Survey finds that merchants are losing ‘millions’ despite expectations that online shopping will rise in 2009. Half (50 per cent) of regular online shoppers cancel purchases if preferred method of payment is not available.

London, 6 May 2009… Online merchants are losing business by not offering a sufficiently wide choice of internet payment methods according to a survey commissioned by ClickandBuy, a leading internet payment system. The survey of 2000 online British adults, which was carried out by independent survey firm YouGov, found that half (50 per cent) of those who regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method is not available, they will cancel the purchase.

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Today’s online social media have replaced yesterday’s “schmoozing” at social events to boost your business. Whether you have a physical store or a virtual business, it’s imperative that you venture into social media in order to keep up with the competition.Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are fantastic places to advertise. The best part? Free, free, free! Well, you have to account for your time spent, but once you get the hang of “twittering” or “squidooing” you might find social media to be quite fun!

The entertainment world has certainly made use of social media. Musicians truly had to adapt to digital downloads over the last decade and find ways to boost their income through concert ticket sales and merchandizing.

A great way to do this was to make themselves more available to their fans via social media such as MySpace. By posting recent events, personal video messages and tour journals, their fans are more likely to stay engaged with the band and continue to see concerts, even spending big bucks to buy special “fan only” VIP packages.

The musicians gain valuable information from their fans such as what worked and what didn’t work at the last concert, or what the fans liked most about their recent album. They are “controlling their reputation” by paying close attention to what their fans desire. They get the word out about their concerts and build excitement for CD debuts and tour announcements. They can sell their own merchandise and reap a greater profit because they cut the middle guy out of the picture without sacrificing precious time.

What can social media marketing do for your business?

Personalization of Your Business

Whatever your business is, you will be a step above the competition if your customers like you. If they don’t know you at all (i.e. faceless, nameless owner of online company), you’ve given up a potential for sales. We like to know people. Think about the last time you went out for dinner. Did the owner or manager greet you? Did he or she stop by your table? When owners and managers show interest in their customers, the customers feel special and they are less likely to choose another establishment.

Make sure you upload your picture and perhaps a few photos of your family or your favourite activities. Be frank and creative in your “about me” section. Interact with your viewers using comment sections.

Driving Traffic/ Controlling Your Listings

You can drive more traffic to your website through social media marketing by placing links to your site and others using the bookmark/favourite function. Now, some sites such as Facebook have automatic “no-follow” links as a response to spammers, but these still can work to your advantage if you continue to grow your friends list and upload links (with keywords of course) as often as possible. Some sites have “do-follow” links and these will convert to click-throughs instantly.

Controlling your listings becomes possible without the need for multiple company websites. When you type in relevant searches and your business pops up on page one, that’s fantastic, but it’s not as good as it gets. Using social media can boost your chances of receiving more listings on the search engine page and eliminate some of the choice that your potential customers have. Instead of competing with several other listings on page one, you may have five of your own listings on the same page!

Controlling Your Online Reputation

By putting more information about your company or services, you have a bigger influence on what will be said about your company. You begin branding your name and getting the word out. It may be frightening to think that you may receive negative comments, but those comments will pop up somewhere, so isn’t it best to be aware of them and control them by addressing the situation?

Keep your content fresh and engaging and be sure to keep up with the comments as much as possible.

Where Do You Get Started?

Some of the more popular sites for social media marketing are:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Flickr
• Mashable
• MyBlogLog
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati

The Value of Website Content

Don’t leave! There’s a reason for the following drivel:

“When writing good web content, you want to make sure that the web content is fantastic because only good web content will keep your customers coming back for more web content.”

Obviously, boring, uninformative, keyword stuffed FLUFF! Gone are the days when you can pay someone a few pounds or dollars to write content that will up your search engine rankings. Instead, you need to make sure that either you or the person writing your web content is well skilled and capable of providing original, informative and engaging content.

One of the main reasons for this has to do with being tech savvy. The other, is one of the oldest business rules of all.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Users were frustrated with search results that often yielded page after page of the same poor content. Boolean searching was not well understood, and the search engine results were often not what the user was trying to find.

