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Niche Products Reach Global Marketplaces

August 29, 2006 | 2 Comments

 

 

Whether its honey scented soap, a bespoke tailored suit or tin planters for the garden – there is virtually no product or service you can’t buy online. The Internet’s growth is changing the modern day business model. Marketing is no longer limited to an advert in the yellow pages, or a 10 second slot on the radio. It has never been easier for niche businesses to reach a global marketplace.

Chris Anderson (editor Wired magazine) coined one of this year’s marketing buzz phrases in his book, The Long Tail: Why the future of Business is Selling Less of More’. The ‘long tail‘ is used to describe how the Internet has created whole new sales and distribution opportunities that never existed before.

Every business, no matter how small, can reach every consumer with an Internet connection. People now have access to a greater variety of products and services than ever. They no longer have to settle for soap that smells like…well, like ordinary soap.

Amazon and Ebay are model examples of the long tail in action. They supply a wider variety of books and products than you could fit in the whole of Harrods. They sell lots of different things rather than just large quantities of specific items.

Amazon and Ebay have only been able to grow at such a dramatic rate thanks to the Internet. If you can throw your net far enough you will always find someone who wants your product. The Internet enables you to throw your net worldwide.

If you are a small business selling a niche product then you no longer have to worry about the supermarket or shopping mall down the road. If anything, you have the upper hand and your size is your advantage because of your ability to evolve your web presence. Marketing online is about developing relationships and giving an insight into your business. Not one way advertising.

Thomas Mahon is a Saville Row tailor who started a blog to reach new audiences and market his business. He uses his blog to give his readers an insight into the time and effort involved in making every bespoke suit and his stories of Saville Row life.

Thomas’ blog took a niche, premium product and created a global marketplace for it by building awareness of his business and expertise. This exposure could not have been developed by a static website.

Thomas now travels to New York every three months to sell to his expanding client list. He has tripled his sales, launched a new line of £150 tailored shirts and is recruiting new apprentices. He attributes this squarely to his blog.

“Business Blogging Best Practices: Maximizing Your Success”, Affiliate Summit, Aug 2006

August 21, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Internet guru Dave Taylor gave a talk on blogging at the recent Affiliate Summit. In the video he provides a rundown on the SEO value of blogging, how they can be used for customer relationship building and how businesses have succeeded or failed in using them effectively. Dave Taylor is an industry expert on SEO, web marketing and various other technical topics, which he has written and given speeches on since 1995.

The video lasts for 1.04 hours so put the kettle on and make yourself comfortable.

Internet Explorer 7 = RSS Consumption Explosion

August 18, 2006 | 8 Comments

Does your website provide an RSS news feed?

Do you know what RSS is?

Do you care?

If up until now you haven’t taken any interest in RSS very soon you won’t have a choice. The imminent arrival of Internet Explorer 7 could well change the way information is found, distributed and read.

IE7 will make it easier than ever before to promote your news feed to visitors, and subscribing will be as simple as adding a new bookmark. IE7 will push RSS from the domain of just the web savvy and into the mainstream. Hold tight because there is about to be an RSS explosion and your business better be ready for it.

Few people will buy your product or service the first time they visit your site. If you have an RSS feed then you have the opportunity to build trust and confidence over time (see my earlier posts on RSS and blogging for more info on how you can use RSS to market your business).

The use of RSS is set to explode in usage and become as important a content delivery vehicle as email. The hurdles of having to understand how RSS works and knowing what a news aggregator is are due to be vaulted in one giant leap.

IE7 is now in its third stage of beta testing with the official version to go live before the end of the year. As well as closing various security holes and a new lick of paint, the new web browser will feature an RSS button bolted into its toolbar. Megan Kidd, Microsoft Windows Product Manager, hailed, “We believe that RSS is key to how people will be using the Internet in the future.”

The new IE7’s RSS button will light up to visually show if a site provides a news feed. It is then simply a case of clicking on the button and subscribing. This could replace bookmarks as the way people log sites of interest.

With full RSS support in the new Outlook and Windows Vista, your feeds will soon be delivered straight to your desktop. Why waste time checking through all your bookmarks when you can receive updates automatically?

So what does this mean to your business?

The imminent spread of RSS could change the way in which the Internet is used for information. People will increasingly rely on their RSS feeds to gain the latest industry and product news. You don’t waste time walking to the newsagent when you can have your newspaper delivered straight to your door.

The importance of regularly updated content will go beyond being merely part of an ‘organic’ SEO strategy. Web users will be subscribing to news feeds in far greater numbers, and this will determine which sites gain the most attention. It will be the businesses providing the latest news and articles who will prosper in the new content driven online world.

As RSS achieves mass market penetration you could even see it start to replace email. With inboxes being clogged up with spam and messages blocked by overzealous junk filters, RSS offers a new vehicle for contacting subscribers.

