Providing reliable dedicated servers, colocation of servers and reliable hosting since 1995.
Fresh Articles:
Internet Marketing
SEO
PPC Marketing
Web Hosting
Web site Design
Internet Marketing
Site Promotion
3.5 Reasons Marketing Your Own Website Will Never Work
Reason No. 1 - It Takes Too Long. There are simply not enough hours in the day for you to do your day job, keep abreast of all the changes in the internet marketing industry, track the progress of your website and make constant amendments and...
More Recommended Ways To Promote Your Website
"Submit your site to search engines!" "Bid at pay-per-click search engines!" "Publish a newsletter!" These are the common website promotion cries. Indeed, my own website promotion site states just that. There are other ways to promote your site,...
SITE PROMOTION: BEST WAYS TO PROMOTE A SITE
SITE PROMOTION: BEST WAYS TO PROMOTE A SITE Biologists will say it was the egg, and not the chicken, that came first. Old-time merchants will tell you the horse comes first, followed by the cart. All pursuits in the physical universe,...
Ten-Step Guide to Boosting Your Site's Traffic and Revenue
1. Hunt for Catchy Domain Names and Get a Quality Paid Host You probably have a domain name already, but you might consider getting new ones for different sections of your website or for different target markets. Gone are the days when...
The Most Underused Component in Web Site Advertising Web Marketing Series
Perhaps the most powerful component of any Web site sales copy is the use of testimonials. Inserted in your sales copy, unbiased words of praise from satisfied customers have the following potent effect for your prospect. Effective testimonials;...
Many of you may be aware of a move by organizations to refocus their efforts into B2B strategies and are pulling back from their B2C strategies. This is largely because it is perceived to be safer, is more lucrative in the short-term, and more easily justified to the bean counters.
I can assure you that true B2C is not dead. It just means that those who stay will be ahead of the game when the sheep wander back.
It is important to point out, though, the differences between B2C and B2B are not that great. It is just the technology and the environment of those you are targeting that is different... after all, people in the business sector are still consumers.
Firstly, what is a business to consumer online business? It is providing an online service to your end-user. Ideally, it shouldnt mirror what the offline business is doing but, importantly, it should leverage and support the businesss offline activities.
The successful online business does not work in isolation from the offline business. It reinforces branding, drives sales, but is not solely revenue driven. A true B2C business will have online and offline elements.
Firstly, develop a strategy.
Within that strategy it is critical to determine what the organizations expectations are up front.
Is the online business primarily a&
" Revenue generator
" Marketing tool for an offline business or a...
" Brand builder to use as leverage for offline revenue generation
Once you are ready to build your online business, there are basic elements to consider ensuring it stays relevant, current and working for you.
The successful online business includes&
" Relevant and current information. People will not keep coming back if there isnt something new or useful to them.
" Attractive look and feel. It is no different to the offline world. People expect to read attractive magazines and enter well-designed outlets.
" Simple user editing capabilities. Have simple user editing capabilities. This allows you to make simple content changes to the site without having to pay a web developer to do it.
" Low ongoing maintenance costs. Have low ongoing maintenance costs. Often the cost of developing the business is eventually exceeded by maintenance costs.
" Adaptability. Allow for further content development and editing. This is critical to ensure the online business is always dynamic, allowing for changes in your business and industry.
" Consideration for your audiences technical infrastructure. Consider your audiences technical infrastructure. There is no point having mind-blowing graphics and content if it takes your visitors 15 minutes to download. They will lose interest and go elsewhere. The whole point of going online is the convenience and speed factor.
" Getting the .com. Think globally and get the .com if you can. The Internet makes the world very small. It offers a virtual level playing field, which means anyone can do business on the web, regardless of size... however, .com gives the impression of beyond Australia.
Youve built your online business, and need to generate traffic. But, you dont have a huge budget.
What do you do?
Public Relations
If done well, Public relations can assist with the branding process, build credibility and drive traffic to your site. It is a very cost effective way of raising the profile and credibility of your online business.
Joint Ventures
This is more than just link swapping with other sites. The objective is to develop an integrated promotional campaign with a site bigger than you so that you receive a higher level of traffic. However, it is very difficult to negotiate with a business that doesnt need you, and if you dont have money to burn.
The alternative is to spot an emerg
consumers are very sensitive to what is being forwarded to them. This has seen the emergence of Permission Marketing. More of this in the coming weeks.
Search Engines
Register with search engines. The only cost involved here is your time. As outlined in previous editions of Directions, if you apply a generic branding strategy, you will see even greater returns from search engines.
Permission Marketing
100 years ago, the world was populated by small businesses.
If you owned a cheese shop and received a new batch, you would notify the customers you believed would be interested. It was very much a one-on-one relationship.