Google began using latent semantic indexing (LSI) to rank listings as a means to eliminate this problem. Rather than relying on repetition of a keyword that is recognized via mechanical formulas, LSI takes into account what the user really desires. In this way, the content of the page is ranked rather than merely the keyword.

Keywords are still important and need to appear in the content, but more importantly is whether other related “theme” words will also appear. For instance, if you had a diet supplement company and you were marketing a weight loss pill, good content would cover the weight loss pill AND other natural topics regarding weight loss such as diet, exercise, fat burning, muscle building and so on. These are in essence, your theme words.

However, you don’t need to focus on that either. The point is to be natural in your writing. Go back to the basics of writing an informative article in a creative, engaging, fun sort of way (this is the internet after all, not a textbook) and you have a better chance of being ranked higher AND winning a customer by providing them with what they wanted in the first place.

Building Trust

You simply cannot build a business, virtual or otherwise, if your customers do not trust you. This is the oldest adage in the book concerning building your business. How does this apply to content? Let’s go back to the diet supplement.

If a user clicks to your site hoping to find out information about a diet supplement and what they find is blaring, blinding “buy me!” “the best brand” “brand name” all over the page, then they will likely click out. Users are savvy. They know you want to sell them something and that you will claim that your product is the best and at the best price etc.

Give them what the really want. What is your supplement, how does it work, why does it work, why is it better than Brand X, and most importantly, appeal to user psychology and address common dieting/weight loss issues.

Personalize the Information

As you build your content, build trust by thinking more about what you have to offer and “speaking” to your customers with the anticipation of satisfying their needs. Once you drop the obvious sales jargon and truly let them know about your fantastic products, you have a much better chance of acquiring sales.

By writing web content that actually informs your potential customer, you’ve already begun to build trust prior to any lead generating tools such as free ebooks or newsletters because you’ve just given them something of value: information; and with that gain, they automatically have a better perceived value of your company in general.

SEO Copywriting can help you achieve high search engine rankings while providing original and interesting content for your users. Talk to E-Strategy about SEO Copywriting today.

You’ve formed your business and set up your website, what’s next? Well, if you had a physical store, the natural thing would be to launch your marketing campaign and get the word out. You might take an ad out in the local newspaper, send out fliers to local neighborhoods, or use radio or television to advertise. You hopefully chose a good location and great signage. The point of course to marketing, locale and proper signs is so that people will find your store.You have to do the same thing with your website by using internet marketing strategies or sadly, you’ll only have visitors that you’ve physically told via a conversation, email campaign or traditional paper advertising. If your rely on these types of strategies for marketing your website, you are missing out on an entire GLOBE of potential customers!

Search Engine Optimization is marketing that utilizes keywords in combination with great content to get the search engines to recognize your website and rank you high on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines. It’s just as imperative for the success of your business website as it is to remember to change the sign to open during business hours for a physical store.

Designing and setting up websites is almost becoming a hobby of sorts and there are plenty of small businesses taking the time to build a website that is mainly used for customers that hear about them through physical advertising. Though this can be handy for the salesperson that’s made a phone contact and is able to direct the person to a website that shows the store’s product, the store is missing out on a huge marketing potential that is already set up. It’s akin to having fliers printed up only to be handed to customers that come through the door.

Search Engine Optimization is also a relatively fixed cost versus pay-per-click advertising. Whereas Search Engine Optimization is paid for up front at a fixed cost (the cost of the content) and maintained at a fixed cost (continued, fresh, original content), pay-per-click is a variable cost forever and always. There may be days when dozens click through and days where hundreds click through with little or no guarantee that the person will make purchase. (This leads us to another very important point, stay tuned!)

In addition, pay-per-click advertising for highly competitive keywords can get terribly expensive. This tends to happen often in sectors such as finance and legal because the potential customer who clicks through is likely to pay big bucks IF they decide to use the company. And as I alluded to a moment ago, there are no guarantees.

How do you guarantee a purchase through Search Engine Optimization? Well, you cannot; however, you can improve your odds of conversion greatly by narrowing your target audience through Search Engine Optimization. People are searching for YOU! If you’ve run a good Search Engine Optimization campaign, your content has reached the top of rankings for people who already have a desire for a product or service such as yours.

