One of the most common mistakes new online businesses make is trying to sell too many different kinds of things.

Last year I sat down with a lovely chap in his fifties who had an idea for an online business that he was really excited about, and he wanted me to help make his dream a reality. He had spent the last six months going round craft fairs and trade shows looking for unique and unusual gifts that weren’t available on the high street and he was going to create an online store that offered them all to the public.

“Great” I said, “So what sorts of products are you selling?”

“All sorts” he replied. And he wasn’t kidding. He had a selection of beautiful environmentally friendly candles, a range of cute animal slippers for kids, a few wonderful handbags and even threw in some fountain pens with crystal detailing.

It was at this point I started to get nervous. And I knew no matter what I designed for him, and no matter how hard he worked, his business was probably going to fail.

Whatever Works On The High Street, Do The Opposite

With a bricks and mortar store it’s good to have lots of different sorts of products, as it can encourage people to linger longer and explore. But with ecommerce it’s much better to do completely the opposite and think about focussing on a more limited range. And the reason for this all comes back to the ideas about search engine optimisation I talked about here.

With my chap, although some of his business would have come from people who had heard about him locally or saw one of his adverts, the vast majority of his business was hopefully going to come from search engine traffic.

“But that’s OK,” my chap might say, “as someone searching for candles will certainly find me”.

Don’t Dilute Search Engine Results

Well, no. Because all the other things he was selling actually counted against him from a search engine point of view. The reason for this is that if someone searches for ‘candles,’ Google sees a site that sells nothing but candles as much more relevant to the searcher than a site selling candles and shoes and handbags and pens – therefore the shop selling nothing but candles will appear much higher in the results. The more different types of product you have on your site, the more it will dilute how well each individual item performs on search engines. Specialising in a certain type of product, or limited range of products, will mean that all the content of your site is concentrated around a smaller range of key words, concepts and phrases. And that means your site will appear much higher up in the search engine rankings when someone searches for that thing you specialise in.

Great Big Niches

And don’t worry that it could mean missing out on some sales opportunities. Never forget the internet is MASSIVE and the niches are still going to be bigger than any offline audience you could potentially reach.

So what should my chap have done? My suggestion was that he specialise in his range of environmentally friendly candles as they were unique, gorgeous and easy to talk about. But he didn’t. And his business failed.

On a more positive note, another one of my customers had a couple of high street stores selling a huge range of kitchenware. A few years ago they had put their entire massive product range online, but they were struggling to really make any headway in sales. The one product which they sold most of were Riedel wine glasses so I worked with them to create a mini-site that sold nothing but these wine glasses. And lo and behold it quickly began to outstrip their main business in terms of sales.

Leave The Mass Market to the Big Boys

Only someone like Amazon can get away with selling everything. So don’t try and compete with them. If you are a small business thinking about going online you should think about selling a small range of products that you understand and are passionate about. Doing that means that people looking for you are more likely to find you, and once they are on your site, that passion and expertise that will encourage them to go on and buy.

I gave you some simple things to look at that were well within your control and will have a real positive effect.

This month, however, is where search engine optimisation gets ugly.

Get Into The Mind of Google

You see, the content on your page is only half the picture.

Imagine you are Google for a minute and Mrs. Jones approaches you and asks you to recommend a shop selling cakes in Bristol. You, as Google, want to make sure that the recommendation you give Mrs. Jones is of the highest possible quality so she will come back to you again next time.

So you have a look and you find three largely similar cake shops based in the Bristol area. How would you decide which one to recommend? You would want to recommend the most reputable-looking one, but how does Google decide how reputable a shop is? As humans, we can look at the design, click around a bit, and maybe look for some reviews in order to make a decision about a shop, but Google can’t really do that in the fraction of a second it has to make a decision. Instead it looks at other factors that indicate the quality, professionalism and reputability of a website.

The algorithms that are used to calculate this are a closely guarded secret – plus they would probably be completely unfathomable anyway. What we do know is that it isn’t all to do with what you’ve got on your site pages. It’s also to do with more intangible things such as how up-to-date your pages are, and how many other sites are linking to you.

