Payment Gateways and Merchant Accounts Defined

If you plan to accept credit cards online for products and services, you will need to set up a payment gateway and a merchant account.

A payment gateway allows online stores and auction sellers to accept credit card payments over the Internet and acts as the equivalent of the point-of-sale device in an offline store. Whenever a purchaser enters a credit card number, the payment gateway protects any sensitive information entered to ensure that information passes securely between the customer and the merchant. It also checks to ensure the customer has enough money on their credit card to pay for the product or services. It then places a hold on the funds so the cardholder can’t spend that money before it is transferred to the business’ merchant account. Two of the most popular payment gateways are Authorize.net, Paypal, and Google Checkout.

Your merchant account will usually charge you various fees such as an authorization fee for each time a credit card payment is sent to the card-issuing bank to be authorized, a monthly statement fee, and possibly a monthly minimum fee if your store’s purchases don’t exceed that amount each month. While some merchant accounts have their own payment gateways, most use a third party gateway. For instance, I use Authorize.net as my payment gateway and Practice Pay Solutions as my merchant account.

Start Accepting Credit Card Payments

If you want to accept credit card payments on your small business website, you have a number of options.

1. Paypal – One of the quickest and easiest ways to start taking money online is to set up a PayPal account. Paypal is a secure payment processor that allows anyone with an email address pay by credit card or direct transfer from their bank account. You can set up an account and connect it to your business banking account in a matter of minutes. And they provide a suite of tools you can use to create a basic shopping cart or “buy now” options for your website. Paypal is great if you only offer a few products or services and don’t need a lot of options.
2. Google Checkout – Google Checkout is Google’s response to Paypal. The service functions similarly to Paypal and allows you to place “buy now” buttons on your website.
3. Shopping Cart – There are numerous shopping cart systems you can use to sell products and services online. Your shopping cart is software that assists customers in making online purchases by simulating an offline “shopping cart” where customers can place items they wish to buy before they “checkout” and make their purchase. At checkout, your customer places their order and enters their credit card number securely through your payment gateway. When the payment gateway approves the charge, it transfers the money into your merchant account, which transfers the money into your bank account. I’ve used 1ShoppingCart in the past and currently use Infusionsoft’s shopping cart system.

If you sell digital products such as PDF files, MP3s, or online videos, you can use services such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or E-Junkie to act as a shopping cart and to deliver your products to customers. Each will allow you to accept payments through Paypal or your merchant account.

Regardless of the size of your company, there is a payment solution that is right for you. Paypal and Google Checkout are great for smaller companies who want to start taking sales online. If you plan to do a lot of business online, you will probably want to look into getting shopping cart software, a payment gateway and a merchant account.

1. Use a clean design – Businesses don’t need to use Flash or fancy graphics for visitors to find your site valuable. Your users want a simple, intuitive design that allows them to access the content they need quickly. Your site navigation should be logical. Your page should be easy to skim. Downloads and newsletter sign ups should be prominently featured.
2. Focus on prospect’s concerns – Your small business website should demonstrate your expertise by providing free information such as articles, free reports, podcasts, video, and other media. When prospects first come to your site, they are focused on their problems – and how to solve them right now. Your “about” and “services” pages won’t interest them initially. First, they want to know if they are in the right place and whether they can find the information they need. They want to know “what’s in it for me?” so make your content valuable.
3. Add new content regularly – Keeping your website up-to-date can be time-consuming, but to build credibility with visitors, you should be adding new articles and updates regularly. Take off any outdated information and add new content about upcoming speaking engagements, media mentions and publications to be released. If visitors see that your upcoming events were for 2007, they will wonder if you are still in business.
4. Use calls to action – What do you want prospects to do on your website? Each page should have a purpose – is it to convey information, to highlight a recent event, to get them to register for a seminar you are holding, to purchase your book, or to hire you? Guide visitors through your site.
5. Don’t collect too much information – If you capture leads with online forms, keep them short and simple. You only need a name and email address for people to sign up for your newsletter. If you ask for more, you will get far less subscribers. For mailed products, ask for the minimum like their name and shipping address, but don’t make them answer a full questionnaire about their business. Keep it simple.
6. Test your site – Make sure all features and links work properly and that you aren’t missing content. Then, ask a few clients to look over your site – can they find the information they need? Is your navigation intuitive? Would they know where to look to find your articles, events, or services?

