Niche Marketing Is About Less Traffic More Business

Imagine two shops that receives 100 customer each every day. Of these hundred customers 40 always find and buy what they need in each of these two shop. Of these 40 that buy 30 come from across the road where fewer people live. Imagine that one of these shops decides to relocate across the road to the smaller population to be nearer to her customers and serve them better. Obviously because of fewer people she attracts less customers to her shop. However because of the closer relationships the customers can now request for what they want stocked. As a result not only do all the customers to her shop buy, they buy more often. This is the power of niche-marketing.Remember ‘Differentiate or Die’, a noble concept peddled not so long ago for survival of corporations? Online it is ‘Niche or Die’. This is becoming increasingly critical for the small internet businesses.Niche marketing is a simple concept that involves targeting very specific keywords and optimizing your website and internet marketing for those specific terms. This practice can help a business, even one in a very competitive online category, to gain an advantage in the search listings.You probably have heard that the internet has leveled the playing field for businesses small or large; those with huge budgets and those with shoe string budgets. As much as this is true, you will quickly discover that no sooner than you have rolled out a Pay per Click campaign, that your moneyed competitors are willing to bid 10 times more than you can even afford – a strategy called loss leader. As an online business person you are ill-equipped to market to the high traffic keywords – read huge markets- both monetarily and capacity wise. Unless you like the feeling of your head cramped in a vice, you are better of targeting more low-traffic yet closely related keywords. Though the internet does give you access to these huge markets theoretically, you will be quickly overwhelmed trying to satisfy it.As a small business, trying to fight for the same market as itunes.com or amazon.com is often suicidal. However you could provide exclusively East-African Music and compete very effectively with itunes or sell specifically motvational books and compete effectively with amazon. These smaller markets provide niches which as a small internet business you can not only satisfy but easily over-deliver. Niche markets may provide less traffic but when well structure they give you more business.

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Features That Mark Internet’s Next Generation

For those who are familiar with software, you are aware of the serialization of software versions. For example Internet Explore 6 was followed by IE 7, Windows 98 by Windows XP. The idea is that the later is usually an improvement of the former. The internet, being a technical platform too, has been for the last few years experiencing improvements too. The term Web 2.0 has been coined to express this trend.

The term Web 2.0 has often been credited to O’Reilly, a media company that publishes both books and websites on different subjects of computer technology. In the beginning the web was nearly a geek’s only environment. If you did not understand what HTML and FTP stood for you were not qualified. The web was characterized by static webpages and content by “expert writers”. If you did not like it, you could as well “Hit the road Jack”.

Today with Web 2.0, users are driving the direction websites take. No longer is it possible to always shove particular content into users’ throats. The term Web 2.0 may sound new to many but there are chances you are already using it. Some of its characteristics include the following;

User Generated Content – This is probably the signature of the next generation of the internet. Websites are now built based on the submissions of the user. The best example of this is the famous video site YuoTube.com. The site is basically a collection of videos submitted by users.

Voting – Which content is popular and which is not is based on a democratic voting by the users. Unlike Web 1.0 where editors would popularize one submission over the others, in Web 2.0 user is really king. They choose what they like. A good example of this is the news submission site Digg.com

Commenting – This is particularly a favorite in blogging. With Web 2.0, you are free to let the world know what you think of a particular content. This is one of the things that make Web 2.0 very sticky. Once you start commenting on different content you never seem to stop.

Blogging – This specific phenomenon sent a chill down the spine of the traditional news media. It has made it possible for anyone to become a news site. Of course some do it better than others. At the very least it lets one share their mind with anyone who cares to listen.

Personalization – The next generation of the internet is allowing one to personalize the kind of content that they get. Unlike Yahoo mail for example where personalization involved selecting between a hand-full of color schemes, Web 2.0 is a complete overhaul. You can determine what you want how you want it when you want it. Even who you get it from and who you can share it with. A good example here is MySpace.com.

