Coaching For Success
Posts tagged internet business
Five Trends That Every Business Should Follow in 2011
Jan 20th
Today we start by looking at looking at 5 internet business trends that are set to have particular significance in the upcoming year.
1. Security
Security is an everyday concern, and 2011 will be no different. This year, it’s predicted that mobile will be a major target, thanks to its startling growth coupled with the inherent fragility of cellular infrastructure and the slowness in implementing encryption strategies.
These threats should be taken very seriously and measures implemented to combat them as soon as possible, making sure users realise they and their security are your number one priority.
2. Mobile
2010 was undoubtedly the Year Of The Mobile Device with users increasingly turning to their mobile phones for their online activities. And the move to mobile will only increase during 2011, so setting up a mobile presence is vital for any online business, no matter how small that may be, be it just having a mobile version of your site, a mobile app or simply advertising.
3. Digital Couponing
Groupon is one of the fastest growing sites on the internet, but offering online coupons isn’t limited to Groupon, with local newspapers and radio stations getting in on the action and small web sites partnering with local businesses to offer deals.
Of course, offering coupons doesn’t mean you need to give everything away; use them as an up-sell tool or as an incentive for spending a specified amount.
Whatever the strategy you use, coupons should be a part of your marketing mix going forward.
4. Search Remains Universal
While not grabbing the headlines like mobile, search remains a massively important feature at all levels, from Google to site-specific search. It’s important for every web site to provide a search option – look at Twitter and Facebook and see how even they provide a search bar. If it’s important to them, it needs to be important to you, so optimise for various keywords and phrases and make sure you’re in the search game.
5. Expanding Business Models
These days, it’s all about diversifying, and the same applies to online business. Look beyond your current offerings to see what kind of different yet complimentary products or services you can offer your customers to add value to their experience with your site.
These are the major trends you should look to incorporate into your internet business.
For help with any of these initiatives, a UK internet business coach can supply all the expertise you need.
A Winning Formula For Collecting Customer Intelligence
Jan 17th
The recent downturn in the economy has wreaked havoc in every sector of life, including Internet businesses, which, even if not as badly effected as other sectors of the economy, still haven’t been spared the rod.
This means that consumers have less to spend and are being much more careful about where they spend it, which, in turn, means that business owners need to be much more aware of the internet marketing needs and preferences of the consumer in order to be able to connect with them in a meaningful and productive way.
Web Sites Need To Become A Customer Intelligence Tool
In order to connect with customers, it’s now necessary for internet businesses to gather as much internet marketing information as possible about them, their attitudes, their preferences, interests, etc., in order to be able to target their offerings to them and turn them from potential to actual customers.
This can be achieved by turning your web site into a customer intelligence-gathering tool by applying the following phases:
- Keeping your web site and its content fresh to encourage return visits
– Personalising your site so that visitors feel that it’s all about them and what you can offer them
– Tracking how visitors interact with your site and what works and doesn’t work, how visitors reached your site, which content they browsed, where they exited etc.
Utilising this approach will give you the insights you need to make your visitors’ online experience meaningful and develop customer loyalty.
Four Steps To Gathering Customer Intelligence
Here’s a four-step approach you can utilise to gather the customer information you need to help make the internet marketing of your site as attractive and appealing as possible.
1. Feel Their Pain
People visit a web site to fulfil a need or to fix a problem, so being able to identify that “pain point” and offer a solution will keep your visitors happy and coming back for more.
2. Make Sure Your Site’s Ready To Engage Visitors
Visitors to your site are probably already very knowledgeable about the products and services you’re offering, so you need to stay several steps ahead of them and set yourself up as an authority figure. If a visitor looks at the price of an item on your site, that’s a good sign they’re thinking of buying and your site should be ready to allow them to do just that.
3. Check Visitors’ Readiness To Buy
By assigning a score or weight to each piece of content on your web site, you can determine what your visitors care about and even what stage they’re at in the purchasing process. Which pages your visitors browse and which images they click on helps build a profile of your customer and their intent – or otherwise – to buy.
4. Gather Data And Track What Works
The way visitors interact with your web site can give you some invaluable data about their attitudes and behaviours that should be compiled in your database. This data, combined with offline customer data and interactions, can be used to measure successful outcomes, which can then be repeated to improve the customer experience.
Accumulating and utilising data about your web site visitors’ behaviours and attitudes throughout their interactions with your company can help you refine and improve your marketing efforts for both your Internet business and your offline endeavours, and thus improve the overall customer experience and your relationships with your customers.
An Internet marketing service can provide the expertise you need to turn your web site into a customer intelligence tool and take your Internet business success to the next level.
Getting Your Internet Business On To Bloggers’ “Blogrolls”
Jan 14th
Doing good Internet Business and being highly visible is not easy, many good Internet businesses struggle as a result of low or no visibility online. As a consequence they struggle to get customers and eventually have to look at alternatives, however this does not need to be the case as if you can get a link from another blog owners site in their blogroll which has relevant content to your own it could potentially bring in new customers to your online business.
A blogroll is a list of blogs that bloggers use indicating to their sites visitors their favorite blogs. These lists of links point to other blogs on the web. You will notice the blogrolls on the sidebar of many bloggers page. Many bloggers will list blogs that are relational in content to their own blog or choose these blogs just because they simply like them. A blogroll is based on the blog site owner’s own taste and choice. In addition blogrolling is a great way to appeal to your target audience via another person’s site.
