MARKETING on the WEB

DEFINITION

There are many definitions of marketing but the simplest I have heard, and the easiest to understand is "looking at the business through the consumers eyes, with a view to making a profit".

Let us just expand on that for a moment. "through the consumers eyes" is the most important part - everything that your consumer can see about your business, has an effect on that consumers view of the business and ultimately whether he will purchase or not.

Running a web based business it does not matter how you are dressed or the state of the office/spare bedroom or whatever, the consumer will never see that. What he will see however is your web site, your emails, your advertising and your quality of service - delivery of orders, answering of queries, handling of complaints. All of this is part of your Marketing Mix. It all goes to demonstrate your professionalism - or lack of it!

I am sure most visitors to this page have come to find out all about Search Engines and Advertising, so here goes - but do read the remainder of the article or else the time spent on Search Engine placement or advertising will be wasted.

SEARCH ENGINES

I could devote a whole site to search engines and on how to get good search engine placement, but for the purpose of this exercise, I will give a brief outline of what they are and what they do, the benefits of achieving a high placement with them and a few general tips.

Basically, there are two types of search engines, the first, such as Alta Vista and Google, will use an automated programme to search your site (A "Robot" who will "Spider" your site). All Search Engines use slightly differing criteria and methods (algorithms), so if you set your site up for one engine, it will not necessarily follow that another engine will give it the same listing - or any listing at all!

Some engines will read your "Meta" tags - more on those later - and some will ignore them and read the actual text on your home page. Some will spider through your whole site, listing a large number of your pages and others will only list your home page. Over the years Webmasters have attempted to trick the engines into giving them higher rankings by various methods, but they have become wise to most of the tricks and now either ignore them or de-list a site altogether!

The second type of Search Engines are directories, the most important of all being Yahoo. Submission to commercial categories cost $299 for a review within 7 days, although there is no guarantee of a listing; non commercial sites can still be submitted free of charge, but listing can take weeks.

Generally speaking, for the average web site, particularly one that is not part of a major off-line company (e.g. Ford, General Motors, IBM) the majority of the traffic is going to come from a good search engine position - I have seen statistics showing it to be as high as 85%. It is not enough though, just to get listed - if you were in every search engine and directory in the world you would get no traffic unless people searching for you found your site in the top 20 or 30 in their search results.

The majority of surfers only look at the first ten or a dozen results and ones past number 30 are rarely visited..

So to obtain a good search engine position, you can do one of three things:-

• Pay a good Search Engine Placement company to place your site - check out some of their clients to see how well they have performed.
• Study Search Engine Placement articles and try and do the job yourself, (type Search Engine Placement into Google) or
• Get listed in a Pay per Click engine.

The choice between the first two options is that of between time and money. A good search engine placement is vital to really make your business grow and if you have the budget, spend some of it with a good placement company and spend your time on marketing your business. If however you are just starting the business and have very little capital, take the second route and at least spend some time on optimising your meta tags, keywords, keyword placement etc., and, especially if you are in a non-competitive area you may be able to achieve reasonable placings in some search engines yourself.

The majority of traffic will come from the top engines and while it does no harm to get your site listed on the hundreds of engines and directories that some auto-submission programmes will do for you, often free of charge, you will never get much traffic from them. In todays economic climate, many of the search engines are looking at ways of increasing their revenue, either by charging for submission, or linking up with the Pay-per-click engines. The situation is changing all the time, so it is pointless giving more than brief details here.

However it can be safely said at present, that by far the most important of the Search Engines is Google - they still offer free site submission and the quality of their search results is consistently higher than any other engine and they are conducting far more searches than anyone else. While it may be difficult to get a high listing with them I have done so on several of my sites with my best keywords.