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How To Increase Your Revenues More Effectively

We have seen that you can increase your revenue by increasing your traffic, merchandising and improving your C.R (Conversion Rate). Though you should use all the three techniques, there is a particular order in which when applied will result to making more money more easily and consequently is more effective. This order has such far reaching effects on your total web revenues that it worth dedicated attention.

In trying to increase sales in your website there is a natural urge to increase your traffic. Simply double your traffic and you tend to double your income. Unfortunately increasing traffic is the most ineffective of the three. As we have previously seen here, you have two options in increasing traffic; first, you can buy traffic through PPCs (Pay per Click Search Engines) and/or you can optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO). Buying traffic is the more ineffective of the two. This is because every visitor to your site costs you money. This automatically eats into your revenues. On the other hand SEO is a specialty few internet businesses willingly want to tackle. It involves designing your web-pages to rank high in Search Engines like Yahoo and Google. This in turn results to increase in internet users who find your web-business. This traffic is free. Unfortunately the mechanics of SEO have a long learning curve few are willing to learn. And to make matters worse, results are not guaranteed.

The more prudent approach to increasing revenues would be first to increase your Conversion Rate (C.R) before merchandising and/or increasing traffic. And this can be attributed to two reasons. First, a higher C.R ensures you are making the most money possible from a given volume of traffic. A poorly converting website is equivalent to a leaking bucket. Such a website loses willing and able buyers which amounts to losing money. The cost of losing willing and able buyers can be enormous. Apart from the immediate loss of profit, there is the loss of repeat business. This makes other strategies like merchandising ineffective. All in all the cost of losing willing and able buyers due to poor C.R amounts to the lifetime worth of a customer.

The second reason to opt first for an improved C.R to increase revenue has to do with control. Unlike increasing traffic to your website, improving your C.R involves testing and changing elements within your website to find the most effective combination. Though not an easy task, the fact that you control nearly everything about your C.R gives desirable control that you can manage to your benefit.

Once you have a optimized your C.R, you can then reap the maximized benefits of other two techniques for increasing web revenues, namely merchandising and increased traffic.

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How To Use Search Engine Synonyms To Your Advantage

Lately webmasters have noticed that some pages are appearing very high in Google SERP (Search Engine Ranking Pages) without even a single presence of the search term; albeit topically succinct. This is a significant departure from what is widely known that for a page to appear for the search term “Apple Computer”, the term should be used in the page fairly frequently. Infact this has been the basis of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactic called Keyword Density.

This then means that when you do a search for “Apple Computers” you will tend to see pages that do not contain this particular term. But they will contain terms like Mac, Macintosh or G4. These are what are termed as SE (Search Engine) synonyms. Evidently Google seems to consider the terms “Mac” etc similar in meaning as “Apple Computers”. This is comparable to the way you would use the words “car” and “vehicle” interchangeably. And consequently instead of serving back pages strictly with the terms Apple Computers it also includes pages without the term but include terms it considers similar like Mac and Macintosh.

These SE synonyms are an expression of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) discussed here last week, peculiar so far only to Google search. But of more importance to a web business is that it impacts significantly on what you can rank for and how you optimize your web pages on this leading SE. Previously, to rank for all the keywords related to “Apple Computer” you would need to write separate pages for each term. But with this development, it seems the same page could appear for any of the search terms – even without those other terms present within the content.

If you particularly use SEs to drive your online business, LSI adds one more strategy into your bag of SEO tactic. The tactic is simply this; when writing content for your website, make a conscious effort to include SE synonyms in the page. So instead of only using the term “Apple Computers” interchange it with G4 and Macintosh. This will greatly improve the relevance of your page. Not only will Google notice your main keywords but also the use of synonyms. This makes the page super-relevant to the synonymic search terms in the eyes of the SE algorithm.

