So, you have become the proud owner of the online store. Well, I wish you achieve your online business objectives. Certainly, you must have worked really hard, invested a lot of money, and took real pain in planning, designing and developing your e-commerce website. Here, I would like to ask you a few questions which are: “Are you sure your online store will enjoy web traffic that can fulfill your business objectives and goals?,” “Do you think your e-commerce website or online store would get higher ranking from search engines?” and “Have you integrated your marketing message in this online store and is it perfectly made to get this message across?”

Well, it is not enough to have an online store or e-commerce website made. In this age of fierce competition, online marketers have to leverage the online marketing strategies available to promote their business and generate leads. Such strategies require hard efforts from the marketers and are really crucial. If you do not implement online marketing strategies then you won’t enjoy web traffic, cannot generate leads and moreover your website will be lost in this virtual world of Web.

Following common online marketing strategies must be used to market your products or services over internet and attract web audiences.

1. E-Mail Marketing –
   Very important and still a gem for marketers. E-mail marketing gives you a platform to get in touch with your target audience and customers. It helps two way communication between you and your clients or prospects. All you need to do this build a list of e-mail ids of your visitors and send them, newsletters, information about offers, schemes and events on a regular basis. E-mail marketing is a direct form of marketing and connects you well with your audience.
2. Search Engine Optimisation –
   Importance of SEO or search engine optimisation can never be ignored. SEO is a long term process and help your website get higher search engine rankings. Today, almost 80 percent of web audience refers search engines to find out a website that serve information, products or services they are looking for. If your website is search engine friendly then it will certainly get good traffic volume which you can convert to achieve your business goal.
3. Pay Per Click Management –
   After you successfully launched your online retail store, the first online strategy that you can utilize to market your store is PPC or Pay Per Click. It is an exclusive advertising model or a type of paid search marketing. It is really cost-effective and offer promising results quickly. In PPC, a marketer has to pay only for the clicks that online visitors make to get redirected to your website from search engines.
4. Banner Advertising –
   It is a type of display advertising on internet. The primary idea behind banner advertising is same i.e. to get a stream of web traffic flowing into your website. Marketers advertise with the banner ads of their website on popular websites. The idea is to get your information or marketing message exposed to a lot of online visitors and attract them to visit your store and convince them to buy your products or services.
5. Social Media Optimisation –
   In the present web scenario, the best way to market your business online is social media optimisation. Today, the trend is social networking through several websites. Social media optimisation (SMO) is almost no cost way to advertise or market your business and build a solid customer base. You can reach masses and enhance your online presence and brand reputation. Also called as Social media marketing (SMM), SMO gives you an opportunity to interact with web audience and let them form opinions about your store or business. It helps you create buzz.
6. Video Marketing –
   Sometimes words fail to paint pictures and impress your target audience or your online visitors just browse through your website and do not read content. In such condition, you have only a few minutes to impress your audience and get your marketing message across. To do this video marketing serves as the best online marketing strategy available. Simple, you can upload a video of your product or message to your website. Web audiences, usually watch videos and understand what you want to express. It is an impressive way to address your online visitors personally and convert them.
7. Online Press Release –
   Just like traditional press releases, online press releases help you share your news / views, opinion or information about events, products, services, etc. with online visitors. Press releases help you generate traffic to your website which gets redirected from PR directories or websites. Online press releases help you build and maintain strong public relations.
8. Blogging –
   Blogging is not a new online marketing strategy. However, it could help you tremendously with your marketing objectives. Blogging help you share your views, information or news with web audience. It gives you a platform to interact with them directly. By blogging you can inspire online visitors to participate in online discussions and provide you an opportunity to find out what your web audience thinks about your products or business.
9. Viral Marketing –
   Viral marketing is nothing but a new form of traditional word of mouth advertising. Here marketer can create a buzz around his website, products or services and business. Viral marketing give opportunity to marketers to improve their brand awareness. It creates a buzz and inspires audiences to share your marketing message with their friends, family or relatives on social networks and through other mediums. It is very effective medium but requires close monitoring otherwise you may end up with ruining your brand image.
10. Web Analytics –
    It is not an online marketing strategy as such but it is the back bone of all your online marketing efforts. The best advantage of marketing your business online is that you can track the performance of your campaigns and make necessary changes as desired. Web analytics help you understand visitors’ behavior, their responses towards your marketing efforts. Web analytics can measure the effectiveness of any of your online marketing campaign.

