France Online is offering a prize of one years advertising in their competition.
Win an opportunity to showcase your business on all, or any of our 7 websites for 1 year.
You will also have the opportunity to feature in one of our Blogs Free of Charge with your own publication showcasing your business or services throughout the year.
All you have to do to enter is answer 3 questions and subscribe to their weekly newsletter.
Since I last wrote about Flash and QR codes, I have noticed something rather strange, they are starting to appear on web pages. If a visitor is already on the page then the flash code is redundant.
Flash codes were meant for printed media such as magazines, posters and leaflets. Ideal for printing on packages, invoices and business cards.
Are you using Flash codes? Does it work for you?
You most likely spent lots of money on your business site – gite, holiday rental, online shop, whatever…
But how much did you spend on photography? Online shops often use pictures from their suppliers. Not very inspiring as many of them are bland and not very exciting. Gite and holiday rental owners take 5 pictures of the drive way and 1 picture for each room. Even then the room photo’s are often dark.
There is so much competition for holiday rental owners, you really can’t afford to rely on your mobile phone for real quality pictures.
So if you could be shown how to take a better picture, would you pay for a course?
A brand new site that connects holiday rental owners with future guests is offering free listings…
We’ve been busy creating Holiday Let Exchange this year. It’s designed to allow you, the gîte owners, to chat with loads of holiday makers and really show off your beautiful properties.The site’s nothing, however, without all your lovely properties. So, we’ve created a really good offer for the first 100 gîtes to be listed…no payment, no commitment, lots of publicity.
Have a look at the site. If it’s for you simply follow the simple steps and we’ll put the Champagne on ice!
I attended the Salon du Chocolat at the Salle Anatole France in Bergerac on Saturday (8th October 2011). I was there on behalf of a friend who had a stall there. There were some really excellent artisans selling the most wonderful chocolate…
One stall had traveled all the way from Carcassonne, that’s a 321 km, 3 hours 32 mins drive according to Google Maps. A long way to go…
But they, like all the others at the show were missing one thing.
Hardly any mention of websites and no mentions Facebook pages.
Some had signs low down resting on the floor. Some had their web addresses printed on bags. But that was it. If you had traveled a long way to visit the show and bought something, you may well want to buy more. For Christmas (that’s looming up fast) or other events, like birthdays etc. With such little promotion of sites and Facebook pages, no one is going to remember where they got their wonderful chocolate from! An artisan traveled for over 3 hours to be there, convinced people from the local area to buy, will they buy again? Not if they can’t remember the name, that’s why you should include SOMETHING in the packing that mentions websites and Facebook pages.
Q. What do you think would happen if one of the artisans had a big sign up on high that mentioned their Facebook page?
A. Repeat customers
As a small business, you want to get your products and services out there. Builders like to take photo’s of finished projects. Gardening services publish their works too. If you sell stuff then you take pictures of the packaging etc. However, are you only publishing your photo’s to one place? Here are 5 free ways to get them seen.
Obvious choice but have you created separate albums and got it all organised? Get it sorted so that visitors can get a good idea of what you are about.
This is still a great a place to upload your photo’s. Flickr allows you to create groups which others can contribute to. For example, you provide a course – a weeks training in something. You can upload photo’s of your students progress but then students can upload the photo’s they took. You can create a community and get to show others why your services etc are a good idea.
There are many services that allow you to easily post photo’s to Twitter. Sites like Yfrog and Twitpic. Check out this post on Mashable for more sites that you can use, 5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter. Share with your followers pictures of new products or perhaps completed projects.
This may not seem obvious but why not string a bunch of photo’s together and create a video of still pictures. Add some nice music that sets the seen and upload to YouTube. Here is a video for Mac users on how to use Quick Time and one for Windows users with MovieMaker.
The brand new social network from Google allows you to share photos. There are millions of members now, in fact anyone with a Google account can now get on. The act of adding and uploading is fairly simple
I read this brief article that Niki Pilkington tweeted a few days ago, ‘Small business must use lawful images‘. In my mind, this applies weather you are blogging, producing advertising material, a static web site or any other activity involving pictures and publicity for commercial use.
