The Net Impact Roadmap

“Why can’t I just buy a $99 per month package and be number one?”

Every week The Net Impact team runs into a discussion regarding SEO packages offered by other SEO firms. The conversation usually begins with “Why can SEO Company A offer us a SEO package that promises to deliver results for $99 per month while other firms, like TNI, only offer custom solutions that are higher in price?” It is a fair question to ask. One that is not easily explained without first educating our prospects a bit on what SEO really is, or maybe better stated, what it has become. Once upon a time SEO solely meant, to most providers, developing site-appropriate meta data, keywords and submitting to directories. When the bar was lower for most firms competitively, then it was possible for an automated program or an unassociated third party to simply follow a routine and achieve some results. Also, some years ago, there wasn’t the appreciation of how powerful the Internet had become as a marketing tool. Firms did not yet realize that the search engines had become so entrenched into the daily lives of individuals. With those points in mind we now fast forward to 2008. Today, developing a website or operating a website meant to market your services or product without taking organic search and other traffic generation marketing efforts into consideration is, for lack of a better term, marketing suicide. Yes, there are still sites strictly built to support a professionals business card. If your networking is all local and you do not feel the need to drive extra attention to your business then perhaps a GoDaddy hosting account and a Web Site Tonight template could be exactly what you need. No argument. For any firm though that is embroiled in a competitive marketplace or wants to bring in more recognition this solution, without a lot of web-savvy support, just won’t fly.
What should I look for in a SEO service?

Let’s start with the obvious. See how your potential SEO service provider does for their own firm. Do a search on, “Search Engine Marketing firm City” or use your state if you prefer. See if they come up on page one. I absolutely throw out the argument that their SEO service is so busy taking care of customers they cannot do justice to their own site through their own effort. Really? We use our own site as a “test tube” for SEO on a regular basis. Only by continuing to quest for advancement can you achieve superiority.

Next, want to see their site (or your site) as the search engines do? There are many tools available for this test, try out this tool. SEO-Browser.com Or, you can download the Google toolbar to your desktop and check things out. There are way too many other “tools and toys” to mention. The fact is, you have ways to investigate.

Other steps are pretty common sense. Ask for references. Don’t just read testimonials. Review their client’s sites. Do their clients face the same level of competition your firm faces? There is a big difference in the way you would market a national sales automation firm vs. a local plumbing supply firm. Both need SEO, but differently. Interview the SEO firm. Ask tough questions. Ask about their process. See if their past experience matches your needs. Will they require any information from you or is this an automated program? Remember, your competition is product, service, region and keyword specific. How can they exclude you from that process and achieve results?

Finally, weigh your investment. Is this a closed-end package that ties you up for a year or more or are their services month to month? Do they seem eager to sign you up without ever knowing your circumstances? Like any good relationship, you have to feel comfortable that your energy will be well spent as well as your cash.

Make the selection of SEO support more than just a price proposition. Consider the decision based upon the desire to be on page one!

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One of the biggest challenges for sales teams today is keeping in contact with potential customers.  Generating leads and staying in contact with them is time consuming and expensive.  It can also distract sales people from providing existing customers the service they need and expect.  Unfortunately, most companies still rely solely on the sales team to develop leads. Since there is so much competition today, requiring your sales team to make constant phone calls, sending out letters and emails, will likely get nowhere.  In fact, there is so much demand for the attention of prospects today; there is now a strong resistance by these prospects to engage with sales people. 

Consumers and buyers no longer rely on sales people for information; they now have the ability to shop and research on-line. They are likely to engage with a sales person only when they get close to a purchase decision.  In the case of on-line purchases, there is typically no engagement with a sales person, so, it’s even more critical to have effective follow-up systems. The current market trends are placing exceptional demands on customer acquisition and retention strategies.  Status quo can be very inefficient and expensive.  Without addressing this new environment, productivity suffers, sales struggle or decline, turn-over increases and customer satisfaction drops.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if there was a way to improve the process of not only lead generation, but, more importantly, lead development?  Wouldn’t it be even better if this process could be automated?  These goals are achievable using new marketing automation technology and by re-defining the role of your sales people.

