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Marketing Small Business Online - Where Are The Sales?
By selfemployedblog | February 19, 2007
I have experience dealing with clients who have already established online stores that have daily sales and with those who have recently launched an online store and have not had one sale. There are some key things to point out between the two. Let’s take what I’ve learned from the already established small business online and what the newly launched small business can use to create sales.
1. Build a professional looking web site
Your customers want to feel confident when making a purchase from you. If you visit a site that looks like it was put together in less than an hour, you wouldn’t feel right buying anything from that company. Start by investing in a professionally made web site. You can find web designers/web developers who freelance and charge reasonable rates.
2. Write good content
You must believe in what you’re selling and writing good content is what establishes that you’re an expert. Write about why your product is the best and what it can do for your customers. If you don’t like writing, you can outsource that task as well to a copywriter. The important thing is to have good content for people to read. It will help build trust and shows that you take pride in what you are selling. Not only that but it helps with natural searches in the search engines.
3. Develop presentations and public speaking
Marketing is not limited only to what you can do online. If you are comfortable speaking in front of groups of people, set up a presentation to market your product. The successful online store owner I know does a lot of offline marketing such as public speaking engagements. He doesn’t own a brick and mortar store. His business sells only from the online store. By reaching out to the public, it creates more of a buzz and more word of mouth advertising.
4. Podcasts, Videos, and Blogs
If public speaking isn’t for you, podcasting and video interviews work just as well. Videos can create a ton of traffic to your site. Simply talk about what your product does or create a how-to type video which advertises your web site during the playback. Podcasting is like having your own radio show. Keep it interesting enough and you can build up a loyal following of listeners. Blogs work in much the same way. Write about issues that your product can help resolve. Provide useful information that will keep readers coming back.
5. Good Ol’ SEO
Search engine optimization can be done by you or by hiring an SEO expert. Basically, SEO involves the use of keywords and phrases throughout your web site content and key areas of your site to help increase your ranking in the search engine results pages. You can learn popular SEO techniques online or in books. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is a good place to start if you want to do it yourself.
6. PPC Advertising
Once you can afford to, pay-per-click advertising is a good way to bring potential customers to your site. Focusing in on a good keyword list is crucial. PPC advertising is costly for inexperienced users. I recommend taking a course or consulting with an expert before spending money on PPC. It can get expensive really fast. It has produced great sales for the successful online store. They continue to maintain a PPC budget for their online store.
7. Use a decent open-source shopping cart
There are several all-in-one shopping carts on the market that provide everything you need to have a secure online store up and running quickly. However, they also take a good chunk of your profit for their service. A good open source shopping cart such as Zen Cart will save you from their fees. It works great and has a ton of features. Best of all it’s free! You will have to invest in hiring someone to install it for you but once you learn how to manage it yourself, you’ll save a lot more money in the long run.
These are the main points that I’ve learned from the successful online store. There is much more detail involved for the above but hopefully it gives an idea on what can be implemented for newly established online businesses. There are also many more marketing tactics that can be used. Just keep an open mind as to how to get your web address out in the public and you may come up with a few ideas of your own.
Tags: marketing small business, seo, ppc, writing content, online stores
Topics: Marketing |
February 19th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Good list. I would include “start a corporate blog and stick with it”. If you don’t know how to set one up on your site (using sites like Blogger is easy, but doesn’t help as much with SEO) and you’re paying someone to build your main website for you, get them to set up a blog for you to. Once blogging software like Wordpress is set up, it’s painfully easy to manage. Writing a blog post once a week on a topic related to your business will increase the keyword count on your site and attract other bloggers to link to your site. Also, make sure you submit your posts to social bookmarking sites like Technorati and Digg.
I actually wrote a news release for one of my public relations clients on this topic last spring. If you’re interested, here’s a link:
http://www.endgamepr.com/releases/netbaldwin-bloggingrelease.htm
February 19th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Another rule — when commenting on someone’s blog, read the rest of the blog FIRST. Obviously you’ve mentioned in previous posts the things I suggested in my comment. My apologies!
February 21st, 2007 at 2:57 am
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