To create an effective small business website, your site must contain more information than your firm’s name, contact information, and a sales pitch for your services. It must be more interactive than your corporate brochure. When prospects visit your website, they want to know what your firm actually does, see proof that your firm is credible, and understand why you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problems.

Step 1 – Discover Your Competitors

The obvious way to start researching your competitors is to do a Google search for your top keywords. Who is listed on the first page? Which websites are advertising their services in the sponsored listings? Create a list of your top competitors so you can keep track of them.

Step 2 – Research Your Competitors

Once you know who your top competitors are, it’s time analyze their websites and traffic. Here are a few tools you can use to monitor the success of your competition.

1. Alexa – Amazon’s Alexa rank isn’t incredibly accurate but it will give you a high-level overview of how a website’s traffic is trending. Alexa will also show any user-submitted reviews for the website, major keywords it is ranked for, and a general overview of site visitors’ demographics.
2. Yahoo Site Explorer – The best way to find out who is linking to your competitors’ sites is to use Yahoo Site Explorer. This tool will show you the most popular pages on the website as well as which websites are linking to the site’s content. This is incredibly useful when you are trying to get back links to your website and want to find websites who might link to you.
3. Spyfu – Spyfu allows you to see which keywords your competitors are buying pay-per-click ads for and how much they spend on advertising. It will also show you how they rank in the organic and sponsored listings. Spyfu offers both a free and a more comprehensive paid service.

Step 3 – How to Analyze Competitors

The best way to analyze your competitors’ sites is to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes. I previously wrote about what your target audience is looking for. Here, you’ll evaluate how good your competitors are at helping them achieve their goals. Specifically, you want to look at:

1. How does the website look? Is the text legible? Is it easy to scan and pick up the basic message? Do the graphics enhance the site’s content?
2. How easy is it to navigate? Will they understand where to click to find information?
3. How useful is the site? Can they do what they need to do?
4. Would they trust this site? Does it look professional? Is there a privacy policy? Is the company’s address and phone number displayed prominently? Do all the links work? Does it look like they keep the site up-to-date?
5. How convincing is it? Would they want to join the mailing list, buy a product, or request a consultation?

Once you’ve made note of the good and bad points of each site, review what your business objectives are and what your target audience will be looking for. From that, come up with a list of features you’d like to include on your site. Stick to the essentials rather than getting caught up in all the bells and whistles. Good sites are practical and functional at their core.

Step 4 – Monitor Your Competitors

Once you’ve analyzed your competitors, the final step to competitive research is to track and monitor what they are doing over time. Ideally, you want to keep track of which keywords they continue to bid on, what their Adwords ads say, and where they continue to rank in search results.

A general rule of thumb is that if your competitors are at all savvy about marketing, they will be monitoring their advertising campaigns so the ads they continue to run should make the most money while the ads they stop running are not profitable. This isn’t always the case – many small businesses don’t have the time to monitor their advertising, so they lump everything together and wouldn’t be able to tell you what is profitable and what isn’t, but generally speaking, if they are making money through their advertising, they will continue to advertise. Spyfu is great for keeping track of advertising trends over time.

In addition, one of the best ways to monitor what people are saying about your competitors is to use Google Alerts. You can sign up for a free account to monitor any keywords, competitor names, and even the names of articles or videos you submit to directories. Google Alerts makes it easy to track virtually anything.