So, once again I would like you to congratulate for your online store and remind you to use online marketing strategies discussed above to be successful in all your endeavors.

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Since this final article focuses on the importance of design in the usability of ecommerce websites, let’s get back to the basics of design. To begin with, design has been defined as ‘the purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details’. To put it simply, design in relation to websites is an amalgamation of appearance and usability. Design more often than not defines the user experience and is important to the functionality of a product, especially when everything depends on how a product is perceived and used.
Thus in an E-commerce website, a well-defined website design will influence how the user perceives your website and spur their interest to further explore it.  

Strategic image placement

While shopping in the off-line world, you may have noticed how supermarkets create elaborate floor plans to attract your attention and ensure that you browse through all the products in their various aisles. You must do the same for your eCommerce website to attract online shoppers and compel them to browse and purchase products from you.

You can start by creating something like a window display that one would have in an off-line store. All you need to do is to strategically place images of the products you sell, for each of your departments various sections.

Audio-visual product descriptions

The image of your product should be accompanied by audio-visual content that demonstrates how your product is used and displays its features along with the user benefits. Research has proven that online shoppers are extremely video savvy and prefer viewing a product in real time, instead of merely reading the product description. By incorporating product videos on your product page, you can create a potent ecommerce solution.

Create product review and rating sections

Alongside your product image and description, your ecommerce site should also include a customer review and rating section to further augment your sales. When customers are given the liberty to rate and review your product it improves your sites credibility while allowing customers to interact with one another and delivers prospective buyers with unbiased information. Once again studies indicate that ecommerce sites which include customer reviews and ratings increase product sales by well over 25%.

Recommend relevant add-ons

Most online shoppers in the buy-mode are quite literally an easy target to gain you sales, if only you play it right. While browsing, they are most likely to click on the first link that comes their way. Hence it makes great business sense for you to place relevant product suggestions on the product page of every item they browse. For instance, if you sell sportswear, on your product page for trainers, you could suggest add-ons like a nice pair of coordinated track pants or socks to go with it. While this add-on suggestion may involve some extra scripting and require a more elaborately designed website, it is sure to benefit you with additional shopping from your customers.

Create last-minute deals

Now that the customer is heading straight towards making the payment after finalising his order via your shopping cart software’s interface, don’t leave him by himself. Continue to engage him with exciting offers. Create last-minute deals that he would find interesting and therefore difficult to resist. The last-minute deal is an extension of the earlier recommendation offer; however it’s more of an impulse purchase.
All you need to do is offer an affordable item that will again accessorise or add-on to the product that the customer is purchasing, which makes him believe that it is important to add to his shopping cart, especially at the price you are offering it to him for. Most shoppers will buy-in to this last-minute deal offer in the belief that these extra items will not make too much of a difference to the total amount.

Single-page checkout

While an ecommerce website should be visually appealing, it must also include an important usable feature of a single-page checkout. Thoroughly verify your e-commerce shopping cart solution, as the checkout process is built into it. When customers realise that they have to keep on clicking through your web store’s checkout process to make a purchase, they will certainly get bored and sign-off midway in the shopping process.

Finally, gaining greater profits is not merely about attracting more customers to purchase from you. It is much easier and advantageous to attract the same number of customers to buy more from you. As you are achieving this increased profit without paying more for additional traffic or optimizations.

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In the first article of this 3-part series on ‘Ecommerce Site Design and Usability Guidelines to Gain Sales’ we discussed how navigation plays an important role in ensuring that customers purchase products from your website. In this article, we continue to highlight additional usability areas like user-friendly links that should be incorporated in order to prevent poor merchandising and convert your website visitors into customers.

Deliver precise product information

Just suppose a website visitor has managed to narrow down your product list and discovered the product that he wants to purchase. Now, he needs to further feel comfortable that your product is the appropriate one for him based on the information you’ve provided. As an online e-tailer, you have a great advantage of displaying comprehensive product information unlike a printed brochure, which has limitations. However, the information should be conveyed in a factual, informative and interesting manner. You should refrain from merely highlighting product specs and instead focus on delving on the resultant benefits to the customer. This way, you will spur on the customer’s interest to purchase your product.