The mass delivery of content such as newsletters, product updates and industry news could all be handled by RSS. That way it is guaranteed to reach subscribers and is far more likely to be read.

If you are serious about marketing online and developing relationships with potential customers you need to start forming your RSS strategy. IE7 will be out before the end of the year. By that point you will want to ensure that the RSS button lights up whenever people land on your site.

How is MySpace relevant to your business?

August 14, 2006 | 2 Comments

 

MySpace is the best known social networking site and is certainly the most popular. With 95 million members, and 500k joining each week, it is the seventh most visited site in the UK. Its these impressive statistics (its traffic has increased 367% already in 2006!) that led to Rupert Murdoch buying the site for £308 mill last year. But why would the owner of a traditional pen and ink printing organisation want to invest in a virtual site like MySpace and how does this relate to your own business?

MySpace is synonymous with the buzz term ’social networking’ and is an online ‘space’ for users to post their own blogs, pictures, videos and music. It is a platform for building relationships based on interest rather than geography.  People can find other users with similar interests and interact or even arrange to meet up just through searching the site’s database.

Use of the Internet for interaction is booming: 70 % of UK 16-24 year olds are believed to be members of sites like MySpace and around 35% contribute to blogs.  Social networking online is a rapidly growing modern day phenomenon.

As mentioned in a previous post, Murdoch’s reasons for buying an online presence can be assessed from his speeches on the changing media marketplace. With Internet advertising set to overtake newspaper ads, Murdoch realised that his business needed to adapt its revenue model. If he wanted News Corp to survive then he would have to move with the times.

MySpace and sites such as Bebo, YouTube and Flickr are now eating into TV audiences and occupy many teenagers’ evenings. MySpace reaches more kids each day than MTV does in a week. With average membership aged between 15-35, MySpace is a marketer’s dream for reaching an ever growing audience of pop culture hungry consumers.

Since buying MySpace, Murdoch’s online adventure has been under the microscope to see how he could leverage ad revenue on his new platform. Many potential advertisers had been put off by the lack of control over the content, and the thought of their ads featured next to somebody’s ‘home movies’.

But it now appears Murdoch has found the answer with the deal with Google to splash Adsense all over the site’s 95+ mill pages. Google have bought themselves into the social networking world to the tune of $900 million. They obviously share Murdoch’s confidence in MySpace as a money making machine.

The second new feather in Google’s cap was their deal with MTV to distribute ad supported video clips. Revenue would be shared with the site owners in the evolution of Adsense into the realm of video. No doubt Google have been watching the explosion of video content sharing sites, such as Youtube, and wanted a place at the table before the market was carved up amongst the early providers.

It certainly looks as though Murdoch has found a new revenue stream for many years to come. He realised that he would have to evolve his business portfolio to match the trends in how people consume content and spend their time.

People are increasingly integrating the Internet into their lives. It is fast becoming the primary platform for entertainment, communication and information. The relevancy to your business is that your web presence is becoming more important as more people use the Internet for product and service information.

Niche businesses can now reach global audiences and the smallest enterprise can now compete with large scale multi nationals. It would be prudent to take a leaf out of Murdoch’s book and assess whether your business is prepared for the changes taking place and that you are positioned to capitalise on the Internet’s continuing growth. 
 

Pay per click advertising – A Waste of Time and Money?

August 8, 2006 | 2 Comments

It would appear that after getting a slap on the wrist, following some expensive lawsuits, Google and Yahoo are now finally doing something to try and combat click fraud. Whether these efforts will have any success, or be pursued with any conviction, remains to be seen.

With estimates of fraud accounting for between 14% and 30% many businesses should stop and think whether investing in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is really worth it? PPC is, after all, only a short term solution to a long-term objective, and can be an expensive one at that.

 

 

Last year Yahoo paid $5mill to disgruntled PPC advertisers and last week Google handed over $90mill. This was the culmination of a number of years’ complaints and law suits because they were viewed to not be doing enough to tackle the problem. A study, called “Click Fraud Reaches $1.3 billion, Dictates End of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Era” released by research firm Outsell, claimed that “Google, Yahoo and MSN…are stonewalling on click fraud, to their own and others’ detriment.” They were seen to be dragging their heels to plug a hole that was pouring money into their own coffers.

The search engines have now clubbed together to form the ‘Click Measurement Working Group’ to work alongside the new ‘Interactive Advertising Bureau’ (IAB) and ‘Media Rating Council’ to establish guidelines on what classifies as a fraudulent click.

The jury is still out on how effective they will be in first identifying and then proving cases. A lot of the automated click through programs use false IP addresses or are installed via a Trojan Horse. They will also have to establish who was actually using the PC at the time, if at all.