To determine SE synonyms use the toogle key before your search query. The toogle key is the key with the “~” sign. You will need to hold down the shift key. For example, if you type it before the term “Apple Computers” you will notice that in the resulting SERP include the words Mac, Macintosh and G4 in bold. The bolded words are what the SE also considers as synonyms to the search queries.

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How To Take Advantage Of Web 2.0

You are standing on the spreads end of the shelf at the hyper market. Every time you have been here you picked Blue Band. But with the advertisements you have been seeing on TV you recognize Biddy stacked right next to your usual margarine.

You would not mind a change. Further more you have been using “BB” since you knew bread. Unfortunaely you remember the nasty experience you had, the last time you tried a new “maj”. The thing tasted horrible but you had to finish the tab because you had already bought it. Right now you are wondering if this is this the kind of trouble you will have if you pick Biddy.

Then you good friend at the office bumps into you as you weight your options. She picks Biddy and goes on to tell you how she likes it. She makes an effort to give you a verbal idea of the taste. At this you pick the medium sized tab with much less apprehension, willing to give it a try.

Your colleague just tipped you over in a manner that those sales girls with cute offers cannot. We generally distrust sales people. They are pushy and irritatingly insistent. But your colleague’s recommendation is highly welcome.

This technique of recommending is well put to use by the Web 2.0 ready Amazon.com among other savvy internet businesses. When you check out stuff in such websites you find it is peppered with opinions from people like you whom have bought. This often sways your decisions just like the colleague at the supermarket shelves.

A Web 2.0 ready business will design their Content Management System inclusive of architecture of participation. Have a way of your users to participate and add value to the website; for example by giving comments on their experience with your product or service.

But recommendations are not the only way to evoke user participation. Rating, which is a less intensive form of participation, is increasingly becoming a common way of accessing quality of an offer. And since it only requires a click of a button, most of the times, more users tend to participate. The more users participate the more sticky your website becomes to them.

As mentioned last week, Web 2.0 is about customers, the user. And as you know customers with good experience do not often tell. But a customer who has had a bad experience, boy, don’t they tell everyone. So you cannot afford to have poor quality offers on your website and a participation architecture. Unless of course, you like the feeling of your head being clumped with a vice. You will get “flamed” with aggressive comments and very negative ratings that can send you business on a downward spiral.

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How To Organize Your WebPages

Imagine you walked into a supermarket for you monthly shopping and you started by looking for brown bread. After a few minutes of craning your neck you saw a rack of white bread. Expectantly you approach it. But all there is, is white bread. You ask the attendant if they have any brown bread and they refer you to aisle seven on the other end of the supermarket. After crossing the floor to the other end you finally find your brown bread.

Incidentally next to the brown bread there is jam which reminds you that you need butter. But all that is in the vicinity are different brands of jams. On asking the attendant where you can get butter they explain, brown bread is together with jam, margarine is with white bread at aisle four , while butter is on second floor together with pasta. You ask why they arrange things so haphazardly and she explains with an irritating sense of pride that products are arranged according to how they are used together.

By this time you simply continue to shop because you have already started. And as you exasperatedly go looking for the next product in your shopping list you swear never to return. And as absurd as this scenario is, many websites have similar page to page linking.

Your website is like the supermarket floor space. Your different pages like products on the shelves and the linking structure is like the aisles. Like a well organized supermarket, you expect to find all your breads in one area as well as all your spreads in one area. Poor linking structure or what is referred to as a geeky linking will quickly frustrate your visitors and confuse SE spiders. And unlike in the supermarket where the shopper may continue shopping, hissing under the breath, online all it takes to exit is a click on the back button.

Incidentally, SEs tend to downgrade your ranking on the account of such poor structures. Test are showing that sites with poor page to page linking do poorly in SERP compared to those with good linking. But what is good linking? The arrangement of breads together with the spreads commonly used with the kind of bread seems reasonable. Unfortunately that is not how people generally shop. They prefer to get all the breads and choose, then all the spreads and choose. Arranging your web content in the same way in internet marketing and SEO is akin to being relevant. For example, a tourism website should have all content on hotel bookings together while that on game drives should be together but separate from hotel bookings. Yet these two categories of content should not link to each other directly. Technically this is referred to as siloing.

