Entries Tagged 'Internet business' ↓

Since the social networking sites became popular in the Philippines, many became interested on how will it be harnessed to help businesses. Actually this kind of thinking have its origin and it came from the west where it all started. Where did twitter, facebook, Youtube and other globally popular social networking sites came from? obviously it originates in the United States. Actually even businesses there are not saved by social networking sites’ suppose to be “solution” to have more customers. Businesses closed down even they have thousands of facebook fan page “likes” or followers in twitters.

So what is the real use of social networking sites to businesses. Oh, before I forget, I also read a blog telling businesses tales, ahem…. I mean business tips, that SEO and social networking is one of his expertise but he is employed and don’t really have a brick and mortar business. He assumes blogging is also a business, maybe I can assume it also because you can earn money by blogging. But I think a more appropriate term for blogging is a kind of self-employment or freelancing. Okay so much for that, back to the real topic. Again what do you think is the real use of social networking for businesses? have you heard of the term “customer feedback”? A business that has a good customer feedback and takes them seriously will be more successful in running a business. Again I remember my previous employment. It was a multinational company but I was very disappointed on how the management handles customer feedback. No one takes them seriously and they don’t plan to put time and effort to this part of the business until they found out that it is really important.

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Do you have a Facebook? Who doesn’t. Facebook is the dominant social network of our time, with one billion users, more than one billion USD in revenue (that’s 41 billion pesos!) and a company worth of about $90 billion.

Facebook is one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, and not just in the tech sector. So I was someone skeptical when I was recently invited to check out a new social networking site by a friend of mine who hates Facebook.

The latest alternative to Facebook is a tiny, unknown upstart called Zurker. It’s still in private beta, so you need an invitation to sign up (here).

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For an online seller or a freelancer, either a seller of goods or services, the biggest problem is how to get your customer’s payment. But there are a number of options you can use. Bank deposit and money transfers are among the popular choices here in the Philippines but what if your clients or customers are from abroad? It will be costly to use the above mentioned but there a payment method that is very popular worldwide and that is PayPal. Good thing that Filipinos can now use Paypal for online transactions and you can receive money from clients by using your email. And you can transfer your money from Paypal to your own bank account by just using the withdrawal feature in Paypals interface. But the problem you will encounter even if you have a bank account is you should also have a credit card.

And what if you are self-employed online entrepreneur? you will have a hard time getting approved because most of the time those who are employed with stable income or have big sums of money in their bank account can have a credit card. If you can’t show a proof of income or the bank officer thinks that you don’t have the capacity to pay, then they won’t hesitate to reject your application. You will also not be able to use all the features in Paypal like the withdrawal feature if you don’t have a credit card because it’s the only way for you to verify your paypal account. So the only way is to get a credit card alternative and that is a debit card. There are many advantages of using a debit card compared to a credit card. For one thing, you will not incur debts and exorbitant interests. The yearly membership fee is also a fraction compared to a credit card. You can also use the debit card to save and withdraw your money like an ATM card.

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Most businesses are not believers of good marketing campaign to promote their business. Even the most attractive advertising won’t get a good return of investment if there are no sales or perhaps not enough sales. Specially in the online world, where the only way you can get a customer is by clicking your ads which I think even the most attractive ads won’t budge an internet surfer if he or she is not motivated enough to see what is behind that ads. Yes maybe curiosity is the answer (out of curiosity he will click the ads) but if he doesn’t really know what the ads is all about, then I think there is good chance that it will be ignored.

A good sample is a story of my friend who was also a blogger. He was offered by an online trading company to place a banner ads on his blog. He was coordinating that time with the company’s marketing specialist and they both agreed to place the banner ads for 6 months. The marketing specialist promised that they will extend the ads after 6 months, probably they will buy ad placement for another 6 months. Then they sent the banners to my friend and he noticed that the ads were too formal and the layout was attractive and professionally done. He haven’t thought that there is something wrong with the banners. But since the offer was irresistible, imagine, being paid in advance for 6 months, he didn’t mind what might be the result of the ads.

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Before I start this article, allow me to greet you Happy New Year this 2012 year of the black water dragon. This year will bring prosperity according to astrologers and specially those who believes in Chinese astrology. And those businesses that relates to water will have a good chance to succeed unlike those connected with fire. Anyway so much for that topic, what I want to emphasize now is the business trends regarding marketing and advertising. Since the internet popularity explodes, with it, online advertising was introduced and in no time it was accepted as one of the means to market and advertise a business. In my observation and also those who were knowledgeable on online advertising know very well that the ads network Google Adwords (when Google also introduced Adsense) revived the online advertising after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 (March 2000 to October 2002).  I’m not sure if I’m 100% correct but that is how I observed it. Google introduced Adsense on June 2003 that enables small publishers to participate and I think it is no coincidence that after launching Adsense the online advertising industry was standing on it’s feet again.

Compared to traditional advertising: print media and television commercials, online advertising was cheaper and more cost effective because you can track your advertising expenditures, ads behavior like banner clicks and impressions and other detailed information. Yes online advertising was a great invention and tool for businesses but since the dawn of the internet, computers was the only device capable of browsing websites. And only a few years ago that mobile phones can now be used to access the internet. Yes of course there is an internet device also invented a few years ago and that is the tablet like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy and others I didn’t mentioned. So aside from traditional online advertising, are you also paying attention to mobile advertising? According to the survey of emarketer.com, the time spent on mobile increased to 30% from 2010 to 2011. More than the time spent on reading newspapers and magazines combined.

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If you have used twitter not just to socialize but have used it on your business, then this might be a good chance to know if twitter really does any good. Honestly I didn’t really know if twitter is useful to me or if it does drive traffic to my blog. What I see in my web analytics tool I’m using right now is there is no traffic coming from twitter.

Maybe because there is a problem on most analytics software identifying the traffic coming from twitter or maybe there isn’t any visitors coming from twitter. I’ve tried 3 kinds of web analytics tools already, and those are Statcounter, Hitslink and Google Analytics and so far I can’t see any referral from twitter although I have implemented an automatic tweet to my blogs. Automatic tweet is useful so you don’t have to log-in and update twitter on any new post created by your blog.

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Social networking sites was a big hit not only in the U.S. but specially here in the Philippines. Filipinos really love to socialize so even online most of us can’t hide that fact. Just after friendster when we became the second largest number of users, facebook came into scene and now we rank among the top ten users all over the world. In fact even with that large numbers of users, many Filipinos still can’t afford to have an internet access and many homes don’t have internet access. The only way those users can access if they don’t have their own computers is going to internet cafe.

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