5 days, 5 Tips: Pick the right content for your website

Three weeks ago we shared five tips to help you master the basics of your website. This week’s tips will help you refine what’s on your website already, or give you new ideas for helping your customers understand your products and services.

TIP #1 -- Make sure your customers can contact you. Do you include the basic information customers need to visit your store? An address and a map is a good start. Go a step further and specify whether your entrance is on the corner of two streets or around the back. Do you have the right phone number for customers to call you with questions? If you’ve included an email address, make sure it’s an account you check regularly.

TIP #2 -- Willing to travel...but how far? If you travel to your customers -- like carpet cleaners or massage specialists or pest control specialists do -- be clear about how far you’re willing to travel. Do you only service clients within the city limits? If you deliver, what’s your delivery area? Consider listing a neighborhood, postcode, or street boundaries.

TIP #3 -- Keep it fresh. What information can you include to keep your customers up-to-date about special offers, new products, or events? Consider featuring a new product or offer every week on your homepage so your customers keep coming back to your website. If you update Facebook or Twitter pages, include a link to these on your website. Sydney based Cakes by Nadia does this well.

TIP #4 -- Look your best. Photos help your customers see instantly if you have what they’re after. Show images of your business in action: a stylist cutting hair, a restaurant during dinner service. Keep in mind some basic photo editing tips. If you’re showcasing a product, make sure it’s well lit so your customers can see the details. Crop the photo to keep the focus where you want it. Consider what appears in the background. One restaurant took pictures of some fantastic looking main courses, but there was a dirty stove and a grease-splattered chef lurking in the background.

TIP #5 -- Write clear captions. If you’re including images on your homepage or in a product gallery, make sure you include relevant information in the caption, such as a description of the product with relevant dimensions or weight, how much it costs, and whether it’s available in store or for delivery.

And if you’re reading this but don’t have a website yet, visit Getting Aussie Business Online to get your own domain name and free website.

Posted by Kate Conroy, Product Specialist

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Blog This!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

One of the things I often hear is how challenging it can be to generate ideas for topics to write about. This may be especially true for popular blogs when you feel as though your followers are eagerly awaiting your next post. Sitting down and staring at your computer with the hope of feeling inspired can result in disappointment. 

On my blog for example, I have a mix of posts that were authored be me, and articles that I've discovered elsewhere that I think may be of interest to others. Like many of you, there are times when I have things that I’m eager to write about, and other times when I just want to share something.

If this sounds familiar, you may find the “Blog This!” Chrome Extension of interest. It enables you post to your blog from any web page with just one click. The Extension is available on the Chrome Web Store under the “Blogging” category.

When you install the extension, a button will appear on your browser toolbar. Simply click the button to open Blogger in a new application window.

The new post is pre-populated with a link to the web page you're on, as well as any text you've highlighted on that page. Edit the post to your liking and post it instantly to your blog.

Happy blogging!

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Living Life in a Day and a summer in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the Official YouTube blog

This weekend at the Sydney Film Festival, we in the Australia office saw a single day on earth, a legendary summer to be remembered and the vision of thousands of YouTubers from all over the world on center stage. Along with the Australian premiere of “Life in a Day,” the world was introduced to “We Were Here,” a feature film made by YouTubers about summer in Australia.



From January - April 2011, YouTubers down under submitted their videos to create an archive of events and experiences from a summer not-to-be-forgotten. Everything from sunsets at the beach, bats in the night, to extraordinary events in Queensland were uploaded to form a new visualisation of the Australian summer map. These stories were pulled together by up and coming Australian director Amy Gebhardt, mentored by Dr. George Miller of “Happy Feet”, “Mad Max” and “Babe.”



To celebrate the world premiere of “We Were Here,” we’ll be featuring the film on YouTube for a short time before making its way around the film festival circuit. Have a look at this collective vision of the Australian summer, as told by director Amy Gebhardt:

Together, these two films are milestones in the evolution of radically inclusive film-making that is taking shape all over the world.



Ernesto Soriano III, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Australia recently watched “1000 words for summer.”

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Announcing Blogger Mobile Templates

Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

A few months ago we introduced mobile templates to Blogger in Draft. Today, we’re excited to announce that not only will these templates be available to everyone, we’ll be supporting all 27 Template Designer templates. We invite you to make your blog smartphone-friendly by going to the Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab and enabling the mobile template option.

Blogger mobile templates are mobile-optimized versions of our Template Designer templates. If you are using one of these templates, when you enable the mobile template option your blog will begin rendering using the mobile version of the same variant. Even if you are not using a Template Designer template, or using a heavily-customized version of one, you can still enable this feature to have your blog start rendering in a generic default mobile template that we have created.

