Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 31 of August , 2007 at 6:44 pm
The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog earlier today announced that it has made some changes to the Yahoo! Panama PPC model. I think some of these changes are quite interesting.
For instance, you can look at all of your pay-per-click ads, up to 20 ads, with one click. And you can also look at competitors’ ads so you can borrow their ideas. But the feature that I found most promising is the quality score update. Every 30 days, Yahoo! will review pay-per-click quality scores and if your quality score goes down they’ll send you an e-mail to let you know. Of course, you can check your Account Summary, but if you are near the end of the 30-day period and haven’t checked yet then they’ll notify you by e-mail. I think that’s a cool feature.
Finally, one new feature of the PPC model at Yahoo! is the ability to save and view up to 45 different reports. I like creating custom reports. 45 of them? Wow, that’s a feature I could go crazy for.
It looks like Yahoo! is making a serious effort to compete with Google.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: PPC
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 31 of August , 2007 at 9:37 am
When I scour the web looking for blogs to read I run across to big mistakes that bloggers make. There are probably more than just two mistakes, but I see two extremes with regard to blog SEO, or blog optimization, that bloggers tend to make when writing their posts.
The first mistake is the “too much” mistake and the second mistake is the “too little” mistake. In other words, the blog posts either look spammy or are written in such a way that you can’t tell that the blog post is SEOd at all.
Blogs are meant to be conversational. That is, it is really a sales tool, not in the sense that I want to deliver a hard sales message and try to close the sale right now. The purpose of the blog is to get people interested in my topic enough that they stick around longer to see what else I have to say. You can call it “pre-selling.” I’m not trying to sell you anything right now. I’m just trying to open the door of conversation.
Since that is true, my primary purpose in blogging should be to start a relationship with you. Not sell, not harp, not hustle. Just relate. But I’m also relating to the search engines and the way humans relate to search engines is through keywords and links. That’s where blog optimization comes in.
Most bloggers, when they try to SEO their blog posts, forget about the conversation part and start adding links and keywords in where they don’t naturally fall. This looks spammy and could count against you at the search engines as well as with your human readers. If your readers notice you trying to SEO your blog posts then they’ll likely lose interest. On the other hand, if you don’t optimize your blog posts at all then you may not have your blog posts indexed in the search engines for the keywords you want to be found for.
Blog optimization is all about managing your two audiences: Search engines and humans. But, really, the more important of the two are your human readers. Talk to them, not at them.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Blogging
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 30 of August , 2007 at 5:10 pm
When it comes to viral video marketing, everyone knows about YouTube and Google Video. But those are not your only options. I wanted to take this time to share with you some other places you can upload your videos as well. Here’s the list of video directories I recommend:
- YouTube - Needs no introduction.
- Google Video - I think you know who they are.
- Yahoo! Video - Did you know the largest search portal on the Internet has a place where you can upload your videos? I highly recommend using Yahoo! Video in addition to YouTube and Google.
- MetaCafe - MetaCafe encourages users to vote on their favorite videos.
- Break.com - Break is unique in that they offer monetary prizes for the best videos in certain categories, including Girl of the Day, and they have ways for videos to make money being the most popular.
- DailyMotion - DailyMotion is very popular and it’s easy to see why. You can upload your videos, join groups, and share your videos with your group. This adds a new twist to social networking.
When it comes to marketing yourself through viral video, don’t just settle for YouTube and Google Video. They may be the most popular video sites on the web, but they are not the only video sites. Get your video out there in as many places as you can because some of the most devoted video marketing freaks aren’t YouTube junkies. Some of the best viral video marketers are actually hanging out in some of these other places too. Oh, and one more for the road: Try Blinkx. It rocks.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Social & Viral Marketing
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 30 of August , 2007 at 8:37 am
If you plan on using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to your website then you need to understand that each ad you write must be optimized for specific keywords. Not concepts. Keywords.
Google evaluates every ad and gives it a quality score. That quality score helps determine the rank that ad falls into when displayed on SERPs and in the content network. The quality score is determined, in part, by how well you have optimized your ad according to certain keywords. Perhaps the most important thing to understand is the keyword mix you have on your target page - the page you are driving traffic to.
