Olark.com Live Chat
April 1, 2010 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under E-Commerce
Customers are demanding more and more from their online shopping experience. And more and more typically brick-and-mortat customers are looking to have a similar experience in an online environment. Hence the increasing demand by online window-shoppers to be able to talk to someone now. The demand for immediate gratification is not just when purchasing, but also now when looking for information about maybe, possibly purchasing.
The solution. Live Chat. Rather than wasting hours a day on the phone with customer after customer or potentially losing the sale by having a delay in email response, you can use Live Chat to quickly and efficiently balance multiple customer questions and seeemingly be giving one-on-one support. Many shopping carts now offer Live Chat as a free addition to their paid hosting plans, but if your cart doesn’t or you’re looking for something with a few more bells and whistles, Olark.com is your answer.
Olark.com is a live chat software program that easily integrates into any html or php-base site. They have a Free Plan that lets you chat with up to 20 customers per month to help you get comfortable with the software. This isn’t a free tiral people, its endlessly free as long as you don’t have more than 20 people try to chat with you in a month. As the popularity of your online chat grows, you can upgrade to their monthly pay plans ranging from $9 to $69, based on how many operators you want on your side. And all these plans come with a 14-day free trial as well.
If you have a team that’s constantly on the go, Olark will let you integrate their live chat with your iPhone, Blackberry and any current chat platform you and your team uses. That’s right. You’re on iChat all day taliking to your fantasy football buddies, and you can be answering customer questions without overcrowding your screen with multiple chat applications. Or if you’re salesman is out in the field, he can answer live chat questions from your site on his Blackberry in between sales calls.
All in all, your company needs to stay ahead of the competition and needs to cater to the whims of customers with questions. In this economy you can’t afford not to grab your potential leads and turn them into customers. Olark.com also has a shopping cart abandonment feature for an extra $30 per month that has a live chat window pop up when your customer is about to abandon his or her shopping cart. In this economy it never hurts to be extra helpful and offer customers lots of opportunities to realize you’re a real person, not just a faceless internet page.
Trouble finding your site?! Free tools so you know where your site stands
December 20, 2008 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under Busi-Tips, Free, New to SEO, News, Other Resources
Figuring out where your site stands and when you’re making progress.
Progress can only be measured if you have a starting point, an ending point and a form of measure. Businesses for centuries have been desperately trying to find ways to measure whether or not they are succeeding. Business classes are rampant with equations to tell you how your overhead compares to your gross sales and how your profit margin compares with your inventory, etc. But the fact that your business is on the Web gives you a huge advantage to a brick-and-mortar shop. Web businesses, more than any other type of business, already measures immense amounts of data without you having to lift a finger. Your problem now becomes choosing which data to ignore which will help you best gauge where your site stands in the turbulent sea of websites out there.
Tool #1: Google PR.
As of April 2008, Google is the primary search tool in over 60% of U.S. households according to Nielsen Ratings. Because of this, most websites choose to optimize their site to attract Google’s attention, and increase their rankings when potential customers enter a certain search term.
Google is constantly changing their search algorithm to combat against spammers and “black hat” tactics, but their focus never changes. Google wants sites with lots of original content with lots of visitors to rank higher than others. Basically, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide every search with valuable relevant information or products on every search. We still have a ways to go, but Google has gotten the closest out of any search engine. That’s why they rule the search engine market. But how do you know how Google feels about your site?
Page Rank. Google actually ranks every single page on the web (every page the Googlebots have found) and ranks them on a scale of 1 to 10. This information is entirely public and free to access. It’s called the Google Toolbar. I would recommend Googling “Google Toolbar” since there’s a different one for every web browser. For example, this link will take you to the Google Toolbar download for Firefox. When you download the toolbar it installs as a line of customizable tools in your browser. After installing the bar it will ask you if you are willing to send data to Google and enable PageRank.
I visited CNN.com. Notice the PageRank icon on my Google Toolbar has almost the entire bar filled with green.
CNN has really high PR
And when I mouse-over the PageRank icon on my Google Toolbar, I find out Google awards CNN.com a 9 out 10 page rank.
The importance of this site is a 9/10
Check out some of your competitor’s sites and see where they stand. When your site first hits the web it will rank as a 0/10. As you gain visitors and links to your site, your PR will go up and so will your position in the Google’s results.
Tool #2: Alexa Rankings
Alexa is a site that tracks all visitors to all web sites, and then nicely reports its findings on its site. The data is broken down by website or webpage and globally, by country, or by category. For example, at this moment, the number one site for kids and teens is Wikipedia. Alexa also will compare 3 sites for you by reach, rank and pageviews. Search by site name and find out exactly how popular your site is. Right now, Yahoo is the number one site globally and Google is second! Maybe Yahoo will gain back some search engine market share. =) Just for kicks, download a list of the top 1 million sites.
Alexa also offers a toolbar for you to easily see where your site is on its massive list of sites. And if you are looking to sell your site in the future, Alexa rankings can be a powerful tool in negotiations. At the very least, you can watch your site climb the Alexa ladder of top sites on the web. Just type in your site’s name into their search bar and find out exactly where you stand, even if it’s 9,435,064. Be aware, though, that brand new sites will take a little while before being catalogued by Alexa. Googlebots will find your site way before Alexa does. In the meantime, though, check out your competition and other sites in your industry that have been around for a while and see where they stand.
Tool #3: Your Site Statistics
Every hosting account provides you with an overabundant amount of information on your visitor like:
- Where they came from to your site
- What browser they’re using
- What country they’re in
- How many visitors you had each hour
- What search terms they typed in to find you
- What bots have decided to stop by
This can be WAY more information than you need. But it’s not a bad idea to jot down how many daily visitors you have on average, or weekly visitors before you try some marketing strategies to see which have the greatest impact. The rest of the information, like how visitors are finding you, will be crucial to your marketing plan, but this article is really just focused on finding ways to gauge if your site is getting more popular or getting lost in the muck.
Tool #4: Google Analytics
Essentially Google Analytics offers you the same information you would find on your site statistics but with a more pleasing interface and convenient access to Google’s many other useful marketing tools (like Google’s AdWords program where you can purchase sponsored ads on Google searches). Google Analytics will monitor your visitors and where they click and when. Their reporting and data analysis is probably much more in-depth than what your host will provide you with.
Because most webmasters are trying to impress Google, seeing how Google views your site can be incredibly eye-opening. Google Analytics, in fact, evolves to cater to Google’s own priorities and reports to you when your site lacks information Google thinks is important in legitimate sites. You can take the Google Analytics video tour for more info.
All these tools are free and will give you a great place to figure out where your site stands now and to measure how your visitors react to various marketing plans you develop. These are the same tools that the top internet businesses are using to gauge their own success and these are the same tools some expensive consultant will use to tell you where your site stands. Just remember to stay consistent with your measuring. Check your placement often but not obsessively and especially before and after any major changes. Best of luck!
