REAL WORLD MEETS WEB WORLD: MARKETING CHANNEL INTEGRATION

photo courtesy of alles-schlumpf

Business and Website Synergies:

Real World Meets Virtual World

There are plenty of brick-and-mortar business owners who don’t recognize the value of a store web site. They’re doing well, lots of foot traffic, improved margins every year – so why take on the headache and expense of a web site? It’s just one more thing to worry about, right? Wrong.

A web site that promotes your real world store can not only boost profits, it can eliminate routine chores that currently eat up a lot of time. When you own your own business, time is money.

The Costs

The cost of a fully functional, secure, commercial web site aren’t what you think they are. With a little help (actually you can do it all by yourself) you can have a web site up and running in just a few hours – a web site complete with a secure checkout, a blog, product pix and all of the other bells and whistles you expect from today’s web sites.

The costs are surprisingly low if you go with the right web host – the company that will rent server (computer) space that’ll hook you in to the world wide web. Prices as low as $7.00 a month get you plenty of disc server space and a box full of free site building tools – free. So, for less than $100 a year, you can have a web site open 24/7 selling your goods and services. Cost should not be a factor when deciding on whether to build a site or not.

Saving Time

Working in your store each day takes up a certain amount of time for administrative chores. You process credit card orders, make deposits at the bank, keep track of inventory and expenses – all activities that take away from the one thing you should be doing and that is taking care of your customers.

With a web site, payment collection is automated, order print outs can be printed for fulfillment, deposits to the business account are automatic – it’s not exactly passive income, but it certainly won’t double your real world workload. It’ll save time.

For example, let’s say you plan a “special customers” sale available to your most highly-prized clients. A computer can help you get the word out quickly and inexpensively. That’s what auto-responders do. They notify customers by e-mail of this special sale or special event. No postage, no running to the post office and no expensive ad in the local newspaper. Instead, you send out a personalized invitation to your best customers to notify them of the impending sale.

Save time and money through the automation of many administrative functions. On-line purchases can be completely automated so that purchase price is deposited into your business account, a shipping bill and label are printed automatically and, if you use drop shippers to handle order fulfillment, all necessary information to process the order is sent to the shipper. You don’t have to do a thing.

Saving time by automating routine functions via a web site is a great way to improve your margins – additional sales without additional labor.

Using Your Website to Promote Your Business

The critical factor, here, is to create synergies between your store and your web site. And there are lots of them.

Use your web site to conduct polls and surveys to see what your real-world customers like and don’t like about their shopping experiences. Low cost promo with high end potential. After all, real world or virtual world – the customer is always right.

Develop sales leads using an on-line form. If someone in town is looking for a good price on a new furnace, you’d want to know about it, right? Well, a web site can give you name, address, telephone number and even the customer’s needs. How convenient is that?!

Use give-aways to collect e-mail addresses. These are called “opt-ins.” You give the site visitor a free pamphlet, a downloadable e-book or a printable 20% off coupon and all the visitor has to do is give you his or her e-mail address. As your e-mail list grows, so, too, does your potential customer base. Each one of these opt-ins has a relationship with you and you can stay in touch with auto-responders, keeping your company’s name and services in front of the customers.

Promote special sales and events on your site’s home page. Provide “how-to” information to keep customers coming back. The possibilities are endless. Think of a web site as a salesperson who never sleeps, never calls in sick and never complains about your management style. And all of that for less than $7.00 a month? Talk about a bargain.

Use Your Business to Promote Your Website

A web site has a certain cachet – it’s an indication that the store owners are sharp business people. And because the cost of building and operating a web site are so low, a web site is a low-cost, badge of prestige and you want as many people as possible to know you’re on-line.

Once your site is functional and all of the bugs have been worked out (pretty easy to do) it’s time to use your business to promote your web site, developing synergies that lead to sales.

First, make sure your web site URL (address) appears on all business stationery from letterhead to business cards and from invoices to adverts in local, traditional media. By telling people where to find more information about your business, your web site becomes an on-line billboard along that ‘Information Highway’. Customers who see your URL in a newspaper ad may choose to make a purchase on-line rather than drive clear across town or across state.

Design an on-line campaign to drive more people to your web site. Announce in your local newspaper advert that customers will receive a printable coupon for 15% off when they visit your web site. Of course, while they’re on-line visiting your site, entice them to make an on-line purchase, as well.

And don’t forget giveaways. T-shirts, bumper stickers, pens and other free stuff that display your web site’s URL will all generate more site traffic and, therefore, greater business efficiencies.