In addition, you need to place a thumbnail photograph of the product which the customer can enlarge and view from various angles.

Display product prices

The fact that your website visitor can view the price of a product, while trying to make an online purchase is often a deciding factor in converting him into a buyer. In viewing the price, he has the option to compare dealers or make a decision to purchase directly from the manufacturer. This ability has effectually been found to increase conversion rates by as much as three percent. Alternately, if the price is not displayed the customer has to go through the laborious process of clicking through to every dealer to review their price, which violates the ‘reduce the number of clicks’ thumb rule.

Ensure your credibility

While a new customer visits your website with the intention of purchasing your product; he is simultaneously filled with trepidation on several parameters, as to whether he can trust you; from delivering him value for his money, to protecting his identity despite the data you hold. He has concerns as to whether he will receive the product he purchased from you and if you are going to sell his confidential information to blacklisted sites.

You need to overcome this critical credibility hurdle by incorporating a declaration statement to the customer stating, ‘We will never give out your e-mail address for any reason.’ You further need to enhance your credibility by listing your physical address on the website as well as including a photograph of yourself and key company associates and possibly shots of your office building too.

Display out-of-stock Dealers

It is interesting to note that more than half of all customers commence their online shopping with product searches on a retailer website. This is evidence of the fact that consumers do have preferences when it comes to where to shop. Therefore it is important to include relevant dealers in your listing even if their products are out of stock. This is simply because if you do not include some dealers you could deter prospective shoppers from purchasing at your site. You can still show the dealer who stocks the product, mentioning that it is currently out of stock, giving the consumer the option to wait if he so desires.

Avoid delays during product purchase

Now, that your customer is well on his way to purchase a product from your site, you need to make the process easy for him. More often than not, several online sites end up haggling customers with questionnaires just as they are poised to give them their sale. This practice of trying to collect customer data at such a moment is less important than clinching the customer sale. You run the risk of detracting your customer and losing his trust and resultant sale. Reserve customer data collection for a later stage, after the order is placed and the sale is yours.

Finally, the potential of usability should go beyond navigation and extend to website design and placement. It is as critical as navigation in advancing usability and ensuring you bag that online sale. In my 3^rd and final article on ecommerce design and usability guidelines I look forward to sharing with you insights on the finer design aspect of ecommerce websites.

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While in the past I focussed on website design tips in general, this time round I’m packing in specific information on how as an ecommerce website owner you can increase your online sales by incorporating succinct navigation and usability techniques into your website’s design. Several research insights indicate that ease of navigation is crucial in enhancing user experience, leading customers to make purchases from well laid-out websites.

Clear navigation leads the way

As an astute marketer you can’t afford to lose your customer as he navigates your site to make a purchase. Reduce his burden of having to figure out what to do next by guiding him to the product he desires to purchase, in a way that is simple and easy. Else you stand the chance of losing out on a prospective customer and potential sale.

Review your website’s status quo

Before you embark on the path to helping your customer navigate your website, you must first review your website’s status quo. The best method to find out whether it is usable enough is to find a test shopper and sit besides him as he navigates your website. You will be surprised at what this test experience throws up. More often than not, you’ll discover that poor merchandizing, insufficient and inaccurate information coupled with lack of credibility prove to be deterrents in clinching the online sale.

Construct structured buy-paths

Generally, a customer has two obvious paths to follow – an optimal one that spurs him on directly to the sale. The other, a long-winding one includes several diversions and areas of interest, which may not necessarily be relevant to the customer. Naturally, the choice is to choose the optimal path. You must be aware that the optimal path too offers myriad possibilities like providing the customer with the option to purchase the product offline, straight from the manufacturer or online from a retailer or reseller. Ideally the customer has made up his mind in advance as to what product and path he’s interested in embarking upon. Thus if he is unable to find the path that interests him, he will out of sheer disgust discontinue his purchase process.
It takes time and effort to incorporate structured buy-paths into your site, but it is definitely worth the trouble. Along the buy-paths you can include short stops where the customer can browse through accessories, product information as well as compare products too. But remember to include a prominent link that leads the customer back on track to his original purchase.

Prominently placed product buttons

If your customers are unable to find your product where they want to, then there’s no way they are going to buy it. Your product buttons must be in easy view of the visitor and placed prominently on the homepage, making it amongst the first things a website visitor notices. It has been researched that placing product buttons on the upper left hand side of the page layout; contrasting it in colour or size from other links and supporting it with page layout design that guide the eyes toward the button works successfully.

