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Getting Help to Build a Vibrant Web Presence | |
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SoHo NEWS & TIPS
Helping You Make the Most of Your Small Office/Home Office
SoHoTIPS.com
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Greetings,
If you have a website for your business, you might want to
think about getting creative with your site to attract and
keep customers. Today's issue offers stories and solutions
to help you build a vibrant web presence.
Best,
Mandi
P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the
new SoHo News & Tips forum. Check it out here...
SoHo News & Tips Forum
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NEWS & TIDBITS
- GE sends notices to 50,000 employees, whose
names and SSNs were on a stolen laptop...
- The United States Air Force plans to cut 40,000
jobs by 2009, two years earlier than previously
planned...
- Verizon Communications Inc. celebrated the
first anniversary of its FiOS home broadband
launch by disclosing subscriber statistics at a
New York financial conference...
- British tycoon Sir Richard Branson has urged
airlines and airport operators to join his Virgin
Atlantic carrier...
- Gambling regulators awarded the first slot-
machine licenses in the state of Pennsylvania...
- Spanish-language media company Univision
Communications Inc. got shareholder approval for
its sale to a group of private equity firms...
- About 640 hourly workers at Delphi Corp's west
Columbus plant have accepted the company's job
buyout...
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Getting Help to Build A Vibrant Web Presence
By RIVA RICHMOND
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal.
Albert DiPadova is facing a population explosion.
Mr. DiPadova is a co-owner of Due Maternity, a San
Francisco purveyor of hip clothes for pregnant
women. In the past six months, he has seen 24 new
competitors emerge on the Web -- which makes it
harder for his store to stand out in search-engine
results and has driven up the price of ads on Yahoo
and Google.
So Mr. DiPadova decided on a new strategy to
distinguish his business. He would supplement his
online ads with a site makeover.
His Web developer used do-it-yourself design tools
from Yahoo Inc., which hosts Due Maternity's site,
to give the online store an assortment of features
for expectant mothers. Among them: a baby-name
finder, photo-sharing service and "Jiggy-O-Matic"
calculator that helps women figure out the date
they conceived. The centerpiece -- and money maker
-- was a wish list that women could share with
friends and family.
"You have to give something more back" to custom-
ers to get them to return, says Mr. DiPadova, who
also owns five brick-and-mortar Due Maternity out-
lets with his wife, Shannon.
As conventional online marketing gets tougher,
many small businesses are coming to the same
conclusion as Mr. DiPadova: They have to get more
creative with their sites to attract and retain
customers. But most small businesses can't afford
to hire their own Web developers and marketers to
add new features to their sites or increase their
online exposure. Even companies that do have on-
staff help want easy-to-use tools that keep the
job simple and inexpensive. So many entrepreneurs
are looking outside their walls for help.
Some, like Mr. DiPadova, are using services that
let small businesses create and manage sites them-
selves despite minimal technical expertise. Others
are turning to full-service design houses that not
only create sites for them but also manage their
marketing campaigns -- everything from buying
online ads to customizing the sites so that they
attract the attention of search engines.
In Mr. DiPadova's case, the efforts have paid off.
Since Due Maternity added the new features in
January, about 50,000 people have registered with
the site, and traffic and sales are up. He expects
his company to reach $5 million in sales this year
-- two-thirds of it online -- up from less than $1
million in 2003, Due Maternity's first year in
business.
The push to get more sophisticated online reveals
just how vital the Internet has become to small
businesses. According to Yankee Group, a Boston
consulting firm, 66% of the 5.5 million U.S.
businesses with two to 499 employees have a Web
site of some kind. The Web has opened up huge new
markets for entrepreneurs, giving even the small-
est companies a global reach. In addition, the Web
is often the first place that potential customers
turn for information about companies.
With the stakes increasingly high, businesses are
finding that it's no longer enough to have a
simple home page. Customers expect a professional,
efficient, engaging and secure site -- and they
expect to be able to find it easily using a search
engine. "If they're going to survive, [small
businesses] have to get on to this" idea of
improving their site design, says Sanjeev Aggarwal,
an analyst at research firm AMI Partners Inc., of
New York. "They need a more professional presence."
