With small businesses still struggling to recover, we have created a central resource with all of the information they need to have a successful presence online.

The Small Business Resource Center is a central, free resource that has all of the tools small businesses need to build a successful online presence.

With less than half of all small businesses having websites, the Small Business Resource Center is designed as a one stop shop for small business owners to either create a website or maximize the presence the already have online.

We have also partnered with Jim Blasingame, the Small Business Advocate®, one of the world’s foremost experts on small business and entrepreneurship, to make his substantial resources available.

To celebrate the kickoff, we are introducing the Small Business Recovery Plan, a sweepstakes giving more than $5,000 in goods and services to small business owners* in need.

• 3 winners will receive new, customized websites
• 10 winners will receive Yola Pro packages with all of the premium tools they need for their websites
• 25 winners will receive Yola Premium Styles
• 100 winners will receive books by Jim Blasingame, the Small Business Advocate® and the Yola Small Business Expert

Enter now for a chance to win!

*Sweepstakes is open to US residents only.

We’ve always thought our support team was fantastic and now it seems that the rest of the world is noticing as well!   Over the past month, the Yola team has received 2 big honors.

First, SupportAwards.org recognized Yola for having the best customer support across all industries, beating out legendary brands like Zappos and Apple.  In addition, our own Monique Viljoen-Platts won the award for the most outstanding support agent.  Go Monique!

Second, Yola was the subject of a Forrester Research study about how we’ve leveraged the strength of our community in Get Satisfaction to scale our customer service as we’ve grown.  The study offers tips for other companies who are looking to improve their customer support though their communities.

Our support team is always working on improving their service and it’s great to see them get this kind of recognition.

Top 5 Sins Business Websites Make Without Knowing It

You’ve designed, developed, and rolled out a great website for your business. Lately, you’ve noticed you’re your business website hasn’t been bringing in much traffic, not to mention sales. You’ve fixed some obvious problems, but your traffic and sales haven’t improved much. What could be wrong?

Your business website may not have any big, obvious things wrong with it, but you could be doing something wrong that you may not know about or have thought of before. Here are the five least known business website boo-boos, and some suggestions to avoid and fix them.

Sin #1: Writing content that focuses on features instead of benefits. Your business website’s content has to both inform customers about your products and services and persuade them to buy from you. Unfortunately, many business websites’ content does a great job of informing customers about the features of their wares, but not so much when it comes to the benefits they’ll realize. For example, if you own a furniture store, mentioning that you have free delivery on your site is a feature. A benefit of free delivery is that customers save on delivery charges and don’t have to make arrangements to pick up furniture on their own, which saves them time, money, and hassle. In other words, visitors want to know “what’s in it for me” and how you benefit them more than your competition.

Sin #2: Not making your business website search engine friendly. The first places your customers often go to find business like yours online are search engines. They’re most likely to visit the sites that appear first in the search results, because they see those sites as most relevant and authoritative. If your site doesn’t appear there, consider search engine optimization, or SEO, to move your site up and make it more visible.

Sin #3: Failing to keep your business website fresh. Imagine two stores: Store X is clean, well-lit, and well-stocked with the latest merchandise. Store Y is dusty, dimly lit, and has only a few of last year’s items on display. Which store are you most likely to buy from? At a bare minimum, you should completely refresh your business website at least once a year. Even better, add fresh content weekly or daily. One way to do this is to have a blog where you post content about your latest activities, offers, and other goodies.

Sin #4: Not having a call to action. Along the same lines of focusing on benefits, your business website should create a sense of urgency in your customers, reinforce the need for your product or service, and direct them toward the task you want them to do. Some ways to do so are to add links to a product page that take customers to the checkout page or to download items or offer Internet-only deals or coupons.

Sin #5: Making it too hard for customers to buy from you. Even customers who want to buy from you won’t buy from you if it takes too many clicks or too much time to buy. The fewer steps from the initial visit to the sale, the better.

When we started out, we wanted to bring you the absolute best website building software on the planet. Since then, we’ve come a very long way, and yet we have so much more we want to offer to you. Today, we have announced the launch of our “Pro” package - which is the next phase of Yola, focusing on the needs of small business customers.

By offering enhanced features and tools, such as Premium Styles, advertising credits & bigger file sizes as part of our Pro package, we are able deliver real value for your money – while continuing to offer an extremely robust free option. In creating this package, we’ve made some changes to our free service. With Yola Free, you can create 5 websites with unlimited pages with 1GB of storage per site. This is more storage than most of our users will ever need, but in order to ensure that we can maintain a reliable and robust offering for everyone, we will charge for usage in excess of that. The Pro version of Yola will allow users to build up to 25 sites with 5GB of storage per site, upload files as big as 100MB, and upload HTML files to their site. In addition, Yola Pro customers will get a Premium Style, removal of the Yola Link and over $50 in advertising and stock photo credits. For more info, see the package details and our FAQs.

As a result of these changes, we are able to focus our development resources on the needs of our small businesses customers who are using Yola to promote their businesses. We’re excited to be launching Yola Pro and are looking forward to feedback on how we can improve our offering.

Vinny Lingham
Founder and CEO

I want to thank all our users and customers for all the input relating to the launch of our recent “Pro” package.  Your feedback is very valuable to us.  As a result of all the interactions and feedback from our users, we’re considering making some changes to our offering to ensure that everyone sees the huge value in what Yola is doing.  Thanks for all the productive & constructive comments.

We are a small company and are very passionate about our product and our users, so it’s important that we offer a paid package to meet the needs of a certain portion of our userbase in order to ensure that we can offer a free package to those who cannot afford to pay for it.