Focus on product winnowing

You could own a site that offers customers a comprehensive product catalogue, which will definitely satisfy the requirements of a broad range of customers. However your website should allow product winnowing, whereby customers can narrow down the product search list to the desired item. There’s a possibility that if you offer the customer a little too many choices, you may end up confusing him and losing the sale. However, if narrow down your choice list, allowing the customer to easily find what he’s looking for, your sales could look promising
Your first link that throws up in a search on a product name should lead to a product description page to ensure optimal results. This will ensure that site visitors are within easy reach of relevant product resources, images and corollary buy paths.

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As a business owner you spent a considerable amount of time and effort on search engine optimising your website. But how do you guarantee whether this investment is really paying off? Are you thoroughly confident that the surge in performance is due to your SEO efforts or evidence of a corollary marketing campaign? While there are several ways to stay competitive by assessing the returns on your SEO spend, I have outlined below 6 key tips that enable you to measure whether the time and money spent on your website’s optimization campaign are working well for you.

1. Track organic results through non-branded keywords
   Ideally, the success of a Search Engine Optimisation program should be measured in relation to organic searches rather than through branded search results. Especially since SEO returns are based on the number of people who reach your website through searches for general and relevant keywords. Hence, your analysis must separate branded and non-branded keywords to evaluate the impact of your natural search strategy.
   Take for instance, if a sports clothes manufacturer, ‘ActivX’ converts a sale through an organic keyword search for ‘lycra tights’, then the sale should be attributed to SEO. However, if the same sale was converted through the keyword, ‘lycra tights ActivX’, then it’s possible that a previous sale or another marketing initiative resulted in this search.
2. Chart search data progress
   Review your natural search data trends on a weekly basis to understand the type of changes online or offline that are positively influencing it. You can do this by correlating updates to your website such as keywords, content addition, architecture and technology changes and SEO best practices, to understand which changes are significantly impacting your search results. It can take around 4 weeks for search engines to index your website updates and a couple more for these changes to translate in traffic behaviour.
   Another important thing to do is to track your branded keyword performance immediately after you launch a marketing campaign to assess whether or not the campaign is working.
3. Onsite conversions
   Traffic and high rankings on search engines are important; however they are not an effective gauge of SEO success. You could be attracting the wrong traffic and not successfully converting the right traffic. What is needed is a smart combination of drawing in the right traffic and succinctly converting it into a lead, sale and profit. Conversion rates will not rise without successful SEO elements like search engine referral rates, rankings, usability and site content, to name a few. While we’d like to focus solely on increasing conversion rates when optimizing a site, we have to lay the foundation that ensures conversion rates increase.
4. Offline conversions
   Businesses that generate sales leads through natural search must track and monitor the leads’ performance on a keyword basis. While the amount of leads generated by each keyword is easy to monitor, it’s difficult to assess the ultimate conversion rate of those keywords.
   A software company can judge a keyword’s true performance by validating its conversion rate. If this company drives natural search traffic to a landing page that involves filling out a form to request a quote. The sales team then follows-up on this request and try to gain the sale over phone or in person. Information on whether or not the sale materialises should be linked back to the original keyword. This data will help in accurately representing the success of your overall natural search campaign as well as your keyword’s performance.
5. Micro analyse keywords
   If you feel certain keywords should perform better than others, then it’s important that you minutely analyse the metrics associated with these keywords and their landing pages. Keep your eyes open for bottlenecks in the click-path and percentage drops in visitors proceeding to the next step, which could be associated with the design or content problems with the page, or irrelevance to the keyword.
6. Increase in-bound links
   Engaging online communities by participating in forums and creating blogs, as well as
   disseminating press releases, are effective means of building inbound links to your site, which can increase your search engine rankings and traffic. Monitoring these inbound links will not help you understand the amount of revenue your natural search strategy is generating. Instead, it will enable you to assess whether you need to adjust your outreach strategy, an important component of good SEO. You can gauge your SEO efforts by tracking the number of links it earns you.

At the end of the day, to ensure your business success, you have to constantly keep measuring and tracking your SEO efforts. It’s a never-say-die attitude that draws in the winner.