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How To Increase Web Revenues

Last week we looked at Adsense etal that have proven to be both powerful and effective revenue streams as a compliment to your primary offer. However, most internet businesses still search for methods to increase their total revenues. Indeed most websites are producing far below their potential. There are three main ways you can increase your web revenues.

First, you can choose to increase traffic. The life blood of internet businesses is in traffic – your website visitors. No traffic means no customers which consequently means no sales. The more targeted visitors come to your site the more money you can make. For example, if your site has 10,000 targeted visitors a month at a C.R of 1.8% and you make Ksh 1,000 per sale, then your revenue would stand at Ksh180,000. If you doubled the traffic to 20,000 your income would automatically double without doing anything else. It is no wonder that this is the most preferred means of increasing revenue for most internet businesses.

This involves strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC campaigns, Article submissions and Link exchanges to mention a few.

Secondly you may opt to merchandise. This involves encouraging the already paying customer to spend more money. This technique that is so popular in our local supermarkets also has it uses online. ‘Back-end products’ is a common term used to refer to merchandising on the net. This is whereby once a visitor makes a purchase of your lead product, you overtime introduce them to other similar and/or related product- the back-end products.

For example, you can sell a Fitness e-book and make Ksh 1,000 per sale. Thereafter you can introduce your customers’ mail list to fitness equipment that nets you a profit of Ksh 5,000. Usually if you have gained your customers trust from the first sale, a significant percentage of the customers will make a repeat purchase. This automatically increases your revenue. One can keep recycling the same customer list making money by offering value through merchandising.

This technique is especially useful in introducing high ticket items that customer would otherwise be too cautious to spend on first time.

Thirdly you can increase your CR. For example a site with a C.R of two percent can be redesigned and reworded to increase it C.R to six percent. Such a jump would automatically increase your sales by 300% without merchandising or increasing traffic. Though the most potent of the three strategies it is the least used because of it complicated nature. It involves alot of testing and retesting of different elements of your web pages as well as website structure. However for maximum effect you should use all the three strategies.

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How To Get Other Websites To Link To Yours

The use of back-links to improve a websites Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) in search engines (SE) has been very effective in diffusing some level of black-hat search engine optimization (SEO). Black-hat SEO involves using “illegal” techniques with the express purpose of fooling SEs to rank a website favorably. Back-links on the other hand are hyper-text links from other websites that link and direct their visitors to your website. They are also referred to as incoming links.

An everlasting question on an internet marketers mind is how they could get other websites to link back to their website. The more the number of links, the higher the website’s Page Rank (PR) and most likely the better the SERP. The better the SERP the more visitors the website attracts, and the more the visitors the more sales the site can make.

One such technique is article marketing. It is so called as it uses reprintable articles to market your website. The driving force of the internet as a whole is information often referred to as content. Consequently, SEs love content, more so new, unique and/or frequent content. Article marketing targets to satisfy this insatiable need of SEs and webmasters.

An article is a literary composition on a distinct and independent subject such as the one you are reading. This is as opposed to series, book, or other such literary works. The idea in article marketing is to compose on a subject related to your website. For example for a tours and travel website one could compose an article about giving tips on dealing with jetlag or choosing a family safari. Ideally, the article should be more than 500 words but less than 1500. You then make the article available for reprint by any other webmaster. They can choose to use it on their websites, blogs or publish it on their newsletters.

The trick behind getting a link back to your website from the websites’ whose owners choose to use the article is in the resource box. A resource boxes is a widely acceptable format of including hyper-linked text at the end of your article with a little marketing message. It is usually a sentence or two. In here you should add a link pointing to your website. As reprint content, an interested webmaster is only allowed to use the content as is – they can neither change the content nor the resource box.

