The Business Library

Or maybe a good shove?

Seth Godin has posted about the importance of luck in deciding the success of a venture. Now, I agree with what he talks about, and his examples do back up his musings, but luck is just one part of a whole mixing-pot of ingredients that go into starting a startup or pushing a product.

Luck is the only force we have no control over – even if we network as rampantly as possible and create the most elegant marketing materials possible, we may still never break the market open. However, instead of thinking about what could hold us back, maybe we should focus on what we can do to maximise our opportunities, and give luck a better chance to do it’s thing.

We still need to invest resources in our ventures – producing high-quality marketing, products and support will still go a long way to ensuring success when luck fails us somewhat, and if not, then relentlessly improving in these areas surely will.

Adding every conceivable keyword to your advertisement is in every sense of the phrase ‘a waste of time’. You may as well not bother. Really. The upshot of adding vague or unrelated keywords to your advertisement is that you waste the opportunity to target your advertisement to potential customers.

There is a fairly good chance, therefore, that adding bad keywords to your advertisement will do your advertisement more harm than good.

The perfect advertiser does not add unrelated keywords to their advertisements, rather, they research and then carefully select a number of specific keywords that match the particular niche that their business resides in. Adding these type of keywords will enable potential customers to find you quickly, and allow you to target the segment of the viewing audience that are more likely to make a conversion. Additionally, having specific keywords for your business reduces the initial competition for getting listed on the first page of the results brought back for a particular query, therefore giving you a better chance of being selected by the browsing customer.

This is one of the golden rules of good Internet Marketing – to place your business advertising in locations that fit your particular niche perfectly. Search engines will be able to then associate your business with the key words and phrases that people use to find you when looking to make a purchase. Doing this will, in almost every case, increase your Return On Investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns, driving up conversions while reducing the amount you need to spend on marketing.

In summary:

• Choose keywords that are specific to your business
• Avoid general keywords and keyphrases
• Target your paying customers (what would you search for?)

So suppose your all singing, all dancing, brand new e-commerce site is now up and running, all you have left to do is get people to look at it, right?

I have spoken to many business owners that think that to be a successful business, they need to get as many visitors coming to their site as possible – irregardless as to where they come from. Their marketing strategies reflect this, often centering on just getting as many incoming links from other sites rather than actually focusing on targeting the locations where interested customers may congregate.

Advertising copy is the meat of your marketing campaigns – the actual information presented to your customers in order to get them to buy your products rather than a competitor’s.

If you create great advertising copy, your advertising campaigns can only benefit, bringing more custom to your business, however, creating bad copy can waste both time and money – it can even give your company a bad reputation in your target market’s eyes.

What I present here are a few points that I feel are vital to get right in order to produce marketing copy that is effective. These few points can be applied to many areas of marketing, whether it be creating a marketing brochure, a banner advertisement for a website or a point-of-sale display.

Once you have set up your online business, spent time and money promoting your services and products, and finally got a stream of new visitors coming to your site, you’ll need to think about how to convert those visitors into paying customers. I am going to look at methods by which you can improve your conversion rates by discussing some of the reasons that people will not make a purchase when visiting your site.