It seems a month can’t go by without another major conference. This time, it’s the turn of the annual ADMA Forum, the expo of the Australian Direct Marketing Association taking place this week from Wednesday July 8th to Friday July 10th.

The ADMA Forum has become one of the most engaging and informative marketing conferences in the calendar, and certainly goes much further than traditional direct marketing. These days, as much attention is given to online marketing, social media and email as it is to the ingenious ways some companies get advertising into your mailbox.

For me, this year’s highlight is the keynote on Day One from Joseph Jaffe, President and Chief Interruptor of Crayon (US). He truly understands marketing as a conversation and has spearheaded much of the discussion on the new marketing world we find ourselves in.

I’ll be there for most of the three days - only disappearing for a few hours on Wednesday to deliver my part of the webinar presented by Nett Magazine in conjunction with GoToMeeting Corporate - “Using Twitter to Gain a Competitive Advantage“. You can still register for both the webinar and the ADMA Forum. If you spot me hanging around between sessions, come over and say hi.

Yet, in order to shape the web, Google needs an ally. The user has more power over the evolution of the internet than any single corporation, including the primary-coloured monster. The public are in control - and Google knows it.

“That is the essential rule of the new age,” writes Jeff Jarvis in his new book “What Would Google Do?“, which unpicks how Google tapped into the entirely different business environment of the web. “Previously, the powerful - companies, institutions, and governments - believed they were in control, and they were. But no more. Now the internet allows us to speak to the world, to organise ourselves, to find and spread information, to challenge old ways, to retake control.”

Many business leaders are tired of hearing how wonderful Google are, criticising the huge influence the search engine has over the success or failure of a website. But as Jarvis points out, such criticism is misdirected.

“That’s like newspapers saying to a newsstand operator, “How dare you make a penny distributing my product? Give my papers back or I’ll sue!” Google is their newsstand.”

Resenting Google for being so successful in driving traffic to websites, and choosing to extract some profit from that free service, seems rather petulant if not extremely misguided.

Google’s success is not because they have an immensely effective website - although that was the start. Google understands the importance of distributing their services and technology throughout the web, embedded on websites and blogs and in browsers as widgets, AdSense, search bars, maps, YouTube videos, images and more. A huge proportion of websites in someway provide Google interactivity for the user, whether they realise it or not, passing back that influence to Google. The people have spread Google throughout the web like a benevolent virus; one where the symptoms actually improve the user experience. And that user experience focus is key. Instead of telling people what to do, how much to pay and where to get it, Google provides the tools for users to answer those questions themselves in an incredible number of increasingly relevant ways.

With the announcement of Google Wave, we are most likely going to see the brand enter into even more areas of our online interactivity. Google Wave was developed by the Sydney-based Google team that created Google Maps, used by millions of people worldwide. Led by Lars and Jens Rasmussen and operating as a remote start-up within Google, under the codename “Walkabout”, the Aussie team focused on improving the way communication and collaboration works for users on the web.

Google Wave is equal parts conversation and document, allowing people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

The significance of Wave may not seem immediately apparent when looking at a screenshot or two. Surely, you might think, it looks like any other email or messenger program. But if you watch the full presentation given to developers at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco last week, possibilities start to combine with imagination to generate some extremely interesting opportunities. Online support could become far quicker, more efficient and deal with multiple clients at once. Online collaboration on projects becomes a breeze. Email conversations become non-linear instead of continually referencing and attaching previous paragraphs or buried quotes.

Yet again, Google has developed a service that has the potential to shape and transform the way we behave online. Eventually, it will be released to the public, who will no doubt stretch the concept further and mould Wave to their own needs. And that is the beauty of the web. The most successful startups - and Twitter is a prime example of this - create tools that users can then adapt and evolve in even more imaginative ways, unrestricted by the developer’s initial intentions or grab for profit. Instead of creating products and then controlling distribution of those products in order to charge a premium, they develop adaptable and interchangeable services that users can take and use within their own online spaces. This allows for immense and rapid growth, which in turn presents alternative possibilities for monetisation from that massively increased influence and user-base.