Keep Up-To-Date

How often you update your site is well within your control. If you haven’t updated your site for months, then Google will think it is some dead site that no-one cares about and you’ll find yourself slipping down the rankings. You must update your site regularly – ideally daily – to give yourself a chance of doing well.

This is when things like blogs come into their own. Having a blog on your site means it’s easy to quickly update the content of your site with the minimum of effort. If you haven’t done so already, it’s worth looking at WordPress (www.wordpress.org). WordPress is a free blogging platform that’s pretty easy to install as part of your current website, although you do need to know a bit about online databases and things so it might be worth contacting a web designer.

Get Connected

The other thing that Google looks at is how many links there are to your site. These are known as ‘backlinks’. The more people that link to you, the more reputable Google thinks you must be. This is the hardest one to influence yourself, which is probably why all the search engines put so much importance on it.

Don’t despair though. There are a few tricks you can use to get links to your site.

First up, have a look and see if there are any online forums where people are talking about the sorts of products you are selling. This is when it’s useful to be marketing to a particular niche area (e.g. selling ’Biker Clothing’ rather than just ‘Clothing’) as you’ll find that the smaller your niche, the more chance there will be of finding an active online community where lots of potential customers are talking to each other. You can then participate in the forums, including a link to your site as part of your forum signature. Don’t promote yourself too brazenly though as there are often rules against this.

Sending out press releases is another good thing to do whenever you’ve got a new product range to launch, or there’s an interesting angle on a current news event that is relevant to your business. As well as traditional papers, there are hundreds of local online news portals out there who are crying out for well-written content to bulk up their sites with. And the great thing about online news sites is that once your press release is on there, it will stay there indefinitely with a link to your site. Nice.

Above all it’s just about having a mindset where you are constantly looking for opportunities to get links to your site wherever you can. It’s a constant ongoing thing, but it really will help your rankings.

Everything Is Going To Be Great, Honest

Although SEO is hard work, don’t forget that if you follow the basic steps in this article, and in last month’s one too, you will already probably be doing more than your nearest competitors. Although you may not beat Amazon quite yet, you shouldn’t be too far behind.

Originally published here – http://blog.postcodeanywhere.co.uk/index.php/seo-part-2-the-truth-about-seo/

Search Engine Optimisation is such a massive turn-off for most businesses. What I hear all the time from my clients is that it’s confusing, it’s highly technical, it takes a huge amount of effort, there’s conflicting information out there about how to do it and no matter how hard you work at it, there will always be some other competitor out there doing it better.

This is an attempt to cut through a lot of the waffle and jargon. More importantly, it should give you a few things to work on with your websites that will actually move you up the search engine results over time.

Relevance is Everything

Let’s start by going back to what Search Engine Optimisation is trying to achieve. We know it’s all about getting you as high as possible on search engine results pages, right? But what actually determines the order of the results?

The answer is ‘relevance’.

A search engine will always try and return the results that are most relevant to whatever is searched for. The two most important things that influence relevance are:

1)      How much your page content talks about the thing that is being searched for

2)      How useful Google (or whoever) thinks your site is

I’ll cover the first one this month, and the second one next month (as it’s more complicated, and I need to do a bit more research first!)

Content Is King

The most important things to get right on your site are the actual words on the page.

Google likes pages that are full of lots of well-written text which contains plenty of words that are relevant to your business (known as ‘keywords’). Everything you write for the site should feature the sorts of words you think potential visitors are searching Google for. Google will thank you for it and, oddly enough, the real humans visiting your site will probably enjoy having lots of well-written and relevant text to read as well.

SEO isn’t about creating some monstrous Frankenstein of a site which only makes sense to the visiting search engine spiders. The one thing Google has gotten right is that it rewards sites that are full of useful content. So try and have a good chunk of text on each page near the beginning which introduces the page nicely, and which any visiting search engine spider can get its teeth into.

The Right Heading

OK – there are a few technical things you can do to your site pages to help them perform well with search engines. I’ll try not to blind you with science too much, but there’s no getting away from it.

The first is to make sure you have at least one heading on each page which uses ‘Heading 1′ HTML tags for the formatting:

<h1>A Heading</h1>

This page heading should be near the top of the page and it needs to contain a few key words that are relevant to what that specific page is about. Again, this will be quite useful for your human visitors as well!