If you want high rankings in search engines, you must know who your competition is and what they are currently doing to market themselves. By studying your competitors and following these 4 small business web design tips, you can uncover what works and doesn’t work for them – thus learning from their mistakes without wasting lots of money in the process.

1. Home Page – Your home page will be the most visited page on your website. Think of it as the front lobby of your virtual office because it greets visitors and directs them to other parts of your website. Your home page should briefly tell people who you are and what you do. It should be clean, well organized and link to the most crucial parts of your site. It should briefly tell people who you are and what you do.
2. Who we work with – What types of clients do you work with? What are their specific characteristics and problems? Offer samples of the key problems and frustrations your clients face.
3. How we work together – What is your process for working with clients? What can prospects expect when they contact you? What steps are involved in working with you? Provide a big picture outline of how you solve client problems.
4. Services overview – What services do you provide? The best way to set up services pages is to start with a client problem, then discuss how you solve that problem and common results clients can expect.
5. Client results – What have happy clients said about you? Do you have any client testimonials? Can you offer case studies about different clients’ problems, how you solved that specific problem, and the outcome?
6. Products – Service providers can increase their revenue streams by offering informational products that solve specific problems clients have. If you give a talk, record it and sell it on your website. If you’ve published a book, link to it. Products allow you to leverage your expertise because you can help more clients than with your one-on-one services.
7. Free resources – Before prospects will agree to work with you, they want to see samples of what you can do for them. Offer free reports, white papers, case studies, articles, podcasts, a newsletter, or other ways to package your expertise into bite-sized chunks.
8. Press room – If you frequently publish press releases or are mentioned in publications, have a press room where journalists can easily access your picture, biography and recent information about you.
9. Privacy policy, terms of use, and legal information – Include a privacy policy that explains what you do with any information you collect as well as any terms of use or legal information you may required to provide.
10. Contact information – Make sure your contact information including your company address, phone number and fax number is easy to find.

By clearly explaining what types of clients you help and how you help them, and by offering free samples of your expertise through articles, a newsletter, and other media, you will build credibility with website visitors and start generating more leads from your small business website.

Step 1: Capture Prospects’ Attention

When prospects visit your website, they are usually searching for information on how to solve a particular problem. This is especially true of search engine traffic. If you want to keep them on your site, you must provide the information they are searching for. A good way to do this is to provide great website content such as articles, audio, video, past newsletters, or an interesting blog. If you don’t capture your prospect’s attention in the first few seconds, they will click the back button.

Good websites focus on prospects and include plenty of informative content educating and explaining different problems your prospects have and offering advice, new perspectives, or potential solutions. They use web copy that speaks to the problems and concerns of visitors. Put yourself in the minds of your prospects – what are their biggest concerns, problems and obstacles? What might be motivating them to solve those problems? What keywords might prospects type into Google to find a solution similar to what you offer?

Step 2 – Position Yourself as a Specialist

Once your prospects learn more about their problem and potential solutions, they will become more interested in who you are and what you might be able to do for them. They are looking for a trusted adviser who can guide them through the process of solving their problem.

At the same time, your prospects are skeptical. They want proof you can do what you say. They want to know if you are credible and trustworthy. Here are two ways to do that.

• Use a unique selling proposition. – Your website should tell visitors who you are, why you are different from other service professionals, and why they should choose you.
• Provide social proof. – While anyone can brag that they are the best service provider for the job, you prospects want to know what other people think about you. Do you offer client testimonials and case studies? Have you won awards? Has the press mentioned you? Do you often speak at industry events?

Step 3: Capture Leads

Offer several ways for people to contact you through your website. Don’t simply provide your address, phone number and a contact form. Give them an incentive to give you their contact information and permission to follow up. Here are a few ideas for capturing website leads.