Explain to real-world customers that all transactions can take place on line or in person. Your web site should be a seamless extension of your actual business, enabling buyers to make purchases and payments, ask questions and even process returns. There’s plenty of software that will enable you to do this – free checkouts, free inventory managers, free shipping software – it’s all there making your job and your customers’ buying experiences easy.

Another reason to maintain a web site? Let’s say you run a local deli offering specials of the day. Your regulars will appreciate the ability to log on and see “what’s cookin’” today. Web sites are very easy to update, so use your site to keep customers up to date on daily specials, menu changes, new product lines and other helpful information. If your URL appears on all business-related paperwork, more and more people will find their way to your site. And, if they find useful information on the site, they’re more likely to visit your store one town over.

Selling Pizza in Zimbabwe?

A web site provides a world-wide presence so if you run a pizza place in Dayton, you won’t have much interest in orders from Zimbabwe – even if they want the super-deluxe special. How are you going to get it there in 30 minutes or less?

If you’re business is strictly local (it doesn’t have to be, by the way) you can use various search engine filters so that only people within a certain range will actually visit your web site, which will cut down on questions from Zimbabwe regarding the status of their order.

Localize your listings with Google and Yahoo so you’re reaching those customers who might actually visit your store or order something because they’ve been to the store before and know they can count on your quality and service.

However, don’t rule out expanding your little enterprise globally. Let’s say you run a small town hardware store. Most of your business comes from local residents looking to buy a wheelbarrow or a hammer. That doesn’t mean that you can’t ship a hammer to Zimbabwe. In fact, that’s one of the coolest things about having a web site.

One web user was looking for those plastic cases used to protect baseball cards. They’re called “screw downs” in case you didn’t know. So, instead of driving from one sports memorabilia store to the next, the buyer Goggled “screw downs” and found just what he was looking for eight states away. The buyer never would have even heard of Ed’s Sports Collectibles, or made the purchase, if old Ed hadn’t built a web site.

So, a web site can save time by automating routine tasks – everything from processing sales to answering FAQs. This frees up your time to devote to in-store customer care.

Next, you can build marketing and promotion synergies between your brick-and-mortar and your virtual on-line store, using one to promote the other.

Finally, you can do all of this for very little money. You don’t need a big, fancy expensive web site design firm and the cost of hosting a feature-rich web site are low – often less than $7.00 a month.

Now the question is – what are you waiting for? Promote your business and your products around the corner and around the world by building synergies between real and virtual worlds. You’ll be amazed at the jump in sales and  just how easy it is to do.


Webwordslinger.com

On-Line Guerrila Marketing: Use The Resources of Others For Your Benefit.

SAVE YOUR MONEY.

GUERRILLA MARKETING IS FREE.

IT EXPLOITS THE RESOURCES OF OTHERS.

SO RELAX, ALREADY.

Guerilla Marketing:

Forget Viral. Go Guerilla.

If you read through webmaster blogs the big thing is still viral marketing. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s free. But viral, online marketing assumes a passive posture when it comes to long-term promotion. You put it out there (whatever it is that you hope goes viral) and you pray for good timing and a whole lot of luck.

Example: A few weeks back the national TV networks all picked up this YouTube upload of a baby in a high-chair laughing hysterically at daddy’s funny antics. It was a very funny clip, no doubt. But out of curiosity, I went to YouTube, searched “laughing babies” and got about 200 hits using site search. Clicking on just a few of these uploads (you can only take so much of laughing babies even if they are as cute as the dickens) I saw plenty of good stuff. Funny stuff. Every bit as funny as the clip that caught the attention of a news editor at a 24-hour cable news network.

So, why does one clip go viral while those other 200 laughing baby clips didn’t? Lots of luck and good timing. Slow news day, pop onto YouTube, find a clip of funny baby (plenty to choose from), show on evening news. Wait for congratulations. Easy, right?

Well, it is easy to upload a webcast to YouTube, and you might actually get some organic viewers. The operative word, here, is might. Viral marketing is effective. It’s also annoying, sometimes illegal, mis-placed, offensive, off-putting and a bunch of other negatives that won’t drive traffic the way you anticipate. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That’s the problem with viral marketing. It relies much too heavily on luck and timing. That means you launch campaign after campaign of viral promotion with iffy results. Sometimes it pays off. Other times, it actually hurts your search engine ranking and annoys potential site visitors.

So, instead of casting your site’s fate to the wind, employ guerilla marketing tactics. These are pro-active, extremely focused and much more controllable by you, the guerilla marketer.