Pay per click advertising is not the same. These ads show up on the listings pages with some correlation to the search, but they are for a much broader audience. For this reason, many pay per clicks are “curiosity clicks” whereby the visitors usually do not hang around.

It’s sort of like wandering into a shop while on another errand. The shop owner might get lucky, but chances are, you’re only window shopping. Now, what if you had to pay the “door company” every time somebody came in to browse? A bit risky.

Business is changing. It is no longer enough to have a glossy advertising campaign and hope that your message gets through. The relentless growth of the Internet as a business tool has meant that any company that does not have an online presence is not going to do business. With a recession affecting everyone across the globe, a strong online name is essential for any business to survive in the modern global marketplace. This is why search engine optimisation (SEO) is so vital to every business.

To produce effective SEO, a business has to consider two audiences; the human ‘visitors’ to the website and the search engine’s ‘bots’, who scan billions of Internet pages and rank them according to set criteria. For a business to have an effective Internet presence, they have to produce a website that interests both of these visitors. The ‘bots’ select pages that match their criteria for relevance to particular keywords used in searches – for example, the phrase ‘SEO’ or ‘search engine optimisation’ typed by a human visitor to Google. The pages that match the specific phrase or keywords used are then listed according to relevance. Those sites listed on the first page of the search results are the ones that are most likely to get the human visitors clicking through to them. Those that fall further down the listings – even on the second or third pages – are less likely to see any visitors at all.

And therein likes your second important consideration – the human factor. If your site isn’t interesting or relevant to the subject or product that your potential customers are looking for, you will find that your visitors quickly ‘bounce’ from your site and onto your rivals. Not only does your website have to catch the attention of the ‘bots’; it has to catch the attention of your visitors as well. Search engine optimisation doesn’t just take into account what the search engines are looking for. It also encompasses a wide range of other features such as the content, links to other relevant sites, how often the site is updated and many other vital components of an overall marketing strategy. Without an effective website, your business is not going to succeed in a global marketplace.

If you are running a business and want to maximize your exposure on the Internet, search engine optimisation is something that has to be included in your business plan. As competition becomes more fierce, the Internet is proving to be the most important ‘shop window’ for any business, regardless of size. By improving your SEO you can make sure that as many people as possible are looking at your own shop window and, by incorporating user-friendly interfaces such as easy to use shopping cards, secure online buying facilities and interesting information, the conversion from visits into sales can be much higher.

Search engine optimisation ensures that your business gets the maximum amount of exposure on the Internet and doesn’t necessarily have to cost the earth. Good SEO companies are becoming the new golden boys of marketing. They use a combination of experienced designers, copywriters, marketing strategy experts and your own input to produce a website for your business that moves you up the search engine rankings and puts you firmly in the spotlight on the first pages of the major search engines. Without search engine optimisation, you may find your Internet site languishing in the backwaters of Google or ignored on Yahoo! by hundreds or even thousands of potential customers. And that doesn’t make good business sense. Search engine optimisation is crucial to 21st century business and essential if you want to make an impact in the global marketplace.

Google’s Book Search service for mobile phones was launched today (10th February) and is set to challenge Amazon’s Kindle device. Classic novels by the likes of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle will be amongst the many authors within the Book Service.

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Cadburys recently launched their Bertie Bassett’s campaign to unveil Sheffield’s oldest bachelor’s girlfriend – called Betty Basset. As part of their campaign to revive sales in Liquorice Allsorts, the company employed YouTube and Facebook to help launch the campaign.

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Link building is the process of generating and improving both the quality and quantity of online traffic to your website. The aim of link building is to increase its ‘rank’ within search engines, so that your website is one of the first seen when a searcher keys in words that are pertinent to your service or product.

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A report by Experian in its “Engaging Online with Empowered Customer” out earlier this week, stated that online fashion retailers have seen a 31% increased in traffic over the last twelve months; however, it did point out that many of these shops were not fully embracing the opportunities offered by online sales and e-commerce

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Leading high street retailers made the unprecedented decision to begin sales and start slashing their prices as early as November 2008 for the anticipated and much needed Christmas rush.

Companies such as Marks and Spencers launched one-day spectaculars on the high street and online in the hope of making up those sales figures. But is this a sustainable long term strategy?

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