What Google knows is that online business is about passing control to the user for free and extracting benefits in other ways, rather than limiting use within a website and charging for the privilege. The user is in control of the internet. Google isn’t alone. When eBay opened up API access to their database, sales increased by 86%. Why? Because customers were now able to access eBay auctions through widgets and applications hosted on other websites and platforms. eBay broke out of the website and spread across the web, carried by the users.

To quote Jarvis one final time;

“Give the people control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

What is conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking is a tool that measures conversions with the ultimate goal of better optimising campaign through greater reporting data on the effectiveness of your keyword selection and ad text.

In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad translates directly to user actions that you feel are valuable, such as a product or service purchase, forum or newsletter signup, specific page view, or lead.

How does it work?

AdWords Conversion Tracking works by placing a cookie on a user’s computer when they click on one of your ads. Then, if the user reaches one of your conversion pages, the cookie is connected to your web page. When a match is made, Google records a successful conversion for you.

So how do I do I set it up?

All you have to do to set up conversion tracking is place a snippet of code on your conversion confirmation pages.

Here’s how to obtain this code and begin tracking conversion data:

1. Visit https://adwords.google.com/select/ConversionTrackingHome. (You can also reach this page by clicking Conversion Tracking at the top of your account’s Campaign Management tab.)
2. Click Create your first action.
3. Follow the steps provided. We’ll guide you through the process of receiving your code, placing it on your site, and completing the set-up.
4. Profit!!!

Search Engine Optimisation, articles on usability, optimising for websites Sydney.

This is an example of writing content purely with Search Engine Optimisation in mind. Sure, the text will be picked up by search engines but so what? It provides nothing useful to the reader and eventually will lose any ranking advantage it gains when no one navigates to your website and provides you with the ultimate online testimonial: a link back to your site. More importantly, you are wasting valuable time and resources attempting to exploit the system. While it is a tempting goal to focus your attention on getting your traffic on the upward climb, you really should be concentrating on creating content that will captivate readers and get them to rave about it to their best mate Johnny, their girlfriend Jane and Grandma Wilkins.

There are a few things you need to consider before you even worry about how many times you can add “Web Designer Sydney” into your content without being penalised for spam.

Online Marketing Consultants must not only have the technical skills to tinker around in the back-end coding of a website, but also have the writing prowess to be able to effectively communicate the primary goals of a website. They must also learn to speak the same language as the relevant target market. Writing content for a debt collection agency will be different than for a paintball club for example.

Ideally you want to write some quality content first, and then go back and make any revisions as necessary to incorporate the keywords you are looking to target, not the other way around. There is no point stemming the creative juices in an attempt to get your keyword phrases accounting for 12.37% of the total text, as it will invariably compromise the quality of the content you are creating for your site. This is especially true for large websites. This message of the web site must not be lost in keyword noise, drowning in traffic but gasping for conversions.

Content is king, so make your content great.

1. The need for persuasion, in a climate of consumers who cling to their savings tighter than ever, is greater than ever.

2. The question of marketing is not whether it should be cut (because it may no longer appear to work), but how, then, does it need to respond to the current climate? The consumer mindset is drastically changing - marketing ideology must change with it.

It could be said that in our modern consumer society, the line between “want” and “need” increasingly became an ambiguous division - subjective to each individual’s indulgences and value system. In a booming economic period, we have the luxury of turning wants into needs - because we can want them! But that’s changing, for obvious reasons - and it’s changing the effectiveness of marketing with it. In periods of tightening or fearful budgeting (because it must be remembered that most people are still spending no less a wage than before, but are simply more fearful of spending it), whether you’re selling a want or need will drastically change what kind of campaign works.

Impulse-buy behaviour is a modern cornerstone of marketing psychology - a symptom, perhaps, of that boom mentality of excess and economic frivolity. The idea is that people have a susceptibility to consumer urges, because our greatest urge to buy a product is our initial reaction (when it is first offered to us). I’m a nightmare in a fashion store, because I basically want everything I see! And “SALE!” signs always manage to trigger a momentary, mindless sort of frenzy: “It’s on sale!” I squeal, as if I must therefore buy all of it, immediately. But even without the sales, a nice pair of jeans can cast a spell on me - so great, even when I inevitably look at the price tag and see $280, I may be beyond the point of caring, because that spell is just so great, and they’re, like, such a hot pair of jeans!! I’d like to think I’m above such superficial bliss, but… well… I’m not. And chances are, neither are you. It may not be hot jeans that arouse the sensation, but we pretty much each have our own weakness.

