The U.S. Small Business Administration estimates that more than 580,000 small businesses will start up this year. The bad news is that about 576,000 small businesses will fail during that same time period. The question is, how can entrepreneurs hedge the odds in their favor. What you can do is take your current business online or maybe start a web-based business.
Merchandise, services, information, and most anything a traditional brick-and-mortar business can sell is sold in Internet businesses but often it is with a smaller operating cost because they only conduct business online. Brandon Lewis, president of StoresOnline, offers these tips to help online entrepreneurs make the most out of their companies.
Knowing Your Audience
A common online marketing mistake is to try to target too many audiences. About 938 million users can be found on the Internet. It is simply not effective to market to all of those eyeballs not to mention it can be very costly. It will do you no good to spend time and money marketing your site to men ages 55-90 if your target customer group is women ages 14-27. Make sure you take time finding your customer and also customize your approach to people who actually search for and would want to buy your product or service.
Why You Should Build a Second Site
A second common mistake is to have just one e-commerce Web site. What you should rather do is build several sites that appropriately customize your sales approach to different audiences. This allows you to effectively sell the same product to different target groups using unique messaging, design and tone. To do this, one way is by building a second site in a different language. The site can help increase your revenue and it can also more easily be searched by customers according to their language-specific search terms.
Get Specific
What you should try to avoid is marketing dissimilar products on the same site. By doing this, you will be able to take advantage of the way web users tend to search. Specific items or categories of items are what people look for when they shop on the Internet. Selling tools and bedspreads on the same site will lower your search engine rankings and cause you to lose sales. Instead, start off selling one type of product and sell it well. You can always branch out in the future.
Merchandise, services, information, and most anything a traditional brick-and-mortar business can sell is sold in Internet businesses but often it is with a smaller operating cost because they only conduct business online. Brandon Lewis, president of StoresOnline, offers these tips to help online entrepreneurs make the most out of their companies.
Knowing Your Audience
A common online marketing mistake is to try to target too many audiences. About 938 million users can be found on the Internet. It is simply not effective to market to all of those eyeballs not to mention it can be very costly. It will do you no good to spend time and money marketing your site to men ages 55-90 if your target customer group is women ages 14-27. Make sure you take time finding your customer and also customize your approach to people who actually search for and would want to buy your product or service.
Why You Should Build a Second Site
A second common mistake is to have just one e-commerce Web site. What you should rather do is build several sites that appropriately customize your sales approach to different audiences. This allows you to effectively sell the same product to different target groups using unique messaging, design and tone. To do this, one way is by building a second site in a different language. The site can help increase your revenue and it can also more easily be searched by customers according to their language-specific search terms.
Get Specific
What you should try to avoid is marketing dissimilar products on the same site. By doing this, you will be able to take advantage of the way web users tend to search. Specific items or categories of items are what people look for when they shop on the Internet. Selling tools and bedspreads on the same site will lower your search engine rankings and cause you to lose sales. Instead, start off selling one type of product and sell it well. You can always branch out in the future.
0 comments:
Post a Comment