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REACHING YOUR CUSTOMERS
The Internet holds immense promise for e-tailers of various kinds. More and more consumers elect to take advantage of the convenience of shopping online. Consequently, businesses continue to mushroom across the Internet to meet the needs of the online consumers. To survive on the Internet playing field and run a successful reseller business online you must know how to reach and attract shoppers.
The first step in this process is to define the type of customers you wish to attract. You may wish to target a particular type of small-business owner with your reseller store, or you may want to take aim at individuals who wish to build and post personal Web sites in as few and quick steps as possible. Or you may decide to aim more broadly at anyone who needs an Internet domain or any of the other products you decide to offer at your store.
USING SEARCH ENGINES
Once you have defined your desired customer base, you will need to find a way to reach those customers. As the Internet is home to billions of Web pages few users come across particular pages by chance. Instead, the vast majority of Internet users rely on search engines when navigating the Web. Search engines – particularly Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves – combine to drive approximately 90 percent of Internet shoppers to their destinations. This means that as an Internet business owner, you must know how to use the search engines to your advantage.
Search engines offer two distinctly different means of displaying search results: Organic listings (i.e., the main results of any Internet search) and pay-per-click advertising. The former format relies on the search engines’ proprietary algorithms for deciding the relevance and thus the rankings of indexed content in relation to the search engine users’ search terms. The latter is an entirely bid-based concept in which the Web site owner (aka the “advertiser”) bids for the top ranking for a particular keyword. The highest-paying advertiser gains the top ranking (until outbid by another advertiser) and is charged the bid amount each time a search engine user clicks through the search engine’s link to access the site.
Organic search engine rankings are the most lasting of the two concepts – and often the type of search results Internet users trust the most. However, securing top ranking for competitive keywords and phrases is challenging and time consuming. But it can – and should – be done if you are serious about long-term success for your reseller business. Pay-perclick is a quicker fix, but can be a treacherous concept for advertisers who haven’t considered the potential cost and hatched a sensible strategy for their PPC campaigns.
COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
Once you have caught the interest of your customers, you need to make sure that you can offer them what they are seeking. For example: If a visitor to your site reached the site by searching for “cheap domains,” you must be sure to actually offer Internet domain registrations at a competitive price. Similarly, if you succeed in attracting customers with very specific hosting demands, it is imperative that you can offer them the complete range of shared, dedicated and virtual dedicated hosting solutions.
Another critical element in the building and maintenance of a successful e-business is customer care. Once you have developed and continue to expand your customer base you will need to ensure that the customers are happy with the service you are providing them with so that they will return to your store when purchasing new products and/or deciding whether or not to extend current subscriptions to your services. Express Email Marketing, which is included in your reseller package, allows you to communicate with your customers through e-mail based newsletters, announcements and attractive marketing campaigns.
Express Email Marketing is strictly permission-based, which means that you will only be sending your announcements, etc. to recipients who have agreed to be on your mailing list. This means that the recipients have expressed their interest in your business by opting in. With Express Email Marketing you can take advantage of this by informing your customers of special promotions, discounts, new products, etc. If you decide to compose a newsletter, Express Email Marketing lets you distribute that, too. Furthermore, the program allows you to survey customer interests and preferences and to monitor the responses to the campaigns you distribute.
With the right combination of product selection, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and Express Email Marketing you will be in a prime position to attract customers to your reseller business and to ensure that they keep coming back for more.
PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING
An alternative and/or supplement to the demanding, time-consuming search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to pay for a top search engine ranking for desired keyword(s). Your reseller account includes a credit for Google’s AdWords PPC program. Google, however, is just one of several providers of PPC services. The concept can be costly, but has proven invaluable to many e-commerce Web sites whose businesses have received sizable traffic boosts via PPC advertising. PPC may or may not suit your business (and your wallet). The following describes the concept in more detail.
