NetBusinessBlog

Product Reviews can Increase Sales

Posted on 30. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

Even though some consumers might deny it, product reviews will actually have an impact on their perception of particular products and services. Web owners can use product reviews as a tool that will add credibility to their site.

People are social researchers

Internet users have access to vast information right at their fingertips. They conduct research before pay for something. For example, the Kelsey Group discovered that around 24% of internet users search for information on offline products and service including hotels and accommodations online. 87% of the hotel searchers who read reviews stated that product reviews greatly influenced their choices.

Negative reviews

Don’t look at negative reviews negatively because it can actually add to the credibility of your site. So what if one person says something bad about you? It is impossible to please everyone and you really need not worry if you get one or two bad reviews. Internet users are becoming sophisticated; it does not bother them to read negative information about a company as long as the positive feedback outweighs the negative.

Look at GoDaddy, I’ve read so many bad reviews about the site. Yet, thousands if not millions, of people still patronize the site because the company has already proven that it can deliver. In addition, GoDaddy has more satisfied customers than disgruntled clients so searchers are not afraid to try them out.

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Design Your Ads Effectively

Posted on 29. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

After you’re finished with your research on your target market’s technical know-how, you have determined the kind of technology you will use for your banner ads and other promotional materials over the internet. This is certainly a great start but you need to consider their “sensibilities” as well. For example, it is up to you to find out what kind of words, colors, and graphics will appeal to them to that you can achieve a high visual impact the first time they look into your ads. Some people are actually attracted to hard-sell antics but there are also those who are instantly turned off by them. So what exactly should you do to achieve great visual impact? Well, start with the hard facts:

Use Internal Data

If your business already has an advertising history, use it as a reference to know which ads appeal to your target market and which one don’t. Even if the materials you used aren’t tested online, there is a good chance that it will be successful if it was successful offline.

Use External Data

Gathering external data is not as complicated as it seems. You just need to develop rudimentary questionnaires about your banner design and look for a sample group and effectively represents your target audience. To know their sensibilities, show them existing ads and use their feedback to guide your future design.

Test Your Ad

Finally, testing your ad will help you asses the preferences of your target audience and know its technical effectiveness. You will be able to find out which ads are actually usable in the real marketplace.

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Calculate Delivery Time Accurately

Posted on 28. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

In the age of fast food, DSL, and Bluetooth, it is not surprising that customers are becoming more demanding than ever. They want products and services to be served instantly. If you are operating an ecommerce site though, then you probably realize that it is not as easy as that because the delivery process consists of different steps. This is the reason why providing an accurate delivery schedule when customers make online checkouts is essential to receive customer approval and satisfaction.

Determine the transit time

Basically, transit time is the period between ordering and the arrival of the goods at the customer’s door. To accurately determine the transit time, you should include the time for order retrieval, transmittal, packing, and the shipping among others. Below are the things you need to consider for transit time:

Clock deadline ? this is the time of day by which the order must be received in order to meet a particular schedule.

Order retrieval ? this involves getting the order from the website to where you need to route them to the appropriate department for processing.

Order transmittal ? this is the time required for the transfer of information about the order. Usually, this will take several minutes if you have a central warehouse.

Packing ? the time it takes for your staff to get the ordered items and pack them for shipment. Although this process is relatively simple, it can become time-consuming if you have a high volume of orders.

Accounting ? the process of payment verification before the products are delivered.

Shipping time ? usually provided by the carrier such as UPS, and FedEx among others.

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5 Steps in Building an Online Community

Posted on 25. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

Online communities are dynamic environments but it also needs consistent management. Members must ne invigorated and reinvigorated by new concepts and ideas so that they will be encouraged to contribute more freely and frequently. Any failed attempts at building an online community must be discarded or altered because they stop a lively community from developing. In line with this, here are 5 steps in building a lively online forum:

Experiment with your rules and procedures ? your forum should be seen as a work in progress especially during the initial stages. This will help you determine which rules and procedures would work for your site and which ones wouldn’t. Try to ask and monitor feedback from site visitors to know their opinion.

Identify community leaders ? in online communities, there will be leaders that emerge. These are the people who will contribute valuable information voluntarily which will help sustain the community.

Cultivate community leaders ? it is important for web owners to encourage these leaders as much as possible so they will be motivated to stay with the community.

