You’ve got the killer idea, you have the marketing sorted and you may even have launched your site, but what do you do now to keep ahead of the competition? Bricks and Mortar businesses utilize a number of cognitive tools, mostly working documents contained in a business plan, to help them asses’ success and plan for the future. In this series of articles I am going to introduce a number of aspects used in e-commerce as well as real world businesses which are shown to improve business effectiveness.
There are many different types of business plan used, from very simple documents to highly complex ones using econometric and accounting data, there is no right way to produce a business plan, but there are many different tips and tools. This series will cover many of the more common tools, and introduce a few proforma spreadsheets which will help with planning the next steps for your business. It will include;
SWOT Analysis
Mission Statements, Aims and Goals and Benchmark measures
The Balanced Scorecard
Cash flow Analysis
Key Personnel Models
Competition Analysis, based on Porters Five Forces.
Whilst none of these aspects deals significantly with SEO or content development (Please see my series of articles on Strategic Content Development) They are all important aspects of business planning, and especially with the level of competition in all niches of the net, it has never been more important for a webmaster to be aware of all of the tools available to help grow a business.
Writing a business plan need not take an enormous amount of time, and they have huge benefits to the webmaster, containing many of the common sense aspect of the business as well as goals and measures of success in one document means that one can easily develop a direction for a business and measure how far the business has come, and how far it still has to go.
The first part of the business plan should be a one page introduction which includes the following information
The Name of the Business
The Niche of the Website and a List of SEO Keywords along with a short estimation of the size of the potential niche
The Names of the Main competition, their page rank and any other pertinent data
This should not be over long and is a single sheet reminder of who what and how you do the things you do.
After learning how to use Twitter..
Twitter has many applications for the Business User (web based or otherwise) and the following are just some examples
Feedback
Does your website appeal to people, is it easy to use, does it get the message across effectively. Ask people, if you have a following on Twitter, you can ask people to appraise your site, generating traffic, and who knows, if they like it they may come back.
Networking
The platform is a perfect way to connect with a network of peers as well as potential users, sharing ideas and product news/business tips and tricks. It’s fast and effective and basically free.
An Intranet
If you work with others, separated by distance and connected by computer, Twitter provides a connectivity tool similar to a local intranet. It’s easy and free to use. This especially useful for webmasters as they are often dealing with a number of people who are only connected by the internet.
Branding
The most important aspect to modern marketing is the Brand; it is used excessively in internet based business to establish new sites/products in a niche to users. Whilst it is difficult to establish a brand, it is often even more difficult to communicate that brand effectively to a wide enough audience. Twitter allows a free medium for communicating the brand of your company to interested users. (see my article here for tips on Branding)
An Office Tool
Schedule meetings, arrange diaries and manage time with twitter. If you find yourself using Twitter on a regular basis then why not use it as an all in one tool for organizing yourself. It is possible to utilize the application to manage all aspects of your working day.
However you use Twitter, you will find that it is an effective application which can benefit many aspects of your business.
The Wide Wide World of Blogging, Roman Circus or Italian Renaissance?
Bloggers are at extremes highly competitive and secretive, and cooperative and sharing. Indeed the dichotomy between the different attitudes to blogging are becoming polarised in the two extremes. Are bloggers the equivalent of gladiators in the roman arena, or are they the intellectual equivalent of the great renaissance artists and philosophers who believed in sharing and developing ideas together?
It is true that the internet offers a media for instantaneously sharing and discussing all things under the sun, but at times we are jealous and petty about the trading of ideas, calls of plagiarism and I was here first, are becoming more prevalent in the blogging community. Whilst we all want to have an opinion on a subject the very real phenomena of plagiarism is on the increase, and many lazy bloggers are utilising it to build up content. There are those, however, and I count myself amongst them proudly, who believe that there is nothing new under the sun, and that all we can offer is our own unique perspective. I take ideas from other blogs, some ideas I generate spontaneously, only to discover at some point in the future that another had already written, almost identical, articles to mine. Plagiarism is being drowned in a vast sea of people who are getting online and blogging.
