How to improve your small business website with “Quick Wins”

The Search Engine Shop

There are so many ways you can improve your website and online marketing to drive better results. From simple things like making sure your Google Maps listing is in order, to leveraging high quality photos of your people, your products and your business on your website.

I recently jumped on the phone with Ed and we recorded a new Business Marketing Show podcast episode that was all about website “Quick Wins” – those small changes you can make to your site and can make a huge different in terms of results.

The episode goes for about 30 minutes and if you’re looking to improve your website in any way at all or looking for new marketing ideas its definitely one to listen to.

To listen: Click play on the Youtube audio above, click here download the MP3, subscribe directly on iTunes

Links and notes from the show:

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker 1:                 You’re listening to the Business Marketing Show, Episode One. You can find us at businessmarketingshow.com.

Brendan Tully:          Welcome to the Business Marketing show. I’m Brendan from the Search Engine Shop. Here is my co-host, Ed Keay-Smith. We’re here to talk to you about all things; online, business marketing, [building 00:00:40] robust, reliable, all terrain businesses while properly using the Internet.

Ed Keay-Smith:          We’re all set, Brendan.

Brendan Tully:          Thank you. Was that a good intro?

Ed Keay-Smith:          That was a very good intro. Hi, everyone, Ed Keay-Smith from OnlineImpact.com. Yes, we’re here to impart some hopefully useful information to anyone that has a web presence or is looking in having a web presence that requires help in building their website correctly, getting traffic to that website, monetizing it and avoiding some of the pitfalls that a lot of people fall into when they get online and start building a website.

Brendan Tully:          We’re ready to drop some knowledge bombs. That’s in … Knowledge bombs.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Knowledge bombs, we’ll have to trademark that name, Brendan.

Brendan Tully:          I did.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. Welcome. Thanks for listening. This is the Episode Number One of the Business Marketing Show, which Brendan said before.

Brendan Tully:          For the Friday morning, so …

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. Brendan and I are recording this via Skype. Hopefully, we won’t have any technically issues, but if there are, we’ll fix them up. Won’t we, Brendan?

Brendan Tully:          Sure. That’s your job, right. Ed, you fix that, we edit that out?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. We can edit that out.

Brendan Tully:          You’re the podcasting guy normally.

Ed Keay-Smith:          That’s it. Exactly.

Brendan Tully:          I’ll rely on your expertise.

Ed Keay-Smith:          First of the back, the whole website building business has changed a lot over the years. These are very strong focus currently to people, who are building e-commerce websites, which will cover in-depth that will be one of the main focuses of this podcast. Brendan has quite a lot of experience in the whole e-commerce game. What we thought we’d do is just give you a little bit of a brief background about who Brendan is, who Ed is, who are these chums that are talking to you, what did they know, what right did I have to sit here and talk this stuff to you. We’ll give you a synopsis on who we are, what we do, what we’ve been doing, and let you decide whether we should be talking to you or not. On that note, I’ll hand it over to Brendan.

Brendan Tully:          Ed, tell me about your business. What’s your business name and what do you do?

Ed Keay-Smith:          That was very good, Brendan. You rocked back at me, [hand over it 00:03:01] back straight at me. Our business is called Online Impact. We’ve been around now for about 10 years. We used to be called Edwards Marketing initially, but we changed name in recent years to have a broader spectrum. We got started. We were one of the first companies in Australia to manage and consult with clients for their Google Edwards campaigns. It was back in 2003, so 11 years ago now.

We also work in the web development game. We have a team of 12 people that do web design and also working in conjunction with Brendan. We also do SEO. Our main focus is web development traffic. Also, Brendan and I co-host a lot of different workshops in the Perth area that we’ve been doing for a few years, yeah, we just help people improve their web presence and traffic and conversions.

Brendan Tully:          Dominate online.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Over the year … Domination, that’s it.

Brendan Tully:          Domination, online domination. My background is in IT. I started my first business when I was 18, 1998, so must have been 18. I started an IT company and ran that for eight years. While running that IT Company, we came across an online store. My business partner at that time when we took that over, we built that to mid-six-figure. At the time, we built that using SEO. I didn’t know what SEO was at the time, but I do change things on the website. We ranked higher in Google and social media.

