Taking A Sabbatical

A time comes in everyone’s life and in every business when you have to step back and reevaluate what you’re doing.

Starting shortly before the new year, I started taking a hard look at what I’m doing at Watersweb and considering different ways that I can help other women business owners, both online and in my local area.

During this time, I’ve made a few decisions:

1. I’m consolidating several sites, including this one, into one site.
2. I’m developing a new buiness model that will enable me to help local business owners who are too busy to run an online business, but need to do so. I will be offering full service website design, maintenance and promotion packages to Oklahoma business owners.
3. I’m spending more time speaking to local organizations and business groups such as the chamber of commerce.
4. I’m spending more time improving my DIY website tools so that they’ll be beneficial to more online and local business owners.

After reading this and seeing my extended absense on this site, you may be wondering if I’ve disappeared and if Michelle Waters Online or Product Sellers Talk Radio will be back.

1. My Michelle Waters Online blog posts will be moved to the Watersweb Shops site. Most of my blogging though will take place at Sparkplugging, where I am the new Ecommerce author.
2. I will move the Product Sellers Talk Radio podcast. Once I know for sure where it will be, I will let you know.

If you have any questions, just let me know here. And if you’d like to continue following me, just ckeck me out at Twitter and subscribe to my feed at Sparkplugging.

Spring Into A Better Business Starts Now!

Spring into a Better Businessdistributed raman amplifier webinar starts now…it is FREE to attend. Go here:

Spring Into A Better Business Login

Hot Press For Product Sellers

One of the fastest ways to grow your business is to find your products reviewed in the editorial pages of a magazine or raved about on a hip website.

But short of a few obviously famous publications, where are the best places to get your products noticed? Among my clients, the following are the most popular:

CoolMomPicks.com — If you produce products for moms or children, set your eyes on this website!

SheFinds.com — If you sell awesome stuff for women, you’ll want a feature here.

MomFinds.com — Ditto above if you sell stuff for moms.

Modish — Perfect place for those of you who make stuff by hand

UrbanBaby.com — Yep, more baby stuff

FunkyFinds.com — I think this one speaks for itself

So, now that you have a list, just send them an email, asking about their advertising rates and their product submission process. You can do it!

What To Do If Your Twitter Account Is Hacked

If you’re following me on Twitter, you probably noticed an “interesting” message inviting you to watch a webcam. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

This was not me.

Read more

Planning Your Website Structure

If you’ve been following along in this How To Make A Website series, and completing each step in the process, you’ve taken huge steps in building just the website you need for your business.

Read more

Choosing Your Website Software

Often, choosing software is one of the first things new business owners do when they decide to make a website. As you’ve learned from this series though, you’ll know that you should really start with researching your business’s goals and your customer’s goals.

Once you have this information, you’ll have a much better idea of what features and benefits you need in the software you choose.

Generally speaking, your website needs are going to fall into these categories:

1. Your customers want to find your location or call you or send you an email. They may want to read some information about your company, but you’re not selling your products online.  If this is your company, than you may just need a basic brochure-style website that doesn’t change often, but does appear in local searches. Software for these sites that I recommend include:

• Expression Web — If you live south of Oklahoma City, you can learn to use this program in my web design classes at Mid-America Technology Center
• Wordpress — This software is usually thought of a as a blogging platform. But you can use it to easily build and maintain a small site.

2. Your customers are looking for information about your industry and product. You’ll need to update the site frequently and give visitors ways to easily access previous articles. In this situation, I recommend software that lives on your hosting account, so you can access it anywhere. The product I recommend is:

• Wordpress — As I said before, this software is usually thought of as a blogging platform. If you’ve seen blog written using Wordpress, you may not want to use it for your site, thinking that you’re site will have to look like someone’s teenager’s angsty blog. But this isn’t true any more. You can setup completely respectable business websites that look nothing like your typical blog.For example:
  • Product Sellers Talk Radio
  • Watersweb Solutions

3. Your customers are wanting to purchase your products online through an automated shopping cart system. If this is the case, you’ll need shopping cart software, a Paypal account and/or a merchant account, and a system for receiving and shipping out orders. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to just recommend some shopping cart solutions for your consideration:

• Shop Kit Plus — The Shop Kit Plus is an excellent solution for the small business owner who is either new to the Internet or doesn’t want to learn HTML. Not only can you add your products and categories easily, but you can also manager your site’s pages from within the admin area. You can also use just about any template design to give your site the look and feel you want it to have.
• CubeCart — This product is more complex than the SKP, but it has a ton of features. Once you get over the learning curve, you’ll discover that it’s very powerful and can handle even the busiest sites.
• WAHMcart — The Shop Kit Plus is geared towards physical products specifically. Cubecart can handle digital products, but doesn’t allow you to take advantage of many online marketing techniques. WAHMcart, includes many internet marketing features built right in, such as several mailing lists. The downside is that you’ll need to build your own website to use WAHMcart, but the plus side is that you can manage your website with either Wordpress or Shop Kit Plus.

Generally speaking, your website should fit into one of these categories. If not, I’d love to hear from you. Just comment below.