Each website that uses your article automatically gives you a back-link. Highly informative content tends to attract wider publishing by other webmasters.

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How Search Engines Help Your Local Business

The discussion of Search Engines (SE) may sound way off for a local offline business. Infact most will only consider a website if their business goes beyond the country’s borders and particularly if they are targeting markets overseas. This explains the content starved brochure like websites developed by most local companies and businesses.

What is not commonly known is that SEs are advanced for local searches. This then means that one can search for information, products or services provided within walking distance of where you live. As of right now, SEs are looking into ways to encourage this kinds of searches as they are seen as the next frontier in the industry.

It is anticipated that you will be able to search for even an obscure thing like “Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary” and find a copy at the local second hand dealer not far away from your home. But for this to happen, the local second hand dealer needs to have a website not only optimized for their products, but also for their local area.

SEs are already designed to tell the difference by the type of results served between, for example, “Brake repair” and “Brake repair Nairobi”. Someone searching for the former would often be searching for information on brake repairs. On the other hand, a search specified with a location like the latter is often someone in need of those services within the specified area.

So what does this mean for a local business person? It means having a website is not only a sign of being with the times. A well positioned website has potential to introduce a whole new market to your business you otherwise wouldn’t reach. Keeping in mind the cost of hosting and maintaining a website, you should easily make profit.

Secondly, you need to optimize your website to be found for both you products and you local area. This translates to removing those four paragraphs you lifted from the brochures and creating informative content. On the brake repair example above, you could detail on how different braking systems are damaged, to show of your expertise and what you do at your repair shop to correct the damage.

Thirdly, sell you visitors. In the same repair shop example, you could offer a substantial discount if the surfer actually visits your shop at Industrial Area for a brake repair job.

Already some, like Lovepot.com, are testing the waters with local online business. And though they might not be getting huge traffic from the still infant local search, it is reassuring for their visitors that they do not have to convince their new found “love” to pay for their flight to physically meet them in France. An affordable cup of coffee at The Stanley will do just fine. That’s local search for you.

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Headlines Are Powerful Prospecting Tools

Many copywriters will attest to the fact that headlines make or break a sale. A subtle change in a headline can result to astronomical increase in sales. A good understanding of headlines is pivotal in a successful internet marketing campaign.

Headlines will fall into three main categories. There are webpage titles, which appear in Search Engine result pages. For example when you do a search in Yahoo, the resulting page has a list of links to relevant pages. These links are page titles that describe the content in the webpage. These are what the surfer will first read to determine how relevant that page would be to them. These kinds of headlines are input in the HTML code of the webpage within the “HEAD” tag. They are only visible to your browser and Search Engine crawlers.

The second kind of headlines is the PPC titles. These are the bold sentences within a Pay per Click (PPC) advert that appears at the top of the advert. These titles are probably the most challenging to create. Due to design issues and restriction of space where the adverts appear, PPC demand you design your title within a number of characters. In Google Adwords, for example, the title is restricted to 25 characters.

The third kind of headlines is the subject line of emails. In email marketing, the subject of the email acts as the headline. Once the surfer opens their mail box, it is the title that either attracts them to click open the mail, ignore it or even worse delete it.
So what gives headlines such power?

Headlines are probably the most viewed elements on a webpage. Surfers use them to quickly determine a page’s relevance. Different wordings communicate differently and as such different headlines communicate relevance differently. This explains why subtle changes have huge impacts. Consequently, headlines are very powerful prospecting tools. They assist in picking out your best fitting customer profile from the crowd.

The secret of harnessing the full power of headlines lies in creating headlines that resonate strongly with your perfect customer profile. Such headlines connect with prospects, draw their attention to click on them to find out more.

You create this resonance by providing the perception of value as being searched for by the surfer. Keep in mind that the surfer is searching for a solution, whether in form of product, service or information. When your headline promises to deliver they will stop to consider you.

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