Social Web Tips

When going online, few people give much thought to all the aspects of running an online business. But in order to be among the 5% of the businesses that still run after their first year, you need to keep a few things in mind.

Know your target market

In order to create something that people would love to buy and use, you need to know your target market. To do this, you can:

• be an expert in your industry
• read websites in the industry, such as blogs, forums, social sites, etc
• ask your friends about your product idea, what they think, what they would suggest, etc
• ask various Internet marketing experts (there are plenty of blogs and forums out there) about your idea: they usually see a winner and can advise you how to improve your idea and approach
• ask your industry expert friends

If your idea is hard to duplicate, you can share it with other people, especially, if you have everything necessary for the start available. If not, it may be not a good idea to share it with the experts.

But one of the signs that the idea is worth implementing is if you hear people saying ‘I want this, but I can’t find it anywhere’ or “Wouldn’t it be cool, if..”. If you see plenty of such mentions related to your idea on the forums, blogs, then you are on the right track.

Ultimately, it boils down knowing the needs and values that run the people and what they need at some point of time.

Provide value to the people

Knowing the needs and values of the people is absolutely necessary to provide value to them. As people only do or use what is useful for them, you need to provide absolute, astounding and astonishing value for them to pick up your product and share it among their friends.

Offer an easy to use product

One of the most precious things on the planet, becides life, is time. You can’t control how fast your time runs: you can only control what you do with it. That’s why people also enjoy things they can use easily and that work fast.

• if you are creating a web application, ensure that it is easy to use and that it runs super fast
• if you create a piece of software, make sure a user has to click the least amount of times to do a task
• if you have a website, make sure it is usable and that you have optimized its speed significantly
• if you have an e-book, apart from providing the PDF format, provide other formats, reading applications for which load faster than Adobe reader (such as .doc, .rtf, .html, custom e-book software, etc)
• if it is a tangible product, only keep the most necessary functions with the least amount of controls (iPod is a perfect example of this)

Becides providing value to your users/visitors/readers, you need to value their time and efforts. That’s why you need to provide excellent experience for them by offering a useful and easy to use product.

Start with a niche

Most products can be used in many industries, markets and niches. But in those markets, there are many other products competing for the same audience. To start well, you need to start with a very tight niche with little competition.

In this case, you’ll be able to

• get noticed easier
• test your product on a smaller bunch of real people
• see whether your product is a success
• spend relatively little before clearly seeing where to go next
• improve your product before going large scale
• have experience, practice and capability of expanding to a larger market
• will learn to adopt to the market (the real people, your customers) easily

All of the above will get you prepared to the future life of your product and company. It’ll teach you how to live in the current market and progress.

Expand to a related niche

Once you have conquered a small niche and have proven that your product is a success, you can expand. But you need to expand smart to keep the image you have earned within your small niche. That’s why you can expand to a market, related to your first one.

For example, if you were producing umbrellas for the business ladies, you can expand to the mens business umbrellas market.

If you want, you may not expand, but you’ll need to increase the quality of your product, create more offers for your niche and try to improve your business from the inside to create a stable company.

Keep working and providing value

Once the success comes, you still need to keep providing value to your customers, because that’s what have earned you their attention. If you increase too quickly, you may lose the product quality and the customers.

Focus on the benefits

Since people need value, you need to focus on explaining why your product is useful for them: show them why they need to spend their time, efforts and money to use your product.

Use call to action in marketing

If you want your target audience to take action, you need to explicitly use call to action in marketing. This way, you will not only get a much higher conversion rate and ROI in your marketing (be it offline or online, especially on landing pages), but will help you get a share of your customers’ minds, if you also focus on the benefits.

Embrace your audience

Nowadays, the web is getting more and more active and interactive. You not only just have to socialize on blogs and forums to know what your audience wants, but you want to be a part of the conversation for people to talk about you.

You can always add a social aspect to your marketing, such as:

• make it easy to share your product or news about it
• ask people to share
• take part in the conversations on the Web: on your and other related blogs, forums, social sites
• have your own blog, maintained by people within the company, who know everything about your product and audience
• create viral content, tools, videos, audios: anything to capture the interest of the people, who share actively online
• create a space for your customers to interact with your product/company and help you improve it (like Dell’s IdeaStorm)
• always be receptive and pay plenty of attention to your customers, both online and offline
• watch your online reputation online and fix the issues as fast as you can
• reward active participants in your community with free gifts and cool gadgets (even if not produced by your company)
• if possible, run local meeting events of your customers, where they can talk, share ideas (you can also use this opportunity to brainstorm with your customers on what they need most in your product and how to improve it, your site and promotion)

If you become a part of the community, your product will also become a part of the peoples’ lives, and that’s what one of your marketing goals is.

Rounding up part I

Of course, savvy Internet marketing can’t be put on one page. While the above rules significantly increase your chances for success online, you may want to subscribe to this blog’s feed to stay updated with more tips on successful Internet marketing.

P.S. A fellow forum member of mine is trying to win a MyBlogLog contest. So if you have time, please join his community (the link is on the top-right) and take part in his $1.5k giveaway contest. Thanks.

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The following is a rant. And if you’ve caught on to anything about me on this site, you’ll know that it’s not about me. But let’s call it an after-thought to something that I have had experience with.