Right now, we’re in the process of gathering data and analyzing it.  Once we complete this, we will be in a better position to understand what your needs are and customize our Pro package to suit the needs of our paying customers, without significantly reducing the value of our free package.  In order to maintain a free service for everyone, we do need a small portion of our users to pay for our premium packages to ensure that it’s financially viable.

We really value our community and trust that you will understand that as a startup company, we need to experiment to figure out what works and eventually come up with a win-win solution.

So, in the interim, please be patient as we deliberate - we are working around the clock to understand your needs better so please keep sending us feedback!

Regards
Vinny Lingham
CEO, Yola

We created the Yola Experts Program to provide resources to web professionals to build their businesses.  With Yola, a web designer can easily build customized sites for clients that are easy to update.

The Yola Experts Program provides:

• Training materials on website building and sales
• Processes to facilitate the creation of quality sites
• An exclusive forum for discussions among web designers
• Marketing collateral to promote the Yola Expert

We are pleased to announce that the Yola Experts Program (YEP) officially moves from pilot phase to public beta today. We have spent the last 3 months with the program in the pilot phase, collecting input from pilot members and their clients. Now that the program is launched in public beta, we are opening it to a wider audience. Please let us know what you think at yep@yola.com.

If you are a web designer, established or recently starting out, we invite you to take a closer look at YEP. Time and time again, the Yola sitebuilder has been referred to by industry experts as an award-winning design tool, which enables quick creation of quality sites.  You’ll find more information on our Join page.

Even with the simplicity and ease-of-use of the Yola sitebuilder, we have found small businesses often do not have the time to create a much needed website. If you are a small business looking for help with a website, or want a redesign of an existing site, please feel free to browse this Directory. There you’ll find the business sites of web designers whose work you can evaluate.  Please remember that these designers are not employees of Yola, and operate completely independently – you will be going directly to them to hire their services.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the pilot phase and for helping us determine the program materials at launch.  We look forward to continuing to expand the program resources and seeing many more high-quality sites designed by Yola Experts.

6 Social Media Secrets for Your Business Website

Have you had someone ask you to be their Facebook friend? Read your favorite blogs? Followed tweets on Twitter? Bookmarked a website on Digg or Delicious? Watched a video on YouTube? Looked at a photo album on Flickr? If so, you’ve just experienced the power of social media.

Social media offers many benefits to your business. It can help you learn about and reach out to your customers, make your business website more visible and relevant to search engines, show that you’re keeping up with technological advances, and promote your business faster and farther than ever before possible.

Want to learn more and get started with social media? Here are six secrets for making the most of social media to promote your business website.

1. Find out what they’re saying about you. The first step in making social media work for you is to find out what people are saying about your business online. Social media sites offer search functions that let you search for content related to your business. If you don’t see anything out there, or what you see isn’t what you want, you can do something about it.

2. Start a blog and post regularly. It’s easy to add a free blog to your business website. You can use your free blog to talk about what your business is doing, link to other blogs in the same or similar industries and even offer promotions via your blog.

3. Make a Facebook Fan Page. A Facebook Fan Page lets you share all kinds of information about your business with people who love business. It helps you find the people most interested in your business by letting them find you.

4. Post photos and videos. Pictures and videos speak louder than words. Flickr and YouTube are good places to put videos and pictures of your product or service, as well as how-to videos and commercials.

5. Leverage links and bookmarks. Social media sites let you link back to your business website. This increases the number and quality of links to your business website, which increases its credibility and relevance in the eyes of your human audience and automated search engines bots. Another way to leverage links is with social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious. Add a button to your web pages to let visitors bookmark them easily.

6. Advertise on social media sites. One of the newest frontiers in Internet advertising is using social media sites. While this form of advertising is still new, and advertising on these sites is not as sophisticated as other forms of online advertising, it allows you to target your advertising to visitors most likely to visit and buy from your business website.

With the Yola Widgetbox Gallery, it’s easy for you to leverage the power of social media on your business website. Making a business website with Yola is easy, fast, and free! Yola is ready to help you make a great site for your business.

After a fantastic event at SOCAP09, we’re pleased to share that Yola’s Kiva Lending Team contributed $7,500 to support entrepreneurs around the world.  Starting today, Yola will be matching that amount and we need your help to identify great Kiva entrepreneurs who need funding.  Here’s the plan:

Yola will be accepting Kiva loan recommendations via Twitter so start following @yola today.  To nominate an entrepreneur, post a message like this one from your Twitter account:

@yola fund this Kiva entrepreneur: Beatrice is a 25-year old dress maker in the Ashanti region of Ghana bit.ly/8Safr

Twitter only allows 140 characters but that should still leave enough room to share something interesting about each of the entrepreneurs. Don’t forget to include a link to each entrepreneur’s page and @yola so we see your recommendation.

For more information on Kiva, read about them here.  And for an interesting article on SOCAP - which Yola and Kiva co-sponsored last week - take a look at this article from the Economist.

Now let’s get lending!

Congratulations to everyone who has participated so far in the Yola Makeover Challenge.  Your designs look great!

For those who are still working on their Makeover submissions, the deadline is Monday, August 24th at 11:59 PST.  The winning designer will receive $2,000 so don’t miss out on this opportunity.

Best of luck and spread the word to those who might be interested!

As we approach the kickoff of SOCAP09, we’d like to invite our users to join Yola’s Kiva Lending Yeam.  With Kiva, the Yola community can make loans directly to entrepreneurs around the globe.  It’s fun.  It’s easy.  And it’s a powerful way to help real people achieve economic independence, improving life for themselves, their family, and their community.

Join us today!