This is a continuation of the article, You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 2 where I discussed the Barriers to Entry and You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 2 where I discussed Learning from Industry Leaders and Networking with the Competition.
Category: Other Marketing Related
You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 2
Friday, 30 November 2007 15:13
0 Comments
This is a continuation of the article, You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 1 where I discussed the Barriers to Entry.
Learn From the Industry Leaders
The industry leaders got to be the leaders for various reasons, but one might be that they know what they are doing. It is really amazing how much you can learn in any particular niche market by how the leaders of that market run their businesses. Find out who these leaders are and how long they have been involved in the field of interest.
By no means should you ever just copy what they are doing and call that your business strategy (see be unique below). That may work for the white-labels in the grocery store but in the world of online business it can quickly make you the target of a more powerful entity, and your reputation will probably be a less favorable one in the long run.
Learn, but don’t copy. Make a study of these companies and find out everything you can (legally) about who they are and how they operate. This will give you further information about step number one above and you may find you really can’t compete, or it may reveal a vacancy that needs to be filled. It will also give you some insight on what to prepare for in the coming months.
Make a list and do some research. If you don’t do it on a spreadsheet, at least do it in your head. Find the top 10 or 20 companies you believe will be in direct competition with your plans. Write down what you think their strengths and weaknesses are and how you can improve on those weaknesses you find.
Do a Google or Yahoo search and find out what you can. Not just the normal rigmarole, find those advanced search features and do as in depth of a search as possible and add to your list. There are many good tools online to help with competition research. Compete is a great resource for comparing the traffic on several different sites at the same time, and Alexa has a similar comparison for traffic. For auction research, Terapeak is a good place to start, and if you want some good basic notices, try Google Alerts to stay up to date with what is going on in the trenches.
You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 1
Friday, 30 November 2007 15:13
0 Comments
Is your company or business in a competitive industry, is there any way not to be? Are you thinking about moving into a specific niche market that is already saturated? You don’t always have to just move on to something else if the field or topic you are interested in proves to be a very competitive arena.
You may have to do things better, be unique, and operate more efficiently than the competition, but you don’t have to automatically make the decision to leave for a less competitive area. Your business may have the talents and skills to run with the competition, survive, and be successful. Usually, at least in the free world markets, you already have competition because you have more than one entity providing the same product or service, so there is probably room for one more.
Keep in mind, success in a competitive market may not be the “number one” spot. Many retail businesses are successful and are not Wal-Mart, so be careful how you set your goals and measure your success. In this article we are going to look at a few ways to compete in an already competitive field.
What are the Barriers for Entry
Before you actually enter into a competitive field for the first time you really do need to look at what the barriers to entry might be for your company or website. Do a quick analysis of what it takes to get into a particular niche market, and be honest with yourself or your company about what you find. You might find that you really don’t want to take the time or energy required to be competitive in that market anyway.Guaranteed Ways to Dump Money on PPC Ads
Thursday, 08 November 2007 16:48
0 Comments
PPC (pay per click) is almost the most efficient way for a small web based company to generate leads. Thanks to it’s unique ability’s to measure results precisely, target prospects in a narrow manor, and tightly manage your spending. That alone has made PPC one of the top lead generating tools ever.
However this technique does have it’s downside. Reason being is that PPC campaigns are so convenient, easy to set up and get started that the small business owner can easily spend upwards to thousand’s of dollars in just a period of weeks until they learn some hard lessons on what will be successful and what will bury you.
So here are some of the most common PPC mistakes, hopefully this is a useful outline on strategy that will start generating leads as quickly and efficiently as possible.
1. Problem: Using the home page as your landing page
There are many search engines that you can setup your PPC campaign with: Google, Yahoo, and others. It is your responsibility to decide where to direct the traffic that clicks on your ad. Most businesses send their traffic directly to the home page. Which seems to make sense since the home page is the equivalent to he store’s front door where you would think you would want to send your traffic. Right?
Wrong. Here is the dilemma in that. Most peoples home pages are so cluttered with information, and generally cover such a broad topic. It’s like pushing someone on to a site that contains the info. they need along with topics on totally unrelated issues. Good luck is what you mind as well say when they get to the home page. Obviously this will lead to a high frustration and failure rate.
Solution: Always take a clicker to a well crafted, easy to use and specific landing page.
2. Problem: Not bidding high enough to secure top spot
You are the advertiser. As the advertiser with PPC you have the option on how much you feel is necessary to pay for any particular search term. Being that PPC works on an auction model the more that you pay relative to the other bidding advertisers the higher up your ad will appear.
The most popular search terms will have up to a dozen or more ads listed on search result pages. This gives off the feeling that any noob can drive clicks with PPC. Consider this staggering statistic though, 85% of all PPC clicks are on the first page and on the top three positions! The scraps (15%) go to the remaining positions, which could number in the hundreds or more.
This all means that if you don’t bid high enough to get on the first page in the top three you are just wasting your own time. your not necessarily wasting money due to the fact that if no one clicks on it you pay nothing. Of-course if you make the decision to hide yourself further down the list it will be tough generating leads that will close the deals that you need to make.
Solution: Choose search terms and possibly less of them that will consistently make you appear in one of the top three spots.
3. Problem: Not making ad copy specific enough
With your two major search engines, Yahoo gives you 190 characters (including spaces) in your text ad. Google offers only 70. With no colors, pictures, or even a company logo. Only words. Many of the advertisers out there today waste this tiny space with vague, meaningless terms, or generalized statements that do not have a definitive uniqueness to what they are offering.
This leads to searchers not clicking on your ad, which once again does not cost you money but time and misses the whole objective. On the much more serious side of things the wrong searcher will click on your ad due to a poorly designed ad copy, realize when they hit the landing page that it is not what they were in sought of and you generate leads that will go no where but you paid for.
Solution: Be very specific and unique with your ad copy. If you have features that are unique to you or something that sets you apart from the others in your market this is a good place to make that known.
In short: PPC has a tremendous amount to offer your small business in terms of trafficking potential customers to you. Keep these few guidelines in mind when you start or revise your new PPC campaign and you will be transforming those clicks into a profit in no time at all.
Anchors Aweigh
Sunday, 28 October 2007 16:37
0 Comments
One of the most important elements to the SEO of a website is the anchor text. But what exactly is anchor text, and how is it optimally used? Just how important is anchor text?
Anchor Text is defined as the visible text of a hyperlink. For example, http://www.allinanchor.com is a hyperlink. Rather than displaying the link address we can use anchor text that is relative to the site or page the link is pointing to. So, rather than this: http://www.allinanchor.com we get this: killer SEO blog. Both links point to the same place, but the link containing the anchor texts helps to establish relevancy of the content on the page to the content of the page the link is pointing to.
As we know the search engines work primarily off the relevancy and importance of the content in a website. There was a time long ago when the search engines placed most of its importance in keywords. People would stuff content full of keywords that had nothing to do with the subject of the website. Now, the websites that have been around the longest, and have the most relevant content are the ones that are on top.
Anchor text optimization is the process of optimizing anchor text using relevant keywords to get higher rankings in search engines. Using keywords as anchor text to link to pages on the same topic helps the search engines establish relevancy of all the text contained in a website. All major search engines place huge level of importance to anchor text in comparison to simple hyperlinks.