PPC Ad Positioning Based On Keywords
It isn’t so much that the keywords that are on that page will be penalized if they don’t appear in the ad. Your ad might still run, but it won’t be displayed as high up on the page. You might have to increase your bid amount for those keywords if you want them to appear on the page. You might be better off discontinuing the ad from appearing on pages optimized for those keywords altogether.
For example, let’s say you sell fruit: apples, oranges, bananas, pears, kumquats. OK, we’ll throw in the figs for a nickel. Well, you can’t ship fruit through the U.S. mail, but it’s just an example, right? So you optimize your ad around the keyword fruit. You don’t have enough space in your ad to list every kind of fruit you offer so you leave those out. You could write a separate ad for each type of fruit. But let’s suppose your first ad uses the keyword “fruit.” Your ad will still run when a searcher queries “apple,” but your ad won’t appear as high on the page - unless you increase your bid for that keyword.
In highly competitive markets your ad may not run at all unless you bid a certain minimum. I saw this the other day. Ads for a certain keyword were inactivated until the advertiser agreed to pay $1.00 for those keywords, a full 70 cents above what he was willing to pay. And they were excellent keywords for his ad. Just keep this one thing in mind: Keywords are extremely important in pay-per-click advertising.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: PPC
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 29 of August , 2007 at 4:27 pm
Real estate agents like to buy the newest best thing. If I were a real estate agent and wanted to build a website, I would stay as far away from real estate gurus who claim to have the best method for building a real estate website. For one thing, if they’re worth their weight in salt as a real estate agent they probably don’t know squat about designing or building websites, let alone search engine optimization. It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in; to succeed online today you need to have a firm grasp on search engine optimization and how to rank your site well at the search engines.
I visited one real estate website and noticed at the bottom that there was a copyright notice showing the owner of the content was the person who had developed the website, not the real estate agent whose site I was on. That’s a big no-no. If you pay a web designer or another professional to build you a website, make sure that you are buying the content. You don’t want to pay someone to build you a website only to find out that they own the content. You won’t be able to modify it and what good does it do to have a website that you don’t own the content to?
The Other Mistake: PLR Is Duplicate Content
That was the first mistake this real estate agent made. Upon further investigation, I found out that the owner of all of that content also licensed the rights for other real estate agents around the country to use it as well. The company actually had links to their customers’ websites. They all looked exactly the same! It was one template and all of the website contained content that was exactly the same. They were PLR articles. It looks like real estate agents who bought into that plan paid for a template with duplicate content so none of them got any SEO benefit out of their websites at all.
When you go to build your real estate website, be sure you don’t buy a package that looks just like everybody else’s. More importantly, make sure the content is not the same as anyone else’s online. If even one other web page has the same content that you have and that web page got that content first then your web page won’t rank in the search engines. It’s duplicate content. You’re only killing your business. Why would you do that?
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 29 of August , 2007 at 7:58 am
Do you have a website that you want to drive traffic to? You can drive traffic to your website, even to a specific web page, by uploading a video to YouTube and Google Video. We call it viral video marketing.
All you really need is Windows Move Maker and a video camera. You can use one of the small hand held point and shoot digital camcorders that are so easy to get these days. You know, the ones people use for making their home videos?
You take your video and have someone hold it while you talk, or dance, or perform … whatever it is you making a video of. Or you could just put your camcorder on the coffee table on top of a tripod, if you are doing it all by yourself. You do your editing in Windows Movie Maker, of course.
Once you’ve made your video you simply upload it to the video sharing sites. But before you do that there is one more thing you need to do. Overlay your e-mail address into the last seconds of your video so that it appears on the screen toward the end of the video. This is so that people watching the video can see what website you are promoting. People interested in what you have to offer can decided for themselves to visit your site. This is one way to get targeted traffic to your site and it works no matter what kind of site you own. It’s also totally free.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Social & Viral Marketing
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 28 of August , 2007 at 2:15 pm
Some interesting stories on Marketing Pilgrim this morning.
First, the Chinese and Yahoo:
“Free speech rights as we understand them in the United States are not the law in China,” Yahoo said in a statement Monday. “Every sovereign nation has a right to regulate speech within its borders.”
