The Click Depot Blog

Thanks to one man’s initiative in which he decided to use the social media for business purposes and began marketing his product and services extensively on social media websites, a large number of businessmen have begun using this excellent marketing strategy for getting in touch with their potential clients on the Internet. That is the reason why Facebook, YouTube, Multiply Gather, Twitter and Friendster are being used by farsighted businessmen for marketing their products to visitors online.
If you have full intentions of doing the same thing you would want to develop a social media strategy, which is not only effective, but manages to give you profitable returns at the end of the day. You start the strategy by signing in on a number of social media websites.
The point is to introduce yourself to the general public and show that you have a face behind the company. After that, you are going to start a methodical download or upload of a number of videos, photos, as well as music; any sort of media which includes information about your product, company and services comes under the social media network marketing strategy.

Even though the services are free and thousands of blog posts are entered on these websites every single day, a businessman is going to have a much better chance of having his blog read, by people who are interested in his particular products. This naturally is a much better way of marketing and advertising than spending lots of money on ads in journals and newspapers.
That is the main reason why many marketing firms have begun using social media websites in their marketing campaign.

To begin your social media strategy and marketing campaign, you need to set out one particular goal. What is the name of your company and which target market are you interested in? Which particular social media site caters to that particular target market? You are naturally going to be doing a little bit of research on these sites.

Your job is to make new connections, and to tell your already existing clients and connections that you are alive and ticking. This is at the top of your priority list, especially when you are building a new marketing strategy which includes social media.

Social media has taken the old marketing strategies of using market surveys to find out the opinion of general consumers, regarding some particular product, to the new stage of free discussions on the product quality, online. That is why you have to keep in touch with the pulse of the general public and that can only be done by looking at the reviews, views, and discussions going on in forums.
You need to go out amongst your clients and general public and become visible. You need to make sure that the customer service is so perfect that any problem is solved within 24 hours.

The Customer is King and never more so than when he is sounding off online. One unhappy customer is quite capable of losing you more than a 100 prospective customers in the future. So when you go online and manage to talk to your customer about his problems, it shows that you care.
This marketing strategy is not only going to make your social media presence quite strong, but it is going to do wonders for your future business prospects. This also includes taking part in a number of forums online and explaining queries and FAQ’s to any prospective client, who is interested in buying your product in the near future.

Extensive research needs to be done so that you know exactly who your customers are and where they can be found. You could use Technorati, through which you can find blogs and websites related to your product, through a search query. You would also want to try out the marketing scope of Twitter. It has a really good search and monitoring tool called Twitscoop.

Once you know about the specific needs and requirements of the customer, you would want to tell them that you are capable of giving them a product, which deals with solving that particular requirement and need.
You would need to measure The Traffic with Google Analytics, Social Mention and Tweetreach. These free tools give you a broad idea of how positive your participation in the discussion was and you can base your communication strategy using the data obtained by these tools.
Once you have found a good social media strategy, which works, stick to it!

Image Courtesy : http://ictkm.cgiar.org/2009/07/29/social-media-the-next-revolution/

One of your goals with your ecommerce site is to get high search engine rankings. Getting ranked good on search engines is a key to getting traffic to your site, which will in turn, bring you sales and profit. Improving your search engine rankings and getting a top spot is not always easy, especially when you are first starting out. With 7 easy steps, though, you can optimize your ecommerce site.

Step 1: Create Individual Pages

You will probably need to go back over your website and make some changes when you first start the process of optimizing your website. You should have a page dedicated to each of your products. This will allow you to create unique content for each product and take advantage of the ability to capitalize on more keywords.

Step 2: Unique Content

Now that you have your website set up with each product on its own page, you can begin to get into content. Content plays a large role in search engine rankings, but just having a few lines of text on a page doesn’t do it. You have to have content that is unique and that is valuable. You likely have product descriptions, but these are not unique. If you sell a common product then chances are that same description is being used all over the internet. Reword the descriptions or better; write up a short article about the product.

Step 3: Cross Referencing

When you are creating the unique content you should cross reference other products that you sell. This links the pages of your website in a very natural fashion.