Researching Your Website Visitor’s Goals

Successful online business owners know that that their websites must meet visitor expectations. When a potential customer shows up on the owner’s virtual doorstep, the website must be ready to give the visitor what she wants. If it doesn’t she’s outta there.

For example, if you are running a local children’s boutique, your visitors may be people in the area who want to call you or find your location so they can shop in your brick and mortar. But if all you have on your website are links to purchase online — no map or local contact information — you may have lost that customer.

On the other hand,what  if you are an online retailer of office supplies, like printer cartridges, and your site visitors from around the globe are wanting to buy online, right now? You can’t just offer them a  few pages with pictures of your products and a phone number, or an order form they must fill out and mail in with a check. Your visitors are going to head over to your competitor, who offers an automated shopping cart allowing the visitor to choose her products, enter her credit card number and be assured that the product will arrive in the mail shortly.

What this means is that your company’s website goals and your visitors goals need to mesh. Your site needs to be easy to navigate and make sense to the people who will be using it — your visitors.

The first step you need to take to make sure your website serves your customer’s needs, is to actually ask your customers.

If you already have a business, you can talk to current customers and ask them what they’d like to see on your website. And if you are just considering starting a business, you can find your customers in online forums where they congregate. Search through threads on those forums to see which website they are buying from and what complaints they have about websites.

The second step you need to take is to research your competition.

Once you’ve found your target market on related forums, you’ll see who they are purchasing from now. Take a look at those competitor websites and see what they are doing right. Take notes. And while you’re at it, see what they are doing wrong on their websites so you can correct those problems on yours.

Survey the visitors on your website

Once you have your website up, that doesn’t mean it’s time to keep back and watch the money roll in. You need to stay in touch with your customers and find out what you can do to continually improve your website.

One way to do this is to randomly call customers. You can also send emails to random customers, asking their opinions.

And you can automate the process by including a survey directly on your website. Services that allow you to easily setup a survey on your site include:

• Survey Monkey (free)
• Easy Internet Survey (paid, but well worth it. Michelle’s pick!)

Once you have determined what your customers need in your website, you can start researching software options and considering the structure of your site.

Your Green Business Adviser

Michelle’s Note: Below is a biography of my friend Amie Nguyen. I first met her in 2004, which she chose to host her Earth Friendly Goods site with Watersweb. We have kept in touch over the years though instant message and through the Green Country Eco-Expo that she hosted in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve invited Amie to share her green business wisdom with you.

Read more

Top 4 Forums To Market Your Natural Handmade Products

If you’re creating products for the natural market, whether your focusing on women, children or the whole family, a few forums stand out as places where the crunchy crowd hangs out. Naturally, I’m going to share:

1. Mothering.com — Perfect for those of you who are making natural, organic products for children and women.
2. TheBabyWearer.com — This forum is geared specifically towards moms who are buying or making baby slings. But those same moms tend to be crunchier than the average bear. You’ll have a greater chance of interesting them in your wooden toys or organic cotton t-shirts.
3. AmityMama.com — This community has been around for years and is a wateringhole for natural family living proponents.
4. HippyMom.com — Busy community for moms into natural products.

Remember, go in with the intention to make friends and get to know people. Give it three months before you start mentioning your business or products. Give it six months before  you give up. Post at least once per day and read for at least an hour.

Let me know how it goes!

Determine Your Website Purpose

Before you can build a successful website, you have to know what it’s supposed to do.

You’ve probably heard it before: Ready…aim…fire! Many website owners have a tendency to fire, then do their research and tweak their website’s to aim at their customers.

The trouble with this approach is that your visitors who arrive at your site will be confused. What are they supposed to do?

And you know what a confused website visitor does right? They leave!

As I stated in the introductory post, you’ll need to have already researched your target market. So you know, for example, that your customers are young mothers who are into attachment parenting and want to carry their babies close to their bodies most of the time. These mothers love cloth baby slings and tend to collect various fabrics in many colors. That said, they are opinionated about which style of baby sling they prefer.

As a product seller, you’ve purchased several styles of baby slings at wholesale and now you need to learn how to make a website that will help you reach your business goals.

So, what are your goals?

1. Convert your website visitors into buyers
2. Educate your visitors about why your slings are better than another type of sling

You might think you’re done with your reseach, but there is one more step. You’ve got to understand what your audience’s goals are:

1. Compare and learn about multiple sling styles.
2. Decide which sling will meet their needs.
3. Find the specific baby sling they are looking for
4. Easily purchase the baby sling.

Knowing exactly what your audience (prospective customers) are looking for will help you provide them with that information.

Website Design

Once you know who your market is, what your goals and what your market’s goals are, you can determine how to  design your site. Do you need to use muted colors and conservative graphics — or pastel colors and cutsy baby graphics?

Website Structure

Understanding your market will help you immensely when you’re ready to create your site’s structure. Just looking at your competitor’s sites can help you learn how your market expects a website to look. Knowing your market can also help you find ways to improve upon the expected and existing structure. We’ll talk more about these issues later in the series when we discussion site structure and navigation.

Stay tuned, the next post in our series will discuss why you need to know how you want your visitor to respond when she arrives on your site.

Next Page »