What then is attributing to this increase in value? This is what I believe is the major shift in attitudes. When the internet began and websites first came online, they were more brochure-like, a one-way monologue with their users. With the advent of social media like twitter, facebook, and youtube, this has turned into a dialog as it’s given users a voice to not just one or two people, but with thousands. Sites like Groupon and LivingSocial have successfully monetized on this ‘dialog transformation’. With the advent of blogs, companies are no longer just an online brochure in the business of telling and selling. They are now in the business of building relationships. A blog has profound implications that benefit a business:

• Helps build trust, credibility, and good will.
• The more you give, the more you can expect to get.
• The increased amount of blog pages directly increases the amount of inbound links.

The Cost Benefit

Hubspot touted some interesting figures after performing a survey on costs-per-lead on organizations that focus on inbound leads (seo, blogging, twitter, facebook, etc) vs organizations that focus on outbound leads (direct mail, telemarketing, trade shows). The survey showed that the cost per lead for inbound leads was 60% less than outbound leads. This number was further rationalized by secondary data on the methods of inbound leads:

• Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors.
• 57% of businesses have acquired customers through their company blog.
• 42% of companies have acquired a customer through Twitter.
• 2/3 of marketers say their company blog is “critical” or “important” to their business
• The number of marketers who report that Facebook is “critical” or “important” to their business is 83%.
• 67% of B2C companies and 41% of B2B companies have acquired customers through FaceBook.
• 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend the brands they follow.

So, in short, we can see the power of community-based marketing in terms of cost-savings and growth. It does not make sense to send an advertising message to the many in hopes of persuading the few.

Adapt or Perish

The online world is changing rapidly. This has a direct implication to your business model. Start thinking about your business as a community-driven entity. Communicate and learn what your customers want. We all know that it’s easier said than done sometimes, but we also know that it is critical. If you’re not doing this now, you need to change. You may not like change, but you’ll like irrelevancy even less.

I recently came across an interesting article from the owner of a portland cafe called Posie’s and how Groupon almost bankrupted her business.

The coffee shop owner, Jessie Burke, had heard of Groupon through a friend and decided to speak with a rep about how to promote an offer to attract new business. The rep suggested a general discount for the greatest exposure and most sales. They agreed upon a price of $6 for $13 worth of credit because, as the rep stated, people really respond to deals over 50%. What was a surprise to her was that Groupon sought to keep the entire $6. After some negotiation, they agreen on a 50/50 split where Groupon would get $3 and Posie’s would get $3. However, the $3 for Groupon was pure profit. Selling $13 of credit for a return of $3 was not sustainable because their markup was in place to cover their other costs like staff, rent, utilities, etc.

The Groupon promotion was a smashing success with over 1,000 of these discounts sold. But this success amounted to disastrous losses for Posie’s.

After three months of Groupons coming through the door, I started to see the results really hurting us financially. There came a time when we literally couldn’t not make payroll because at that point in time we had lost nearly $8,000 with our Groupon campaign. We literally had to take $8,000 out of our personal savings to cover payroll and rent that month. It was sickening, especially after our sales had been rising.

It’s not that Groupon was selling a bill of goods to Mrs. Burke. Their promise is to bring new customers for their clients by using their ever-increasing popularity. But that’s where it stops. They do not know your business and what makes it tick. Groupon’s business model is extremely clever and it’s for that reason that it has become one of the fastest growing sites on the internet. But the problem with the model itself isn’t about making money for Groupon, it’s about making money for Groupon’s clients. Groupon has no shared risk. And it’s that problem that got Josie’s in such a position.

There are a couple lessons that can be learned in this case. First, customers that are lured to your business by a general discount may not be interested in what you love about your business. They get something they think is cheap and you quite possibly operate at a loss. Second, focus on building happy, repeat customers rather than growth at any cost.

There could be a great benefit from the exposure of a Groupon event for your business, but it’s important to clearly research what sort of campaign will work for you. If we were to look at the coffee shop as an example, another solution might have been to offer a discount on a specific type of high-end bag of coffee instead of an across-the-board discount. This might have had a better effect as it would have limited the offer to those that knew what sort of deal they were getting on the coffee. And those particular people would be the ones that could more easily be turned into repeat customers.

Just remember that you know your business and your customers better than any fancy advertising rep with the next great marketing pitch ever could. As for Josie’s, they’re still around. Their saving grace was that $13 credit’s expiration date.

I’ve been telling my clients that content is king for quite sometime now. It’s an old cliche that I heard back in the days from those big ad agency authority figures when search engine optimization was just a baby. While I still do agree to the basic concept of this mantra, I’ve begun to question that authority, at least in an e-commerce frame of mind.

There’s no question that the rise in popularity of blogs and social sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Digg and others have gotten users to spend more time reading online than ever. But how long do you spend shopping online? Ok, first let me state that I’m a guy and most guys don’t tend to shop quite as long as women, so I may not be the most reliable source. My shopping online consists of looking at a few sites to compare prices and products. The whole experience can take as little as 5 min, up to an hour if it’s a bigger ticket item. It’s important that I find a place that meets all my shopping needs so that I can move on with the rest of my day. And this is where the Community comes in.