We run that for a few years, and then in 2008, started a consulting business I have now. The business I run now is the Search Engine Shop or the searchengineshop.com. We work with three types of clients. We work with small businesses or local businesses, typically businesses that has a physical presence that people go to or they visit, like, retail stores and the accommodation businesses, things like that. We work with e-commerce businesses, so mid-six-figure and seven-figure business owners, I do consulting, we do some services for them.

Then we do some work with corporate marketing departments as well. Similar to you, and we do some SEO stuff. SEO is a lead service of getting more traffic and then we also do quite a bit of technical IT stuffs too, although, I don’t really like to promote that. I don’t like being the IT guy anymore.

Ed Keay-Smith:          We then have to edit that out.

Brendan Tully:          No, you can leave that in.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Oh, leave that in.

Brendan Tully:          I’ll refer to it as all sorts of things, my web guy and my IT guy; that guy who does the web site stuff, like, we live with traffic, but we’re lucky [bit of 00:05:48] a one stop shop. We do web price, web development, we do IT and stuff, we do some ad word stuff, but it’s at the low-end.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. We’ve got you covered. Between the two of us, we have a pretty broad spread of technology and experience in the web side of things.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. Maybe you’re in like 2009-2010 when we started doing it.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, end of 2009, beginning 2010. Around there we started running workshops through [false 00:06:22] industry and the federal government. We were sponsored by them with several other people who some of will end up on this podcast in different areas of specialty like photography and graphic design and business strategies and things like that, and pay offs.

We’ll cover those areas as we’ll have some guests on the show other than Brendan and I, but the … I think the thing we want to impart is there’s a lot of people now who are a bit lost, that don’t know what to do at all different levels. Whether you’re someone who’s in a corporate environment who has a website, it’s gotten to a certain level but you want to move it to that next level and ramp it up and just start dominating your marketplace. We can help you and that’s where we prefer to work. That sounds main area of our focus is those types of businesses. We’re happy to talk to different people and see if we can help you if it gets to that stage. You can always ask us a question. If we can help you, we can. We can always refer [if you want 00:07:27] someone else, we can.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. I see if we can deliver like one action point or thinking point per podcast, we’re doing pretty well around.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes, absolutely. Usually there will be more than that.

Brendan Tully:          One hard quality.

Ed Keay-Smith:          We can’t help ourselves, can we?

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. Maybe we can dribble on about this stuff all day long, all right.

Ed Keay-Smith:          We could. A couple of areas, a couple of what we like to call “quick wins,” things that can help people who listen to this podcast for the first time, that can go way in under half an hour or so which is typically the length of the podcast. We’ll give them some information on things I can go in action and actually start measuring the improvements that have been made from those actions.

Brendan Tully:          Instant action points, Ed?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Instant action. That’s it. What’s the first one, Mr. Brendan?

Brendan Tully:          We have four. Like, we’re talking about before the call, regardless of what you know, these thing you should be doing and they’re pretty easy to do and you can DIY them … Well, to a certain extent, you can DIY them. You don’t need a whole bunch of research time like us see a lot of people who get, they want to do a website rebuild and it takes them a year of researching and talking to people and everything else. These ones you can do today and get the ball rolling. That’s why we’re calling them “quick wins.”

We work with … As you know it, Ed, not for photography projects, we do the workshops with, I’m handling clients constantly about the crappy photos, the crappy images they have in their website, like you know the same guy that you see on every website. That guy is like 50 years like in the business suit with a little smirk in his face.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Silvery hair, glasses.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. We should get a photo and put it in the show. [Stock 00:09:09] photo is like dead, it’s ridiculous the number of time you see that go high on busses, on websites. Everybody is using online. It makes sense that if you have good quality photos of your people and team that you can really stand out. If someone is looking at your website, I could [inaudible 00:09:29] those website, all things being equal. If you have good photos of real people, and they have stock photos that look just so fake; you’re going to win. It’s this hands down like a no-brainer. You can use the photos for years. Matt took photos for me when we started the workshops in 2010. I’m still using those photos. I use them all the time.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Is that what you’re talking, you’ve aged.

