If you’re a small business without a website, I have one question for you: What the hell are you waiting for? If the idea of high costs or technical know-how is still stopping you, then you need to pay attention to the list below. These are my top five free or inexpensive easy-to-use web building services that can get you up and running your own website in minutes!

No. 1 – Wordpress
My all-time favorite. I’ve written countless times about my love affair with Wordpress and how it can be used not only for your blog, but for your company website. The platform is incredibly easy to use and comes complete with a wide selection of templates and widgets, site traffic stats, spam filtering, and much more. And it’s all free. You can have a site up and running in less than 5 minutes.

No. 2 – Weebly
Weebly lets you create a free website and blog in little time. It has an incredibly easy drag-and-drop interface, and offers lots of design templates and themes to choose from, as well as free domain hosting. Add pictures, videos, music, documents, and photos with ease.

No. 3 – Bravenet
Want to add message forums, online calendars, guestbooks, or other web tools to your website? Check out Bravenet. Bravenet offers these and lots more, along with free hosting and optional professional hosting. You can either build a pre-existing website and upload it through FTP to Bravenet to host, or use Viviti, their drag-and-drop site builder and content manager to build your site with them.

No.4 – Wix
Looking to build a stunning Flash website for free? Then Wix is your answer. Simple drag-and-drop editor, lots of customizable Flash templates  to choose from, and apparently search engine friendly – I don’t have proof that it is, but very important when building Flash sites, which are notoriously unfriendly to search engines.

No. 5 – Squarespace
Okay, this service is not free but it’s damn good so I’ve included it here. Starting at $8 per month, Squarespace offers you a fully hosted and highly professional custom looking websites that are easy to build. If you’re looking for greater control over the look and feel, as well as the content of your website, Squarespace is the right choice. Celebrities like Jamie Kennedy, Dane Cook and Kevin Pollak use it, as well as fashion giant Marc Ecko Enterprises.

I attended the ad:tech Digital Marketing event in London back in September and sat in on an intriguing presentation by ComScore about online banner advertising and how more and more people are clicking on less and less of them. In fact, only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all clicks according to their study. Compared to search engine marketing (SEM), click-through on banner ads seem pitiful and almost a waste of resources and money. But wait. Before you decide to kill your banner ad campaign, consider this: using just click-through to measure the performance of your banner ad campaign is a mistake. Here’s why. The vast majority of Internet users do not click on banners, but are still very active on search and they’re buying. The most interesting finding from ComScore’s research is that banner ads generate a significant lift in search activity among users exposed to banner ad campaigns, regardless of whether they clicked on the ad or not.

The table below shows the results of ComScore’s study which tested a control group of users not exposed to a banner ad campaign against a test group of users exposed to it across various industry verticals. In all cases, there was an increase in search activity by the test group, in one vertical as high as 77%. The overall average lift being 46%.

It makes sense when you think about it. I see myself behaving similarly. I seldom click on banner ads, but many times I have later gone to Google to search for a brand name or offer from an ad I was exposed to earlier – as I try to recall it. In this common scenario, the banner ad would have no value if it was measured by click through alone. Yet, in reality it entirely influenced the final search activity, which is often assigned all the value as the “last click” to the site. This study gives enough reason to reassess how you value banner advertising and the impact it has on your overall advertising campaign… beyond the click.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison believes cloud is just water vapor.

All the buzz in web hosting these days is around cloud hosting. From large providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the Rackspace Cloud, to a whole bunch of tiny providers, you can’t find a corner on the Internet that isn’t talking about or trying to offer up a cloud service. But what exactly is cloud? If you aren’t quite sure, you’re not alone. A recent independent cloud hosting study of 200 IT decision makers showed that 88 percent of them do not use cloud technologies, while 39 percent said that their lack of knowledge is preventing them from adopting it. And 24 percent were reluctant to use cloud because of perceived security risks. But almost half of the respondents did say they are considering cloud hosting with the majority of them citing scalability and flexibility as the key reasons.

So is cloud hosting the wave of the future? If you are to believe Oracle’s colorful co-founder, Larry Ellison, cloud is not only the future of computing, but it is the present, and the entire past. He comically referred to cloud as “water vapor” in a recent rant and writes it off as just a cutesy term for what we’ve already come to know as software as a service, on-demand, or just simply the Internet. So, if you’re feeling cloudy around cloud computing, don’t feel bad – even seasoned industry veterans can’t agree on exactly what it is.

While stacking up your sales department is a good way to drive inbound leads and sales, I find that many businesses are overlooking the potential for a rockstar salesperson: their website.

