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Successful Web Marketing (part 1)
To find what people are searching for on the Web: (this can be scary)
So let's suppose you decide to sell toys. During the holidays, it ranks 4th in dollars spent, and is very close to the 3rd place group. Now, what do we do? Let me digress for a moment. If you noticed that 2/3rds of people abandoned their carts before checking out, you may wonder why. The key reasons are (in order of importance):
These items are web-design related and will be addressed later, but the important point here is that getting people to your site means little if they don't buy or even worse, you frustrate them. So customer satisfaction is very high on your list of things to get right. This leads us to the distribution end of the business. Before you can be successful in selling on line, these items must be addressed:
If you get these wrong, you can forget it. One solution we might consider in our toy business is to find suppliers who are willing to drop-ship the items directly to the customer. In performing a web search for "drop ship toys" I ran into this website http://www.angelfire.com/biz2/sparkyszone/ (this is not a referral, just an example). This site is a listing of drop-ship companies specializing in online sales. The next step is to research this and other sites to find the best deal available. Get references from satisfied customers and look for forums for members to express their problems. Now we have our product and have solved the order/distribution problems, we need to look to reduce the size of the potential market. This may seem odd, but the most successful small business websites are very targeted. For example, you might look at educational toys. Using "educational toys" on Google, I found 754,000 listings. If we limit it even more, to "educational toys for preschool", we drop to 107,000 entries. that's OK, we aren't afraid of competition. Next, we can make a list of potential users of our site.
Now we need a title for our page. How about, "Teaching young children with educational toys." Search engines often use the title for the printed reference on their site listing. So you could have another page with a title of "Educational toys for Grand Parents", and so on. Now you need a list of 'Key Words' (at least 25 ) to use as meta tag description words. If you are a bricks and mortar store, be sure to list the town, surrounding towns and the State . Try to use phrases and not just single words. Such as -- toys for preschoolers, educational toys, teaching math to preschoolers, etc. Most search engines can parse these phrases into single words, but most people use a phrase when searching. If possible, brain storm with someone else to generate the list of keywords. And remember the most powerful word on the Internet is FREE.
Now that we have a list of potential keywords, we need to determine if other people use these keywords. To test our keywords, we go to Overture and use their word usage check. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ This lets us test each word for usage. It also tells us how many times a word has been searched for in the last month. Let's test a few. 'Toy' yields-- 1,402,791 searches in the last month. It also lists other related searches and as I look down the list of terms we might use, I see, "educational toy" which was searched for 11,624 times. Now I click on the term 'educational toy' and it leads me to around 30 new listings. The next most searched for 'educational" item was "child educational toy" with 1165 requests. By repeating this process, you can target the 'best keywords' for your site. (by the way, 'educational preschool toy' was searched for 50 times) Using the term 'grandparents' shows 8,798 searches. I hope you can see the power in researching your keywords. Even if your not listed on the first three pages under the broad categories, you can still get lots of clicks using the right keywords. I'm not the best typist in the world; and I'm not the only one. Try misspelling a popular search term, you maybe surprised at how many others do the same thing. An example for us is granparents. Misspelled words can really payoff on pay to click sites. You can often be the only listing for a term on Overture, and since the top three listings in Overture also are header listings for Yahoo and Lycos, you can get lots of clicks for a small price. (go to Google and try granparents and grandparants, yeh) OK, we've researched our distribution and keywords, next we are ready to build the site.
Billions of dollars are spent to determine the right colors, graphics and layouts to improve results on websites. How can we benefit from others research? Just look at a large competitor like, in our case, Toys R Us. http://www.24hourmall.com/Toys.html , this is a very well researched site and in fact there is little about it that is difficult to duplicate. Notice, I'm not at all suggesting that you copy their site, but you can study it for their use of colors, layout, ease of use and overall design. It might be a good time to point out some basics on site design. The well known acronym K.I.S.S. is a good idea when it comes to websites. Keep it simple stupid. Load times should not exceed 30 seconds at 28,800 kbs. Even though you may be connected to an OC48, many people are not. If you remember the statistics above, 36% of buyers are interested in convenience, many of these are from suburban or rural areas where the closest Sax 5th Avenue is hundreds or thousands of miles away. It also holds that rural and many suburban areas do not have fast connection speeds. Think in terms of your own capacity to wait for a page to load. Thirty seconds seems like an eternity to me, especially if I'm looking at a blank screen. So, remember that one of the reasons people leave a site before checking out is due to frustration and few things are more frustrating than dead time. Load your page with graphics interwoven when possible, use 5 to 7 second page transitions (i.e. dissolves or vertical blinds) and avoid flashing, pop-ups and pop-under's. Give people something to look at and if possible, read while your graphics load.
Try not to require more than 3 clicks to go anywhere on your site. This means avoiding intermediate break out pages and using a more horizontal design rather than a vertical approach.
By using an approach that concentrates more connecting links on the Main Page, customers can determine where they want to go faster and in seeing the options, eliminate unnecessary clicking. The deepest a customer should have is to a third level. Many sites have large catalog areas containing thousands of pages, but even then, the three click concept is possible. By using a search engine on site, the first click pulls in a dozen options with good descriptions based on the entered term and the next click should get the customer where he wants to go.
Dealing with the addition of shipping charges, zones and delivery options are a cause of additional frustration for the web shopper. If possible, add the cost in for each product where the 'estimated and included' cost averages the true shipping cost for your company. If, after a few months, you see that the costs need to be adjusted, make the adjustments in your prices and carry on. If you want to predetermine a safe amount, just use the highest domestic rate and add this amount to each item. Now, in order to see if the price is too high, check the price against local merchants. As of this time, you can add the sales tax in on the price for a local store and not on your web price. This normally offsets the cost of shipping for web-based businesses. Remember, whether the shipping is added on or not, the shipping cost is still reflected in the total price one way or another.
In general keep the number of items fairly low, yet offer the areas of products that customers find most interesting. How do I know what people find interesting? Go to a successful bricks and mortar company and look at how they allocate their floor space. Form a list of groups of items, and see how many isles are devoted to each. For example, if a local toy store devotes one of twenty isles to educational toys, it's fair assume that these toys represent about 5% of sales. Look to see how that isle is broken up. Perhaps by age group or maybe by type, such as electronic or board games etc. These groups should be reflected in your site setup with six to ten items in each group. You might have a web-page for each group and have all the items for that group on it.
One way is to see if the manufacturer has pictures and descriptions of items on their web-site. Most do and most have a way of your getting a copy of the presentation for your site. If not, a digital camera can allow you to get pictures if you have the items in hand or you can scan pictures from a supplier catalog. Using a content management program can help keep a site fresh. What a content management program does is allow you to enter text changes and images into a single location and have that content placed on the web-page automatically. You can remove or rotate the content on each page as often as you like. The archive process allows you to store this copy for use on another day. Ladata Software Development produces custom content management software or have a look at http://www.interactivetools.com/ for a boxed approach.
Taking credit cards or other payment over the web is much easier today and you must take credit cards on the web. The options are:
I recommend using a company like PayPal to handle transactions because it's simple and cheap. Well, now we know what to sell and how to present it on the web. All we need are customers to complete the process. |
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