Develop Your Own Style, Be Unique

As noted above, you should be a unique entry into that niche market. In case you haven’t noticed, there is already a ProBlogger, a Technorati, and an eBay, so why try to copy, or even emulate them closely? Sometimes there is a great need for improving a known business or product. Ask Overstock how that whole eBay competition thing is going? (Of course it doesn’t help for the CEO to be nominated and receive honorable mention in the “Worst executive of the year award” either.)

You don’t need to be an exact copy of something that already exists. There may be room for one more, but there might not be room for one more exact copy. Develop your own business style and don’t worry about being an exact copy, that will make things worse. You should know who the competition is, you should know generally how they operate, and then you should do your own thing and not worry about what they do.

Over the past 10-15 years I have developed a few new products and brought them from a thought in my head to a manufactured item that our company could sell. Part of product development is working to brand that product. What is the name going to be, the packaging, a logo and so on.

Because this particular product was going to be sold at conventions all across the country, it would be seen by attendees walking by a vendor’s booth in a crowded hall of sometimes 500-600 different vendors. So the packaging had to stand out. I took some squares of Astrobright paper (the neon colored papers) in all different colors and with my eyes shut, threw them on the floor.

When I opened my eyes I picked the very first color that I saw, a very bright neon yellow, and this became the trademark color buyers looked for when they walked the crowded floor. It stood out among a sea of browns and earth tones and even if a buyer didn’t know what the product was, it caught his or her eye and drew them into the booth.

Learn to develop your own style and you will be rewarded by standing out among a crowded field of earth tones.

Stay Focused and Be Positive

It can be very easy to get discouraged when entering a new field or niche market. The competition has been doing this a much longer time, they have developed relationships you don’t have, traffic you can’t generate, and revenue you only wish to achieve. Set some short term and long term goals and try to stick by them. Don’t worry about the fact that you can’t directly compete yet, that takes time.

Try to stay as positive as you can and focus on the job at hand. For those of us who are never satisfied with meritocracy, it can be a challenge to stay focused. Whatever short term goal we reach should have been higher and whenever we do reach that goal, we have already looked at why we didn’t reach the one above instead. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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.

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I love the people who think that they can just put a website on the internet with a basic html form and they are just magically going to start generating leads. And then they’re all, ‘why am I not getting traffic’, or, ‘why am I only getting leads touting the latest ED pill’. Obviously doing your own lead gen takes a considerable amount more work, but if you’re a geek like us, this work is fun and interesting.

The things you need to know as a lead gen noob: (more…)

So here are the numbers by percent of revenue spent on advertising in 2006, believe me these were shocking to me too.

1. Microsoft - $11.5 billion (20% of revenue)
2. Coca-Cola - $2.5 billion
3. Yahoo - $1.3 billion (20% of revenue)
4. eBay - $871 million (15% of revenue - most on Google advertising)
5. Google - $188 million
6. Starbucks - $95 million

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“Developers and users alike are going to be very surprised and pleased at how great [business] applications look and work on [the] iPhone

This is a little overstated, I think. The iPhone is a nice shiney new toy that we would all love to play with a little. When it comes to business apps, though, professionals need it to be more about function than form. This pretty much negates half of what the iPhone has to offer. When it comes right down to it, the Treo is a superior business tool out of the box. The only real advantage that I see in the iPhone is that it has a superior built-in Safari browser.

With this browser, online applications have an easy way to say that their application works on the iPhone. It’s already fully capable of displaying and executing all the fancy AJAX and Javascript stuff that we have come to love in our applications. The AIMpromote CRM Software application is web-based, and is fully iPhone compatible just as-is. We haven’t needed to change anything. That’s nice, but it’s hardly novel.

We will see that with its inflated price and it’s almost standard functionality that there are other products on the market that will serve the business community more efficiently. From an Internet marketing standpoint, I think we will be adding an iPhone logo on our site to state that it’s compatible. This will really just be a marketing move though, as there was no actual work involved on our end to make it work on this platform.

If I were your boss would I buy you an iPhone? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be because it’s such a great business tool. The Nokia N800 is a far superior product at a lower price point. It has all the necessary business functionality with a price point $100 less than the iPhone. If you want something fun to play with, then get the iPhone. If you are looking for cost-benefit and ROI, get the Treo or the N800.

Apparently, these whiners were dialing in “40 to 50 times as often” as the “average customer,” and after failing to appease them, the firm chose to “terminate the relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options.”

This was smart. Some people might cry about how ‘unfair’ it is, but the fact is that these are at-will relationships. If Sprint doesn’t want to do business with unprofitable customers, then they should definitely not be forced to. It wouldn’t surprise me if legislation is created regarding this issue (or at least the attempt will be made to create legislation).

Sometimes it’s hard for us to realize that we don’t have to do business with every willing customer. The fact is that if we aren’t profitable, we can’t long provide our services to any customers.

This article notes more detail on unprofitable customers:

Unprofitable customers are parasites. Harvard Business Review estimates that, on average, 15% of all customer are unprofitable. The book, Angel Customers & Demon Customers, estimates that, in most industries, the best 20% of customers account for 150% of profits. The worst 20% typically lose money equal to 75% of profits.

You could always raise the prices of these customers, but that has the potential to backfire. How do you explain to one of these parasitic clients that they are being charged an additional premium due to their overuse of services that were supposed to be unlimited. It may actually be illegal to do so. It’s far easier just to cut these clients loose, and let them find another company with which to do business. There are almost always alternatives for the customer.

If you have customers that are clearly unprofitable, just cut them loose. It is ethical, and it is the only sane decision that a business can make.