M5Media, Inc.

It often comes up in the development phase of an ecommerce website… How do you want people to pay you?  The majority of customers have no idea what the pro’s and con’s of using Paypal vs. a Merchant Account and Gateway are so here it is:

Paypal:

Pros:

• Easy to setup
• Cheaper for a startup business with low volume sales
• Some people trust Paypal more (owned by EBAY)
• No SSL needed (paypal handles payments)

Cons:

• May cost more depending on the rate you negotiate with a MA
• Takes customer off of your site
• Some people trust Paypal less (to each his own)

Merchant Account (MA)

Pros:

• Often appears more professional
• Keeps users on your site during the payment process
• Can be cheaper if you are doing a lot of volume
• Better customer retention and success rate

Cons:

• More programming overhead to setup
• Have to pay a % + a transaction fee
• Often a monthly fee to keep the MA open
• Need an SSL certificate (for scrambling of CC numbers during transmission to the payment gateway)

Conclusion

It’s a mixed bag really, in my experience few people want to pay the overhead of setting up a merchant account with the fees and trouble.  However, customers seem to prefer that method and your success rates (from surfer to purchaser) are usually higher.  I usually recommend starting with Paypal, then when you are getting a lot of sales, switch to a MA.

Advice on not getting your email campaigns junked

Unfortunately, not every email you send in a campaign makes it to it’s destination.  You can expect 10-20% of the emails you spend to inevitably end up in SPAM filters and junk mail boxes, it’s the nature of the beast.  Even if you send email campaigns following all the rules and only to recipients who asked for them you can end up in SPAM filters.

Unfortunately, there are no simple ways to avoid this, best practice is to understand SPAM filters and how they work.

Believe it or not, SPAM filters do not *know* that your email is SPAM or NOT SPAM - they guess.  This sounds scary but they are surprisingly good at it.  However, they occassionally deliver what are known as false positives from time to time.  A false positive is when a message that is not spam is labeled as such and blocked.  This is demonstrated by the familiar conversation:

“I sent you an email, didn’t you get it?”

“No, I didn’t, are you sure you sent it?”

“Check your junk mail box”

“Oh, I don’t know why it went in there”

(the email probably had a subject “OMG!!!!!! DID YOU SEE HOW WE COULD SAVE $$$$ MONEY BY SIGNING UP ON TOTALLYFREESTUFF.COM?? ” )

SPAM filters operate on a set of rules that have been established by people in the know about people who send SPAM a lot.  The SPAM scanner (a program) analyzes each email as it comes into the system and runs a set of rules on it, if it accumulated too many ‘points’ it is labeled as SPAM and sent to the junk folder.  Here are a few samples of numbers that Spam Assassin assigns emails that it thinks look like spam:

• Talks about lots of money (.193 points)
• Describes some sort of breakthrough (.232 points)
• Looks like mortgage pitch (.297 points)
• Contains urgent matter (.288 points)
• Money back guarantee (2.051 points)
• Why Pay More? (1.249 points)

The number of points that send your email to the SPAM dungeon varies from server to server, it is configurable and ranges from very lax to very strict.  What people have their SPAM settings at is usually related to how much SPAM they get and how annoying they find it

What do I do then (or not do)?

Avoid these common mistakes:

• Going crazy with the exclamation points!!!!!!!!
• USING ALL CAPS WHICH IS YELLLING!!!!!! (exclamations thrown in to make it extra spammy)
• Annoying bright colors and dubious offers like Click Here for a FREE VACATION
• Intentionally misspelling ’spam words’ like vi*gra FrEe HeRE, this might even work but it makes you look like an idiot.
• Having a history of doing these things: a bad rap follows you and the server through organizations like spamhaus.org

How do I follow the rules?

Following the rules is easy - just don’t do anything to somebody else you wouldn’t want done to you.  Here’s a cheat sheet FYI:

• Only send email to people who have agreed or signed up to receive from you.
• Only send email that pertains to your business or something pertaining to your business (everybody hates those affiliate programs)
• Send useful information or tidbits - if you wouldn’t want to read it, who else would?
• Only send out to lists that have asked specifically for the material you’re sending.

And there you have it, SPAM 101

In this industry I see business owners often making this same mistake over and over again.  They use up their entire budget on building a decent site, then they forget to promote it!  We usually hear something like the following:

“You mean people won’t just visit it because it’s there?“

Back in the first month the internet was born this was realistic, some people just surfed the web to see what they could find, and your site would pop up in the rudimentary search engines of the day because there was virtually no competition - sorry but those days are long gone!

To help promote your site, here are some tried and true ways to build traffic to your site through the online community.  Remember, todays online browser can be tomorrow’s customer if you do your homework.

SEO - strategies for getting better results from search engines

1. Write a page title - this is the first thing that search engines look at when viewing your page, it’s also what appears in the top left of your browser window, don’t forget it!
2. Include your keywords in the header (h1, h2, h3) - Browsers interpret these tags as having more importance than regular text (hence the ‘h1′ which means ‘header 1′).  Use these tags to not only grab attention for what’s to come, but to impress search engines as well.
3. Use keywords in hyperlinks - Google especially puts emphasis on the words used in a link (what is blue or underlined).  This is seen as a ‘gateway’ to another page or location and the text used describes that location, hence making it more important to the search engine.
4. Promote your local business using google - This is a must do!  It amazes me how many people don’t realize the business potential in this.  Every time people look at a Google Map or search an area on a map Google shows what it thinks are relevant businesses.  If your listed in that area, you get one of those balloons with your name, address, and phone number.  Google will send you a postcard in the mail which you have to mail back to them to verify that you are a local business.  This service is FREE (minus the cost of the stamp and 3 minutes of your time).
5. Business Blog - On the internet content is king as the old axiom goes.  What better way of building solid online content about your business can you think of than blogging about it?  Press releases, new projects, industry developments are all great ways to build content.  It also helps a lot in keeping a site fresh, downside is you have to be semi-diligent about it.  Nobody wants to read a blog whose last post was in 1999.
6. Submit site to key directories - This helps build traffic in two ways:

• It builds ‘real’ traffic to your site through click-throughs from directories in your field.  Directory listings often show up in searches and this can be a great way to build traffic.
• It also builds ‘votes’ for your website.  The way this works is fairly easy to understand, when someone links to your site they are in essence ‘voting’ that your site is a desirable destination on the internet.  Google’s and other search engine algorithms see this and positively consider it when ranking your site.

