Catching the Big Fish: How Your Website can convert your Traffic into Money

This is the age of information, of rapidly shrinking yet ‘intellectually’ gaining computing devices, smart people with smartphones and a ready link to the ‘cloud’ of information on the World Wide Web. It’s an academic question these days if your company has a website? If the answer is NO, you probably were unfrozen from your decades old cryogenic sleep recently and are confused and adjusting to the modern world. And if it was YES, and you are a SME or a B2C or B2B trading company, you might be wondering if your little website is supposed to make any difference to your business at all. Websites were, are and will always be a well calculated promotional device. If yours is underperforming, it needs the quick fix. 

A professional website is also a productive website and we are not talking about those e-commerce portals wherein you provide your credit card details to buy a product or a service. The key to effectively promoting a SME, a B2C or B2B service is to propagate information in an eye-grabbing, ‘seductive’ format. In a sea of similarly designed, developed and priced products, how can your website promote your product in a conventional yet ‘different’ manner? How can your B2C or B2B service or offer be shown as a better option than your competition? The bottom line is that a website that presents its selection of products in an imaginative, creative and targeted format is more likely to attract a sustained impetus of an appreciative audience than a website that believes in tossing the information at a visitor in a hurried and jaded fashion and allows him/her to land at a judgement rather than forcing it on the very impressionable visitor. 

Right, the presentation aspect of our drive is taken care of. The next concern is to attract visitors to your website via some focussed SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work. This calls for some expert help from SEO professionals whose job is to feature your website high on popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. For example, for B2B Suppliers involved in the export of B2B services and products. A SEO professional can, with the assistance of powerful content from your website; the influential Social networking sites and a few tricks up his sleeve (ensure all are white hat techniques and not the despised Black hat methods) can give your website a very powerful boost. 

You are your website’s best friend. Thus, the onus to promote your website starts with you. Utilise your Social media connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to spread the word. Make it a standard procedure to tag your web URL in every piece of official or personal communication alongside the habit of subscribing the website as the information hub for your company whenever asked for it. Little ideas like these go a long way in bringing credibility and interest to your web presence.

Thus, the basic ideas for attracting the right audience and promoting your business online are before you. The greatest conquests begin as mere ideas that find the perfect execution- about time you attempted yours.

The Advent of Online Marketing

It’s a question that every marketer out there is asking, is online marketing a better option than conventional offline marketing? I mean, the prospects reached, the focussed nature of promotion, the immediate response generation, all these are immediately obvious. The money saved rises as a factor in the longer run. Yet, is casting a vast net and hoping for a ‘surprise’ catch better than targeting a predictive segment and reaping a set number? The topic makes for a rich debate.

The conventional marketer is a tested creature- forever immersed in crunching numbers and strategizing newer ideas that will hopefully work. The market is gracious to the risk-takers and the trend makers and yet, brutally dismissive of people who embrace anything that is deemed too radical or extreme. The mediums of marketing are many- the mass media, the roadside hoardings, attractive ads, hand-outs and the human models.  These methods however are exhausted and immensely predictable…and a preferred choice amongst the full segment of the marketers’ fraternity. You may be selling Insurance or toilet paper, a conventional marketer will decide upon the above promotional options to make his voice heard. The problem is, a lot of people are speaking the same language, at the same pitch and the target audience seems used to these tactics. It’s as if the average buyer demands that his senses must also be invested alongside his money. Think about it, two commercials advertising the same product from two different brands- and you are more likely to choose the one that emotionally appealed to you. If you smiled, or cried, so much the better.

The online promotional tactic is more personal. The target is to reach a vast number of people, and selectively appeal to the responsive mass with a pinch of online marketing techniques. A resourceful marketer, over the course of an afternoon, can reach thousands of people situated all across the world and pitch his product via the magic of colourful emails or inquisitive banners and pop-ups. The online chat-rooms of the world are a marketer’s test lab; social media websites bring in the fresh kill and a steady stream of mass emails generate the necessary public opinion. Online promotion is all about finding your niche audience from amongst a thousand test subjects- quite similar to finding a needle in the haystack. However, the size of your target audience and the vast amount of information carried by your medium make this a very cost-effective option when compared to other conventional marketing tools. Also, since the concept of online advertising is a fairly new bird- more people are tolerant and receptive to it. A hoarding standing at a busy intersection calls out to nobody in particular and is likely to lose its novelty in a few days, the same hoarding when cut to size and shows up in your personal online space is assured of your undivided attention. Maybe it’s not love at first sight…but the process can be repeated many times until it draws the necessary response from you.

Maybe a skilled mixture of online and offline marketing is the answer. Online marketing allows a small enterprise to compete with its more illustrious competitors. A good example of this kind of success story is the humble home grown wines from Tuscany, Italy. In a land famous for its wines and even more for the powerful winery that have stood for generations- the smaller growers have managed to earn a share of the market thanks to the quality of their product and the word of it spread through the online space. This example is repeated the world over and shows the universality of online marketing- a B2B or B2C portal by which the last corners of the earth can be reached and a interested customer bought on board. With the advent of smartphones and the enhanced acceptability of the online way of life, maybe a day might soon come when online marketing, the peddling of products over the world wide web- from pens to penicillin- is just a way of life.