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Unlike traditional media, the online world moves at dizzying speeds as information travels instantly across time and geographical boundaries. While this bodes well for marketers who spend time and effort to improve their visibility on search results, it can transform into a double-edged sword when the search results are negative. As an increasing number of unhappy customers, ex-employees and nasty competitors take advantage of the quick and easy online forums, blogs and message boards to vent their frustration on companies and individuals they are unhappy with.

Why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is Important

Your customers are no longer passive receptors of the information you disseminate to them through your website. However, with perceptive online marketing you can convert critics and disgruntled customers into your advocates and evangelists. While most customers make purchases offline, they take advantage of the internet to make purchasing decisions based on online research and reviews of customers who’ve used your products and services. Hence, it is very important to ensure that you have an ORM process in place to protect and advance your online reputation.

ORM involves tracking and managing how the online world perceives your product or service through the various online forums. When people say bad things about your product or service, you don’t just delete the negative comment and retain the positive ones. Displacing negative search results is not the solution to the problem, since it only resolves an overt issue, even as the root cause of the problem remains to be addressed in detail. A bad online reputation can reduce customer confidence and plunge profits. However, you must take a proactive ORM approach and incorporate good business practices by placing the right messages through focussed social media marketing and simultaneously deliver excellent customer value online and offline.

Through ORM you can protect and manage your reputation by being actively involved in the outcome of search engine results and incorporating a 4-step process.

Analyse Your Online Space

The goals of ORM are high rankings and indexing in search engines for all positive content on associated websites. This will ensure an increase in your overall positive web presence, which will enable you to own top spots in search engine rankings for your brand. Thus, as a first step, you need to understand where you are placed in relation to your use of social media, search engine positioning and what the buzz on you in the online world is all about. In the same vein, you should analyse the core elements of your website and the online activities you are involved in that negatively affect your reputation.

Monitor Activity

People Googling your company name will often skim through all the links that appear on the results page and not merely the ones that lead to your website. There could be both positive and negative listings about your company on these links. At the end of the day, the general public moulds its opinions on how your brand is viewed through blogs, podcasts and opinion forums, necessitating that you monitor these online conversations. However, since it is difficult to continuously monitor everything that is being mentioned about your brand, you need an advance information system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so that you can remedy it if the need arises. You can do this by:

• Setting up Google and Yahoo Alerts to track your brands mention in the news including the names of company, products/services and key employees
• View how your brands fare in blogs by participating in sites such as Feedster, Blogpulse and Technorati
• Monitor industry-related sites
• Customize RSS readers for brand tracking

Even as a monitoring system for your brand is set in place, you should also track news on competitor brands, companies, industry terms and general industry news. While monitoring is an essential strategy for addressing adverse information within your search engine space, its effectiveness is best realised through proactively influencing what people read about your brand in your space.

Optimise Content

You can protect your brand’s online visibility by optimising your content. Ensure that all your digital communications is optimised. This includes PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content, which is publicly available on the web as well as across social media sites viz. text, images, audio, video; to enable listing of more branded content in the search engine ranking pages. This does not effectively put your brand in control and above negative backlash, but it places you in a much better position if such a situation arose. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

Influence the Influencers

Finally, get actively involved in online conversations by participating in them to improve your brand’s perception and eliminate negative feedback. Regularly participate in your industry’s conversation by contributing to blogs and forums that cover consumer opinions and complaints, competitor attacks, social networks, counterfeit products and trademark infringements.

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A job gives a fixed monthly income. In today’s world everyone wants to Earn More, Earn Big! It has become all the more possible due to the Internet Revolution. You just need a website to get started and establish an online business. Some of the fundamentals for conducting an online business are explained below:

@ Unique Product: Your product should have an edge over other products of the same line. It should be innovative with some special features, better utility, and most importantly affordable. It can soon become hot in the market if it is adapted by different stratas of the society. If people realize why your product is unique it will be successful.

Tip for E-Commerce: Search engines like google, yahoo or msn can help you find websites selling your product.

@ Competitive Price: Study your competition. Every entrepreneur should do his homework of analyzing the prices of its competitors. Your product is a new entry in the market; people will consider buying it only if it offers better utility at a comparatively lower price.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can find the prices listed on the websites along with the product descriptions.

