Building Websites

Nov 21 2017

The Easiest Way to Accept Online Payments for your Small Business, Even If You Don’t Have a Website

If you’re a small business owner and you’re not set up to accept online payments, you’re probably either leaving money on the table, or you’re creating an inconvenience for a significant portion of your customers.

I know what you’re thinking. “It’s not that hard to write a check and mail it.”

You’re right. It’s not, but we live in a world today where a rapidly growing portion of the population doesn’t even own checks, because all of their bills are paid electronically (myself included).

While Baby Boomers and Generation X may be used to writing checks, addressing envelopes, keeping stamps on hand, and getting papercuts, this is a huge headache for the Millenial generation and their desire for speed and convenience. Many millenials have never even owned a checkbook, and have no intentions on doing so.

Fortunately, for those customers that ask for it (and for those that haven’t yet) there is a very easy way to get paid for your services online, even if you don’t have a website. Odds are that you’ve probably heard of it before.

Paypal is, by far, the most trusted and most widely adopted online payment method that exists today. The only thing you need to set it up is an email address and a bank account, which you should already have if you’re operating a business in today’s world.

PayPal is extremely flexible. You can go as far as integrating it into your website to accept payments directly online (which we’ve done for a few customers), or you simply provide your PayPal email address to your customers on their invoices.

Both methods will get you paid instantly. The latter is how I would recommend you start, and will take 15 minutes or less to do.

This will also save you a ton of time down the road, because for those customers that pay you digitally, you won’t have to worry about messing with paper checks or running to the bank every time you want to make a deposit. This can save you several hours each and every month and you get your money even faster.

Here are the steps to accept online payments for your small business.

Create a PayPal Account to Accept Online Payments

Your first step is to create your PayPal account. This will allow you to accept online payments and will store them until you transfer it to your business bank account. Customers can pay by credit card, bank draft, or their own PayPal account balance.

All of this is 100% secure and automated. You don’t have to worry about taking credit card numbers, bank account numbers, or messing with depositing checks from your customers. All you do is send them your PayPal ID and the money arrives in your account instantly when they pay you.

Get started by creating your Business PayPal Account here. Make sure you complete all of your business information up front so your customers know who they are paying, etc.

Link PayPal to Your Business Bank Account

This will likely be done during the setup process, but it’s important to call out specifically. Linking your business bank account to your PayPal account is what will allow you to transfer the money you get paid to your bank account. Otherwise it will just sit in your PayPal account. You can still spend it from there, but only through PayPal.

This process typically just requires an online authentication with your bank, and assumes you have your bank account online access set up already.

To get started, go to Profile and Settings at the top under the gear icon, then My Money, then click Update next to Bank accounts. Follow the prompts from there to hook things up.

As a side benefit, linking your bank account to PayPal will also allow you to pay your vendors securely using PayPal if you choose. From this screen you can also add business credit cards and debit cards if you would like to use those to pay vendors as well.

Add Your PayPal Email Address to Your Invoices

A great benefit to PayPal is someone can pay you using only your email address. For example, to send a payment to us, you would simply login to your PayPal account and send a payment to “help@louisvillewebnerds.com” in the amount of your invoice.

That’s what you would tell someone when they ask you how they can pay online. “Just send a PayPal payment to (insert your PayPal email address).”

PayPal explains how to send money here using their tools. If people are asking, most people will already know how to do this. If not, you can send them an invoice by using the PayPal invoice feature under Tools, which is extremely easy to use. This will allow you to send an invoice directly to their email address with a link for them to click to pay you.

You can also create buttons, links, etc for specific amounts and things like recurring payments, but the email address is the simplest way.

What I recommend doing to start is simply adding a note to the payment information section of your invoice with your PayPal email address. This can be something like, “To pay online, send a PayPal payment to (insert your PayPal email address) with your invoice number in the notes.”

Here is a screenshot of one of our invoices where we call out this payment method. Very simple, yet very effective.