Community – A Challenge to the Throne

When I visit an online store, I’m looking for a great online experience. I want a seamless, easy to navigate site that provides the right amount of information for me. Ratings and reviews from customers provide, more often than not, an unbiased opinion. An ecommerce shop that stays on top of trends, offers tips and tutorials, and gives a platform for their customers’ voices shows me that these people are professionals that know their business. These sites are not just places to dump content, but rather a growing community that fosters participation and loyalty.

Yes, the role of the ecommerce site is to drive shoppers to the site and make the conversion. But by building a place where shoppers can come to gather information and share their experiences and knowledge, you’ll be building brand recognition that will lead to more repeat sales and greater word-of-mouth.

Content is still very much alive and extremely important. But for the online shopping experience, the community is quickly gathering strength.

So you now have a website and are scratching your head trying to figure out how to get your site listed at the top of the search engines. Although it may seem like a big mystery, there are things you can do for free to help others find your site. Although there is no magic bullet that you can use that will instantly give you top placement (unless you pay for it), here are a few, tried and true tips that you can use.

Utilize your search terms on your pages

One of the best ways to add content to your site is to think like a potential customer. If you were on Google and wanted to find your site, what keywords or phrase would you use to search by? Once you figure out what those are, use them in your site in a natural sounding way. Search spiders look for these keywords and phrases to understand what your site is about.

For example, if you are a hair stylist in San Francisco, say so near the top of your page and repeat it in a sentence somewhere else on the page. If you specialize in women’s hair, say that as well. Something like “I am a hairstylist in San Francisco specializing in women’s hairstyles.” It’s concise and descriptive enough for the search engines to use when analyzing how best to index your site.

One word of caution – don’t overdo it. There are some web publishers that believe that the more keywords they can add to their site and the more they can repeat those keywords, the better. this practice is called ‘keyword stuffing’ and can get you in big trouble with the search engines. If Google feels that a site is practicing in keyword stuffing, it’s very likely that the site will be de-indexed from the search engine. So just do it in a natural way, as if you were describing the page to someone verbally.

Create a blog and add content regularly

A blog is a great way to communicate with your customers. When you write a blog post, you are adding fresh content to your site. This lets search spiders know that the site is updating on a regular basis which they index more over the old and stale stuff. A blog also allows you to build links and gives other sites more opportunity to link to your site, which is another really big plus.

A big question that most often comes up is what to write about. Well, if I’m a hair stylist in San Francisco, I may want to talk about some of the ways to keep your hair looking nice for those windy or wet San Francisco days. Or you may want to talk about some nightmare hairdos you’ve seen that you’ve had to fix. That sort of content can be really popular and people may create links back to those articles. More links means higher google rankings. Also, if you have trouble trying to come up with new content, see what people over at Digg and StumbleUpon are writing about. They are good places for inspiration. For more tips on blog content, read the article “Finding Fresh Content for Your Blog“.

Get those tags added and get them right

There are two highly critical tags that are used by the search engines – the title and description tags. These are also referred to as ‘meta tags’. The title is the name of the particular page. You can see the title at the very top of the browser window. Your title tag should be very brief and very descriptive. A single, short sentence, no more than 60 characters (spaces included) is recommended. The description tag is used as a longer description of the page. This description is not seen on your page specifically. Instead, it is seen on the Search Results pages in Google and other search engines. For example, if you do a search on google, you get a list of results. The top part is the title and that is a link to the web page. The second part is the description of the page. This is what will be used when you include a description in each of your pages. Keep descriptions to no more than 160 characters, including spaces, to guarantee that the entire description will be viewed.

There was a third tag that was big for many years. This is the keywords meta tag. In the very recent past, sites would have to add keywords to the meta data for engines to get an idea of what the site was about. Nowadays, the spiders have become a lot more intelligent, looking at the site as a whole instead of needing to look at keywords. So now, very little is gained, if anything at all, from adding meta keywords to your site.

Use free tools

There are a number of quality, free tools at your disposal. So why not use them? Google.com/webmaster is a great tool and is completely free. You can create and submit a site map which is used to show Google all the pages in your site, use the diagnostic tools to see where possible problem areas might be occurring, and find out how users arrive at your site.

If you have a brick and mortar store, you should add your site to the Google Local Business Center (google.com/local/add). Your business will show up within the first 10 non-advertised spots with a map. It’s really a no-brainer.

Get other sites to link back to you

Once you’ve got your search terms, added your tags, and have started posting to your blog, it’s time to get really serious. A web site’s popularity is critically important to Google. Getting links from authoritative sites gives your site authoritative status. It would be wonderful to get a link from the New York Times or CNN. If you do, Google thinks that you must be important. However, this isn’t always achievable. So start on a smaller scale. Look to sites that are a little bit bigger than you and see if you can get them to link to your site. The key is to get sites that are more popular than your own to link to your site. Getting a ton of links from very small sites doesn’t do as well as getting a few from larger ones.

Another key to this is to get these links without having to link back to them. Google got smart a few years ago on link exchanging – the practice of putting a link on your site from another site and vice versa. They now look at link exchanges as a deal made between two sites to help both their rankings. Because it’s not natural, no credence is given to this arrangement. So yes, this job of getting these inbound links has been made more difficult over the years. But if you are successful, you can really reap the rewards.

Summary

There are a number of ways to build traffic to your site. it doesn’t have to require any money or advertising. It just requires an understanding on some basic fundamentals, persistence, and some trial and error. It doesn’t happen overnight, but putting yourself on the right footing from the get-go will have you traveling in the right direction.