Better Meta

We will end this bit of the article talking about the things which most SEO articles start with – meta tags. These are invisible bits of code that sit within the <head>…</head> section at the top of your HTML page and have an effect on your search engine rankings – but not as much as you might think.

The only really important one is the ‘Page Title’ which sits within <title></title> tags. For example, if I view the source of one of my old articles – http://blog.postcodeanywhere.co.uk/index.php/why-should-you-bother-with-twitter/ – I can see the following tag in the <head></head> section:

<title>Why Should You Bother With Twitter? | Postcode Anywhere Blog</title>

This controls the text that appears in the title bar/tab of the browser window, but more importantly it will become the actual link people click on in the search engine results:

Furthermore, all the search engines put a huge amount of importance about what’s in your page title when they calculate the relevance of the page. So make sure each page in your site has a clear useful page title. And don’t bother about making it too long – all search engines will cut it off after about 60 characters.

The text you can see underneath the link comes from the ‘meta description’ field – which looks like this in the code:

<meta name=”description” content=”blah blah blah” />

No search engine actually uses the meta description of the page to calculate how relevant the page is. But you should still think about using it as it will mean you have complete control over how your site pages are described on the search engine results.

Finally, you may have heard about ‘meta keywords’ which are big lists of keywords in the <head> section of each page. Truth is, these have been so abused over the years by spammers they are completely ignored at the moment by search engines and I can’t see that changing any time soon. So you can forget about them for now.

Until Next Time

Hopefully you’ll have recognised by now that the majority of SEO is not really that technical or tricky. Yes, you need to think about your <title> and <meta> tags, but you also need to have good-quality relevant content and informative headings. It’s good for search engine position, but your human visitors will thank you too.

Next month we will talk about how you can make your site appear more important and useful to search engines, as this is probably the area that is least understood but most vital to get right.

Next job was to add in a top menu, a sidebar menu and a footer menu. Unsurprisingly, to get at these you go to ‘Site > Menus > All Menus’

Configuring menus in Actinic Online is a neat distillation of everything that is great, and everything that is frustrating, about Actinic Online.

AMAZING

It’s great because it’s so intuitive to add an item to any menu in the design. Simply highlight an existing menu item and a little pop-up menu comes up within an option to ‘Add a New Menu Item’. You can even ‘Add a Sub-menu’ in order to automatically generate drop-downs (from the top menu) or flyouts (from the side menu).

LESS AMAZING

So adding a menu item is dead easy. The interesting part comes when you want to link a menu item to a page or category you’ve already created in Actinic. To do this you have to edit the ‘Navigation Behaviour’ of the menu item. In English it means you have to tell Actinic Online what happens when you click on it. So something as simple as creating a link to a section means having to add/edit a link and then:

1. Click the ‘…’ button under ‘Navigation’ behaviours
2. Set ‘Type of Behaviour’ to ‘Display one of the site components’
3. Under ‘Component’ select the ‘Shopping Cart: Catalog’
4. Under ‘Opening Mode’ select ‘Propose a category and/or brand’
5. Under ‘Category’ select the category you want to display
6. Click ‘OK’

A bit long-winded huh?

But then like everything with Actinic Online, simple things might seem overly complicated but that’s because there is a huge amount of other things you could do. So instead of linking to a section you could link it to a brochure page, or a search page, or a login page or you could link to a completely different web site, or link to a file, or… or… etc. etc.

PERHAPS A BIT FRUSTRATING

The frustration hits around now though, because it’s around this time you realise that there is no way to just tell Actinic Online to automatically create navigation to the categories in your store. Every simple link to a category has to be added manually. Not a problem for my store because I’ve only got one category at the moment. I can see myself risking RSI though when I need to add navigation for a large store in future.

BACK TO AMAZING AGAIN

OK, that’s the downside. But that’s pretty much the only downside. And there are massive upsides to enjoy too.