Communicate This Feature to Your Customers

A lot of your customers may overlook the invoice note, so if you have an email database, you can send a note to your customers letting them know that they can now pay you online. You can also create a blog post on your website announcing this news, or even send a mail insert if you’re still sending paper invoices.

If you need help creating a website, check out our Small Business Websites service.

Decide How You Will Handle PayPal Fees

While PayPal will save you a lot of hassle, and open up your business to new customers, it does come with a small cost, but only when you receive money. You can read about PayPal fees here.

You’ll essentially pay 2.9% of each transaction, plus a flat $0.30 per transaction. So on a $100 transaction, you would keep $96.80 ($100 – ($2.90 + $0.30)). Personally, I think it’s a small price to pay to be able to easily and securely accept essentially any method of payment instantly.

What you’ll want to decide is how to handle these fees. You can either choose to accept the fees yourself as a cost of doing business (which is what I recommend), or you can pass the fees along to your client as a service charge (not very customer-centric in my honest opinion). I’ve seen both done.

You can use this handy PayPal Fee Calculator to calculate your fees in either case.

The latter is definiltely more difficult because you need to adjust your invoices based on how a customer wants to pay. Sure, it’s not free, but if there is value to your business, which there definitely is, it should cost something. You also get a plethora of valuable capabilities that you cannot do with paper checks, such as setting up subscriptions for your services (which makes recurring accounts far easier to deal with).

Look at it this way. If you get just ONE additional customer, the few extra dollars here and there is absolutely worth it.

So, What Should You Do Next?

This is a complete end-to-end guide with every step you need to take to accept online payments using PayPal. If you feel like you can do all of this yourself, take a few minutes and get it set up! Your customers will love it.

If you’d like help, we’ll gladly provide guidance and answer questions along the way under our hourly rates, and we’ll even let you pay us by PayPal after as your first test!

Just get in touch with us on our Contact Page and we’ll be happy to help!

Nov 10 2017

No. Your Website Is Not a One-Time Project.

A huge percentage of the website projects I build are “from scratch” rebuilds of websites that have gotten old and stale over time because they were not properly maintained.

This is a big problem for small businesses.

Here’s what typically happens

A business hires someone to build their website for what usually ends up being thousands of dollars. That person finishes the website, which is usually exactly what they need at the time, then hands over the keys to the business owner.

At this point, the business owner typically says “I can handle it from here,” but guess what – in my experience 9 out of 10 won’t do it, and honestly shouldn’t be. An experienced web professional is going to be 10x more efficient at this, and business owners should not be wasting their time trying to hassle with the technical ins and outs of a website.

So this is how the scenario ends. The small business typically grows, adds new services, pricing changes, contact information changes, and more, but the website sits there and NEVER gets updated for years, because the original creator is on to other projects.

The business owner is then frustrated because they cannot update the website themselves, and they either can’t get hold of the original creator, or they end up spending thousands of dollars, AGAIN, to update it with several years of changes (rightfully so – this stuff isn’t easy).

So in a few years, your website ends up looking like this:

Instead of like this:

And that’s where the problem starts. Your website should be a growing and living business asset that keeps up with your business and the latest technology, not a one-time project that becomes a pain point. When this happens, you get embarrassed to send people to your website at all, and…

Your website becomes a liability

Thinking of your website as a “one-time project” is why so many small business websites are so stricken with errors and incompatabilities, not to mention poor user experiences.

Web technology changes over time, very rapidly.

If you’re not updating the software, content, and technology on your website over time, then you’re not only not putting your best foot forward, but you’re also risking losing business due to factors such as:

Lost search engine traffic (Google hates stale websites)
Poor user experiences due to outdated design
Poor brand alignment
Broken contact forms
Old phone numbers
Outdated email addresses
Lost trust from square one
Hack attempts (hackers LOVE stale websites)
And the list goes on and on…

As an example, I was on a website recently checking for a quote on some work on my car.