@ Business / Commerce Platform: You need to opt for a platform that has low operating costs. If your business has low overheads then you can pass on the benefit in the form of low prices to your customers.

Tip for E-Commerce: Register a domain and establish your business on a website. That is E-Commerce!

@ Shopping Experience: Your customers should have an enriching shopping experience with you. You need to provide them clear instructions.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can incorporate a Free Shopping Cart in the initial phase. Once your e-business picks up, you can go on for subscribing one.

@ Good Customer Service: You need to understand; “What your customer wants”. After comprehending their situation effectively, you should deliver them with what suits their needs. Answering to their queries and clarifying their doubts should be done in the first place. Satisfaction of the Customer rather than high profit should be prioritized for building a strong brand name.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can make an interactive website, provide contact forms in your website, and give your email id, chat id, telephone number, mailing address etc so that your customers can interact easily.

@ Follow-up: Just selling your products to customers is not enough. As a business you should follow up and take feedback about the usefulness & limitations of your product. This feedback is gold since it can help improve your product. Next time your customers will experience better product utility. In this way you win life long customers.

Tip for E-Commerce: Maintain a database of your client’s details, like their email id, birthday date, anniversary date etc. Send them wishes on these occasions and request for feedback on your products. This will help to build the basis of a relationship.

Comscore reports that retail ecommerce sales growth was only 11% in Q1 2008 compared to 17% in the prior year 2007. So you need to get cautious in following the above points with full efficiency. But you can certainly Start Growing with E-Commerce Now!

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The online shopping experience is not very different from the real world one. In the real world, on a general shopping outing one encounters a wide variety of shop owners pitching their wares in unique and creative ways. From roadside vendors displaying their colourful wares and vying with one another to pitch them by yelling out loud in markets, to quaint shops displaying enticing products outside and shop billboards ranging from the mundane to the weird and funny beckoning you to enter. The online world offers an equally compelling call to action trying it’s best to target a specific, niche audience in the process.

Competitor study

Closely observe your main competitor’s websites to see how they attract their targets through their USP. Also, study their positioning on search engines, the keywords and URL they use. This study is not meant to be an end in itself, rather it should serve to enable you to identify how you can position yourself differently and draw competitor traffic to your website.

Keyed on target

On the face of it, getting the greatest number of hits vis a vis your competitors in the hope of drawing higher sales, seems the wisest thing to do. However, in reality it doesn’t work that way. You need to target as many people as you can from a specific target group by offering a product or service that is customized to them. It’s possible that your target market is geographically determined by region. In that case you must consider optimising your keywords for local search.

Supposing you have created water-proof socks through the use of breakthrough technology, you wouldn’t want to sell it to just about anyone, but rather to people who would best use it like mountaineers, trekkers, people living in damp environmental surroundings and such like. However, to do that you need to populate your website with appropriate content. Your web copy must include relevant information and keywords that will appeal to your target audience. Use long key phrases to increase your scope of being found in search engines when users search for information on your product or area of expertise.

Active forum participation

Search for online forums that are relevant to your product and join them. Be an active participant by engaging in discussions that will give you feedback on what your target audience is saying, their grievances and expectations. Transform yourself into a respected and authoritative subject matter expert by giving advice and sharing tips. Another means to further advance your objective involves including a link to your website in your forum signature to attract qualified traffic.

Once you have discovered your target audience and those who have the greatest need or affinity with your products or services’ your battle is half won. To fully win, you must continually work to engage these prospects and convert them into avid customers.

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A Press Release is a public relations tool in the hands of small and big businesses. Most companies take out a Press Release when they want to share the information or news with the media and general public. Usually the news is of commercial nature. For instance; a Press Release issued at the launch of a new company, a new product, a new website, software upgrades, winning awards, company merger etc. It has been used as a Public Relations tool for over a hundred years to provide first hand information to the journalists and public.

A good Press Release should have a solid news angle, well written and followed by a targeted distribution. In the earlier times lengthy press releases were written mainly targeted to be distributed through mass media including newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. In the present day brief Press Releases are written in the reverse pyramid format, giving the most important information first followed by other details. Now Press Releases are distributed to the online media as well – News Sites, Niche Websites, Blogs, Online magazines, E-zines, Newsletters etc.