THE PAY-PER-CLICK CONCEPTIn a PPC program advertisers (i.e., Web site/business owners) bid for the top ranking for a given keyword. The advertiser that places the highest bid is ensured the top ranking for that keyword – until he or she is outbid. The second-highest bidder will seize the number 2 ranking; the third-highest bid will claim the 3rd spot, etc.
Pay-per-click advertising is offered by a number of companies, including Google (AdWords), Yahoo! (formerly Overture), Kanoodle and MIVA (formerly eSpotting/FindWhat). Google AdWords results are displayed in the Google search engine, while Yahoo!’s PPC listings are displayed in the Yahoo! search engine. Microsoft recently launched its own paid advertising program that will feed the “Sponsored Sites” area of the MSN search engine.
PPC listings are displayed separately in search engines – usually labeled “Sponsored Results,” “Sponsored Listings” or something similar. When a search engine user clicks a sponsored (PPC) link, the advertiser is charged the amount he/she bid for the listing. The click-through fee to be paid by the advertiser largely will depend on the chosen PPC provider and the popularity of the keyword(s) on which you are bidding.
The obvious advantage of PPC advertising is that you do not have to worry about optimizing your Web site in order to be listed in the top search engines’ top results. If you are willing to pay for it – and perhaps even engage yourself in bidding wars with other advertisers – then PPC can be an enticing option. However, unlike organic search listings, which are free of charge – obtained through continual search engine optimizing – and lasting, PPC click listings disappear as soon as you stop paying for them. Many large-scale e-businesses rely on a combination of paid advertising and targeted SEO.
USING TRAFFIC BLAZER FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND SUBMISSIONBecause promoting a business online can be both time-consuming and challenging, your reseller account includes Traffic Blazer, an advanced search engine optimization and submission tool. Traffic Blazer allows you to zero in on the most opportune keywords for your site, build Meta tags, analyze the site and finally submit the site to a number of Internet search engines and directories. Traffic Blazer even includes advanced tracking tools that enable you to verify that your site has been indexed by the major search engines and check its ranking for applicable keywords. Additionally, Traffic Blazer includes a comprehensive tutorial on search engines and search engine optimization, which will help you understand the dynamics of the Internet’s search engines. Traffic Blazer is a convenient tool that will help you get your site optimized and submitted in a few, easy steps. Note that many search engine optimization actions cannot be performed on our pre-built reseller storefronts. In order to optimize your reseller Web site, you must build your own storefront Web site. Included in your reseller package is a WebSite Tonight One-Page Web site credit. You can use this credit to build a customized one-page reseller site for your business. You will then be able to analyze, optimize and submit the custom site to the Internet’s search engines. USING E-MAIL CAMPAIGNSAs an Internet business owner you will need to cater to your customers’ needs. One way of doing so is to keep in touch with them to ensure that they know that you care about them. Express Email Marketing, a versatile and easy-to-use e-mail marketing tool, is included with your reseller account. Express Email Marketing gives you the power to reach out to your customers through e-mail announcements, product promotions, newsletters, etc. In addition, you can use the program to create and perform surveys of your customers’ preferences and level of satisfaction with your services. Staying in touch with your customers not only ensures that they are aware of any promotions you may be running or new products you are adding to your portfolio, it also means that those customers are more likely to think about you next time they plan to purchase a type of product that is offered in your store. Building a solid customer base gives you a significant edge in the competitive e-business world. Communicating with and caring for your customers allows you to maintain that edge. Express Email Marketing includes a wide selection of professionallydesigned templates that allow you to build dazzling, eye-catching campaigns for your customers. And the featured reporting tools allow you to keep an eye on how the recipients respond to your campaigns. Because electronic bulk mail – i.e., spam – is a persistent pest for many Internet users, Express Email Marketing is carefully built to comply with stringent anti-spamming standards thus ensuring that your e-mail campaigns will not be mistaken for spam once they reach your customers’ inboxes. In essence, Express Email Marketing only allows you to distribute your campaigns to recipients who expressly opt to be featured on your mailing list. All outgoing messages will include the recipient’s opt-in date and the option of discontinuing further messaging by opting out. |