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Promoting your business is a very integral part of how well your business does at building clientele, remaining profitable and communicating to people what you have to offer. It does not matter if you sell mud flaps for automobiles or pencil sharpeners, you need to reach your target audience and let them know that you have goods or services to sell them. Usually, the predominant factor that influences how far and wide your promotion reaches is the budget.

Building a flawless reputation for the quality of the goods or services your business has to offer is what the right promotional product does for your company. Whether you want to give away eco promotional products that allow people to save energy and are environmentally friendly because they are made from recycled materials, the bottom line is that it has to be a product that is within your company’s budget.

Have a small budget is by no means an indication that you have to sacrifice the quality of product you choose for your promotion. The best way to make a decision on a promotion when looking for a product is to have a firm idea of exactly what your budgetary amount is. If necessary, revisit budget figures and recalculate budget amounts to ensure that your budget is not short or over in the end. Although it is an ideal scenario, choosing promotional products that land you squarely on target for your budget are the best products for your promotion.

Making a lasting impression with these products means that you should give ample consideration to choices that convey your logo and other pertinent information on the outside of a product that people will be glad to receive, view often and are reminded of your business every time they see or use the product. An increasing number of people are very concerned about saving the earth and are extremely appreciative of a company that invests in environmentally friendly promotional tools.

You can make the most of your promotional event such as a tradeshow, grand opening or other celebrated event by using advertising inflatables. Highly visible from a great distance, many people are often compelled to stop and, as a result, patronize the business that gets their attention from the road. This is the perfect way to create a noticeable presence for your establishment that may be less visible from other competitors nearby or to let people know you have a presence in a new location.

A sizable budget for your next promotion is a good thing but don’t be swayed from getting high quality products without spending a fortune. Some of the best products are designed for any size budget. Choose from a small amount to meet the needs of one particular event or take advantage of bulk savings and stock up to have the right product in stock and on hand for any needs that arise.

Choosing the right promotional product doesn’t have to be a headache. Start with a realistic budget, decide on a sensible product that packs all of the quality and style your budget can afford and shoot for the stars.

If you are building an online shop, you will need to address the question of taking payments for orders. You can, of course, request that a check payment be sent to you in the mail. Most shopping basket software allows you to select this option when you are setting it up. If you already have an offline, bricks and mortar business, you may simply wish to accept credit card payments over the phone.

However, there are some basic problems with these solutions and it all comes down to the way people shop on the internet. Customers expect to be able to add items to their basket and proceed to the checkout to pay. If they then find they must telephone you or print out and send their order, they may simply abandon their order and hop over to another website. Shopping online is all about convenience and if you are unable to provide this, you may be losing customers without even being aware of it.

So, what are your options and what is it all going to cost? Well, the good news is you can do it all very simply and cheaply. Paypal does not have a set-up charge and is a large and trusted online payment processor servicing 78 million accounts worldwide in 56 countries. Your only cost is a small percentage on each sale; a transaction charge. Payments from your website go straight into your Paypal account from where you can transfer amounts to your bank account with the click of a button.

Once you sign up with a payment processor, you can either link to their secure server from your shopping basket facility or build ‘add to basket’ buttons via a simple web query form. The html generated is then pasted next to items on your web page and your customers will be transferred to a secure server when they go to checkout.

Traditional merchant accounts are normally set up through your own bank and will become integral to your business account. Having your own merchant account gives you the choice of many different online payment gateways. Most, however, do charge a set-up fee, monthly fee and transaction charge. Just as you would offline, do make sure you research any company you sign up with on the internet. Print out and read their terms and conditions. Take particular notice of where they are operating from, their fees, when and how you will receive your money into your account.

Another point to consider is the question of chargebacks. This happens when a buyer requests a refund of an amount already paid to you. Reasons include not receiving goods ordered or items arriving faulty, damaged or not as described. Sometimes requests are made if the buyers card was used fraudulently.

If the chargeback request is successful, your merchant payment processor will charge you a processing fee. However, some companies will now provide you with insurance against chargebacks inclusive in your monthly fee. It’s certainly worth shopping around for the right solution for you but knowing you have done your research will give you some peace of mind.

A key component to every web site is traffic analysis. When analyzing traffic, it is important to understand the difference between hits and visitors…and why both are important.

Be One With The Log

To analyze traffic to a site, you should be looking at your server logs. Server logs come in very raw data, but most hosting companies have interpreting programs that summarize the information into readable form. From these programs, you should be able to analyze who is sending you traffic, the number of hits and visitors among other information.

Hits v. Visitors – The Game Is On…

Many people, myself included, are lazy when it comes to discussing traffic results. We tend to use “hits” as a catch phrase for traffic hitting a web site. This isn’t entirely true. Traffic should always be analyzed in two categories, hits and visitors.

A “visitor” is a click from someplace on the net to your site. In your server logs, a visitor will be credited with visiting the site one time regardless of the number of pages the visitor views. For example, a person entering a brick n’ mortar bookstore is only one potential customer regardless of the number of books the person looks at.

A “hit” is a click on any page of the site and represents a multiple of the visitors. When you review server logs, the hits represent how many times visitors clicked site pages. Going back to our bookstore example, every book viewed by the person in the bookstore would be a hit. So, which information is more important?

Hits v. Visitors – An The Winner Is…

The simple fact is both visitors and hits are important statistics to analyze in your server logs. Obviously, the information on the number of visitors is important because you want to know how many potential customers are coming to your site. That being said, you should never focus on visitors without contemplating hits as well.

Hits are important because the number of hits tells you very important information about your site. Since hits represent the total number of pages viewed by all visitors, you can use the information to determine the effectiveness of your site. I call this by the very original and sophisticated name “hits to visitors ratio.” Let’s go back to our bookstore example.

Assume a person walks into a bookstore and only looks at one book. This may mean the person knew what they wanted, found it and bought it. Obviously, this is an ideal result. But what if a thousand people walk into the bookstore and only look at one

book each? The bookstore would have a problem and start trying to figure out what it is. The hits statistics on your server tell you the same thing.

If your site has multiple pages, you need to find out if visitors are clicking into the internal pages. This is generally known as determining the depth of your site. The simplest way to do this is to divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for a particular time period. This figure will tell you if people are seeing one “book” or taking a look around.

Analyzing your server stats can be a real eye-opening experience. The information can be good or bad, but at minimum you will know if any corrective steps need to be taken.