Trends in Online Marketing

Posted on January 26, 2012 by admin

Over the past few years, the trends in Internet marketing have grown significantly. The involvement of social media in Internet marketing has forever been changed because of the rise and the success of social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. There are several major retailers that have accounts on these two social networking websites; however, the primary mission is to continue to use these websites to boost their sales revenue.
Even though most companies quickly jumped abroad and begun connecting with their customers that had accounts on these social networking websites, it was not until recently that other companies started to pay attention to this form of Internet marketing. Although there are still a few businesses that have caught the Internet marketing fever, many of them have realized that they can build their brand loyalty by offering discounts and other deals to their online customers; furthermore, they now have the ability to monitor trends and review feedback that has been made by their online customer base.
If you are familiar with digital marketing, you are probably aware that there are different types that exist, such as: PPC (Pay-Per-Click), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and banner advertising. However, those are just the primary types of digital marketing, as other types are inclusive of: instant messaging, wireless text messaging, video streams, podcasting, blogging, fax broadcast, voice broadcast, RSS and email.
In order for you to completely understand what digital marketing is, you have to first understand what it is not. This form of marketing does not involve the use of the traditional marketing channels, such as: print, billboard, television and radio, and this is primarily due to the fact that traditional marketing channels do not provide marketers with instant report and feedback. Yes, there are actually people who do respond to advertisements that are featured on these channels; however, the response is not as significant as the response that marketers get from Internet marketing.
The Internet lies at the center of digital marketing and it is not only a great vehicle for communication, but it has recently proven that it is also a very powerful medium for marketing. Marketers can use the Internet to pull content that is needed for PPC search terms or banner ads, or they can push messages to their customer base via voice broadcast, video streams, RSS, IM or email. As such, digital marketing can be described as an amalgamation of Internet pull and push technologies, in order to carry out marketing campaigns successfully.
Now the question is, are you ready to take your business to new heights by using Internet marketing?

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Need for Semantic Web in Webdesign

Posted on September 19, 2011 by admin

According to current market scenario, internet users are increasing in  rapid rate. In order to face this situation, business owners and individuals started their own website to publish their information. It is the easiest way for people to know about other professionals and companies who can provide solution for their requirement by using internet.
Here at SWOTIN, we provide you complete online branding services. Our approach is to understand your business, who is your target audience and proceed with website design accordingly.
Now let us mention our unique feature among existing Web Design Company briefly. We did lot of research and we started to implement the concept of SEMANTIC WEB (RDFa and Microformats) in website (if client requested) and we succeeded by seeing enormous improvement in SERP in major search engine within short period of time and by spending very less time and money in Offsite SEO (you can see the W3C logo at the footer of www.swotin.com). This Semantic Web concept is used by all major search engines to categorize and understand  the content and its relationship present in the websites.

 How Semantic Web can help you?
Using Semantic web we can represent all your content as the actual data (not just a paragraph of text) and its relationship to the search engine. This is a common set of rules which is by all major search engines and new born search engines to understand the relationship of the content. This Semantic Web concept adds rich information about the content in a webpage and helps search engine to understand the website easily and it can easily crawl through your website as per the internal structure we define. This method can help you reduce lot money to be spent in doing Offsite SEO.
Following are brief features of our website design:

  • Designs we make are unique.
  • Websites we make are search engine friendly (which helps your SERP)
  • User friendly admin panel (Only knowledge of word document is required to publish content)
  • Everything comes under your budget, without sacrificing the QUALITY of service.

We have lot of experience in developing simple HTML website to Complex e-commerce website (you will get to know once you visit our portfolio section in our website).

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Ecommerce website design best practices

Posted on May 5, 2011 by admin

What features are e-commerce website design best practices?
There is no one answer to the question ‘What makes for a good e-commerce design?’, as it’s a subjective field. What’s appealing to one might be unappealing to the other. However, there are always some basic rules or framework that can apply in every situation and this one’s not any exception. A good website that abides by all the rules of e-commerce would correctly be called a piece of art. It is a correct balance of form and functioning of the website.

This is when e-commerce web design best practices come in use for you. Follow these practices and they can help in getting more and more sales.
More often than not, it is not the entire website that has to be re-done. The work is often retouching and rearranging already existing elements on your page. It’s amazing how detailing can work wonders for your page. Also, another important factor to be kept in mind is a site’s usability. If a store is not easy to use and buy from, then it can affect the traffic of prospects and clients.

After all, would YOU want to visit a website that’s confusing and is a mess? So if you wouldn’t want to visit such a page, why would you buy something from a website that you find unappealing? You would never trust it with your credit card number, would you? The best of websites are rendered useless if prospects find it hard to navigate through their pages. Nobody wants to waste their time now – time is money. Imagine the frustration of a customer who wants to pay and check out from your website, only to find that he has to click through several screens trying to find how exactly to do that. If prospects can’t get anything quickly and effortlessly, they then move to another website much easier to navigate through.