If you are going to attempt Search Engine Placement yourself, I suggest that the first thing you do is to get the FREE Search Engine Masters Course. This is an in-depth five day email course that is sure to help you understand Search Engines and to improve your own ranking - click here and then press send. I can also recommend that you download Web Position Gold Trial - this is a FREE thirty day, limited trial version of the programme that is widely accepted as the best web positioning programme available (this is what I use to get my top rankings). Even if you do not go on to sign up for the full product, you will learn a great deal from this trial version to help you in the future. I have a UK based shopping site and on the keyword "shopping" on UK pages from Google UK I am achieving a ranking of seven out of a total of 4.2 million!!

If you then wish to take your own Search Engine Placement one step further, check out the JER Group, Inc. who have been producing online courses since 1994 and whose latest course is specifically on Search Engine Placement using Web Position Gold.

You may also read a selection of leading articles on the subject here.

The final course of action is to try Paid Per Click Search Engine placement through the likes of Google Adwords,and Overture. The idea with these is that you bid on a certain keyword or phrase and dependant on where your bid is in terms of other bids for the same phrase, determines where in the search result your site comes. If you have the highest bid, your site comes out number one and so on. You only pay for the number of hits your site actually receives from someone searching for it.

Whilst Overture and Google are probably by far the largest, it may prove less expensive to try one of the others. On Overture you are able to check out how often a particular phrase or word was searched for in the previous month and how much it costs to bid on it to achieve the required position in the search results. There may well be a large gap in the bidding between number one position and, say number three, and as both sites would be seen on the same page by the person doing the searching, it may well be more economical to set your bid to come third or fourth, without losing much impact.

Another trick on these pay per click search engines, is to bid for several keywords that are not searched upon very often, rather than the leading keyword. If, for example the most searched for keyword relevant to you cost $2, ten visitors to your site would cost you $20. If however you bid on ten keywords for only 10c each, your $20 dollars would bring you 200 hits! Whilst the top keyword applicable to you may receive 1,000 hits per month, you get the same hit rate by bidding for 10 keywords that receive 100 hits per month. It takes a little longer, but is far more cost effective.

The last time I updated my bidding at Overture, I found several phrases that had been searched on 30/40 times in the previous month, but had received no bids, so I was able to ensure coming out top for those key words for just $0.01 per click, so I was getting 100 hits per dollar! Unfortunately, they now have a minimum charge of 5c for each search term, so to get large numbers of low cost hits you will need to try one of the other engines.

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ADVERTISING

As with Search Engine placement, how you advertise on the Web, depends very much on money. If you have an advertising budget there are lots of advertising opportunities to attract visitors to your site. If you have little or no budget, then you can still advertise on a host of free classified sites, or in Newsletters (ezines) which accept free advertising. You will not get a great response - you will be lucky to get any response, but, if it is planned, if your headlines are good and if you sit for hours copying and pasting text into ads, you just may build up your sales to a level that brings in enough income to allow you to invest in some paid for advertising. (Click on this link for some great sites for FREE AD submissions).

If you are trying to make money by promoting just one affiliate programme that has given you your own duplicate page with your own url, then time spent on free advertising can eventually pay off. If however you are trying to create your own, comprehensive site, then I would suggest that you would be far better employed concentrating on building the site and marketing through less labour intensive methods.

If you only have a very limited advertising budget, I would personally spend it on one of the pay per click search engines (see above) - at least you will only be charged when people actually click on to your link so you know exactly how much you will have to spend per visitor. And if your site is good enough, and marketed in other ways, you will eventually gain regular visitors.

The next area to consider advertising is in the Ezines or Newsletters that are relevant to your market. You may find some that accept free adds and many others that accept paid for advertising at very economical rates.

By using such ezines, you are aiming your add at a targeted market and usually get much better response than simply blasting your add out to all and sundry.

There are several sites around where you can advertise in ezines for a minimal outlay. The first one I used, is the 2BucksAnAd programme. This will enable you to advertise to thousands of ezine readers for just two dollars per ad.