Don’t be afraid to invest in your website just as you would a training and education budget for a salesperson. You may be tempted to throw a lot of money into paid search, but investing in organic search will last much longer, making it the most effective way to drive leads for your business. That means once the ad budget runs out, the leads and the traffic stops, but the work you put into organic rankings will last for months, if not years to come.

But what happens when you can’t find your website in the organic listings?

Chances are, you need help optimizing your website to tell the search engines what your site is about. I run a company called Pear Analytics where my team developed a tool that gives you a free SEO analysis in about 30 seconds with actionable details and instructions on how to fix the issues in “Fisher-Price” language. You’ll get a score from 0 to 100, as well as a detailed report, which will look something like this:

Each category is labeled with an indicator to help identify your problem areas, where you can expand each section to learn what it is, how you scored, and how to fix that particular item.

Increasing your score helps ensure that your site has been properly set up to be search engine friendly; however, you will still need to work on three main things in an ongoing manner.

1. Understand the keywords you should target and your competition
I find quite often that websites are not systematically targeting any keywords, or they are targeting words or phrases that do not get searched often. Use our Website Analyzer tool and look at the Keyword Targets section of the report. It tells you the keywords you are trying to target, but also what Google thinks your site is about. Evaluate the words to target based on how many searches per month the word gets. In other words, you don’t want to target a keyword that gets searched 20 times per month. You want to target words that get over 1,000 searches per month, or 500 per month on a local search (if you add a location to your search term).

2. Generate interesting content that people want to read (and link to)
This is the one thing that worries small business owners because they do not have a lot of time to dedicate to keeping up a website or a blog. In reality, this is an exercise that will take a couple of hours a week – more is better if you have the time. Over 40% of the traffic that comes to my Pear Analytics company site is from blog posts that are found through Google searches. I have roughly 50 blogs and have been blogging about analytics, SEO, SEM and other topics for about a year now. Try to do a blog post per week, or generate a new page of content, or add new products to your site on a weekly basis. Google likes new and fresh information and will give preference to sites that update often.

3. Build your inbound links as organically as possible
Building links is the most time consuming and difficult task. Most people won’t link to you without good reason, and you want to avoid buying links whenever you can. Most sites that offer to sell you links for a few hundred dollars are not very good links. You would rather have a few great links than lots of poor links. This goes back to creating awesome content – like whitepapers, video, or other information that would be valuable to people, or something they would expect to pay for. You can also use public relations as a way to build inbound links. By writing press releases and posting them electronically with strategic links back to your website could be extremely valuable.

Try the free SEO tool and start thinking strategically about your website and getting found in the search engines. Let me know what you think about the tool and if you’re finding it helpful. Would love to hear your feedback!

Lindsay Smith announced today on her blog that early bird tickets are now available for the F5 Expo featuring bestselling author of Tipping Point and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell. As I mentioned in an earlier post, F5 Expo will focus on future trends in the online space including social media, digital media, SEO, and mobile apps. I’ve seen a preliminary list of additional speakers being added to the event, and it looks very impressive. Vancouver is starving for this type of an event. The first block of etickets released are available for $220 and includes:

• Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote presentation
• Access to all sessions and panel discussions
• Lunch and refreshments
• USB memory stick preloaded with exclusive offerings and savings for your business
• Admission to the post-event networking reception with Malcolm in attendance

BONUS: Your name will be entered into a draw to meet Malcolm in-person. Only 20 tickets will be made available for this private reception.

Order Early Bird Tickets Here

Just watched the demonstration of the new Google Wave. Very impressive product that I can’t wait to try out! Does someone out there have an invite they can send me? (Thanks for the hook up Summit Media!) It takes the best features of online communication – social media, instant messaging, and email – and integrates them into a seamless stream of communication rather than the traditional back and forth, piling on of messages. Watch the video to see how it works.

Host of Tech Talk Expert on Global TV News and show organizer, Lindsay Smith asked me to join her advisory board this year to help with the latest edition of the Massive Tech Show to be held in April 2010. The event has lost some steam over the past couple of years and is looking to refocus. We had our first group advisory meeting earlier this month and the overwhelming consensus was the event needed a heavy makeover to make it relevant again for people doing business today. Some of the core decisions included a re-branding, focusing on social media (Twitter and Facebook) and online marketing (SEO and SEM), and placing a greater emphasis on quality content and big personalities. To that end, Lindsay announced yesterday she has signed on Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers as the event’s keynote speaker! Wow. If you haven’t read any of his books, please do yourself a favor and visit Amazon or your local Chapters or Barnes & Nobles and pick up one. A tremendous author with incredible insight on the world as we know it, Malcolm will be quite the draw at F5 Expo (ah yes, the new brand, cleverly named after the “F5″ function button on your keyboard, typically used to refresh your screen).

