Creating a website is totally different from creating an effective website. It is easy to think that making a website is just putting it there in cyberspace and people will flock into it. This is I think is a common mistake specially to businesses and companies who makes websites and I have a feeling that up to now many are still alien to the word “WEB 2.0″. So what is Web 2.0 ? Maybe a good definition is from Wikipedia and I quote:
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
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It’s now here and landed in the Philippine soil. PLDT SME Nation has recently partnered with the world’s largest and the most used search engine Google to help businesses harness the power of the internet. Majority of the consumers nowadays research on the internet before buying in a brick and mortar store so this is an ideal medium for businesses to connect to their potential customers and turn them into buyers.
It is estimated that 80% of internet surfers uses Google, it has the widest reach of any search engine globally. And they have the most efficient and the most cost effective advertising network service called Adwords. Businesses can quickly and easily promote their products and services to targeted audiences around the world. You create your own ads and choose your desired keywords and phrases relevant to your enterprise. So what are keywords? they are words typed by an online surfers to search engines like Google looking for information whether it is a product information or a solution to their problems. So when they search for those keywords on Google, if you are an advertiser on Adwords, your ads ( with a link to your website) will appear in a special portion above or beside the search results. So whenever a surfer click your ads, they will be delivered to your website.
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I was a little intrigued then I read an article on Small Business Trends saying that “smart people are on twitter”. What I have in mind about twitter is, most users are celebrities, people who just want to know the tweet of their favorite stars and online marketers who wants to promote their businesses, products and services, blogs or websites. Micro blogging with just 140 characters seems not too intelligent in my opinion but come to think of it, how will you express yourself and tell everything you have in mind with just 140 characters using twitter? again quoting from the article:
Hubspot referenced a report from Edison Research that highlighted the education level of Twitter users. It seems that in comparison to the general population, they are more educated and early adopters who are ready to test and respond to the latest products and services. The Twitter community (21 million) is not the large volume that the Facebook community (152 million) is, but they are educated and focused, making Twitter the perfect place for business networking and relationship building.
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I guess there are no data that we can search regarding the online buyers in the Philippines unless the online sellers themselves will provide their statistics. If there is an organization or group of people that will gather statistics, then we will have an idea how many buyers are there. Similar to what NSO (Philippine Census) is doing, they gather statistics on people living here in our country.
Maybe a good place to start is to find online sellers in the Philippines. The sites I know where many Filipino online sellers flock are Multiply.com and Ebay Philippines. The only problem is, are they willing to share it? since that is one of the trade secrets of online sellers. If we could only knew what are the exact hot sellers on the internet, then we could also jump in the bandwagon. In my opinion and observation, most of the items I see sold by online sellers in the Philippines are fashion accessories, branded or imitation cellphones, gadgets, ladies bags, shoes, sandals and clothes.
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Most businesses now have a blog and a facebook fan page. But since it is not easy to transfer your blog post to your facebook fanpage wall, you need to have an automatic application that will do that. It will be tedious if you will post the link of your new blog post to your Facebook fanpage. There is a twitter apps on facebook that can do that but the result is not satisfactory in my own opinion. The first thing I observe is the very short description on every facebook wall post and the bitly URL shortener. I don’t like to use URL shortener because the true URL of the blog is masked and will not pass link juice to your blog if you care about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So why this is important to a business who have a blog or a website? simple, to bring traffic and visitors.
This is not only applicable to facebook fan page but also to your existing facebook account if you want to let some websites or blogs to post on your wall. What I wanted to tell you about is the facebook app called RSS Graffiti. This amazing apps is so far the best facebook app for posting automatically on your wall of your favorite blog or any website that has an RSS feed. To use the apps, just go to RSS Graffiti ( you have to login on your facebook account first) and authorize the apps by clicking the “click here to authorize RSS Graffiti” button. Then click “allow” button on the Request Permission page. Then click the “add feed” button and find on the basics tab the field “Feed URL” and put the url feed of your favorite blog (see snapshot image below). For example ( http://www.thefilipinoentrepreneur.com/feed ) use this feed to test it if you like this blog. Then click the “save” button to save the settings.
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There are lots of online business ideas that you can create yourself. And the internet is great advertising medium because almost everyone who knows how to use the internet can do it and with a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising medium. So what actually is an online business? my concept of that is trading in the internet where buyers and sellers transact online where the seller sells his products in the internet and the buyers purchase it through an online shopping cart and using payment facilities like Paypal, GCASH or bank deposit (which you can do by online banking) then the seller will ship the items through a courier. In my experience it is really hard to succeed on e-commerce if you are only going to target locally, that means here in the Philippines because I think e-commerce is still in it’s infancy here. If you are going to use online business just for promoting your brick and mortar business or a physical store, I think that will be fine. Like for example using an online classified ads to post your business ads together with your products, location where to buy your products or any promos you have. But having a purely online business, I really doubt it.
Why you may ask? in my own experience out of 10 customers I’ve encountered, 8 of them wanted to see the actual product, prefer a meet-up and asked me where can they see the store so they can buy their chosen item. So again , maybe a semi- e-commerce site (an advertisement on classified ads or a company website showing all their products where the purpose is for information only and not buying online) is the only way to go. Some small online businesses without a physical store have managed to sell their products thru meet-ups or their own personnel will deliver the goods. Unlike other famous e-commerce site like Amazon.com where everything is done online.
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If you are in the internet business, one of the main problem is a start up capital for promoting your website. That will not be a problem to big companies which can afford advertising their websites. But during this tough times even big companies are cutting costs which is very obvious because of the massive lay-offs. So to make things easier and not costly many are looking for an alternative. Software tools offers automating tasks. For instance, before the word processor was invented, there was a typewriter that needs a skill of a typist and a good vocabulary,grammar and spelling knowledge. If you are using a typewriter and doesn’t posses a good skill like those, I guess you will use up a gallon of liquid paper before you finish a page you are typing. But that will not be a problem with a word processor like Microsoft Word which are loaded with macros to correct your spelling, grammar and indentation.
So comparing that scenario to an internet marketer, there are many things that have to be automated to get things done in a short period of time and less expensive. Personally I’m not a believer on those promising software claiming that can make an automated article, build links to your websites so you can rank on the first page of Google, automated friend adder in twitter and similar strategies which are an internet marketers dream. Many people are becoming victims of those promises because most of us wants instant gratification. I can’t blame anybody for that because I myself want things done in an instant. One example I want to share is my experience to a software called Humming Bird which is an automated twitter friend adder. I really wanted to try this software a long time ago but because it was a little expensive and very doubtful if it will work or not, it took me a long time before trying this. Luckily I had a chance to have this software so I was very happy that finally it will solve my problem gaining additional traffic to my blog.
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