The contact form would not work, the email address was wrong, and the phone number was out of date… The only way I was able to get in touch with the company was that somehow Google had their correct phone number.

I ended up going with someone else because I just didn’t have a lot of trust in that business to begin with. If a business can’t have enough care to update their phone number and email address on their website, should I trust them to work on my car?

And here’s the greater mystery.

Ongoing website maintenance isn’t all that expensive or time consuming, and it can even be a profit center for your business.

You can typically contract this for a couple hundred bucks a month, or even less depending on your needs (our plans start at $99 / month).

As a business owner, a thousand dollars a year is absolutely worth it to fit into your budget to put your best foot forward online. You’ll absolutely lose business otherwise.

Today’s generation also demands technology

Staying in touch with technology and the latest website trends will only continue to grow in importance as the money spending population gets younger and younger.

Millenials don’t like to talk on the phone. They don’t like to write checks. They don’t want to get bills in the mail and they certainly don’t want jump through hoops to do business with you.

The Solution

Technology is your friend. Your website and web presence is the FIRST thing people will look at when deciding whether or not to do business with you.

Invest in it. Hire someone (us even!) who can keep your website up to date and make sure you’re allowing your customers to do business with you the way THEY prefer, not the way you prefer.

You’ll catch a lot more of them that way and you’ll be able to take pride in your website in the process.

Jul 23 2017

Five Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Working for Your Website

It’s no secret that blogs are awesome for generating web traffic and ultimately real money-making business. If executed correctly, a blog can be the difference between a failed business and a wildly successful one. I’d be willing to bet that you know at least one person who has generated a significant amount of revenue for their business using a blog if not more. I’d run out of fingers before my count ended, but do you exactly know how those people do it?

There’s A LOT that goes into blogging strategy design. A lot of business owners just start blogging without truly understanding what is involved in the success of a blog. Maybe because they’ve seen someone have success with it, or maybe because a peer recommended it to them. That’s all well and good, but that kind of plan only lasts so long.

For a blog to truly work as a business asset, you not only need a long-term strategy to use it to generate real activity and leads for your business, but you also need to ensure it’s set up successfully from the start to best do that.

The few tips below will help you identify a few key areas where you might be making mistakes, and courses of action to fix them.

You’re Blogging for the Wrong Reasons

Why did you start blogging in the first place? Is it because your competitors are doing it? Is it because you had a friend who recommended it to you? Is it because you want to get your name out there?

Blogging for your business is a great idea, but you have to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. You have to make sure you’re doing it strategically, with reasons that align with the goals of your business. You can’t just blindly write articles with no strategy and hope they stick. That’s a recipe for quick failure.

First, analyze the business result you want from your blog. Then build your blogging strategy around that.

This blog for example, isn’t built to generate a ton of incoming traffic. I do freelance work on top of a full-time job, so I sometimes have to turn projects down if I have too much going on. It doesn’t make business sense for me to build a traffic generating powerhouse of a blog at this point in time.

Right now, this blog exists to establish authority on the website, enhance freshness for the domain, help educate people about the ways of online marketing, and inform people about the services I offer (I also just really like to write). The articles are linked on the homepage, they cross link to one another, and they also link to many of my services. The architecture of the site completely supports that goal.

However, the strategy for becoming a local authority in your area of expertise would be quite different. With this strategy you’d need to do things like:

Create a content generation strategy that reinforces that goal
Build in ways to increase user engagement and retention on your site
Find ways to spread your content around in the community and be visible
Make sure your site is optimized to gain local web traffic

The blogging itself is just a small fraction of the success formula. The success here starts with the initial business goals, and the creation of a blogging strategy around those goals.

You’re Living Inside Your Blog

The web has changed a lot in the past year. It used to be the case that you could start a blog, write posts for a few months, get a few easy links back to your website, and all of the sudden you’d have a boatload of traffic coming into your website without ever venturing outside of the protected walls of your blog.

