I recently meet with a prospective client for the first time to discuss their ideas for a new website. Before meeting with them I fully engrossed myself with their website, understanding their business, reading bios, case studies, etc. My first impression was that they were a reputable small, maybe 10-15 employee firm. To my shock and almost downfall, they were a much larger firm occupying two floors of a massive corporate building. Needless to say, I thought I was in the wrong place.

In the example above, this client had a very big problem. Their business is very people orientated, and if it looks like they have only employees, then it looks like they can only handle small accounts or fewer of the big ones anyways.

A good website will enable your sales people, account reps, and marketing efforts to get the attention they deserve. Imagine you are a company with a hundred employees and multiple locations, and your walking up to a Fortune 500 company and trying to sell them $500,000 in goods or services. But the decision maker that you are meeting with already reviewed your website and thinks you are a small shop with half a dozen employees. Imagine his concern with handing you a $500,000 purchase order.

The ideal situation is that your website not only makes your company appear larger, but more capable and more experienced to handle the ideal target clients you want to pursue.

Undoubtedly the hardest aspect of the selling web & interactive services is that you cannot simply hand the client an actual product, anytime, even after the project is complete. Graphic designers have it slightly easier in that they can hand a prospect their portfolio and the prospect can touch it, feel it, marvel at it the wonderful printing techniques, and I think you get the point.

So how do you convince someone to buy something from you when you cannot hand it to them? The same way the dentist convinces you that you need a tooth pulled. First, no one questions a dentist and his abilities, he is admired, trusted and to some people, down right scary. But even fear instills power. So do you start carrying a gun to meetings? No, but you can instill a fear of choosing the wrong firm (not yours) for the job.

Another reason the dentist does so well is because of his knowledge, his experience. Knowledge is power, excuse the pun. When a CEO, Marketing Director, or even a small business owner, goes to make a decision on developing a website, most of the time they will know next-to-nothing about everything in involved in producing one. It is your job to be the instructor, to be knowledgeable of every aspect from concepts to programming to beta testing. Our developers will tell you, I am anything but a programmer, but I have forced myself to learn the lingo, understand the concepts and methodologies of programming, so that I can inform my clients of the best practices.

So how do you effectively sell the invisible? Simple, make the invisible, visible, make it you. Your knowledge, your experience and some personality doesn’t hurt.

“Your fired”, a term made so popular by Donald Trump, however he uses it towards his would be employees. I suggest it works well for clients as well.

All too true with the technology industry and more specifically the web design industry, is the huge barrier between clients and firms. Knowledge is that barrier.

I spend so much time educating clients on the business of the web. So much in fact that for some clients I have contemplated adding a line item to their proposal for “education & training”. How frustrating is it to build a phenomenal website with a client-friendly content management system, only to find out two months later they want a quote for updates?

Then there are those clients that maybe watch one too many infomercials, and view the web as their ticket to millions. The first conversation goes something like this, “I have a great idea for a website that combines MySpace with eBay and has cool features like eHarmony”. What is that? A site that you can take a compatibility test, make them your friend and if you don’t like them anymore you can put them in auction? In all serious, I have had plenty of conversations that have sounded like that, and they all end with me quickly hanging up.

So where do you draw the line? What brings you to the point of no return? It all boils down to time and money. Are they waisting too much of your time without making you enough money? As much as your client cares about ROI, you have a bottom line too.

In today’s fast paced society, just about everywhere you look people are connected to the internet. Via their laptop or now the more popular mobile phones and pocket PC’s. The business world has noticed and is now taking advantage of the web to attract new customers and gain an edge over the competition. More and more companies are finding it absolutely crucial to seek out new and innovative ways to connect with their clients. While it has gained in popularity and acceptance, the internet is still far too often overlooked as a marketing tool in today’s market. The internet offers a wide range of marketing opportunities that are unsurpassed by any other medium to date. One such tool being utilized by successful businesses is email marketing. Recently, email marketing began to gain attention and recognition due to its low cost and proven results.

Email marketing is a simple and direct way to literally reach innumerous amount of customers with the same ease it takes to send just a single email. Utilizing such an email marketing tool saves valuable time, which in business, directly translates into increased profits. A reputable email marketing tool will allow you the ability to include all of the valuable information of a letter in standard text email format or with rich media, such as graphics and photos.

Email marketing campaigns can be directed to a select group of individuals that might have a need for your company’s products or services, or is often used to simplify the process of keeping up with existing clientele like sending monthly newsletters. What’s more is that email marketing campaigns can be personalized in order to appeal exclusively to individual recipients. A person’s name, business, address or any other variable piece of information is often included in mass mailings without actually typing them individually. By including someone’s name or other personal information in an email, it gives each email a personal touch, that often gets noticed and feedback from recipients.

