WebForSuccess

Make sure your Ecommerce Marketing is Diversified and You Have a Plan B

Recent outages at major social media sites reminded me how important it is not to put all your eggs in one basket with your internet marketing efforts.You need traffic and sales from many sources to help insure the stability of your business and protect it from changes in the internet landscape.

Change can Be Bad if You Don't Have Plan B

You never know when a traffic source will change in cost, change the rules of the game, or just not want to play with you any more.

For example, say your SEO efforts have really paid off and you get 70% of your ecommerce sales as a result of Google organic (non-paid) listings.  Sounds great doesn't it?  But it's not necessarily a good thing. That could change significantly at any time due to changes in ranking algorithms, your site, or perhaps a "misunderstanding" that causes you to get penalized or banned.  I'm aware of sites that are afraid to make the slightest change on the main pages of their site, even allowing their site to become stale  because so many of their visitors come from key google rankings and they are afraid a change could alter their rankings.

The same applies to paid listings in search engines or comparison shopping engines.  You might get great ROI (return on investment) from a given source one day, and then find in the future that it has become cost prohibitive, perhaps due to new competition, click fraud, or even changes in how listings are displayed on the service.

Paid listings are also harder to sustain in an economic downturn because shoppers may shop more, going to more sites, causing lots of clicks, looking for bargains and window shopping more than in the past, making some paid listings hard to turn a profit on.

You will sleep much easier at night and have the confidence to plan for the future of your ecommerce business if your traffic and sales comes from a robust combination of the following sources:

Ten Ecommerce Traffic Sources to Include in Your Diversified Marketing Plan:

1. Pay per click programs such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Microsoft).  Google is the heavyweight here, but better to use several, which will also allow you to compare ROI between engines.
2. Search engine optimization.  Working to get good incoming links and intelligently designing your site and creating great content that will naturally draw traffic.
3. Blog marketing - Search engines like blogs because content tends to be fresh.  Have your own blog and also encourage other blogs to link to you.  Offer them products for reviews or send them press releases about interesting things going on at your site.  Post comments on related blogs and include your url in your signature.  You never know who will see it, check it out and post about your site.
4. Friends and Family programs.  Offer customers and their friends a bonus, discount or freebie for referrals. 
5. Bookmarking -- encourage others to bookmark and share your content by signing up with a service like AddThis  This also creates links to your site which are good for search engine optimization.
6. Email Marketing - customers who have purchased from you or signed up for emails voluntarily on your site can be one of the lowest cost, effective marketing channels. 
7. Shopping comparison engines, both paid and free.  Paid include Shopzilla, Shop.com, Become.com and Free include Froogle.com (Google product search)
8. Contests can create a lot of buzz about your site.  The best contests are ones where users have to take some action other than just submitting a form, such as creating a video, tweeting about you on Twitter, or writing "why I want to win this product in 25 words or less"
9. Social media marketing.  Make use of Twitter and Facebook and encourage your customer to "follow" and "friend" you.  They are then a ready source of traffic when you post about what's new, interesting, or a great deal.
10. If you market in a niche, be sure to explore all the related sites in your niche to see which will allow you to be listed in a directory, buy inexpensive advertising, or publish articles with a link to your site.

The above is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but a starting point and reminder to think about how many traffic and revenue sources you have.  Even if you are relatively diversified now, you can always expand your marketing so that you are further cushioned from changes in the ecommerce marketing landscape.

A final reminder is to spend time keeping up with trends in ecommerce marketing so that you can take advantage of opportunities as they arise, especially low cost and free ones like Froogle, Twitter and Facebook, all of which are relatively new on the scene.

Twitter "the Discovery Engine for What's Happening" can't tell you what's happening at Twitter when Twitter is down.

Twitter being victimized by a denial of service attack this morning made me realize that I've gotten so used to using Twitter to find out  real-time info about odd happenings such as when a major credit card processor went down for almost a day at the beginning of July, that I almost forgot how to find  current news of this sort from other sources.

Breaking news that isn't quite CNN worthy, such as a site being down, can be challenging to find on the web.  For the first time in months, I used Google  to try to find info on a breaking web event and typed "Twitter down" to find out what was happening with Twitter  when I couldn't connect for a couple hours this morning.  I was trying to answer the questions is it me (or some network pipeline problem somewhere) , or is it Twitter?  Had some other site been down, I would have checked Twitter to see what was being said.

Unfortunately it IS Twitter, being victimized by a denial of service attack, which takes place when a mailicious party or parties attempt to overwhelm a web server(s) with so much traffic, it essentially crashes or slows to a crawl.  People attempting to reach Twitter, right now don't even see the famous "fail whale" graphic which Twitter displays when they have internal problems and overloads.

Fortunately, Twitter, like other big sites has a status page that is hosted at a totally different location or server, that at least allows them to update those who know about the existence of the status page.   Their blog has also been up intermittently, and they've confirmed the denial of service attack on both pages.

I hope that this attack is just some pranksters, or college kids with time on their hands until they get back to school.  Considering the amount of political and sensitive commentary published on Twitter, both terrorists and totalitarian governments could consider Twitter a worthy target for this sort of attack.  A recent example of this type of Twittering is the hundreds and sometimes thousands of tweets per minute generated during the Iran election controversy, which were labeled #iranelection, and still continue today, although at a slower pace.  In some cases these Tweets came from within Iran and provided a source of information directly on the scene when mainstream journalists were forbidden to report from within Iran.

