The web is a great place to learn about and to conduct business, and can provide us with all the communication  information  tools and marketing power that we need to launch a product and get it into the homes of the market we see for it. But forgetting the way that business used to be done, and forgetting our roots is a big mistake – there is still a lot to learn from the humble high street or the local retail park. These old ‘analogue’ business models allow us to see the strings working behind the business models and to get a fuller and better understanding of how business systems operate. Look down your road at some of the shops there, and you have a wonderful little microcosm of business which can teach you a lot. Thinking about which stores are thriving and why and asking how the different businesses are competing, can very enlightening and even if your business takes place entirely on the web.

One question you might ask then when thinking about the way these businesses work is why you so often see competitors setting up shop right next door to each other. Where you find one fast food outlet you will almost invariably find several more, and the same goes for technology shops, for charity shops, for home stores and really anything else you can imagine. Let’s look at why this is the case, and at what we can learn from this phenomenon.

The Logic

At first glance you might well be forgiven for presuming that opening up right next door to your competition would be a bad move. Of course this would mean that you’ll lose some of your sales to the competition next door and means you’ll be inadvertently doing marketing for that other business. If you’re the only shop selling a specific product then you are surely more likely to sell it if there’s another shop selling the precise same thing right next door?

Of course this is true, but of course it also works in reverse and for every customer you lose to the store next door, you’ll probably gain one of theirs meaning it should roughly even out. As long as you can differentiate yourself in some way (http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/differentiate-yourself-from-the-competition-2009-01), and offer better value in at least some areas, then you should be getting just as many of their customers as they are of yours.

But more to the point there will be more customers there in the first place to look around your store. The reason for this is of course that you’ve now given them twice as much reason to look for the product they want in your area. If you are a bed shop and you set up next to another bed shop, you turn that area into the ‘place to be’ for bed shopping. Particularly if you are situated in a retail park, you’ll have now created a situation where anyone shopping for bedding will come to the place where they can browse in two major outlets conveniently located next to one another.

New businesses stand to benefit even more than established ones, and particularly if they haven’t yet done much marketing. Here a new company that no one has ever heard of can be discovered by people going to the store next door. If the well-known store offers a similar service or set of products to your own, then you will be introducing yourself to the market that matters and at the same time creating the right associations. And every time the store next door advertises and gets more people to visit – you’ll benefit too without spending a dime.

Making the Most of It

This also gives those shoppers the chance to ‘shop around’ and to compare prices in at least two stores. This also greatly increases their chances of making a purchase because it means they can feel sure they’re making the right choice. If you offer a cheaper price than the store next door, then that contrast (http://book.personalmba.com/contrast/) will make your product appear cheaper still.

In some cases of course a shop or restaurant won’t be able to accommodate its customers – they’ll be out of stock, or they’ll have no tables available – and in that case you can pick up the pieces and take on that extra business. You don’t have to be enemies either – you can even make an agreement or an arrangement where you pass customers between each other and avoid stepping on each other’s toes in terms of what you provide. This way the assumption will be that you are competing and driving prices down for customers, but in reality you’ll both be benefiting and taking advantage of this perception.

This is just one of many lessons you can learn from your high street, so if you want to become more business savvy take a stroll through the town centre. You’d be surprised by the strategies employed here.

The author of this post, Kim Cruise, has a keen interest in topics like business mergers and acquisitions and resorts to guest blogging to share her thoughts on it. She is part of the team at Steinepreis Paganin Lawyers and Consultants.

Why Do Competing Shops Often Open Up Next To One Another? is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Weave Got Maille is a wholesale and retail chainmaille jewelry supply company based in Ada, Minnesota. The website offers everything an experienced chainmaille jewelry maker could want, plus kits and tutorials for the beginner. This full eCommerce website is developed on Magento Commerce. Visitors can choose from thousands of products in the store to compare, add to a wish list, or purchase. Shoppers can buy online with credit cards or PayPal. The chain maille products are showcased by using custom design and photography. Jump Rings have multiple options, including type of metal, color, gauge, mandrel size, and package size.

eCommerce Web Design: Weave Got Maille is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Cloud computing has been represented as an infant in the world of technology, but lately — especially with advances in cloud-powered marketing tools —the cloud is finally starting to grow up. Just as some cloud computing industry analysts have suspected, it’s no longer a question of “if” but rather “when” businesses will make their way to cloud platforms. In fact, it’s to the point where arguing against the cloud’s benefits is an exercise in futility.