In direct sales, there is significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of the sales team by improving not only how sales communications are managed, but by whom. Business owners should carefully look at the role of the sales person and the role of their marketing resources.  There should be greater alignment between these two functions; freeing the sales people from unproductive tasks and requiring marketing to take on more responsibility to nurture both prospects and existing customers. Marketing automation tools facilitate this process. 

Leading companies are now integrating nurture programs into both their on-line and off-line marketing and sales strategies. These companies have their sales and marketing teams work together for the same goals - getting and keeping customers.  They rely on a marketing function to generate new leads and maintain contact with those new leads. Through this nurturing process, they also qualify the leads.  Once they are considered qualified, or reach some trigger point, then the lead is sent to sales.  With marketing automation technology, this can be automated and integrated with CRM software or other business applications. This strategy allows the sales team to stay in front of their customers more often, thereby building stronger relationships and improving retention rates. 

To help companies address this challenge, The Net Impact has partnered with Marketing Solutions, Inc (MSI), based in Chesterfield, Missouri.  MSI specializes in marketing automation software and lead nurturing programs.  Together, our combined resources offer small and mid-sized businesses a resource to improve their lead generation, lead conversion rates and customer retention.

Learn more about how technology can help your lead conversion at this St. Louis-area seminar.

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We looked at Zen Cart before as a nice, open source shopping cart.  However, there are still plenty of other options if you have specialized products or are looking for something cheap with an easy-to-use interfaace.

The Shopping Cart Alternatives

There are plenty of monthly services that you can use for your shopping cart that may also give you a headstart instead of building the cart yourself.  Among those options are Ebay Stores, Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, and ProStores.  These services are just the tip of the iceberg. 

While each of these services is different, as a whole they do have general advantages over creating your own shopping cart.  Those advantages include:

1. Ease of Design

For the most part, the previously mentioned store applications offer template designs.  Template designs offer an effective, easy way for you to design a nice looking web site and get the web site launched quickly.  There are often templates that can be purchased for other shopping cart interfaces such as Zen Cart, but they still require some adjustments on the part of the store owner.

2. Customization

On one hand, complete shopping cart customization is only provided through creating your own shopping cart.  However, if you don’t have that type of ability or budget, using one of the preceding pre-packaged shopping carts offers plenty of flexibility in design and layout in most cases.

3. All-in-One Solutions

Most of the monthly store shopping carts have one other advantage that can save you time: Credit card processing.  While you may need to install modules or simply configure your account information with shopping carts like Zen Cart, many of the pre-packaged stores listed above do the credit card processing for you and make this process easier.

4. Non-Technical Advantages

Don’t know HTML or some other technologies necessary to design a web site or edit components?  The overriding purpose of these previously mentioned online stores, in most cases, is to give you the ability to design a store without using any code.

5. Safety

In general, using one of these pre-packaged stores is safer than coming up with a design yourself.  The designs provided by these store services have often been tested, so you know whether or not they make effective stores that will lead to conversions.  Also, you can get technical support from the store services if you ever run into problems.

Affiliate Stores

Somewhat closely related to shopping cart stores is the ever-growing affiliate store.  CafePress.com and Zazzle are two very popular affiliate stores that you can use to design your own apparel and sell it to customers.  CafePress seems to be the market leader, but Zazzle is catching up.  Both affiliate stores allow you to customize clothing, cups, and all sorts of other apparel with your logo and other designs.  CafePress lets you setup your own press, while you get a percentage of the sale with Zazzle.  Like the shopping cart stores listed above, these two affiliate stores are easy to setup, design and customize your apparel.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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For any web site making money through advertising revenue, the creation and deployment of a media kit is an extremely important process.  The media kit for web sites is an informative guide to advertising on a web site, often including advertisement prices, banner locations and available advertising space.

The creation of the media kit can be a complicated and daunting task if you have never done it before.  Where do you even start?

The following steps will help you get started, and from there it will be a piece of cake.