Viral Versus Guerilla Marketing

Indeed, they are similar, sharing two important characteristics.

Viral marketing is based on to critical premises:

1. It’s free.

2. It employs the resources of others for your gain. Legally!

The characteristics of guerilla marketing:

1. It’s also free (to you).

2. It also employs the resources of others.

3. It puts you in control. It’s pro-active promotion, unlike viral.

Why is this important? Well, let’s say you launch a viral marketing campaign and you post a bunch of your well-written articles on sites that syndicate content to other site owners. Syndication sites include helium.com, ezine.com and a bunch of other free content sites.

Once you’ve uploaded your article, design, program, artwork or other bait, you give up control over where those elements end up. Your scholarly article criticizing the United Nations could end up on a skinhead site. Great, now your name and your ideas are tainted by your “association” with hate groups. Ugh.

Your rights free photos can end up on competitor sites, or a site in a different language that you can’t even read. The fact is, when you employ these viral tactics, you may get the results you anticipated – visitors that have identified your authority and want to learn more about your good or services. Or, you may have a mess on your hands that’ll take a bunch of work to clean up.

Online Guerilla Marketing

Control over your creation. That’s what you want, even if you’re giving it away.

Place Free Content Downloads on Your Site

So, let’s say you have 50 articles uploaded to helium.com. And your pieces are spread all over the web on lots of different sites, each providing a backlink to your site. Okay, but what if you put those 50 articles on your site in an archives format and allowed rights-free use of the content.

Add “free content” to your keyword phrase list. This accomplishes a few things. First, you decide who can use your content and who can’t. Second, it drives traffic to your site, not to helium’s site. And third, using a content management system, you can track where your creations appear.

The content has to be good to be picked up so if you can’t string words together to form cogent sentences, hire a “ghost” at elance.com, guru.com and other outsourcing sites. You can buy words by the pound – and, because it was ghosted, you own it. It’s yours just as though you wrote it.

When you do offer up a free whatever, make the terms clear. You can download this article and display it on your site. In return, you must provide a link back to my site. By the way, it’s a good idea to track whether links are, indeed, provided. Some less-than-scrupulous site owners may claim the text as their own, defeating the whole purpose of guerilla marketing.

Blog Like a Crazy Person

Okay, if your blog posts sound like they were written by someone who howls at the full moon, you’ll probably get yourself banned. However, if you blog other sites everyday, pretty soon you’ll have lots of non-reciprocal back links.

First, find the top blogs within your area of expertise. For example, if you’re a site owner, Google “webmaster blogs” to see what pops up. If you’re an aerospace consultant, Google “aerospace blogs.” You get the idea.

Write your blog post or response in Word so you can check for spelling and other typos. These things still count as testaments to the quality of the writing. Be provocative. Controversy sells. But be sincere, too. It’s pretty easy to spot a blogger who’s more interested in promoting his or her agenda than providing a forum for public discourse.

Blog posts should be longer than 600 words but no longer than 1200 words. Embed text links to your site in each piece. These embedded links rank higher with search engine bots than the link in the “About the Author” block at the end of a piece.

You should set a goal of three or five or 10 posts a week if you can keep up the pace. And spread around that wisdom and experience. Use different blogs but don’t use the same content on different blogs. Spiders don’t value re-used content anywhere near as much as green, original content.

Become a Yahoo Authority

Yahoo Answers enables you to establish creds and get your URL plastered all over Yahoo. Here’s how it works:

You create a Yahoo account. (Have to.) Sign up as an authority. You don’t have to name a specific field. Just create a screen name, start looking for questions to which you have helpful answers and be sure to end each answer with contact information – especially your site’s URL.

You receive two points for each question you answer, working your way up the ladder from a level 1 authority to a level 7 authority, all the time helping others, helping build credibility for yourself and driving traffic using the resources of Yahoo to spread the word.

Yahoo users vote for “best answers” to questions. If your answer is selected best, you receive 10 points and you’ll move up that authority ladder pretty fast.

Try to post at least two good answers to open questions a day. Questions identified as resolved may still be read but they won’t move you up the ladder regardless of how cogent your answer.

Provide HTML Code for Your Webcasts

YouTube does this. If you look at a YouTube upload, you’ll see the HTML string for the video clip. Just copy and paste the code to embed the video on a site. However, don’t follow YouTube’s example.

Remember, the important aspect of guerilla marketing is control. You want to maintain control over where your content appears so let webmasters know that your webcasts can be embedded on other sites. They just have to drop you a line.