Basic Mistakes
Indeed, many companies make very basic mistakes
with their sites, says Justin Kitch, chief
executive of Homestead Technologies Inc., which
designs sites for small businesses and provides
do-it-yourself tools for entrepreneurs. Sometimes
the phone number on the site is wrong, a link
doesn't work or the design looks sloppy, he says.
Those kinds of mistakes can ruin a company's
marketing efforts, he argues. Online advertising
is "very important only once you have a site
that's worth marketing," he says. It is "useless
otherwise."
Helping companies create polished sites is
becoming a big business. Yankee Group predicts the
U.S. market for Web services for small and medium-
size companies will grow 7% a year to $4.1 billion
in 2010 from $2.9 billion in 2005.
Extending Your Reach
BUILD BUZZ: Invite regular customers to write a
review of your business in their favorite online
city guide or on sites like Yahoo Local, Citysearch
and Yelp, where local consumers share recommend-
ations.
MAKE AND MARKET: Don't blow your whole budget on a
flashy site. You also need a presence on search
engines to draw traffic in the first place.
HAPPY LANDINGS: Online ads shouldn't always send
visitors to your home page. Choose "landing pages"
that are more relevant to prospective customers'
needs.
MONITOR YOUR RESULTS: Make sure your marketing
efforts are working. Many hosting services help
track where your online traffic and sales are
coming from and offer tips for getting better
results from your ads.
These services fall into two broad categories.
First, there are do-it-yourself packages. You pay
a third party to host your company's Web site,
email and other services, but you put together the
site yourself, selecting a template and then add-
ing options.
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One of the biggest names in the field is Yahoo,
which has more than a million small-business
customers and hosts 40,000 e-commerce sites. Its
do-it-yourself packages start at $11.95 a month
for a basic site; Mr. DiPadova uses the top-tier
offering at $299.95 a month, which carries a $50
set-up fee and 0.75% transaction fee per sale.
Using Yahoo, people with no Web expertise can
create a site from scratch or customize one of 380
templates. They can, for instance, drag and drop
images onto the page and move around elements such
as the site's headline. Likewise, users can adjust
color schemes, fonts and button styles, and add
extras such as tables, maps, multimedia content
and customer forms. Yahoo also offers templates
to help merchants set up online catalogs.
A slew of other hosting companies, such as
Homestead, of Menlo Park, Calif., and Web.com Inc.
of Atlanta, Ga., provide similar template-based
services. Packages range from $9.95 a month for a
simple brochure-type site to $49.95 a month for a
full-fledged e-commerce site.
High-End Help
Even with these customizable offerings, many
entrepreneurs find they lack the time, expertise
or staff resources to build their own site. So
they hire Web professionals to create and market
a site for them. A custom site can cost anywhere
from a couple of hundred dollars to many thousands,
depending on individual needs, plus hosting fees.
Most of the hosting companies that offer do-it-
yourself templates also offer soup-to-nuts service.
"It's incredibly painful to build a Web site,"
says Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence,
a Web research and consulting firm in Oakland,
Calif. "There's a lot of stuff going on, and it's
very messy. It's wheels within wheels, and your
head starts to hurt."
For Shane Gallagher, going with a design team was
an easy call. Mr. Gallagher, a 27-year-old surfer,
founded Fringe Clothing LLC in Santa Cruz, Calif.,
with his father, Paul, a year ago. The younger Mr.
Gallagher says it was clear that he had to have a
site -- and a cool one.
Most of Fringe's products, athletic clothes for
extreme sports, are sold in retail stores. Even
so, the clothing buyers at stores and the kids who
wear Fringe's gear needed "a face to the company,"
to reassure them that it was an established opera-
tion, Mr. Gallagher says, and they would look for
that face on the Web. But Mr. Gallagher, who
professes a "hate" for computers, didn't want to
handle the site himself.