Since Google Panda and Penguin hit, the quality revolution has hit the web hard. The definition of quality incoming links has changed, and the ranking factors in search engines that put articles at the top of the results for given keywords have as well.

Things are much more organic now.

To get noticed now, you have to not only create quality content for your own site, but you also have to get outside your blog and utilize your relationships to get some high quality organically generated links back to it.

Guest posting is a great start. It’s one of the best ways to generate traffic initially for your blog. Social media is also a good way to build a following that reads your blog regularly, especially for a local business. The more you can get outside your blog and expose your content to new audiences, the more people you are going to have coming to your blog and reading every day.

Keep it freshly populated with quality content, but also try to focus just as much if not more on gaining exposure on other closely related sites as well.

Your Blog is Not Integrated With Your Website

This is a pretty big technical mistake that a lot of new bloggers make, and you might be making it too. You run out to WordPress.com or Blogger and start posting there because its easy, then expect it to flood your website with visitors. Or you may even start a standalone blog on your own domain or a subdomain.

Here’s the problem with that.

If your blog isn’t completely integrated with your website, meaning it’s not built into your navigational structure, you’re not putting links to it on your homepage, it’s difficult for users to get to, you’re burying it three levels deep in your hierarchy, etc – it’s going to cause separation issues. Yes it sounds stupid, but this is a real thing.

For your users, it will be a disconnected feeling that results in your blog and your website being two separate entities in their eyes. This means neither your site or your blog benefits much at all from the added traffic each produces. They each stand alone.

This also results in that same perception for search engine crawlers. They’re pretty smart nowadays. They see this separation as your blog not being very important, so they won’t rank the content as high in search engine results, or at all. You also won’t get the benefit that the link authority of the rest of your site can pass to your blog. This also contributes to lower rankings and will kill any chances you have at generating organic search traffic.

I won’t get any further into the technical about how website architecture affects SEO, but you see my point anyway. The more integrated your blog is with the rest of your website, the higher the likelihood is that your content will rank high and be able to pull in your traffic for the rest of your site.

My advice to you is this. Make sure if you do have a blog, it’s on the same domain as your website, and it’s completely integrated with your website in every way possible. If you can, use a CMS platform with blogging capabilities like WordPress, Joomla, or Hubspot to build your website. This is exactly what these platforms were made for, and they work extremely well.

A great example of these principles in practice is UserVoice.com. See how the transition between their blog and their website is completely seamless? It’s integrated into their website completely. It’s super easy to hop back and forth. They link to it everywhere. It links back to the rest of the site, and they use it to genuinely help their user base.

That’s the way to do things, and they’ve done pretty well with it.

Your Content is Lame

This one is pretty basic. If you’re producing unhelpful content, pitching right and left, or producing stuffy that isn’t relevant to your audience, then it’s not going to do very well. One of the huge powers of blogging is that it has a massive sharing potential. If people don’t like your stuff, they won’t share it, and they probably won’t come back either.

People love to learn, and people love to smile. You can’t succeed with half-assed dry and weak content that doesn’t provide a lot of help to your audience and expect to do well. This will neither make people smarter nor happier. And if all you’re doing is posting your press releases and pitches for your wares, that’ll send people packing in a hurry. You’ll fall flat on your face.

Always focus on the two Es of blogging with the content you produce – Entertain and Educate. ALWAYS provide some sort of value to your readers in your posts. ALWAYS.

If you can do both of those basic things with your articles (I may have missed the entertain part with this post :)), then you’ll be in really good shape. At the very least, provide amazing educational value – and you’ll do well enough.

You Don’t Give it Enough Time

Let’s say you have everything else right on the list. You have a solid strategy, you have a following, you’re even doing some promotion, and your content is pretty sweet.

Well, you’ve still got to give it some time chief.

You can jump start things by developing a solid email marketing and social strategy to get existing users to help you spread the word, but you’ve still got to give it time to get noticed.