With the growing trend of publishing Press Releases on the Web, many sites and online businesses get the SEO benefit from it. The issuing website that distributes a Press Release gains Valuable One Way links, placement in the news search engines and increased traffic to the featured website etc.

Mainly due to the SEO benefit and popularity measure, many sites issue a Press Release.

Generally a Press Release is written in the following format:

Release Time: Mention the Release Time; e.g. For Immediate Release OR Embargoed until Date

Headline: It is the Title of your News Story.

Subheading / Summary: It’s a 2-4 sentence summary of your Press Release.

Dateline: It contains the date when the news is being issued and the hometown of the person / company launching the Press Release.

Opening Paragraph: It should answer the 5 W’s of Who?, What?, When?, Where? and Why?

Press Release Body: Contains the details of background information, statistics etc.

Boilerplate: It contains “About Us” information regarding the issuing person / company.

Call to Action: For getting complete information mention complete Contact details & Web Address of the media person at the end.

A Press Release can be distributed by following methods:

1. Manual Distribution: You will have to search for media contacts yourself.
2. Hiring a Professional PR Firm: If your budget allows then you can opt for a professional service.
3. News / Press Release Distribution Sites: Such sites are often free but some good ones charge you for distributing each Press Release.

Media Contact Databases:

• Burrelles
• MediaMagnet
• Bowker’s News Media Directory
• MondoTimes.com

Paid and Free Distribution:

• PRnewswire
• BusinessWire
• MarketWire
• PRweb
• WebWire
• EmailWire
• PR.com
• PRurgent.com
• Free-Press-Release.com

An estimate of Press Release Viewership:

As reported by http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are 1,463,632,361 internet users around the world. Therefore you may well imagine the scope of viewership your Press Release has on the Internet.

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Do you think you’re the small fry competing with the big fish for eyeballs and stand no great chance? Well, granted you may be small, but the good news is you can think big, really big armoured with the right SEO strategy. I believe, as a small business you have several advantages over large businesses – so let’s just focus on them.

Carve your niche

Big businesses have big requirements to cater to and larger markets to target. You can transform your small business size into an advantage by focussing on a niche market and profit from it. First, identify the niche you are able to best service. This makes your life much easier as you can rank for keywords that are directly relevant to your narrow niche. Even if your niche is already a competitive one, you can still figure ways to attract traffic to your website.  Take for instance the entertainment industry, which is by far a very competitive arena. However, were you to market your rock fest within a clearly-defined geographic area, the level of competition would be much less.

Personalise customer interaction

Mainly because of the enormity of the scale of business, big businesses tend to lose touch with their customers, who more often than not end up being dissatisfied because of poor customer service. As opposed to a small business, where customers can connect directly with decision-makers. You need to capitalise on this facet of personalised service, instead of shying away from the fact that yours is a small company and trying to impress your customers by portraying the image that you are way larger than you are. Use your advertising copy and title tags to emphasize the benefits your customer gains because you are a small enterprise viz. ready availability, personalised service, accountability, etc. If you take pride in your business and walk the talk, you’re bound to succeed.

Innovate and adapt according to market trends

It’s much easier for a small business to change their plan-of-action based on market dynamics, compared to a large business. Try to gain the first-mover advantage in spotting the latest trends through which you can target new markets and gain new customers. Make use of keyword tools and other research mediums to gather insights in markets that show great potential.

Self-fund the business

Generate a self-sustaining business process where the growth is aligned with your revenues. Looking at this approach from the lens of SEO implies focusing on revenues. In a pay-per-click optimisation scenario, you research your profitable and weed out the unprofitable ones. Following which, you pay only for keyword clicks that draw in revenues even as you cut back on clicks that don’t attract conversions. Based on the research output, you can confidently launch an SEO strategy that focuses on profitable keywords.

Partner to progress

While big businesses face several hurdles like legal hassles and indefinitely prolonged tie-up procedures, small businesses because of their lean framework are the ideal candidates to partner with. There are manifold advantages such alliances can deliver on the SEO front – link to their website, issue a press release to announce the partnership, join forces through common sales literature to market joint offerings. Get proactive with your partners, respond to their needs and they will more than happily link market for you.

Working at staying small can actually be a profitable business strategy – With agility, speed and personalisation on your side, there are things you can do which a large business would find great difficulty implementing. Eventually, size does help make a positive difference if you’re a small business with a smart SEO Strategy.

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