Brendan Tully:          Honest, I’m … Still I’m young, come on.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Ages, all relevant. I agree. I think anything you can get away with using stock photos for is generic objects. Like a photo of a bull or a cow or a dog or something that people wouldn’t know that it was yours or a photo that you’ve taken or not. Yeah, definitely, I agree when it gets stand to very specific items like Matt does a lot of product photography. If you got specific products that you’re selling that are unique to you, things you’ve manufactured or whatever it is, then the photos need to be “A” class, because that’s what people are looking at.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. Photography is not something you can … You’re tied off about, like I say, some clients get photos taken of someone’s friend who has a SLR camera, and that’s great, but there’s a lot that goes into a good photo, like, it’s the composition of the photo, the lighting, how it’s framed and then also Matt totally transforms photos when he’s doing post-production stuff.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, excellent.

Brendan Tully:          It’s not super-expensive. It’s not bargain basement, [he debated 00:11:00] he has professional photos down, but you invest ones and you can use those photos. I think it’s a no-brainer.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Cool. That’s something in future podcast we’ll probably dig [dug 00:11:12] bit more into that how photography area we have met rate on from [few 00:11:14] project and we’ll go through some specific things with that. Again, it’s one of the important things to remember when you’re running a business is initially, yes, if you’re in a start-up phase, there is going to be a degree of bootstrapping when you’re trying to do something’s yourself, but eventually if you want to grow and you want to expand what you’re doing, you have to add source or employ other people to do these things. You can’t be good at everything. You’ll either be bad at everything or good at one thing, which is building a business, working on your business, not in getting other people to fill those gaps. Hire out things you’re bad at doing and get the people who are good at doing it to do them.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. I just want to add to that. I’d say in terms of photography, people photos, there are you can do 360 degree product shots, you can also do a Google Street View photos of inside of your business that link into Google Street View and Google Maps and also giving a little bit of a ranking boost as well. We’ll link to those in the show in our speaker’s day. Proofing photos and that whatever but there’s other ways this was new photo technologies, you can also use.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes, true. It’s a rapid changing world. There’s lot of tools now that can assist you with that stuff. Next was video, is that?

Brendan Tully:          Well, I have photography video as one part, I’d say …

Ed Keay-Smith:          As one? Yeah.

Brendan Tully:          Everyone talks about video but nobody talks about photography. I’d do photography before video. Video is definitely a game changer if it’s done well. I’d say some people, “Yes, you can use an iPhone to take video,” but again just like photos, there’s a lot that goes into a good video, more than a good photo. I don’t know what your opinion is, but I think video is still something that people are afraid to get in front of the camera. If you do it well, it’s definitely a game changer, but if you do it crap, it’s going to … What do you think?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Absolutely. I think the thing to remember with video is you don’t physically have to have someone. All the person in a video like we do, caught a lot of videos for clients now where we’re using the what would describe technique where these images and people talking, there’s not, there not be photos and kind of comes and having good quality photo that appears within this animated video.

It’s not necessarily a person or talking heads to sit in that do a video. We try and make them a little bit more interactive and descriptive and call to action then, something at the end or in the middle of the video that I can click to get them to do something. You can do videos in all sorts of different ways. I think if you’re going to do really poor quality videos, not do them at all. Shot on your iPhone; you know iPhone’s these days take pretty good video. It needs to be a combination. The video quality needs to be good, the lighting needs to be good, and the audio needs to be good. You need to be marked up properly, in all stuff. Do it properly or not do it at all. That’s we’re all but saying.

Brendan Tully:          I think we could do a whole episode in video, yeah. Maybe we should get Matt to come in and do photography inside. Then we can do a video and one with him after that.

Ed Keay-Smith:          It sounds good. They’re in the same baskets. Images and video can make or break a website in my opinion and obviously Brendan’s opinion.

Brendan Tully:          All right. Next one, SEO best practices; what do you think?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes.

Brendan Tully:          I’d say essential. I have here three points. I have one, is index ability. I would, technical jargon, the ability for search engines to find your website and actually display it in the search results.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. Absolutely. Some websites are blocked and the search engines just can’t find them or the robot tags which is a bit of code on this side, giving instructions to the search engines of what they can see or what they can’t see. Often they’re not setup correctly, so the search engines indexing the correct pages. Or quite often what I see happen a lot is people who build websites in WordPress, there’s a little select point inside or a little tab that you can select in the settings that completely hide the website from getting indexed from the search engines.

Often when a new WordPress website is built, people forget to take that off. I had a client whose website was running for seven months. We didn’t build the website; probably. That whoever did the site for them, who remain anonymous because not knowing anyway had left that checked. Their website was not indexed by Google for seven months. Yes, that’s a very good thing to be careful off.