If you intend to use pictures that your supplier has used in a product catalog, check that you are allowed to use them. If there is no statement that says you can’t, don’t take that as a yes. Get written permission, email or otherwise.
You can take pictures of products but companies can be very protective over brand names, again get permission. Always better to be on the safe side.
There are several options here that you can follow.
Just because you found an image you want to use on an image search, it does not mean you can use it. Even if every one else seems to using it, it does not make it right.
Where ever possible, if you intend to use an image for commercial use, make sure you have permission in a written format.
It has never been easier to market your products or services. Actually, I should say, it has never been easier for YOU to market your products or services. It used to take specialists (PR companies) to create the message, hours or days learning your products or services, create adverts, research the best places in print (newspapers or magazines) and then charge you a heck of a lot of money.
Now you are in control, after all you know your products or services better than anyone.
Make your business blog your media channel. The place where you communicate with your customers.
Direct them there from Facebook (source: Facebook)…
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
How much does it cost to access 500 million active users? Nothing…
Send them to your site from YouTube (source: Flip me – the new world of video is here)…
“…there is 100 hours of video loaded onto YouTube every five minutes…and YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world…”
How easy it is to make your own video? Got a smartphone or a video enabled camera? Virtually nothing or spend around €200 for a decent HD video camera.
Get on to Twitter and spread the word (source: How Many Users Does Twitter Have TODAY)…
I believe that Twitter has 277,559,946 amount of users, which will change tomorrow or even as you are reading this, since Twitter has 460,000 accounts created per day…
Cost to access that vast number of people? Nothing, Twitter is free.
The Prospect Networking blog has an interesting post about site translations, My website is up and running, do I need to translate it?
I thought I would expand on that and mention other expat business issues.
Yes and no, it all depends on your target market/audience and who really is your market/audience.
You may be have set up your website to help sell your widgets to the English speaking expats here in France but are they the only ones interested?
Check your analytics and see which countries your visitors are coming from, Google Analytics can tell you languages as well (other tracking systems/packages may well do that as too). Who you think is visiting and who actually wants to spending money are two different things.
You have more English speaking visitors than French, however the proportions are narrow? Then have one or two pages in French to summarise your products and services so they can find out what you do. If the proportions are not narrow then you will have to consider if it is worth translating.
You have decided to get the translation done so what’s next?
Just a simple question, you could spend money on translating your site in to French (or for that matter any other language) but do you actually speak the language? If you are inviting non English speaking visitors to your site, shouldn’t you be able to converse with them by phone or email?
A few months back I was talking to a German translator who gave me excellent advice, always get the the translation done by someone whose native language is the language you are translating to.
There are excellent translators out there but some times you need the cultural background to ensure you get your message across. Choose wisely and ensure your sales message comes across accurately.
It is very tempting to use an online service, Google Translate being the most obvious. But as The Prospect Networking blog points out, difficult and complicated sentences can be mis-translated or at the very least come out strange.
When it comes down to it, only you can decide whether to translate or not. It is an expense that may prove worthy if the site statistics agree. You may be missing out on potential customers if you don’t.
Recently I have been looking at Google Places as a way to attract more visitors to a company website. If you are not already aware, when a search is conducted on a place name a map may be shown with local businesses marked on it. Here for example, is a search for “Bergerac bed and Breakfast“.
As you can see, the map is labelled to tie in with the search results.When a user searches for accommodation, they are more likely to use the results within the map as it gives a much clearer idea of where these places are located, there is more relevant information than a straight listing. This leads on to two major benefits…
You stand out from the rest
As your business is shown on the map at the top of the page, you stand out from the rest. Searchers are more likely to start clicking the map because it is as the top, it is above the countless pages of listings that follow.
Page one results?
It seems to me that anyone who has their business listed on a map, will show up on page one on geographical searches. If your business relies on customers coming to you, like the above example of ‘bed and breakfast’ then this is something you must be looking at.
Overall benefit
The use of Google Places is going to make it easier for customers to find you. It is also a free service that should take little time to do. Could this be the easiest SEO trick for a page one listing?