Advertising today = Interruption Marketing
The emergence of national and multi-national organizations, competitive forces and technology in the 50s and 60s saw the rise of advertising, and the end of the personal touch.
Traditional advertising is often referred to as interruption marketing.
Permission Marketing = 1 on 1 and 2 way
Permission marketing gives customers something in return for providing information about themselves. And as we all know, information is a powerful asset, as we try to re-establish the closeness we had 100 years ago with our customers.
Information for information
The sorts of things an online business might offer in exchange for information includes:
" Information on new products and services based on a customers profile
" Birthday and Christmas greetings
" Newsletters
" Invitations to special events
" Discounts and special offers
Opt out clause
The critical element of permission marketing is the customer always has the option of opting out.
What to look out for&?
Plan for success
Firstly, plan for success. This may sound strange but you need to ensure your ISP and IT infrastructure are equipped to deal with large levels of traffic.
We used to use a small Internet Service Provider, but found that it was too slow and could not handle the level of traffic that our online businesses were generating.
It was taking forever for pages to download& which meant visitors gave up and moved on& which meant fewer pages were being viewed& which meant that the level of traffic rated lower.
At the end of the day, traffic is an evaluation criteria, and you dont want external elements like your ISP affecting this.
We eventually moved our hosting boxes to a better ISP. Far more people were able to access our businesses, but our own IT infrastructure was unable to cope. Our servers were falling over every 8 hours. We are currently in the process of upgrading these servers.
Justifying the effort
After building your online business and establishing your marketing program, you will be expected to analyze the performance of the business before moving onto the next stage. There are many products on the market that can help you with this.
The best strategy is a combination of analysis tools and online rating sites. The analysis tools allows you to measure the health and popularity of your business, which URL or web-address visitors use to try to get to your business, and which pages are the most successful. One of the best personal analysis tools is Web trends.
The online rating sites, like Hitwise, illustrate how you are performing compared to other online businesses, and alerts you to any PR activity in the marketplace because of the spike in traffic. The statistics shown in our weekly newsletter are from Hitwise and are a great measure for the health of our incubator web sites.
Invest in Security
The other thing to look out for is hackers. We had a mail bomb planted from an external source that sent out 40 emails per second with one of our online businesss name attached. This was disastrous because the content of the email was highly suspect. We were unable to shut down the bom
Reason No. 1 - It Takes Too Long. There are simply not enough hours in the day for you to do your day job, keep abreast of all the changes in the internet marketing industry, track the progress of your website and make constant amendments and...
More Recommended Ways To Promote Your Website
"Submit your site to search engines!" "Bid at pay-per-click search engines!" "Publish a newsletter!" These are the common website promotion cries. Indeed, my own website promotion site states just that. There are other ways to promote your site,...
SITE PROMOTION: BEST WAYS TO PROMOTE A SITE
SITE PROMOTION: BEST WAYS TO PROMOTE A SITE Biologists will say it was the egg, and not the chicken, that came first. Old-time merchants will tell you the horse comes first, followed by the cart. All pursuits in the physical universe,...
Ten-Step Guide to Boosting Your Site's Traffic and Revenue
1. Hunt for Catchy Domain Names and Get a Quality Paid Host You probably have a domain name already, but you might consider getting new ones for different sections of your website or for different target markets. Gone are the days when...
The Most Underused Component in Web Site Advertising Web Marketing Series
Perhaps the most powerful component of any Web site sales copy is the use of testimonials. Inserted in your sales copy, unbiased words of praise from satisfied customers have the following potent effect for your prospect. Effective testimonials;...
Take Back Control Of Your Site
Many of you may be aware of a move by organizations to refocus their efforts into B2B strategies and are pulling back from their B2C strategies. This is largely because it is perceived to be safer, is more lucrative in the short-term, and more easily justified to the bean counters.
I can assure you that true B2C is not dead. It just means that those who stay will be ahead of the game when the sheep wander back.
It is important to point out, though, the differences between B2C and B2B are not that great. It is just the technology and the environment of those you are targeting that is different... after all, people in the business sector are still consumers.
Firstly, what is a business to consumer online business? It is providing an online service to your end-user. Ideally, it shouldnt mirror what the offline business is doing but, importantly, it should leverage and support the businesss offline activities.
The successful online business does not work in isolation from the offline business. It reinforces branding, drives sales, but is not solely revenue driven. A true B2C business will have online and offline elements.
Firstly, develop a strategy.
Within that strategy it is critical to determine what the organizations expectations are up front.
Is the online business primarily a&
" Revenue generator
" Marketing tool for an offline business or a...
" Brand builder to use as leverage for offline revenue generation
Once you are ready to build your online business, there are basic elements to consider ensuring it stays relevant, current and working for you.