Proving cases will not be an easy process and will have to be pursued with some vigour for it to be effective. When it isn’t in their interest to limit the problem you shouldn’t expect to see any vast improvement in your bills anytime soon. As Clarence Briggs, chief executive of Web hosting company AIT (which has sued Google over click fraud) put it, “Do I think the fox should guard the hen house?”

With SEO now moving from a technical method to an ongoing ‘organic’ strategy the question has to be asked whether PPC is an efficient use of time and money? How much of a window can you afford to give your companies website before your ad budget runs out and it gets lost from view? Wouldn’t your investment be better spent producing content to market your business and create a sustainable long-term presence?

Pay per click advertising can gain you visibility in minutes but has a limited shelf life due to the ever increasing price of keywords. Standard SEO techniques are now also inadequate. Fiddling with meta-tags and carefully crafted page titles might get your site indexed, but wont satisfy Google and Yahoo’s desire for the most up-to-date, relevant info.

You now need to think about ‘organic’ optimisation to be on the first page of search results. Studies by Jupiter Research also suggest that 6 out of 7 people will click on the search results rather than the PPC ad – even more reason to invest your budget in evolving your site’s content.

In a previous post I discussed how I have been able to achieve top rankings in Google and Yahoo after 51 days simply by posting to my blog every week. My daily hits are now approaching 250 and still rising.  The current price for the top ad for ‘copywriter’ is £1. To receive the same daily traffic, relying purely on PPC advertising, could cost me £250 per day = £1750 per week! If I’d exhausted my marketing budget on PPC my site would simply slip back into obscurity never to be seen again. 

PPC is only viable as a short term tool for selling products of significant enough value and conversion ratio to ensure a good ROI. Using a PPC ROI calculator you can gauge whether a paid ad campaign would be appropriate for your business. Your campaign will also need to be monitored on a daily basis to ensure you are using the most profitable keywords and hitting your conversion target. If the results aren’t as hoped you can always pull the plug. One of the advantages of PPC is its campaign visibility.

As more businesses join the rush to advertise online prices will inevitably rise. PPC may eventually only be feasible for businesses able to budget for thousands of clicks at £5 a pop. PPC might gain short term visibility. But is not an adequate long-term strategy and certainly not for small businesses.

The resonance of the phrase ‘content is King’ is gaining strength as search marketing evolves towards long-term, cost effective organic optimisation. The words on your website will not only sell your business. They are now needed to tell Google you are offering the most updated, relevant info. Organic SEO can build targeted traffic to your site and more clicks still means more sales. But unlike PPC, each click isn’t going to eat into your profit or cost you extra because of fraud.

The challenge facing the traditional media

August 3, 2006 | 1 Comment

The Guardian has reported that by the end of the year Internet advertising will overtake traditional newspapers with a 13.3% share of the £12.2 bn spent on UK advertising. With ITV’s ad revenue also falling below £100 mill, in a year on year decline of 11%, traditional media organisations are having to reassess their position and business model.

The challenges facing newspapers were no more prominently acknowledged than by the speeches of Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last year and in a London lecture, March 2006:

“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors.

A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it.

This new media audience - and we are talking here of tens of millions of young people around the world - is already using technology, especially the web, to inform, entertain and above all to educate themselves.”

In his speeches Murdoch expressed his concern for the need of the traditional press to adapt to the changes in how news is distributed. They ignored the growth of the Internet, as a credible and significant resource for information, at their peril.

Newspapers can only provide the latest news up to its 11.00pm print run, whilst TV is restricted to hourly bulletins. The 18-34 age generation have grown up using Google, Yahoo and now blogs to get the information they want on demand. Why sift through a paper when you can access stories matching your interests at the press of a few buttons?

The distribution of news is no longer the sole domain of newspapers and TV. The means to publish is now available to everybody with a blog or website. Now anybody can have an online printing press and distribute their content to millions.

Newspapers and magazines won’t cease to exist altogether. Until a cheap, electronic roll out screen has been developed to replace paper then there will always be a market for the medium. People still read books in their millions and video never did totally kill the radio star.

Traditional news organisations now need to reassess the way they view themselves and their role in the world. They no longer hold the monopoly on the distribution of news. They now need to think in terms of the quality of the content they can produce online. Their resources to provide video and the most accurate information will be how they can differentiate themselves on the web.

Circulation of newspapers, magazines and TV audiences will continue to fall as more people switch to the Internet for information and entertainment tailored to their needs.

The challenges faced by the traditional media organisations in adapting to the changing marketplace are also faced by other businesses. As more people rely on the Internet for information the more crucial it will be to have an online presence. Your web visibility to your customers is becoming more important than any conventional advertising in newspapers and magazines. 

Rupert Murdoch has been astute enough to recognise that he needs to rethink his own business model and embrace the online world. Now how will he be able to apply his business acumen to raising advertising revenue on the Internet?

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under blogging