Other e-commerce website design best practices

Other simple e-commerce web design best practices that aren’t often discussed include:

  • An automated response to remind customers of their abandoned shopping carts
  • Using proper font size for text, along with highlighting the headlines and subheadings
  • Be sure that your contact information is clearly visible and placed in a position that cannot be missed by customers.
  • Give customers the liberty to sort their products by their shape, size, quantity etc.
  • Let them add items to their cart before making checking them out.
  • Apart from the products displayed on your page, be sure to make other pages’ items on display to customers.
  • Keep it simple and clean – avoid clutter on your checkout page.
  • Show stock availability on your page.

Another thing can most business owners do is to create message forums in their websites. These forums are very beneficial as customers and prospects can interact with each other and discuss their problems, share their experiences and even lodge complaints with the website’s owners.
Its advantages also include:

  1. You can get a lot of educational information on your site via members.
  2. Traffic increases through repeated visits made my members who posted on various threads, just to check replies to their posts.
  3. You can get the email addresses and other details of the customers who have to register to your website before they can post.
  4. This allows you to build more goodwill in the eyes of prospects and gain more creditability.
  5. You can build inter-personal relationship with people who visit your website.
  6. This is the quickest means for you to gain information and respond to complaints.
  7. You can archive information in a systematic and orderly manner
  8. There is a major reduction in the mail servers’ workload.
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The Definition of E-Commerce

Posted on May 4, 2011 by admin

Let’s begin at the beginning. What is E-commerce?
Very simply put, E-commerce is the activity of buying and selling of goods and services via the internet. E-commerce covers a wide range of businesses – right from retail sites to wholesale sites, from deals of MNCs, to auctions of random stuff. It wouldn’t be wrong to state that this is one of the core concepts embodied in the Internet to have emerged in the last decade or so. Needless to say, since all transactions happen over the internet, knowledge of the internet becomes a must.

But, why E-commerce? What is so great about it? I’ll tell you why – because it’s convenient; it helps everybody do their business in a better and quicker fashion. Customers get more control over the choices offered to them, while both the business and its consumers have no barriers of time or distance to worry over.

The Internet has increasingly become the preferred choice/medium of communication for today’s people. And why not? It’s via the internet that people can communicate with each other with almost no time wasted, and the absence of human intervention (read: middle men) makes it an even more attractive medium – no hassles, and lots of money saved that would have otherwise been spent as part of their commission. Also, who wouldn’t want to get the maximum that they could, out of paying the minimum possible amount for it? Think of the amounts of money you could save on petrol if you’d otherwise gone down to a store to buy what you want. Via the internet, however, all you have to do is sit comfortably on your chair, click on a few buttons, and voila! You are where you want to be, without having to spend an extra penny for it.

Any place, anytime. That is the power of e-commerce.

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Components of an Internet Business

Posted on May 1, 2011 by admin

Remember when radios and televisions first hit the market? They were a sensation, and for the first time the world witnessed mass-market advertising. However, as is the case – change is the only constant. Radios and televisions were slowly and steadily replaced by an even more efficient advertising market – the internet. And even though the advertising campaigns and marketing strategies might have been altered to suit this new medium, some of their basic rules remain the same even now.

For example, in the real world, you must have a product or service to sell, and a place from where you can do your business (a store/shop). However, in the world of e-commerce, even though your product or services might remain the same, the place from which you do your business is your web site. And in the regular commerce as well as e-commerce, marketing strategies and advertising are of great importance as they are the main manner in which you can attract customers to your store.

As it is in any business, one has to take and process orders while receiving payment for their goods or services. In an actual store, customers browse through the products on display, pick what they want, and proceed towards the cashier to pay for their purchase (check, cash, or credit or
debit cards). In the world of E-commerce, orders have to be placed and items, shipped and payments are made only via secure electronic transfers. Once the dealer/seller receives the payment, he delivers/ships the product. Fulfilment in the virtual world is as easy as putting one’s merchandise in a carry-bag and handing it over to the customer. However, in the world of e-commerce, fulfilment becomes slightly more cumbersome as one has to make efforts to ship or transport their products to clients.

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Make Your Website’s Purpose Clear – Revenue Generation

Posted on April 27, 2011 by admin

Business owners often fail to understand that until and unless ideas get them enough revenue to pay their bills, even the best of ideas are rendered useless.

There are three primary methods for revenue generation:
(1) Prospect generation
(2) Online sales transactions, and
(3) Advertising and referral income.

Prospect Generation

What are prospects? They are potential clients/customers whose interest in your products might result in sales for you. The usage of the Prospect Generation model is amplified if you make use of the internet share more information about your products with prospects. Once you’re done with convincing prospects about your products, the next step becomes closing your deal. You can do it in any manner that is most suitable to your prospect – telephone, e-mail, or a face-to-face business transaction.

