Internationalize Your Website 5 - Use The Right Order Forms For International Sales
April 30, 2008 by 
cindy
Last Updated 17 August 2008
Are using your website to attract international clients?
You want all of your efforts to bring you international sales, right?
There is more than one pitfall in the process of taking the online sale. Don’t forget to check all aspects of your order forms.
Establish An Easy Path To Your Order Page
The first obvious thing is to take your international visitor to your order form. Is this path clearly indicated? Read more
Start Your International Negotiations With Identifying The Right Person
April 29, 2008 by cindy
Sometimes the obvious difficulties in cross cultural negotiations lead people to forget the most basic things.
Jumping to automatic assumptions and entering into negotiations with the wrong person.
Identifying the right person you need to negotiate with is easy in your own culture. But in cross cultural negotiations several factors can come into play. Read more
How An Information Product Strategy Develops Lead Generation Beyond Your Current Borders
April 28, 2008 by cindy
Businesses with strong international sales know how to use information products effectively in their lead generation strategies.
Your business is probably already using information products. But are you getting all of the sales value you possibly can with your information products?
This article is part of the Guide To International Lead Generation, which is just one of the marketing strategies in the Business Guide 4 - Build Your International Marketing Strategy essential for effective international business development. Be sure to check them both out.
Information Products Open The Door To International Development For Brick And Mortar Businesses
April 25, 2008 by cindy
International business development still remains risky and expensive in the minds of most brick and mortar companies. And that is if they are even able to envisage markets for their current products abroad.
This article is part of the Guide To International Lead Generation, which is just one of the marketing strategies in the Business Guide 4 - Build Your International Marketing Strategy essential for effective international business development. Be sure to check them both out.
Information Products To Create International Sales
And yet, any business can use the internet for international sales and lead generation. Brick and mortar companies of all kinds can create their own international business using the internet from their physical office.
There is always a way to use information products distributed on the internet to either get international leads or make international sales.
Here is how information products are used to generate sales on the web. Read more
How Offline Businesses Can Learn From Infopreneurs To Develop Outside Markets.
April 24, 2008 by cindy
It usually takes brick and mortar companies months and months to create a new product and make a first sale.
So of course business owners are continually looking for ways to increase their business with what they have. And they often look at their own current products or services to see if there are any new ways to market them.
This article is part of the Guide To International Lead Generation, which is just one of the marketing strategies in the Business Guide 4 - Build Your International Marketing Strategy essential for effective international business development. Be sure to check them both out.
Brick and mortar businesses tend to look at the market they know and identify themselves with. New sources of revenue often require a long, slow process.
This drawn out process offline is in stark contrast to what the infopreneur does online. An infopreneur can create a new product totally from scratch, put the sales and promotion in place and have a first client in a weekend. And he does this all by himself. Read more
Don’t Get Trapped Into Thinking All The SEO You Need Is The Non-Tech Easy Organic SEO Based On Valuable Content
April 23, 2008 by cindy
Internet can be daunting for brick and mortar businesses. Small companies feel they don’t have the time to learn all of this technical stuff. They may even feel pressured into getting a website for international business. All they want to do is provide the technical geeks with the content for the website and let the business roll in.
Many small businesses end up paying a web expert to set up their website. The website usually stagnates, until the information on the website becomes obsolete, or the small business becomes frustrated with the lack of sales and wants to get more out of it.
Organic SEO
Only then do small businesses usually hear about Organic SEO. They understand web content must be written for both their human prospects and the invisible search engines.
They normally understand that content is good for both their human readers and the search engine “readers” or spiders. These spiders pick up their website and list it when their prospects are searching for their products.
But then most small businesses often come to the conclusion that the mysterious technical SEO is an expense and all they want to do is add the one ingredient they can:
- their content.
After all Organic SEO is said to be good. Very good in fact.
Best Type Of Website For Organic SEO
A small business just creating a website today should seriously consider creating the company website on a blog platform. Why?
- There are many free website templates or blog themes available that can easily look like a standard brochure website.
- The technical aspect of putting your information on the “blog” platform is easy to grasp. There are also little tools certain website hosting companies offer that make it very easy to grasp – “Fantastico” is one.
And with a blog platform you have the added advantage of putting up content regularly in a blog format with all the added business benefits of having a blog:
- Creating a community with your prospects
- Actively promoting your products and services
- Getting valuable feedback from your prospects and clients
- Establishing your company as a leading authority
- Boosting your SEO value even further
Organic SEO for your website becomes more powerful, with the more valuable targeted content you put on it. Using a blog platform gives you the option of looking like an ordinary brochure style website in the beginning and adding a blog when you are ready.
You can then add even more content – fantastic Organic SEO power.
Content Needs A Minimum Of SEO
This is where most small businesses still drop the ball. Content targeted at your prospects is great. They will pick up the value. But you still need a tiny bit of that technical SEO.
It’s simple. Your content has titles, sub-heads, categories and it makes sense to your readers.
WordPress is the most effective blog software to use for organic SEO. There are a few very technical reasons for this. But even WordPress software needs a little tweaking.
Well, you need to change the automatically generated titles for your content or blog posts for the search engines to list your company under the correct words searched by your prospects.
It really is not that difficult to go in and adjust this technical language in WordPress. And what a difference it will make on your search engine rankings.
Of course you will get better results: you just gave the search engines the headlines, sub-heads, categories and other valuable explanations it needs to place your website correctly and align its technical language with normal English.
Simple Permalink Adjustment
In technical language, to enhance the Organic SEO value of your blog post titles on a WordPress blog, you need to change the “permalink” codes it generates automatically for each of your entries:
The default way each blog post or entry is named after your .com/ has a question mark followed by p= and a number.
Your 128th post will default to
- .com/?p=128 – the 128th page.
