August 31st, 2010
Some of the advantages e commerce has over traditional commerce are the reasons that shopping online has become so popular. If e-commerce sounds complicated to you, don’t worry. It’s not a difficult concept at all. E-commerce is simply the exchange of goods and services through electronic data transfer. You pay online and either download an electronic item you’ve purchased like a digital book or music, or the physical goods are shipped to you. Almost everyone has used some sort of e commerce. Online auctions like eBay are e-commerce, too, but that’s considered C2C or consumer-to-consumer commerce. And if you’ve ever used file-sharing software, whether money changed hands or not, that’s a form of P2P or peer-to-peer e commerce.
The term e-commerce has been around a lot longer than eBay or Amazon.com. In the days before the Internet when businesses used to exchange information electronically, the term e commerce was born. But only after the invention of the Internet did e commerce become something the average consumer could use.
With more and more people getting online every year, more people discover the convenience of e-commerce, so sales are growing right along with increased Internet usage. Most traditional retail stores now have an online presence that accounts for a large percentage of their sales. Even small local Mom & Pop shops often have online stores that allow them to sell electronically, and bring local business into their retail stores. So many people search online and comparison shop before they actually go to a store to purchase an item, that not having an Internet presence makes no sense in today’s marketplace.
The advantages e-commerce offers business makes running an online store a highly desirable thing to do. Not only do you show up in Internet searches for your products, if you’ve taken care to make sure your search engine rankings are good, but you’ll draw local customers as well as long-distance customers who can order your goods or services online regardless of location.
Advantages e-commerce offers the merchant also include the ability to change prices, and even an entire business structure, just by making changes to a website. A merchant can try several different methods of online promotion and marketing, and track each one to see which works best. The ability to quickly adapt to trends and adjust sales efforts is one of the chief advantages e commerce offers over traditional marketing and promotional methods. If a print ad or even television commercial isn’t giving you results, there’s little you can do. But a banner ad online can be changed and tweaked until results are more favorable. Customization is one of the advantages e commerce offers merchants and consumers. Web sites can be designed to offer recommendations based on a customer’s last viewed or purchased items.
The ability to shop without having to stand in line or pay for gasoline is also one of the chief advantages e commerce offers today.
Tags: e-commerce
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August 11th, 2010
Post ads on bulletin boards
Bulletin boards are underused tools. They are simple to use and free. Post a flyer on one for a boost in sales. Make sure you get permission, though, and follow the rules.
Be a part of the Sunday paper
The Sunday newspaper is the most popular newspaper and the prime market for advertising. You can either put an ad in the classifieds or you can add a flyer to the loose pages of the paper.
Place newspaper ads
Newspaper ads are surprisingly effective and affordable. Use them to your advantage.
Hand out flyers
Flyers allow you to target customers and add that personal touch because it gives you face time with them as you are passing them out.
Get in the church bulletin
Church bulletins are well read and they are a great place to get your business name published. You should contact the pastor to see how you can get in the bulletin.
Develop an offline affiliate program
Affiliate programs are not just for online. If you have a product that can be easily carried around and showed off then you can make an offline program.
Get in a newsletter
Many local organizations and groups publish newsletters that go out to all their members. You need to get your name in there. Write a guest article or do an interview.
Tags: Offline Marketing, offline traffic tactics
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August 8th, 2010
Team up with a local business
Find a local business that complements your business and see if the owner wouldn’t mind working with you. You can give the business an online presence and you can use them offline. You can trade business cards and even team up for package deals.
Create a phone book listing
The phone book is still a great place to get found. You can even buy an ad where you can put your URL. People still use the yellow pages a lot to find businesses so this makes this a natural place to advertise.
Think outside the box
Try off the wall ideas. See every situation you encounter as an opportunity. You might just be surprised at the results.
Become a news story
Do something newsworthy or become part of a news story and you will get free publicity from the news.
Host promotional product giveaways
Giving away promotional items is a great idea because you are giving away something free and people love that. Plus you are giving away something that advertises your business, so that is good for you. It is a win-win situation.
Put up a billboard
Billboards are attention grabbing and they send your message out to a large number of people.
Tags: ofline line marketing
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August 5th, 2010
Print up tee shirts
Tee shirts are great advertising tools. Think about how many times you have stopped to read someone’s t-shit. Now think about how amazing that could be for your business.
Pass out bumper stickers
Bumper stickers are a cheap way to get your business name out there. You can give them away with orders or just hand them out to people who already have one on their car.
Use the old stand by of word of mouth
Word of mouth has been a great tool for building many businesses. Put it to work for you by encouraging people to tell others about you.
Set up shop at fairs or festivals
Fairs and festivals allow you to reach a large group of shoppers. You can set up a booth for a small fee and sell quite a bit of product.
Print up pamphlets
Pamphlets allow you to put all the important information is an easy to read package. People do not usually mind taking a pamphlet and looking it over. Plus it is a nice reminder of your URL and business name.
Send out text messages
People use text messaging as a main form of communication these days. Get into the trend and send out text messages like you would email messages. People like to forward messages so make yours catchy enough to be something they will forward and get more mileage out of your efforts.
Tags: Offline Marketing, offline traffic creation
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August 3rd, 2010
Use direct mailings
Direct mail is a proven method of advertising. You can make highly targeted mailings and reach your customers with a fairly inexpensive method of marketing.
Start up a telemarketing campaign
Telemarketing is a very effective. It is also something you can do on your own so it is cheap.
Print up business cards
Business cards are great tools that can be used in many different ways. You can hand them out, leave them at local stores and even send them with orders.
Sponsor a contest
Offer your products as a prize for a contest. Be sire to include your label or business card with your URL in the prize package.
Sponsor a sports team
Local non-school associated sports teams rely on sponsors to fund their programs. In exchange for sponsoring the team you get your business name displayed on their uniforms. It is a great trade off.
Give to charity
Give in the name of your business and you will help your business reputation.
Tags: offline marketing methods, offline traffic
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August 1st, 2010
Here are some great ways to create traffic using offline methods
Guest star on a radio talk show
Radio talk shows are hot these days and make a great platform for you to get your name out there.
Get yourself on television
Do a local television show as a guest. If you have the money pay for a local commercial spot. Television is an amazingly effective medium.
Be a guest speaker
Got o local clubs or organizations and volunteer to be a guest speaker for their next function. This works best if the group is somehow related to your product or group members are a part of your target market.
Make yourself into an expert
Being an expert gives you status and makes people believe in you. Start establishing yourself as an expert in your community so you can have people start vouching for your expertise.
Advertise in a local magazine
Local magazines are affordable and a good way to get your name to the public.
Tags: Offline Marketing, offline traffic tactics
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July 27th, 2010
Do you get the best shopping deals online? … My dad does. He’s not internet savoy and only uses the internet to read the news or get me to find him the best prices for tools for his building trade.
Up until now I was using Google like every one else, it use to take me ages to look through all the sites and find a decent price for him. But then I came across this really cool shopping comparison app. Its FREE to download and use. It basically installs on your computer and every time you do a product search instantly finds the best deals and the lowest prices on millions of products. Its fast and easy and free. AND it will end up saving you money.
It searches the internet including major retailer and auction sites such as Amazon, Ebay, Wal-Mart and top search engines to get you these results.
>> DOWNLOAD the app for FREE here > Shopping Comparison Sites
Tags: save money online
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July 17th, 2010
Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
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Tags: Target Audience
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July 9th, 2010
Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.
So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organisation well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.
If you already have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.
Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Traffic
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July 1st, 2010
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
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Tags: Web Design
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