Let’s take the example of my own business – the internet was of great help to me as it helped in attracting clients for my online store design business. What they needed was information, and I gave them whatever they wanted to know from me. That automatically resulted in more prospects visiting my website for even more enquiries about my products, because everybody wants to know the detail of the item that they’re going to buy from any seller. If I got lucky, some of those enquiries would results in sales.

A properly designed online response form acts as a catalyst for getting more and more prospects. E-mail links on your site give people the convenience of contacting you, but keep in mind that if they fill in online forms, they give you catalogued information so that you may categorise prospects on various basis for your own convenience.

A couple of years ago, a police products cataloguer did business via a website so that he could get more requests for a print catalogue. To his surprise, he found out that he actually got more requests for catalogues through his website from international prospects, as opposed to the business he generated via conventional sources, and that too at much, much lower costs. He very smartly asked his leads the name of the organization they represented or were members of. In this manner, he cut down on a huge number of catalogue requests from people who would more likely than not convert into sales.

If your business has clients that need proper human contact for knowledge about their purchase, or they simple take their own sweet time to come to a decision, then prospect generation is your best bet. This is especially true of products that have a higher price tag or need customization.
But, you can always boost your sales by providing information on your goods or services via your website. An argument then pops up – if we tell customers everything that there is to know, they
wouldn’t bother contacting us, in which case we might not be able to complete the sale. That might be true. However, you have to understand that today’s consumer is highly smart and will never spend their hard earned money on something that they know not much of. If they find the information on your good or service dubious, incomplete or unsatisfactory, they’ll move to your competitors’ website, and get whatever information they want. In that case, it’s a definite loss for YOU.
In today’s world, competition for your business is only going to increase, and for prospects, access to your competitors is going to be just a click away. For this very reason, the manner in which you present all your information should be compelling enough for making your prospect not want to go to any other business party.


Sales Transactions

Being in any business means you have something to SELL, and when you have to sell, you need to have a way to process your transactions. The Sales Transaction model is all about completing the actual sales transaction over the Internet.

Let us begin with the advantages that business owners have while processing transactions over the internet. The internet has made many things possible now – is has the ability of extending your company’s reach beyond your physical market area i.e., you might be sitting in California, but you could make business deal with another dealer across the ocean, in Japan. And you don’t even have to do much. Run a website for your company, give the details of your products and your company, a phone number or email address to get back to you, and then the whole world becomes your playground! The transactions are user friendly too – new products can be added with the simple click of a button.

Business to consumer is not the only growing area in the online retail market; business-to-business e-commerce is growing by leaps and bounds. For any online business company, it is mandatory for it to complete its sales transactions and product delivery over the internet. Analysts were not wrong in believing that in the near future, almost all software transactions would be taking place via the Internet. With your competitors have the same price ranges as your product or services, it’s finally what you have over and above them that’ll set you apart – how efficient you are in delivering your product and helping customers out with whatever troubles they might face after their purchase. Product fulfilment is of great importance for any business owner.

Advertising and Referral Revenue

The third revenue generation model is about your referral income and how you advertise.
Everybody wants to just sit back in their chairs, comfortably in their offices, and get lots of revenue from advertising without having to do much. But as they say – no pain, no gain.

Each and every day sees thousands of website springing up. The number of websites is increasing by leaps and bounds, but there’s not enough demand for online advertising that can keep up with the creation of so many websites. Due to this, many websites do not get any paid advertising. And there is no reason for advertisers to put their money into a sinking boat, is there? If a website is not getting enough traffic, no advertiser will be attracted to it.

In order to get good traffic, your website needs to be nothing less than outstanding – something that’s all in one, something that contains information, news, has an online forum for members to interact with each other, etc.

Affiliate Programs

You might have it all – a star product, good delivery status and even an extremely appealing website, but you still might not be getting much business. You can make money off the traffic that visits your site, along with making prospects buy your products, all by following the Affiliate Program. Providing incentives is one smart way of going about it – you hire affiliates to bring traffic to your page, and in return, you pay them a few that is in direct proportion to the traffic they bring to you. This program is a viable option for smaller site owners because it helps them earn more money, quickly.

The primary objective might be to obtain a particular sales level, but for most new business owners, raising awareness is of prime importance. There are many ways in which you can garner your payout:

  • Pay-Per-Sale – Affiliates are given a certain percentage of the profits of the sales they make. Larger companies generally opt for this option.
  • Pay-Per-Click – You pay money to your affiliate every time someone gets to your site via any ad.
  • Pay-Per-Lead – Prospects click on an access point from the affiliate’s site. They fill a form, and it’s send to you. You pay money according to the number of forms forwarded your way.
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Make Your Website’s Purpose Clear – Brand Development

Posted on April 26, 2011 by admin

Many people make the mistake of treating of their business as a business, and not as a brand.
you may have never thought about your company as a brand, so this may be new to you, but
track with me. Why do you have a website? Primarily, because it’s a great way to promote your business. Also, it’s a great way to show your clients that you’re up-to-date with technology and that you’re expanding your avenues, which you’re on the cutting edge.

