Assisting Small Business Nationwide

Lots of Capital but not a lot of Technical

This is a good place to be, you have money to fund the creation of your ecommerce site but also a bit dangerous since you don’t have the technical knowledge to understand when people aren’t telling you the truth.

The truth is that there are quite a few companies out there that can help you create a very robust, SEO friendly, and highly scalable ecommerce site including Volusion, MondeVertInc, ShopVisible, Zoovy, Datafeedr, PopShops, and of course Google Checkout and Amazon Stores, etc.

Each of these companies have experience in building the ecommerce store, helping you understand the implications of the technology and in general handling most of the business from the technical side…but for a price.

The kicker here is that each of these companies specializes in helping you run your business but seldom do they actually make sure you know how to run it without them. They are in business to gain recurring revenue from your interaction with them and not in the business to show you how to code the system, or create great features without someone paying for them.

With that said if you are an existing business and have an existing brick and mortar world that you are already managing then these are the folks for you because they take a majority of the work off your hands.

Keep in mind they help design, build and deploy your new ecommerce presence but they do NOT run it for you. That is up to you and your staff…you do have staff to run your ecommerce business don’t you? You might want to think about that, there are hundreds of ecommerce sites languishing in despair for lack of someone within the company that is charged with the sites’s success and understands how to run an online business.

So in the Capital but no Technical world your main problems will be:

1) Understand what you are asking for and find vendor that does it

2) If you don’t have the ecommerce or technology background hire someone to manage the process designs, development and deployment of the site for you or you WILL get bitten, this is simple reality.

3) Be sure whomever is designing then look and feel of the site KNOWS what that means. You well wishing marketing and art departments need to understand usability, interface design, and any number of other aspects of this business to be useful. If they don’t HIRE someone that does and have them do the designing.

4) Throughly understand the features of the system you are buying and keep asking for training till you do. Most of the features of these high end ecommerce systems aren’t used by most customers. You need to be engaged in the your own business and understand how the platform can make you money.

5) Remember, and this applies to all ecommerce websites, traffic to your site doesn’t not mean sales (conversions), yes you need to drive traffic to your site but that means qualified traffic and traffic that is there to buy not to look. Remember the retail model, window shoppers don’t buy and buyers seldom window shop.

So in the next entry we’ll cover the middle ground, We’ve got the Technical but funds are tight, this is an exciting area but requires you know how the plumbing of your new ecommerce site really works!

Dan Horn is the founder of Noh Limits Consulting, Inc.
Dan does writing, social networking, and freelance consulting for technology challenged individuals and companies worldwide.

The world of ecommerce is exciting, painful and sometimes down right foolish, but we all want the independence that running our own store “could” bring.

Being independent of “the man” and being able to work from anywhere in the world is quite an appealing prospect but most of us have no idea how to do it or the innumerable problems in our path.

One of the primary things to think about when opening an ecommerce store is how much time you have to actually spend working on the store operations.

Keep in mind all the things you would do if you owned a brick and mortar storefront apply to the ecommerce site.

Even though you don’t have to deal with a lease and hard furnishing you still have all the equivalent issues with the ecommerce site lease equals hosting, hard furnishing equal pay per click and SEO marketing costs.

Over the course of this series I’ll be helping you understand not only the various ways to create a successful ecommerce store but also how to do it to fit into your lifestyle.

Lots of Capital but not a lot of Technical

As an example if you have time and financing you could certainly build the site from scratch, rent a warehouse, buy and store products and ship them from your warehouse. You certainly can buy these website development from any number of companies at any price range and they will happily hand you a fully operational ecommerce site that is fully customizable, at a fee, and you are in business…if you know how to run an ecommerce business.

We’ve got the Technical but funds are tight

In the middle of the spectrum if you only have time but not much capital to run the business you might want to consider using one of a number of ecommerce shopping carts, find a few drop shippers to do your fulfillment and use your sweat equity to design, develop, and deliver the ecommerce site to the web using organic SEO techniques and some of a number of shopping cart systems.