Now it’s clear that the world of web marketing is reaping some powerful benefits from the world of shared computing resources in the cloud, but just how does this affect your business’s marketing efforts? In this post, we’ll aim to answer this question.

The future of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is in the cloud

If you look at the recent research conducted by the likes of Gartner or Forrester, the evidence is overwhelmingly in the favor of cloud computing as the future of Web marketing. In fact, roughly one-third of all digital content will be stored or distributed using cloud technology.

Lastly, a recent Forrester study also reveals that by 2020 locally installed applications will have all but vanished. This means that the bulk of future consumers will access their digital content in the cloud, which also means that this is where Web marketers need to congregate to stay competitive in this new marketing space.

Why marketers are migrating to the cloud

• Simplicity and flexibility — As data becomes complex — most would refer to this data complexity as “big data” — it’s becoming harder to manage on-premise data with the limited IT infrastructure available to most small to mid-sized businesses. The cloud offers a great deal of complexity to those small businesses needing to leverage the power of big data on a tight budget. When you can access cloud block storage and requisition immensely powerful cloud processing almost instantly, why would you invest in expensive, quickly outdated in-house computing?
• Device independence — In the cloud, hard drive, local storage and operating system compatibility concerns are a thing of the past. Web interfaces that power every cloud solution eliminate the need to worry about device compatibility. You can access all files and tools from any Internet-capable device.
• Cost-effectiveness — Regardless of whom you ask, one of the biggest assets of cloud migration is cost. There’s no longer the threat of small business marketers having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on local servers to deliver marketing campaigns to the masses. Small businesses merely pay for the computing power they need. Nothing more. Nothing less.
• Security — While this is still heavily debated, many of cloud computing’s security concerns are rapidly disappearing. Cloud providers have built robust security applications to help ward off data breaches in the cloud environment.

What this means for your small business

Companies as diverse as eBay, Whole Foods and PayPal are migrating to cloud server solutions to help streamline their marketing processes. The good news for SMBs all over the place is that this can be your reality, too. Cloud services are perfect for small businesses with fluctuating needs and budget constraints.

Should You Move Business Operations to the Cloud? is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Imagine this. You’re wearing a pair of glasses – you tell them ‘Glass, take a picture’ and it takes a picture of what you see; you’re sitting alone, you ask what’s the time and in front of your eyes – 12:OO PM displays; you walk into an airport – in front of your eyes pops up a message telling you your flight is delayed, after which, in front of your eyes pops another message – telling you the nearby places you could catch a bite at. Sounds like the stuff of science fiction dreams? Not any longer. Welcome to the world of Google Glass.

The Product

Soon to be available in the market, Google Glass is a product that wants to make augmented reality a reality. Defined as a ‘wearable computer with a head mounted display’, Google Glass resembles a pair of regular glasses, with the lenses replaced by a heads-up display. The device is powered by a 1.2Ghz processor and Android 4.0.4 and features Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth connectivity, a 5 megapixel camera capable of HD recording, 16GB of onboard storage, a gyroscope and an accelerometer.

Concerns

Not everyone is excited though. The primary concern most people have is privacy – the idea of being able to photograph everything that your eyes see or to be able to look up strangers walking on the street on the internet is more than a little discomforting to some. Many believe that the service also puts too much power in a single internet mammoth – Google. However, although valid, these concerns aren’t able to diminish the excitement surrounding the product.

Opportunities for the Future

Google Glass is one of the few products released with the potential to completely overhaul the way we interact with the internet-

Social Networking and Communication

The possibilities for integration with social networking are endless. Imagine being able to share what’s in front of your eyes with just a simple voice command – no need to take out your phone or to take out a camera. Imagine walking around and seeing an email pop before your eyes, and being able to dictate a reply right then and there.

Utilities

Google Glass also has a ton of really useful features built in, and the potential to have many more. The ability to translate what you’re hearing and display it in your native language in front of your eyes sounds incredible. GPS Navigation takes on a whole new dimension in Google Glass- with directions displayed in front of you as you move. And don’t forget Google’s original product – search itself. You’ll now be able to look at a monument – and just by saying ‘What is that?’ ‘Who built it?’ – you’ll get all the answers you need.