Update - just as I am publishing this post at 11:44am Eastern time, I was able to load the Twitter front page and DoS and DDoS for "Denial of service" and "Distributed Denial of Service" were the top topics listed, so some people were getting through, and, possibly, contributing the the problem as when a server is overwhelmed, all the extra traffic generated by people frantically trying to reach it and Tweeting when they do get through may add to the problem.

Twitter Ramps up for Business with Twitter 101 At Business.Twitter.com

Twitter has just released a guide for business use of Twitter they call "Twitter 101".  This resides on a new subdomain http://business.twitter.com.  This new focus makes it official that Twitter is not just for "what are you doing?" any more.  It is a web 2.0 business tool and Twitter realizes that embracing the business use of Twitter will eventually go a long way toward making Twitter pay.  This will be a developing story over the next months and years, and we look forward to "following" the story.

As Twitter says in the guide, "Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter."

The guide begins by covering getting started and "learning the lingo" which help businesses new to Twitter come up to speed, and then moves on to best practices and case studies which are the meat for businesses currently using Twitter to glean additional strategies for further leveragining their presence on the platform.  The case studies include companies like Dell, Jet Blue, Pepsi and smaller companies and the innovative ways they are leveraging the social site.

Twitter 101 concludes with a valuable resource section that includes books, other sites and pertinent blog posts for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Another interesting tidbit is that there is now a link in the footer of every page on Twitter labeled "business" that takes you directly to Twitter 101, A Special Guide

Stay tuned.  This is just the start of the "monetization" of Twitter, which some will mourn, but we welcome as a Web 2.0 marketing tool for retail ecommerce sites.

Top 5 Google SEO Resources - Straight from the Source

Do you think of Google as a great big scary black box when it comes to their search engine rankings even though their corporate motto is "don't be evil"?  What you may not realize is that Google offers some great resources in both video and printed form covering a variety of topics that will help you design websites and create content that will maximize your results with both search engines and visitors (and ultimately, paying customers).

1. If you are relatively new to SEO (search engine optimization), you MUST read Google's Guide to Search Engine Optimization this is a regularly updated guide that gives advice directly from Google on the organization of you site and url, along with best practices and do's and dont's.   If you have been working on your site SEO for years, you still need to review this so you know Google's current thinking.

2. Matt Cutts Blog Matt has been a Google employee since 2000 and is currently head of their Webspam team.  He's an active blogger, and his posts often attract hundreds of comments, to which he often responds with additional valuable nuggets. When he talks about Google ranking, and their search algorithm, you want to listen. 

3. The Google Webmaster Channel on youtube http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp Lots of videos here, pick a short, single topic one, or a comprehensive one like the Google Trifecta Video, a one hour video that covers the Webmaster Central tool, Analytics and testing with Website Optimizer and how they can work together to max results from your site

4. The official Google Webmaster Central Blog with hundreds of articles covering tips, techniques and webmaster tools to optimize your site.

5. The Google Webmaster Help Forum You can post questions here, and get feedback from community members and from Googlers (Google employees) whose posts are flagged with a blue G logo.

Google really has an interest in having your site found when it has good content that people will be interested in.  This is in their best interests and yours.  So try to get on the same page and deliver great content, and follow their logical guidelines and you'll have a big leg up on traffic and results.

If you've got a quick few minutes, here's a great basic  5 minute SEO video from Matt Cutts of Google  

The payoff from effective website design and optimization can be huge if you get a traffic boost from the search engines and it results in increased sales.  Spend some time honing your skills and create a game plan to devote some time each week to this task.

Best Practices for Obsolete Ecommerce Pages on Your Site

You've been running an ecommerce site for several years.  You have hundreds or thousands of products.

What's the best practice to use when a product is discontinued?

• What is best for search engine optimization (SEO)
• What is best for your customers
• What is best for you (a combination of the above 2, in other words, maximize revenue.

Well, what if I just leave all my old pages up with a note that the product is discontinued?  Well that won't  create a lot of conversions.  Also, search engines are pretty smart and they may realize that pages without a buy button aren't as valuable for searchers as those with.

Also, most search engines will only index a certain number of pages from your site, unless you have very high pagerank, i.e. an extremely high profile site with massive amounts of incoming links like Wikipedia.org.  Wouldn't you rather have your latest and greatest returned in searches than those items that customer can't buy?

The best possible approach is to intelligently program a  "301 redirect" for the obsolete page.  This will tell search engines that a page has permanently moved, and automatically forward the web browsing public transparently to the new page.  It's best in this case to forward the obsolete page to a page showing similar products, such as the category page for the product they tried to reach.  Here is a good article on programming 301 redirects for various hosting platforms and web languages.

The worst practice is to just remove the page and then provide a totally unhelpful generic "404 not found" page.  If you must do these, at least provide a custom 404 page with your logo and links back to the main page of your site. Here is a great resource for configuring 404 pages on your server (covers many server types)

Taking some time to work through this common problem and come up with a uniform, customer friendly solution can pay big dividends in the form of happier customers and better search engine results going forward.