by Michal Wurm on January 21, 2010
Your website may very well be the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal. Not only it is your point of contact on the web and the place for your clients and prospects to find out information, but your website also has a huge impact on your prospects’ purchase decision. In fact a whopping 97% of the 200 surveyed buyers—from companies of all sizes—say a provider’s website has an influence on their ultimate purchase decision.
The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.
The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years. According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.
It’s clear that having a good, well established website that delivers results is vital for professional services firms. With more and more of our daily activities conducted online, having a good website could be the key to success for many businesses.
With a well performing website you can:
- Establish that you are professional: through professional design, writing, and arrangement of content.
- Establish that you are worthy of consideration: through an overview of your services, your client list, biographies of your professionals, and case studies that show how your helped clients.
- Establish yourself as an authority: through blog posts, publications, videos, and other resources to help build credibility, reliability, and trust. All of these are essential elements necessary to win clients and increase your sales.
How important is your website to growing your business?
by Michal Wurm on December 16, 2009
Google Wave–a new communication and collaboration tool developed by Google–has certainly caused a lot of buzz in the past months. While it is still in pre-beta stage and access is limited by invitations, Google Wave clearly demonstrates it has the potential to change the way we work and communicate online. Those who can see the capabilities hidden behind the little bit clumsy interface (remember the development is still in early stages) know Google Wave is something to monitor closely. Those who do not “get it” on the other hand are clearly not the right audience for testing the beta version and will probably be very surprised once the technology is adopted by mainstream programmers and developers.
I believe Google Wave is a platform that will become very successful once enough people start using it. The key is to think of it as a platform on which other great things will be built on. Remember iPhone SDK? By giving away the tools to build iPhone applications for free, Apple AppStore has grown exponentially to the point where it now has over 100,000 iPhone applications. Google is on the right track to similar success.
Following Itai Boublil’s post, I decided to describe how I use Google Wave in my business.
Me and my team have been using Google Wave for over a month now. Ever since I saw the first demo of what it can do I knew Google Wave is the perfect tool for our internal communication. We design websites and marketing materials and most projects involve at least two or three people. I have structured my business so that everyone works from home. There is no central office therefore having a good communication channel is essential for us. Before Wave we handled things by email, instant messaging or phone which was a bit cumbersome at times.
Using Google Wave simplified our internal communication and increased productivity by quite a bit. No more bouncing emails back and forth, waiting for the other side to reply … it’s like email meets instant messaging on steroids.
We use Wave as a project management tool, work sheets, internal memo board, track of payments, to-do list, link exchange plus normal -. The savings are in productivity alone but this free tool also replaced our $400 project management system.
If you have a project or a work on a document which requires input from more than two people, give Google Wave a go. You might be surprised how quickly you get used to it and how easy it is to use.
Yes it is a bit rocky at times and the speed could be better, but considering how useful it is for us even now while Google Wave is still in it’s very early stages, I think it’s safe to say it’s really going to be a huge success and is certainly worth a try.
by Michal Wurm on December 11, 2009
We all know them. The email your friend sent to you and all his other contacts in address book. They usually warn you about a “dangerous computer virus that will melt your hard drive” , “win a free laptop“, “there is a little girl either lost or in need of a new kidney” or “don’t get out of your car at petrol stations or your car will be stolen“.
95% of these emails are just hoaxes playing on human compassion. The fact is the emails warning about computer viruses become the virus itself – using unsuspecting people who mean well to spread the rumors to everyone in their address book, clogging up mailboxes and eating up your bandwidth.
How do you know if the email is a hoax? Ask Google.
Here is what I’d like you to do. Next time you get a suspicious email warning you about this or that, copy the entire first line of the email text into Google search and see what comes up. It’s that simple. I can almost guarantee the first three results will lead to sites like hoax-slayer.com, urbanlegends.com or museumofhoaxes.com. This way you can find how much truth there is to the email you just received, and perhaps let the poor fellow who just sent you the hoax know he has nothing to worry about.
So the moral is this – please think before passing on the hoax email you just received. Google the first line of email text first to see if it is a false alarm.
How do you deal with mass hoax emails?
