We prefer to teach you to fish...

» ezimerchants guide to success!

Four Steps to Online Success for Small to Medium Business

After building and uploading your new website you have finally arrived at the starters gate! That′s right. Its only the beginning of your new venture. What you have is a great store without any customers. Now its time to attract customers, keep them and make some money. It is at this point we utilise all the knowledge we can resource to make your start successful.

With more online sales operations than any other company in Australia we have the unique advantage of having helped more people in this space than any other provider. As a result we have greater hands on experience, watching and helping these businesses for over five years. We know what works and does not. We have clearly identified the online roadmap to success.

Take these steps and Succeed! It works!

Establish your product in a niche or vertical market. If you are planning or already have product we show you how to pick and/or position your product to SELL!
Get Found on the Internet. We show you how. Watch while thousands of people visit your website.
Manage your customer/email list. We show you how to build, manage and make money from an email list.
Be patient and budget 6-18months. It can happen relatively quickly.. But be prepared to wait.

We also show you how to establish a unique selling proposition that can make you succeed in markets others fail in.

Step 1: Establish your product in a niche or vertical market

If you already have product in a competitive market and you are not yet getting any results maybe you need to specialise. The biggest mistake many companies make is trying to be everything to everybody. Find an obvious void in the marketplace and fill it! Adjust your company or product to meet a specific need and then specialize! We will give you some examples.

OR, if you do not have a product, rather than trying to dominate a huge, general market like pet owners or car owners, narrow your focus to a targeted "niche" like parrot owners, car seat covers or magazines.

Find a Niche Market
Figure out what they want
Develop the product
Offer it to them
Automate the business
Start another one and diversify.

We have individual merchants with over 23 active stores and adding more each day. We know this works because we see it in action each day.

The truth is, running two or three web sites that each target a specific niche market is the EASIEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY on the Internet.

Step 2: Getting found on the Internet

Aside from utilizing real world marketing tools, there are three essential strategies that can be deployed in attracting visitors and sales to your website. These are:

Search Engine Submission, Optimisation and Ranking
Pay for Inclusion Services
Pay Per Click Search Engines

Get Ranked on the Search Engines

More than likely you recently used a search engine to find either product, services or information. 81% of Internet users find their products and services through the likes of Yahoo, Google, NineMSN, AltaVista and others to name a few. So how easy is it going to be to find your site. Lets use Google as an example. Google have over 3 billion files to sort through every time you do a search. Each day they list over 6,500,000 new pages. They have to use over 3000 PC’s to manage this process and add 30 new ones each day! So finding your site amongst all of that is near on impossible. Unless of course you are ranked and when someone searches for your keywords you are listed on the first or second page.

The importance of Search Engine Optimisation and Promotion

When running an online store on the Internet, either selling a product or service, nothing is more important than having a highly ranked site in search engines. The beauty of having your customers find you in search engines is that they are qualified leads. Your potential customers are actually searching for your goods and services

Submission and Optimisation

Submission and Optimisation are two separate elements in the “art” of search engine promotion... “Search engine submission” refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Another term for this is search engine registration. Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist. Think of it like a buying a scratch lotto. Having a ticket doesn’t mean that you will win, but you must have a ticket to have any chance at all. “Search engine optimisation” refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms, especially with crawler-based search engines. Returning to the scratch lotto model, let’s assume there was a way to increase the odds of winning by picking your lotto numbers carefully. Search engine optimisation is like this. It’s making sure that the numbers you select are more likely to win than purchasing a set of numbers at random.

Search Engine Placement and Positioning: Ranking Well

Terms such as “search engine placement,” “search engine positioning” and “search engine ranking” refer to a site actually doing well for particular terms or for a range of terms at search engines. This is the ultimate goal for many people—to get that “top ten” ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Search Engine Marketing and Promotion: The Overall Process

Terms such as “search engine marketing” or “search engine promotion” refer to the overall process of marketing a site on search engines. This includes submission, optimisation, managing paid listings and more. These terms also highlight the fact that doing well with search engines is not just about submitting right, optimising well or getting a good rank for a particular term. It’s about the overall job of improving how your site interacts with search engines, so that the audience you seek can find you

Automatic Submission Software – Beware

Beware of automatic submission software that claims to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. This cheap software plagues the Internet and boasts that you will be listed in all of those search engines around the world. The simple fact of the matter is that over 90% of searches made on the Internet are made in 10 major search engines. So why is this so misleading? Well, the software actually submits to all the “Free for All” lists (FFA’s). Submitting to FFA’s (or Link Farms) used to be done to increase link popularity, therefore increasing your ranking. Search engines used link popularity to improve rankings and some still do. However, the search engine companies believed that people who submitted to FFA’s were “cheating” their rankings. So, links from FFA’s are no longer allowed. As far as Submitting to the major search engines, sure, they do it. However, some of the major search engines now will not lists sites that have used automatic submission software. The main reason is because that software “spams” the search engines (submits too many times)

So what is a Search Engine?

Search engines such as Google comprise of a database that is constructed by “Spiders” or “Robots” that travel the Internet that return and store web site addresses in its database. Because search engines “travel” the Internet, finding web sites, it is possible to get listed without submitting… be prepared for a long wait!

What is a directory?

Directories such as Yahoo! don’t have “spiders” and Robots” to build their database. Instead, Yahoo! uses their staff to manually review and categorise your web site for inclusion in the directory once submitted.

The top ten search engines:

Step 3. Managing your customer and email lists

Email marketing and Customer List

We find that any one of our successful sites is especially good at just one or more of the four steps. Some have spent a lot of effort in building, managing and servicing growing email lists. From slow beginnings they have worked at it and built lists that are worth rivers of gold to their business.

Your most valuable email asset: an in-house, opt-in list

If you are online and you are not building an email list of customers and prospects, you may be making a costly mistake. Why? Because the opportunity to build opt-in lists will become more limited in the future as the volume of email rises. Now is the time to build trust and start an email relationship with your clients and customers. You'll need to make the collection of email addresses a top priority for every contact with customers or prospects.

If we have done our job properly in optimising our website for search engines, the website and online ads will be primary drivers in an acquisition campaign designed to build your list. You must have on each page of your website an email subscription form to capture addresses.

There are also other ways to acquire subscribers. Consider as well offline media, especially direct mail; onsite promotions and events; print and broadcast ads; and out-of-home media, in addition to any other communications channels your company might be making use of. A little creative brainstorming will help you decide which media can best help to build your list with subscribers who are interested in your offering.

Through these media, you deliver your value proposition to your prospects, along with privacy and acceptable use policies that reassure your subscribers that you won't abuse the trust they've placed in you and your company.

Of all the components needed to successfully build an effective email list, the most important component is the value proposition to the consumer. If you are forthright with regard to what you plan to give the consumer, you will build a list of interested prospects. Keep in mind that while you might want to deliver price lists to prospects each week, that's probably not what they want or expect from you. It is more likely you'll have to package sales content in such a way that it entertains and holds interest. In other words, you may be able to get away with disseminating a price list to an email list, as long as the email also contains something of entertainment value consistent with the value proposition.

The best email lists concentrate on quality, not quantity. Its better to have a list of 5,000 prospects who want to hear from you on a regular basis than a list of 20,000 who are only marginally committed. Good email lists deliver as much value to a subscriber as the product or service it promotes. Keep that in mind, and you'll do a fine job of building an effective list.

Step 4. Be patient and budget 6-18 months

It can happen relatively quickly. But be prepared to wait, the majority of successful sites did not happen over night.