Marketing

Google Glass is an online marketer’s dream – the ability to track users and display information relative to what the user needs at that minute will allow marketers to target consumers like never before. If you’re walking pass an establishment that your Google Glass recognizes – you might see a coupon for the same establishment in front of your eyes. Although Google claims that as of right now, there will not be ads on the product, you can be sure in the future, Google will find a way to monetize its product. Whether you’re excited or concerned about the launch of this product, it’s quite clear that Google Glass is making an impact, and is here to stay.

Written by a Jefry, designer and tech blogger, who is interested in Google products and MotoCMS HTML templates

Google Glass: Augment Your Reality, Litereally is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Twitter can provide businesses lacking the resources to utilise more costly channels with a cost effective way of reaching out to potential customers and brand advocates. Assuming, of course, that it’s used the right way.

Here’s a look at just three of the simplest ways to ensure you’re getting the most of your efforts with the platform.

1. Don’t Waste Follows

If you’re new to it, you may have assumed you can use Twitter to get updates from an unlimited number of sources. Whilst, thanks to retweets, it is possible that anyone could end up in your feed, to make sure you have access to what other users are saying you need to follow them.

However, you can only follow 2,000 other people (or, if it amounts to a higher number, 110% of the people following you). This is, in all likelihood far more than you’ll find you actually need in order gain great value from the tweets in your feed, but, as well as being an important way to source information, following other users is also one of the best ways to extend your own reach (reciprocal follows being the easiest sort to acquire.)

Given that selecting your follows will determine not only what you hear, but to a large extent, who you end up being heard by, it’s imperative you choose wisely. One good tactic is to go for the people who have the most influence in the niche that concerns you. This way you have more to gain if you do get any exposure from your interactions with them. Wefollow.com makes it easy to find the most followed profiles in any one area.

As well as knowing who to follow, it’s a good idea to know who you should unfollow. Refollow.com provide a great tool to help you manage the people you’re following and get rid of the deadwood. The site can show you who amongst those you follow has failed to follow you back and get rid of them, freeing up more follows to use elsewhere.

Finally, don’t limit yourself to follows. Adding people to lists, whether they are specific or general, is a great way of grabbing their attention and getting the favour returned.

2. Find the Right Conversations to Contribute to

Of course, Twitter is completely unlike many other tools you might use to promote your business, but this doesn’t mean that traditional marketing methodologies don’t apply.

For instance, in the same way that you’d make extensive efforts to target an add at a certain demographic, when it comes to contributing to the global exchange of views that is Twitter, you need to find the conversations where you really have something to contribute.

There are some handy tools out there to help you with this daunting task. The third party program TweetBeep can be used to alert you when people are talking about a subject pertaining to your business. Indeed, you could also use it to monitor mentions of your brand, allowing you to react to important topics as well as proactively getting involved in discussions relevant to your industry/customer base.

HootSuite is another dashboard that, amongst its many functions, makes it easier to track down where the keywords that most concern you are being used, offering you the chance to swoop in and offer an expert opinion.

3. Time Your Tweets

One of the key things that attracts users to Twitter is how rapidly and dynamically discussions of a topic develop and grow. The fact that things move quickly on Twitter is great in many ways, but it does mean that your messages aren’t going to stick in your followers feeds for too long.

As a result, it’s important to share at times when your news is likely to have the maximum impact. You’ll hear various opinions as to when the best times to post are but, depending on who they are, they may well not apply to your followers. The best course of action is to find out for yourself.

Paul Scanlon writes on subjects pertaining to the worlds of business and finance. He works as part of the editorial team at UK Net Guide.

3 Golden Rules for Smaller Businesses on Twitter is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Original image from http://www.thecoolhunter.com.au/cloud/view/Office

Office branding is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, from smaller business to larger brands such as McDonalds and Google. The process, where you design your workplace to align with your brand, can really set your business apart from competitors. Peter Ames from Office Genie has a look at why it could give your business a real boost.

Impress your potential clients

Perhaps the biggest reason to consider office branding is the boost it can give to your business’s image. Your client spaces are where you want to display your brand most overtly; giving you an opportunity to really wow people who come into your office.