This no doubt has human rights activists up in arms, but does Yahoo have a point? Is this a matter of Chinese law rather than U.S. values? I believe we’re going to see more and more of this in the future. The Internet is not a U.S. entity. It is owned by no nation, but every nation wants the right to regulate what can be accessed through within the boundaries of their borders. Do nations have that right? If not, who does?
(Pilgrim) Now that more of the NYT’s archives are appearing in Google’s search results, many individuals are finding their past is catching up with them. Worse, it’s the NYT’s version of their past that contains misinformation.
In out litigious society, this could be cause for a few lawsuits. But who would those injured sue? Google or the New York Times? Maybe both?
What happens if an old news story that contains false or unverified information appears online? This is another reason you should be paying attention to online reputation management.
These stories weren’t on Marketing Pilgrim’s blog, but they’re interesting nonetheless:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Google Inc. said Tuesday it will serve as the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertisments throughout Time Warner Inc.’s CNN.com
I think we’ll see more of this type of buddy/buddy advertising from big media in the future as well. The Internet is quickly becoming the playground of large media companies just like TV has been for the past 50 years. Anyone care to guess who will eventually rise to the top (Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, et. al.)?
(Turncoat) If AOL is serious about wanting to improve DMOZ, this would be a good place to start. For now, I’ll join the crowd of people saying Google should stop using DMOZ. Of course there are editors who do a good job, but these mob like practices make it impossible to work with and for.
You’ll have to read the whole story to get the full picture, but this DMOZ editor is the Martin Luther of online directories. Well, not quite, but this is quite telling. Do the right thing and even the has-beens will get you. It really is the wild west, isn’t it?
(Source) The new allowed sites feature now seems to be live for all AdSense publishers. Just login to your account and go to https://www.google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view.
I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on any of this ….
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Search Engines
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 28 of August , 2007 at 10:08 am
(Source) To start, you need something to record the audio. If you own a Mac, GarageBand is included, and is a great program. Since I own a desktop for podcast, I use Audacity.
Podcasting is picking up speed. It’s easy to see why. Anyone, literally, can do it. If you have the right equipment you can be set up to do podcasting in just a few minutes. All you need to do is record your podcast and upload it to your website then send it out to a few podcast directories for marketing purposes. If you don’t drive traffic to hear the podcast then it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you put into it, no one will hear it.
Of course, you can go back to the backs, and you should. SEO delivers more traffic to more websites daily than any other form of online marketing. But how do you SEO a podcast?
Search Engines Still Learning To Read Podcast Files
This is the question to answer. The search engines, as of now, can’t read audio, video, or image files. Therefore, these files won’t get crawled. That’s been a problem historically. Some day I believe we’ll see search engines that can crawl these files, but for now, we have what we have.
The only way to ensure that search engines crawl your image files is to add alt text to the files. More and more people are starting to figure that out now and are including alt tags with their img src codes. Can you do something similar with podcast files? Yes, you can add an alt tag to your podcast files, but honestly we haven’t figured out yet just how the search engines rank photos and audio/video files.
If you conduct a search for images using a keyword that is important to you then you’ll get a list of photos and images related to that keyword, but the order seems rather random. So too do the results for audio and video queries. What gives?
How To Optimize Podcasts And Other Multimedia
I believe the best way to optimize your podcast files is to give your podcast a keyword-rich name that you want the search engines to key in on. For instance, if you are an auto mechanic and your podcast is a 10-minute free instruction podcast on how to give a car a tune up then you might name your podcast “auto tune up instruction.” Very basic and very important. Whenever someone searches for that specific keyword phrase at any of the search engines, you’ll increase your chances of being found, especially if they add the keyword “podcast.” With Google Universal and Ask 3D making vertical searches more easy, this type of optimization will become more important in the future.
One thing is clear, the Internet is becoming more technological in the sense that demand is rising for multimedia presentations - video, audio, slideshows, and a mixture of media presentations. It is important that you poise yourself now for the advances in optimization for these media so that when the search engines roll out their beta versions of spider technologies designed to rank your podcasting, video, and multimedia files, you’ll be one of the first to hit the ground running.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 27 of August , 2007 at 3:56 pm
This was an interesting discussion on blog ROI. Unfortunately, Forrester closed the comments to the thread so I can’t trackback, thereby proving the ROI.