Email marketing has numerous benefits for those that use it to its full advantage. One major advantage is the ability to track sent emails. Tracking enables you to see how many people read the email, forwarded the email, and clicked on any website links. Tracking is a key tool in determining who is interested in your company’s products and services. Mailing lists can be created to facilitate repeat mailings or follow-up emails. In order to avoid resending information to those who have already read the email, responded, or requested to no longer receive information, you can easily manage the mailing lists directly in the email marketing system.

Some companies are apprehensive about email marketing because it is commonly misinterpreted as SPAM. The frequent inundation of mailboxes with unnecessary email advertisements, or “SPAM”, is enough to turn anyone off of the idea of marketing through email. SPAM, or the unsolicited mailing of irrelevant bulk emails, has given email marketing a bad name. Legitimate email marketing campaigns seek out potential clients and tailor information to their interests, unlike SPAM which sends identical advertisements to anyone’s email address.

The popularity and ease of email marketing has provided many ways to implement the marketing technique. One simple and low-cost approach to email marketing is to use a service called ReadNotify.com. This website has an email tracking system that tracks the time, date, and location of opened messages, how long the message was opened and other message history. The service costs between $24 and $36 a year, based on which options you choose. But service is intended to be used for single emails at a time, and not mass mailings, mainly because it does not allow for the personalization features of larger systems. It does, however, provide a good way to test if email marketing will work for you.

Mass mailings are the most productive form of email marketing since it can be used to reach large numbers of potential clients while still providing a personal touch. There are many helpful websites and email marketing software providers available if you want to manage an email marketing campaign on your own. Despite these services, however, mass email marketing campaigns are frequently handled by interactive agencies as opposed to individual companies due to the overwhelming complexities of SPAM regulations. Either an email marketing software provider or an interactive agency with extensive knowledge of SPAM regulations should be used in order to stay within the parameters of the law. The main advantage of using an interactive agency is that they can not only send and track the email marketing campaign but they can also help in the creative aspects of it as well.

Clearly email marketing is a fascinating direct marketing technique. As the numbers of marketing mediums become more and more crowded, businesses need to look for new and engaging ways to reach potential clients. Email has become a primary form of communication and the average business user checks their email at least 6 times a day.

Whether you handle email marketing yourself or hire an agency to work with you, email marketing is a proven and profitable direct advertising medium. The age of the internet is upon us. It is time to move towards new forms of marketing and step into the progressive field of web communication. Embrace the new marketing opportunities and mediums that technological advancements have made a reality.

I know there has been a lot of talk about Google Analytics and how great of a tool it is. Personally, I love Google Analytics, I have used several other web analytics programs and none of them compare. No this isn’t a Google advertisement, but it is an article on the benefits of using web analytics software.

Analytics gives you the ability to track where a user comes from, what they look at on your site and inevitability whether or not they choose to convert into a sale or a lead. You can track users from referring websites, search engines, online campaigns and paid search results. But the real beauty is being able to track more than just your online efforts.

Imagine tracking your print ads, radio ads, commercials, yellow book ads, billboards and any other form of advertising. Using unique domain names for each type of advertisement, and specifying the campaign in your analytics program, you will setup a page at each domain that attaches a tracking code to the users browser and passes them to your website.

Now that you have that all setup you will be able to compare how well your different advertising efforts compare to each other. The key is giving you the data to be able to make effective marketing decisions.

Probably one of the hardest things to deal with new clients is educating them on what they really need in their website. Now, lets get one thing clear, almost everyone would benefit from having a website, but that doesn’t mean they need the best website available.

Probably the biggest stumbling block for new clients is whether or not to build an ecommerce website. For most new clients considering ecommerce, it is usually a case where they have spent years developing a new product or service, and they have preconceived their product will be the next George Forman grill.

It’s really hard to tell a client, that they should take it slow, maybe build the first phase of the website as just a product awareness site. Build the demand for the product, then fullfill the demand.

Some web professionals may not agree with this tactic, but think of this way, would you rather an angry client, or a successful happy client that is eager to bring you more work? I don’t know about you, but I like happy clients, and for those clients that are destined to fail, wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t contribute to that?

Well, its about time I sat down and began composing my thoughts on business, more specifically my own business which is a small web & interactive design firm. The firm’s name is Inovat, and it started about 5 years ago.

The firm is currently, and probably will forever be, located in a small town called Elizabethtown, PA, USA. Elizabethtown is probably most commonly known by the town it borders, Hershey, which is of course the home of the great Hershey chocolate bar.

So, currently my position at Inovat is in developing strategies for our clients online presence, promote the firm and it’s work, and manage the operation of the business. My business partner, Nick, handles the business finances, employees, and the new property management group of Inovat.

So, all of that being said, this is a blog, and I am going to write about everything that pertains to my business, my clients and what I have learned.