Increasing Alexa Rank of your Website

For starters I am pretty sure, all they know is Google rank. Well, honestly speaking it’s not just the Google rank but you got the Alexa rank as well that’s considered to be a big booster for  website owners. Trust me, many investors judge a blog or a website by looking at your Google page rank and your Alexa page rank. You might find many articles or blogs that talk about increasing your ranks on Google. The current trend is all about different innovative strategies for an ecommerce website. Today, I have decided to cut the chase and write something about promoting your Alexa ranks.

The first question that pops up in anyone’s head is, How to increase my alexa rank to attract investors and clients? Before actually jumping into the formula, we need to understand what alexa is and how it works.

Alexa Rank:

Alexa Rank is a relative measurement about the popularity of a web site in the internet world. Alexa Rank can be relative when compared to Google, as it totally depends on the data that it receives from the Alexa Toolbars installed in the browsers of the users.  Alexa Rank is calculated considering the number of visits using the Alexa Toolbar over a period of 3 months. Alexa has contributed big time in the evolution of online social order.Given below are some basic tips to increase Alexa Rank of your website:

1. Installing an Alexa toolbar always helps. Make sure every individual has an Alexa toolbar installed in their systems. This ensures that any search done is captured and helps you rank better.
2. Be sure that you have set your website as the homepage in your browser.
3. Submission of links to social networking sites will help boost your site in its rank.
4. Visitors to your website should be prompted to leave positive testimonials for the Alexa detailed listing page.  For this you need to place an alexa page link on the website asking them to rate it.
5. Write reviews on all the top rated sites by Alexa.
6. Use Alexa redirect whenever you can. This can be done by using a redirect command with the help of the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=abc.com (replace abc.com with your website).
7. Have an Alexa widget placed on your blog or website. This improves the credibility of your website/blog in front of your readers.
8. Claiming your website is another important factor to improve your ranks. All you need to do is place the alexa ID inside the header and help alexa to assess your website in a better way. Make sure you have updated your site description, country name and your profile while claiming.

These are few basic, but important tips that can help you up your Alexa rank. There are many other sites like B2B and B2C that have followed this and have succeeded in increasing their ranks.

SEO Strategies for Ecommerce Websites

In the recent decade, there has been a tremendous hype of the Internet industry. Internet has grown up to a level where, you can call it a layman’s game. It definitely has been a game changer. With more easy and flexible options available over the net, people have started getting absorbed so much in the virtual world that they hardly have got any time outside it. It’s just like many individuals falling into the quick sand and trust me; it is very difficult to pull yourself out of it. According to me there are two important factors that keep users glued to their systems are ‘Social Media Sites’ and ‘E-commerce sites’ (Of course, there is lot of other factors as well).

‘Social Media Sites’ has definitely been a revolution and as mentioned in my previous blog “Evolutionof Online Social Order” Social media is now treated to be a very important tool to impress the customers. With the advancement in technology, we saw the emergence of e-commerce platforms. With lot of e-commerce sites popping up every day, Google decided to give importance or ranks only to those e-commerce websites that were relevant to the users. This imposed a challenge for all the e-commerce websites to maintain a user friendly website (navigation wise).  

Frankly speaking, it does not really take much to maintain and get an e-commerce website rank well on Google. All we need to do is follow some simple and very important steps whenever we are building an e-commerce website, it can be a B2C portal or a B2B portal. I am going to list down some very basic but, important steps or call it rules that you need to follow for an e-commerce website:

Know your user: Try and analyze what your customer would look for or more likely to search for. I mean to say look for those keywords or phrases that describes your website and also matches the high volume searches that are relevant to your site.

Content: I am sure, everybody agrees to this. Your site should have unique content that describes your product. Avoid duplication of content and the products. Make sure all your pages have the ‘Meta Tags’ intact and it has to be unique. Also, consider having H1 tags on the pages.

URL Structure: Usually it is seen that people do not pay attention to the way the URL is structured. Make sure you have your keywords mentioned in the URL. It’s easy for the crawlers to understand that particular page. The most common mistakes found in e-commerce websites is that people miss implementing the canonical tags to the necessary pages. In an E-commerce site it is a very common thing where you have duplicate URL’s that get generated automatically. We need to make sure that they have canonical tags in those URL’s .

Social Media: It is very important to have all the social media widgets as this can be word of mouth advertising. It is very import to encourage people to leave their comments, product reviews or even share them on their personal social media pages (facebook, twitter, G+). Blog is another important tool which can be used to talk and promote your product.

RSS Feeds: Generating and submitting your RSS feeds regularly helps customers keep themselves updated about new offers and products.

Optimize images:  Make sure the images of the products have been optimized by having the alt txt. This helps the crawlers in reading the image as well.

Off page optimization: Try and build links by doing some off page submissions to get links from them.

I am sure there are many other tips and tricks that will help you design a perfect user friendly E-commerce website. But the ones mentioned above are basic and very important rules for E-commerce website.