You only get one chance to create a good first impression and few things can impress a client quite like a slick, well-designed space. It could really help your business stand out in a competitive market.

Give your employees an inspiring workplace

Of course you want to consider the impression you give to clients and customers, but don’t forget your staff. Office branding offers an opportunity to design a space in which staff can live and breathe your company. An inspiring environment could  help motivate them to produce their very best work.

In staff spaces it’s best to be a little more subtle about displaying your brand. Staff don’t really want to be bombarded. In fact it can be as simple as setting aside some collaborative working space; where employees can sit down and chat about work outside the formal environment of a meeting room. At Genie HQ our break-out area has proven to one of the most popular features our office re-design; offering staff an area in which they can sit and eat lunch together, rather than hunched over the keyboard.

Attract the very best

Don’t forget a great working environment can also help you attract the very best candidates. It feels like there’s almost a different survey every week that shows how the next generation of top-class employees are attracted to more than just money.

If you can show potential employees an inspiring, dynamic working environment then they’re going to be so much keener to work for you. If you can complement your space with a unified image of your brand spread across your website, business cards and even business stationary then that’s even more impressive.

Of course there are other factors that can help (Bring your own device schemes and flexible working to name but two), but don’t forget the space in which they’ll be spending most of their time.

Peter Ames writes for Office Genie, a UK-based search engine and marketplace for desk and office space.

What a Branded Workspace Can do for Your Business is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Bismarck Heating & Air‘s new animated web design looks fresh and family-friendly. Easy to use and easy to update, it’s features include a rotating testimonial in the sidebar and easy vendor links in the footer. This is built on a content management system to make updating easy.

Web Design: Bismarck Heating & Air is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Definition from Wikipedia: In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page” or a “lander“, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link.

Landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads. By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and Conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.

A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to “capture the lead” and add the prospect to a mailing list. This is known as a conversion. The number of times the capture form is filled out divided by the number of visitors to the page gives you the conversion rate.

The Web Shoppe can help you set up a landing page for your next promotion. Contact us today for more information.

What is a landing page? is a post from: The Web Shoppe

Every picture tells a story and, in many cases, that story has a plot that suggests the photographer is not that good. For commercial purposes, photography – be that for a website, brochure or news piece – should be considered a key part of your investment strategy. Many businesses – particularly online firms – don’t seem to always grasp just how important original and quality imagery can be.  Stock images are easy to buy or rent and this seems to be the approach that many firms take.  However, stock images are never the perfect solution. Even stock images produced by excellent photographers can become clichéd, while popular images can be found on numerous websites. Custom photography not only allows you to display your wares to their best advantage; it also shows that you care about your products and your customers.

Quality Content

We live in a hugely visual society; in advertising imagery has played a pivotal role for millennia.  From daubed images in caves through to modern digital images and video, pictures not only tell a story but they sell. Words play a part too, but images are the first impression that your customers will get of your products. The more detailed (and the better quality) the image, the more interest it is likely to generate. Words and images have been combined in most forms of advertising for many centuries; the role of the image is to grab the attention of the viewer and the role played by written content is to coerce (in the nicest possible way) the viewer to take action (preferably with their wallet or purse!)

Imagery Overload

Rumour has it that each individual is subjected to several thousand advertising images a day. That may be stretching a point but it is important to realise that your visual offerings are just one in a sea of many similar images. Standing out from the crowd and arresting people’s attention is the crucial factor to consider when investing in a commercial photographer. In TV advertising, imagery is all-important and yet some adverts (for cars or scent) often employ roughly the same imagery over and over again. Those that don’t are the ones that stand out and they are often crafted and created by the best in the photography and film world. While it’s possible to pick up a ‘competitively’ priced photographer, like any investment the return will depend very much on your initial spend.

Genre Matters

The product or service you’re promoting or selling, will dictate the type of photographer you work with.  Some photographers are good all round experts but many specialise in specific fields.  These areas include interior photographers, wedding, landscape, architectural and portrait photographers.  Although basic photography skills and techniques are often transferable across different areas of photography, some genres require different technical skills.  A photographer with a strong background in and good understanding of your own area of business will be best placed to create images that have the biggest impact.

What am I Paying for?