Reinforce participation ? new members must be welcomed and they must be encouraged to participate in the online community. Their questions and queries must be answered; acknowledging and replying to posts that receive no response will help as well.

Avoid “churn” ? churn is a problem on the internet because visitors are continually looking for new and fresh content. Avoid churn by offering fresh material on a consistent basis.

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Email Delivery Tips

Posted on 24. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

Email marketing involves sending out bulk emails to subscribers. While this sound like a great concept, there are actually problems you will encounter in e-mail delivery. In the past, ISPs are the key factor because it scans the email for content but nowadays, reputation has become the most essential factor. Take note though that “reputation” is a combination of many factors including recipient reputation and ISP reputation.

? Recipient reputation ? this is your track record with the subscribers. You need to send out relevant and timely content at the right frequency to the identifiable subscriber.

? ISP reputation ? this is your tract record in sending emails to live and accurate email addresses. The “from” address as well as the IP address needs to be consistent; the content you send out should be also opened by the intended recipients.

Here are some tips for you to improve the inbox delivery rate:

1. Send content that will build your reputation ? that means you need to send out only information that are relevant to their needs because otherwise they will view your emails as irrelevant; this can damage your reputation.

2. Don’t send unnecessary emails ? when subscribers get too many emails in a short period of time from your company, they will no longer open most of them. ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN can detect open rates as well as click-through rates; your ISP reputation can be damaged if these emails are not opened.

3. Use feedback loops ? this will let you instantly unsubscribe the recipients who tagged your mails as spam messages.

4. Remove recipients with “hard bounces” ? it hurts your ISP reputation if you frequently send emails to “bad” email addresses.

5. Woo back the subscribers ? use attention-grabbing subject lines and offer special promotions or discounts. Your open and click-through rates will improve; likewise, your emails will no longer be tagged as spam.

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Optimizing Your Images

Posted on 23. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

“Content is king”, this statement is and probably always be true for organic search engine rankings. To get high search engine rankings, your text should be original, informative, and it must include your keywords and its variations within the text. And until recently, the images found on your page played no role in search engine optimization. However, this is no longer true.

? According to comScore, Google Images have seen a significant 40% increase in traffic from the previous year.

? “Universal search” or the results that displays text, images, video maps, news, stocks, and weather is being featured in 17% of Google searches.

With these kinds of figures, it is apparent that using images to optimize your site can be beneficial. Visual optimization can also aid e-commerce sites because searches need visual information for the products and even the services they are looking for. So here are the basic steps to image optimization:

1. Keywords ? of course, keywords will always play a part in your optimization technique. You need to determine which keyword is the best description for the image.

2. Filename ? you need to include your keywords in the filename.

3. Nearby text ? your webpage need to include the same keywords found in the image.

4. The ALT attribute ? place the same keywords on the image’s ALT attribute.

You can also try Google’s Enhanced Image Search to optimize your website using the Google Webmaster Tools account for free. This tool can greatly help in improving the quality of your site traffic from the images.

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Tactics That Might Increase Your Online Sales

Posted on 22. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

There is no sure-fire formula to achieve online success. This is because one tactic that might work for one company may not necessarily work for yours. A lot of web owners find their luck through sheer trial and error because even though you might receive some great tips from internet marketing gurus, not everything will work. Success can come by testing different techniques and strategies until you find the formula that is perfect for your business. So here are some tactics that just might work out for you:

Offer several products on your home page ? a lot of websites feature a single product on their websites; usually, this is their core product and their best-sellers. Focusing on one product may actually work but you might also want experiment by including several products on your main page with product descriptions and images. It is recommended for you to keep the products you display within a single product line to keep the visitor’s focus on your core business.

Hover Ads ? pop-ups used to be the “in” thing several years ago. That is, until internet users began to thoroughly dislike them and a lot of pop-up blockers appeared on the market. However, no one can deny that pop-ups were actually effective promotional tool for some time. I won’t be recommending the use of pop-ups though; instead, you might want to try out hover ads. They look like pop-ups but actually isn’t; a lot of marketers already enjoyed increased subscription and sales because of its use.

