Category Archives: service

business, Consultancy, service

Is Your Blog/Business Getting Noticed – Your Internet Plan

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This being my three hundreth blog post I am going to publish an Internet Marketing Plan in several parts. With so many sites competing for traffic you have to stand out. What I hope to do with this series is to give my readers a clear strategy to building/marketing an e-commerce website and getting traffic to those carefully crafted blog posts. I will be publishing a step for step on how to best do that .

Goals

One needs to start somewhere and I am sure that if you are reading this you already have an idea of what you want to create. Goals are intimately related to every aspect of your business plan. You’ll want to massage your goals again and again as you research various aspects of your marketing plan. Goals ought to be both financial and non-financial and be related to the length of your marketing plan’s timeline. Below are some examples:

Non-financial goals:

To grow steadily in market share each year from the current ? to 32% over five years.

To grow the percentage of sales from our store’s website from 5% to 45% over five years.

Move from hobby site to a profit centre within two years.

Year one: add e-commerce capability.

Year two: develop an advertising revenue from both website and Rss/e-mail newsletter.

Increase the number of visitors and page views per a month, respectively over a period of six months using a combination of traffic-producing strategies.

Redesign the site using Web 2.0, E-commerce technology. Make the site visually attractive, interactive, and easy to maintain, over the next 9 months.

How to do it – Months 1-3

Links

  • Inbound links not only bring appropriate traffic to one’s site but also improve rankings in certain search engines, such as Google.
  • Find informational sites on writing, on small business and on marketing and submit pages from your site as suggested links.
  • Discussion groups; Join and participate in about six discussion lists/forums (topical discussions carried on among subscribers by e-mail). Serve as a moderator of one of these. Of course, there are lots more where I can have an influence and attract subscribers, visitors and clients.
  • Post something related to this month’s new product in each of my regular discussion haunts.

Web site and infrastructure

A web site is an ever-evolving entity. It is constantly changing, and needs adding to and improving.

  • Make sure every article and feature at my site contains appropriate keyword metatags, which help for some search engines’ rankings.
  • Revise or remove outdated information.
  • Create and install “e-mail a friend about this page” utility.
  • Install bookmarking tools
  • Ponder changes I could make to convert more visitors to buyers.

Starting a Member Web Site?

Setting up a member website where distributors and sale agents can meet on line and gain product knowledge, and discuss products in a closed website that is only accessible to selected members. Websites like this can give a big input into you business. Such websites like this can be set up using technology from http://www.ning.com/ or www.drupal.com

Search engines

  • Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic which search engines are sending to you- where your visitors are coming from and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
  • Search engines can provide a wealth of information , in particular when used in relation to competitors website.

Publicity

  • Decide on 6-12 industries to target for the rest of this year and compile PR contact lists for each niche.
  • Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more Web site traffic and more RSS/Newsletter subscribers.

Direct mail

  • Send Webcards of your business to executive directors of professional organizations for selected niche markets.

Product development

  • Convert existing special reports into downloadable products and use them for selling material for users/distributors. Find third party outlets on the internet to sell your products.
  • Persuade appropriate site owners to sell course/product knowledge from their site in exchange for a commission.
  • Convert special information into audiotapes and make them downloadable

Posting content

  • Write, Post and Convert press releases into an articles
  • Post Press releases & Internet Marketing articles (previously written) at free content sites.

Is there anything you would add?

Check back soon for part 2

business, Consultancy, E-Commerce, service

Understanding Spam – How it Works and who it Benefits

For the longest time I could not understand spam. I failed to see the benefits of a promised breast enlargements or a new Gold watch that is not offered on Amazon. To put it frankly I considered it a total waste of everybody’s time. Why did some yo-yo sit there comprising emails that make no sense with links that would never be clicked upon or is that the case?

For the average educated person one can assume there is no interest in spam. The Spam market is for the poorly educated who most probably have little or no education. It is this type of user who is the most susceptible to this type of marketing. (third world countries) Unfortunately the spammer cannot differentiate from the email address the country of origin. (maybe we should start using country domains on our emails)

Spam exists because it does achieve it objects. 17 percent of the emails sent out will be clicked upon on and presumable a slightly smaller percentage will buy the products offered.

Of course due to the low cost of this form of marketing it is very attractive marketing for certain products. I was going to write companies here but I know any western company caught associating with this would face legal proceedings.

There is millions of pound spent on anti spam software, hundreds of thousand man hours on security. Is it effective? Well yes intill we have the next round where it starts again each side trying to better the other in spam wars.

So how do we defeat Spam? Educate People so that they know better would be my choice. It might solve one or two other problems too.

For Further reading on this topic check out Bruce Schneier excellent article http://www.schneier.com/essay-143.html

Consultancy, Relationship, sales, service

Who Is Your Audience?

I am sure there are some people out there who interested in widgets and can spend twenty years talking about them. That is great if I need help to understand widgets I will go and visit a blogger or a professional who can help with that. The widget blogger has a defined audience he knows who it is and the widget lovers know who he is. One could say a perfect Marriage.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it. I have a wide lens and am interested in wide variety of subjects. Which is fine. For each subject I run a blog helping my users in just that area. The problem is business development is quite a big subject area, possible too big. So should I just focus on a few niches like sales, or telephone sales?

Then comes the second question how to market to that market. If I have chosen my area than maybe face to face marketing is better than using twitter or plurker. But Selling to the converted is easier than selling to the newbie.

Food for thought indeed?

 

brand, business, E-Commerce, service

Do You Trust The Internet?

Yesterday I came across to two glaring examples of misinformation. One was on the News vine site where someone had posted a story about presidential hopeful Obama. Without wanting to focus on the story as it has been removed It was quite clearly unfounded. But it does show how important it is that we remember the old motto believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see. Of course a web 2.0 social community will provide some form of control and editorship in place of where you may have a lone blog spouting misinformation.  
That is the problem in general with speculation, rumour and the internet. There is an awfully lot of information out there that probably is not correct but we have no idea how much. The number of dodgy e-commerce businesses that I have seen is really amazing. All sold by promises that they can never hope to achieve. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is on the internet. If there is none of the usual tracking methods such as feedback, users comments, transaction history then be very suspicious.
brand, business, Marketing, News, sales, service

Has Google Become Too Big?

Everybody loves Google or so the saying goes. A few years ago if you wore a Google T shirt you would be greeted by smiles as you walked down the street. But that was a couple of years ago. The market place has changed with Google now controlling at least 75 percent of the search engine market and respectively the same amount of advertising and they now hold a very secure position. Fundamentally Google has not done anything wrong. It is just that you have no choice when it comes to advertising. Small and big e-commerce sites all use Google advertising. For example Tech crunch , Digg etc.

Effectively there is no competition which means that Google can dictate terms and conditions and have a very big say over who does what in the market. If a website owner was to say the wrong thing they could find themselves on the other side of the fence with no advertisers. Now the much talked about takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft is the first step in readdressing this problem. I am still not comfortable though. Both of these companies have such a large influence and control of the most dynamic communication medium. Is it time that we should start to worry?

Maybe not just yet, but the signs are there. While we have all become Google search converts. What would it take for some of us to start using another search engine? The array of products that Google provides are truly amazing. From Gmail to Youtube all for no cost to the user and paid for by advertising. But as the old saying goes Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is Google too powerful?