A short video that takes you through the easy proceedure of registering a private domain name.
Be warned, I take to pieces one popular domain registrar that you should avoid like the plague. (…)

Adwords Learning Center
If you want to get stuck under the hood of Google Adwords, your best staring point is the Google Adwords Learning Center. (…)

Now that you've setup your wordpress blog, it would be nice to figure out just how to use it. (…)

While it is common, nowadays, to whine how Google shouldn’t tell people how to make money with their websites (like selling links), this time Microsoft has done the same.

Lately, it’s been noticed that Live.com spams the referrer logs of the websites, claiming that it is only about quality check.

But since they check it from only a small range of IP addresses, this can be noticed (which has been by plenty of people) and adjusted to, if someone is already doing cloaking. This is a really small job for black hats, really.

So what is really behind the scheme? Honestly, I don’t know.

But for me, it screws my stats, makes me use Google Analytics instead of AwStats to see the top referrer websites and keywords. Why does Microsoft force me to use Google? I don’t know, maybe thousands of employees didn’t think much about it.

How to see if you have it, too:

Technically, what I see is a lot of searches for single-phrase words, related to my site, such as ‘website’, ‘links’ and so on and they occupy top spots in the keyphrase stats. Obviously, I don’t have such rankings, so they are fake.

Really, instead of making me a happy website owner, they add tar in my jar of honey.

If you decide to blog the IPs, you will be out of the Live index. Go figure. Quote from MSNguy from WMW:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

But what’s more, Live botting and crawling increases AdSense impressions, thus lowering the income from running AdSense on your website(s). And in Michael’s and in my opinion, intefering with someone’s income is unacceptable.

Is Microsoft trying to ruin the AdSense game for Google so others would switch to other contextual advertising schemes? Now that’d be a plot. And a very likely one, even though not the one admitted officially (read Michael’s post for more explanation).

• Will Microsoft keep going with the sneaky tactic and not explain everything to the webmasters?
• Shall we block Live.com bots fom our websites?
• What happens next?

We shall see the answers to these questions soon, I guess.

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Back in the days, Web 2.0 was defined as a new medium that allows people to share things. Blogs and social sites were Web 2.0 and forums and personal sites were 1.0.

State of the Web and the forums

In a Cre8asite Forums thread, a question is raised about the state of the Web and where forums find themselves in it.

And while this is a very good question, it got me thinking. What makes a forum and what makes a social site?

While a forum is open two way communication (compared to one way blogging or social sites, where members can’t write anything unless someone [blog or article author] has already written on the topic), surely there are other differences between forums and the social sites?

How are forums, blogs and social sites different?

In my opinion, the difference is the people and how people interact there.

The difference between Cre8asite Forums and Digital Point forums is the people. They make one forum the most populated and polluted one and the other the most tactful and thoughtful. And, ultimately, the people that post there give the newcomers a chance to make their choice, whether they want to stay there or not.

If we take social sites into account, people there can:

• learn what other people think on the topic
• discuss it with them
• share things of common interests

While this relation isn’t as strong as on the forum or via email, it still allows people to feel alive and useful and spend their time doing something more interesting, than staring at an empty ceiling (or working ).

How forums, blogs and social sites are different?

Often, a question is raised about the difference between forums, blogs and social sites. People start naming technologies, such as RSS, AJAX, comments, etc, but no one really mentions the people themselves.

Since all of the sites offer various kinds of communications, various types of people are attracted there (or at least for various reasons).

• If you want to ask a question from a knowledgeable community, you go to a forum (or email a blogger, which is harder to do, though).
• If you want to read an opinion on something, you go to your favorite blogs in your RSS reader or to Digg.
• If you want to learn the latest news in your field, you go to your social site, or Digg, if you are into technology.

Alternatively, on any of them, you interact with different people in a different way, thus making your experience unique and uninterchangable.

Why Sphinn is the best of them all

All in all, I think that’s why the launch of Sphinn for the Web building community means a lot (Slashdot tried, but isn’t as close, IMHO). Sphinn (or “Spin”) has it all:

• plenty of knowledgeable people
• a chance to start a discussion without an URL to link to
• post comments and discuss the topic, either in a discussion or some post

Sadly, because the discussion isn’t very actively encouraged there - or maybe because the people don’t participate them eagerly, Sphinn hasn’t yet become The place to go to discuss things. But it’s getting there.

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In business, you may often want to offer a “competitive” price in order to win a client. But what happens when you do get him?

Do you work as hard as you’d be working for a better pay?
Do you enjoy working as cheap labour?

In essence, I’d think that you should charge yourself fairly, because:

1. you’ll actually be doing what you can, not what you have to just to match the price
2. you’ll enjoy the work (it should be #1, but its second to what the customer gets)
3. you’ll keep the industry pricing up, allowing others to quote themselves higher, thus benefiting everyone, including your rivals and prospect customers

Naturally, you’ll need to actually do something useful and productive to match the price, but that’s the whole point. You should charge high enough to match the value you provide, but not high enough to cheat your customers.

And what’s more (bonus reason), if you do all you can for as much as you reasonably cost, your clients should be getting a much more efficient work, which should make them happier and more loyal customers. Who doesn’t want to have loyal customers?

More things to read:

• Do you compete on the price or the value?
• The perception of value and the decision to buy
• How to get paid what you want

P.S. No, I am not abandoning the blog nor changing format largely. I’ve been busy, but should be back to solid posting soon (along with posting more thoughts than I have been). Stay tuned.

Cheers.

P.P.S. I am sure someone has written about this topic before. Could you please mention the links to posts on the same topic in the comments or via yuri at improvetheweb.com? I’ll mention them in this post. Thanks.

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