|
|
advertising
I stumbled across Lionsgrip
traction pads in a very surprising manner --- searching for information
about chicken feed. When googling for homemade chicken feed
formulas, I kept ending up on a very useful site with
several recipes.
Finally, I decided to poke around and see who had compiled all of this
information about chicken feed, and I discovered that the information
was just a small offshoot of a microbusiness website.
Lionsgrip actually has
nothing to do with chickens --- they're a small company that produces
mats you slip under your tires when your car gets stuck in the
mud. But the owners decided not to stop building their site after
they added all of the obvious information about their product.
They went on to build six separate "guest websites", each chock full of
useful information (and with two ads on every page sending you back to
their traction pads.)
Lionsgrip's website is a
great example of the SEO truism --- if you create
good content, people will come. Granted, Lionsgrip probably would
have gotten more specific traffic if the content they built was more
closely related to their product, but any useful content will attract
potential customers to their site.
For other tips on free
or cheap advertising, check out our microbusiness ebook.
We do spend money advertising
our chicken waterers, but whenever possible we
snap up chances of getting free exposure. As we discuss in our microbusiness ebook, probably the best method of
free advertising is writing a press release for a national
magazine. Our microbusiness really took off after we were the
subject of a writeup in Backyard
Poultry Magazine
--- nearly a year later, orders still trickle in from magazine readers
who stumble across the article.
Another great option is
to be interviewed for a podcast or radio show. A friend of ours, Everett Sizemore, makes a large chunk of his
income from ad revenue on his websites. He was recently interviewed
by American Freedom Radio, and the show went out over
the internet and aired on 18 AM stations across the U.S. His show
is worth a listen for those of you who might want to follow in his
footsteps. Notice how he clearly went into the interview with the
mission of sending folks back to his website, so he made sure that the
radio personality got his URLs right and repeated them a few times.
If you're stressed out
by the idea of having your voice broadcast on national radio, take a
few minutes to write down your main talking points. Then consider
the kinds of questions the interviewer may ask and write up some
potential answers. Practice on your spouse or your dog so that
your talking points feel natural on your tongue. Then go for
it! The great thing about free advertising is that you have
nothing to lose.
Our first atempt at starting a microbusiness was a
learning opportunity. We decided to sell some of the native
plants on our 58 acre farm on Ebay, figuring that all it would cost us
would be a few seller's fees and a bit of postage. We made a bit
of money --- which was much appreciated at the time --- but in
retrospect, we should have run the microbusiness very differently.
The problem with Ebay
from a microbusiness perspective is that buyers expect to get a really
good deal, so you need to undercut all of your competitors to make a
sale. We had to drop our prices to rock bottom, meaning that we
were barely making minimum wage on the time we spent packaging plants
and taking them to the post office. Added onto that was the
buyers' mentality --- after spending a mere $2 on a plant, they were
pissed off if it arrived wilted.
In retrospect, we should
have sold our plants through our own website and spent money on
advertising (and search engine optimization) to bring customers to
us. Then we should have found a way to make our products more
unique in some way. But we learned a lot from the experience, and
our next microbusiness product went much better!
To read more about our
experience developing our microbusiness, check out our ebook.
One great thing about ebooks is that you can
sell them in a lot of different ways. We currently sell our microbusiness ebook on
our own website and have
listed it on Google books for more free exposure. Time to see
whether it's worth our while to sell our ebook to an even wider
audience through Amazon's Kindle Store.
Uploading our ebook to Google was quite painless, but I can't same the
same for uploading the same ebook to Amazon. At the moment,
Amazon recommends that you upload your ebook in MS Word, HTML, or PRC
format. When I converted my OpenOffice file to a Word file then
uploaded it, the result was wonky. Next, I decided to give PDF a
shot since Amazon allows ebooks to be uploaded in PDF format (though
they warn of low conversion quality.) My conclusion? Amazon
was right --- their conversion of PDF files is even worse.
While fighting with file formats, I decided to poke around and see what
the finances of listing an ebook on Amazon look like. Google
makes their money by putting a bit of advertising on the side of
your book page, but Amazon's business model involves getting money
directly from the sale of your book. And Amazon's commission is
quite steep --- they take 65% of the retail price as
their own profit before giving you a 35% royalty.
For the moment, I've
decided to give up on listing our ebook on Amazon. It looks like
I'd need to manually reformat an html file to make our book look pretty
again, which just sounds like too much work if they're taking such a
big commission. I'd be curious to hear if other folks have
decided that selling ebooks through Amazon is worth their while.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted some pointers
for building
your business with an email list. At the same time, I
sent out an email to all of our own past customers, telling them about
a holiday sale. In the business, this type of list would be known
as a warm list --- clearly, all of the folks on it had bought our chicken waterers at one time,
but some of them hadn't visited our website in a full year.
What were the
results? 0.3% of the people asked to be removed from our list, 1%
of the people had questions about use of our product, and 1.5% of the
people came to our website to make another purchase. These
numbers are pretty normal for email lists, where the return rate
(percentage of people who visit your site afterwards and make a
purchase) is usually between 0.3% and 1%.