Sometimes, however, my rationality (thankfully) returns. That’s right - I’m an intelligent, sensible man! Aaron! Shame on you! $280 for a pair of jeans?! That’s more than the electricity bill you haven’t payed. And so what if that shirt is on sale? It’s actually kind of ugly, and you’ll probably never wear it, anyway.

Here, the impulse urge - as it happens with other more traditional reactive human urges (like sexual or aggressive urges) - is overcome by our rational assessment (the basis of “morality”). There’s a window, therefore, where the result of the consumer mindset - in terms of making, or not making, a purchase - is drastically different. Impulse-buy campaigns are designed to beat the inevitable shift, and take the consumer to the point of purchase, before that sensibility kicks in.

To beat this window, the campaign generally imposes a time limit - pushing the consumer to act before such a time as their rational assessment may withdraw from purchase. This is why the expiry of a sale is the focus of the sale psychology (and usually the core message of its communication). The pressure of a deal soon to disappear pushes us to act with a sense of immediacy - that immediacy keeping us in the short-term world of reactive, unrestrained consumer impulses. Otherwise, we are permitted to “think about it”. And thinking about it leads us into rational territory, where we will begin ruling out purchases on the basis of them being deemed “unnecessary”. Since necessity is the basis of how we perceive the difference between “needs” and “wants” (for wants are generally considered unnecessary), if the general mindset of this division is culturally shifted, the mechanics of impulse-buy campaigns must obviously be affected.

When we have either less money, or are afraid of potentially having less money, we maintain a constant state of rationality. And we watch our money - we actually budget! This means that when we’re making purchases (shopping), we’re approaching it with a very different mindset. We have very particular ideas of what we’re looking for, and we enter every moment knowing we’re not supposed to be venturing outside of that budgeting. At very least, we respond to every potential purchase - such as being offered a sale - with a tougher, more aware, judgment (if it’s going to lull us out of that budget and sensibility, it would want to be worth it!). This is why marketing is so important - a stronger argument needs to be made, because people need that persuading (the essential role of marketing and advertising). So where does it leave impulse-buy campaigning - a proposition seemingly making a virtually impossible argument?

Of course, you may want to steer clear of impulse-buy campaigning, altogether - or, at very least, shift your marketing budget, to place grater emphasis on non-impulse tactics (that maybe you’ve neglected?). But it’s not time to count the basic premise out, altogether. You can alter them to suit the shift. There are two things to consider, when it comes to doing this.

The first approach is to relax the rules. Ease up on the urgency - extend those time-frames. If you’re product is worthwhile (you be the judge of that!), then there’s no reason why people would not eventually decide that the purchase deserves a slice of that budget. But there’s something to be said for repetition in the art of persuasion - particularly, if you’re campaign will find people more than once, within a certain period. The last time I gave in to a pair of jeans on sale, I firstly resisted the urge to buy them, every time I walked past them in the store window, on my way to the supermarket. “Oh, I want them! They’re beautiful! And they’re on sale…. No, Aaron, keep walking.” Each time, I would want them more - but the rationale remained the same. But by the fifth time I walked past that store, the urge had grown, to the point of overpowering that rationale. And hey, the sale was finally about to end - if I was going to do something, I’d have to finally do it, now. I wear them, still.

However, there’s an opposing school of thought that retains the importance of urgency. It makes great sense; but it comes back to the idea of needs and wants. In economic downturn, if you’re providing something perceived as a need, then you’re clearly in the privileged position. But you can hardly sit on your hands. The market is there - but you’re still competing against every other competitor buying for the same spot in the weekly budget. In this situation, impulse-buy campaigns may very well make the difference.

This is because part of the current economic mindset revolves around anticipation. Let’s not take anything away from the people who are already horribly affected by the crisis - but still, most people are not yet technically compromised, financially. They tighten their wallets, and sharpen their consuming awareness, because they’re “thinking ahead”; prodded by a media so happy to pump up the doom and gloom for the benefits of sensationalism. They change today’s spending habits, for the sake of tomorrow’s. The thought, therefore, is “I have money to spend the money I have now, because I might not have it in the near future” - and this has an obvious relationship to impulse-buy campaigning. The term, “stocking up”, is somewhat of a cliché, but it’s a cliche for a reason - in times of crisis, we quickly grab those perceived needs. If you’re offering a need, then, that’s your impulse. It’s a completely different impulse to the traditional (somewhat indulgent) kind - but it’s still an impulse!

