This has been a tough year for us.

We have not been feeling any of the recession at all, up until the middle of this year. It’s one of the reason I decided to start posting on this blog, to try and increase traffic, readership and hopefully sales. But even with my daily posting my traffic continues to drop.

It’s a scary moment for any business owner. When you start worrying about how you are going to make payroll come Friday.

Shortly after starting Geeks on Steroids I turned the running of the business over to my husband Gregg. I was pregnant at the time and have spent the last 4 years raising my two kids. This means I’ve been out of the business for the last 5 years, other than a little posting here and there on forums and blog. To make it worse shortly after I got out of the business an x-employee posted lies about my business, me and my husband online. His thought was that somehow writing bad stuff about us was going to help him start his own web design business. About the same time that was going on a web designer in the porn industry sent Gregg a threating email claiming he would sue us if we didn’t remove the contact form from our website, because he invented the drop down email forms. Gregg told both of them off and both unknowingly headed online where they begin making up lies about us. They meet each other and immediately believed the other was a real client and begin getting all excited as they changed names and hit the forums, blogs and other sites.

In the meantime, Gregg had taken over running Geeks on Steroids and had totally misunderstood how to run a business. We were selling websites for nothing, so if the website has a problem we start losing money. The only way to make money at those prices is doing them in bulk. This means that we need to have about 30 jobs going on and need to be selling new jobs daily, while pushing finished jobs out the door. Gregg is the only one on the phones and he is dealing with new clients, potential clients, old clients and complaints. As you can imagine Gregg feels that every second of his time is important to him and it’s important to the business. If he’s tied up on the phone not only are you holding up the speed at which your website can be finished but you are also keeping him from working on other important things either for yourself, us or another client.

The problem with these types of time restraints is that it makes it impossible to spend the needed time addressing the client’s problems. You are always rushing from one task to the next and are no longer able to do any task correctly.

Rushing an already upset customer off the phone only makes that customer more upset. You see the problem created by the x-employee and then porn designer put us in an extremely delegate situation. When a customer calls with a problem and Gregg loses his temper he escalates that problem and then an already upset customer goes online to see if anyone else has had a problem with the company. Normally that would be the end of it, but when they find something and can leave a post and blow off steam on a topic that already exist it’s hard to resist.

For example one of the first problems we had was with a client from Apple Valley, California. We built and designed her website. Everything was ready to go online but she couldn’t remember the domain name she had purchased, nor where she had purchased it. Greg called and spoke with her and tried to explain to her, but when she did not understand the problem Gregg lost his temper. Gregg has since been trained on how to talk to people. But this lady ends up on the same forum with an x-employee who’s pretending to be an x-client. And since he knows not only everything about our business but also knows everything about this lady, he can lead her anywhere he wants her to go.

Chances are this lady would have never posted anything but because she was upset and was joined by the x-employee with her frustration, she did post. A couple days later we refunded her money, she went back to the website and asked them to remove what she had written, and they refused.

Now I’ve got a friend that just contacted me and she’s got the exact same problems I do. Starting in June her traffic and sales dropped off.

That was about the same time Geeks on Steroids traffic dropped off. She had some contractors that did some work for her write bad stuff about her. This stuff is currently ranking for her name. She’s having the exact same problems I’m currently having with Geeks on Steroids.

But there’s another problem I’ve been having with Geeks on Steroids. When I blog I am all over the place from conversion, search engine optimization, shopping carts, website designs, and the list goes on and on. As I go into the New Year I’m going to be totally changing Geeks on Steroids. I’ve decided to spend next year writing a step by step post 5 times a day on all the things I am doing to get Geeks on Steroids to get it back on track. They will all be written for my friend in hopes of getting her website to making money along with my own.

So let’s getting started on the New Year, because I’d like to break a million this year!

I spent the last two weeks writing some pretty awesome content; hopefully you’ve seen it here on the blog. I wanted to see how much of an increase in traffic I would get if I posted to the website every single day.

Geeks on steroids has been around for about 10 years. It is currently getting some decent traffic but nowhere near what I would like for it to get. Because of the age of the website and the amount of work done on the site in the past I would think the results from my daily posting would be greater than or equal to the average website. However the increase in traffic was so small that I hardly paid attention to it. By posting a couple times a day I was able to increase website traffic by about 10 visitors per day and that was posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.

Needless to say I will continue to post what I am doing here as I attempt to raise traffic to the blog.

The next thing I want to try is commenting on other people’s blogs.

There are only a couple websites that I would do in black. One of those is photographers. Black backgrounds really bring out the colors in photos. Of course the other side is that photos say so much, that the web designer needs to get the design out of the way.

The website needs to be simple and in no way to try outclass the photos. The website should be designed around the photos and be built to bring out the photos.

If you’re looking to hire a photographer everything that matters is in that photo. So the whole website, the whole concept, the whole business needs to be built around that photo. The neat thing about a photographer website is that you can really get into some serious testing with photos.

By trying different photo positions, different photo styles, and different kinds of people in the photos you can figure out which types of photos and where they need to be positioned on the website to get the best response from your website visitors.

Web design photographer websites can be one of the most difficult websites to but at the same time one of the funniest!

If you study history, even before the Internet, people always wanted to be social. It’s built into us, we like to socialize. I don’t know what the next big thing will be. But I can tell you one thing for sure, it will be social.

Social media works online because social media works off-line.

When they invented the telegraph machine the idea was you would put one in each town and then you would have a man run around and deliver the messages to the people. When they invented the telephone it was originally designed for businesses, because no one thought anyone would want a telephone in their home. Motorola said they invented the cell phone long before anyone else, but just couldn’t imagine anyone wanted to carry a phone around with them.

Businesses have always underestimated people’s desire to be social.

The other day had a potential client call me, as we spoke I realized who was.

He was an ex-employee of one of my clients and he had not left on the best of terms. I had to make a decision.

1. Let him know that I knew who he was and that we were not interested in doing the job.
   
2. Pretend like I didn’t know who he was and if the client found out then I could say I didn’t realize who the guy was.
   

But I didn’t want to risk losing the friendship.

Within seconds the decision had been made and I was telling him we weren’t interested in any doing business with him. The fear of losing something you already have is greater than the chance of getting something you don’t have.

Let me see if I can explain that better.

The fear of losing what I’ve already got is greater than the desire for the rewards.

Okay…how about this?

Your website needs to work hard at removing any doubt of losing when someone purchases your product. The way things are worded can also makes a difference. If you have a 90% chance of winning then you are more likely to respond then if you have a 10% chance of losing. Losing scares you more than winning excite you. The way things are worded will affect how you respond as well as photos, colors, layout and content.

Your website design matters and needs to reassure the website visitor every step of the way.