As well as putting text links into menus, you can also put in headers, images and separators. These aren’t much use in the header and footer menus, but these are great for the sidebar menus. In my case I wanted to include an image of some gift card designs. So I added a ‘header’ called ‘Gift Cards’ and then I added the image of the gift cards underneath it. Then I set up a ‘navigation behaviour’ for the image so when people click on it they get a bigger version of the image opening in a pop-up. Then I put in a separator and underneath that added a header of ‘Store Information’ and added in links for ‘Delivery’, ‘Returns’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’.

It sounds simple, but things like this had to be manually coded in HTML in Actinic. Now they can be managed via a neat user interface. I can certainly see how it’ll be simple enough to show customers how to manage a range graphical promotions in the sidebar which link to different brands and promotions.

SUPER STYLING

Best thing about the menus is that HTML-wise they are all standard unordered lists which are easy to style.

You’ll see the following styles in the stylesheet:

#headermenu / #verticalmenu / #footermenu – wrappers around the header / sidebar / footer menus
ul#hmenu / ul#vmenu / ul#fmenu – the actual header/sidebar/footer menus
li.mitext – list item containing a text link
li.miimg – list item containing an image
li.mititle – list item containing a title
li.misep – list item containing a separator
ul.submenu – a dropdown/flyout submenu

So for my design I just needed to position #headermenu correctly and give it a translucent background. Then I pretty much took out all css borders and backgrounds for the links in the top menu so they looked like standard text links.

CLASS

All the links in the top bar by default float to the left, but I needed my final link (to the shopping basket) floating to the right. To do this I edited the properties of the link and used the ‘Associated CSS Class’ field to give it a class of ‘basket-link’. I could then add a reference in the CSS that floated a link with a class of ‘basket-link’ to the right rather than the left.

The sidebar and footer menus were edited in a very similar way, which then just left the job of styling up my products and categories. This is where it starts getting (even more) interesting, but I’ll cover that in the next article.

If you are doing a custom design, you can start in one of two places. Either you can start with a ‘SmartSkin’ or you can just pick a static ‘Site Design’.

SmartSkins

It is quite good fun to play with Actinic Online’s SmartSkin editor ( go to ‘Site > Site Design > Modify’ then click the ‘Use a Smart Skins Design’ link). This bit of Actinic Online is intuitive and well presented (and therefore has clearly been written by different developers than the rest of the software…) You can use to change the colours and sizes of all the main page components I mentioned in the last article (header area, sidebar, footer) and also change the appearance of all the navigation menu items.

All that’s happening with the SmartSkins editor is Actinic Online is dynamically changing the CSS of the site based on whatever you select, so whatever you can do with SmartSkins, you can do by editing the CSS of a standard Site Design. And because I am a MASSIVE control freak, that’s what I decided to do.

CSS Site Designs

First thing I did was to select a theme that was close to my design idea – i.e. roughly the same colours. The one I went for had the catchy name of #40454. Once I selected that, I had to go to ‘Site > Site Design’ and click the ‘Create and Manage Custom Site Designs’ button. I could then click the ‘Edit Properties’ button and suddenly I had a big load of CSS to play with.

Because my eyes are bad enough already, the first job was  I copied and pasted everything into a new file in Dreamweaver.

Then with Dreamweaver open in one window and a preview of the store open in another I got to work.

Changing CSS

First job was easy – editing the body tag to stick in a background colour, default text colour and change the default font.To test it you just need to copy and paste everything back into Actinic Online and then refresh the preview.

Next I needed to stick my graphics in. To actually get my graphics online I went to ‘Gallery > Files’ in Actinic Online. You just click the ‘Add’ button to add them in, it’s quite easy.

Then I needed to figure out where to point to my images in the CSS file. Fortunately, the main container classes all have terribly sensible names:

.maincontainer – the wrapper that goes around the whole design

.headercontainer – the wrapper around the header

.bodycontainer – the wrapper around the sidebar and main content area

.footercontainer – the wrapper around the footer

My design has a stripey pattern that went down each side (see design here)  so I set the width of ‘maincontainer’ to 1200 (the width of my whole design, including the stripes down each side)  and set my stripey image as the background to the div. The tag ended up looking like this:

#maincontainer {
text-align:left;
margin: 0 auto;
background: url(‘/Files/44633/stripes-background.gif’) repeat-y;
height: auto;
width:1200px;
}

Note how when you reference a file you need to start the path with a ‘/’

Then I set the margins of headercontainer, bodycontainer and footercontainer each to:

    margin: 0 110px;

Which then meant I had a 110px gap either side of the design so my stripes were visible.

