Selling Products Online - Shiny New Mouse Killer Hunter Weapons

So, you’ve found out where the mouse killers hang out. And you’ve figured out that you’ll need some shiny new weapons in your arsenal if you’re going to be successful in catching a few.

In Internet Terms the cheese is content and the shiny objects are viral/social marketing, search engine optimization and search engine marketing. These Internet terms are really just ways to make sure you are ‘near’ websites of ‘the same interests.’ On the Internet being near something means being linked to and from it. That link can be anything from a blog comment that contains your URL to a banner ad to even a sponsored link. It means making sure that when the mouse killers are reading about mouse killing at another website, they to see a link to your website.

Let’s look at these new internet marketing tools. First let’s explore content. Content in its simplest form is a bunch of words, or pictures or videos or sounds that appear on a website or a blog. For the mouse trap seller content might be images a mouse riding a frog (seriously, click the link I found a picture of a mouse riding a frog). It might be articles about the joy of mouse killing or 101 things to do with a dead mouse or even an article exploring the confessions of a reformed mouse killer. Maybe it is a video clip showing the new Super-Duper X 1000 mouse trap in action. Whatever the type of content, the important thing is that it is relevant to mouse traps. Videos of exploding whales might indeed be fun to watch but they really won’t help here.

The value of the content is really two-fold. First mouse killers like to view pictures of frog riding mice and read about the exploits of other mouse killers. So they will seek out articles, pictures and videos on the subject. And once they find a good source of content they will likely come back there next time they want to catch up on the latest. And, even better, when other website owners like the mouse killer blog we came across earlier see the articles they will create a link to your article. And viola, you’ve got a next door neighbor. This is the beginnings of a viral/social marketing shiny object that we’ll cover later.

The second reason is less fun, but it is all about search engines like Google and Yahoo!. They eat up content, almost literally. All other revenue sources notwithstanding, search engines stay in business by delivering highly targeted content to searchers. If someone, say a mouse killer searches Google for ‘stories about mouse killing,’ the results page (SERP) better have a bunch of links to websites with stories about mice and killing them. If it were to return links about, say PETA, the mouse killers are likely to go somewhere else, like Yahoo!, to look for stories. Google lost a customer, but more importantly they lost the possibility that you’d click one of the ‘sponsored’ links on the page. Sponsored links is another shiny object that we’ll cover shortly, but suffice it to say that Google makes a lot of money on those clicks.

One last point about content: It needs to be ‘keyword rich’ meaning to attract mouse killers it should include words like ‘mouse’ and umm… ‘trap.’ But be careful, content that is too rich can be overkill and actually make it harder to find. That’s something for another shiny object, search optimization.

So, we’ve got our cheese content. Now we’ll explore the shiny objects like viral/social marketing, search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

To Be Continued...

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...