Dear Dan: We’d like to capture customer testimonials and feedback and post the best stuff on our own website. Is that likely to be beneficial? What’s the best way to do it?  — Under Review

Dear Under Review:  Customer ratings and reviews are all the rage online these days, and for good reason. Studies show that more and more ready-to-buy shoppers use these reviews as an influencing factor when choosing between competing merchants. But many small business owners are either oblivious or uneasy over what customers are saying about them online.

Tea Guys, LLC, a family-owned and operated Hatfield, MA-based retailer of exotic tea, considered the same route that many small businesses take – ask a few customers for testimonials and post them on the company website.  But in this age of instant communication via social media, and skepticism about testimonials that businesses gather themselves, Tea Guys wanted something more cutting edge and compelling. Read the full entry

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Dear Dan: Okay, I admit we’ve taken our eye off the Internet ball a bit, and maybe we’re falling behind in the race to win more business online, and with social media. Is it really that important? How are others doing it?  — Social Slacker

Dear Slacker: Internet users conduct billions of online searches monthly. And since one in every five searches is spurred by a local need of some kind, the implications for local businesses are huge. It comes down to this:  If you aren’t leveraging online business-building strategies to their fullest, you’re putting yourself in a competitive ditch.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently stepped up its efforts to inform business owners about all the ways they can build business online – from Internet yellow pages (IYP) and mobile marketing to social media and online video. The SBA is acting because it knows that local business owners who are plugged into the web create more jobs. “As the web evolves and consumers adapt accordingly, we know that more customers are finding Main Street businesses online,” says SBA Administrator Karen Mills.  Here are four short success stories and four things you can do on your own: Read the full entry

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One of the most pressing issues facing small business owners today is this:  “How do I get paid faster?” Over the last several years, millions of business owners, including freelancers, solo businesses and home businesses have turned to web-based invoicing services to improve the payment process and get money in the door faster. And nearly a dozen such services are available.

Now financial giant American Express is joining the fray. Amex OPEN, the company’s small business division, just launched AcceptPay, a nifty new online invoicing and payment solution that aims to help business owners improve cash flow at a time when customers are taking longer to pay. Read the full entry

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Whether you are planning to sell online for the first time, or are tuning up and re-launching an existing e-commerce site, drawing visitors to your website is a challenge. Some traditional marketing strategies actually translate well to e-commerce, such as promoting to places where you know your customers congregate (either online or in the physical world). If you have a physical store, review what has worked there and morph those activities into your online efforts.

One of the biggest hurdles in online marketing is keeping visitors on your site long enough to buy something, says Jean Van Rensselar, a Chicago-based marketing expert. At a store, they’ve already made a time investment to be there and are less likely to walk out. Online, however, there’s no such investment so the quality of your site will make or break your online business. With a single click, potential customers can bolt. Here are some tips for marketing an online store and some errors to avoid: Read the full entry

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Want to see the future of picturing products online? Visit the website of one of the companies specializing in 360-degree product photos, virtual reality (VR) images, user-controlled product zoom, hotspots and multi-media VR that also combines sound.  Forget flat, boring 2-D images. This stuff will bring a new “cool factor” to your website, and can literally put you into a different dimension from your competition. Businesses using 360-degree product shots are producing huge benefits such as:

• Longer time on site
• More clicks and more sales
• Fewer returns
• Fewer calls and emails asking product questions Read the full entry

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In case you’ve been off-planet for the past several years, “social networking” has become the talk of the Internet. And more to the point, it’s now an essential tool for business, having moved from experimental curiosity to business networking necessity.

But social networking involves an increasingly complex and ever-changing web of technologies, communities and strategies that even the smartest business minds have trouble mastering.  Basically, social networking is the process of creating online relationships, conversations and connections through a wide range of social media such as blogs, networking sites (think LinkedIn), web communities (Facebook), photo and video sharing services (YouTube, Flickr) and the micro-blogging site Twitter, among many others. Read the full entry

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Ever notice how Google and Yahoo are always changing their logos online for holidays, seasonal events or other reasons? Now you can do the same for your web logo, for under $30. LogoNerds, a web-based logo design service catering to small business, will take your existing logo (or one you have them design) and jazz it up with a customized holiday theme.

LogoNerds is one among many low-cost services that have revolutionized logo design for small business by offering custom logos, with many options to choose from, at rates you’d have never thought possible.  Unlike most other services that use freelance designers overseas, LogoNerds claims its own in-house design team.  Here’s how it works: Read the full entry

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With small businesses moving in droves to pay-per-click (PPC) online ads, the ability to gauge click quality just got a welcome shot in the arm. After years of planning and wrangling over standards, the Media Rating Council (MRC) — an online ad industry group — has awarded the first-ever click quality certifications to four leading sites, including Microsoft, Business.com (which publishes What Works for Business) and two others not yet publicly named.

In short, this provides — for the first time ever — an objective, audited means of assuring that the clicks you pay for are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service you are advertising. MRC puts sites that apply for accreditation through a rigorous “stress test” to ensure that click quality meets strict industry standards. Sites with sub-standard traffic and shoot-from-the-hip measuring methods won’t pass the test — and there aren’t any government bailouts available. Read the full entry

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Dear Dan – Our sales have tanked and profits seem a distant memory. Nevertheless, I’m an optimist who believes things will turn around. Meanwhile, how can we prepare and position our business right now for better days ahead? — Preparing

Dear Preparing:  One upside of an economic downturn is that it offers opportunities to take a fresh look at how you operate and make some of the relatively simple changes that can put your business at the front of the line when things start to pick up.  Small businesses can often see an immediate bump in sales just by making a few easy tweaks, such as fixing website functionality or revising a sales pitch.

Here are ten things you can do to prepare your business for profits ahead. Read the full entry

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If you sell business to business (B2B) — and especially if you are launching a new B2B product or service — here’s good news:  Your job is far easier than business-to-consumer sellers who must convince hordes of fickle, faceless, un-invested citizens to buy their latest gizmo.

But you — as a B2B maven — can easily get potential customers to do much of the heavy lifting for you.  B2B sales expert Dan Adams says they’ll even do it willingly. “Compared to end consumers, your B2B buyers are more insightful, interested, rational and fewer in number,” says Adams, president of Ohio-based Advanced Industrial Marketing, Inc.  “They are perfect marketing partners and if you don’t take advantage of their clear-headed wisdom, your new product launch will suffer.”

The purchasing process has changed. The Internet and other digital technologies now drive the B2B marketplace. It’s all about the free exchange of information. And unlike yesteryear when the onus was on you to seek out customers, it now makes sense to let prospects find you on their terms and timetable. Research by MarketingSherpa.com shows that customers now find suppliers – not the other way around – in 80 percent of B2B transactions. Adams recommends these steps to B2B success: Read the full entry

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