1. Take an Inventory

Do you have existing advertising?  Do you know how many ads you will be putting on your web site?  Before setting up a media kit, it is a good idea to nail down the foundation of your advertising availability so that you know exactly what you will be offering to potential advertisers.

2. Evaluate Competitors

How are your competitors doing their advertising?  Your competitors can tell you a lot about not only where to put the advertising but also the advertising landscape.  If bigger competitors are struggling to find advertisers, it could be an indication that the advertising dollars in your web site’s industry are not available.  If this is the case, you may want to hold off on creating a media kit or adjust your plan to attract advertisers that are cautious about advertising in your industry.

3. Find Samples

There are media kit samples all over the internet, and evaluating what you like and don’t like is a good starting point for creating your media kit.  Simply type in “web site media kit” into your favorite search engine, and you should get thousands of results.  This is also a good idea to take an inventory on the format of the media kit - PDF or webpage.

4. Develop an Outline

Writing a media kit seems like a big process, but it really comes down to what you learned when writing a paper in school.  Plan ahead with an outline.  Outlining the media kit will make the process much faster, rather than adding and subtracting sections in a disorganized fashion without an outline.

5. Create the Media Kit

Once the media kit is mapped out, it is time to start putting it together.  Since your media kit is an important tool in your advertising sales, it is important to make it look neat and provide traditional calls to action.  Creating the media kit can take some time, but the difference between a good and a bad media kit can easily be reflected in sales.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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One of the misnomers in e-commerce is that your store needs a shopping cart.  Sure, a store like Amazon.com or Buy.com with a huge, unmanageable inventory does need a shopping cart system, but a shopping cart could be a waste of time for simpler stores.

If you are selling a few individual products and don’t offer package savings or other special deals, shopping carts could be a waste of resources.   If the vast majority of your customers only buy one product or service, why implement a more complicated shopping cart that could actually frustrate your customers and eventually lead them away from your product?

There are several options if you don’t use a shopping cart.  Among them are the use of a “Buy Now” or “Add Product” button on each individual product, a contact us prompt for potential leads to inquire about services, and simply setting up a 1-800 number to take phone inquiries.

For the purpose of an e-commerce store’s shopping cart replacement, the “Buy Now” or “Add Product” buttons are probably your best option.  Possible payment processing solutions for this arrangement include Paypal, Google Checkout, Versign, and 2Checkout.com.

Examples of types of e-commerce stores that can possibly do without a full shopping cart include book authors, bands, companies with individual, customizable solutions, expensive products and other random items that are sold individually such as cell phones and server hosting plans.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Aside from offering advertising, affiliate programs are an excellent way to make money on your web site without producing or selling a product of your own. Before going any further, let’s clarify the definition of an affiliate program in this context.

“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” -Wikipedia

Affiliate programs can expand the value of your web site for your visitors, becoming a one-stop shop for the services that they use. However, the wrong affiliate programs can annoy your users and lead them away from your web site. When considering whether to add particular affiliate programs, a careful evaluation of the programs available is important. The following are four ways to help you choose the right affiliate program for your web site.

1. Reputation

Is the affiliate program reputable? This is by far the most important criteria when choosing affiliate programs. Not only do you need to know whether the program is reputable for payment purposes, but also whether the program will deliver on its promises when you send your own visitors elsewhere. If a visitor is not happy with a product that they received from your referral, that reflects poorly on your web site. Be sure to ask the right questions and get all the information before committing to an affiliate program. For every industry, there are several reputable affiliate programs. If you have doubts about one affiliate program, don’t hesitate to try others.

2. Compensation

Most web sites make compensation their first priority when considering affiliate programs. Certainly, your compensation is important, but you also must consider the type of products that you are selling in the affiliate programs and how likely your users are to buy these products. Even if your return for a computer-related affiliate program is great, you probably are not going to get much return on the affiliate program if your web site is about pets.