If you can get another blogger to link to your Internet business blog then you have a flow of additional traffic from their site to yours. It is customary in these cases for you to link their blog as well. It may have seem the obvious thing to do but that does not mean that you have to do it if you feel that the content, character or type of site would be detrimental to your site or your visits. So it is always good to check where possible the type of site linking to yours not just for reputation but also for your optimization efforts not to be hindered. If you do decide not to link back do not worry it is not uncommon in fact protecting your reputation is very natural and doing this is not against any blogging ethics. However, if you like someone’s blog and it is linking to you, then it is a normal courtesy to link back.
To get your Internet business onto someone else’s blog requires effort, sometime you may need to get the attention of other bloggers you can do this by providing valuable comments on their blogs which is a great way to get their attention. Try to encourage them to visit your blog and do the same to you. You can also send an email to introduce yourself to them.
Blogrolls has a lot of benefits besides just linking back to other blogs. One thing you should always remember is that every time someone links to your blog you will get a backlink, which in turn improves your search engine ranking and also traffic flowing to your site. The downside of this for your internet business is that if your site has not got staying power then you will lose many visitors to your site possibly permanently to your blogroll buddies as these can be used as an escape route for your visitors also.
Blogrolling can work for your Internet business as a value added service for your blog site. You may have visitors that come to your blog, in gaining just one or two new visitors from someone else’s blogroll each week you could potentially find new customers for your internet business products or services. This is how the blogging community works at the end of the day you may lose a visitor or customer or two or you may gain some but many Internet business owners find the risks worth taking.
Why An Internet Business Coach Is Vital To Your Business Success
Jan 12th
The Internet is great way to promote your business if you know what to do and how to do. It can work like your best friend. On the other hand, if you do not know how to make your business visible on the Internet then it can be your worst enemy. If you do not know what to do on the Internet you may be throwing your hard earned money away. This is why you need a good Internet business coach to mentor you so your Internet business can flourish.
Lots of efforts and dedication is needed for online lead generation and it is far less expensive to do online in comparison to traditional methods. But like all else time, money and effort is wasted if you are unsure of what you are doing, it is common sense to employ someone with the right skills to do this for you or to get mentoring to learn how to do it yourself. A good SEO consultant can help with this but a great Internet business coach can mentor you on what you really need and how to do it cost effectively so that it is working for you.
Before you can start promoting your Internet business, you need to have a clear idea about your target audience. Try to figure out which promotional messages or which promotional media you should use for your business. If you can put your product or services’ value across to your target audience in a meaningful way, then it is possible that this will help promote your services and get you end sales which is why you are in business.
Once you are done with your promotions now it is time to monitor your efforts. Doing this you will be able to find out whether giving all the effort in promoting your business is really helping or not. Monitoring will allow you to compare your business to find out whether your new promotional scheme is really working or not again a good Internet business coach can help provide you with a service to do it for you or mentor you to do it yourself.
Promoting your Internet business online does not need to be hard work if you are wise you will use the services of an Internet business coach to mentor you to success.
Free Marketing And Search Engine Optimisation Tools
Dec 29th
In Internet business we try our best to ensure that our sites and the tools we use to ensure they get in front of customers can do the job. Many Search Engine Optimisation tools can be quite expensive so we have put together a list of SEO tools to help you do the same job for free.
1. Search Combination Tool
This Search Engine Optimisation tool will generate lots of different combinations of two separate lists of keywords. This can help your internet business finding new ways of promoting your website and reach your audience by allowing you to broaden the keywords you use to reach them. This SEO tool can be used to change and optimising title tags, URL, and the internal structure of the binding.
2. Header Checker Tool
The Header Check tool can be used to check the labels of any web page header. Use this tool to check any web page’s header tags, this helps you ensure your pages are returning the correct status codes and that your redirects are working properly, as incorrect redirects can cause indexing and ranking problems.
3. Keyword Density Analysis Tool
This tool allows a healthy balance of keywords to ensure your content is well balanced on page. When you enter the URL of your internet business site it shows you the keyword density of each sentence on the page.
4. Spider Viewer
See your site like the spider sees it. This view links to important information about your location. It allows you toevaluate the internal links, metadata and page content.
5. Google Webmaster Tools
This can be used to make sure that there are no errors which may be preventing search engines from indexing the content of your website. It also shows top search queries.
6. Google Local Business Centre
SEO Tools 1
Sometimes when we look for local businesses Google shows a small map. This adjacent map is the links to local businesses which matched the description people searched for. It is important to an Search Engine Optimisation efforts you make that you are listed locally.
7. Wordtracker Labs Keyword Questions
The majority of people online are seeking information and to that end will often type questions into search engines. This new tool will allow you to find these questions, answer them and get some great search traffic. If your business uses it to target long tail keywords and to provide content that readers want to read and link to then your SEO and traffic it generates to your internet business should go through the roof.
8. Facebook
Google has started indexing Facebook fan pages. As a result many people are looking towards Facebook to increase their Search Engine Optimisation rankings.
9. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
This free tool is dedicated to those marketers who are looking for the best keywords for their Google AdWords business. It can give you a sense of how often people use a particular keyword, or variations of it, in Google searches, and how competitive a keyword might be to rank highly for it in Google search queries. It can give you an idea of how people often look for a particular keyword or variants. This Google tool can also suggest keywords related to existing Web pages. It should really be the first tool you use when you start brainstorming keywords or new content for your website.
10. Google Insights for Search
Google AdWords Keyword Tool displays you the volume of searches conducted using different keywords for your site where as Google Insights for Search tells you about the trends of keywords research.
All of these free Search Engine Optimisation tools are out there to help your internet business to become more visible online and generate more traffic. Go search them out now and use them.