Logical. Clear. Translates into any language that recognizes numbers.
Absolutely no use for readers, nor for search engines unless I happen to be searching for ?p=128.
Just for info Google list 1.3 million ?p=128 results and Yahoo over 2 million. That is how many times people have not taken the time to change this.
Customize Your Permalink Structure
Which of these two links tells you something about the topic of the post that is presented on the website?
- http://cindyking.biz/?p=128
- http://cindyking.biz/information-products-can-save-your-business-in-a-slow-economy/
Both get you to your destination, but the top option - the default - does nothing to help a reader understand what this content is about.
The second option puts a new set of keywords into your SEO basket. If someone does a Google search for “information products” or “slow economy”, you are actually giving Google the tools to help them find your site.
This setting can be changed in WordPress 2.5 by going to Settings and selecting Permalinks and in earlier versions of WordPress by going to Options and selecting Permalinks.
Types Of Permalinks
The WordPress Codex is the online information manual for WordPress. It defines Permalink types as follows:
There are three basic types of WordPress permalinks:
- Default: “Ugly” http://example.com/? p=128
- mod_rewrite: “Pretty Permalinks” .com/category/post-name or .com/year/month/day/post-name
- PATHINFO: “Almost Pretty”.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/
The available tags in your Permalinks can be:
- %year% - the year
- %monthnum% - the number of the month
- %day% - the day of the month (not Tuesday)
- %hour% - the hour using a 24 hour clock
- %minute% - the minutes
- %second% - the seconds
- %category% - the category under which your content is posted
- %author% - the designated author which is useful if multiple writers are providing content
- %postname% - the name of the content
- %post_id% - the unique ID for each content entry or bog post
The unique ID # of the content referenced in this article, for example is 128
For most organic SEO purposes, it is best to change the WordPress code for each blog post entry. Don’t keep the standard setting and keep the “?p=number” code.
You Have Options
The blog title or %postname% is often chosen as the best option. This will give you organic SEO for the words in the title of your blog post. So if you chose your content titles wisely, you can have Google working for you on each of those words.
But you can also choose to categorize some or all of your content under a category called “Weekly Favorites” for example. Then you either include a date in your title or add in %year% %monthnum% %postname% so people can ID what week is in question.
This can be an option for a monthly content series for example. Each monthly content post would have the permalink code with the year, the month and the title on your blog post.
It is difficult to imagine using the permalink code to specify minutes.
Having the unique ID number for each post and the content title (%post_id% and %postname% ) would give this using the previous example would appear as
- biz/?p=128/information-products-can-save-your-business-in-a-slow-economy/
It looks a little too odd for humans and the search engines do not need to use the ID number here.
WordPress Suggests
The WordPress codex suggests using the following to identify each of your blog posts:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. – year, month, day, post title.
The Good, The Bad…
The good news is that when you go into your WordPress software you set it up once and it works for all of your blog posts.
The bad news is:
- If you keep changing your settings you will lose the visitors to your pages who are getting to you through old links.
- And if you already have a WordPress blog all of your old post links will become invalid. Everything is changed on your website – the old blog posts and the future blog posts. So if you have many people who have bookmarked individual blog posts, they will lose that direct link.
Established WordPress blogs will want an experienced person to make this change. It is possible. It only needs to be done once. But if you don’t want to cut your links off it is a bit more complicated.
Your boat, you go float in it.
…And The Great
You can decide which words you would like your prospects or readers to find you with.
- You can only give them the option of finding you with the name of your website.
- You can also give them numerous other options: they can find your website through the different titles you give to of each of your blog posts.
This gives you more key words to rank high on the search engines.
The businesses that opt for a WordPress platform have a huge Organic SEO advantage over any other type of website.
| 2.5 |
Adapt Your Own Communication For International Business Success Like The Professionals
April 22, 2008 by cindy
Fear of cultural communication blunders often waves its head at some stage in international business. Especially for businesses just starting out in their own international business expansion.
Lack of international business skills can make this fear take all sorts of proportions.
Learn From Others
Looking at the communication styles of seasoned international business professionals can be a big help.
The Three Factors In Finding The Right Marketing Mix For Your International Business Expansion
April 21, 2008 by cindy
It is possible to get international clients with strong internet marketing. It is even possible to develop your international business through internet marketing.
There is one condition though. You will need to find the right marketing mix to use your internet marketing in your foreign target markets.
You will not be able to rely on a simple website or simplified internet marketing strategy. This may work to some extent, and it may work in your domestic market.
If you are serious about developing your international business you will need to add a little bit more marketing skills to the mix.
Three Factors To Find The Right Marketing Mix
In order to develop your sales in your foreign markets a variety of marketing techniques come into play. Here are the different factors involved:
Read more
How To Prevent Most Cross Cultural Miscommunication By Examining Your Own English Communication
April 18, 2008 by cindy
April 18, 2008 by cindy
Miscommunication between people happens all the time, especially when one of the parties is using a second language.
We often end up hearing miscommunication stories in the form of a joke: “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me…” But we don’t always hear all of the stories. Especially if we cause the miscommunication with international clients.
Native English speakers have the so called advantage of speaking the so-called world business language. If this is your case, it is likely your clients put up with the visible problems of miscommunication.
You may not even be aware there is any miscommunication, and your business can suffer from it.
Why You Need To Internationalize Your Own Communication First To Avoid Cultural Blunders
April 17, 2008 by cindy
Last updated 20 August 2008
If you are just beginning your international business development you are probably concerned about avoiding cultural communication blunders.
There are stories out there of major companies making major business mistakes.
Enough to damper any business’ international fervor.
Most peoples reflex is to look at the other cultures first. After all, they are the ones that are different.
You might be tempted to start by researching all the possible types of cultural communication blunders with all of the different cultures out there.
