Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and Web Design Articles: Internet Marketing Articles by Web Profits

Nov

5

Is E-Commerce Truly Recession Proof?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in E-Commerce

The current economic climate is very troubling for almost everyone. If you are working for someone else you will be concerned about your job security and about the likelihood of having no wage rises for the foreseeable future. And if you are working for yourself you will no doubt be spending more time than ever trying to figure out how to cut costs wherever you can and attract more customers to keep your business healthy – even if that means reducing prices to a certain degree.

We’ve often been told that internet marketing businesses are safer from such economic woes than standard brick-and-mortar ones. And there are certainly more and more cases of local businesses – and even well known names – shutting down because they are no longer able to trade profitably.

But during all this upheaval are internet based businesses really untouchable? Can they really ride out any kind of recession with no issues or problems at all? After all it seems hard to believe that when other businesses are falling left, right and centre, e-commerce companies are staying exactly as they were before.

In truth there will be e-commerce businesses that fall by the wayside during this time, but they tend not to be noticed quite as much as more traditional businesses are. You would certainly spot the difference if a shop you walked past every day suddenly closed down, and yet unless you bought stock from a website continually you probably wouldn’t notice if it went the same way.

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Oct

29

Do You Back Up Regularly?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Web Design

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Okay now be honest. Do you have copies of all your work – and do you update them regularly? What would happen now if you suddenly lost all your work, your computer crashed irretrievably or your laptop was stolen?

If you have a website or do most of your work on computer then you owe it to yourself to keep back ups of all the data you have. Even though your hosting provider may be completely secure and your website is in no danger at all of crashing or being lost, we all know that things do happen and if you don’t have back ups of anything then you run the risk of losing everything – and by that I mean your whole business.

And it’s not just a question of security either. It’s practical to keep a back up of everything because you never know when you may need it. Let’s suppose you have ten categories of goods on your website, and each category has twenty products in it. If you needed that information for web marketing to enable you to put your products on eBay as well as on your own site, it’s a lot easier to have a word document to work from that you can edit and tweak as you need to, than to copy the content from your website and use that. No matter what your website design is like, you’ll find this a tricky and frustrating option to go for – and all for saving some space on your hard drive.

The best bet is to keep more than one copy and keep them in separate places. If you have a safe, make a copy of everything and put it in there. It might sound like overkill but if you ever need it you will be glad it’s there.

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Oct

22

Can A Business Survive Without Broadband?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Internet Marketing

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When it comes to getting online, you have two choices. You can either go for dial-up, which uses a phone line to get online and therefore ties up that phone line whenever you are on the internet, or you can opt for broadband, which is permanently on, permanently available, and often one hundred times faster than dial-up.

This simple but very distinct difference between the two options almost answers the question posed in the title without any further thought at all. If you are serious about running a proper business – even if that business is based at home – then you really must have broadband to get the best from your business. If you don’t have it you will soon become frustrated at the limitations that dial-up gives you.

When we hear about how various people set up their businesses online and delve into the various aspects of website marketing and how to provide the best service to their customers, you will never hear too much about what service they use to go online with themselves. But you can almost guarantee that they will be using broadband.

The only situation in which the owner of an online business might just get away with using dial-up is if their website runs virtually on autopilot, and the only thing they need to do is to hop online occasionally to see what is going on and to check their stats.

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Oct

15

Are Your Postage Charges Putting Off Customers?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in E-Commerce

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How many times have you visited a website, seen something that you liked for a few dollars, popped it into your basket… and then discovered that the postage charge effectively doubles the price of the item you want?

This isn’t uncommon online and while postage charges often benefit those who are ordering multiple items from the same website they do tend to sting people who are only looking to buy one thing. That’s why it pays to keep an eye on what you are charging your own customers to buy items from you, because if you get the balance wrong you could end up sending people elsewhere to buy what they want.

Of course it isn’t always as simple as that. While your website marketing may benefit from promoting low postage costs you need to ensure that you won’t lose money by offering rock bottom postage prices. Some companies offer free carriage on everything you buy, but they are few and far between and they tend to be huge in nature – not a small business that is selling perhaps fifty or sixty items a week or less.

The idea of course is that by offering low or free postage you will attract more people to buy from you, but if you aren’t getting the footfall to your website in the first place it could effectively wipe out all your profits in one fell swoop. Think about the type of goods you sell as well; if you are selling temporary tattoos then your postage costs will always be very low, since they will all go in standard envelopes or small postal bags that don’t cost much to mail out. And bigger orders will bring in more profit to cover the slightly higher mailing costs.

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Oct

8

Are Offline Business Directories Still Worth Advertising In?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Internet Marketing

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Business directories can be a worthwhile place to promote any business, because a lot of people still rely on them to find a local business which appeals to their needs. But are offline directories still worth the effort it takes to get your details included in them?

There is no doubt that website promotion in any form is a good thing, since it will always bring businesses into contact with people who may not have been previously aware of them. But in these internet fuelled times many businesses that exist purely online and do not have an offline store at all don’t tend to think beyond the internet very often when it comes to finding new customers.

They might use pay per click advertising on a regular basis to attract new customers but the thought of checking out forms of advertising and promotion which do not involve the internet at all may not even enter their heads.

But should they really be forgotten completely? It is true to say that the vast majority of business directories that are created in book format for distributing door to door don’t contain that many internet based businesses in them – if any at all. You would certainly be hard pushed to find them on every page.

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Sep

26

The Value Of Asking Your Customers To Fill In Surveys And Questionnaires

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Online Surveys

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If you take a look around the internet you will notice that some websites have surveys or questionnaires for their visitors to fill in and submit to them. The other thing you will notice is these websites are far outweighed by the ones that don’t bother to do this.