Referred to as brand development, such activities are aimed at communicating a positive image of your company in the minds of your potential clients. Your site, hence, is a portal to your business, which is why it should be of a high priority to you. Everything, right from the color scheme, to the font used, the size of the font to the quality of the design, the time taken for your site to buffer, all contribute to your brand’s image,

You have to create a website, and in such a manner as to make people remember it and make them want to visit it at least once more, preferably with an intention of buying something from you. Major MNCs spend millions of dollars for the development and maintenance of their brand image, so obviously, it one’s brand image IS of great importance. It is how clients will view you – as someone they can have enough trust over that they can do business with them.

There is no reason to be disheartened if you’re a small business; you have as good a chance as any international organisation, if you play your cards right. You can make you website can as suave and sophisticated as major corporations, without even having to spend the kind of money that they do – if you know the proper people (read: professionals) to contact.

An experienced website designer or even a decent graphic designer can work wonders for your site. Their artistic sense comes in handy when it comes to attracting people to your site. They know how to carry forward your brand image via your page, or how to let your page portray your brand image. Sure, it might mean your shelling a little more from your pockets, but believe me when I say that all that money will pay off in the end. And if spending a little more money equals to a LOT more business, then, why not?

Brand development (your brand image) is related directly to your clients’ trust, which is why it should figure at the top of your list of priority.

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Determine Your Website’s Main Purpose

Posted on April 25, 2011 by admin

Before beginning anything related to a website, you must be clear as to what you main purpose for creating the website is. It helps you from having to face conflicting purposes in the future.

  • If yours is a website design firm, a good idea would to showcase your high-tech goodies, with your client’s site as the centre of attraction.
  • If you’re an employee who’s stuck with the job of creating or re-designing a website, be sure that if anything goes wrong, you’ll be the first person to be blamed. So, do your best and be prepared for the worst.
  • If you’re a volunteer, you may just want an excuse to tinker and be praised for it.
  • If you’re a business owner, you will most probably care more about the costs and how much of a return you’d be getting on the money you’ll be spending on your website.

Recognizing your needs pave the way to building an effective website. You have to understand the needs of your organisation, and give them top priority.

Here are some common website purposes:

Brand Building
Using virtual brochures or pamphlets is a smart way to go about attracting potential clients to your company, and helping them see you and your work in a positive light. It is a very legitimate way, especially for local businesses, to enhance their company’s image and to create goodwill with their customers. Clients are always hesitant to approach companies they know nothing of, which is why it’s important for them to know who you are, what you do, and how to contact you.

Providing product information to clients is another smart move.  Look at auto websites – the manufacturers do not sell anything on their sites. Instead, the pin-point people to retailers who carry their products, so that they can buy from them.

Sell advertising
What do Rediff, Google, Yahoo! and other major websites have in common? They are designed in a manner so as to accommodate and sell advertising. However, as is always the case, there’s too much of a supply, but not enough demand, i.e. there’s too much of advertising space, but not enough money to fill all that space. Internet advertising might be improving, but it is still under-priced. Also, you have to understand that it isn’t exactly something you’d want to do for huge returns. Sure, be hopeful, but do not be optimistic of getting big numbers.

Sell goods/services via the Internet
This way, you can easily cater to a national or even international market.  Needless to say, you’ll have to develop your own ordering system for online transactions, but it’ll be well worth the time and effort you put into it.

Earnings via links on your website
Haven’t you noticed how most of the times whenever you click on a website, a picture of even a link, another page pops up, or maybe an advertisement? These micro-sites are nothing but manners in which designed to generate traffic for a particular good, service, or even website. When someone actually buys from the link or page suggested by you, you receive a commission for sending a customer that company’s way.

Customer Help/Support
Help your customers, help yourself. Keep columns or pages aside for FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), technical information/problem solving, etc. Give them contact details and several manners in which they might contact you – phone numbers, fax, email ids, addresses etc.

Save money via online efficiencies
Money can be saved so easily if one’s working via the internet, as opposed to working in a real-time environment. For example, think of the amounts you’ll be saving if you do not have to get advertisements of your store printed on paper; you’ll be saving on the money spent on paper, printing and the distribution. All you have to do is create virtual pamphlets and catalogues for your business! Web pages dedicated to FAQs and customer help/service cut down the number of customer service personnel to zero. The more you think, the more ways you can save your money. And this is just the tip of the iceberg here…

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