No Money and No Technical no problem

At the far end of the spectrum a recent trend has come about that is called an affiliate ecommerce site which is all about putting together a website that you drive traffic to and then as people buy products they are sent to the company website that actually sells the products and do the transaction there. This process alleviates a number of the onerous tasks associated with running an ecommerce store because you don’t have to deal with inventory, credit card processing, customer service and returns since they company one the other ends deals with that and give you a commission on each sale.

In my next article I’ll be taking each of the three methods, and all the variants and discussing the pros and cons of each. Over the next few weeks we will look into what can be done and how much time, effort, and expense if involved in each method and how you can be successful running an ecommerce business yourself.

Next up we’ll cover the process where you or your business has money to invest in the ecommerce business but not the technical chops so you hire a company to do your ecommerce site: Lots of Capital but not a lot of Technical next!

Spending the same amount of money, and yes more time, on data mining and analysis might just benefit your revenue and profits in a far greater and more sustainable way.  How would you like to actually decrease your traffic and, at the same time, double or triple your online business?  Making more out of less is always a strong part of any good business plan.

Dan Horn & Noh Limits is a member and contributor to StephenDGross.com and BrookstoneMarketingGroup.com

Time after time we listen to conversation concerning traffic generation and traffic conversion when using Google Adwords and Google Analytics.  These days financial dreams are planted in the chase of the all-mighty click through ratio (CTR), conversion ratio and goal funnel success.

In addition to the obvious benefit of using these Google tools for directly growing your revenue is the tremendous benefit of data mining.  Data mining, used correctly, can grow your business faster and more profitably than any online marketing strategy.  That’s right!

The professional Internet Marketer should know the value of this well known but seemingly elusive method for reverse engineering your online marketing campaigns.

So what are the benefits of data mining?

We’ve experienced overall conversion rate increases of 100’s of percentage points.   Bounce rates, specification page exits, and navigation detours tremendously decreased.  Customer loyalty and re-visits have been increased up to four-fold.  Other side benefits include the ability to incorporate better customer services practices and inventory control.

What is the result of this sometimes painstaking and often tedious work?

Spending $10-20,000.00 on marketing online expense will certainly bring additional traffic.  However, you may end up pouring more water into a large bucket with many holes.  The increases in traffic might snare additional revenue but can you afford the expense drain and lower profitability?

Spending the same amount of money, and yes more time, on data mining and analysis might just benefit your revenue and profits in a far greater and more sustainable way.  How would you like to actually decrease your traffic and, at the same time, double or triple your online business?  Making more out of less is always a strong part of any good business plan.

Once you have honed your website into a fine tuned engine and have verifiable results then and only then might be time to ramp up your online marketing budget.  Use the lessons learned from data mining to create better metrics and a more sound online business.

Check out Brookstone Marketing Group for additional assistance.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your views on Google Adwords and Analytics.

Backlinks are a method used by SEO Marketers and Webmasters to increase the opportunity for getting better and higher listings with search engines.  Essentially, backlinks are mostly clickable links on an external domain or website that links to your domain or website.

Many popular websites have hundreds if not thousands of backlinks.  However, care must be taken when creating links, not to violate some very important rules the search engines use to value and/or discredit your website in its ranking.

First off,  Backlinks are a signal of the popularity or relevance of a website. Backlinks play a valuable role in SEO because search engines including Google, Yahoo, and Bing award value to websites in terms of quantity of links and quality or relevance of the backlink.

Search engines use many methods to determine the quality of the backlink.  Here is a simple list of do’s when constructing backlinks:

1. The linking site should have high relevancy to your site.

2.  Make sure the links or page do not have a “no-follow” command.

3.  Make sure the linking site allows anchor text links.

4. Try to link from pages with a Google Page Rank of 3 or higher.

5.  Look for sites that have been around a while.

In addition to following the do’s listed above, make sure you adhere to the following don’ts or your do’s will be negatively affected.