There really is no way to calculate the bottom line ROI. That’s because there are so many variables to blogging and so many of them are unmeasurable. For instance, what is the value of 100 customers commenting on your blog every month? What is the value of one trackback to another blog that delivers 1,000 visitors to your blog over the course of one year? It is somewhat even difficult to calculate the expense of your blog, let alone the ROI.
For example, you might spend $20 per month on blog hosting or you can set up a blog on a free blog host (I don’t recommend this, by the way). You can download WordPress for free (and I do recommend this) or spend thousands of dollars on a fancy schmancy blogging platform that under-performs. You can blog yourself (if you have the time) or spend anywhere from $100 per month to $10,000 per month for a blog copywriting service. Some corporations hire a full-time blogger to write their daily blog and pay them a nice salary plus expenses. You may not need to do that.
Your Company Blog’s Measurable Value
So the real question is, “What is the value of your blog to your business goals?” Depending on your industry, it could be very valuable. In a highly competitive industry such as search engine optimization, real estate, or the technology sector, a blog is indispensable. It allows you to communicate back and forth between customers, colleagues, and industry peers, competitors and non-competitors inclusive. Plus, there are many purposes and missions for blogs and which one you choose for your blog determines a lot in terms of your expense outlay and ROI.
All of that said, there are some definite things that you can measure about blogging. You can know how many calls you get from members of the press to quote you or a company official regarding your area of expertise. That’s free advertising. How much would you normally spend on advertising to get the same exposure?
Another thing you can measure is feedback from your customers. If you’ve ever spent money on a focus group or another market research initiative then you know it could get expensive. If you can get good, honest feedback on your blog and you don’t have to conduct your focus group or research then how much money could that save you?
Blog Consultation From Nick Stamoulis
While there is no real way to measure ROI for your blog, there are some measurable results that you can look at to determine the value of your blog overall to your company. But before you can do that you have to have a blog. Call me for a consultation and I can help you decide the right kind of blog for your company, or whether you need a blog at all.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Blogging
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 27 of August , 2007 at 8:22 am
Yahoo’s ability to deliver useful services that attract lots of traffic continues to amaze me. The latest product from the Internet’s largest search portal is omg!
omg! is an entertainment magazine, kind of like People or Entertainment Weekly. They deliver the latest celebrity gossip and news and a sleek new attention-getting format that is attractive and a little bit on the tabloid side of the genre. One of the things Yahoo does well is on this new magazine look is to camouflage the ads within the main frame of the “cover.”
The Clever Disguise of omg! Ads
Well, they’re not really camouflaged, but they are cleverly disguised as they look just like the other clickable panels that allow users to navigate to the content they find most interesting. With products like omg!, Yahoo doesn’t really need to excel at search. This kind of products puts the search queries right in front of users so that they don’t have to search. Here’s an example:
If you’re interested in the latest gossip on Brad Pitt or Halle Berry then you can read omg! No need to search for their names and an extra word to get the scoop. You’ve got your tabloid gossip right in front of you. This is important because the likely case, if you did search for the latest gossip on Halle Berry or Brad Pitt, is you’d be taken to the stories that you’ll be reading in omg!, but they’d exist on a different website.
omg! Is A Good Lead-In To Other Yahoo! Services
If you click on the Jennifer Aniston photo you’ll go to a page with stunning photographs of the star and links to related stories. Users see what they want, but they stay on Yahoo! longer, which means they’ll likely use other Yahoo! content once they are done with omg! Scroll down the page and you see links to other Yahoo! products - Flickr, 360 degrees, Groups, Messenger, Health, Shopping, Travel, etc.
I think this is a brilliant move by Yahoo!, already the most trafficked website on the Internet. Plus, it should be a good revenue stream for the search portal. If they get enough traffic checking out the latest news and photos they publish then they can charge top dollar for advertising. It’s possible that Yahoo! will become a much more profitable company as a result and you’ll see the search portal stretch its lead in providing great popular search services. I see it as further nichification of the search marketing business.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Search Engines
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 26 of August , 2007 at 8:50 pm
With Google Pay-Per-Click, advertisers get the option of sticking with the search network or using the content network. The search network is simply having your ads placed on Google SERPs whenever the keywords in your ad campaign match a searchers search query. Pretty simple.
