Walmart Forced me to Shut Down my Online Businesses!
By · CommentsI’ve been talking with a lot of online retailers since Walmart announced last week that it will be offering free shipping on online orders.
OMG… talk about panic!
“I can’t compete with Walmart, I can’t afford to offer free shipping!”
“I’m not going to make any sales over Christmas, I might as well close my site”
What I load of cr@p!
For starters if you’re trying to compete with Walmart on price, then you’re right, you might as well go ahead and close your doors. Walmart sells a tonne of “stuff” and a lot of online businesses sell something that someone like Walmart or Amazon also sells. So if we’ve never been able to compete on price then how come I make sales everyday for “stuff” that the big boys also sell and generally for less?
Don’t Compete, Differentiate
You need to formulate your marketing strategy. Here are few ways you CAN compete with the big boys:
- Be the expert in your niche, offer specialized information, advice and after sales service
- Offer other incentives, if you’re selling a digital camera, maybe throw in a memory card or case
- Don’t sell the stuff Walmart sells!
- Offer more selection within your niche. Say you are selling Exercise Equipment, try to carry some of the higher end stuff that consumers won’t find somewhere like Walmart
- Answer the phone – have tried to find a telephone number for Walmart online… they suck. Offer that personal service that you know their not going to get at Walmart
These are just a few ideas but there are many more advantages that you can leverage as a smaller online retailer.
In a nut shell, what I’m saying is stop whinging and whining and make some money online this Christmas. It’s certainly not the end of the world when a big player like Walmart appears to offer something big.
Thumbs up for Facebook Deals
By · CommentsLast week social media giant Facebook announced a new service added to Facebook Places. With immediate effect, Facebook users can look for local deals based on where they are.
You’ll see 4 different types of Deals:
- Individual deals for a discount, free merchandise or other reward
- Friend deals where you and your friends claim an offer together
- Loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to a place
- Charity deals where businesses pledge to donate to a cause when you check in.
These deals are obviously not from Facebook but from merchants. Already there are a plethora of businesses are already on board including:
Chipotle: Giving its Facebook guests two entrees for the price of one.
Gap: Giving blue jeans to the first 10,000 customers to claim their deal.
The Palms: Upgrading your room or extending your weekend at the hotel another night–on the house.
Texas Tech: Giving away 100 pairs of tickets.
The deal service available in the latest iPhone app. If you are an Android user you can access deals via touch.facebook.com.
How does Facebook Deals work?
Well it couldn’t be easier:
- Look for the yellow icon when go to check in using Places
- Click on the deal to claim it
- Show it to the cashier to get the deal
- Claimed deals will show on your News Feed (viral marketing at it’s best – your friends see your deals and get the chance to do the same)
Facebook is presenting a massive opportunity for local businesses with these deals. If you would like some help implementing your Facebook campaign, just give me a call 1-580-504-9561.
On Wednesday 10/6/10 Facebook announced 3 new features that the company says will give its users more control over the information they share and receive on the social networking site.
Groups
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was talking at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Mark said that the biggest change was a new feature called “Groups”. The 500 million users of Facebook will now be able to group their friends so they can share specific information with specific groups, work friends, college friends, family, etc.
Under the new feature called Groups, users can create sets of friends and share information solely with that social circle. He said the solution stems from what Facebook has done with Photos, where 95% of users on Facebook are tagged in Photos as a result of friends tagging them.
The groups feature will allow users form online havens around a discreet circle of people just as they do in the real world.
Members will then be able to share information with people specific to that group.
“There’s a huge amount of sharing people want to do,” said Zuckerberg, who said users were inhibited because there weren’t enough privacy settings or people didn’t want to annoy all their friends with information that might not apply to them. .
Analyst Ray Valdes of Gartner called groups “a major milestone in a very long road that represents part of the ongoing evolution of our social connections”
Download Your Information
Another feature called “Download Your Information” will allow users to download everything they have ever posted to the site, such as photos, status updates, messages and wall posts.
