broken

Whether you use a template-driven ecommerce system or work with a custom web designer, mistakes can be materialize, seemingly out of nowhere. A small coding error can render your site useless. If your drop in order volume alarms you, place a test order on your site. Perhaps you will discover that the “Add to Cart” button has mysteriously disappeared, or the formatting is out of whack and the prices are not showing next to the products. Go through the entire checkout process, including entering valid credit card information, to be sure you haven’t missed an important detail.

To improve your search engine ranking, increase the number of quality links to your site. Links are the lifeblood of search, especially for competitive terms. You don’t necessarily have to pay for links. You can obtain links through suppliers, customers, product reviews, and links from local organizations that you are part of, such as chambers of commerce and civic associations. Friends, family and more… We cannot stress the importance of building links. Talk to us today if youd like to automate this laborious process.