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Archive for the ‘Small Business Internet Marketing’ Category
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
Marketing Pilgrim reports on a survey by ChannelAdvisor.
MP concluded the following based on the study results:
- Retailer value is more important than brand recognition
- Price is the leading factor that determines whether consumers will purchase from you or your competition online
- Free shipping is also highly influential in determining buying decisions
- Third on the list is trusted seller status, but this only makes sense on sites like Amazon and eBay
- Fourth – discount coupons; I consider this one related to price
In other words, if it comes down to a premium brand versus small Mom and Pop and you can offer the same or similar product for less while providing greater value, guess who wins? Yep, you do. Small business rules!
Of course, Marketing Pilgrim also points out that 83% of online consumers are influenced by product reviews.
So how do we put this all together? What’s the take away? If you can drop your price lower to beat the competition and still profit, offer free shipping and get positively reviewed on well trafficked websites while building your trust as an online retailer, you’ll sell a lot of product.
Tags: online retail, pricing, product reviews
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Online marketing is becoming increasingly more important as companies struggle with competition and the costs of doing business. In many cases, marketing your business online is cheaper and easier than doing it off line. But it’s not a make it or break it deal. In other words, if you fail online it doesn’t mean your business will fail.
Glen at Viperchill wrote a great blog post on how to make a living at self-employed Internet marketing. But as a small business owner, can you apply his principles to your business?
You aren’t trying to earn a full-time living from Internet marketing. You’re just trying to market your off line business online and make it profitable. Is that possible? It sure is. Here are a few tips from Glen’s post that you should consider for your own business.
- Write a mission statement. No one else needs to know what it is. However, if you have a business that caters to customers then it might be helpful to state your mission on your website and other marketing collateral. Still, whether you share it or not, a mission statement can keep you focused.
- Identify what you’re good at and drive it home. That is, focus on your strengths and exploit them till you succeed.
- Instead of wasting time on nonessential tasks, identify what the most important tasks are and do those every day.
- If you don’t start you’ll never finish.
- If you are self employed it might be difficult to establish working hours, but you should do it any way. Even if you don’t have specific client work starting out, establish your working hours and make sure you work on something during those hours.
- Don’t go on spending sprees and waste all your profits.
- Don’t let yourself down. Your needs are important too. Don’t let others take you away from what you know is important.
- Don’t put on airs or pretend to be bigger than you are. People do business with people, not nameless, faceless enterprises.
- Remember that anything you do online is marketing. It will have a public consequence.
- If you have a problem with something then, chances are, someone else does too. Fix the problem and capitalize on it.
- This is easy to do online. Become a member of your own market. If you are selling something then network with others who sell something similar or who do business in your niche. In the Internet age, markets are conversations.
- Set launch dates for yourself and stick to them. Meet your own deadlines.
- Set your own rules. You are the boss. If something doesn’t work for you then don’t do it. On the other hand, if something does work for you and no one else is doing it then do it any way. Self employment means you are doing things your way. Even online, you are the boss of your own business.
In this day and age, marketing a small business means marketing both online and off line. Learn to integrate them successfully and you’ll do well no matter what you are doing.
Tags: online marketing, small business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Online small businesses are not quite the same as their offline cousins. In the world of bricks and mortar, customers find your business through a variety of channels with the most important being walk/drive by traffic. We don’t talk about location for no reason – it’s highly important. Online businesses don’t have that same advantage. To make small business internet marketing even harder is the fact that the goal posts are continually moving, search engines are continually changing their ranking factors, and new marketing channels seem to come and go on a daily basis.
What is good news for online businesses is the growth in numbers when it comes to internet use and internet shopping. Consumers are now turning to the internet to help them find bricks and mortar businesses and this can have interesting results. What if they find your online business while looking for a bricks and mortar business? Can you convince them to deal online rather than driving down the road to make an instant purchase?
That is just one of the hurdles that online businesses have to jump – yet strangely, they are slowly winning that contest. Consumers are being swayed to pay today and receive next week when they could walk down the road, perhaps pay a dollar or two more (sometimes less) and receive the same product in their hand.
Social media marketing, reputation building, search engine optimization – I could go on. They are all coming together to have a huge impact and for small business, its great news. The one thing that has become evident is that size is irrelevant online. A small business can be just as successful as a big business, often more so. Where small businesses struggle to compete in a bricks and mortar world, they are finding success online.