• Include an opt-in form for your newsletter. – Place your newsletter’s opt-in form prominently on your page. Ideally, your form should be visible when a visitor clicks on your page so they don’t have to scroll down to find it. Use your form to capture your prospect’s name and email address in exchange for joining your newsletter, downloading your free report, or accessing special content on your website.
• Display contact forms prominently. – Use contact forms for general inquiries, to schedule a consultation with you, or to ask a specific question, which you will answer on your blog.
• Offer RSS feeds. – Some people might not want to give you their email address but may still want to receive your updates. Make it easy for them to do so by providing an RSS feed. Services like Feedburner.com will allow you to track your feed’s subscribers by providing subscriber statistics.
• Store leads in your contact database. – Having a place to collect and store leads is critical to your follow up success. Anyone who joins your newsletter, requests free information, or inquires about your services should immediately be entered into your contact database.

Step 4: Have a Follow Up System

Most people who give you their contact information won’t be ready to hire you. Instead of discarding these leads, follow up with them. Here are a few ways to do that.

• Offer a newsletter – Email marketing is cheap. You can sign up with an email service provider like Aweber for less than $20/month. Decide how often you want to publish your newsletter and send prospects articles about potential problems and issues regularly. A 500-word article shouldn’t take you more than a few hours to write, once you get good at it. Then, simply copy and paste it into Aweber’s interface and click “send.”
• Create a follow up autoresponder sequence. – Autoresponders are emails that you schedule to send at particular intervals in response to a prospect’s actions. For instance, if they request your free report by filling out your form, your email service provider (like Aweber) will automatically send them an email with the link to download that report. You can also schedule to send emails every few days to follow up, The best thing about this is that it’s completely automated. You write the content once, set it up, and Aweber delivers the content to your prospects for you.

By putting this four-step small business website lead generation strategy into place, you will not only capture more leads from your website, but you will convert a higher percentage into paying clients.

Step 1 – Choose A Topic Based On Keyword Research.

Keyword research is essential to article writing. You need to know exactly what keywords and phrases visitors type into search engines to find content like yours. A great place to research keywords is Google’s Keyword Tool. Simply type in the keywords you’d like to be ranked for, and Google will give you suggestions and synonyms.

Pick a key phrase that is 3-5 words long and gets moderate traffic. Don’t choose keywords with tens of thousands of visitors because they have plenty of competition and will be more difficult to rank for.

Step 2 – Decide What Type of Article To Write.

There are a number of types of articles you can write. Some of the most common include a how-to article, where you lead the reader step-by step through a process; a list, where you give readers a number of tips or ways to achieve a goal; a case study, which asks a question and then offers a few real-life examples; a review, which gives your opinion on a product or service; or an editorial, which offers your opinion on a particular problem, trend, or current event.

Step 3 – Write Your Article.

Your article should include a brief introduction paragraph which tells readers what they can expect; the body of the article, which delivers the main content of the article, and a concluding paragraph. Try to keep your article between 400-700 words, so it’s a fast read, but is long enough to give readers the content they are searching for.

For web articles, keep your paragraphs short and break up your text with sub-headlines, bulleted lists, and bolded font. Use a conversational style and make your content useful to readers.

Step 4 – Give Your Article A Powerful Headline.

Your headline is what grabs reader’s attention immediately, so writing a great headline is key to your article’s success. A good headline peaks your reader’s curiosity so they keep reading. You can promise quantifiable benefits for reading the article, such as what they’ll learn, how they can complete a task, or how they can save time or money. Or you can ask a question about a common problem or fear they have.

Step 5 – Proofread.

Use a spell checker and re-read your article to catch any spelling or grammar mistakes. I find it helpful to read the article aloud to make sure it sounds conversational. You can also ask someone to proofread your content, or wait a day or two and re-read it before publishing it.

Step 6 – Optimize Your Content.

Finally, when publishing your article on your website, the best way to maximize its traffic generating potential is to make sure your keyword is used first in your site’s title tag. So instead of writing:

6 Steps For Generating Free Web Traffic With Article Writing

You’d write:

Article Marketing Tips – 6 Steps For Generating Free Web Traffic With Article Writing

Using your keywords in your website’s title tag is the single best search engine marketing strategy you can use because search engines place considerable weight on what your title tag says when ranking websites.