Step 4: Keep Adding Content

Content is very important to your search engine rankings, so do not stop adding new, fresh content to your website. You can add a blog that will allow you to keep adding new content on your site on a regular basis. You can also just add in articles where you see fit. Whatever you do, just add content often.

Step 5: Links

Content is not the only thing that is considered during search engine rankings. You should also have good quality links to other websites. When you link up to websites that have rankings then that will help you in your rankings.

Step 6: Get Reviews

Reviews not only add content to your website, but also encourage buyers. You can ask current customers to review the product for you and give them a coupon for their next purchase.

Step 7: Go Social

Social networking sites are amazing. The potential for a business person on these sites is amazing. You should join as many as possible. Make sure you stay active, add friends and post content. This is free advertising and it allows you to link up to these popular sites.

Optimizing your website does not have to be tedious. You just need to make sure that you are doing everything you can. You have to stay with it as it is an ongoing process. The internet is very fluid and things change everyday, so stay on top of things and your website should end up on top.

image Courtesy: http://www.netlogical.com/

If you have a website, then you know that it cannot possibly survive without the right amount of traffic. What’s the use in having a killer page that no one visits? It’s literally like you have went through the trouble for nothing. If you have found yourself in this situation, then you might need a couple of pointers to help guide the way to driving more traffic to your website.

Listed below are some proven ways to start getting the traffic that your website needs to thrive:

1.Sign up to free ad forums – Any time that you have a chance, take some time out to sign up to a couple of these very helpful advertising spaces. The more that you sign up to and post, the more traffic you will get in return.

2. Above all, make sure that you have fresh, up to date, and interesting web content – Only write about those things that you know people are going to be fascinated with. A good way to know is to think about what fascinates you. What is something that you really enjoy talking about? You also need to make sure that you can go into a bit of detail about your subject. Content that is vague and fuzzy has no point of existence. Frequently add updates to your site, and you will notice that people keep coming back to find more fresh, true content.

3. Sign up to an affiliate program – Getting others to promote your site or products is a wonderful way to increase traffic to it’s maximum potential. The only downside is that you may have to allow a percentage to go to the one’s who are promoting the website. But hey, at least they are helping to drive traffic, right? And without them, you most likely wouldn’t have as much traffic as you should. Some people use this method by itself and find that it keeps their website booming with traffic.

4. Sign up to a video casting website – This is another great way to get the word out there about your website, and it is also extremely popular right now. People are constantly logging into those types of sites to see what videos are hot and also to see what everyone is talking about. Just make sure that you include a link to your website in the video, and you will see that traffic is headed your way.

5. Gain traffic through link exchange – All you have to do is contact the individuals who own the site, and give them your website address. You’ll be promoting their sites, and they will be promoting yours. A good way to begin is to contact someone that you know gets a good bit of traffic, because that is where the people are.

6. Keyword your website – Do a search on the topic of which you will be talking about, and figure out what keywords are used to search for pages that are similar to yours. You might even find that some of the search phrases are a bit odd, but just try your best to incorporate them into your content.

7. Use online forums to market your website – Find a forum that you are interested in, and visit it frequently. Talk about things that relate to your website because you never know, your page just might be the answer to someone’s question! And furthermore, participating in online forums is a fun way to promote your page.

Follow these 7 essentials, and your page will end up with more traffic than New York Times Square!

Image Courtesy : http://nasirjafri.com/improve-web-site-traffic/

Backups are necessary. We just talked about that in the previous post. I talked about Aronis True Image. Acronis is great to get a backup of your computer - incluging the OS, files, applications, Etc. OK, but where do you put your backups? Most people backup to an external hard drive or DVD’s that are stored right in the shelf next to the computer. While that might be OK in 99% of the cases, there is always that unfortunate chance that your entire office or home gets in the path of a hurricane, flood or forest fire. Now we sincerely hope that no such thing happens to you, but you’ll sleep better knowing that your most imporant personal and business data is protected in such a situation. Keeping your backups off-site is the way to go. Sooner done the better.

