Twitter could kill your business – take care..!

Twitter could kill your business if you fall victim to the condition Enterotwittus. This is a “gut feeling” present in many business owners that spending hours each day using Twitter will actually help their business. Whilst it might help their business, taking time away from work it could actually lead …

Read More

Fear is a powerful motivator preventing online shopping

With all the hullaballoo after Christmas telling us that online shopping was a huge success bringing in hundreds of millions, it hasn’t taken long for a dose of reality to hit us firmly between the eyes. A new survey by the electronic payments company, Cybersource, suggests that two thirds of …

Read More

How many search engines do you use?

People often don’t do what we think they do. Take search, for example. Just go into your local street and ask how people search for things on the Internet. There’s a fair chance you’d come back with some stats that showed most people use Google. The result is we think …

Read More

emailsystem

Email is crucial to company income

Email is such a fundamental part of business that any failure in the system would cause a loss of income for one in every five companies. That’s one of the stark findings of a new survey from Neverfail. In a study of over 200 companies, the business continuity firm found …

Read More

workshopbook

Online seminars will make you more money than ebooks

People love buying things – or so we are led to believe. Current psychological thinking suggests that as we spend ever more isolated lives, going shopping plugs an emotional gap in our lives. Depression is known to lead to increased spending, for instance. Shopping and buying things helps us so …

Read More

Google makes a huge assumption – which could be wrong

  Eye tracking studies show a fairly constant pattern of where we look on a web page. Essentially, most of our attention is focused top left. Then we scan to the right and then zig-zag back and forth to roughly half-way down the screen before we give up. It’s almost …

Read More

coloureye

Manipulate your audience brains with web site colours

People are affected by colour. For instance, traffic lights tell us to “stop” with red; we associate the colour red with danger (unless you have red-green colour blindness of course). Similarly, we associate green with positive things, action, “go”. Other colours also tell us things; on the Internet blue signals …

Read More

Internet retailers fail to learn

Online retailers have failed to listen to their customers. The latest research on Internet retailers shows that they have changed almost nothing on their web sites – even though they were told a year ago what consumers wanted. For instance, customers want 0800 or toll-free numbers on the web site. …

Read More

User generated content set to take on huge importance

We already know that many Internet users contribute content to the web. Take YouTube, for instance, which reportedly has around 15 hours of video uploaded to it every minute…! Not all of that video is professionally produced, business material. Most is what we’d call “user generated content”. Already, just over …

Read More

So we need an editorial process on the Internet after all..!

My phone rang yesterday with a client curious about how the world knew about the Hudson River air crash before any news channels were carrying the story. Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, blogs – they all played their part. But for the traditional news media they simply couldn’t run the story …

Read More

How do you relate to your own web site?

Business owners have a variety of ways in which they relate to their company’s web site. And not all of these relationships are good. Rather like a child, a web site is your offspring and it continues to develop. Anyone who believes you set up a web site and then …

Read More

Larger numbers mean you will sell more

Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered that we just love big numbers. In fact, the bigger the better it seems. The study has important implications for anyone in business – particularly online where people are looking for the prices of your products and services rather keenly. Here’s what the …

Read More

New President, New Era, New Internet

President Obama was responsible yesterday for a significant slow down in much of the Internet. During his inauguration more people than ever before decided to watch the speech online, rather than on TV. More people than ever before posted status updates on Facebook, saying they were watching the speech. And …

Read More