So, for many businesses that offer products that may not appear, at first glance, a necessity - or for those who walk dangerously close to the parameters - the goal of your marketing is clear. You must become a need. And, perhaps, you already are - if only you knew it. Remember, that different people - different demographics, in other words - have very different ideas on what are essential components of life. I don’t particularly see any need for guitar strings; but I know a professional musician who is increasingly anxious about juggling the shrinking entertainment job market, with the rising cost of his imported strings and guitar accessories. Last week, our pleasant stroll through the city was interrupted by the frenzy that erupted upon sighting a sale on his favourite guitar strings. He “stocked up”. “Do you really need ten packs?” I asked him; “Didn’t you just tell me that you’re struggling, this week?” But he assured me that within a couple of months, prices for these strings could be almost double that sale price. He saw it as a completely rational purchase. He was successfully impulse-pitched.

So, if you’re currently scratching your head, as to what to do next to market your business, or even why that last impulse campaign didn’t quite make the mark you thought it would, perhaps it’s time for a reassessment that steps outside the square of traditional thinking. Times are changing. You’ve got to change with them. Right now.

As a child, the year 2000 was always put forward in science fiction and popular culture as the benchmark of a golden age. My favourite comic as a boy, 2000AD, depicted fantastic future worlds of robots, flying cars and spaceships. Now, the year 2000 is in our past and doesn’t seem to be the technological marvel it once was in our minds. So much has changed in our world that the year 2000 now illustrates how quickly we all have to adapt.

2000AD – From future fantastic to ho-hum history

In the year 2000, I was still working as an employment consultant in a small office. Thinking back to the technology that populated my daily life feels almost like a walk through a museum of antiquities. Sure, some better technology was becoming available to those with the money and the access, including digital devices and ever smaller gadgets, but assuming I was an average consumer, I think it’s safe to say that 2000 was still a different world for many people.

My mobile phone was just that – a mobile phone. No internet access (never mind broadband), no camera or MMS, no blue tooth or infra red, no mp3 player and only the tinniest of ringtones were available, interpreting the pop hits of the day as if performed by Stephen Hawking.

For music, I carried a portable CD player and a small folder of twelve discs in my bag to provide choice on the long commute home. Only twelve albums! And it skipped every time we hit a bump.

There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no MySpace or Twitter. No one asking to be your friend every five minutes or following your every move or sharing every pratfall and family movie clip in a bizarre multi-national edition of “…Funniest Videos”.

Google was still a new beast, not yet the cyberspace conqueror it would become. Yahoo was still top of the search engine pile, but no one talked about “Yahooing” to find a fact on the net.

The was no iTunes or any other legitimate place to download music. Napster was still king but Metallica and Madonna had just started legal proceedings that would close the hugely popular music piracy site down the following year, ironically as Napster hit its peak.

An SD card with a few megabytes seemed plenty of storage. My friend had an external hard drive for work that he carted everywhere with him. It was a monster piece of kit. I now carry ten times the storage in my pocket.

Our overseas holiday that year involved a bag full of camera film and a couple of 35mm cameras. Not all the rolls were developed and at least a third of those printed shouldn’t have been. We wouldn’t have a digital delete button for another couple of years.

Certainly, people were shopping online. I was already a seasoned eBay user and Amazon was making an impact. Yet online shopping was still in its infancy. I paid either by postal order or by sending my credit card details broken across two emails as advised to me by one seller (for security, you understand). Convenient checkout processes were still beyond most small online transactions.

I still bought movie tickets by queuing up and occasionally missing the start of a film if the line was long enough. I still paid bills by walking into the post office. Although PayPal was launched in 2000, I was blissfully unaware of it for another couple of years, still ordering goods from overseas by international money order from the bank and paying exorbitant fees.

I still bought the newspaper. Like most people, I thought a blog was an online personal diary – sad attention-seeking affairs where people discussed the daily adventures of their cats or moaned about the ex-wife or listed their daily appointments with monotonous accuracy.