Brendan Tully:          I think also how you often the search results is important, having titles and edit descriptions yes, which we can link to. I’ll link to an article in this show note for that. There is also a quick test you can do to return the search results, how people sees your website. Basically type into Google site colon your domainname.com and it will display all the search results or your business. When I’m talking to clients in the front like people call me at the SEO bus, I do that while I’m talking and that gives like that. Now I can see immediately whether there’s massive stoke for improvement or not. That’s a really quick test you can do as a business owner, to see how your website’s actually being showing to people in Google, also aside that you need to be number one for your business name.

Ed Keay-Smith:          That’s a given isn’t that?

Brendan Tully:          Because that, if someone refers your business to someone else, the first thing that person is going to do is go to Google and google you. If you don’t show up, you’d loss that referral in affect, which brings me to the next point. I have got three in this SEO best practices, is showing up on Google Places or Google Maps, whatever it is called today, Google Plus Local. Again if someone Google’s your business, if you’re like a retail business or a place where people go to, you need to be on Google Maps.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Definitely.

Brendan Tully:          Non-negotiable, right?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Non-negotiable, official.

Brendan Tully:          That leads me in the right spot, like people in Google Maps and the pin thing is totally their own place. Like I go to places all the time and I waste in the store, it’s like 500 Main is down the street but nowhere near where the pins is.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Very handy, very true.

Brendan Tully:          I’ve sent out a mail and you might have seen that last week. You can now so being places is now all Australia and a bunch of other countries that Bing, Microsoft search engine, you can now be on that, that’s previously you have to be in new pages in Australia which is a nightmare. Let’s not talking about yellow pages, but that’s where checking out a problem. We’ll put a link to that, right.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, absolutely. People just can’t Bing and I think that’s a bit of a mistake really because I got this small portion of the marketplace. When people bought windows computers that’s already preloaded with Internet Explorer which is already preloaded with Bing search engine stuff on it, there’s a lot of people that I got a client yesterday. He was looking at stuff and saying I can’t see, I’m not showing up and he was supposed to be looking on Google. He was looking on Bing and he couldn’t see what I was trying to get into look at. I’m again no you’re actually on Bing not on Google. There is a little bit of confusion sometimes with the two different search engines even though Google is so much bigger.

Brendan Tully:          People use the windows [inaudible 00:19:02] quite a few of those around. In Bing and Google and in the Google Maps. Get five reviews, at least five reviews because when you have five or more reviews you rank a little bit higher and you’ll stand out in the search results because you get stars next to your business name.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Correct and mundane.

Brendan Tully:          Cool. Okay. Last one is the SEO, which is not purely SEO, it’s what ecommerce business Google product listing ads.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes, definitely.

Brendan Tully:          I would say if you have an ecommerce business, you need to be running product listing ads which is a hybrid between SEO and ad works. I’m going to have to explain, the paid inclusion.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, it’s a paid inclusion. You’re showing up when someone does a search on a product or a particular especially if you’re selling something that’s commonly searched on or is a model number or that type of thing. You’re going to show up in the paid results with images. People are seeing a shopping image to load up rather than just text.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. I think it’s another, and the [inaudible 00:20:06] like for the clients we run product PLAs for. We see depending on the market and you usually $0.10 to $1 click whereas regular ad works $1 to $5 a click. It’s a lot cheaper as well.

Ed Keay-Smith:          You said product PLA. What we have to be very careful of Brendan because I do this all the time; we use acronyms a lot in the web marketing game. This and there’s so many and because we use in everyday we just ashamed that other people know they are. We can go edit that way to make sure we say what these acronyms are. You just said PLA, what does PLA mean?

Brendan Tully:          PLA, Product Listing Ads.

Ed Keay-Smith:          There you go. That’s the PLA.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Good job.

Brendan Tully:          Okay, now, the best that you have for SEO best practices, all sort of thing.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, fantastic. In the comment section of the blog, if you have any questions, you can always ask specific ones and move to our best to try and add some volume.

Brendan Tully:          Comment, okay. Next one. It has your website running at the moment.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Not my website at the moment, Brendan. He’s having instead of me because before we started recording this particular podcast, I was having issues with my website loading. It kicks extremely slowly and we are talking about different hosting options and I’m saying we probably going to move away from these guys. I won’t stay there. I’m not going to do that. Yes, web hosting and the speed that your website loads is important for several reasons.

