December 2007 Archives

The battle to convert site visitors into customers is hotting up and many websites will fail by not understanding the issues that affect customer behaviour.

In part one of this article, we looked at recent research that demonstrated what factors were most important to site visitors when deciding whether to make a purchase. As it became apparent that price was the major factor, and that postage meant online sellers were competing with traditional stores, the issue of an effective price point has become crucial in beating competition.

But if online businesses are solely competing on price, eventually, profit margins will be shaved so much that price differences will be nominal and profits will suffer. If all the competing online stores have prices within the same narrow band in an attempt to stay competitive, there is nowhere left for the marketer to go. Or is there?

Online marketing has given businesses large and small all over the world the ability to compete on a level playing field. But although your online store has the potential to reach more potential customers than you could ever dream of, converting them into sales is often overlooked in this constant push for a high Google position and a strong link campaign.

Well, who’da thunk it?

My plea for Sphinns resulted in a huge outpouring of support. Once the post gained some momentum (at first, people seemed to be nervous about jumping on board) the Sphinns rolled in so fast that the post not only went hot but became the hottest post of the day!

For most of the day, though, it was narrowly being beaten by Jeff Quips submission announcing the arrival of a little Wiep. This has led me to thinking that I should start pressuring my girlfriend so that I can have another white-hot post in nine months.

But finally my post crept forward, taking the lead and going on to reach a staggering 51 Sphins! This is actually more Sphinns than all my other submissions added together and is deserving of a huge amount of thanks to all of you.

So what can be learned from this experiment?

Seems like this social bookmarking is a tough nut to crack, but read to the bottom for a one-off Sphinn related offer.

Getting onto the front page of Digg has always been notoriously difficult, so I realised a while ago that chasing the Digg vote for an online marketing blog wasn't a good strategy.

Another day, another Google story is blown out of context across the web in the name of SEO.

It seems each week some throwaway line by Matt Cutts or a mysterious rumour sends all the SEO blogs into overdrive as thousands of paragraphs are unleashed to thoroughly dissect and debate the news before anything is even clear.