Selling Products Online - The Hunt for Mouse Killers

Back to our tale of Selling Products Online...

To catch you up... Now comes the hard part of selling your Mouse Traps online... Location, Location, Location and, oh yeah, Competition.

When you first buy a domain and build a website your location is much, much, much worse than that back alley site you considered earlier. Your location is almost literally ‘No Where.’ You can’t get drive-by traffic, depend on the grocery store next door because no other website is next door to yours. Your only way to get buyers is for them to magically drop out of the Internet sky. Of course if they know your domain name (http://www.best-mousetraps-ever.com/) they could type that in but who, other than you and your family knows that?

And what if mousetrap buyers did drop out of the Ethernet sky? Would they land on your website? In your small town (go back and read the last post) there is only one or two other competitors for that sky dropper. But on the internet there are possibly millions of competitors. Do a quick Google search for ‘mouse traps.’ Go on, I’ll wait…. How many competitors? I found 184,000 when I checked. What if you sell ‘shirts?’ That Google search comes back with 257,000,000 competitors. So if you sell mousetraps you have a 1 in 184,000 chance of catching that sky dropper, right? Nope. As a new website owner you’re most likely not even included in that list of 18,000 competitors. You are in ‘No Where’ location. For you SEO wonks, maybe you’re in the mythical Google Sandbox.

So what do you do? If you were in town you probably run an ad in your newspaper, on the local radio station or on a local TV channel. But on the internet ‘local’ has a different meaning.

Local (get the tie in with ‘Location?) on the internet really means ‘of same interest.’ You have to get your website in front of potential buyers who want or need to kill mice one at a time. That means your location now becomes whatever websites mouse killers frequent. So where do mouse killers hang out on the Internet?

Obviously they frequent search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. According to Yahoo! searches for ‘mouse traps’ and similar products (like ‘rat traps’) were at the high end of 15,000,000 last month. Google searches would be many multiples of that. So you have to be located on the search result pages (above the other 177,000 competitors) of the major search engines. How do you get that location? In Internet Marketing terms that you need to do Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.

According to most studies, the majority of mouse killers, possibly 80%, start looking for mouse traps on search engines. (This statistic is true for more than mouse killers) That means the other 20% start somewhere else. That somewhere else is likely a content website such as http://www.mousekilleranonymous.com/ or a blog such as DiaryofaMouseKiller.myBlog.com.

So your hunt for the mouse killers has been successful. You’ve found out that they, you potential customers hand out on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. They also hang out at popular content websites and blogs. Now that you’ve found them, how do you catch them? With cheese and shiny objects, of course.

To Be Continued...