Anyone can write articles to generate more traffic to their small business website. By following these six steps, you can generate free web traffic quickly. Read more small business web marketing strategies.

1. Solve your readers’ problems. Write your web content from your readers’ perspective. They want to know “what’s in it for me?” If they are visiting your website, they have likely typed in a keyword in Google and are looking for an answer to a question or information related to their search. What do they want to know? By providing articles and information related to your prospects’ problems, you build your credibility as an authority on that subject matter. Providing valuable web content is the first step to “pre-selling” your services.
   
   
2. Share your expertise with readers. What are frequently asked questions beginners ask you? What do newbies want to know most? You probably already answer these questions whenever you talk with prospects. Write up your answers and provide them on your website.
   
   
3. Give dull research a new spin. If you keep up with your industry, you probably hear key numbers and statistics regularly. How can you make these numbers exciting to your readers? Don’t just report. Offer an opinion to jazz things up.
   
   
4. Ask readers for questions. If you aren’t sure what to write about, ask your readers “What is your biggest question or challenge regarding [your subject matter]?”
   
   
5. Use reprints or guest articles. With thousands of article directories on the web, you can easily grab great content to use on your website as long as you provide a link back to the author. Look at sites like ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. Or, create a form for guest authors to submit content to publish on your website.
   
   
6. Use comments as seeds for new discussion. If you have a blog, visitors may post comments regularly. Read through those comments, choose the most interesting, and write a brand new article or post about it.

By focusing on your readers comments, problems and questions, you can quickly generate a stream of web content ideas for your small business website.

Author: Hurol Inan
Publisher: Longman
Year Published: 2002
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you’ve been looking for a thorough guide to website metrics, this book is it. The book is written for anyone who wants to tackle the question of ‘is my website really working?’ – from newbies unfamiliar with metrics to experienced marketers looking to measure results.

Often, people judge the success of their website by number of page views or unique visitors. Author Hurol Inan, formerly of Anderson Consulting and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, shows that these metrics are only scratching the surface and gives readers a framework for more effective measurement.

The book is broken into a number of key sections: developing a framework for measuring success, engaging customers, explaining dropouts, collecting and analyzing data, choosing the tools and vendors to use, and making sense from the results.

Fundamentally, marketers need to start with four key questions:
- How do customers arrive at your site?
- Which customers use your site?
- How do they interact with your site?

- What is the result? Do they leave happy?

Notice all questions revolve around your customers, not your company. The best metrics frameworks start with your customers – Who are they? What do they want? And how do they search for that information?

A website must reach its target audience if it is to fulfill its purpose, and this leads to a common process. All customers or potential customers go through the same stages as they engage with a website, from (i) initial attraction and recognition that the website meets their needs; to (ii) the transaction process (whether it be buying a product or exchanging information in return for a service); and, ideally, (iii) repeat transactions. Audience engagement therefore provides the common framework for measuring the success of websites.

Looking at it from the business perspective, the company works to:

1. Reach: Reach a target audience
2. Acquire: Drive their target audience to their website
3. Convert: Convert browsers into buyers (or subscriber to your newsletter or to download a guide)

4. Retain: Get people coming back

However, at each stage of the process, people drop out of the process. These dropouts can occur at each of the stages listed above:

1. Leakage: the number of window shoppers that visit your site but don’t buy (acquire stage)
2. Abandonment: Those that start to fill out your form or add products to their shopping cart but don’t complete the transaction (convert stage)
3. Attrition: former customers that no longer buy from you (retain stage)

The rest of the book deals with metrics companies can put into place to measure the dropouts at each of these stages, and some of the hot issues that come into play, such as customer privacy concerns and the costs of storing and maintaining large amounts of data.