Can we ever be truly original? I don’t think so, or at least only in very specialist and advanced studies, say physics or pure mathematics, and the number of people being truly original in those fields are few and far between. What we are doing, by posting our thoughts, or tips and tricks is acting as an editor to the collective unconscious. We are refining, polishing and representing ideas and thoughts which exist in the minds of millions of others. I believe that the blog is the single most important cultural invention since the printing press for the dissemination of ideas and information. We are participating in the modern renaissance, and every effort should be made by all responsible members of our community to remain free from censor and hindrance.
This article follows on to my general introduction to Incentives which you can read here
If you offer a competition it is important to structure it in such a way that it minimises the hassle of running it, and maximise the positive effects to your blog. The following are some of the common tips given by many websites (for a more in-depth guide to competitions see Problogger)
Sane (KISS). As I have alluded to before in many blogs on designing content for the net, the average surfer is a person of very short attention span. This is no insult to you, constant reader, it is because of the information overload on the web, the Human Brain makes sub conscious judgments millions of times a second, and the gestalt effect of ideas, images and sounds all determine in a short space of time whether or not our brain deems something important enough to read. This has always happened but the coming of age of the information superhighway has multiplied this effect tenfold.
Therefore anything which at face value appears too complex or time consuming to be worth the effort will be edited by the brain, and clicked away by the finger. Simplicity of design is a beautiful thing, think about the old business maxim of ‘build a better mousetrap.’ Simple questions followed by a A) B) C) answer style is fine, and about all that needs to be done, remember you are not challenging the intellect of your reader in the competition, if they want a challenge then they will apply to Mastermind (I don’t know if the Americans have an equivalent of this program, answers on a postcard…) Remember to KISS.
Maximise the Potential
If you are running a competition, it is important to remember that you expect to gain some benefit from doing so. The use of a competition as marketing tool is not a new thing. It has been happening for many years. With a ‘hard’ product, an item or similar that is physically purchased, the incentive is simple, ‘buy me, and you will get the chance to win this.’ With promoting your blog or website, the incentive is to read me, or subscribe or click these links. Effectively it is the same ploy and there are a number of ways with which you can maximize the effectiveness of this. Make your competition open to new RSS subscribers, or for those who leave a comment or URL link on your site. If you are after content, make the competition a writing competition or similar. A highly cunning, but bordering on transgression of the above KISS rule from ProBlogger is to hide clues in archived posts and holding a treasure hunt (increasing page views at a stroke)
However you do it, and whatever method you arrive at for your competition, think about the inputs and outputs carefully.
Branding used to be when a cowboy would burn his mark into his cattle to identify which he owned. It was a simple mark, unique to the rank which owned the cattle, and was instantly recognisable when the cattle was being driven across country, along with other herds, or when it was taken for slaughter.
The modern concept of branding is not different to the old concept. It is a means of differentiating your product from other, often similar, products. It is also one of the most powerful business constructs you will ever have. A brand has value far beyond any of the other assets you own, and yet it is intangible. There are many books and sites on how to build a brand, one that I can personally recommend is Creating Passion Brands by Helen Edwards which you can buy here at Amazon.
This book focuses on build emotional connections to customers, and as such is suited to the web based branding which we are predominately interested. Also there are many sites which have loads of information on Branding; one great site is utalkmarketing which has a great section on online branding here.
Do some wider research and you will begin to see that there is more to the branding process than a cool name and great logo (although these are important) To explore the brand as a construct a bit more I am going to use two very well known brands, one old, Hoover, and one new Google.
Hoover makes vacuum cleaners, not Hoovers, but we call them Hoovers anyway. The brand is so synonymous with vacuum cleaners we naturally refer to them as such. The word has, by dint of Hoover dominating the market from an early stage and a consistent marketing campaign, entered common usage. There can be no more powerful brand than this, it is all that a brand should be, when we think vacuum cleaner, we think Hoover. How does this happen? Many experts agree that the cultural linking of a products name with its general product area, like Hoover, takes a consistent and lengthy process, but many detractors argue that the web has changed this and now it can be managed in a matter of years, and not decades. This is due to the sophistication of the consumer, we can distinguish between products because there are simply more products, but also we are more used to marketing than two generations ago. We are Brand Sceptical, and we accept trusted brands quickly, but also discard them quickly if they fail to meet our specific needs.