Next, I changed the height of ‘headercontainer’ and placed my wavy line (and logo) as the background to the header:

#headercontainer {
height:197px;
position:relative;
z-index:100;
background: url(‘/Files/43505/main-background.jpg’);
margin: 0 110px;
}

It’s not rocket science, I was just playing around and trying things out.

Hopefully that’ll be enough to get you in the CSS, in the next article we will deal with the wonderful world of menus.

There is nothing like having a real customer to help focus the mind on learning a new bit of software.

No, let me rephrase that.

There’s nothing like there being money involved to help focus the mind on learning a new bit of software.

When a customer approached me wanting to use Actinic Online for their online store, I had only really spent about 5 minutes clicking round the demo store vaguely seeing how it all fitted together. Now I had to properly learn it and implement a site using it.

Crumbs.

The first challenge was coming up with a proposal and a price for the project. As I really didn’t know yet what I was going to be able to achieve design-wise, my first job was to figure out the layout options there were in Actinic Online and come up with a design that worked with them. Then I would have some sort of chance of coming up with a realistic cost for everything.

Familiar Themes

My first stop was to go to ‘Site > Site Design’ then I clicked the ‘Modify’ button and then clicked on the link marked ‘Use an Oxatis site design included in the subscription’.

There are 8 pages of pre-built themes that come with Actinic Online. They are all modern, clean and well-designed (quite an improvement on Actinic Desktop then!) but you cannot really get away from the fact that they are all, essentially, identical.

Every single design in Actinic Online will have a structure like this:

So you have a header area at the top, which includes the logo image but, more importantly, has a main horizontal navigation bar. Then you have a similar footer area at the bottom with another horizontal bar. And finally you have a sidebar that contains a vertical menu.

And that is pretty much all you have to play with when doing a design for Actinic Online.

I can hear the cries of outrage from here: “So inflexible!” “How can designers work with this?” “Down with this sort of thing!”

However, I am actually OK with it for the following reasons:

Firstly, the developers have taken the sensible decision of picking a basic layout which supports 80-90% of what every entry-level store will need.

Further to that. It’s all decently coded nicely marked up with CSS so you can get at everything by tweaking the stylesheet – which I’ll talk about in my next article.

Finally, having gone through the upgrade process a number of times on various Magento and CS-Cart stores, being able to get at the HTML of an online ecommerce system is a really mixed blessing. Yes, it’s nice to have total control, but every time an update comes out you waste a day in having to re-apply your designs to the latest set of templates. It’s a total nightmare. At least with this you don’t have that issue.

Anyway, based on the structure of Actinic Online stores, the design I came up with for the client is below. In the next article I’ll talk about how I went about coding it up.

Twitter can be an incredibly powerful business tool.

You can use it to encourage loyalty with your current customers, and also connect to brand new people who you would never have reached before Twitter.

Which sounds marvellous in theory, but there’s no denying that it’s also a tricky medium to get your head around.

If you read my last article, you’ll already have set yourself up with a Twitter account and started following a few people. The next step is to engage with Twitter meaningfully and effectively in a way that’ll gain customers and drive sales.

The ultimate goal on Twitter is to get as many relevant people subscribing to (or ‘following’) your messages as you can. With more followers you have a larger ready-made audience for your news and promotions, and you also increase the chance of your messages finding an even wider audience. Gaining followers isn’t easy, but there are a few tried and tested techniques to get you started.

Recruit Your Existing Customers

The first step is to get as many of your existing customers following you on Twitter as you can manage.

If you’ve got an existing mailing list, you could include something in your next newsletter that says the first 20 new Twitter followers will receive a 10% off coupon. Bingo – instant followers.