Some of our feature highlights:

• Preview: Get a glimpse of how your blog will be displayed by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code.


• Automatic redirection: Viewers will see the mobile version of your blog when accessing from smartphones*.


• Template support: We are now supporting all 27 templates. Some gadgets are also supported**.


• Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or in-line blog ads.


• Comments and videos: Viewers on smartphone devices will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the mobile templates. As always, we would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think through our feedback form, and stay tuned for future improvements.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for this launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.

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The need for speed - and how it drives innovation

The Internet has become an amazing platform for information and communications. The blogs you read (thanks!), the tweets you send and receive, the videos you watch and share, are all testimony to that fact.

The openness of the Internet has fueled an explosion in innovative online services. Basically anyone can access it, anyone can communicate and anyone can upload content. Nevertheless, online services are only as good the weakest link in the chain, which is typically the user's Internet connection, and sometimes a slow connection is simply not good enough.

Let me illustrate this point with a story about a start-up company. The company:
• started out as a web radio company in 1995.
• saw opportunities in using the Internet to make videos available online.
• was acquired in 1999 by a major search engine company for US$5.7 billion.

What’s the company?
If you guessed YouTube, you were wrong! The company was Broadcast.com, and today it simply doesn’t exist. If you search for Broadcast.com you get forwarded directly to Yahoo.com, who paid quite a bit of money for it at the height of the dot com boom

Broadcast.com had a very similar concept and business model to YouTube, but it failed because of an insufficient critical mass of high-speed broadband users to both upload and download content. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of broadband users in the US increased from 5M users averaging 500kbps to 50M users averaging 3Mbps, i.e., 10x the users, 6x the speed. So it has only been in the last few years that Internet speeds have been fast enough to support YouTube’s business model.

There are other examples. Can you remember the name of the first social-networking site? MySpace? Friendster? No, it was Six Degrees, also back in the mid 90s. Their biggest need was photo uploading which could not be done at the time. Imagine a social network without photos!

So there is a direct correlation between Internet speed and delivering on innovation. Simply put, higher speeds enable innovative new services; slow ones don't. Faster connections not only enable applications that require more bandwidth, but also enable users to run more of them at the same time. Best of all though, faster speeds enable applications to run that have not yet been invented. Bring it on!

This is an excerpt of a talk I gave at CeBIT Australia in Sydney earlier this week.

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Add the +1 Button to Your Blog

Posted by Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer

“+1” is often used as a digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” It’s also a way for friends, contacts, and the rest of the world to find great things on Google search. Google launched the +1 button back in March as a way to help share web content and make search more personal and relevant. For more information about the +1 button, you can watch this short video:



Since Google made this feature available, web publishers and bloggers have been asking us how they can add the +1 button to their sites, including Blogger blogs. Today, we’re excited to let you know that you can add the +1 button to Blogger blogs with just a few clicks.

To add the +1 button to your blog, you’ll need to enable Share buttons on Blogger. To do this, go to Design > Page Elements on your Blogger dashboard, find the Blog posts area, click on Edit, and select the “Show Share Buttons” option. If you are already using Share buttons, the +1 button will automatically show up as a new share option.

By adding the +1 button to your blog, you’re providing an easy way for your visitors to recommend your posts to their friends right from your blog. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you blog about biking. One of your readers, Tom, finds your recent post about mountain biking interesting, and clicks on the +1 button. Now, when Tom’s friends and contacts search for biking or mountain bikes and your post appears in Google search results, they might see an annotation showing that Tom +1’d your post, helping your content stand out.

[Example of how a blog post +1’d by visitors appears on the Google search results page]

We hope +1’s will help your blog stand out better in search results, which could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to your blog. Now, that’s indeed a big +1, isn’t it?

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NSW Office of Trade, Business and Industry joins Getting Aussie Business Online

Across the country there are many organisations dedicated to helping small businesses succeed, and one of the topics they’re most often asked about is “should I get online?” That’s why today we’re launching the Partner Program for the Getting Aussie Business Online campaign.

Today the NSW Office of Trade, Business and Industry has joined the Partner Porgram. We’ve worked with them to organise a series of workshops and website clinics at their current Microbiz Week in Sydney. Microbiz Week is dedicated to solo operators and home-based entrepreneurs; they can drop by to learn how to get online and get some personalised advice on how to make the most out of their website.

As a partner of Getting Aussie Business Online you’ll get free tools to help your members or customers be successful online. You’ll also appear as a featured partner on our portal and you will have an opportunity to promote relevant events. Whenever possible, we’ll assist with training and expert speakers.

Check out out our events at Microbiz Week and let us know if you want to become a partner.

Posted by Bora Toska, Small Business Marketing, Google Australia

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