I have been working on a new site of late built on the Magento platform. The site was developed over many months with Lighthouse Care sourcing the best deals they could for their clients as their ethos is :
Your independence is our success
The site has been filled with the best content and optimised so that it is extremely easy for anyone to find just what they want – that is the essence of a site – clarity.
Google of course, aided in a few ways, analytics was integrated to every page of the site to allow us to track visits and visitor behaviour. Magento also comes with an automated export to Google Base / Froogle. Google Merchant so that you are able to have your products listed on Google within a few days of launch and not have to pay per click for this useful and targeted traffic.
The checkout was set up using Realex Online Payments which provide a secure online checkout facility which easily integrated with Magento and gives full security for credit card purchases.
Lighthouse are continually adding new products and services to their portfolio of mobility aids and disbility products and aim to become a leading provider in the UK and Internationally.
The site can be found at Lighthouse Mobility
Thing is with marketing a niche product to a willing market is that you really don’t have to try too hard.
You are not pushing some unnecessary consumerist dream down their throats, nor suggesting a lifestyle change; just putting a willing customer in touch with a suitable supplier.
This is where social media comes into its own, if you create the right sort of Facebook/ Twitter/ YouTube etc page which carries a true source of information about a shared sphere of interest you can be sure that the majority of people who follow, share, befriend, fan your social media pages will be almost willing customers.
Hence, create your social media pages, lovingly add/ drip as unique and interesting content as you can on a regular basis and you will soon find that you have followers and, better still, conversions.
Been working on marketing a data recovery website for a while now, makes you think about how terrible it would be to lose all your data. Don’t close the door after the horse has bolted and back up now I say.
I have been adding the site to relevant search engines, optimising title tags and metadescriptions and researching keywords. All of which was a most enjoyable day.
Now, I may be completely wrong, this is all conjecture of course as I am no expert in the economy for sure.
Recently I have been made aware of the awful crash of a country I loved like a lover, like a sibling or like a child I am not certain which, just it was an unconditional love – that is for sure.
Greece, it seems, had fallen on bad times, it has become debt ridden and bankrupt, it can no longer function and there is a general malaise and public discontent.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in that fair and beautiful land I have some comprehension how this has come about.
Basically, they have been rogered brutally by the Great Powers, not for the first time either. It is a pattern one can see repeated on both macro and individual scale and is a perfect example of the ongoing slave trade these days. On an individual scale the crash of the western economies over the past few years has been down to the same cynical exploitation of greed by the money lending corporations.
In the late 1950′s Karamanlis paved the way for Greece’s entry into the then EEC.
Since then the real West : America, Germany, France, England and China have convinced this poor Balkan state that it too, could and should, be living the Western dream.
Slowly this appeared possible, The Greeks, of course, knew that they were in no way inferior to the rest of the Western countries so they took the bait an waited….and spent
Sure enough it was not long before their way of life was changing, they were soon reaping the rewards of this new way of life.
In 1985 the average Greek drove 0.25 of a car which was 15 years old. By 2005 the stats had changed to 1.5 cars and 2 years old on average. The Greeks had also become accustomed to a steady increase their ‘standard of living’, mobile phones were widespread, laptops, newer automobiles, new cocktails, German air conditioning, French Wine, English steel, Chinese gadgets, American clothes ….. they had made it, and all because they had answered the simple question :
“why don’t you live like us?”
well the trouble is that there is one simple answer ~
“they can’t afford to!”
You see, this lifestye we are so busy selling the world costs money, we can afford some sort of fascimilie of the lifestyle because it is actually a representation of the lifestyle we have created ourselves…our temperate climate and historical progress has allowed us to create a way of living rich in the very goods we have invented..to some extent….
Not so for the rest of the workd, not so for most of the world, all we will do to them is sucker them into chasing our dreams and saddle with a vast consumer debt…
Greece is now in financial ruin because it tried to ape some ethereal soap opera lifestyle which maybe does not even exist, and certaionlyl if it does, proffers far less in terms if humanity and joy than the languid and happy lives they had before this katanalotic idiocy started them up.
I was asked the other day how I felt that ecommerce had changed over the past few years and my initial reaction was that it has not. I mean, in essence you still proffer up your goods and services online and try to induce your customers to click the “buy now” or follow the call to action, whatever it may be.
I got to thinking a bit more, my glib immediate reaction needed some form of analysis….
Further I felt that the massive increase in user generated content online must be a very important factor in the way in which the online shopping experience has changed over the past few years. Even as little as 5 years ago the Internet was pretty much read only for the consumer, you looked and read but did not play an active role in it, much like watching TV or reading a book. Soon the blogoshpere took over and forums and niche industry sites captured a decent market share of the online audience – this was the beginning of social media.
The very fact that now people were having their say online meant that gradually the onus has shifted. For a while price comparison sites dominated the search engine results (SERPS) and the consumer was able to view many websites’ offerings side by side. I suspect Google no longer give these sites the ‘exposure’ they merit in order to maintain their grip on paid results, but that is another story.
Nowadays if you are shopping, say for a new Sat Nav device you are far more likely to ask someone, rather than blithely click on the first result from your favourite search engine, you may ask someone down the pub, at work or at the school gates, this means that you may be searching for say “Dabs” after the recommendation rather than “Sat Nav”.
Some interesting issues make themselves evident now, if you search for a company by name you are quite likely to come across user generated ( and unmoderated ) results – you will find forums, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and consumer groups all showing up in the search results.
Social Media has given SEO a new and very powerful tool to drive targeted traffic to your site; potential customers will have gleaned trust and knowledge of your site prior to visiting so that conversion rates are much higher. This leads of course to a corresponding necessity to spend on alternative routes to market such as paid advertising.
Of course it takes time and effort to set up, track and maintain all the social media strategies but done properly this can generate increased exposure and qualified traffic. D
As new social media sites come and go you will have to keep an eye on where it will be pertinent to increase exposure and where words will be wasted, it is here to stay and traditional SEO tactics will have to change, or be left behind.