1.  No “free-for-all” links.  Sites that allow anyone to post an un-reviewed backlink.

2.  No “link farming”.  Pages with little value that contain 100’s of links.

3.  No “triangular linking, reciprocal linking”.  getting together with your buddies and only linking to each other or sharing the same IP.

4.  No “no-follow, robot.txt” attributes and meta tags.  Sites or links that contain a link or robot meta tag that tells the robot to ignore your link or page.

5.  No “broken links”.  Website and links that contain broken links.

The opinions, art, and craft of backlinking is a wide and various matter.  Research into backlinking may in fact leave you confused and dismayed.  However, by instituting a methodical and planned approach you should see a quick return on your investment.

Don’t forget that backlinks will also help to create a sense of authority and trust in the eyes of your visitor.  Try to use visible and apparent links to or from websites that offer your visitor high relevance but low competitive value.  For instance, if you sell bicycles, try linking to or from a site that offers advice about riding or maintaining bicycles.  Try using Blogs, Articles, and Press Releases with content about bicycles in general to “kill two birds with one stone”.

From a conversion standpoint, when linking to an external site, try opening a new window when developing the external link.

Check out Brookstone Marketing Group for additional assistance.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your views on backlinking.

We had the opportunity, this past week, to interview several severely frustrated potential small business clients who were looking for a quick website disaster relief strategy.  The degree of frustration inherent in today’s small business owners seems to be rising at epic proportions during the last 3-6 months.

What is the cause of their frustrations?  Website failure to produce.

More and more we are confronted by small business owners who look to us for website or web presence disaster relief.  Although we are always happy and willing to assist them, the ability for us to do so has become drastically hampered by the impressions and failures left by the previous internet website design and/or marketing company.

Case in point is Kelli (not her real name).  Kelli spent over an hour hammering us with “what-if” and “how-come” questions regarding her Internet strategy.  She claimed to have spent thousands and thousands of dollars over the past 2 years for web design and online marketing.  Unfortunately, as she said, her small business has had little if any return on the investment.

After listening for over an hour, and with Kelli still on the phone, we decided to run a quick real time analysis on her website and ask a few questions about her strategy.  YIKES, not good!!

As is normally the case these days, Kelli had a low-cost individual website designer develop a website for her business.  In addition, nobody considered pre-design criteria like keyword analysis, content analysis, value proposition, competitive analysis, and goals and objectives.  To make matters worse, she has employed two separate website design firms and has attempted at least 3 different online marketing strategies.

Fortunately, Kelli’s website and past marketing efforts have created a strong enough base to allow for some fairly quick and financially painless changes or modification to get things turned around.  Unfortunately, sooner than later, she will be forced to discard most of the past work in order to make room for the much needed long term changes.  These changes will be required to allow her to reach her long term goals and objectives.

So how do you stop this from happening to you, again.  Make sure you only work with a website or web presence company that fully understands the need for pre-design and marketing (not advertising) analysis.  This analysis must include the design of the online destination (website) as well as intended marketing efforts.  Failure to do so could translate into a disaster relief effort, or worse yet, a business failure.

Do you have a disaster story?  Leave a comment.

Interview and content provided by Brookstone Marketing Group

Now that the first decade of this century is over, small businesses are waking up to find themselves in a quandary trying to decide on traditional marketing versus online marketing and the means to finance either one.

Traditional Media Advertising and Marketing is often times out of the financial reach for most small business owners.  Even if they have the resources, small business owners get caught up in the need to justify and ensure a return on the investment of their time and hard earned dollars.  Traditional Media firms normally require an up front payment plus a long-term commitment before launching any campaign.  In addition, the charge for creative work is passed on as an addition expense to the media buying small business owner.

Internet or Online Marketing, more often than not, follows the same routine as Traditional Media firms in terms of financing the campaign and charging for creative.  The difference is that Online Marketing is typically far less expensive, much faster to launch, and easier to track and justify.  However, many online pay-per-click campaigns are launched by inexperienced marketing agents, and thus cost, and at times exhaust, their clients available budgets before a payback can be achieved.