Another one worth trying is Noozles - in cooperation with an ever-growing network of email newsletters and ezines, Noozles has been able to secure unbeatable ezine advertising rates to suit your advertising budget with a high targeted reach. They work directly with the publishers to guarantee faster response times and accountability that ensures you a high return on your email marketing campaigns.

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FFA

FFA (or Free For All) pages may have had their use in the past, but these days there are so many people submitting to them via multi-submission sites, I believe that you are wasting your time using them unless you know that they do not accept multi-submission programmes.

If you do submit to FFA sites using multi-submission programmes, you headline will probably be dropped off the page within a few hours and hardly anyone will see it (that is if anyone even bothers to look). All that will happen will be that your mail box will be inundated with emails from the FFA site owners. With most programmes these days you are even advised to use a separate mail box when submitting which you simply empty a couple of days after your submissions.

So you have wasted your time and the site owner who has set up a system to reply to your postings has wasted his time also. If a site does not accept multi-submissions and if it asks for a verifiable mailbox address before posting your link, there is a chance that your ad will be seen.

One of the reasons given for hosting a FFA site is that one of the criteria Search Engines use in ranking a site is the number of other sites linking to it. Nowadays however many of the Search Engines are not listing sites with FFA links or Banner Farms, and may even ban sites with such pages.

However if you wish totry FFA advertising, submit to the MegaResponse FFA site, this network contains 36,635 individual FFA sites. You can place your ad on all 36,635 sites in the network FREE with the click of a button! there are six categories where you can put your links and you will receive NO emails from the site owner!

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LINK EXCHANGE

Far better than using an FFA page is to set up your own link exchange programme. It takes a little more work than simply having an FFA page but the benefits can be far greater. For a comprehensive article on the benefits of Link Exchange go to our archives and read the article "Link Popularity: How to Check it and How to Improve it!" by by Brent Winters, President of FirstPlace Software, the producers of the best web positioning software available, "Web Position Gold". (This will open in a new window, when you have finished reading the article simply close the window to return here).

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BUILDING CONFIDENCE/CUSTOMER SERVICE

I have grouped these two together because if you don't get the visitors confidence first, you will have no customers, and if you give your customers bad service, you will soon lose all confidence they may have had in you.

Building a customer's confidence in you and your product is probably more difficult and more important in a web based business than in a bricks and mortar one.

All you have in which to gain that confidence are your site and your service. Lets take the site first. Obviously it needs to be smart, attractive, eye-catching, well laid out and easy to navigate - everything you will have considered under Web Site Design - but what else will it need in order to build your visitors' confidence?

First, it should have an "About Us" page. The absolute minimum this should have is your address and contact details. Next, some personal details about you and your staff - ideally with a photo of you - it reminds visitors that they are dealing with a real person not just an abstract being from cyberspace!

The biographical information you give must relate to the theme of your site. A resume of your career is not relevant if you are running a site about dressmaking- unless of course you had a degree in fashion design and were a senior clothing buyer for a major chain of dress shops! Conversely, details of your family pets are not relevant on a site about marketing.

This page could also include any testimonials you have received about your site or brief details of articles you have published. Many large companies include an archive of press cuttings and a history of the company. It all goes to build a visitors confidence in you.

Whatever you put though, make it genuine. If you are a one man/woman business operating out of your spare bedroom, you don't necessarily have to disclose that, but DON'T state that you are a large company operating out of plush offices - you WILL be found out and when you are, all confidence and credibility will disappear overnight.

One other pet hate of mine, is the practise of owners of small, one man companies calling themselves C.E.O.'s (Chief Executive Officers). There is nothing wrong with being an owner or partner or proprietor of a business. What would you think if the owner of your local hardware store called herself a C.E.O.? At best you would probably think that she was being somewhat foolish. Don't give others the opportunity to think that you are foolish.

