Archive for category Marketing
How To Create A Bad Online Store in 10 Easy Steps
Who wants to create a successful online store that actually makes money? Not us! All sarcasm aside, we’ve all seen plenty of sites that make us cringe, and many of them share the same terrible traits. Learn from their mistakes and create a webstore that makes customers buy, not run away!
1. Hide The Buy Button
Make it difficult for customers to buy your products. Hiding your buy button all the way at the bottom of the page – or better yet, not having one at all – is a surefire way to a bad Web site!
2. Flash Them
A beautiful Flash site is sure to entice customers to buy, right? There’s nothing you would rather do, as a customer, than wait in anticipation until the page loads to be presented with a somewhat cool video that lasts 5 seconds. Then, despite your busy life, you’ll wait for each and every page on the site to load, and you won’t even think about going to the competitor’s fast-loading site. Right?
3. Search Engine Optimization is the Devil
You’ve heard from “savvy” webmasters that Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the process of tweaking certain internal and external factors on your site to better rank in the natural search engine results, is the devil’s work. Shouldn’t Google just know you’re a great online store? Who needs to work for results? You can just buy 100 spammy links and submit your site to 100s of directories!
4. Click Click Click…Click…Click
Other webstores have just a few seconds to engage customers, but not yours. You can create a Web site that takes 10 clicks to place a single product in the shopping cart. You know your customers just love tapping that left mouse button.
5. We Love Clutter
You know that room in your house where you have the old toasters, furniture, and everything else thrown all over? Wouldn’t that make for a great site? Just throw tons of product pictures on a page – the more the merrier. K.I.S.S. simplicity goodbye!
6. People Click on Popups
Popups are wonderful tools to yell at your customers to buy. Be sure the popups are as obnoxious as possible, blinking and mimicking the look of a Windows error message. That’s the only way customers will ever notice your products!
7. Don’t Let Them Find You!
You don’t want those pesky customers to find you. I mean, what happens if, heavens forbid, they call or email you about a product? Including your contact info might make customers trust you more. Scary thought.
8. Webstores Are Really Just Fun Mazes
Webstores are cleverly disguised to appear like they sell something, but the best Web sites are designed so customers can figure out a maze. If customers can find the path from the landing page to the checkout in a minute or less, you’ve failed!
9. Hmm. What Is This Store About?
Remember, your online store should be a puzzle. In addition to the maze you’ve created, make sure no one can actually pinpoint your industry in three words or less. Sell so many different products that your online store rivals Wal Mart.
10. Branded Shopping Carts Are For Losers
Branded shopping carts insult your customers – why would they ever think that a blank shopping cart section means their credit card info is now in the hands of criminals? Customers automatically trust you with their credit card info the moment they land on your webstore, and a shopping cart that matches the look and feel of your site won’t entice them to hit that “Checkout” button. Absolutely not.
Ok, our sarcasm is getting the best of us. We’ve seen our share of bad online stores and we’ve got some pent up frustration to express. Here’s a real tip – don’t follow any of the above tips.
Organic SEO versus PPC Advertising: Pros and Cons
The increasing importance of search engine marketing to online profitability has sparked debates in the industry on whether to use “natural” methods for SEO or opt for pay-per-click advertising. The ideal strategy would be one that incorporates both methods into the SEO scheme as they both have advantages and disadvantages to them. This is rarely the case though and for those that cannot quite decide on which course to take, the following is a rundown of the pros and cons of each method.Organic SEO Organic SEO is deemed more credible by people as popularity and traffic are gained through painstaking work and time investment. Your search engine levels are acquired on the basis of relevance and content quality. As long as your website keeps in line with search engine considerations, it continues to belong to the top search results.
Consequently, the results yielded by organic SEO are more enduring. It doesn’t adhere to a pre-planned timeline rather it is an ongoing project that is amended and improved over time. It is a constant part of the marketing strategy. Organic SEO also incurs relatively low costs especially if you implement it yourself. You also have complete control over the content of your website. You decide which data to use and post without interference from third parties so the quality of your content isn’t compromised.
On the downside, organic SEO results are not immediate. It may take a while for your website to see any meaningful traffic and the time spent waiting for these strategies to take effect may impact heavily on it s profitability. SEO is a complicated undertaking and if you are a neophyte in this industry you might inadvertently be putting your website at risk.
Pay-per-Click Advertising
The biggest draw of pay-per-click advertising is the near-instantaneous results. Traffic is driven immediately to your website as your link is prominently shown over the search engine. This attribute of pay-per-click advertising is especially attractive to websites that are starting out. Pay-per-click advertising is also easier and faster to implement because it is a fairly uncomplicated procedure.
A drawback is that pay-per-click advertising can be quite costly. Studies show that the rates for PPC advertising are rising and as more people visit your site, you pay more. There are also studies showing that people tend to distrust paid searches and are therefore less likely to click on these links compared to organic search results.
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