Enter Social and Content Marketing.  These forms of Online Marketing can be seem elusive and untrackable for the small business owner.  Many times, the small business owners lack of understanding of the philosophy behind authority, trust, and communication keeps them from participating and committing financial resources towards this form of marketing.

Small business owners are looking for a low cost of entry solution for marketing for 2010.  The Internet can and will offer a pay-as-you-go alternative to the old fashion no-risk traditional media firm financial model.

Small Business owners seem poised and ready to commit the necessary dollars to get their business growing again.  However, they will only do so if the marketing channel is proven and offers a high opportunity for success and/or has some assurances built-in for controlling and tracking the marketing expenditures.

Brookstone Marketing Group has now released a marketing campaign that fits such a requirement, PayGo Marketing.  For more information concerning PayGo Online Marketing release click here.

What is your struggle with online marketing?  Leave a comment.

PayGo Online Marketing is a campaign offered by Brookstone Marketing Group.

In a recent interview conducted by Smart Brief, Shiv Singh, vice president and global social-media lead for Razorfish, author of “Social Media for Dummies”, discusses several key elements that will be essential for brand and business development starting in 2010.  Here is an exerpt from the interview.

What are the three trends on the horizon that business leaders absolutely must keep up with?
Social brands. The company must be willing to let its employees and its brand advocates become the face of the brand. Consumers demand that, and brands like Best Buy, which are evolving into social brands (think Twelp Force), will be the ones that win.

Real-time brands. Companies that are dynamic and responsive in real time to their customers and their needs will be the ones that succeed. This doesn’t just mean real-time customer service, but real-time market research, real-time product development and real-time customization and personalization of products and campaigns alike.

Identifying, nurturing and managing relationships. Customers increasingly are also influencers, and companies will need to know who those people are and how much influence they actually have. Along those lines, understanding how customers come together as communities and make collective decisions will be important, too.

Do you have a small business?  Leave a comment.

Click here to read the entire interview.

Most small business owners need to remind themselves about what caused them to start or take-over a small business to begin with.  In addition, they often forget how they were able to get a new business off the ground.

Many times the answers to these questions can be found in the Marketing acronym AIDA.  So what the heck is AIDA?

1. Attention – what you do to get the customers attention.

2. Interest – what is done to get the customer interested.

3. Desire – what you do to get the customer to desire your product or service.

4. Action – What causes the customer to take the desired action, i.e. buy something.

There are plenty of examples of each one of these very important steps.  Getting the customers Attention may be a simple matter of a coupon offer, advertising that you have a limited supply of something, a visual advertising display, or maybe an attractive person in an advertisement.

The Interest step takes a little more thought. This is where you give the customer a reason to read or view farther.  Tell them what you can do for them or maybe how they might benefit from doing business with you.

Creating Desire can be a little challenging.  Be sure to stay on message during this step.  Most small businesses have a habit of either skipping this step all togetheror  placing very minimal emphasis on its value.  Some great techniques for Desire are:

- Offering a Bonus or Incentive to buy today

- Using testimonials from happy customers

- Show how your product or service will immediately solve their problem

- Demonstrate how doing business with you is the best decision

- Again using the powers of scarcity

This step can also serve as a tool to separate you from the competition.  Don’t hesitate to combine several of these techniques to prompt the customer to buy from you today and not look further at a competitor.

Action is the ultimate step in getting the customers business.  However, it’s perhaps the easiest step in AIDA marketing.  Make sure you tell and guide them to what the next step is and exactly how to complete the action.  You can offer or restate a bonus offer to buy today.  Create a strong Call to Action.  In eCommerce, make sure you show a prominent Buy Now button.  Above all try to prompt them into the desired action without confusing them about your original message and offer that was created during the first three steps of AIDA.