That’s a shame, because when it comes to web marketing any ethical advantage you can get over your competition is a good one, and you can glean a lot of knowledge and information from a single, well designed survey.

In this sense it doesn’t matter whether a website is brand new or it has been around for many years: there are always improvements that can be made and the more you know and understand your audience – the very people who are visiting your site – the better you will be able to serve them.

Webmasters use surveys and questionnaires for lots of different reasons. Sometimes they may simply ask people what they think of their site and invite comments and suggestions for the future. In fact, a simple question like this could be permanently integrated into the design of a site – either by requesting answers and opinions by email or by having an interactive multiple choice box on the site which automatically updates with the results so far whenever someone makes their choice.

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Sep

12

The Popularity Of Blogs As A Selling Tool

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Blogging

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Blogging used to be seen as a social tool. It was a way of telling the world how you felt about things that mattered to you – and in a way that has never changed, even though many business owners have now cottoned on to the fact that blogging is a great way to attract new customers and visitors to their website.

The concept of blogging has clearly changed somewhat over the years, and while there are still people out there blogging about what matters to them, the format is now regularly bringing in fresh sales and new business to people who are players in the internet marketing field.

So why are blogs so popular in this way?

One of the main reasons is that online businesses have a tendency to be ‘faceless’. You cannot see the person or people behind that business and it can be all too easy to set up a bogus business that looks good on the outside but consists of nothing more than a way to fleece ordinary people of their cash.

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Aug

29

The Importance Of Getting A Balance Between Traditional And Online Advertising

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Online Marketing

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In these high tech days where it seems like virtually everyone has an internet connection, it’s easy to see why so many webmasters are constantly talking about the best ways to advertise their website online. There’s online classifieds, traffic exchanges, banners and buttons, and plenty more besides.

But in the furore over the importance of online marketing, it is sometimes easy to forget that we all used to advertise offline back in the good old days when the internet simply didn’t exist.

It’s easy to assume that everyone has access to a computer and the internet and so can find your website easily enough online, but of course different people use their computers for different reasons. Some people are still naturally wary of shopping online, and some don’t surf the net anywhere near as often as others. What this means is that any online businesses that are solely concentrating on advertising online are likely to miss out on a potentially huge audience that just doesn’t use the internet as often as other people do.

This is where we need to find a balance. If we are concentrating too heavily on one form of advertising to the detriment of another, then we aren’t going to be reaching the widest possible audience for our wares. Even if we set out with good intentions they can easily go astray somewhere along the line, when we spot a particularly good advertising deal online or get involved with the important process of creating plenty of quality backlinks to our websites.

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Aug

15

Do Internet Business Owners Still Have Firm Working Hours They Stick To?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Blogging

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One of the joys of finally being able to give up your day job and devote yourself to your online business full time is being to arrange your day as you see fit. If you never liked getting up at 7am or earlier to head out and go shoulder to shoulder (or bumper to bumper) with everyone else, then having your own internet business can be the perfect alternative.

But working from home comes with its own set of challenges. People find that not only do they have to constantly think about web promotion issues to make sure their business develops and is seen by plenty of other people, they also have to make sure they put the required hours in to keep the money rolling in.

There tends to be two main groups of people that are identifiable when we look at anyone who has started their own internet marketing business. Some people are so delighted at finally being able to work from home that they don’t actually put the hours in at all. Temptation is all around them with household jobs to be done and all kinds of interruptions on top. The second group goes completely in the opposite direction – they are so delighted to be working on what they want to do that they rarely give themselves any time off.

While some people do try to stick to regular hours it is clearly not always possible to do so when you are the boss. If an urgent job comes in or there is something that needs doing before you finish for the day then it is up to you to get it done. It might not always be what you want to do but the days when you could leave work anyway and pass it on to someone else are over when you are responsible for your own business. It’s clear that finding smarter ways to work is crucial if you are one of those people who are likely to work all hours if you aren’t held in check.

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Aug

5

Will The Threat Of A Recession Damage Internet Businesses?

posted by Alex Cleanthous in Internet Marketing

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If you read the paper or visit internet news sites with any regularity you will know that the word ‘recession’ is appearing more and more in a number of different places. The impact of that word is sometimes reduced slightly by the addition of the word ‘possible’ in front of it, although at other times you’ll see the word ‘global’ instead.

While everything seems to emanate doom and gloom at the moment, what impact would a recession have on internet businesses? Moreover, are they already feeling the impact or are they more protected than the traditional bricks and mortar businesses?

There is no doubt that consumer spending is slowing down in some countries. Worry over interest rates, the economy and the rate of inflation are partly to blame for this. Everyone is understandably being more cautious. It seems harder to make a sale at the moment, but not all internet businesses are suffering.

If a full blown recession did hit, then there is no doubt that sales online would suffer just as those in the shopping malls would. But the degree of suffering is likely to be mixed, depending on which businesses you are looking at.

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Internet Marketing Articles by Web Profits

Is E-Commerce Truly Recession Proof?

Do You Back Up Regularly?

Can A Business Survive Without Broadband?

Are Your Postage Charges Putting Off Customers?

Are Offline Business Directories Still Worth Advertising In?

The Value Of Asking Your Customers To Fill In Surveys And Questionnaires

The Popularity Of Blogs As A Selling Tool

The Importance Of Getting A Balance Between Traditional And Online Advertising

Do Internet Business Owners Still Have Firm Working Hours They Stick To?

Will The Threat Of A Recession Damage Internet Businesses?

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