Television was still viewed on a television; not a mobile phone, a laptop, PDA or iPod. I watched the Olympics on my old non-digital CRT television and if I missed an event I would have to catch it on the news headlines. No online streaming of the main events back then, and even if there was, my dial-up internet connection wouldn’t cope with it. I bought my first DVD player in 2000. It was a basic affair that would never play the different files asked of such devices today. DivX was unheard of. BitTorrent was but a gleam in a peer-to-peer file sharer’s eye.

Looking back – Looking forward

So why am I sharing these reminiscences with you? What does this have to do with your business today?

Simply put, back in the year 2000, there were those entrepreneurs clever enough to realise that search engines – Yahoo and then Google – would be the key to online business. Search engine optimisation started in the late 1990s but is now a major source of online marketing, creating a huge industry around itself. Back then, even though mobile phones served only as phones, there were businesses preparing to exploit the next stage of MMS marketing and developing websites viewable on a small hand-held screen. Those ‘in the know’ knew mp3 players were just around the corner. Digital cameras may already have been available in 2000, but the rapid take-up in the next few years created massive opportunities for businesses that revolve around digital imagery - such as printers, photo sharing websites, digital photo frames and more. The incredibly speedy shift from VHS to DVD changed the living room as well as the way people interacted with their entertainment.

Each new technological advancement opened new opportunities, changed consumer behaviour and was exploited by businesses that understood what was occurring.

Alternatively, there were those businesses still operating in the past, refusing to catch up with the new technologies. Nine years ago, the music industry may have been engaged in legal battles to close down Napster, but no one had yet created a legal, quality alternative - a lack of foresight for which the music industry is still paying in lost revenue and the embedded nature of online piracy with consumers.

Change will continue to occur. Technology now updates and evolves at such a rapid pace that by next year there could be new opportunities and new consumer behaviours and new business threats and new ways of doing things. Those businesses that plan for future change, keep an eye on development and perform risk assessments on developing tech are best placed to achieve great things.

There are still many businesses catching up with the technological world of 2000, only now incorporating mobile technology or marketing through social media or applying more secure and efficient shopping carts. Some businesses have operated too long under the rules of 2000, continually playing catch-up and potentially losing market share, instead of planning and looking ahead to 2009 – or even better, 2010 or 2011.

What will the technological world look like in a few years time? How will your target audience behave with this new tech? What kind of world will your business be operating in?

Are you ready for the future or will you remain a few years behind your audience?

By following these concise tips, you too can drive your online business into the ground quickly and get back to watching Simpsons reruns. D’oh!

Success is overrated.

1. Be impossible to find

That’s right. Make it so frustratingly hard for potential customers to find you that they’ll go to the competition instead. There are a number of ways you can achieve this, but my all-time favourite is to misspell your own domain name.

If that isn’t possible, ensure that links you’ve managed to get on other websites lead to the wrong places or to 404 error pages. Also, at all costs, avoid appearing prominently in Google. This is pretty easy for the first few weeks as it takes the search engines months to locate and index new websites. Don’t make it easy for them. At all costs, avoid using words people actually use when trying to find your products. For example, instead of bargain furniture, write about economical wooden sitting utensils. Far fewer people will type those words into Google when looking for a chair.

2. Overcharge on postage

This one is a classic method for losing customers. Some previous champions at business failure have turned thousands of customers away with inappropriate postage charges. The easiest way is to only offer overnight courier service on all purchases – regardless of what they are. Suddenly, that t-shirt is an expensive buy when you add in $30 worth of courier costs!

But even without going to such extremes, it is possible to scare people away. Avoid postage discounts on multiple items. Yes, of course you’ll send the products in the same package but by insisting on charging as if you are sending them separately, you can be sure to create some angry customers who won’t come back.

3. Hide your best deals

You know that your special offer on ornamental teaspoons could be a great money-maker but relying on the psychic powers of the average consumer to find the page within your website may be taking things to extremes. On arriving at the website, don’t make it too easy for a person to find your best products and prices. Bury them deep in your product pages, preferably at the bottom of overlong pages of unattractive offers that are not linked from the home page.