The online business world is continually evolving and growing. As an online business owner, you cannot use a set and forget strategy any more (if you ever could). You need to stay up-to-date with the latest in marketing opportunities, the latest changes to the way search engines handle search, and the way consumers interact online. If you’re reading this, at least you’re in the right place to find that information. Small business internet marketing – it’s become a niche in it’s own right.
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 6 Comments »
Friday, August 6th, 2010
There are several reasons why, if you are a small business owner, you might want to invest in multiple domain names.
- You can market toward different segments of the same population
- As a competitive business strategy
- To capture more traffic
- To prevent yourself from losing traffic
- Reputation management
There may be more reasons than these. But if you are a small business owner then you might consider some of these reasons for investing in multiple domain names for your business.
Marketing to different segments – Let’s say you sell childrens toys. You might have the website childrenstoys.com. You could also purchase girlstoys.com and boystoys.com and sell only toys that appeal to each gender. By marketing to different segments of your target market this way you could build your business with more diversity and get more.
Competitive business – If you own childrenstoys.com then you might also buy up childrenstoys.net and childrenstoys.biz to prevent your competition from getting them. Point them to your main website just in case anyone types in those domains directly into their browser window.
Capture more traffic – Along the same lines as marketing to different segments, multiple domain names targeting the same keywords could bring you business on both websites.
Prevent losing traffic – People typing in your domain name directly could misspell it. If that happens they’ll get an error page – unless you own the misspelling too. Redirect that misspelling to your main website to recapture what might have been lost traffic.
Reputation management – This especially works well for brands. Instead of letting competitors, angry customers or disgruntled former employees from buying up domain names similar to yours and attacking you, buy them up and put content on them for reputation enhancement purposes.
As long as the World Wide Web is the wild, wild west you’ll need to look out after your own interests. Owning multiple domain names can be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy.
Tags: internet marketing, small business
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Sunday, August 1st, 2010
In the past few weeks I’ve read quite a few articles claiming that content farms are lowering the quality of content on the Internet. ReadWriteWeb wrote one. Illuminea has one. And Outspoken Media has one.
It seems that the big publishers are all condemning the content farms so imagine my surprise when WebProNews came out and defended them. But who’s right?
Are content farms bad for quality all around or will competition increase the level of quality over time? Frankly, I’m skeptical of both arguments.
Content farms, like most things, have their pros and cons. There may be some diminished quality as a result of these websites existing. After all, if Demand Media is producing 7,000 new web pages per day then they can’t all be spectacular. But, chances are, they aren’t all bottom-feeding crap either. Most, I’d suspect are somewhere in between. But does it really matter?
Quality is often in the eye of the beholder. If someone is looking for information on how to fix a leaky faucet, they aren’t particularly concerned with whether or not you’ve won a Pulitzer. They do care if you can help them solve their problem. So if you’re an expert in a particular field then the so-called content farms could be a way beyond your own website for you to share your expertise.
Tags: content, online marketing
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
If your target audience consists mostly of women then, according to this article by WebProNews, you might want to consider social media marketing. Consider the following statistics:
- 75.8% of all women online visited social networking sites in May 2010
- Women view 57% of the pages on social networking sites
- Women account for 56.6% of the time spent on social sites
- 94.1% of Latin American women are on social networking sites
- 91% of women in North America are on these sites
- 85.6% of the female population in Europe visited social networking sites
- Globally, women spend 8% more time online than men
- Women spend 20% more time on retail sites than men
In all the categories mentioned, women held a higher percentage than men. It seems that it might be easier to reach and market to women online than men. If your product or service appeals to women then it is clear that online marketing works. Social media, in particular, could be a marketing channel you should consider pursuing.
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, July 26th, 2010
It seems that the more things change (online) then the faster they change. As Huey Lewis once crooned:
The more something changes
The more it stays the same
Online marketing is in a constant state of flux and because of that you can be pretty sure that it will always be in a state of flux. Things are never the same and never will be. Ever since the early days of search engine marketing and directory submissions, marketing a business online has been about finding out where the traffic is and tapping into it.