Google built a brand on excellence, they were simply the best product available to the mass market, and as such Google has become the big player. The name (in fact a spelling mistake) is synonymous with internet searching, and this was achieved in less than a decade. However they only stay on top due to continued improvement of their services, if a diligent programmer were to hit upon a better way to search the internet, it is entirely feasible that Google could be dominated by it (Think Internet Explorer and Firefox, IE looked unassailable from a conventional business standpoint.) Brands, although potent, do not command the same loyalty as even ten years ago and the only way to maintain the superiority of your site or product is by through constant innovation.
If you use twitter, you will know that it is a platform designed to capture information in small bite sized chunks and present them for search to users. Twitter is the epitome of the lack of attention generation of internet viewers. We all of us spend far less time viewing and evaluating information on the internet than in any other media. Twitter is designed specifically to cater for this phenomenon. Its name, the sound of bird chatter, provides a good clue to how its use feels, it is distracting and at times irritating. It is also well used and has a large community.
Increasingly, Twitter is being used as a tool for marketing (there are those who would argue that it is the purest marketing tool there is as it is the home of the soundbite.) Actively used for self promotion, Twitter will deliver your opinions, links and products to a user base which is actively searching for them. Generate a following, and create a no cost mailing list that is immediately updated, and as Twitter is available via mobile device, you are in constant contact with your list.
Twitter is fast becoming the Loop with which people want to connect, users feel that they are on the cusp of the information highway, instantly sharing and reading many bites of information.
For those few of you who are completely new to Twitter, the following is a very good general intro to the site
Driving traffic to your blog to gain new readers should be included in the things you do on a regular basis as a blogger.
Here are some tips that will help you to grow your reader-base by getting high amounts of traffic to your blog:
Share your blog posts on social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon or any of the social bookmarking sites you frequent. Be sure when you submit to these sites you use appropriate tags so that people searching the site will find your submission. Sending the links to where you can Digg or Stumble to your friends will only increase the number of visitors you receive. Increase your group of friends on each site so that you can use these bloggers tools to their full postential.
Post a link to your blog on the forums you visit. If it’s on topic with the forum, there’s no reason why you can’t market yourself and your blog there. Just do it in a tasteful way with a really great teaser in your post and watch the traffic come pouring in.
Posting comments on others blogs in your niche will entice their traffic to see what you have to say on the subject if you post your comments wisely. You can link to your blog by entering the url of it on the submit a comment form. It will then become a hyperlink anchored to your name so there is no need to mention your actual blog url in the comment itself. These types of comments are normally viewed as spam and won’t be included in the list.
Video comments is another way to get traffic that might not have found you otherwise. I know that most video sites will allow you to use html in the comments section, so why not put a link to your blog? Make a witty comment that will make people give you attention by visiting your blog, you would be surprised how well this works. A good video site to start at is VEOH. You can easily search for videos by keyword to minimize the time you spend on this task of commenting.
If you get a lot of traffic but they rarely return, consider changing your template so that you give readers a new layout to look at. You can find Free WordPress Themes right here on BlueVerse to give your blog the look it needs to retain readers. Download one today and see how your traffic reacts. Make a blog post about your new look to get some interaction with your visitors.
Don’t forget to sign your blog up at IZEA for their RealRank program. This program could prove to be more beneficial for your blog than you can even imagine so get signed up today.
Branding used to be when a cowboy would burn his mark into his cattle to identify which he owned. It was a simple mark, unique to the rank which owned the cattle, and was instantly recognisable when the cattle was being driven across country, along with other herds, or when it was taken for slaughter.
If you use twitter, you will know that it is a platform designed to capture information in small bite sized chunks and present them for search to users. Twitter is the epitome of the lack of attention generation of internet viewers. We all of us spend far less time viewing and evaluating information on the internet than in any other media. Twitter is designed specifically to cater for this phenomenon. Its name, the sound of bird chatter, provides a good clue to how its use feels, it is distracting and at times irritating. It is also well used and has a large community.