The content network is a little bit more complicated. Advertisers who are a part of the content network include those advertisers who have opted to allow Google AdSense ads on their websites. But the ads that appear on their websites will match the keywords that their web pages are optimized for. To add another element, you can choose certain sites for your ads to appear on and you can choose certain sites for your ads to not be featured on. The members of the content network also can elect to have certain ads not appear on their sites.
If it benefits a certain website owner to ban a competitor from having ads appear on his site then that website owner can ban the ads. So when you join the content network it is not predictable where your ads will appear. And results from the content network can be spurious as well. The content network will usually yield a lower CTR, but you could be reaching a more targeted end user as well. It’s really a mixed bag.
One danger to the content network is a competitor could easily use your PPC ads to wage an aggressive campaign to drive you out of the PPC market with something that has been called click fraud. Some advertisers will pay someone to make malicious clicks for the sole purpose of draining their competitors’ budgets. This is very difficult to detect. If you are in a highly competitive industry then the content network may not benefit you as much as the search network.
You may also not gain as much benefit from the content network if the items you sell are low-dollar items. If you are selling units that cost $3-$5 each then Google may be out of your budget anyway. Most PPC ads will cost you too much for you to get a reasonable return. If you do engage in PPC you’ll likely want to stick with the search network for the low-dollar items and leave the content network for the big players.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: PPC
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 26 of August , 2007 at 8:48 am
Google’s personalization feature, iGoogle, is now a few months old. Old enough that you should be able to judge whether or not you are getting decent recommendations based on your search history. But if you search the way I do then you’re all over the map.
I’ve been known to do well over 300 searches in one month. That’s about 10 per day. If you are a full-time writer and spend your entire day doing research every day then you could feasibly be making 50-60 searches each day, or more. And all on different topics! Will you get very good results from iGoogle based on that?
I’d say not.
If you really want Google to return decent sites based on your true interests then you need to turn the personalization feature off when you conduct research for your clients. In fact, anything not specifically related to those items you want Google to make recommendations on, you should log out of iGoogle before searching for those items.
You could set up more than one iGoogle account and search for specific items based on your account. In other words, if you are a health and fitness coach who also enjoys photography and parasailing then you might set up three accounts. Whenever you search for items related to parasailing then you sign into your iGoogle account for that e-mail address. Whenever you want to search for photography-related items or health and fitness then you sign into iGoogle under that appropriate account. Is that a lot work? Maybe. But if you truly want personalization based on your interests and you want Google to present you with decent results based on your interests - items you might not find otherwise - then I recommend that approach. Otherwise, you’ll get watered down results for a variety of unrelated interests that probably aren’t your true interests in the first place. Personalization won’t be much good to you then.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Search Engines
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 25 of August , 2007 at 1:06 pm
You may be asking, “What is Picasa?”
Picasa is Google’s photo album feature. It isn’t as popular as Flickr, owned by Yahoo, but I believe it just as essential because as more and more people go online and learn to make vertical searches, they will look for photos. Here’s how to use Picasa for SEO purposes related to your business:
- Make a list of your most searched for keywords
- Take a handful of photos for each keyword that best captures the essence or spirit of what they keyword is about as related to your business
- Open a Picasa account and upload your best photos for each keyword
- Make sure that you group each of photos associated with a particular keyword into an album using that keyword as the album’s title
- In your album description, describe the nature of your photos as they relate to your business and try to word it so that it sells a benefit to potential customers. Include the URL of your website (Picasa as of right now doesn’t allow you link externally, but if you include your URL in the description then people who view your photo albums at least have an URL that they can copy/paste to find out more information about your business
- Take the next step and add captions to each of your photos in the photo albums. Make sure each photo caption includes your important keywords
This is an important step in your SEO strategy because of Google Universal. While Picasa may not be extremely important right now, Google is moving in that direction. Once Google Universal moves out of beta and more people learn to incorporate it into their search habits then you’ll want your business to appear in as many vertical searches as possible. When searchers look for your important keywords and search under photos they will find your photo albums in Picasa for each keyword that they search for. Do this now and you’ll have a head start on your competition.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 25 of August , 2007 at 8:46 am
There are really three levels of business enterprise. It helps if you know which one you belong to as you will be better able to market your services to the right market. Here are the three levels of business, and this applies online as well as off line:
- Small Business Enterprise
- Small to Mid-Size Business Enterprise
- Corporate Enterprise
These three levels of business likely have other names, but this is how I categorize them. The first category, small business enterprise, is made up of local DBAs, mom and pop shops, freelancers, artisans, crafts people working alone, small co-ops, and most local businesses. In short, the small business enterprise category is largely a local market with some variations. I make the exception for the small business that operates solely online. You can run a successful small business or freelance entirely on the Internet.
