The Click Depot Blog

Archive for December, 2008

As we explained in our previous post, autoresponders are indeed any online or offline business;s best friend. OK, but how do you go about getting started in your Email marketing journey? I have bad and good news. The bad new first - it’s not that easy actually and there are some key decisions you will need to make to make sure you do this right. The good news will come at the end of the article.

Autoreponders come in three flavors depending on who sends out the email.

Desktop Based: You buy a software that installs on your desktop, just like your Office softwre. This inclues Mailoop and PrimaSoft. With these, the email is sent out via your chosen ISP - usually your high speed internet provider such as Cox or Comcast. These are good if your email list is small - few hundreds at the most. If your email list is in the thousands, then you are asking for trouble if you adopt this type of software, unless you are super careful. The problem starts with some subscribers of your mailing list using the “This is Spam” buttons on their emails instead of cleanly unsubscribing from your email list using the unsubscribe link. Once your ISP sees a lot of these spam complaints, they just stop sending your emails or notify you that you need to stop sending your emails and you are pretty much stuck at that point.Most ISP’s limit the number of email that you can send out at once. This is usually limited to a few hundred emails. ISP’s also do not offer much of a service guarantee for your email delivery like some of the hosted solutions do.

Server-based: These are basically software or scripts that you install on your website space. Now the email goes out from your hosting provider’s servers, not your ISP. Leading providers are AutoResponse Plus and phpList (Free). In this case as well, you run into similar issues. Hosting providers have a limit of the number of emails you can send out. This is either a per day or per hour limit. Site5.com for instance has a 500 emails per hour limit and SiteGround.Com has a 400 emails per hour limit. There are some others that are more generous. Third Sphere Hosting, for example, allows 20,000 emails per day, but that’s unusual. Now 500 per hour might sound like a lot to you. But really, over time, it’s easy to get into lists that are in the thousands. Just offer a freebie on your website worth a couple of hundred dollars and you could have a few hundred subscribers overnight. That can be good and bad though. On one hand , you have a list of potential buyers now but on the other hand, a lot of those people will never really buy from you but are there just for the freebies. You really can’t do anything about that problem though. Everyone involved with Email faces that issue. You will have to send email to all your list subscribers at least initially before you can segment them into ones that are VIP’s for you and the regualar masses. Coming back to limits on email delivery, once you exceed these limits, and sometimes, even before that, your hosting provider will ask you to move to dedicated hosting, which is usually hundreds of dollars per month. At that point, most will want to consider using a hosted solution.

Hosted Solution: There are way too many to even list here. The leading providers are Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp and iContact. These provides own dozens, and some even hundreds of servers that they use to send out their emails. If one of the servers gets in trouble for spam complaints (which are often not valid), then they can still use others to send out their email. Your email has a much higher deliverability chances when you go with these providers. The downsite, well you get to pay a hefty fee for the reliability promise. The cost can be between $15/month to several hundred dollars per month depending on the size or your list and the frequency of your emails. Cost is not the only issue though. Most of these providers require that each of your subscribers double opt in to your list. In other words, if you bring in a list from either of the above options to a hosted provider, your subscriber base will have to confirm that they want to remain part of your list. For many, including good subscribers, they may just decide not to renew their subscription out of laziness. And that could cost you dearly in the long run.

Our recommendation - go with a hosted provider FROM THE BEGINNING. It can cost a bit higher, but you will have your bases covered and potentially save a lot of time and trouble in the long run.

Autoresponders are that little piece of software that most online businesses cannot live without. They help automate, and in fact, envigorate your communications with your customers and leads. If this is not sounding familiar to you already, then you really should be worried right now, and here’s why:

1. Most online businesses make at least 50% of their sales through their Email list. That means that regardless of how many visitors you have to your website, unless you have a email list of potential leads, you are probably missing out on at least 50% of your sales opportunity. We work for a client that actually does 100% of their sales through Email Marketing and direct mail and almost none via their regular website visitors that come in from search results and Adwords. That’s because in their niche, people don’t often buy on their first visit, and need to be reminded multiple times before a sale is made. Another one of our clients has a website that gets almost 50K visitors per month, many of which are paid clicks from Adwords. He promotes several products on his site and gets paid each time a product that he promotes is sold (typical affiliate marketing). Sounds like a business model, right? You pay for clicks and sell product. Not quite. If that is all he did, he’d actually be losing money. instead, he makes aorund $20K per month. How? He builds an email list via this website and promtes a related coaching service to them via Email marketing. Now, that’s smart and that’s precisely how important autoresponders are to you as well.

2. Autoresponders and Email is immediate. Almost no other form of marketing can boast of that. Direct mail, TV, Radio, Cold calls, all have a lag. Email on the other hand is almost immediate. For some of our clients, we see sales within seconds of sending out an email blast. That’s how responsive the list if you build it carefully.