Or, even better, you should ask them to post a tweet that mentions you. Your customers would then have to post a tweet saying something like “@yourtwittername Yes please can I have my 10% off coupon”. When you include a username in a message with a ‘@’ symbol, this is called a ‘mention’. The beauty of mentions on Twitter is that then anyone else following your customer would then see the message that includes your mention, and then might choose to follow you and ask for a coupon as well. Result! You’ve got a new follower and a new customer.

Partake In Some Casual Stalking

Another good idea is just to follow anyone who is in a vaguely related field to you – especially if they have a lot of followers. When you follow someone, there is a chance they will follow you back. If you then post a message that they find interesting, they could then forward (or ‘retweet’) your message onto their followers. See below for more on the awesome power of the retweet.

Even if the person doesn’t choose to follow you, you could always playfully stalk them by mentioning them (with an ‘@’) in a tweet every now and then. That way, there’s a chance they will read your message and might choose to respond to you, which all their followers would then see.

Retweeting Rocks

The most powerful tool with Twitter is the ‘retweet’ (shown as RT). There is so much meaningless jabbering on Twitter that when someone actually reads something interesting, meaningful and sharable, there is a good chance they will forward it on to their followers with a ‘retweet’. Retweets include a mention of the original poster, which means that people you’ve never heard of before can read your messages and then might potentially go on to find out more about you.

Whenever you post something on Twitter, always keep in mind the potential for it to be retweeted. It’s good to post something personal, but if you manage to post something that’s fun and sharable, there is a much better chance of it being forwarded on.

Starting to see the potential yet? It’s like a massive network of interconnected mailing lists. You message all your people, and then any one of your people can retweet your message, or just reply with a mention– at the same time telling all their followers about you.

Tune In To The Good Stuff

Twitter can potentially overwhelm you with a massive amount of raw information. The twitter.com website is fine for managing your profile, but it’s a terrible place for reading tweets as it gives everything to you in one massive list. There are Twitter readers around to help you make sense of it all and one of the most popular is ‘TweetDeck’ (available from www.tweetdeck.com).

The key thing about TweetDeck is that it allows you to split the people you follow into different lists or ‘columns’. So you can have one column for competitors, one for customers and one for kitten photos (or whatever floats your boat, I’m not here to judge).

One essential tip for TweetDeck is to go to ‘Settings’ (little spanner icon) and then click on ‘Notifications’ and click the ‘Advanced Options for Columns’ link. This allows you to stop TweetDeck bleeping at you EVERY TIME there is a new message (that soon gets irritating – trust me) and just bleep at you when it’s a message from one of your key people.

Keep At It

The key thing is persistence. Try and post at least three or four times a day. The ideal balance of tweets should be a mixture of interesting/fun observations, personal notes about products you are excited about, the occasional promotion or special offer and retweeted messages from other people.

It will probably take a few weeks/months of consistent high-quality tweeting before you get a good number of followers but your persistence will eventually pay off with a gang of loyal followers ready to read and distribute your messages.

When I talk with my clients about using Twitter, half of them tell me they don’t understand it, and the other half don’t see why they should bother with it.

To be honest, I can see what they mean – it’s not like the average small business owner in the UK needs to know much about Justin Bieber’s latest haircut, or what Lauren might do next week in ‘The Only Way Is Essex’.

However, there are some massively useful things that a business owner can get out of Twitter, without even having to get that involved in it.

Here’s where to start.

Step 1 – Dip Your Toes In With A Search

Just go to www.twitter.com and use the search bar to search for anything you like. If you sell angling equipment try searching for ‘fishing’, of if you run a holiday cottage in North Wales you could try searching for ‘Snowdonia’. What you will you get back is a huge amount of people’s random thoughts and opinions on that subject (as well as a few bits of commercial spam) but still:

Easiest. Market. Research. Ever.

And remember, if you are reading people’s thoughts on the things you sell, then so are your potential customers. Maybe they should be reading your messages instead…

Twitter used in this way is like a great big search engine for thoughts, opinions and experiences around your areas of interest. It’s especially useful if there’s something in the news that’s related to your business – you’ll soon be overwhelmed with information.