The enjoyment of the visitor to the site, so they’re not sitting there waiting, because then they’re just going to click the back button and disappear. It also has an impact for your search engine rankings because Google does actually look at how fast your website is loading and incorporates that into its algorithm of where you’re placed. That’s my viewpoint on it. Maybe you have some complete different.

Brendan Tully:          After the broad one, the technology that works.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Okay.

Brendan Tully:          A website that loads fast, for sure, good quality web hosting. That is what we call that, that recommendation.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes, good quality. Lot of people go for cheap and nasty and you know what cheap and nasty results.

Brendan Tully:          I think cheap is fine if you’re starting out but yeah like for me, like my … so when I look at website speed, I think the website needs to load in under five seconds and optimal is one to two seconds. That’s fantastic if it loads one to two seconds, it needs to be under five seconds. If it’s just over five seconds, whatever but what we’re talking 10 to 20 seconds, something is wrong like the server has a problem, the hosting plan isn’t big enough or high enough or there might be a code issue with the website as well or you’ve got like a massive image.

Then if it’s under five seconds, that’s okay. I was talking to my friend Rob Hanley last week. I mean, so I recommend WP Engine for WordPress hosting. It is like this I was telling before the show; it’s magic. My friend Rob had to start. As an old sod, he hasn’t touched in a few years, 15 to 20 second load time. Telling at least a couple of people away, given WP Engine, it’s on WP Engine now and he has like one second load time, two second load time just by moving the slide across.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. It’s an easy win. You know itself is the site, if you’re half interested in something that’s like taking too long to load, you’d just close the window.

Brendan Tully:          Yes. I was closing the window on my own website.

Brendan Tully:          Yes, for sure.

Ed Keay-Smith:          That’s not good. I haven’t had that issue in the past. I’ve had it occasionally where things would be a little slow but this is obviously an issue this we’re I’m prone to so ask, that both on this podcast because it’s probably or out. I think I’ll be moving across the WP Engine side.

Brendan Tully:          I just want to point out as well. So WP Engine is great if you happen to do it yourself. You know nothing about hosting, you better using your web guy online marketing guide because that will manage the hosting. You still need to be aware that it needs to be fast. We sell hosting to our clients. That’s a managed hosting service.

On top of the hosting, we have support, which fix it if it’s broken and we have a few other things. We have backup on top of that as well. If you got to DIY, I think WP Engine’s great. If you just want to set it again, you better having someone local or somebody having relationship with the managing the hosting as which.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. Very good point. Ultimately all web posting is not created an equal. A lot of people just think it’s a standard thing and they need to pay $5 a month for and why would they want to pay $30 a month for it, very often, two very different systems and two different services soon.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah, for sure.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Do your research.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. I use tools.pingdom.com as my quick speed test. If it loads on the five seconds on there, then we’re doing pretty well.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Two minutes and 65 seconds is not good then?

Brendan Tully:          It’s probably not optimal.

Ed Keay-Smith:          I’m suffering from the mechanic with the car that’s blowing smoke at the moment. I’ve got to get on to that.

Brendan Tully:          The other point I have here in technology that works in a host in your works. I mean the two big ones, fast website hosting and the website backup essential and when we’d get into that. Mostly we’ll have like a lot of mine, I ran into nice people. A lot of clients that come to me, that email hosting is rubbish. The email is down for like, that now it sounds like I get sorry my email was down. I lost emails and I can’t believe that, today’s world, its 2014 now. That is still the same problems with email hosting; it’s ridiculous.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. Good quality and any recommendations in what you use?

Brendan Tully:          I only use and recommend Google Apps. I don’t know about what yours is but that would be my recommendation.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Same deal.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah. Microsoft have there is Google Apps is Google’s cloud hosted email products. It used to actually be free for up to 10 user accounts, and then you have to pay for it. It’s only $5 a mailbox per month. It’s nothing really compared to the days 10 years ago, I don’t remember, we had a big email server, thousands of dollars for the server, thousands of dollars for the software. Then we had dozens of dollars of equipment to back it up. Now you’re paying $5 per; paying $5 per month is ridiculous.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, much more reliable too.