The successful online business includes&
" Relevant and current information. People will not keep coming back if there isnt something new or useful to them.
" Attractive look and feel. It is no different to the offline world. People expect to read attractive magazines and enter well-designed outlets.
" Simple user editing capabilities. Have simple user editing capabilities. This allows you to make simple content changes to the site without having to pay a web developer to do it.
" Low ongoing maintenance costs. Have low ongoing maintenance costs. Often the cost of developing the business is eventually exceeded by maintenance costs.
" Adaptability. Allow for further content development and editing. This is critical to ensure the online business is always dynamic, allowing for changes in your business and industry.
" Consideration for your audiences technical infrastructure. Consider your audiences technical infrastructure. There is no point having mind-blowing graphics and content if it takes your visitors 15 minutes to download. They will lose interest and go elsewhere. The whole point of going online is the convenience and speed factor.
" Getting the .com. Think globally and get the .com if you can. The Internet makes the world very small. It offers a virtual level playing field, which means anyone can do business on the web, regardless of size... however, .com gives the impression of beyond Australia.
Youve built your online business, and need to generate traffic. But, you dont have a huge budget.
What do you do?
Public Relations
If done well, Public relations can assist with the branding process, build credibility and drive traffic to your site. It is a very cost effective way of raising the profile and credibility of your online business.
Joint Ventures
This is more than just link swapping with other sites. The objective is to develop an integrated promotional campaign with a site bigger than you so that you receive a higher level of traffic. However, it is very difficult to negotiate with a business that doesnt need you, and if you dont have money to burn.
The alternative is to spot an emerg
consumers are very sensitive to what is being forwarded to them. This has seen the emergence of Permission Marketing. More of this in the coming weeks.
Search Engines
Register with search engines. The only cost involved here is your time. As outlined in previous editions of Directions, if you apply a generic branding strategy, you will see even greater returns from search engines.
Permission Marketing
100 years ago, the world was populated by small businesses.
If you owned a cheese shop and received a new batch, you would notify the customers you believed would be interested. It was very much a one-on-one relationship.
Advertising today = Interruption Marketing
The emergence of national and multi-national organizations, competitive forces and technology in the 50s and 60s saw the rise of advertising, and the end of the personal touch.
Traditional advertising is often referred to as interruption marketing.
Permission Marketing = 1 on 1 and 2 way
Permission marketing gives customers something in return for providing information about themselves. And as we all know, information is a powerful asset, as we try to re-establish the closeness we had 100 years ago with our customers.
Information for information
The sorts of things an online business might offer in exchange for information includes:
" Information on new products and services based on a customers profile
" Birthday and Christmas greetings
" Newsletters
" Invitations to special events
" Discounts and special offers
Opt out clause
The critical element of permission marketing is the customer always has the option of opting out.
What to look out for&?
Plan for success
Firstly, plan for success. This may sound strange but you need to ensure your ISP and IT infrastructure are equipped to deal with large levels of traffic.
We used to use a small Internet Service Provider, but found that it was too slow and could not handle the level of traffic that our online businesses were generating.
It was taking forever for pages to download& which meant visitors gave up and moved on& which meant fewer pages were being viewed& which meant that the level of traffic rated lower.
At the end of the day, traffic is an evaluation criteria, and you dont want external elements like your ISP affecting this.
We eventually moved our hosting boxes to a better ISP. Far more people were able to access our businesses, but our own IT infrastructure was unable to cope. Our servers were falling over every 8 hours. We are currently in the process of upgrading these servers.
Justifying the effort
After building your online business and establishing your marketing program, you will be expected to analyze the performance of the business before moving onto the next stage. There are many products on the market that can help you with this.
The best strategy is a combination of analysis tools and online rating sites. The analysis tools allows you to measure the health and popularity of your business, which URL or web-address visitors use to try to get to your business, and which pages are the most successful. One of the best personal analysis tools is Web trends.
The online rating sites, like Hitwise, illustrate how you are performing compared to other online businesses, and alerts you to any PR activity in the marketplace because of the spike in traffic. The statistics shown in our weekly newsletter are from Hitwise and are a great measure for the health of our incubator web sites.
Invest in Security
The other thing to look out for is hackers. We had a mail bomb planted from an external source that sent out 40 emails per second with one of our online businesss name attached. This was disastrous because the content of the email was highly suspect. We were unable to shut down the bom
Tim Giles is a Pre Marketing Consultant for Enedia (www.enedia.com). Enedia's client's include Ansearch (www.ansearch.com.au), an Australian search engine and directory.
The ideal starting point for reliability in our 24 X 7 manned Data Facility for your dedicated server.