In the past Facebook has been criticized for not allowing users to access their own information.
“Philosophically, that’s a core thing that people want from Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “People want to be able to easily take their information to another service and do that in safe way.”
New Dashboard
A brand new dashboard was revealed that will allow users to see all of the apps that they use on one page. In addition it will also allow users to monitor and manage all their Facebook tools, like privacy settings and deleting unwanted apps.
New Study Shows Retailers Turning to Social Media
By · CommentsAs you know at SearchMarketingWeb.com we’ve long been advocates of Social Media. We use social sites like Facebook and Myspace as well as the video sharing sites and article marketing sites for our Search Engine Domination Strategies. Well it looks like the big boys are finally catching on and implementing Social Media as part of their online strategies.
Below is an except from Internet Retailer, you can read the full report on their site:
The 2009 holiday shopping season was perhaps the roughest in the history of online retailing. The wretched economy caused consumers to rein in spending and conduct more comparison shopping, hunting for the best deals.
Changing consumer behavior throughout 2009, in turn, caused retailers to try new selling and branding techniques, or augment existing ones. Three areas of change included the use of social networking, online video and streamlined purchasing, according to The E-tailing Group Inc.’s annual study of 100 online retailers.
60% of the retailers in the study featured on their e-commerce sites links to social network presences, notes Lauren Freedman, president of the research and consulting firm. Freedman will be speaking at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference, Feb. 15-17 in Orlando, FL, in a session entitled Lessons from Holiday 2009.
Right now social is very top of mind for merchants, but it’s an R&D issue to understand how social works, what its role is in driving customer engagement and what it will deliver in return on investment,” Freedman says. “The biggest impact social will have will be on engagement with the brand. I am skeptical about its ability to deliver sales, which in the end is what marketing has to do.”
The study also found that 61% of retailers present video guides—for branding or how-to, for example—throughout their sites. This is up from 49% in 2008.
“Last year there was more use of video at the experiential level from a branding perspective like a fashion show or leveraging YouTube to show how to decorate your house for the holidays, as well as video on product pages,” Freedman says. “Video is a growth area. The customer likes it, it’s not expensive to produce and present, and it gives customers more confidence to buy.”
In conclusion: If you are not using Social Media as part of your online marketing arsenal you are being left behind, it’s not too late but you need to start doing something. If you are already using Social Media, then now is the time to kick things up a gear and start dominating the search engine results for your market.
Websites are dead long live the blog!
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Gone are the days when blogs were just for geeks and places for people to rant about a topic or their life in general.
Nowadays it has become harder to tell if you are looking at a regular website built with HTML or a WordPress blog. Blogs now look and feel like a regular website.
There are two main types of blogs:
Hosted Blogs – you, (or your webmaster), install blogging software like WordPress on a web hosting account.
Free Online Blogs – services like Blogger and BlogSpot offer the option of opening an online blogging account on their servers.
Hosted blogs actually have many advantages over traditional websites, here are a few of them:
- Much less expensive to set up than a traditional website
- Quicker to get up and running
- Users can maintain the blog without any technical knowledge (and without Web Designer costs)
- The search engines love blogs making your marketing efforts easier
- There are plenty of professionally design templates to make your blog stand out
- Adding regular content is a breeze and you can even schedule updates to occur on a regular basis
Ok, so traditional HTML based websites aren’t exactly dead, (in fact I still use them for my eCommerce sites that have thousands of products), but for the average small business that wants a web presence, a blog is certainly the way to go.
Save on domain names with Search Marketing Web
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Marketing Strategy: Customer Relationships Are Key
By · CommentsToday I wanted to take a step back from Search Marketing and talk about money you could be leaving on the table.
If I could show you how to raise your sales by fifty percent without enlarging your promoting budget, would you be interested? Naturally you would, what selling pro or entrepreneur would not be interested? When you’ve finished this article you may have worked out the best way to just do that. Take a couple of seconds and think about all of the inactive buyer files you have in your file cupboard. Entrepreneurs regularly make the pricey mistake of servicing a purchaser once then presuming “they’ll stay” as a shopper or customer without maintaining and growing that relationship. A year later that entrepreneur is wondering what’s happened to that client and where they went. Why haven’t they hear from them? Did they leave? If this is so why?
