Arachne's Sister

Once you have a website up you might want to consider accepting payments for your products and services online. These days there are tons of options for accepting credit cards for your business, and selecting the right option can be a challenge. These are the most important things to consider when making your selection.

What Are You Selling?

The first thing to consider is what exactly you are planning to sell. Are you primarily interested in accepting payments from clients you work with one-on-one? Are you setting up a group coaching program, or having an event you want to sell tickets to? Are you planning on selling a self-published book, or a physical product? Is it an information product, like a collection of videos, audio recordings, or an eBook? Are you establishing a membership or some other type of regular subscription? Knowing what sort of payment processing you need up-front will help you make the right choice. Also, don’t just think about your current plan, but what you plan to sell later as well. You might be able to find a payment solution which will cover most of your current – and future – needs.

The basic types of sales you might be making and want to think about include:

• One-time payment (“Buy Now” button)
• Multiple items at a time (Shopping Cart)
• Automatic billing on a regular basis (Subscription)
• One-off requests for payment (Invoice)

How Are You Going to Deliver?

Distribution is an important factor in your online payment processing strategy. If you are shipping a physical product, this is especially important. Assuming that you are using a fulfillment house for your product, you need to make sure your payment system has a way to alert your fulfillment house of the new order and share the customer information that they need in order to ship out the products. If you are providing an electronic product, your payment system needs to handle the distribution automatically. The simplest way is to either use a system designed for secure product downloads, or to have it hooked-up to an autoresponder which will email the purchaser a download link. If you are delivering a service, you just need to have yourself notified of the payment, then you can begin whatever your standard process is to fulfill the service.

Certain payment services exist to handle specific types of product/service needs. For instance, event ticketing, membership websites, and self-published “print on demand” books. Whether you should use a specialized service depends on things like their fees, the volume of sales you expect to make, the complexity of using a more general solution, etc. The advantage of these specialty services is that they often include helpful tools and advanced features. Explore all the fees and features before making a decision.

What Is Your Expected Sales Volume?

How many sales you expect to make will also be a factor in your decision. Some payment processors will give you better rates for higher-volume, whereas others will cap the amount of money you can take in each month before they start investigating your business for fraudulent activity and possibly putting a hold on your account.

Depending on your products and distribution plan, volume might be a major deciding factor in whether a specialty processor is worth the extra fees. For example, if you plan to offer many events with high attendance at each, using a dedicated system for event ticket sales might make a lot of sense, because the extra management capabilities will save you so much time and headaches, whereas if you are just having a single local talk at which you expect to get 25 attendees, a simpler system will likely be just fine.

Similarly, offering a couple eBooks for sale versus a full line of 50+ products will make a difference in the type of Shopping Cart you will want.

What is Your Larger Marketing Plan?

If you have a larger marketing strategy around your online sales, it might require a more sophisticated setup. For instance, if you plan to have affiliates help sell your products, your shopping cart needs to keep track of them. If you are using a multi-step sales process, you will need to have a system that can handle simple free opt-ins in addition to paid sales. You will need a way to contact your buyers after the fact, and for high-volume sales, your shopping cart can manage your customer list as well as email marketing and autoresponders. If you plan to deliver your product via a membership website, you need to have a payment solution which integrates with your membership site software. Talk to your technology providers for help selecting the right solution based on your more complex needs.

Web Action Steps

• Make a list of all the products and services you plan to sell, along with what you need for the distribution of each.
• Sign up for a free Business PayPal account to use for simple online sales.
• Ask your fulfillment house or print-on-demand provider for recommendations about which payment systems work best with their fulfillment process.
• Estimate the number of sales per month and the total sales in dollars per month for the things you wish to sell. Make sure these numbers will work with the payment system you choose.
• Check out the Whole Web Impact Recommended Resources page for payment processors and shopping carts.

Accepting payments online is a great way to get paid faster, and expand your business. Consider your business needs when choosing a payment processor. If you need customized help deciding how to set up your products or services for online sales, consider a Website Analysis & Strategy Session with me.

When you are running your own business, it’s important to do whatever you can to make your business appear professional. Especially when you are starting out, you don’t have years of business history or hundreds of glowing testimonials to act as strong credibility boosters. This is where consistent branding comes in.

One simple thing – having consistent, attractive branding – will boost your credibility even if you just opened shop a month ago.

Why?

Because it sends a message.

The message it sends is “I care about my business. This is a serious operation. I have invested for the long-term and details are important to me.”

This is powerful. It works on a sub-conscious level more than anything, but what it does is reassures your prospects that your business is important and professional. This translates to suggesting high quality in everything you do – including providing services and products to your customers.

So, What Do You Need?

The first step is a company identity. This would be a company name and a logo. I recommend having a professional design your logo unless you are artistically talented. You don’t necessarily need to spend thousands on a branding expert, unless you want to at this stage. Just spending some time thinking about who you serve and what feeling you want to convey to them will be a great basis for your logo design.

Another thing you will need is an excellent professional headshot. Not only will you likely use this in your website, but also on your social media profiles and in PR materials. Having a great headshot or two will give you so much more confidence to reach out to organizations for speaking and publishing opportunities.