Old School - traditional marketing tactics

1. Include your URL on all company media - This is a no-brainer and the best and easiest way to promote the online component of your business.  Radio commercials, TV ads, your company vehicle, pencils, pens, business cards (especially those!) and stationary should all have your web address.
2. Develop something for free - Everybody wants something for free, especially on the internet it seems.  Develop a part of your site that offers free stuff.  Maybe a free example floor plan if your an interior designer, a free quote service if your a contractor, the always popular free newsletter subscription.  These services are technically free, but they help to bring you business which more than makes up for the effort and cost you expend to create them.

Email - marketing techniques for emailing your customer base

• Email Marketing - Get the Word Out… but not through SPAM!  Everybody hates SPAM but there are legitmate and effective ways to build business through email marketing.
• Traditional Mail or Electronic? - We Vote Electronic!  It’s cheaper, faster, and much easier to implement. M5Media has a newsletter system that comes with a custom template that matches your website and marketing material!  Email newsletter marketing is an industry in itself so look to this site in the future for more information and future articles about this subject.

Don’t get me wrong… the old site was great in it’s day but we can all agree it was getting a little long in the tooth. The web has changed so much in the last 5 years that new stuff is all over the place. My previous month has been building a new web server for our stuff to run on and it only makes sense that we upgrade the site too.

We wanted to make the M5 site a little more flexible and up to date, and of course make it cool so we opted for a blog based CMS. Wordpress has been around for awhile, but let me tell you… this piece of software is impressive! When you consider it’s plug-n-play architecture and active online community you have a great CMS/blog system.

Design wise it’s a little of the old with a little of the new, the website runs on the Word Press engine. We opted through several iterations for this redesign but none of them felt right so we ended up working with and overhauling an existing theme from WordPress and adding our own stuff.

We also have a new logo! I was looking for something that would tie the two words together in a design sense, you be the judge… [below]

M5Media New Logo

This site goes out to Will Weyer of Wiretree.com, who has always been an inspiration to me and shown that good work is worth the extra effort.

What to Look for in a Web Designer…a beginners guide

Experience: If his/her answer to this question is “Yeah, I designed a website once” that should tell you something.

Online Portfolio: Your Web Designer should have some sort of portfolio online, take a look at it. Do you like what you see? Call up a website owner and ask about their experience with the developer. Did they get what they paid for? Was the developer easy to work with? Is the site doing what you need it to do? Etc.

Server Side Scripting: All but the most basic of websites have interactivity, without it a webpage is just an online brochure (which is fine if that is all you need it to do). However, to start working for you a website needs to have some sort of server side scripting. Do you want the website to collect information from people? Do you want the website to sell your products? Do you want the website to accept job bids, photo submissions, questions from customers? People’s needs are impossible to guess…here are just a few examples of things people needed server side scripting to accomplish.

• One client needed a website with an online dating service for its patrons (a nightclub),
• Another needed a way to upload and sell their photos online (a photography studio),
• Another needed to take job submissions over the internet (a construction company).

Aesthetic Design: This is a very subjective one but you can be the judge. Are sites that this Web Designer has done pleasing to look at? Are they functionally designed? Are they easy to navigate? Do they load in a reasonable amount of time? Do they have purple backgrounds with yellow text and jumping clowns? (Hint, this is not a good sign)

CSS: CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a language developed to separate content from markup. Your web designer should use CSS in some form or another. CSS allows all the text and some of the design elements for the site to be controlled from one document. When you want to change fonts or colors on a site, it’s a matter of minutes instead of hours, which is time that you are paying for.

A Private Server: Ask your Web Designer if they have their own server or if they just rent space. I’m not saying every web developer has to have their own server, but if they do, this should tell you two things.

1. They are serious about the business; nobody has their own server just for fun.
2. Your website will get better performance. Virtual hosts (companies that rent space to people for cheap) often severely overload their servers to make more money. Downtime, email problems, slow page-loading, and a million other problematic things are the usual result. You are less likely to encounter this problem with a developer or company that has its own server(s).

Monthly Fee: This should be a reasonable number, no more than $75 a month unless you are getting free consulting time or your website has special needs. A range of $15 - $35 is pretty standard for just hosting, depending on the needs for your site and what comes with it (expect to pay more for consulting time, extra storage space, etc).

Cost: Every website is unique, and most of the time you usually get what you pay for. If you want your site to do everything but wash your dishes and your budget is $500, you are not being realistic. On the other hand, if you just paid $5,000 for a site that doesn’t really do anything, your getting ripped off.

A Content Management System: You shouldn’t have to pay your Web Designer every time you need a few words changed, modern sites should be built with some kind of Content Management System (CMS) which allows you (at least) to make basic text changes.

Features: What comes with the website?

• Does the site include email accounts, statistics tracking?
• Does the developer or company backup the site regularily? Can you make backups? (this is especially important if your site holds important information)
• Can you make changes to the site without paying for them?
• Do you get consulting time? How much? What’s the hourly rate?