No business can be successful without a deep understanding of its customers. This knowledge can help you to adapt your business style and advertising techniques to attract more customers and expand your client base.

Though face-to-face interactions are most suitable for understanding customer requirements and behaviors, web entrepreneurs do not have this luxury. Therefore, you must know your customers through indirect methods. Here are some of the methods you can use.

Tracking your Website Traffic

Traffic reports can serve as an excellent first step in understanding your customers. Ask your web hosting company about the free reports they offer on website traffic. Analyze these reports to determine key trends in traffic and visitor information. Once you have familiarized yourself with report information, use it to track your traffic and modify your website in accordance with customer’s requirements and trends. For instance, if you notice that you have many visitors from China, you can add features on web pages that attract attention of Chinese people and ensure that they keep coming back to your site. Tracking will also help you to assess the impact of specific advertising and promotion campaigns on customers and if they have been profitable for your business.

Some web hosting companies, however, do not provide any traffic reports. In this situation, you can look into your log files directly. Go to your web hosting service and look for a directory named “Logs”. Within the directory, download the most recent file to analyze the location of visitors, the pages viewed, the duration for which each page is viewed and the links attracting the most traffic. E-commerce websites can also recover information on sold products and where, in the ordering process, do customers bail out. Most text editors can open the file containing this information.

Collect E-mail Addresses and Stay in Touch

Give your online visitors incentive for registering with your website by offering them free a newsletter subscription, an e-book or articles. Websites selling services can get customers to register by offering short free consultation. Make sure your web design incorporates these methods so that you can collect the emails when visitors land on your website.

After you have obtained the email addresses and the permission to send mails to your customers, you can use the addresses to contact potential customers, and keep in touch by sending them discount coupons and special offers, information about sales, newsletters, articles and catalogs.

Getting Feedback from Customers

There is no better way of getting to know your customers than asking them directly about their requirements and expectations. Use your website to develop customer databases, and build user profiles and mailing lists. Give your customers an option of joining your mailing list on the homepage of your website. However, when seeking feedback directly from your customers you should always make it a point to respond to their messages or you risk alienating them. Analyze customer responses and requests to determine common problems and then aim to develop solutions to them. If you show genuine concern about their problems and needs, they will reciprocate by being loyal to your business and brand.

A deep knowledge of your customers helps you to precisely target your products and services and attract customer attention and interest. This in turn, helps you to increase your business profitability and significantly expand your customer base. If you want your web business to be successful and your website to be effective start getting to know your customers today by incorporating these methods in your web design.

Website templates can be cost effective and they can save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new theme for your website. However, a lot of users make mistakes in the process of choosing and implementing a site template and end up with a creation that is not even close to the image they had in mind. Here are a few helpful pointers to help you avoid those mistakes.

The most common mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is extremely popular. If a lot of people are using the same template, your website will not stand out as unique at all and your reputation as a solid, original website will be tainted. To put it another way, you will appear generic just like many other websites.

The main reason to use a web template is to spare yourself some time. You just modify the title and appropriate details and you are. The most costly mistake a start up business might make is to modify the template beyond recognition. While this might be ok in the sense that you’ll get a unique website, you’re going against the main reason for using a web template :saving time and effort.

However, from another prespective, if a template you aquired is suitable but some editing must be done to match your site’s theme, then you might want to spend the time to make the changes. For example, you might come across a good template that suits your hobby site except the creator has put an image of stamps at the top. You can find images of garden plants and tools to replace the stamps for your gardening niche website. However, you should only make the necessary changes and avoid redesigning the whole website template.

In some circumstances, users simply make a bad selection of templates. This is a rather subjective matter but you should be careful in choosing templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are shiny, choose them because they suit your needs.

With web 2.0 becoming more mainstream, many web developers are turning to dynamic content. A very easy way to incorporate this would be to use a Content Management System, or CMS. WordPress is 100% free and has a wide range of options, allowing you to make a very professional looking website with little to no effort at all.

Never, and I stress this strongly, violate any terms of copyright when using a website template. Many authors/designers have specific rules for leaving a backlink to their site. Leaving these links in place will help ensure that there will always be someone out there willing to develop free tools that we can use for our own marketing purposes.

Remember that there are many website templates out there, and the only real way to make any of them work is to fill them with quality content. So save time, and be sure to provide quality content to your visitors.

If you are particular about quality, chances are you are not going to give a second look at cheap web hosting services. You may be surprised to know, however, that cheap does not necessarily mean poor quality. These days, the cost of web hosting services has become more affordable, possibly due to the growing number of companies trying to edge each other out, so the idea of finding a web host that meets your budget is not that far-fetched an idea as it might have been once.

Back in the early years of the World Wide Web, a web host plan can cost hundreds of dollars, but now, there are cheaper alternatives (some offer web hosting fee of only $10 a month or even less), and the differences among them aren’t very significant. Of course, it does not mean that you will just jump right at the first cheap web hosting service provider you come across with and not give it a second thought – that wouldn’t be wise.

You have to be very cautious when looking for a web host, especially if you are considering of going for cheap web hosting services. Remember that an online business is serious stuff and for sure you would want to stay in the business for as long as possible. As such, you would need a web host that has the capabilities to meet your requirements for the long haul. As you know, changing web hosts is very difficult; not only that, there is always the possibility of losing your data in the process, and you really would not want to start all over again. Besides being frustrating, there’s a good chance that you will be losing customers in the process, too.

The shortlist of things to keep in mind when you come across a web hosting service provider should include uptime percentage, disk space, and of course customer or technical support. Uptime refers to the time your website is up and running on the World Wide Web. An ideal uptime score is no less than 99%. You probably did not think it is possible for cheap web hosts to provide an uptime percentage of at least 99.5%, but the truth may surprise you.

The amount of disk space provided should also be a concern of any webmaster. It might be normal to think that when dealing with a cheap web host, you have to deal with small disk space as well, but that no longer holds true nowadays. Many web hosting companies are now able to offer unlimited disk space at a very affordable price.

Just because you are paying a cheap price does not mean that you can expect exceptional customer support in return. A reliable company, regardless of whether it is professional company or a cheap hosting company, should be able to render customer support in a variety of ways, 24/7. Web hosting companies should provide phone support as well as live support, and they should be readily contacted any time there are technical problems that need to be addressed at once.

Source

1. Contact current customers of the hosting provider. See how satisfied they really are, whether they have encountered any problems, and how the hosting company responded. Contact customer service and see if anyone picks up the phone.

2. Pick up the phone and call the support line. Ask a few questions and see how they respond. Are they courteous?  Can you understand them, or are you speaking with offshore support staff? How long did it take for someone to answer?

3. “Make sure you understand the different packages and services the company provides. “Read the website; ask questions.” There are a number of factors to consider. How much storage space will you get? What about bandwidth and data transfer – how much is covered? Will you be charged for over-usage and if so, how much? How frequently will site backups be made? What’s the hosting company’s uptime / downtime experience? What level and type of customer support will you be entitled to with the package you choose – email-only support, telephone customer support during business hours, or telephone support 24/7? What level of security monitoring and intrusion prevention/detection is available?