3. Email marketing is a great way to get feedback. In most businesses, entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of trying out their product and getting feedback before putting the product out. With a loyal email list, you can put out early prototypes or just get a survey or poll result to know whether the product is likely to fly with that crowd. What a useful thing!
Now that you know how useful Email marketing can be, the next step is to pick your Email Marketing Software. Unfortualtely, that can be a pretty time consuming complicated decision to make. And for reasons explained here, it’s one of the most imporatant ones you will make for your business.

There are 2 ways to get a online store quickly. Either get a software product such as CRE Loaded or OScommerce, and host your website on your own domain or get a store using a hosted service such as the Ystore by Yahoo. In recent days, YStore has risen in popularity, for a few reasons.

1. YStore is hosted and services/software, Etc. are managed by Yahoo. Even for tech-savvy webmasters, managing regular security upgrades on the software is a challenge. Additional modules and third party components are great, often free, but ensuring that they work well with your site is really left up to you. And then when the site gets hacked (which does happen to regular sites, trust me!) bringing the site back up is perhaps the craziest time you’ll spend behind a computer. Leaving that up to the experts is often a good idea in the long run. Ystore is a very reasonably priced hosted solution considering that it’s backed by the world’s #2 Internet company.
2. Creating products is a piece of cake with Ystore. Most fields can be entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded into the site. Images can be uplaoded easily as well.
3. Ystore comes with a whole bunch of features for promoting your products online, analyzing sales, search keyword data, Etc. This is a useful thing to have from a single dashboard. As against other offerings where you will need to usually deal with a separate product or third party for many of those features.
4. Optimizing Ystore for search engines is simple. You don’t even need to know HTML. Just log into Store Editor, edit each page, enter the Page title and meta tags into their fields, that’s it. Now, to know what to enter into those fields needs some knowledge of SEO concepts and keyword research. But a good SEO company should be able to do that for you.

Now, not everything is that perfect about the Ystore and you should know that before you jump in.

Ystore makes YStore for novice store owners. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. For instance, it’s not easy to change the URL of a page once you enter it once. According to several sources, changing product URL’s requires changing the product ID and a re-upload of the catalog, which can end up breaking the existing incoming links to the site. To my knowledge, URL redirects for Ystore URL’s is not easy either. We are still researching some of these issues, but as we do that, we are realizing that there is not enough information about Ystore SEO on the Internet. There are several companies that will do it for you, but charge heavily. Yahoo’s help section is not too useful. The help results include items from Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other sites, so finding the aritlce that applies to the Ystore can get challenging sometimes.

Overall, Ystore is a great offering. Our recommendation is that if you are planning to create a store using Ystore, consult with a reliable online marketing company about SEO upfront. Doing that upfront is much easier.

OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.

Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.

Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.

Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.

Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.

Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.

We see websites all over the place that sell something or the other. Anything that’s available in a real world store (well, almost) and more (digital assets) are available online. If making money from Ecommerce or other ways online sounds thrilling to you, then you might have taken a few minutes to search on Google for phases such as “make money online” or “online website business” or “sell shoes online”. Try any of these searches and you’ll find thousands of websites and programs that claim that making money or selling online is the easiest thing to do. Many will even show you pictures of their checks and some will go as far as giving you a 110% money back guarantee to buy into their money-making idea. So, given all that, here’s the million dollar question - Are all of them really making money?

Our experience (and several studies, btw) show that it’s not as easy as it seems. Take Ecommerce sites for an example.

Ecommerce websites: Putting up a website with valid products might not be an easy task by itself but if you are tech-savvy or know someone who is, that part can be done. Which is why you see thousands of sites selling stuff. Are they making money? We know for a fact that many aren’t. We get approached by Online store owners that have a site that does ZERO sales after months of promotions. It truly is not easy to sell online. On the other hand, we have promoted many sites that do thousands of dollars in sales every day. What separates the profitable ones from the others is mainly 2 things.

a. Smart Online Market Research: There are several tools that help you analyze what people are searching for. Google Trends, Google Keyword Tool, Ebay Keyword Analyzers such as TeraPeak, and many more. Analyzing online consumer behavior is key to selecting a product that has a chance of succeeding.

b. Product differentiation: Choosing a product that differentiates itself from the competition is a time-tested marketing concept for success. It applies online even more so. Online, why would someone buy from maryselectronics.com when the exact same item is available, often cheaper, at amazon.com? On the other hand, if you were maryspinkelectronics.com, now you stand out and may be you’ll have an audience that is looking for your products.

c. Intelligent Marketing: Offline, location is critical. If you have a store on a busy intersection, you will probably find people stop by without any marketing. Online, there is no such thing. There are over 3 trillion web pages and yours is just one of them. Promoting your site at the right places and targeting the right keywords for search optimization are ESSENTIAL.

Keeping these three principles are likely to ensure a much better chance for success for your website or online store. Now go online and look at stores out there. How many of these do you think are doing all three? You willl be surprised - not even one out of 10. There are too many domains out there that don’t have a site on it. There are many sites that have no visitors and many visited sites that don’t make any money. It’s not an easy thing, which is why if you really think you have a good product to offer online, consult with a good online marketing company to help you sell it. Making money online is possible and thrilling, but that does not make it easy.