As the event starts taking shape, I’ll post some more details on it, but expect it to be an entirely different show than past iterations – in a very good way. Congrats Lindz on getting Malcolm!

Proud to be Canadian. Even more so after seeing hometown hero and NBA superstar, Steve Nash pitch Vitaminwater in this hilarious infomercial spoof. It appears Steve is spreading his wings and positioning himself for a career in television. He did an even funnier bit recently on David Letterman, and I’ve learned that the new SHAQ VS. show was actually Steve’s concept of which Shaq stole. Steve was recently awarded an “executive producer” credit for it – surely to stem off any legal heat. Nevertheless, the ad itself is clever and integrates crowdsouring and social media, using both Youtube and Facebook. The pitch: help Vitaminwater create the next great flavor. To do so, you’re instructed to add a Facebook app to participate.

“Convenience acts like anti-matter to fidelity. The more convenient something becomes — the easier it is to get — the more its aura dissipates. The more convenient something becomes, the less that item identifies its owner as someone unique and special. For Starbucks, excessive convenience dragged down the brand and made it commonplace.”

And so explains Kevin Maney, author of Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, why coffee giant Starbucks came to a crossroads in 2007 with a major drop in its share price and customer store visits; the company still hasn’t fully recaptured its early luster. Starbucks increasingly traded its high fidelity for high convenience which rarely, if ever, works. Companies need to be one or the other, or risk confusing their brand. Starbucks stood for a luxurious and pricey coffee experience that consumers were willing to seek out and wait in line for – nothing convenient about that, which was perfect for the brand. As it became more ubiquitous through a juiced-up expansion strategy that included shops on every corner, packaged beverages in grocery stores, and a record label – it could no longer hold on to the same prestige it once had. Kevin quotes economist and author Tyler Cowen who said, “Once Starbucks became ordinary, it was committing suicide.”

7-11, McDonalds, and Dunkin Donuts are examples of brands that are high in convenience and don’t attempt to be high in fidelity. And as a result, they are incredibly successful. Starbucks is trying to re-discover its passion for coffee under Howard Schultz’s return as CEO, and place less focus on growth and more on the coffee experience. It’ll be interesting to see  if he can recapture the brand’s early magic.

The most inexpensive yet impacting way for small businesses to compete with the big boys is to lead with remarkable customer service. I know you’ve heard this before, and I’m almost certain you’ve made a similar claim – “We have great service” or “Our service is why people buy from us” – and yet more often than not, the service isn’t that remarkable. In fact, it’s fairly ordinary. Many mistake providing friendly, attentive service as exceptional when it’s actually the simple expectation or norm. So, what does remarkable service look like?

In an article titled Service-Led Battle Plan by Growing Business, business operator and customer service evangelist, Dominic Monkhouse reveals his approach to taking on his former Internet company (and industry leader) with a commitment to delivering remarkable service. He outlines his philosophy that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business – something he learned during his early days at retail giant Marks & Spencers:

“It wasn’t uncommon for men to come in and buy a suit on a Friday, cut all the tags off, wear it to a wedding and then bring it back on Monday claiming it didn’t fit,” Monkhouse says, recalling one incident where the item was so creased it couldn’t be resold. Much to his surprise, his manager agreed to take it back, insisting that it was all part of owning and building the store’s reputation.

Monkhouse is fostering a similar culture, and believes it’s futile to get into a war over who’s to blame. “We’re in the IT game,” he says. “Things do go wrong and customers break their own stuff all the time. Then, if they ring us and say: ‘It’s broken,’ we’ll assume responsibility. In fact, we’ll say it’s our fault, so we’ll also take accountability, because without owning the problem, we can’t fix it. We won’t say: ‘Actually, we’ve looked in the log file and we think you logged in and broke it.’”

In other words, sometimes you need to take one on the chin and think about the long-term benefit, rather than succumbing to your gut instinct and becoming defensive. That said, Monkhouse concedes there is a line. He doesn’t think the customer is always right and he won’t tolerate abuse. “If anyone is abusive to any of our staff, it doesn’t matter who they are, we’ll terminate the account,” he says.

Delivering ordinary customer service is a given. Delivery extraordinary service is a commitment. This means owning your customer’s mistakes, owing up to when you screw up, and letting your employees own their roles and have freedom to make decisions to resolve customer issues quickly.  So, are you ready to make every human interaction count?

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