If you take credit cards on site (and you really should if you are selling off the site) then not only should you ensure that that part of the site is secure, you should explain to your visitors, before you ask them to enter their credit card details, that you are operating a secure site and that they should only give their card details when they see the locked padlock at the bottom of their screen and the "https" in their browser bar. (If you do not yet accept credit cards, check out Clickbank and PayPal).

Next, you should make it easy for visitors to contact you. As well as simply putting your e-mail address on your "About Us" page, invite visitors to contact you with their comments or queries from your home page. Not only will this help with your future marketing, by gathering e-mail addresses, it will again build confidence in your site by letting visitors know that you welcome their comments.

Likewise, producing a newsletter gives you an opportunity to develop a long term relationship with your visitors and give you a greater chance of converting those visitors into customers.

Once your site is up and running, and you are obtaining customers, you need to ensure that your customer service is top class. When a visitor emails you, answer as soon as possible. I have an autoresponder on my site e-mail address which states that I will contact the sender as soon as possible. This shows that I have received their message. I then endeavour to reply personally, within 24 hours at the most. If they have raised a query which can not be answered immediately, tell them that you are investigating the problem and give them some idea as to when you will get back to them again - and ensure that you DO, even if it is only to update them on the situation.

If you are selling goods on your site, make it clear when and how they will be delivered and what your returns policy is. Implement a good order tracking process so that if customers contact you wanting to know when they may expect delivery, you will be in a position to tell them.

It is good practise to e-mail your customers to confirm that the goods have been dispatched. You can include a message about how to use them or how best to look after them, or who to contact if they do not receive them. You can also take the opportunity to include a short message advertising another product, perhaps with a special offer for new or existing customers.

If, after receiving the goods, the customer complains for any reason, do not get into an argument with them - there can only be one loser, YOU! Ideally deal with the complaint and help them resolve their problem. (It may be as simple as getting them to read the instructions properly. The old adage "if all else fails read the manual" can be very true).

Remember, if you help them solve their problem you have gained a friend who may buy off you again or even recommend you to their friends. If you are totally offhand and unhelpful, they will certainly NOT buy off you again, and more importantly, will probably tell all their friends not to buy off you. It can take years to build a good reputation, but only five minutes to destroy one.

As a last resort, it is usually better to accept return of faulty or unwanted goods gracefully, than to argue. If it ever gets as far as litigation the courts usually find in favour of the customer and the lost goodwill, never mind the legal fees, will rarely be worth it. Just remember, "the customer is always right - even when he is wrong!"

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NEWSLETTERS

An excellent way of building customer loyalty and keeping customers coming back to your site is to start a regular newsletter.

You can use a newsletter (or ezine) to keep your visitors up to date with changes in your business, to make them special offers and to provide informative articles on the theme of your site. Once you have built the readership up to over 1000 subscribers you can then start charging for advertising. In the meantime you can insert free ads from new subscribers, ads that you swap with similar newsletters, and ads for your own products or for affiliate programmes you are using.

Your own newsletter can also be an excellent place in which to test your ads. After all, if you can not attract interest from subscribers to your own newsletter, you will never attract strangers.

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SIGNATURE FILES

Signature Files (or sig. files as they are more popularly known) are one of the most overlooked means of advertising on the net. When you are operating a "brick and mortar" business, the very least you have is a letterhead with your company name, address and contact details. You may well also have a company logo and possibly an advertising slogan. You may well also frank your envelopes with your name and a slogan.

Why then when writing on the net, do you confine yourself with a "from" line and your name?

At the very least, you should put your web address below your signature and possibly some type of advertising slogan, informing recipients what your business is.

Once you have a sig. file (most email packages have the facility for creating one and using it automatically or at your request - in Outlook Express go to tools/options/signatures and create your signature and settings) use it on ALL the emails you send - even if you are sending a personal email to your mother or your cousin - they may just know someone who is interested in your product or service.

One word of caution though. Don't go over the top. I have seen some sig. files that are longer than the message!. If you are too blatantly advertising, you are bound to upset some of the recipients!