A typical blog in today’s world, if executed completely correctly from the start and given consistent attention, will still take around 6 months to start to catch on and generate a significant amount of new traffic for your website.

This is simply due to the period of time it takes to build up a nice repertoire of content that gets a lot of links back to your site, and a lot of attention in the social space. Just like a brick and mortar business has to develop a solid infrastructure of assets and resources before it really takes off, your blog is the same way.

You’ll have some spikes in there when you get good PR from places, but until you’ve established yourself as a serious player in the game, you’ll get little love from search engines. Once they realize you’re serious, you’ll see a significant burst in activity and you’ll really start to reap the benefits of blogging.

Takeaways

Blogging isn’t something to take lightly. It’s a serious piece of a marketing strategy. It’s something that has to be considered as a long-term venture, and it needs to be allocated proper resources if it’s going to succeed.

Make sure you develop a solid blogging strategy before even posting that first article
Make sure you have strategic partners lined up, or you know where to find them to promote outside of your blog
Make sure you understand the proper technical setup behind a blog to integrate it with the rest of your site
Make sure you have at least one serious writer whose job it is to produce awesome content for your blog, that your readers will love
Make sure you’re willing to give your blog enough time to succeed before your embark on your journey

Do these things correctly, and you’ll be set up to do very well with your blog. You may even build a serious business around it.

May 18 2017

Easy Content Generation Strategy for Your Blog

You know how people really love watching re-runs of old TV shows? There’s a reason for that. They love the content of those shows. This blog post explores a clever content generation strategy that uses this re-run principle to add quite a bit of posting power to your blog.

In the work that I do in helping small businesses promote themselves online one of the top things I recommend is that they maintain a blog (more than one in some cases) that they post to at least once a week.

A hurdle that I often have to help business owners contend with is how to keep generating content for their blog on a consistent basis, especially if they have limited in-house resources. In many cases the businesses I work with only have a couple of talented writers on staff, and their main jobs obviously aren’t creating blog content.

Creating content consistently isn’t that difficult if you only post once a week, but at that rate it is going to take quite a bit of time to generate any sort of significant organic traffic back to your website – 6 months or more depending on your industry. I recommend that my clients post twice a week if at all possible, and if they really want to ramp things up quickly, that they try to make some kind of post each day or even multiple posts per day if their resources allow it.

But in that case the problem eventually becomes… “Cody, we’ve run out of things to write about.”

I hear that one a lot, but believe me, no you haven’t. You’re an expert on your topic and there are hundreds of millions of people online each day, each searching for different things. It’s not going to hurt if you post about the same thing now and again, but in a different way, or from a different perspective. This is what separates the so-so blogs from the highly trafficked blogs – finding unique ways to continually generate content. This big blogs like BNET, Wired, Engadget, and Techrepublic do this extremely well.

This is one of the strategies I highly recommend. Aside from the SEO value this offers to your website in the form of freshness and being able to generate anchors to other posts, this strategy allows you to take advantage of your past “most popular” articles.

Rather than just tell you how to do it, here’s a perfect example of this tactic in use.

I was going through the analytics in one of my blogs recently looking for what people liked. As I was looking at the stats I saw an article that had nearly five times (5x) the page views as other articles posted around that same time period. I knew that I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary to promote that article, but people really liked it.

So I re-read it for some inspiration, wrote another article that expanded on its ideas, gave it a catchy headline, and posted the new article, linking back to the old one in the process (thereby increasing the views of the older post as well). And by the way, while I was writing it I came up with two or three more ideas of things I could post about that related to it.

If you’re running low on content ideas this is a VERY powerful, yet simple strategy to generate new ideas. Simply go through your traffic statistics, find your most popular articles, and re-use their ideas. You can never have enough content about things that people love to read, so take advantage of that fact!

If you like this article, share it below!

(image provided by freedigitalphotos.net)