There are lots of reasons a buyer or client may leave you, but the ones you’ll hear most frequently are :
* They felt your pricing was rather high or bigoted.
* They’d an unresolved complaint.
* They took a rivals offer.
* They left because they felt you did not care.
When you remember the last 2 make up the bulk of why a customer or buyer won’t use your service or purchase your products – it could be a hard tablet to swallow. After all it means they’re an inactive customer because they felt you did not care about them and your competitor did.
This appears sensible when you factor in that clients frequently buy your product or service because they have developed a relationship with you, they owned another product or yours, or they were referred to you by a mate or associate. When faced with the above facts why is it firms spend eighty percent of their selling bucks going after new customers instead of nurturing, maintaining, and keeping up the customer relationships they already have? Before you use your time and cash going after new clients and customers you don’t now have a relationship with consider the following statistical data :
* Repeat consumers spend 33% more than new buyers.
* Referrals among repeat clients are 107% bigger than non-customers.
* It costs 6 times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that very same thing to a purchaser.
As you can see your selling bucks will go further if it’s used by you to build, nurture, and develop your shopper relations.
This is not as tricky as you suspect. Building these relations just means treating your clients as if they actually are your strategic partners and showing them that you actually care about them.
It is important to try and satisfy them with the right service and goods, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Purchasers can simply note indifference and hypocrisy and they just won’t put up with it. Long term customer and consumer fidelity is a long term challenge that you have to strive for each day and with each exchange regardless of how massive or little. While a growing business wishes to consistently capture new consumers, the focus and concern should be on pleasing your current consumer base. Firms that fail to nurture and keep their customer base finally fail.
You’ll also spend twice as much to get new clients as you’ll in sorting out your existing buyer base.You also will be limited in your capability to draw in new clients if you are unable to keep hold of and satisfy your present customers and clients. The final analysis is that one of the key parts in selling and business expansion is to spend the bulk of your effort and time nurturing shopper relations, so you get business from existing clients and purchasers. This is a method which will move you forward in skyrocketing your sales by fifty percent without inflating your financial position.
The world is online
With 1.4 billion people online, the Internet has shown incredible potential for advertising opportunities like search marketing and other forms of online marketing. This phenomenon has led many to believe that offline marketing strategies are no longer as useful as they once were. What those same people do not realize is that online marketing and offline marketing are actually in cahoots, so to speak. One influences the other, and vice versa. If one stops to think about it, the cyber-world relies on real-world observations and concepts. In return, the real world is becoming increasingly reflective of concepts found on the World Wide Web, and is where many online ideas are actualized. With so much going on between the two, it would be pretty much impossible to cover everything in detail. This article will instead take the general view, and just hope that it can do justice to the wonders in our increasingly integrated online-offline world.
Flogging stuff online
The term search marketing refers to one of the most common methods of flogging stuff in the cyber-bazaar. With so many products that can be sold to a large audience, the Internet has proven to be the best way to reach potential customers all over the world. Unfortunately, it is becoming saturated, and due to the nature of commercial competition, there are many brands of any single given product. By changing the way search engines work, it becomes possible to advertise as users search for items. In fact, the very keywords submitted for lookup become the basis for offering various services or products, either in straightforward advertising sections on webpages, or subtly, sometimes flagrantly, modifying the search engine results. Another way of marketing online is by endorsement, just like in the real world. User testimonials would be attached to products in an effort to convince potential buyers to purchase and use these products. The measurement that many people find the best in terms of determining a website’s or product’s value is the amount of traffic and buzz that it generates. The Internet is incredibly alive with gossip and massive interpersonal contact, so word gets around extremely quickly. This can be used to the marketer’s advantage, whether to promote offered products or services, or undermining the efforts of rival companies.