But these days that’s a little bit more difficult to do. When there were only 3,000 websites online you could hazard a better guess about where your couple of hundred potential clients would come from. But with millions of websites online and millions of potential customers, there is a heck of a lot more to think about. And you must be willing to say no to a few things.
Heading to where the latest fad hangout is might or might not be a pay off for you. Does your target market hang out there? If not then you shouldn’t either, no matter how popular it is. On the other hand, if that’s where your target market is then you’d better be there.
Chasing traffic is the name of the game. But not just any traffic. It’s got to be the right traffic for your website. And you can be sure that the Internet one year from now will be a completely different place than it is now. Don’t fear it, embrace it. And change with it.
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Amazon has announced that e-book sales has outpaced print book sales. So, how significant is that news?
I think it’s very significant, but it isn’t omni-significant. In other words, print books aren’t going to be extinct any time soon.
Note that these sales do not represent a book-by-book comparison of print-to-digital sales ratios. It’s an aggregate total. For the past three months, Amazon.com has sold more e-books than print books. That doesn’t include free book downloads.
The real significance of this news is that Amazon has been selling print books for 15 years. It’s been selling digital books, or e-books, for less than three years. Given that, I think we can expect that print book sales will start to decline while e-book sales will start to increase. This may be gradual over time (how gradual is anyone’s guess), but it’s a reasonable expectation.
So does that mean you should publish an e-book? Should you publish an e-book and forget about the print book? Yes. And No.
Yes to you should publish a book, e-book or otherwise, if you have something to say. You should publish it as an e-book if you want to reach the Kindle market (and I think the Kindle market is quite different than your ordinary print book sales market). But if your book is truly worth publishing then you should consider publishing as a print book as well.
I’m looking forward to the future of e-books. Aren’t you?
Tags: Amazon Kindle, e-books
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
There comes a time in the life of every small business Internet marketer that begs a difficult question (or a simple one). Today I discovered three very important questions for Internet marketers of the small business variety. These questions are right up there with “what’s the meaning of life” so if you have a little time on your hands, let’s get philosophical.
- What Does It Mean To “Go Google?” - Asked of John Battelle. Apparently, it means to change from being a Microsoft freak to being a Google geek. Or something like that. What it doesn’t mean – any more (or maybe it does in part) – is to search for something. Maybe they’re afraid of being out-Googled by Bing.
- What Is The Value Of A Link? – This one is a bit more important than the first question. It’s also a little bit more difficult to answer. But Vertical Measures makes a worthy attempt with this infographic. Discovered by Gab Goldenberg. A few things to note:
- Link building methods that used to be on everyone’s list (ie. content distribution, blog and forum comments, reciprocal links) are now the easiest and lowest valued of all.
- The highest valued links are the hardest to get.
- A PR10 link is worth more than 28 million average links (really?).
- And the truly interesting part: A PR1 link is worth 11 average links (hmmm, that one takes some contemplation).
I’d be interested to know just how they came up with those values. Wouldn’t you?
- Do You Need A Private Data Center? – Twitter does. Personally, I think once you get to a certain size then it’s inevitable. A business has needs. And the last thing you really want is for your business to have hiccups due to server failures and outages. That’s happened a lot to Twitter and if it doesn’t get under control then Twitter could be one of those “businesses” that goes by the wayside.
So ask yourself now, Do I need a private data center?
Have you discovered the meaning of life yet? How about your small business Internet marketing strategy? Discovered it yet?
Tags: google, link building, servers
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Everyone has competition. If you do business online then you’ll have competition online. And here’s the sad part: Your online competition could be completely different than your off line competition. That will mean that your business will face more competition, not less, for being online. Congratulations!
Sarcasm aside, it’s time to see competition as a good thing. Sure, your competition can do some things better than you. But you can also do some things better than them. Your goal as a small business owner is to take inventory of your strengths and see where you best fit into the marketplace.
HINT: Take inventory for both your online business and your off line business.
When you take an off line business online you are essentially starting a new business. You are not just adding an extension of your existing business. You are entering a whole new market. Is there some crossover? Yes. Your current customers will likely find you online. But you will also likely find new customers online that never would have found you off line. At least, you hope so. That is the goal.
For these reasons, I always tell small business owners who go online to do business to study the competition online and figure out what your niche is – online. Your online niche could be a lot different than your off line niche. But you need to find it.
Tags: competition, online marketing
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »
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