Tag: social
What businesses are succeeding on the internet
by admin on Nov.23, 2009, under General
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What businesses are succeeding on the Net?
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This week we will address the most basic question any
Internet business owner will have to answer at one point or
another…”what should I sell?”.
After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks
have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially,
a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet.
Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful
place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of e-commerce
wasn’t all smoke and mirrors, four dot-coms recently
reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the
Internet’s publicly held moneymakers includes eBay Inc.,
Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc.,
Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc.
Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines
Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too.
In 2001, the last full year where numbers are available, the
Department of Commerce broke out e-commerce sales versus
total U.S retail sales which revealed the $3.16 trillion
retail industry saw a total of $37.7 billion in sales take
place online — comprising 1.2 percent of the total. This
year e-commerce is tracking about the same. Through the
third quarter, the last full quarter where numbers are
available, total retail sales were $856 billion versus $11
billion in e-commerce, about a 1.3 percent share.
There were big gains made in Home and Garden, a 78 percent
increase; Furniture and Appliances, a 75 percent increase;
and Toy shopping online with a 61 percent increase in the
year 2002. There is no doubt that online shopping is
growing.
Nielsen//NetRatings found that more than 35.5 million U.S.
Internet users made shopping trips to virtual department
store sites during the week ending November 3, 2002 – that’s
a 20 percent increase from the week ending October 20 and
roughly 14 million more than almost the same time period in
2001.
There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay
for valuable content online. There are many reasons for
this. First, only a few websites operated by big companies
can afford to provide valuable content without being
compensated. The rest of us can’t be so generous. And trying
to recapture our expenses by selling advertising on our
websites has failed to pay the bills. Online advertising and
click-through rates are on the decline.
Second, many people are now more than willing to pay to
receive quality services and products even if they were
offered for free earlier. Several paid content websites have
already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer
values his/her time as also the quality of information or
service and is willing to pay for it.
However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some
products may be better suited for online sales than others;
others simply will not work on this new commercial medium.
According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular
online purchases are computer related products (40%), books
(20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%),
subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).
Businesses offering paid services have also prospered
enormously. The top three categories (Business
Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and
Personals/Dating) accounted for 62% of all paid content
revenues in the first three quarters of 2002. The total
market for paid online content in the U.S. grew to $361.4
million for the quarter, a 14 percent gain over the previous
quarter and a 105.3 percent gain over Q3 2001. An
interesting statistic put forward by this report is that 85%
of money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to
the top 50 sites in most of the categories.
The graph below (Top 3 Content Categories) is indicative of
this change.
In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business
sites – especially finance and investment rank the highest.
In other words, users are more likely to spend longer time
surfing through a business website compared to other
categories. This study was conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings.
The table below shows the most addictive web categories for
2002.
Category Time per person(hr:min:sec) Audience
Business – Finance and Investment 0:21:33 51,586
General News 0:15:47 64,822
Entertainment 0:14:32 45,922
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings
According to the above figures a person spends about 22
minutes on a finance website on an average.
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Should you be selling a product or a service?
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The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain,
educate and research. It is thus no wonder that
nonperishable, information-intensive products – including
computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics,
magazine subscriptions – are the most popular online
products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based
sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range
of topics, have been sprouting all over the Internet.
Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and
investments have successfully translated themselves to the
Internet.
Unique services such as Online driving schools have been
prospering. Some states in the US have set up online payment
sites for Government services. Residents of a state can log
on to a common site to pay all bills and other expenses,
such as parking tickets to the local/County courts.
However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the
Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face
selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give
lots of preliminary information that’s useful in setting the
scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place
offline – i.e., not on the Internet.
Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the
Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best
on the Internet are those that take advantage of the
convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the
primary reason why consumers flock to the Internet in the
first place. People can shop any hour of the day at any
site. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales
clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.
Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract
online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not
try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus,
few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with
daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare
cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can
and do sell on the Net.
Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well
on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products
that could be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping
costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products
and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high
shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages people
from buying online more than any other single reason. An
Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online
shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too
high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with
credit cards being stolen.
As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages
as well as disadvantages of selling either products or
services. However, in the recent past, online services have
known to flourish. Nevertheless, if you chose to sell
products you need to rethink your product offering if the
total costs of the product and the shipping are higher than
what is offered elsewhere.
Take some time to evaluate your products or services. There
is a growing market of potential customers on the Internet,
you just need to offer the products and services they are
looking for.
For Your Success!
Brian Simpson
AlbaIM Social Network
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AlbaIM Social Network for Internet Marketers,
Entreprenuers and Online Business Owners
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Improve your Business Placement with Internet Marketing
by admin on Aug.25, 2009, under General
Starting a business today is indeed a challenge. With the current economic situation, people are extremely careful with spending their money. They start to weigh which expenses are necessary and which ones are not. This makes starting up a business and sustaining its survival later on somehow difficult.
Regardless if the items or services sold are important or not, the key is to persuade the target market to purchase it. How does one do that? There are two answers to the question: conventional marketing and Internet marketing.
Of course, marketing the product and service will branch out other questions. The first question is how to do it while the second question is how much will it cost.
Conventionally, marketing uses advertising tools. These advertising tools make use of three major media. Print medium uses printed advertisements placed in materials such as magazines and newspapers. Radio medium, on the other hand, are audio clips ranging from 10-15 seconds played on selected time slots usually in between segments of a program. This is the same for television medium. The difference is that there are visuals in a television advertisement. The length of the advertisements is also longer and can range from 30-60 seconds.
The cost of the production and placement of advertisements in this medium is a problem. Producing the advertisement, especially the ones to be shown in the television, will definitely include a great amount of money. The price for the placement and positioning is another story. The better the placement means the higher the price. The question goes again to starting businesses. Will marketing using conventional media be practical?
If conventional marketing may not sound like a good idea, Internet marketing is the next option. With rapidly advancing technology, there’s no wonder that entrepreneurs and marketers have maximized the use of the Internet by using it as a new medium. Search engine marketing and social media marketing are just a few of marketing strategies used in the World Wide Web.
Search engine marketing uses search engine optimization. This means creating media mileage by releasing articles that are optimized for search using search engines. Keywords are used to make the article ready for search. When the contents are search engine optimized, it means that there are higher page rankings. Once the target market searches the Internet using keywords and search engines, the page with high rankings appear on the top of the list. A high Google search engine ranking means that more people can visit the site set up for the business.
In the method Social media marketing, knowledge about the product is disseminated through the use of social marketing sites such as Twitter. The advantage if using this method is that many people are hooked up in visiting sites like this. This makes it a perfect ground for marketing as there are millions of eye balls to be persuaded to avail of the services offered.
With Internet marketing, the chances of reaching the target market are increased since almost everyone today has an access to the internet. The best news is that costs for Internet marketing methods are not as high as conventional marketing methods.
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