Creating a buzz and positioning a client or their business as the celebrity in their market is what Search Marketing the Rebel Way is all about. When someone searches for a product or service online and see’s that there are multiple listings on Google’s front page all about one company, it gives the searcher confidence that this must be a decent company. It also reduces the chance of them clicking on anyone else as you’ve knocked most of the competition off the first page, and lets face it who wants to go the to the 2nd or 3rd page.
From cyberspace to the real world
Perhaps the most amazing thing about online marketing is how it can be used to involve the users in product development. Some examples include a digital fashion design contest for a popular online game, the winning entry from which was translated into a real-life article of clothing, and a company that makes instant noodles taking flavor suggestions from customers and realizing them. These user-defined products often sell very well, since they are already favored in the virtual online world. Real-world marketing now often incorporates various concepts from the digital world. As an example, consider the use of digital artwork in posters and print ads. The pixilated look is also iconic and has found favor on the fashion market, plus it has potential as a device in advertising for things like cameras and such. Photomanipulation, or the editing of pictures has advanced with the power of digital tools. Many of the designs seen today were inspired by artwork from various digital artists posting their works on the Internet. Some of these artists became so popular on the Internet that they were hired in real life to produce works for print. Television ads and shows alike are increasingly making use of sophisticated animations and transitions, as popularized across cyberspace. Plus, keeping track of trend on the World Wide Web can tip one off to what would prove popular to the youth, who are often recognized as the frequenters of the digital world.
In closing
What the Internet provides for the real world is a repository for information and a continuously renewing source of inspiration, not only for online marketing as well as offline marketing, but also in daily living. It is a true reflection of our collective culture and consciousness, an invaluable resource and peerless medium of expression. As the Internet becomes a part of everyone’s lives, only time will tell where it will all lead. And for those on the cutting edge of Search Marketing, a lot of money is waiting to be made!
Flash on your website – Cool or Ego Trip!
By · CommentsI think most of us would agree that Flash Technology is pretty damn cool.
The problem is who is it there for? Potential customers just get distracted or annoyed by it. Search Engines… well don’t even get me started on Flash and the Search Engines – the long and short of it is they can not read Flash, so you get no benefit from using it on your site.
I’ve even had clients who have had a large web design company build their entire site using Flash (for lots of money as you always pay a premium when working with Flash). 12 months later I get a call asking for help as their site is not ranked anywhere… really? I guess that’s another site that’s going to need to be rebuilt!
So why would anyone use Flash on their website? I guess it boils down to the business owner’s ego. It’s very aesthetically pleasing and it’s great when someone comments on how cool your website is. Cool is great, but I’d rather take cold hard cash thanks. Flash is not going to help me close a sale, so I don’t use.
My advice, steer clear of singing and dancing websites and concentrate on a clean easy to use website with loads of great content. Your customers will thank you for it and search engines will eat it up. The Results:
- Better Search Engine Rankings!
- Better Sales Conversions!
- More money in the Bank!
Search Marketing Secret Mastermind Group
By · CommentsI’ve just spent a lot of money and 72 hours with some of the greatest minds in Search Marketing, so I’ll keep this brief as I’m exhausted!
Howie Schwartz, Todd Spears, DK & DB (names protected as these are bad @ss underground marketers), all in one closed door meeting. Did I learn anything? How could I not!
We all know that marketing online is a constantly changing game, but what most people don’t realize is just how quickly it changes. I remember the good old days when you could just stuff a web page with a bunch of keywords and rank. The person that stuffed the most keywords, won the war at Google. Obviously those days passed a long time ago, but Google changes it’s algorithym so frequently that what worked just a couple of weeks ago, may not work today. If your online search marketing is not diverse and Google makes a change that effects the one tactic you are using you’re screwed! That’s the main reason I always have an arsenal of tactics that I take to every market I go into. If one thing stops working, I don’t care, I have all of my other strategies working for me!
Over the next couple of days I’m going to share some of the Search Marketing Techniques that are working today – not last month or last year like most of “Marketing Gurus” are still trying to push!