Like most creative products there’s a small matter of royalties and copyright when you invest in professional photographic images. Some photographers will charge a royalty fee for each and every use of an image while others will sell different types of rights to their work. Some, though by no means all, will retain many of the rights to their work, which allows them to sell the images to other clients (often competitors of your own firm). When negotiating a contract with a photographer, consider the investment you are making and ensure that you are buying rights that suit your project and your long term needs. It will be cheaper to buy limited rights, but it may well be a false economy to do so. In an image conscious world it’s surprisingly easy to overlook many of the images that bombard us on a day-to-day basis; when it comes to commercial photography it pays to invest in the best to ensure that your images stand out.

Bob Emerald is a freelance writer who believes that commercial photography is a vital investment for any business. Therefore you should put your faith in reputable companies like Rob Bennett Photography who offer a professional and highly creative solution to any commercial project.

The Commercial Value Of Imagery is a post from: The Web Shoppe

License: Creative Commons image source

While much of SEO has changed in recent times, some things remain the same and there are still those highly desirable keywords and phrases that everyone seems to want and that can help you to take your website to the next level in terms of popularity and profit. Take ‘Make Money Online’ for instance – that’s a phrase that anyone with a money making website would be highly lucky to land and that would almost certainly make you rather rich. Alternatively, how about ‘bodybuilding articles’? Sell an eBook from that page and you’re not going to want for cash for a while…

Obviously though, targeting these highly popular phrases has an innate problem – that being that there’s an awful lot of competition making it very difficult to actually get your site to the top spot. What you need is a plan and fortunately I’ve got just the thing for you…

The Old Strategy – Things to Avoid

A few years ago getting to the top of the SERPs for such a popular subject was still a relatively simple process. All you needed to do was to build up as many hundreds of thousands of links as you possibly could using that key phrase as your anchor. Then you would make sure to lace that keyphrase awkwardly throughout the text on your site/page in order to ensure that every spider and robot that landed there knew what your site was meant to be about. Then it just came down to who was willing to run on the treadmill longest. Post more links and write more content than the other guy and you would make it to number one.

But then things changed. The dreaded ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ updates to Google’s algorithms fixed it so that such blatant techniques would actually get you penalised and send you down the SERPs rather than letting you climb them.  So if you want to rank for that keyphrase don’t use keyword stuffing and don’t build lots of useless links.

Today’s Techniques

Today then you should build your links only through painstakingly trying to get your site mentioned on well-known blogs that are in your same niche and by ‘link baiting’. By writing great content with no keyword stuffing, the aim is that people will gladly share your links – so you need to make sure that you use eye-catching headings and that you give real attention to quality.

Instead of keyword stuffing, what you need to do is to write ‘around’ the topic as much as possible. Google’s new ‘semantic search’ means that it now recognises synonyms and related terms, so the more you write around the subject naturally and the more detail you give it, the more you should be able to become an authority on the topic in Google’s eyes. Link out to relevant subjects as well as in and generally try to offer as much value and useful information as possible to your visitors.

A New Strategy

That’s how you should be targeting your popular keyphrase according to modern SEO thinking, but I did promise you a new technique that you could use as well…

The strategy I’m proposing then, is to try and target a slightly different keyphrase and in fact several around the one you’re aiming for. So say you wanted to aim for ‘bodybuilding articles’, you might look at targeting a few of the more long-tail terms such as ‘best bodybuilding articles’ or ‘index of bodybuilding articles’. This way you’d be aiming for a key term that had less competition, making you considerably more likely to be able to get to the top.

The reason this is so effective though, is that success tends to breed success. Point is, that once you have established yourself, you’ll find that you start to generate a lot more links naturally as other writers start pointing to your site as a resource and as your readers start discussing your content on forums and comments sections of blogs. The point is, that you will then be able to elevate yourself from having a few links to having lots more and this will generate something of a snowball effect. From there, you may then start to attack the bigger key terms that are harder to reach. Start small, then work your way up – you might just be surprised at how high you can go.

Todd Ramos is a renowned SEO and the owner of toddseoguy.com. An experienced campaigner, he has stated some new strategies in this article that will help people get an edge in targeting competitive terms.

A New Strategy For Targeting Highly Competitive Terms is a post from: The Web Shoppe