Hit and Run. Don’t Stop Ever.

On battlegrounds, guerilla fighters make short, powerful attacks and then disappear into the jungles or mix in with the rest of the population. That’s what you’re after. Short bursts of promotion repeated over and over.

Guerillas don’t face their enemies on the battle field. Strategic placement. The right force for the task. Control, hit, retreat, reload, hit. Over and over.

So take control of your content to insure its best use for your promotional efforts. And remember, guerilla marketing is short and sweet. A 10-part auto-responder is NOT short and sweet and by the time that 10^th piece of hype lands in the inbox, most users are apoplexic. Enough already.

But a one page, surgical strike aimed at previous buyers who already know your solid reputation is good, guerilla marketing.

The final key to the success of a guerilla marketing campaign is persistence. It’s the repetition that wins the day. It’s the use of other people’s resources – their blogs and websites – that makes it work. And, the fact that going guerilla doesn’t cost anything but your time, you have to admit it’s cost effective.

Using this hit and run strategy will provide the means to take on much bigger competitors and enable you to stay in the fray and even flourish thanks to the use of free, controllable resources.

Go guerilla.

I know, marketing dollars are tight, but if you don't market your site, how's anyone going to find you? Guerrilla marketing has been around for millenia. It worked 4,000 years ago and it works even better today. I'll show you how.

Webwordslinger.com

GUERRILLA MARKETING USES ASSETS OF OTHERS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE.

IF IT'S FREE, USE IT TO PROMOTE YOUR SITE. TWEET, TWEET.

Guerilla Marketing:

Forget Viral. Go Guerilla.

If you read through webmaster blogs the big thing is still viral marketing. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s free. But viral, online marketing assumes a passive posture when it comes to long-term promotion. You put it out there (whatever it is that you hope goes viral) and you pray for good timing and a whole lot of luck.

Example: A few weeks back the national TV networks all picked up this YouTube upload of a baby in a high-chair laughing hysterically at daddy’s funny antics. It was a very funny clip, no doubt. But out of curiosity, I went to YouTube, searched “laughing babies” and got about 200 hits using site search. Clicking on just a few of these uploads (you can only take so much of laughing babies even if they are as cute as the dickens) I saw plenty of good stuff. Funny stuff. Every bit as funny as the clip that caught the attention of a news editor at a 24-hour cable news network.

So, why does one clip go viral while those other 200 laughing baby clips didn’t? Lots of luck and good timing. Slow news day, pop onto YouTube, find a clip of funny baby (plenty to choose from), show on evening news. Wait for congratulations. Easy, right?

Well, it is easy to upload a webcast to YouTube, and you might actually get some organic viewers. The operative word, here, is might. Viral marketing is effective. It’s also annoying, sometimes illegal, mis-placed, offensive, off-putting and a bunch of other negatives that won’t drive traffic the way you anticipate. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That’s the problem with viral marketing. It relies much too heavily on luck and timing. That means you launch campaign after campaign of viral promotion with iffy results. Sometimes it pays off. Other times, it actually hurts your search engine ranking and annoys potential site visitors.

So, instead of casting your site’s fate to the wind, employ guerilla marketing tactics. These are pro-active, extremely focused and much more controllable by you, the guerilla marketer.

Viral Versus Guerilla Marketing

Indeed, they are similar, sharing two important characteristics.

Viral marketing is based on to critical premises:

1. It’s free.

2. It employs the resources of others for your gain. Legally!

The characteristics of guerilla marketing:

1. It’s also free (to you).

2. It also employs the resources of others.

3. It puts you in control. It’s pro-active promotion, unlike viral.

Why is this important? Well, let’s say you launch a viral marketing campaign and you post a bunch of your well-written articles on sites that syndicate content to other site owners. Syndication sites include helium.com, ezine.com and a bunch of other free content sites.

Once you’ve uploaded your article, design, program, artwork or other bait, you give up control over where those elements end up. Your scholarly article criticizing the United Nations could end up on a skinhead site. Great, now your name and your ideas are tainted by your “association” with hate groups. Ugh.

Your rights free photos can end up on competitor sites, or a site in a different language that you can’t even read. The fact is, when you employ these viral tactics, you may get the results you anticipated – visitors that have identified your authority and want to learn more about your good or services. Or, you may have a mess on your hands that’ll take a bunch of work to clean up.

Online Guerilla Marketing

Control over your creation. That’s what you want, even if you’re giving it away.