As Inan explains his metrics framework, he uses fictitious case studies to demonstrate the principles in a mostly real world environment. The cases are somewhat generic but work well to illustrate how companies can apply and get better results from analytics.

Overall, Inan provides a logical framework for measuring your website’s success in an easy to understand format and without technical jargon. Inan does a great job of focusing on the subject matter rather than pitching his own services. My minor criticism is that at times, his presentation is a bit dry and “textbook”-like, but this is still one of the best books on the subject out there.

I’m going to assume it’s been a few hours since you purchased and set up your domain name, as it can take 24-48 hours for everything to work properly – though the process called “domain name propagation” (defined below) has become a lot faster recently. If it hasn’t been that long, give it a few hours. Otherwise, read on…

A Quick Overview of Domain Names and Web Hosts

Your domain names and your web hosts operate independently. Your domain name is an easy to recognize word or phrase like “morningstarmultimedia.com” and your web host is the computer where all the files that make up your website sit. This computer is connected to the internet and has a series of numbers called an IP address that identify it from all the other computers out there that connect to the internet. An IP address is a lot like your street address – it’s (more or less) unique to you so the mailman can deliver your mail and friends can come to visit without knocking on all your neighbors’ doors.

Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Website

In order for your domain name to point to your website, you usually have to do two steps:

1. You must tell your domain name what the IP address of your web host is. Web hosts make this pretty easy by giving you “DNS Server” information. You then log into your domain name registrar (the website where you registered your domain) and change the domain’s current DNS information to the DNS information your web host provided you. The process of changing DNS Servers to point from one computer to another is called “domain name propagation” and can take upwards of 48 hours – though it usually only takes a couple of hours.
2. You must tell your web host about your domain name. I mentioned that an IP address is a lot like a street address, but your web host generally hosts more websites than just yours – so think of it more like an apartment building than a house. You’ll usually have to add your domain name to your web hosting account (or inform technical support) so they can tell their servers that your domain name should point to your account rather than any of the thousands of others they probably host.

Many web hosts automate #2 so you can log into your account and add your new domain name. The catch is that they don’t know what domain names you’ve registered, so you can add a domain name even if you didn’t purchase that specific one (I’ve had a few clients who made a typo or forgot a hyphen, so, for instance, they told the web host they registered “mydomain.com” when really, they registered “my-domain.com”.)

Verifying Domain Name Ownership

Of course, if you didn’t actually purchase your domain name, you can’t tell it to point to your web host and you won’t see the site you’ve created – in other words, step 2 is dependent on step 1 to work.

If you want to double-check whether you really do own the domain name you’ve told your web host you own, you can do a whois search at virtually any domain name registrar, for instance Register.com’s Whois Search. This should tell you who the registrant is, when they purchased the domain, when it expires, their contact information and which DNS Servers the domain name points to. (Some people do purchase “private registration” so their personal information is kept private.)

After browsing through the StopBadware site, I determined I must have some malicious code somewhere on my website… Sure enough, at the very bottom was a strange block of code pointing to some foreign site.

This type of hack is more common than you think, so if this happens to you, here’s what to do:

1. Remove all traces of the bad code. If you aren’t tech savvy, find someone who is – a tech guy, your web host, someone from Elance.com – and get them to pour through your code.
   
   
2. Change your passwords. I admit, the password I was using for that account was pretty weak, so I guess it was pretty easy for a hacker to figure out with the right software. Make sure your passwords contain letters and numbers – and if you want to be extra random, try PCTools’ Random Password Generator.
   
   
3. Check Google Webmaster Tools for warnings. Google has lots of helpful tools for Webmasters under their Webmaster Tools section. If you registered your site previously (which you should!), Google might provide you with the following warning:
   
   
   
4. Request a review. Once you are sure all the malware code has been removed, click the “request a review” link to notify Google you’ve taken care of the problem.

If all goes well, your site should be re-included in the normal Google search results within a few days.