As a small business your website should, at the very least, consume 20% of your time and budget. Unlike larger scaled businesses, small businesses have a limited perspective on advertising, based on revenue and exclusivity – forcing tiny marketing teams (if existent) to attempt benchmarking. The number of internet users has been growing non-stop since it went public. That means every day we have a better chance of reaching a new customer online. Although we may not have the time or budget to ramp up our sites to the standards of Timberland or Amazon, we can take advantage of free, cheap, powerful tools to rule the competition.
The Tools to Boost Your Website
1. NEW! Swiftly ($15 per task)
Building a website and designing a website for small businesses in this day and age is as simple as drag-and-drop. Literally. Thousands of themes are pre-built and ready to go. Learning how to code or hiring a coder is only necessary if your site needs to have really advanced features.
Unless your business is a graphic design business, chances are you have never touched Photoshop. Once you have a website and logo, small cosmetic things such as changing colors, sizes or adding tiny details may be needed.
This is where Swiftly comes in.
Upload your HTML code/design files to Swiftly and make a list of changes that you need done. Swiftly handpicks the designer in their community that can make the necessary changes for you and it’s done the same day. After approval, you pay $15 and the job is completed.
I created a task on Swiftly to show how easy it is. I decided to add a little wrench to the logo for CJ Pony Parts. Here is the task dialogue:
The task only took 20 seconds to create and 7 minutes to complete.
The original logo was:
The updated logo:
Simple.
Get started with Swiftly here.
2. Hello Bar (free and paid options)
When it comes to reaching out to your customers, Hello Bar will be critical. This web-embedded app allows you to direct traffic from your website to your most important website content.
Hello Bar utilizes small banners that can be embedded into your website. The design interface is simplistic in size and use. It takes an average user 60 seconds to create their perfect Hello Bar. After creating it, embed it into the design of your website and you can forget it thereafter.
The simplicity with this web app is that once embedded, you never have to remove it. In fact, you can edit it through the Hello Bar interface and it will change as you change it.
I put the 60 second challenge to the test…it only took me 30! Simply customize your header with a link and Hello Bar gives you a snippet of code like this:
Paste the script anywhere in your HTML body. You don’t need any programming experience. Simply open up your HTML and look for <body> [paste anywhere in between these tags </body>. That’s it! I did one for my free infographics, check it out!
Who can use it?
Bloggers
Marketers
E-Commerce
Product Owners
Nonprofits
ANYONE WITH A WEBSITE
Anyone with a small business market will find it beneficial to drive customers to their Facebook, Twitter, recent sales or content articles. Quickly directing and converting customers has never been so easy.
Get Hello Bar here.
3. Crazy Egg (30-day free trial, then paid plan)
As a small business owner, knowing what your customers are doing on your website will be important. Crazy Egg gives small business owners the ability to finally track their customers’ movements and categorize them on a heat map.
The Crazy Egg heat map shows you a report on what people are clicking on your website. The heat map is literally a map of your website and shows you by color how often a spot on your website is being clicked. For small businesses, this becomes a key component in increasing conversions.
Crazy Egg also shows you a scroll map of your website, where it starts off as red, goes to yellow and eventually white. The lighter the page report begins to get, the more people are abandoning your page. This allows you to see how much of your page is attracting your customers before they quit scrolling and go elsewhere.
Both the heat map and scroll map give small businesses a vital insight on their webpages, allowing them to change their layouts and information for better conversions.
One situation is if we have multiple media options on a page. For example, if we observe the hot water plunge pools from Hydroworx, we see they have a free information kit button, followed by photos, features, specs and videos.
With Crazy Egg, we’d be able to see which of these receives the most attention. We might discover people prefer the video as opposed to reading an information kit. By swapping places, we can continue testing with Crazy Egg.
Get Crazy Egg here.
4. Olark (14-day free trial, then various paid plans)
One of the more basic features you can utilize on your webpage is olark. If you are a successful product-selling business, it will be important for your clients to chat with you during business hours via chat.
Olark allows small business owners to integrate a chat onto their website where customers can contact you immediately. If they have a question about a product, you can answer them immediately, prompting for faster transactions and showing customers you care about their needs and questions. They have a full suite of features worth checking out, especially if a large chunk of your customers are spending more time in your online store then your physical one.
This is what Olark looks like closed:
And this is what it looks like open:
Get Olark here.
5. Google Analytics (free)
Google Analytics has been around for years helping both small scale and large-scale businesses keep track of their website stats.
Google Analytics allows you to see how many monthly unique visitors your website is receiving, how you are receiving those visitors (organically, referrals, direct, email or news feeds), time the average visitor is staying on your page and what area each of your unique visitors come from – giving you a detailed guide.
Most importantly, spending some time learning how to set up goals, declare your site an e-commerce site, and track multi-channel funnel paths will help you make SMART business decisions, design and copy changes.
Furthermore, Analytics shows your website’s progress through social media outlets – breaking down how many retweets, reblogs, notes, bookmarks and likes you receive through each social network. You can see which social networks your visitors and customers utilize most often, allowing you to expand on it to reach a larger audience.
In all honesty, Google Analytics can be a time suck. A good rule of thumb is to figure out exactly what you want have reported to you from analytics (goals, conversions, visitors, demographics) and spend a weekend setting up a custom report. After that, don’t worry about checking the data daily. Review the data once a week or even bi-weekly. This will give you more data to influence decisions and give you more time to invest in the other facets of your business.
Get Google Analytics here.
Was this useful? Know of any other free or cheap website tools to help small businesses? Please share in the comments below!
Cheers!
Written by Jesse Aaron. Jesse is a professional blogger with a passion for homebrewing. He writes on a variety of topics on his blog Mashbout. Follow Jesse on Google Plus.