3. Service

How responsive is the affiliate program to problems and issues? How quickly do you get paid? Are your payments on time? Some of these issues are learned the hard way through trial and error, but once again, you can learn a lot by asking the right questions of your affiliate. Service may not seem like a huge issue before choosing an affiliate program, but it is definitely an important consideration as you start to generate revenue from the program.

4. Attractiveness

More than likely, your affiliate program has banners. These banners are meant to sell the products from the affiliate programs and drive traffic to the vendors. Like any other advertising, if the banners or messages are attractive, they are more likely to bring traffic. If your marketing message or advertising banners posted on your web site are unattractive, you could simply be wasting space. The same can be said for the landing pages and overall web site design of the seller.

May 2008 TNI Test: Theaudiobookstore.com 

May 2008 TNI Test: GoodCheapWineGuide.com 

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Not mentioned in the previous “free stuff” blog was the contest strategy.  Free contests are very similar to the aforementioned free strategies in purpose, and for some products there is more upside with drawing attention to your product and collecting potentially valuable customer information.

Artistic Sensations, an e-commerce toy and gift store, is an excellent existing example of this strategy.  They are driving traffic and interest with their Holiday Loft Bed Giveaway.  In the process, Artistic Sensations is generating interest in their products, learning what their customers like most, and drawing attention through the contest

Giving away free products can be an investment, but if implemented properly, the return on investment in new customers, attention, PR and additional customer information collected has the ability to generate value many times over. 

The key is to develop a well thought out, extensive plan.  In the right industries, this strategy has limitless potential.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager at The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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In the past, we have discussed the strategy of giving away items such as e-books and other products to attract visitors.  That strategy seems easy enough for an established web site to get their visitors’ mouths watering, but there is a real Catch-22 for upstart web sites.

If you don’t have any visitors already, how do you attract visitors to your giveaways?

This question would lead one to believe that giveaways are a poor strategy for upstart E-Commerce web sites.  Actually, that is not necessarily the case.  In fact, giving away free items can still act as your web site’s launching pad, as it gives visitors a reason to check back, stick around and browse your other items.

Even so, we still have the problem of getting people to find your free stuff.   The following are three strategies you can use to spread the word about your free stuff quickly and without requiring you to stand on a street corner and beg people to take your items.

1. Message Boards

In the world of internet marketing, message boards are one of the most underrated and effective tools available.  Popular message boards allow a quicker and easier way than even blogs for you to get your voice heard and become an authority on a subject.  Message board contributors tend to stick together once they find a message board that they like, and some of the internet’s most popular message boards have thousands of regular contributors.  In addition to these contributors, many message boards have “lurkers” who simply read message boards to learn and develop opinions.  While overtly advertising your products is against the service agreements of many message boards, most message boards do allow you to put a link and information in the “signature” of each post.  At worst, you should be able to attract a few message board readers to your website to sneak a peak.  At best, one of those readers will spread the word to their friends and the rest of the message board about your free stuff.

2. Blogs

Not only can you develop visitors and authority through the use of your own blog, but you can also develop traffic by using other blogs.  By no means am I suggesting that you should spam other blogs.  There is an appropriate way of indirectly pushing your products on the comments portion of blog posts without spamming.  Personally, I can’t even count the number of times that I have found cool, new products or leads on services during specific internet searches as a result of blog discussions.  The vast majority of blog comments are indexed in the search engines, and if your product or service contributes positively to the discussion, blogs provide you another chance to get the word out about your free service or product.  Just remember, there is a big difference between spamming the message boards to market your product and mentioning your web site or giveaway in context to help readers.  Be sure that you are doing the latter! 

3. Social Networking

With the number of Web 2.0 web sites growing with each passing day, there are new opportunities for you to spread the word about your web site and products.  Social networking web sites include everything from Facebook and MySpace to Digg and del.icio.us.  Social networking web sites that show what is popular in a public forum, in particular web sites similar to Digg and del.icio.us, give you an especially great way to attract visitors quickly if your free stuff is useful.  In particular, if your product is of a technical nature, it is likely that many of your users are utilizing social networking web sites.  If you have the time and resources to promote to social web sites, you might as well promote to every social bookmarking web site that you can find in order to attract the most possible visits to your web site and freebies.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the strategies mentioned above will be nice starting points to promote your free stuff.  Having giveaways on your web site can be a nice marketing move to get your web site going.  Just think of how many stores drop their prices on the day after Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Black Friday, in order to get people into the store.  This way of thinking, if developed properly, is an effective E-Commerce strategy that can spread the word about your product even more quickly through the World Wide Web. 