Cost for off-site backups used to be high in the past. Most often you’d need a dedicated server and end up costing thousands of dollards annually. Now that’s a thing of the past. Welcome to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a web-service based offering by Amazon. Amazon has a tremendously powerful website as you know at Amazon.com. It gets more traffic than all websites in Raleigh put together perhaps and more complex features than most websites on the Internet and millions of vendors selling their products on their website. A fully automated product management and inventory management capability and the ability to provide guarantees on price, shipping, delivery and a solid feedback mechanism. To run all that is no simple task. They have thousands of servers in state-of-the-art data centers and configurations that few people in the world can image. Such capability meant that they are experts in not just selling online but also on IT infrastructure. They are also experts on webservices and one of the first to bring serious ones to the market that allow other people to create stores using amazon products for an affiliate commission.

As a smart company, they decided to put those 2 fields of expertise to use - web service and IT infrastructire. And that gave birth to Amazon S3 and we’re sure you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. In essence it’s a service that makes it easy to trasfer your files from your PC or your website to Amazon via a high-bandwidth connection (which is a BIG deal, because uploads over the internet are generally slow, which makes it difficult to upload a large amount to data off-site on a regular basis). And the best part is that it’s cheap. At about 20 cents per GB of storage, it’s really cheap for the kind of protection that Amazon offers. No wonder many are using it already since the launch in 2006.

Several companies such as Seco backup and EzS3 have tools available that make it easy to use Amazon’s service. This is a handy list of amazon s3 tools. Jungle Disk and Backup Manager are perhaps the leading ones in the PC and Mac home backup market.

Another benefit of Amazon S3 is saving storage space. I used to have tons of unused storage space at home. Hard disks, DVD’s, zip drives that are hardly used, etc. Each of them would have some backup that I did at some point and I didn’t want to risk deleting them so they kept taking up space. Another problem with website backups is that once your website becomes slightly larger (500 MB - 1 GB storage or more), downloading the website’s files on a regular basis for backup takes forever and breaks all the time due to network issues. Having automatic backups with Amazon S3 takes care of both of those issues for the most part.

Give it a serious thought. You set it up once and forget. Worth the money and highly recommended!

Marketing for small business often means working with a print company to print some coupons, fliers, postcards, brochures and sending it out to a million people. Of course, you have a website that does nothing for you other than help people find directions to your shop front once in a while. You think most people want to call you anyway so you are OK with that. Well, things have changed.

Small business is not really that easy anymore. Especially in recessions, there are large number of startups from people that have lost their jobs. You need to get creative with your marketing ideas to be able to survive and thrive. And the best part, it’s a LOT of fun. It’s like playing a game of Age of Empires - you plan and implement strategies and gauge results - which means more money! OK, I got a little carried away there - Age of Empires is not as much fun as creative marketing is

So what is creative marketing? Well, it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ten years ago, having a website that was used effectively was creative marketing. Today, that’s a necessity. Creative marketing today is finding ways to reach your clients that few people in your market are doing. Here are some examples:

1. Search Engine Optimization is one such way, which is actually fast becoming  necessity. You optimize your websites for certain key phrases. Create specific content on your site that is targeted at new key phrases that are emerging in your market space. This helps you create new market share on an active ongoing basis.

2. Dynamic businesses thrive in today’s market. Frequent change is liked by customers and they think of you more often that way. You also reach a broader audience since different offers may fly with different people. A new coupon or offer every week on your website or print newsletter.

3. Give stuff away that’s useful in your target market. Easiest way to make inroads in a market that has many players already. Make it fun too. For instance, if you have website, use your developer’s help to create a sweepstakes giveaway that includes  a slot machine. Visitors click on the slots and if they win, they get something from your products or services free. To play, they enter their email - now you can market to them after they leave. Email marketing is not creative marketing anymore - it’s a must. But finding creative ways to get your leads’ email in a safe, non-intrusive manner is where the creativity comes in.

If this sounds like too much work for you, talk to us. We can work out a creative marketing package for you and help you stand out!

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.

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.