Annoying Online Mistakes | BTalk Australia

(6min 52) Is your business guilty of Robert Gerrish’s mistakes of small business. Robert is the founder of micro business portal Flying Solo. On today’s Btalk Australia he takes Phil Dobbie through things that are done online that make him irate!

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Phil also talks to Robert here: Time to Shine | BTalk Australia

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• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today the mistakes that small businesses make on their websites.

Now, Robert Gerrish is the owner of Flying Solo, which is a website for people in home or micro-businesses and he’s on Skype at the moment — we’re just so up with modern technology here on BTalk Australia I tell you. And he gets angry at some of the things that he sees small businesses doing online. Robert you don’t strike me as an angry sort of person normally what’s getting you hot under the collar?

Robert Gerrish: It’s just a few things Phil that just drive me nuts and, you know, in many ways these are the kind of behaviours that happily at times like this, as we’re kind of lurching towards recession, I think these are often the sort of businesses that are the first to disappear and frankly I’m quite happy with that. All sorts of things drive me nuts.

Dobbie: So like one at the moment I noticed that you said that people who are search engine optimising their websites. Now, you want to do that don’t you, obviously, that’s a good thing?

Gerrish: Yes, of course, oh, yes, look it’s perfect. Absolutely and any business that doesn’t is bonkers. But the ones that drive me mad are the ones where they’ve worked search engine optimisation to the absolute maximum, but when you get there there’s nothing there. So often what happens on those sites is we have to sort of click our way out of their stupid sites and that’s how that business makes its money is by us getting away from the site.

Dobbie: So the whole site’s been designed to get people there without actually doing anything when you get there.

Gerrish: Absolutely right and they drive me mad. Now, happily those businesses and Google is on to them as well so I think little by little they will be removed but they just drive me nuts.

Dobbie: Yes, and, in fact, Google do say that they change the algorithm all the time don’t they to try and catch up on the cheats, so it’s not going to work if you’re doing that, basically is the message. Now, sales messages, you know it’s important that you have sales messages on your website but I guess it’s how you do it isn’t it?

Gerrish: Absolutely right and, again I’m just getting worked up now. When you get to websites where they’re so kind of self congratulatory that it’s a beggar’s belief that anyone’s going to fall for this. If you are a real leader in business you don’t tell the world you’re a leader you just are a leader. If you’re sought after, you demonstrate it you don’t puff on about it. And also sites that say, yes, you know, I’m internationally sought after, and you dig a bit deeper and you find they’ve been to New Zealand once for a conference. It’s not enough, it’s fine, yes, of course, we have to have sales tax but let’s keep it real for goodness sake because the people that are coming to these small business websites are, in most cases, a lot of cases, themselves are just small business or indeed they could be kind of corporate business. So let’s not kid ourselves, let’s keep it real. You know another thing that drives me crazy are these things that look like testimonials.

Dobbie: Oh yes.

Gerrish: Nice big aversive comments. They look like a testimonial but there’s nobody’s name assigned to it.

Dobbie: A customer from Dundas.

Gerrish: We all know who wrote it, who’s fooling who here no one’s fooling anyone you know? It drives me crazy.

Dobbie: The other thing that’s often done as well, of course, is that, people entice people in with stuff for free, which is stuff you don’t necessarily want in the first place.

Gerrish: Yes and there are some of those tactics that are very successful and some of them do genuinely have stuff of a kind of quality. So just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has some kind of value, it can often be very valuable. But the piece on that sort of line that, again, just drives me to distraction, these one’s where you see websites saying, get this free PDF download valued at $297. Well, excuse me, who valued it?

We know who valued it, the person who wrote it valued it. If you want an evaluation of a PDF report stick it on eBay and see how much you get for it.

Dobbie: That’s always a good test isn’t it? Well, listen if you want to know the benefits of podcasting you can go to my website and there’s a $4000 report there which I managed to knock off in four hours, but I value my time rather highly I have to say. The other thing, I guess, is just the amount of words on the website isn’t it as well. Just the sheer verbiage can be an issue.

Gerrish: It certainly can and I know that there is a whole kind of theory out there and some people listening to this will probably be just laughing thinking how naive and stupid I am that I don’t understand these things enough, but there are certainly tactics where you can write very, very long sales pages and you’ve seen them, I’m sure, where you have every other paragraph is highlighted with a yellow highlighter. I just find these things totally disgusting. Now, they may work but, you know, selling drugs outside schools work it doesn’t mean we should be doing it. You know what I mean? It’s just like let’s keep it real at times like this.

Dobbie: And a bit more subtlety might be called for is that what you’re saying?

Gerrish: A little bit of subtlety, yes.

Dobbie: And then all those happy smiling people. I mean so many websites you go there and they’re just a joy to behold all these people who are just surely, completely ecstatic with their lot in life and a lot of that goes on.

Gerrish: Isn’t it funny they’re often the same smiling people.

Dobbie: They are big consumers those people aren’t they they’re buying almost every single product.

Gerrish: My thought with stock photographs and we use stock photos on our site to kind of illustrate content in articles, but the stock photos that have all those beaming members of staff that you know damn well don’t work for that business, what are they doing there? What are they doing there? If you haven’t met these people and they don’t work for you what are they doing on your website? That’s my view of it you know? And to kid ourselves that these lovely, young, smiling, airbrushed people are all employees of this business. I mean really we’ve moved on and we need to move on a lot further I think. Get real, keep it honest, keep it real I’m repeating myself.

Dobbie: No that’s alright I think that’s the message though. You do have to keep it real because you’re not kidding anyone otherwise. Hey, listen, Robert you sound like you calmed down a great deal anyhow. I’m glad — if nothing else today we’ve served a purpose, you’ve got it off your chest, you’ve vented your spleen and I feel as though your blood pressure and all those other side effects might have come under control now. So I’m glad we’ve done you a service and I hope we’re going to talk to you again soon Robert Gerrish.

Gerrish: Yeah, can I go and have a lie down now?

Dobbie: Yeah you can. Robert Gerrish the owner of Flying Solo on BTalk Australia.