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OFF LINE MARKETING

When you are planning the marketing of your web site, do not forget the opportunities to promote it off-line.

If you already have an off-line presence, ensure that your existing customers and suppliers know you have a web site, and how it will benefit them. e.g.. can they order direct from the site, find out more details about your products, submit sales enquiries or service problems. At the very least, include your web and e-mail addresses on all of your stationery - letterheads, brochures, business cards and advertisements.

If your site is designed to improve your sales or your customer service (and if it does not do either - preferably both - why have you bothered to set up a site?) consider producing a small leaflet/flyer announcing your site and its aims and send it out to all of your customers and suppliers and insert it in all of your outgoing mail.

Likewise, if your site is being run for a club or a society, ensure that all members are aware of the url and email address - advertise it in the club house or in the monthly newsletter.

For those of you whose business is solely on-line, there can still be many opportunities for promoting yourself off-line. Dependant on your target market (is it primarily local, or is it world-wide?) you can try windscreen or bumper stickers for your car, getting some compliment slips printed with your web site address on - perhaps a copy of your sig. file - to place in all of your outgoing mail. Remember, even the clerk who opens the envelope that contains your cheque paying your quarterly utilities bill may be a potential customer, or know someone who cold be interested in what you have to offer.

Tell your relations, friends, neighbours, colleagues what you are doing. Again, if they are not interested themselves they may have contacts who are. One word of warning however, do not become an Internet bore.

When I was selling life insurance many years ago, a sales manager said to me "Make friends of your customers, not customers of your friends." Once your friends know what you do, allow them to approach you when they are interested -that way you will, in the long run, get more customers, without losing your friends!

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MAKE YOUR SITE STICKY

Making a site sticky is web speak for encouraging visitors to stay and browse through a site or to return to it, rather than skimming through it and leave never to return.

The obvious way of making a site sticky is to fill it with good content - something that the visitor will find of interest and value. It is also important to keep the content fresh by adding to it, changing it if appropriate, giving the returning visitor something new to look at.

There are however many other methods to help make your site sticky. You can hold regular competitions, offer free gifts, regular surveys etc.

You can offer your visitors a free email service, so that they keep returning to your site to use the email, set up a discussion board for visitors to contribute to, or a guest book where they may leave their comments, and read those of other visitors. You can also set up your own chat area.

You will be pleased to know that there are many sites on the Web offering this type of service for you to place on your own sites, and I would suggest that you check out Bravenet who offer a whole range of programmes to help you improve your site.

You can set up your own free classified pages. Go to Adland Pro and click on "become an affiliate". You can also place a Search Engine on your site, and many of the Search Engine companies will pay a small amount for each search carried out.

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BACK END SELLING

To become successful in any business, you must get your customers coming back for more. The cost of obtaining the first order from a customer in terms of time and money is far higher than that incurred in getting the second and subsequent orders.

Once the customer has made that first purchase, provided that he is satisfied with it, it should be much easier to sell him something else. He now knows and trusts you and you have some idea of what his interests are.

The art is, to ensure that you have an efficient record keeping system. If, for instance, you run an online pet store, send a special offer to all customers who purchased dog collars off you, for, say, a dog kennel or pet insurance. You should get a far higher response than just sending the same offer out to all of your mailing list.

Bearing this in mind, many successful net marketeers heavily promote a low cost, low profit item for their new visitors, knowing that once they have converted a visitor into a customer, there is a good chance that they will be able to sell more profitable items to them later.

Grouped in with Back End Selling is Add Ons, because again, the hard part has been achieved in getting the initial sale and now is time to get the profit.

To take car sales as a prime example, a large portion of a motor dealers profit, certainly in the UK comes not from the sale of the car, even though that is the high value item, but from the sale of such add-ons as finance, extended warranty, break down recovery service, and the usual extras as upgrading the stereo system, alloy wheels etc.

Look at your own products and see what profitable extras you can add on to that first sale.

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