Place Free Content Downloads on Your Site

So, let’s say you have 50 articles uploaded to helium.com. And your pieces are spread all over the web on lots of different sites, each providing a backlink to your site. Okay, but what if you put those 50 articles on your site in an archives format and allowed rights-free use of the content.

Add “free content” to your keyword phrase list. This accomplishes a few things. First, you decide who can use your content and who can’t. Second, it drives traffic to your site, not to helium’s site. And third, using a content management system, you can track where your creations appear.

The content has to be good to be picked up so if you can’t string words together to form cogent sentences, hire a “ghost” at elance.com, guru.com and other outsourcing sites. You can buy words by the pound – and, because it was ghosted, you own it. It’s yours just as though you wrote it.

When you do offer up a free whatever, make the terms clear. You can download this article and display it on your site. In return, you must provide a link back to my site. By the way, it’s a good idea to track whether links are, indeed, provided. Some less-than-scrupulous site owners may claim the text as their own, defeating the whole purpose of guerilla marketing.

Blog Like a Crazy Person

Okay, if your blog posts sound like they were written by someone who howls at the full moon, you’ll probably get yourself banned. However, if you blog other sites everyday, pretty soon you’ll have lots of non-reciprocal back links.

First, find the top blogs within your area of expertise. For example, if you’re a site owner, Google “webmaster blogs” to see what pops up. If you’re an aerospace consultant, Google “aerospace blogs.” You get the idea.

Write your blog post or response in Word so you can check for spelling and other typos. These things still count as testaments to the quality of the writing. Be provocative. Controversy sells. But be sincere, too. It’s pretty easy to spot a blogger who’s more interested in promoting his or her agenda than providing a forum for public discourse.

Blog posts should be longer than 600 words but no longer than 1200 words. Embed text links to your site in each piece. These embedded links rank higher with search engine bots than the link in the “About the Author” block at the end of a piece.

You should set a goal of three or five or 10 posts a week if you can keep up the pace. And spread around that wisdom and experience. Use different blogs but don’t use the same content on different blogs. Spiders don’t value re-used content anywhere near as much as green, original content.

Become a Yahoo Authority

Yahoo Answers enables you to establish creds and get your URL plastered all over Yahoo. Here’s how it works:

You create a Yahoo account. (Have to.) Sign up as an authority. You don’t have to name a specific field. Just create a screen name, start looking for questions to which you have helpful answers and be sure to end each answer with contact information – especially your site’s URL.

You receive two points for each question you answer, working your way up the ladder from a level 1 authority to a level 7 authority, all the time helping others, helping build credibility for yourself and driving traffic using the resources of Yahoo to spread the word.

Yahoo users vote for “best answers” to questions. If your answer is selected best, you receive 10 points and you’ll move up that authority ladder pretty fast.

Try to post at least two good answers to open questions a day. Questions identified as resolved may still be read but they won’t move you up the ladder regardless of how cogent your answer.

Provide HTML Code for Your Webcasts

YouTube does this. If you look at a YouTube upload, you’ll see the HTML string for the video clip. Just copy and paste the code to embed the video on a site. However, don’t follow YouTube’s example.

Remember, the important aspect of guerilla marketing is control. You want to maintain control over where your content appears so let webmasters know that your webcasts can be embedded on other sites. They just have to drop you a line.

Hit and Run. Don’t Stop Ever.

On battlegrounds, guerilla fighters make short, powerful attacks and then disappear into the jungles or mix in with the rest of the population. That’s what you’re after. Short bursts of promotion repeated over and over.

Guerillas don’t face their enemies on the battle field. Strategic placement. The right force for the task. Control, hit, retreat, reload, hit. Over and over.

So take control of your content to insure its best use for your promotional efforts. And remember, guerilla marketing is short and sweet. A 10-part auto-responder is NOT short and sweet and by the time that 10^th piece of hype lands in the inbox, most users are apoplexic. Enough already.

But a one page, surgical strike aimed at previous buyers who already know your solid reputation is good, guerilla marketing.

The final key to the success of a guerilla marketing campaign is persistence. It’s the repetition that wins the day. It’s the use of other people’s resources – their blogs and websites – that makes it work. And, the fact that going guerilla doesn’t cost anything but your time, you have to admit it’s cost effective.

Using this hit and run strategy will provide the means to take on much bigger competitors and enable you to stay in the fray and even flourish thanks to the use of free, controllable resources.

Go guerilla.

Working with a small marketing budget. Learn to do it yourself and save. Drop me a line and let me show you how to use your web-based assets for max impact and even revenue.

Talk soon,

Webwordslinger.com