Which search engine do you use? Which search engine do most of your customers use? Which search engine is the best place to advertise on to drive sales? Well, compete.com has done a little research for you and hands down they say Google generates the most traffic. From the graph below you can see that Google has almost 3.2 times the market share that Yahoo goes. Google has more market share than all the other search engines combined.
If Google has the most traffic, that means that they have the most eyeballs looking at your site and your ads. If you’re going to spend your money on only one search engine, Google is definitely the way to go.
The bigger question is, why does Google have so much market share? As an SEO vendor, I can tell you that Yahoo is really hard to get your site listed on. If your site is for a business, Yahoo expects you to pay for the privilege of getting into the Yahoo Directory for ranking. If they decide not to rank your site, they still get the money. Sometimes I think exclusiveness is not the way to go. Wouldn’t it be better to let businesses freely into the marketplace? The truth is that the consumers will determine what is important and what is not.
You may or may not know, but at TriCalyx, we all work virtually from our home offices. Having worked in an office environment for several years, I’m glad that I adjusted so quickly to working within my home office environment.
Alas, my cat, Jade, has also adjusted to this change and it’s quite educational. Jade is one of those cats that never really wanted to have anything to do with you. She didn’t come visit you often and when she did, it was because she needed to be fed. Now that I’m working at home I get to spend a lot more time with her. Several times a day, I was able to give her attention as I move around the house during the day. A funny thing happened once she was getting more attention; she is now by my side often, purring, sleeps near me during the day and cuddles up with me in the evenings. This is NOT the same cat that she was before!
What does this have to do with business optimization, you ask? What do you think would happen if you started to give a little more care and attention to your best customers? Like Jade, the customers that get more attention, will give you and your business more attention. If they feel great when they interact with you, they will want to interact with you more. If they can count on you being there consistently and providing them god quality service, these customers will come back - often!
Just like Jade, these customers will show you that you’re important to them and that they value what you provide them.
Looking back it’s amazing my family survived my childhood, I was one of “those children” that told my parents they got the wrong baby at the hospital, because I was supposed to be a princess. Now you are wondering how is the Online Optimist going to relate this to growing my web business?? Well last week I was working with my client Kazoo Toys on keyword density within their product pages to improve their search rankings, and what product came up but the Musical Princess Skirt by Acting Out. This company was started by Mom’s that saw a need or void in the market. Who could know the needs of children better than their parents. My long winded point is that knowing your market and who you are selling to is the first step in growing or starting any business.
Lately I’ve started wondering if AA will accept Google Adwords Addicts? One of my clients, Kazootoys.com has over 5000 toys they sell, so you can imagine how many keywords we track and manage for them! Morning, noon and night, I find myself checking the statistics to see if I’ve improved my “click thru rate” or if my “conversion rate” has inched up with the new changes I’ve made, or even more important, what my daily sales are! I can’t decide if it’s my analytical or competitive nature or a combo of the two, but I absolutely love reviewing all the stats and testing new theories on what changes to try next. It’s a little like poker, get rid of your loser hands and when you get a hot one, ride it all the way. They real key I’ve found to getting good returns on your Pay Per Click Ads, is to watch the numbers, if you get lots of impressions and very few clicks, you need to either change the ad copy, or delete the keyword. It’s the same for conversions, if you get lots of click thru’s, but few conversions, you need to make some changes or delete the keyword!
It takes more than some hammers and nails to build a reputable, long-lasting brand. We don’t call it a “tissue”; we call it a “Kleenex”. We don’t call it a “soda pop”; we say let’s get a “Coke”. How do the most well-known brands do it? They give customers products that they want, they make their products attractive, they bring consistency to their service to the customer. They entertain and touch our hearts year after year.
Consider your brand. What are you doing to set yourself apart from everyone else? How are you special or different? How do you provide a better service to your customers? What will bring them coming back year after year?
Google Checkout is gaining among e-commerce Web sites, but the largest retailers remain wary because they fear sharing data with Google, according to a survey by Cowen & Co.
This article about Google Checkout, which came to me by way of Digg.com, speaks to the intense competition there is out there in the e-commerce vendor market. Everyone seems to be getting into the game, but each of these vendors still provide vastly different features for their application. Be wary of marketing and sales influence when selecting an e-commerce vendor. Instead select them on whether they will provide you the features that you need at a reasonable price. Will they help you grow your business, and will these keep your customer data safe?
read more | digg story
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I don’t have time to design it, we just need to build it!” from customers. The go-go-go mentality associated with technology development can be hazardous to the health of all businesses.
If developers are rushed into developing a project before they know what it is they are building, they run a very serious risk of developing code that will soon be thrown away. Leaving business decisions to the developer will likely result in features having to be tweated and modified soon after development is completed.
With a little bit of guidance and pre-planning you can provide your developer a clear plan for what you want implemented. If almost all decisions on the design are thought out ahead of time, the developer can implement quickly and produce quality, long-lasting code.
Agile Development does not mean “do not plan, just build”. Agile Development means that you document just enough of the application to give they developer clear direction on the current task. Then while the developer is developing that task, you (as the application designer) are documenting the next task.
Don’t rush yourself so fast that you build an application that has to be rebuilt within only a few months. Do it right the first time.
When blogging first started up, I thought who really cares! I couldn’t have been more wrong! Blogging is hot and here’s why. Blogging with the help of RSS feeds has allowed specialists, and the not so specialists in every topic imaginable to get their knowledge, opinions and thoughts syndicated to people that are interested. It’s become a very viral way of distributing information, people who have similar interests pass along posts from a blog to friends and colleges. Bloggers put links in their blogs to other blogs they like to peruse, books they read, music and restaurants they enjoy, events and places they visit and in turn little virtual communities are built.
What are some of the advantages for me to blog, you say? A blog on your website, and only if it’s done well, can help improve your search engine rankings, bring you leads and can help people better understand the value your service can bring to them. Worst case they might get a good laugh now and then!
So go start a blog today!
Lee
Create a website and they will come!
Okay, well this really isn’t true, is it? First we need to let visitors know we exist through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Second, we need to keep the visitor on our site once they get there.
We know you are tracking your traffic as we’ve talked about that before, within your analytics report, your Bounce Rate will tell you what percentage of users leave your site after viewing the first page. These are the people you what to try and retain. It’s very common to have bounce rates higher than 50%. Your goal is to lower this percentage by providing meaningful content on every page.
Your analytics report will likely also tell you the average page views per visitor. This will tell you how many pages the average user goes to on your site before they leave. It’s very common to have this be less than 1 page per visitor. Your goal is to raise this percentage by providing links within your page content to draw your user further into your site to learn more.
Before you decide you want to keep all your profit margin to yourself, consider the value of a good Affiliate Marketing program. Eyes on the internet go to many different websites. You cannot guarantee that a visitor will land on your site when they want to buy a product like yours. It is much more likely that this visitor will never find your site, and thus never buy your product.
An Affiliate will highlight your product on their site. If a visitor comes to their site and is interested in your product, they will be able to link through to your site to buy. The catch here is that the Affiliate will want a percentage of your profit margin on that sale.
Are you giving away the farm here? No. you can offer your Affiliates a small enough percentage of the profit to keep them happy and you in business. Consider this sale one that you would never have received otherwise. Is it better to get a new sale with a little less profit? Or to get no sale at all? What if that Affiliate ends up sending you 1000s of sales?? How cool would that be?