In summary, it may take some time and well thought out strategies to perfect your AIDA marketing.  We recommend split or multi-variant testing with more than one AIDA process.  The result will be a noticeable increase in your conversion or closing ratio.

How is your AIDA?  Leave a comment.

So what is all the magic about the number 37?

Very simply stated, the number 37, in our opinion, is the root of success for almost all sales and marketing.  Every web designer, content writer, and marketing guru should know and understand the power of this number!

Ok, so what the heck is the magic in 37?  Did it originate from some super-duper magic show in Las Vegas?  HA!  Not really.

It really should be shown as 3-7.  These two numbers are somewhat separate in terms of how they perform their magic.  You probably use these numbers everyday without knowing it.

Had enough?  Give up yet?

The first explanation concerns the use of getting the buyers attention and making them sticky.  In other words, getting them to return to your website.  So here are the forms of magic:

You have no more than 3 seconds to gain the customer’s attention on your website, page, content, offering, and/or pricing.  Additionally, you have no more than 7 seconds to verify their decision to commit their attention and gain their trust. That’s right, you only have a maximum of 10 seconds to gain their attention and prove they made the right decision to commit their time.

Secondly, during these economic times and under non-emergency conditions, its takes an average of 3 visits to your website, etc. to get the customer to believe in your offering.  It may take as many as 7 visits for the customer to take the action you want them to take.

The “Marketing 37″ concept has been applied, in many different forms, throughout marketing history.  No the magic is not in pasting this number throughout your website (duh).  The real magic is using and applying these two “Marketing 37″ concepts to drastically increase your conversion ratio.  Understanding the need to grab the customers attention, get them coming back, and having them apply the actions you desire is really what the magic is all about.

What is your conversion ratios?  Leave a comment.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group for more information

It seems the world of Web Design, Internet Marketing and Advertising, and Consulting is becoming over crowded with Guru’s, Strategists, and so-called experts.  These bobble heads are claiming to be online professionals with top-secret methods and strategies for success beyond imagination.

Well if it walks like a duck…..

Unfortunately, the real professionals find themselves having an even tougher time separating their message and abilities from the crowd.  Have you searched Twitter lately for online marketing experts?

The well intentioned, professional, and successful people like Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, Dan Hollings, Frank Kern, Shawn Casey, Tellman Knudson, and the staff at StomperNet to name a few, are providing tons of great information to educate oneself on the means to attack the world of Internet marketing.  Unfortunately, more often than not, the people who listen and learn from these sources do so haphazardly and tend to take a poetic license and automatically deem themselves a professorship at the World Wide Web College.

Can you say impostor?

So why did I use the term “Newscaster”?  Have you ever watched TV News?

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a few days with one of my wife’s relatives.  This relative just happened to have on-air experience with national news casting and a couple nationally known TV news shows (Don’t want to get in a law suite).  After trying to beat him in word games and TV shows several times, such as Jeopardy, without success, I finally asked him how in the world he knows so much about everything.  Was it his world travels? Education? Books? What was this top-secret weapon?

When he stopped laughing he informed me that he really isn’t that intelligent.  In fact he challenged me to get out the dictionary to see how many words he really knew the definition to.  I was astounded!!!  He was right.

So how does that story relate to Internet bobble heads? Just take a look around, find a few of them, and ask them some questions (Contact me if need some advice here).  Most of them can talk about online marketing with the best of them but most rarely ever make a dime for themselves or their customers.  In fact, more than likely, they have never even conducted a long-term online marketing campaign much less stuck around to see if it made money.

Employers get stuck with bobble heads on their payroll everyday.  Slick talking imposters have a habit of over exaggerating their abilities and experience.  For the most part, the intentions are honest but reality quickly sets in that the actual return on the employer’s investment may leave a lot to be desired.

How do we correct this trend?

Time is usually the automatic fix.  As metrics and analytics become less hyperspace-oriented and therefore more user friendly, business management will rely less on the messenger and more on the message for actual results and justification.

Have you been burnt by “Newcasters” ?  Leave a comment.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group for more information.