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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Have you ever thought about starting an internet business? It could really be as simple as opening a Yahoo Store, or on the other end of the scale, as complicated as building your own, professional, dynamic, e-commerce website. Regardless of your approach to internet business, to ensure the success of your business, you need to know of, and apply the following 7 key points.

1) Demand–

Lets say for instance, that you have a really amazing product, and a website that looks like a million dollars–but what if you have no demand for your product? In saying that, you aren’t going to be left with a sword in a gun fight. In the online world, there are many ways to advertise and generate demand for your product. There are the choices and possibilities of advertising in Ezines, joint ventures, affiliate programs, referrals, and even as simple as encouraging word of mouth. Remember, without demand, what do you have? No sales. Where does a business without sales end up?

2) Order–

Its all well and good to have visitors to your website, but they don’t do anything for us unless they become a customer. However, its not as easy as it first appears. Now, once your visitor has turned into a customer, you need to ensure that them becoming an actual customer, is as easy as possible. A straightforward and simple ordering process will do wonders for your business. Less clicks and less time it takes for a customer to complete his or her order, the better it is.

3) Payment–

If there was any part of your business that you would not want to get wrong, it would be this–how payment is actually being transferred between you and your customers. Generally, when taking into account online businesses, the most popular method is credit card transactions. Not only are they an easier and quicker method than most other forms of payment, but it also goes to a psychological level. Credit Cards exude a “buy-now, think-later” attitude. Taking this into account, as a business, you’d be making more profit and sales if you accepted credit cards. However, in saying that, it would also be a wise decision to use alternative methods of payment. After all, the easier it is for your customer to find ways to pay you for your product, you’ll see a more efficient increase both in sales and customer numbers.
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A few weeks ago, I presented myself with a challenge – to do some Internet sleuthing and get to the bottom of this perplexing condition that newly search engine optimized websites (that’s SEO) face known as the Google Sandbox. At times this endeavor made me empathize with Captain Ahab chasing his white whale, but unlike Ahab, I’m not going to meet a watery grave today. ICMediaDirect.com provides SEOs with life jackets – so I got that going for me, which is good. The obsession to confirm, pin down, and counteract the effects of this Sandbox is proving as difficult and elusive as any whale hunt I’ve ever been on.

Before explaining to the uninitiated just what the Sandbox is exactly, or what it’s purported to be, it warrants mentioning that Google officially neither confirms nor denies its existence. So from the word “go” we wade into mystery. We’re forced to consider the Sandbox as either a modern quasi-myth of the Computer Age or an actual no man’s land created by Google where SEOs are pitted against the machine. Kinda cool, right? This would be a limbo, an undesired waiting room for web properties seeking quality recognition from Google’s Search Engine Results Pages are, as I like to say, unSERPable. Incidentally, the stakes are very high, too, since higher rankings mean increased revenue.

The effects of the Sandbox are not in question. Websites listing with Google are simply beat down in their rankings for no apparent rhyme or reason, thus leaving the afflicted with no avenue of redress but time itself – no magic linking is known to spring sites out. (Though it’s whispered that influential friends at Google can pull favors.) New websites and overhauled existing websites (often reworked, ostensibly, for better rankings) are its primary “victims”. It was first noticed or acknowledged in October, 2004. No one outside of Google knows exactly how or why sites are Sandboxed.

Here are some Sandbox basics: it only happens to English speaking websites; it is a “.com”-only phenomenon, no “.edu”s, “.us”s, or “.org”s need worry; it could last from weeks to a year before release into deserving results rankings; its effects are seen with Google only, so you can rank high on Yahoo and be in the Sandbox (or even rank poorly – I have little info handy on poorly optimized websites mired in suspected Sandboxes); the Sandbox is by no means universal and not automatic. It’s a crapshoot.

There is a minority of SEOs who think that the Sandbox is the end result of better algorithms and not and specially created punishment. Believing, as I do, that Google has the best search results, this isn’t implausible.
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Readers on the internet nowadays, seem to be starved for information especially free information. Blog and Ezine publishers are constantly on the look out for good, original and informative articles they can add to their websites or ezine publications.

Article writers therefore have an open source of hungry readers and publishers ready to pick up their written masterpieces. The article writers have the capacity via the authors profile and signature line to advertise their primary business websites though hyper-linked key words so attaining free and targeted internet promotion for their websites.

In many cases an article can be written within a few hours, and can easily be viewed by many hundreds if not thousands of eyes over it’s lifetime. Articles have a long life span, and assuming you have chosen to write the article yourself, it is a very effective form of free advertising imparting yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field of writing as well as giving publicity to your primary business.

You may also hire ghost writers, or if you are more comfortable speaking an article, you can hire transcribers who will put your spoken words into written form, easing the labor for you.

4 tips to help you produce better articles are:

Choose Your Headline Wisely.
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Most business owners do not explore new marketing strategies until they experience a sharp decline in their revenue. Avertising campaigns are not evergreen. They evolve and grow, improve and degenerate. Most work at home, or small business owners shell out a substantial amount of money for a good ad campaign and then let it run dry.

The first strategy for success is found in the way you view the advertising campaign’s purpose. A good advertising campaign needs to do three things. First, it needs to collect data on the market. Who is buying. What is hot, and what is not.

Second, it needs to collect vital information about the people who make a purchase from your website. This can be compiled into a profile that helps you determine how to best reach your target market. It is a market research tool that helps determine what types of advertising works, at what times of the year.

Third, it should ‘brand’ your name and logo. A successful advertising campaign will imprint the company name and logo onto people’s subconscious. This increase their ‘decision to buy’ response when they visit the website

For example, online shopping increases dramatically just before Christmas, but only if the payment gateway is fast and easy to use. However, if the user must leave the website to use the payment gateway, like paypal.com uses, then the statistics do not change. However, the payment gateway does not effect sales in the summer.

You’ll notice that no aspect of an advertising campaign is to sell the product – that is your website’s job. A successful marketing campaign manager never measure’s an advertising campaign’s success based on sales.

Large corporations will tell you that a successful advertising campaign may run for months before the results appear on the income statement.

The advertising campaign should be reviewed often, and compared to new methods, in the hunt for new ‘hot markets.’ However, hot markets burn out very quickly. The whirlwind of change that continuously sweeps through the marketplace is a powerful balancer. It gives small businesses an edge over the elephants that move slow and react to change in months, not weeks.

This is true, but there needs to be balance. Always keep 80% of the marketing budget in the tried and true marketing methods – even if they do not offer the big rewards. The other 20% of the marketing budget is free for exploration of new advertising mediums. Don’t discount anything. Look at the fortunes made when youtube.com and myspace.com skyrocketed to fame. For a few months, advertisers were raking in millions.

It is also important to keep a finger on the pulse of the population. There is a time to brand your company, and a time to break away from the pack and create a new image for yourself like Calvin Cline did with their underwear commercials.

The important thing to remember is to focus. Calvin Cline didn’t try to sell underwear to all age groups, they focused on a narrow niche. Work at home and small business owners need to learn this lesson – niche marketing is the secret to making millions.

The potential is expansive. Clever competition and new technology should be seen as marketing tools, not threats. Staying on the cutting edge is all about innovation and creativity. Money is no longer the #1 element to success. Many small businesses are becoming international on small budgets.