WEEK 27
EXPLORE MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES ON THE INTERNET
If you are not marketing on the Internet, you are missing out on a huge slice of the retail pie. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau E-Stats report, eCommerce in the retail sector accounted for over $100 billion in annual sales. And this does not account for the millions of customers who shop online but purchase offline. More and more people do their preliminary research on the Web before they ever get serious about buying anything, especially big-ticket items, including homes, cars, boats, computers, entertainment centers, and just about everything else you can imagine.
In addition, people are constantly searching for tips and tricks on how to get the most out of what they purchased, how to repair or maintain equipment, where to go for a great vacation, where to live, and much, much more. The people who provide the information that is in high demand often have an inside track to a particular market.
By establishing a presence on the Internet and building a reputation as the go-to guy or gal for information related to your industry and the products and services you sell, you position yourself to become the salesperson of choice when a prospect is in the market for what you sell. In the following sections, I discuss various ways to increase your presence on the Internet.
BUILD YOUR OWN WEB SITE
You should have at least one web site you call home. This web site should provide an online version of your marketing packet, including a photo of you (on the front page), your contact information, information about you and what you do and what you sell, information about your company, and perhaps a link to research or purchase the products and services you sell. I have several web sites, including
AboutRalph.com, where interested parties can meet me and find out what I have to offer;
RalphRoberts.com, where home buyers or sellers can find out about Ralph Roberts Realty; and
FlippingFrenzy.com, which is really a blog designed to educate consumers and professionals about the problems associated with real estate and mortgage fraud. (For more about blogs, see Week 37.)
Register Your Own Domain
A domain is a specific place on the Internet, for example,
foreclosureselfdefense.com. While some companies, including Yahoo! allow you to set up a free personal web site, they usually require that you include their domain as part of your domain name—for example,
yourname.yahoo.com. By registering your own domain, you have a unique address of your very own where your clients can always find you.
Choose a domain name that people can remember easily and preferably one that reflects your name, such as
RalphRoberts.com. (You can have several domain names that all point to the same web site, so you may want to register any domain names that are similar to your name.)
You can easily check domain name availability (for free) and register domain names online (for about $10 per domain name per year, assuming the domain name is not already registered). Visit online Web hosting services such as
GoDaddy.com,
Bluehost.com, and
Register.com for more information about domain names and hosting services.
Subscribe to a Reliable Web Hosting Service
A Web hosting service stores your web site on a server that provides visitors with access to your site. Hosting costs vary, but most services charge less than $100 for a full year of service that includes several e-mail accounts, web site management tools, and a host of other tools to build and manage your web sites and blogs. You can manage several domains through a single account, so the cost of adding an additional domain later is only $10 a year (or whatever the service charges for domain registration). You do not need to set up a separate account for each domain.
Tip: Most Web hosting services partner with professional web site design companies and can recommend a professional designer. If you go with a pro, you can expect to pay about $5,000 for the initial web site design and setup.
Plan Carefully
You can probably slap together a decent looking web site in an hour or two, but you can avoid a great deal of frustration and rework by setting it up properly the first time. I strongly recommend that you use a content management system (CMS), such as WebYep (
www.obdev.at/products/webyep). A typical CMS provides a collection of tools that enable you to create and edit Web pages online (inside your browser window) that you can later simply pull up in your browser and edit just as if you were editing a document in a word processor or desktop publishing program.
If you do not create your web site using a CMS, trying to add a CMS later can be a nightmare. The more planning you do up front, the less fiddling you will need to do later, and the easier it will be to modify the web site, if necessary.
BUILD COMMUNITIES THROUGH BLOGGING
Blogs (short for Web logs) give you the opportunity to quickly and easily post messages to the Web. A blog usually has one or more templates you can choose from (or customize) that control the appearance and function of everything on your blog. You simply choose the desired template.
Posting content to your blog is simply a matter of typing the information into a form. You type a title for your post and then the desired contents and then click a button (usually the Publish button). The article is then posted to your blog where visitors can read and comment on it. You’ll learn more about blogs in Week 37. For now, realize that blogs are powerful but relatively simple tools for building communities, gaining visibility with search engines (such as Google), and marketing yourself as an expert in your industry.
DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEB SITES AND BLOGS
Soon after you have a web site to market yourself and your business, you need to start promoting it. Once people begin to visit your site and talk about it, word-of-mouth advertising will drive traffic to your site, but people have to know about your site first.
Set a goal of getting a million people to your web site. While that may seem unrealistic, I prefer that you set your goal a little on the high side. Then, create a list of the various ways you can get that many people to visit your site, such as:
• Post valuable content. Content is king. People will not return to your site if it does not offer something fresh and valuable.
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Add Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a nifty tool that enables you to track traffic coming into and moving through your site. You can see where visitors are coming from, which pages they’re pulling up most frequently, the percentage of new and returning visitors, and much more. This helps you find out which content is popular and which is not, so you can provide people more of what they’re looking for. For additional details, visit
www.google.com/analytics.
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Register with niche directories. Page rankings are often determined by the number of “important” web sites in your web site’s category that link to your site. By registering your site with industry-related directories, you can boost your page rank, so that when people use Google and other search engines to search for industry-related terms, your page is more likely to pop up higher on the list. For a great list of niche directories, visit Incoming Links at
www.incominglinks.com.
• Post messages in industry-related discussion forums or blogs. By contributing to community discussions, you automatically increase your credibility. If the forum (or blog) allows members to include their web site or blog address in posts, this gives you another way of linking to your site from another site and increasing your search engine page rank.
• Write articles and reviews for other web sites. Offer to write articles and reviews for industry-related online publications. Most online publishers allow you to add a brief bio at the end of the article complete with a link back to your site.
ADD A SIGNATURE FILE TO YOUR E-MAIL MESSAGES
Every e-mail program enables you to have a signature automatically added to the end of every outgoing e-mail message. Use your e-mail program’s signature option (in Outlook Express, choose Tools, Options, Signatures) to add a signature file including your name, contact information, and links to your web sites and blogs. If you e-mail me with a request at RalphRoberts@RalphRoberts.com, I will send you an e-mail that includes the signature file I use.
In addition to promoting your web sites and blogs, your signature file provides the recipient with instant contact information, including your phone number. While I am on the road, I often check e-mail messages with my BlackBerry. When I receive a message that contains a signature file, I can see the person’s phone number and quickly call them without having to search for their phone number or call back to the office to get the phone number if I do not have it with me. By adding a signature file to outgoing e-mail messages, you make it easy for the recipient to get back in touch with you.
Ralph’s Rule: Don’t whine about the fact that the Internet is destroying your traditional way of doing business. That won’t change the fact. Embrace the change and figure out how to put the Internet to work for you.