Good luck in all of your online free giveaway endeavors!

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Online stores that don’t want to deal with their own credit card processing always have a dilemma.  There are many options for payment processing, including online store platforms, checkout vendors and simply processing the credit card orders yourself. Two of the most popular options for online credit card processing are Google Checkout and Paypal.  Paypal has been around for years, while Google checkout has come along more recently.  Each service has some definite pros and cons, which are worth discussing if you are faced with this decision or are looking to switch from one service to the other for your credit card processing. 

The following is a description of how they square off: 

Price: Google Checkout Wins 

Google Checkout wins this battle, and it’s really not close.  They charge 2 percent of the sale price plus 20 cents per transaction, while Paypal charges 1.9-2.9 percent based on sales volume plus 30 cents per transaction.  However, Google checkout processing is free if you spend equal or less than 10 times your Adwords spend.  So if you spend $1,000 in Adwords, your first $10,000 of merchandise processing is free.  For most online e-commerce stores, it becomes almost impossible for Paypal to be cheaper than Google Checkout. 

Customer Trust: Tie 

At this point, the vast majority of online customers know about Paypal.  It has been around for a long time, and most online merchants accept it.   On the other hand, Google has plenty of name recognition as the largest search engine.  If your customers have used just one of the payment methods, it is more likely that they have used Paypal.  Still, Google Checkout is likely a trusted method of payment by your customers because of the name. 

Payment Flexibility: Paypal Wins 

Paypal allows customers to use their bank account for payment, while Google Checkout does not.  As most Paypal users know, Paypal also allows for peer-to-peer payments, which is a bonus for using the service. Both payment services now offer international currency and shipping. 

Miscellaneous: Paypal Wins

As already mentioned, the peer-to-peer payment feature in Paypal can be very convenient.  Paypal’s fraudulent return policy is also good for big purchases, as there is not a time limit on refunds, whereas Google fraudulent purchases need to be reported within 60 days.  Otherwise, the comparison seems rather similar for implementation. 

The Verdict 

Paypal seems to have a few more advantages, but Google Checkout beats Paypal on probably the most important factor: Price.  Google takes out less money in nearly all circumstances, and that is probably the most important factor when choosing a payment service.  Paypal’s advantages are probably not enough to make the two services rank equally. Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.
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EBay has been one of the most popular web sites on the internet for a number of years.  Thousands of internet users have opened eBay stores, and millions have bought or sold products on the internet auction web site.  Chances are you have been impacted by eBay in one way or another through your online crusades. Still, many web sites and internet marketers have made eBay work for them.  At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial, web marketers can benefit from eBay and promote their products cheaply in the process. 

Market entrants often lower the price of some of their products in order to get people to try their products.  eBay provides you with another opportunity to get your product in the hands of your intended audience, promoting your product as a result. The previous blog on mini e-books relates well to promoting your web site and products on eBay.  There are thousands of e-books for sale on eBay each day, and many of these e-books are being sold for one cent by companies participating in this market entrant strategy.  If the price of your product is negligible, your risk in basically giving away your products on eBay is miniscule.  Of course, eBay does charge you to sell products, but if the product that you are giving away is likely to provide you with further leads, then the money you spend is certainly well worth it. Even while digital, low-cost products are the most desirable for this marketing model, material products can be worth the risk depending on your rate of return.  For example, eating the cost of shipping to send out a sample brochure or magazine that you sell for free on eBay can be worth the investment if you receive a regular customer or subscriber out of it.

This strategy is used by many online companies already.  It is not right for every product and industry, but it is worth looking into for many online stores and products.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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