Reposition the opt-in box ? the position of your opt-in mailing list box is very important. You need to place this tool at a prominent space on your home page. It is recommended for you to put it somewhere on the top of your site if you haven’t done so already. It can lead to a substantial increase of subscribers which can translate into sales later on.

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Top Reasons Why Blogs Fail

Posted on 21. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

A lot of blogs are being established and abandoned every single day. It is an ongoing cycle of waste; wasted time, wasted money, and wasted energy. Whichever way you see it; resources will be wasted when the blog you invested on turned out to be a failure.

But why exactly do some blogs fail while some succeed? It is important for a blogger to understand why blogs fail because it will enable you to gain insights on what you need to do and what you strategies you should use set up a blog. So here are the top reasons why blogs fail:

Blog lacks a purpose ? blogs that don’t have a purpose will not have direction. If this is the case, the blogger will have no idea about which audience he should target and what information he should put into his blog. Even before you start your first blog post, you need to know the blog’s purpose. In addition, it is essential for you to determine which money making business model is right for your blog. For example, some blogs are advertising-supported, some focus on selling affiliate-products, and some are combinations of both.

Content is not original ? it is sad but true, there are a lot of blogs that makes use of content that has been written and rewritten over and over again. Some bloggers have attained success even with this flaw because they know how to effectively market their blog as “new”. But to establish yourself as an expert and enjoy long term income potential, finding your niche and blogging about it on a regular basis is the foundation for success.

Blogger don’t have patience ? a lot of bloggers don’t have the patience to write everyday when they don?t see revenues pouring in. It is important to remember that success in blogging takes time as your content builds up. So unless you are an established columnist who decided to set up a new blog, you need to be patient in generating traffic and retaining a loyal base of readers. However, there are also cases when your investment is worth more than the revenues coming in; so use your best judgment in determining whether a particular niche is worth pursuing or not.

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Guard Your Online Reputation

Posted on 18. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

All types of business need to factor in their online reputation as part of their overall marketing plan. Chances are, if you have an online presence, you have a virtual reputation as well. Your reputation traces its roots from the perceptions of your visitors, clients, and prospects. People usually judge your reputation based on your SERP, first impressions, and what other people say about your company.

Online companies that don’t guard their online reputation risk losing business to their competitors. On the worse case scenario though, these online companies may lose credibility when they are attacked by unscrupulous competitors, defamation, and even unsatisfied customers. Because of all these risks, it is important to guard your online reputation and fight back when necessary.

According to Chris Dellarocas from the University of Maryland, “Google is no longer jut a search engine; it is a reputation engine.” And from what is evident in internet marketing promotions today, this statement is certainly true. I mentioned in a previous post, 3 Online Monitoring Tools that Google Alerts is a great way to monitor certain keywords. It is important for a web owner to use this regularly to see results that are associated with your products and services. Meanwhile, Technorati another great resource because you can monitor your reputation in the blogosphere when you subscribe to certain search terms that are related to your online company.

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Reasons to Use Contact Forms

Posted on 17. Apr, 2008 by Dave.

Every web owner wants their site visitors to contact them when they have any questions or clarifications about the website. The easiest way is to put your e-mail address on your website. When visitors click on this address, the user’s e-mail program (usually Outlook) will instantly pop up to send an email. Anyone can conveniently send you an email through this. However, there are two disadvantages namely:

? Spam ? your email address will inevitably be seen by spambots which will result to a deluge of spam that you will inevitably have to deal with.

? Incomplete information ? even if you can control the subject line and even retrieve the sender’s email address, you usually won?t get enough information such as the sender’s phone number which enables you to give help immediately.

So what is a better alternative to providing your email on the website? A lot of web owners have realized the benefits of online forms. These forms provide better security and more relevant information from the sender. You can ask the sender for answer specific fields so you can get complete information from him. Some of the latest version of these contact forms gives you the necessary protection against spambots and hackers.

? Unseen configuration ? today, online forms can conceal personal information such as your email address. It also has a configuration structure that cannot be seen from the browser interface.

? Field Verification ? this prevents hackers from tying characters that provoke errors. Field verification should be accompanied by the program from the server instead of the program from the client (for example, using JavaScript on visitor’s browser).

? CAPTCHA ? this is the graphic challenge wherein the sender needs to verify that they are human. This forces people to look into each of the online forms they fill out; it succeeds in deterring hackers in most cases.

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