Of course, you need a great looking website. If at first you can’t afford a full website with professional custom design, use clean templates and perhaps just brand with a banner which includes your logo. Make sure the design coordinates with your logo colors!

Make everything consistent. Use your logo and “company colors” on everything you produce – stationery, business cards, sales pages, blog, website, videos, brochures, etc. Even more than the “fanciness” of your branding, consistent application will convey professionalism.

Web Action Steps

• If you don’t have a logo, get one designed. Lean toward a simpler design, especially if you feel you still need to define your target market or positioning better.
• Once you have your logo, select 3-5 colors from the logo design to act as your “company colors” use these whenever designing communications for your business.
• Have professional photographs taken. Get a few different shots – full length, 3-quarter length, headshot, and facing both right and left. Keep the background as simple as possible.
• Purchase your domain name and get at least a basic web page up with your logo, some info about your business, and your contact info.
• Order business cards that include your logo, and possibly your headshot. Don’t forget to put your website on them also!
• As you start adding to your online and offline marketing materials, keep your graphics and colors consistent. Everything doesn’t need to be identical, but it should “go together” if set side-by-side.

Consistent, attractive branding will improve your professional image fast. If you need help getting your business online fast, check out my Online Quick Start Package.

A great article about formatting your website text for easiest reading and maximum effectiveness. In Summary:

• Sans-serif fonts work the best for online reading
• Using a larger font size is not the best strategy
• Try to limit larger fonts to headings/subheadings
• Different colors should be used with care, contrast is best
• Shorter paragraphs are better than long ones, due to the way people scan text when reading online
• Shorter pages are also easier on readers, with links to different pages for more in-depth information

Read the whole article here: SiteProNews: Consider Font and Page Size When Writing for the Web

When creating or redoing your website, though your website’s graphic design might be the thing you are focused on and excited about, you should definitely spend some time considering how you structure the true work-horse of your site: the content.

Clients often ask me about how long their content should be. The truth is, it should be as long as you can reasonably make it – but it needs to be presented in a way that is not overwhelming to the visitor and puts the essential information first.

Visitors (aka potential customers) will all have different needs and desires when it comes to the information on your site. Some people want to get the facts quickly and make their decision without spending a lot of time reading and researching. Others might want to have more information so that they can feel comfortable that they are making the right decision to hire you or buy from you. You want to make sure that you are offering both types of visitor the content they each want.

The best way to accomplish this is to organize your site clearly, offer paths for visitors to follow, and write like a journalist.

Organize Your Site Clearly

By having your content well organized and labeled, it should be easy for visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. By following common website conventions and keeping your site organization pretty simple, your visitors will move around your site with ease. As tempting as it might be to get “cutesy” with your section names, please avoid this sort of obscurity. There are better ways to get across your “theme” or personality.

The basic sections you should have for your site are ones that most of your visitors will be expecting to see: About, Contact, Products/Services, possibly a FAQ (frequently asked questions page). Your business might have a structure which lends itself to some other organization of pages, which is fine, but make sure you stay reasonably consistent and don’t mix up your navigation taxonomies too much.

Offer Paths for Visitors to Follow

You might want to offer some specific paths for visitors to follow through your site, based on their demographic (if you serve more that one target market) or their main problem, issue, or interest.

If you choose to go this route you should present only a few options (no more than 4) and the choice for the visitor should be obvious. (This is not where you want to stump your potential customers!)

This “path” might be going to only one page which is directly written to the option chosen, or to a short series of pages which makes a sort of “presentation” to the visitor. The key is to keep it simple.

Also, if you are using this technique, use it only as a supplementary navigation – be sure your main navigation menu is always visible.

Write Like A Journalist

Journalistic writing for newspapers is organized like a pyramid, with the shortest possible description of “just-the-facts” at the front of the article, and then more and more details added as the article gets longer. This is done so that a reader could look at just the first paragraph or two to get the news, and continue reading for more details only if it is of interest.

You should think about your website content like this as well. Wherever possible, put the important facts up front, and link to more detailed pages “for more information….” This could mean that your “services” page has only a brief summary of each service, with links to other pages focused entirely on giving more information about each offering individually.

This will allow “skimmers” to find what they are interested in quickly, while also providing the backup materials that “researchers” will enjoy.

Web Action Steps

For a new website or redesign:

• Plan your new website structure according to the tips above.
• As much as possible, break content down into topic-focused nuggets which you can link together at higher levels of the site structure with “summary” pages
• Make your detailed content pages longer, broken into easy-to-skim paragraphs with clear sub-heads and the most essential facts at the top of the page

Tweaking your current site:

• Is your site structure clear and easy to understand? Do the names of items in your main navigation menu make their content obvious?
• Which pages can you add more information to?
• Which pages could you break up into separate pages and provide instead a “summary” page with links?

Good content that is easy to navigate will really help your visitors to get to know you and feel comfortable buying from you. If you are considering a new site or a redesign and would like to make sure your new website follows best-practices and is easy to update with new content, consider a custom website from Whole Web Impact.