To avoid being overwhelmed, people on Twitter don’t read absolutely everyone’s stuff. Once they find someone who is regularly posting interesting things, whether that is the musings of a Stephen Fry or an Ashton Kutcher, or else another business somewhere in the world selling the same sort of stuff as you, you can choose to ‘follow’ them – to opt into their messages. For that though you need an account, which we’ll come onto next.

Step  2 – Register

The best way to think about Twitter is a just like an email newsletter which anyone in the world can potentially opt in to (or, to use Twitter-speak, they can choose to ‘follow’ you). You’ve only got 140 characters to play with, but you can use that to tell people about new products, special offers or just if you had an interesting person in your shop. The magic of Twitter – and the thing that makes it special – is that once you get people following your messages (your ‘followers’), then they can forward (or ‘retweet’ – shown as ‘RT’) any of your messages to their followers, and then those people can forward it to their followers. And so on and so on. It’s not just you broadcasting and hoping people listen – it’s you starting a conversation that anyone in the world can join in on. Your customers become your marketing team.

Registering with Twitter is easy (the tricky bit is actually getting people to follow you, but we’ll come to that in my next article).

To create a Twitter account, go to www.twitter.com and use the fields on the right to enter your full name, email address and a password. Then click ‘Sign Up’.

The next, and most important, thing you’ll need to do is give yourself a Twitter username. Try and find a meaningful name that you won’t mind printing on your company literature. It could be related to your company name and maybe even include a keyword related to the products you sell. Take your time with this and try a few different ideas and permutations. Eventually you’ll find something that works and you can live with for the next few years.

Then just agree to the terms and conditions, click ‘Create My Account’ and you are done.

Congratulations! Kiss goodbye to your free time (just kidding).

Step 3 – Have a Play

The first thing you should do now is click on your username at the top right of the www.twitter.com home page and select ‘Settings’ and then go to ‘Profile’. Here you can choose a nice image (it needs to be square) and enter your web address and a short description of you and your company. Your image will appear against all your messages, and your description and URL will appear when people choose to follow you.

In the next article I’ll give some tips on how to start to get followers and use Twitter meaningfully, but in the meantime search for some interesting people to follow, add your Twitter username to your website and marketing materials, try and post something at least once a day and just get used to how Twitter works and looks. It takes a bit of getting used to but if you can get the hang of it, it’s a fun way to communicate with your current customers, and a great way to promote yourself to new ones.

Part two to follow…

My experience moderating the Actinic Community for four years has meant that I’ve had a chance to see what works with forums, and what really causes problems. Here are a few tips I offer people when they are thinking of adding a forum to their sites:

1)      Purpose – It’s worth being really clear what the forum is there for in advance, and ensuring all new joiners know that. Is it just for people to ask advice from you or from other users? Is it also for people to generally network and become friends? Believe me, it really helps to know these things. Otherwise the regular forum posters who are on it every day (see point 4 – below) will dictate what it’s about and maybe take things in a direction which doesn’t reflect what your company is about.

2)      Policies – What happens if someone gets abusive? Do you kick people off or put them on moderation? If people are on moderation, who does the moderation? A basic set of policies needs to be agreed in advance and turned into a set of terms and conditions that all new joiners sign up to. That way it minimises arguments.

3)      Policing – The best way to keep everything lovely and keep debate flowing freely is to deputise a few trusted people who are on there regularly to keep people in line. Then things only get referred to the company (or some sort of appointed oversight group) if things get properly nasty and needs being dealt with.

4)      Postaholics – Some people live on forums, and they will read every new posting and respond to about half of them. They will start to see the forum as being ‘their’ forum and will conduct random and irrelevant conversations – often hijacking threads on otherwise interesting things. This isn’t something you can avoid – this is just the reality of being on a forum. As long as you provide a ‘Random Chat’ forum, that will hopefully siphon off most of the chatter.

As I say, forums provide a great opportunity for mobilising what essentially amounts to an unpaid sales force, but there are huge pitfalls as well. By following these rules hopefully yor forum will become a place where people want to be – including you!

Both allow the clients to update all the content and images in the site themselves using a browser, rather than having to pick up the phone to us (as much as we love to speak to our clients!) Casa Bellavista also features slideshows that can be managed by the client.