Brendan Tully:          Sure. Microsoft has similar products. If you’re like more traditional business and you’re heavy Outlook uses and you share calendars and all that stuff; then Microsoft solution might be a better one, I think it’s called Office 365.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, Office 365. Cool. Again these things will go into more detail over the coming podcasts.

Brendan Tully:          I think if your email hosting works, your website hosting works and is fast 80, 20, with those technologies that works.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. Dead true, indeed. All right, well.

Brendan Tully:          I got one more point.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Go for it.

Brendan Tully:          This one I could rant about that a little bit. I see a lot of stuff online where in the online marketing space and people talking about things like conversion optimization and percentages of whatever improvements and change this color and move this around. Good and well. I’m still having conversations with clients about actually being able to accept orders or bookings or payments or conversions through their website.

I still can’t believe its 2014 and I’m having almost arguments with customers that they should have a ‘Buy Now’ button and a credit card form on their websites, so people can buy off them 24/7. What do you think?

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. That is a absolute no-brainer, has to be done, it’s not even like if you’re not doing that and you’re selling a product or service where you can’t take orders for online and you don’t have that in place. You just leaving massive amounts of money on the table and your competitors are picking it up. Yeah, that has a button, don’t have a shopping cart, and don’t have whatever a payment system. Just yeah, you’re losing money, hand out a fist.

Brendan Tully:          I mean, the bit like I said the big helper is like we’re saying we call, I worked with quite a few looks like small accommodation providers that might have 10 rooms or a five building or whatever it is. Then I have a ‘Book Now’ button online. That’s crazy like everyone is conditioned to book flats and accommodation everything online. If you have an accommodation website, you are actually losing money but not having that ‘Book Now’ button on the website. People have some fears of that, I think taking credit cards online as well which they’re probably not justified. Some people think it costs a lot of money.

It doesn’t, you can use PayPal to take. Let me what I know if you have a PayPal account, you can actually accept credit cards as well, not just PayPal payments. It’s expensive like particularly in the accommodation space, they can get like an online booking engine for $25 a month or something it was like that.

Ed Keay-Smith:          That’s very expensive.

Brendan Tully:          Maybe like say orders online. You need to have credit card form; people maybe will hit that and book at. I don’t know what else to say and like this.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. It has to be done. It’s petrol in your car; we own the car but don’t put petrol on it, what’s the point of owning the car. It’s like we have a website and not having something to fuel that website and take money. It’s crazy. I mean, the whole PayPal scenario has been around for at least 10 years. I’ve been using it for taking money and payments for, it must be at least 10 years and so and that’s a very straightforward thing to setup is a just setting up a PayPal business account.

That’s at least the starting point. Then you can go into getting merchant accounts later when you start growing or taking higher volumes of orders. PayPal’s good enough for most people to get started with if it’s taking under a couple of 100 orders of month, something so.

Brendan Tully:          I’d also say, if you already have a ‘Buy Now’ button and you’re only using PayPal or you already have one merchant provider, so that one process for processing your credit cards, you should find another one I say. You should have two, particularly if you’re doing order volume. If you’re doing a decent amount of money through that ‘Buy Now’ button, you need to really have two time and provider because often they break, things go wrong, PayPal has been known to close accounts or freeze accounts. I think it’s important but if you have an established ecommerce business or website that’s taking orders online that you have two forms of electronic payment.

Two, the ability to take electronic payment by two methods; for us, in Australia UI is like the credit card like the main credit payment processes. We’re using UI and PayPal. If PayPal breaks, we have UI, if UI’s broken, people can use PayPal. Because this is technology, you got to expect it to go down.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah. That would just be having the two options on the side. People can click on the PayPal logo to pay with that or they click on another.

Brendan Tully:          Credit card.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yeah, all right. We’ve hit the end of our 30 minutes. I think that was some good info to start with but we’ll be going into further detail in weeks to come. Thanks Brendan.

Brendan Tully:          Thank you, Ed. Have a good day. It’s Friday. Friday is my favorite day of the week.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Yes. That’s why we like doing the podcast because we’re all chirpy on a Friday.

Brendan Tully:          Yeah.

Ed Keay-Smith:          All right, thanks, guys.

Brendan Tully:          Thanks guys. I’ll see you next week.

Ed Keay-Smith:          Bye now.

Speaker 1:                 You’ve been listening to Business Marketing Show at businessmarketingshow.com where you can find us online. This is for Business Marketing Show.

Leave A Response

* Denotes Required Field