The second category, Small to Mid-Size Business Enterprise, is comprised of large companies that operate outside of one specific locale market. This would include regional companies, LLCs, small corporations, professional associations, and freelancers who have built up an organization around themselves such that they have several freelancers working for them.
The third category, Corporate Enterprise, is perhaps the easiest to define. Multi-national corporations and organizations that operate internationally, across country geographical lines and on a more local level may operate across state lines if in the U.S. or regionally within the boundaries of Europe.
Do you know where you sit? Who is your market?
If your ideal customer is the man who lives down the block from you then you fall into the first category. If you are a construction material supplier who delivers within a three-state area then you likely fall into the second category. If you are IBM or Apple then you fall into the third category.
This matters because how you build your website and perform your online SEO depends a lot on this picture of yourself. Who are you trying to reach? Answer that question and I can better tell you how to implement your Internet marketing strategy.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Internet Marketing
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 24 of August , 2007 at 4:07 pm
Greg Howlett is tough on e-tailers. I don’t blame him. As I’ve said before, Google sets up barriers to entry for small businesses. I think this trend will continue as money becomes a more influential factor in the success of Internet businesses.
Anyone interested in starting an online business of any kind, particularly retail businesses that require a lot of inventory, should pay attention to these points Greg makes:
- Startup costs for online retail now exceed startup costs for offline retail.
- It takes far more knowledge to compete online than it used to.
- SEO is becoming more out of reach for small companies.
- No paid advertising options are lucrative for small companies.
- Inventory costs are climbing.
- The trends indicate that startup conditions will get worse rather than better.
If you’re starting your own retail business online, I’d recommend learning more about SEO and Internet marketing before you ever get started. In order to compete online, you’ve got to be able to think long term and set a long term strategy. Don’t go into it blind.
In the early days of e-commerce, a lot of the software that companies are using now didn’t exist. You can easily spend thousands of dollars on software that the big companies use and you will just be spending thousands of dollars. You’re much better off doing it yourself, but you’ll have to learn how to earn a living online and if you’ve never done that then you’ll have a tough go of it. That said, it can be done. Here’s how I would suggest small businesses start off today:
- Don’t go it alone. Get a partner. It is so much easier to work online in a partnership than it is to do it all yourself. Find someone who is in a similar business to yours, but doesn’t compete, and share the costs for a website, e-mail, and other Internet marketing expenses. Share the expenses, share the revenues, more business for both of you.
- Divide the responsibilities between you and your partner. One of you can learn about SEO while the other learns about web design. That way, you can each become an expert in your areas and not step on each other’s toes. This doesn’t mean you’ll actually do all the work. You might hire a web designer to do the work for you, but if one of you knows how to communicate with the professionals that you do business with then you are more likely to get what you want and not get taken advantage of.
- On paid advertising, I’ve seen businesses benefit from it online and I’ve seen businesses not benefit. I agree with Greg. Pay-per-click is probably the most lucrative in terms of ROI for most businesses.
- You’re much better off with a service business online than a business that requires inventory. If you must retail, cut down on your overhead by using a drop-ship method. Otherwise, it could be years before you’ll be profitable enough to make your business pay.
- On Greg’s last post, I’d amend it to say, “Things will get worse before they better.” I do think we’re reaching a peak in e-commerce. We’ll see a sharp decline in the next few years, but that will be followed up with a larger trend toward more Internet startups succeeding. I base this on Elliot Wave analysis in market trends. We’re reaching the peak in the second wave of e-commerce. In market analysis, wave three is usually the longest wave. That means e-commerce is just getting started, but there will be bumps in the road.
All of this aside, success is still possible, even today and in the near future. Calculate your risks, set realistic goals, and only work with professionals who have a proven track record.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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