If possible, have conflicting offers on different pages of your site. What is offered at 25% off on one page is full price on another and removed from sale on a third. Ensure the customer doesn’t know what to do to get the best deal – and even if they do make a purchase, seed them with enough doubt about whether they paid more than they should.

4. Loop pages around

Ever been to a website FAQ section where answers that don’t answer the questions loop around each other taking you in circles? One answer suggests you click to another page for the information you need, but the new page refers you back to where you were.

You know that answering consumer questions accurately may force you to reveal how bad your business really is. Baffle them with pages of vague and useless waffle that fails to address the issues while linking meaninglessly to each other in a perpetual loop of confusion.

And then refuse to take queries from customers who have not used the FAQ to solve their problems.

5. Don’t provide any contact details

Taking this one step further, prevent any personal contact at all.

Jeez, so many people want to contact you these days! Anyone would think they want to make further enquiries or ask for information to help them make a better purchase. Timewasters! Don’t let them interrupt your daily routine with petty customer service issues. Just remove all possible forms of contact from your site – especially email – and force anyone with a question to attempt to find an answer on the looped and infuriating FAQ pages (see 4).

6. Avoid updating the site

If your website looked good once, why change it? Sure, that was back in 2001, the news items are out of date and the products you are pushing went out of fashion three years ago, but fresh content and accurate info only encourage more sales and that means more work for you!

If you haven’t updated your postage rates for years, it will really get up customer noses if you email them after a purchase to demand more money to correct the difference. But nothing loses customers faster than failing to update which stock is in or out of stock. That really pushes their buttons of disappointment – especially if your site forces them to confirm the purchase and pay for the item before you email them to say it is out of stock. Don’t repay the money, of course, just tell them it’s on backorder and should be available within six months – maybe – if you remember to call the suppliers.

So there you have it – some foolproof ways to turn away all those pesky customers. All of these techniques are tried and proven to work. In fact, examples can be found every day across the web, leading the way in customer dissatisfaction. Don’t get left behind! Join the fight against business success today!

Yet if you’ve been in business even longer, you may remember it wasn’t always like that. Before TV, before massive supermarkets and soulless shopping centres and big budget campaigns targeted to carefully selected demographics and slick brand advertisements in magazines that don’t seem to sell anything and focus groups and surveys - before all of that there were shopkeepers and customers having conversations.

Now we have the internet, the art of conversation marketing is returning. Consumers no longer want the one-way marketing messages from faceless corporations telling us how to behave and what to buy. They want a two-way conversation; to be able to interact with a brand, give feedback and be treated as an equal participant in the marketing relationship. No longer can a brand preach from on high and expect to be unquestioningly followed, demanding respect and consumer loyalty simply because of who they are.

Presenting a human face

For online consumers, one of the key deciders when making a purchase is trust. But trust isn’t easy to create - it has to be earned. One way to do this is by being open in conversations with the customer base. Blogs and social media activities such as Twitter allow a free exchange of information and feedback. This allows consumers to see you as approachable and listening to their opinions and comments. The days of dismissing customer feedback and arrogantly pushing forward a marketing message are gone.

For many businesses, especially large ones, it is hard to build a warm feeling to the brand in the customer. We don’t view utilities – to take one example – with a warm and fuzzy glow of friendly interactions. Most people pay their utility bill, ignore the letters promoting new services and get annoyed when their telemarketer calls up at dinner time. The company becomes no more than a corporate machine in our minds; processing our payments and dispensing our products and services with mechanical efficiency. In fact, if you are like me, the only time you really engage with a human being in one of these companies is when something goes wrong. The efficient business machine has made an error – how could this be? We call up and complain. This means we only get human interaction when we’re already in a negative frame of mind.

With the arrival of social media and the rapid uptake of online business, the retail marketing environment is reverting to the older village community model – only this time it is the global village and the social media community. When I was a boy, I knew the couple that ran the corner shop and they knew me, knew my parents, even knew what I liked to spend my pocket money on (a few fruit salad chewy sweets, Bazooka Joe bubble gum and a comic). Back then, a shopkeeper would develop relationships, converse with you, swap stories and treat you as an equal. The butcher not only served meat but knew everyone who came in his store personally, knew their stories, knew who needed off-cuts for the dog or who liked the fat left on the ham and served them accordingly.