So he hired Affinity Internet Inc. of Fort Lauder-
dale, Fla., to create his site, where customers
can order items directly or find out which dealers
carry Fringe's clothes. The design features
stylized midflight images of skateboarders, motor-
cyclists and snowboarders; customers can also read
a surfer's tale of near death in the underwater
grip of a 20-foot wave.
Now Mr. Gallagher plans to work with Affinity to
set up a MySpace page. Many companies that market
to young people set up pages on the popular
social-networking site to build buzz. And Affinity
is developing ads for Fringe on the surfing portal
surfline.com.
Indeed, another big appeal of the soup-to-nuts
plans is that they usually offer online marketing
as well. Many small companies are overwhelmed by
the job, and are only too happy to turn it over
to a professional. Affinity, for instance, manages
a modest $100-a-month search campaign for Fringe.
What's so complicated about online marketing? With
so much competition, it's getting harder for online
businesses to maintain high placement in search
results. And it's becoming more expensive to buy
ads tied to search terms. Prices for these ads are
set in online auctions and can jump on big bids
from novices who don't know the going rates, as
well as large competitors who can afford to drop
lots of cash. Indeed, larger companies have for
the most part cornered the market for the general
keywords -- such as "clothing" -- that are most
popular with searchers.
Choose Your Words
Many small businesses say Web-services companies
bolster their chances by carefully choosing which
keywords belong in an ad campaign and managing
bidding to balance cost, ad ranking and results
in Web visits and sales. Traffic to Deborah
Williamson's six-month-old online store,
ChinaGlassAndMore.com, based in Gillette, Wyo.,
rose to as high as 70 clicks a day on weekends
from almost zero after Homestead began buying ads
for her on Google. The ads are tied to keywords
such as "china gravy boat" and "collectible dish-
ware."
Ms. Williamson pays Homestead $49.99 a month for
a guaranteed 400 clicks a year, or about 33 a
month. She is now generating about $600 a month in
sales.
Pros can also design a site that attracts search
engines and boosts their ranking in the so-called
natural results, where ranking is determined by
relevance only. For example, the Web site for
Pizza John's, a pizza restaurant in Essex, Md.,
gets the top ranking on Google or Yahoo for
searches on "pizza johns." Crucially, it beats
out the similarly named national chain Papa John's,
which has many stores in the surrounding area. It
also ranks at the top for searches on "pizza Essex
Maryland."
Web.com credits this high placement to a few key
elements. The site has a clear, descriptive domain
name, pizzajohns.com. The site's design also
avoids certain types of graphics and frames that
can be troublesome to search-engine "spiders," the
automated programs that scour the Web analyzing
sites and help engines determine relevance, and
therefore ranking.
And the site repeats keywords such as "pizza" and
"pasta," as well as the restaurant's name and
location. Spiders like to see consistency and
redundancy in the text on a site. That's where a
small business, focused on one area or product,
can gain a big advantage over a larger one. A big
business's site often must emphasize the company's
breadth of operations and services, leading to
less redundancy in the text.
Similarly, when Affinity designed an online dating
site for Matchmaking Moms Inc., the company made
sure to repeat lots of keywords and use "metatags,"
invisible text that gives search engines inform-
ation about the contents of a page. Affinity also
included a special Google site-map file that gives
the search engine more information about the site,
which lets moms set up their sons and daughters
with potential mates.
That design may have helped the San Francisco-
based site get its big break. A producer for NBC's
"Today" show spotted Matchmaking Moms while doing
a Web search, and featured it on the show on Aug.
9. The publicity sent 350,000 visitors to the site
that day, says founder Dawn Miller, and netted
about 200 memberships, which are free for now.
Since then, she has been averaging 20 to 30 new
members a day.
DID YOU KNOW?
Building a competitive edge into the fabric of your business
is crucially important to long-term success. Some ways to
get this edge are by knowing more than your competitors,
making a product that is hard or impossible to imitate,
being able to produce or distribute your product more
efficiently, having a better location, or offering superior
customer service.
So what did you think about this issue? Drop me a line and let
me know at mailto:mandi@gophercentral.com
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