Online, businesses are beginning to take advantage of building these same relationships. I frequently engage with customers on Twitter and hopefully solve their issues. Other businesses have used social media platforms to canvas feedback, conduct surveys or provide an open forum of ideas. So the changes in marketing brought about by the internet are not knew, they merely take us back to the best aspects of being part of a community, aspects almost forgotten in the change from local stores to impersonal and large supermarkets a few decades ago.

Take the time to chat

Many business owners still see conversation and relationship-building as time-wasting activity. Instead of talking to a customer, the shop assistant is told to clean the back room. Instead of taking the extra time to provide some personal service for someone who needs a bit more help, the business sticks to procedure and efficiency. What is often misunderstood is that extra time building relationships with customers can return ten-fold, even if the instant sale or bottom line benefit is not apparent. People always go back to a store they trust. People will recommend businesses that made them feel comfortable and answered their queries.

More big online businesses are now realising the value of starting up these conversations again. They have begun to realise that blogs and Twitter and all the other online social spaces aren’t about return on investment or tracking click-through stats or all the other tangible metrics managers like to dissect in board meetings. They are about appearing human again, just like that friendly guy in the corner store who had the smile and the funny stories and the helpful advice whenever it was needed.

By the way, you can chat with me by enrolling on Twitter and following @kimota, subscribing to this blog or reading and commenting on our newsletter articles. I’ll even be smiling.

Yet a recent survey conducted by Sweeney research for the Quarterly Sensis Business Index in November 2008 revealed that online businesses are far more confident and prepared for growth in 2009 than the general business community. When asked about their business prospects for the coming 12 months, online businesses returned figures indicating 46% confidence compared with only 13% for all small to medium businesses.

So why are online businesses more immune to the economic slowdown and preparing for growth when everyone else stands still? Here are ten reasons why ecommerce will be huge in 2009.

1. Online business is simply cheaper!

No shop front rental, fewer employee needs and automated administration mean online stores are incredibly cheap to run when compared with the average street shop. Monthly hosting costs and web design will never add up to as much as shop rental and fit-out. And your website can potentially serve customers without you needing staff to operate the till or reach the top shelf.

Although many businesses choose to enhance an existing street business with a website or use a website to attract business to a landline service, the relative cheapness of a website is contrasted only by its high potential to make money!

2. Working in pyjamas

The day of the pin-stripe suit and power meeting are over. Throw off the shackles of the capitalist corporate world, throw on the monster feet slippers and comfy PJs and switch on the laptop in the spare room.

Now you can be a successful businessman without shaving every day! God, I love this job!

3. Earning money while you sleep

Continuing the pyjama theme, nothing beats a business that keeps working while you get some shut-eye. Websites don’t have closing times and never clock off. In a worldwide online market, when Sydney closes, London opens. And being open when the high street shops are closed can also boost business.

Online mail-order shopping is increasing dramatically year on year as more people discover the convenience of buying products when and where they want with a few clicks.

4. Online marketing is more effective

When someone likes an advert in a magazine, they can’t click on it to buy straight away. When passing a billboard, you may be miles away from the shop. But online, when a banner ad or search engine listing catches a potential customer’s attention, they can act on that impulse immediately.

Within minutes, they’ve visited your store bought the item and transferred funds into your account. Tell me one other form of traditional advertising that links desire with action so closely?

5. An online store can be refitted in seconds

Want to redecorate? Traditionally, that means closing the doors of the business, throwing sheets over the stock and spending weekends painting the walls and building new fixtures and fittings.

Not anymore. An online store can be adjusted behind the scenes without influencing the ongoing customer activity. Once a new colour scheme or layout has been selected, one button push switches it on. Voila – new design.

6. Tech is the new cool

These days, it seems everyone has an iPhone or a laptop or PDA or mp3 player. My stepmother, who can normally cause technology to spontaneously produce error messages merely by switching it on, has joined the 21st Century with her iPod and ceramics website.

Each year, more people become techno-junkies. Fear of technology and computers is diminishing fast. Online spending is steadily increasing and more potential customers are connected to broadband now than ever before.

Ecommerce has a long way to go before it completely fulfils its potential. Like stock that keeps going up and up, it is a pretty safe bet that online business will continue to improve and grow in popularity for years to come.

7. Politicians love the internet

Whether it is Barack Obama with his Blackberry fetish or Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull dueling on Twitter and YouTube, politicians love the potential of the internet. Expect governments to continue to support the expansion of online business as they thrive on the kudos of association with the future.
Gone are the days when the Government seemed to yearn for the 1950s to come back, resisting change and embracing tradition. New governments are forward looking and excited by the wide reaching potential offered by the internet and new technology.

8. Online business has never been easier

Virtually anyone can build their own professional website these days. Special applications allow anyone to create a shopping cart website to rival Amazon. The only limit is your imagination.
The evolution of the internet has created plenty of tools aimed at helping the average person extract the most from the web without spending hours at night school.

Of course, there are no guarantees of success. Even if you can build a fantastic website quickly and cheaply, if your product stinks, you have a problem.

9. Start up costs won’t break the bank

Can’t get credit to set up your business? The bank tightening up loan conditions and refusing more business applications in reaction to years of bad credit? Who needs the banks when an online business can be launched for the price of a decent lunch!

That’s right. Some businesses are starting off small and growing as money comes in. $15.95 a month may be enough to get a simple hosting account and use a website builder application to get the first website running.
Spreading marketing costs over monthly payments can also get the business off and running without putting the family out on the street. Starting with a monthly search engine optimization program and/or an email marketing program could bring in those first few valuable customers to get the ball rolling.

Why risk your mortgage launching a traditional business in uncertain economic times? A lot less can help you to launch online right now – smaller risk, greater opportunities for growth.

10. The world is your oyster

Assuming your product or service is not geographically limited – you wouldn’t offer your cleaning services to families in Los Angeles – you could take advantage of the weaker dollar to export overseas.
Your website is accessible wherever there is an internet connection; Liverpool, Paris, Zanzibar. If your range of designer cosmetics or rare comic books can be reasonably shipped by post or courier, your potential customer base can increase from the population of your local city to billions around the world.

More potential customers mean more sales mean more financial security in these difficult times.

So What Are You Waiting For?

2009 could be your year. If you have an existing business with uncertain times ahead or you have a new business idea waiting for the right moment to be unleashed, the internet is where the smart money is.

So burn the suit and tie, pull out the pyjamas and monster feet slippers, brew a pot of coffee and get started!

Think I responded to this email with a link? If you can assemble the words hell, chance and snowball into a sentence, you may have the answer.

My personal website receives a handful of these every month in various shapes and forms. Yet most conform to a list of major online marketing no-nos.

• They are all very obviously form letters with no true insight into my website
• I am addressed as ‘webmaster’ despite my name appearing prominently throughout the site – it’s my domain name for pity’s sake!
• The email makes no reference to any content or gives any other indication that a real person has ever visited the site.
• The website making the offer is in a completely different industry to mine, meaning any link exchange would be woefully irrelevant.
• The website makes erroneous claims about how reciprocal links benefit both websites in the search engines
• Often, all of the details are not filled in, so that nonsensical phrases such as “I visited your website, [insert name of website], yesterday,” appear.

Swapping links has been going on ever since webmasters worked out that links had an influence on the search engines. Yet, after a decade of search engine optimization improvements, the search engines are clever enough to weed out spammy exchanges and inappropriate links.

Exchanging links with a casino site or some equally inappropriate online neighbourhood can actually have a very detrimental affect on your website. Links to and from websites earmarked as ‘spammy’ or engaging in suspicious linking activity can incur site penalties that lower your appearance in the search engines and lose you customers.

These spammy link exchange emails are extremely common, meaning that enough people must fall for them to be worthwhile. But you should never swap links with a website you would not naturally choose, especially when they can’t even manage the courtesy of a personal email or any real interest in the success of your site. You can bet that the website making the offer has a crappy ‘resources’ page stuffed with hundreds of links, making them near worthless in passing on any benefit to other sites. But those sites that do happen to link back may well have far fewer links, meaning their link carries more weight and helps them rise higher.

Their site wins, your site loses – just as you would expect.

Less obviously spammy than Viagra or breast enhancements or ‘genuine’ university degrees, these emails are designed to appeal to the inexperienced webmaster. Send them to the junk mail folder where they belong and continue using professional link building services and organic techniques.