Although those return
rates sound pretty low, keep in mind that sending out an email to your
past customers costs you nothing except a bit of time. Check out
our ebook for more tips about advertising your business
for free.
When we
submitted Microbusiness Independence to Google Books, I was ready
to wait a month or two to see my information live. Imagine my
surprise to check back a week later and see our book in place!
At the moment, our
book's title is misspelled, but I have high hopes that will be fixed
with a little patience. Otherwise, I have to say that the
uploading process was astonishingly easy and quick.
Of course, I'll have to
wait and see whether listing our book on Google sends us more
customers. As usual, I'll keep you informed!
Meanwhile, feel free to
check out our ebook for information about creating your own job.
Putting your products on
sale seems like an anti-intuitive method to make more money, but it can
actually work. Our chicken
waterers tend to hit a sluggish period as the weather cools, at
which point we stop advertising and settle in for a restful
winter. This year, we decided to see if we could boost our winter
profit with a 10% off sale combined with an
email to our past customers.
The sale definitely helped increase our conversion rate. The week
before the sale began, we had a 2% conversion rate (meaning that 2% of
the people who dropped by our website bought a waterer.) The
first week of our sale, our conversion rate jumped to 3% --- a 50%
increase! Of course, we made a little less money per waterer sold
during the sale period, but even with that factored in our gross sales
increased by 35%.
Check out our small
business ebook for other hints on free and cheap methods of
increasing your sales.
If you've read our ebook about starting a
small business and quitting your job, you'll remember that one of
my top pieces of advice is to keep your costs low. We're just
starting to apply the lessons we learned with our last microbusiness to
our new ebook and are discovering that ebooks are even easier than
physical products to market on the cheap, especially if you leverage
Google Books.
What is Google Books? This facet of the big
search engine company allows publishers and authors to send their books
to Google so that the entire book can be searchable over the
internet. You can set options so that visitors can view anywhere
from 20% to 100% of your book for free online, including or excluding
pictures. I've often been searching for a bit of info, ended up
in the middle of a book listed on Google Books, and become so
enthralled by the book that I headed straight to the library to read
the 80% that isn't freely listed online. I assume that most folks
aren't quite as cheap as I am, and instead plunk down some cash to buy
books like this, especially since Google Books will link directly to
the page on your website where visitors can buy your book.
Google Books amounts to free advertising, and the website
is set up to make it easy for ebook publishers to list their
writings. If you don't already have a Google account, you'll need
to sign up for one. Then add in a bit of contact information and
upload a pdf file of your book (or mail in a paper copy, but this will
take much, much longer.) Since you probably won't have an ISBN
number, you'll have to skip over "1. Tell us about your books" and go
straight to "2. Send us your books." If the file you're uploading
contains the cover and the content of the book all together, rename the
file to match the title of your book and upload it as is.
Otherwise, you'll need to read Google's simple instructions about
naming the cover files and content files.
Then be patient and wait
for your book to show up. This is the stage I'm at --- I'll be
sure to update you on how the next steps go once I get to them.
I'll be the first to tell you that we made a
slew of mistakes during our first year in business. One of our
worst was struggling with branding.
We started selling our automatic chicken waterer
from a page on our blog just because our blog was our main internet
presence at the time. Within six months, I realized my
mistake. People looking for "chicken waterer" or "Avian Aqua
Miser" were much less likely to click on a search engine result that
talked about homesteading than one focused solely on chickens. We
finally got our business its own domain name, but then we had to redo
all of our search engine optimization to get folks to start showing up
on the totally new site, which meant our sales plummeted for a month or
two.
We also sent out waterers for the first few
months without a label or logo anywhere on them. We figured
everyone knew we were a small mom and pop business and would appreciate
us not adding fancy packaging that raised their price. I quickly
learned that Americans like fancy packaging at any price --- a couple
of our customers complained about the homemade nature of our
waterers. So we came up with some fancy labels to stick on the
waterers and used the same logo on our instruction sheet. Adding
the URL to the labels also helped us gain more repeat customers who
might otherwise forget where they'd gone to buy their waterer.
If I had to do it all
over again, I'd give my product its own website from the get-go.
I'd also make up a logo and plaster that everywhere, building brand
name recognition and preventing complaints of our product looking too
homemade. It turns out that branding should be one of the first
steps in selling a product, not one of the last!
Check out more lessons learned in our microbusiness ebook.
Like social
networking sites,
email lists are a great way to keep your customers involved in your
business and to gain repeat customers. I've run several email
lists over the years and have come up with a few pointers:
- Keep your emails relatively
infrequent. Many customers will enjoy (or at least put up
with) emails that come out once every two weeks, but when you start
emailing more than once a week they get cranky.
- Keep your emails short, sweet,
and to the point. A great way to do this is to give
tidbits of news, then include links to your website for the full story.
- Keep your emails relevant.
Resist the urge to email your customers about your birthday and your
friend's new business.
- Each email should be a call to
action. At the least, you want your readers to keep you in
mind and wander back to your website. Do you also want them to
take advantage of a limited time sale or vote in an online poll?
- Use the blind carbon copy (Bcc)
function to hide everyone's email address so that no one can
reply to the whole list or steal those emails.
- Always include a simple way to
unsubscribe.
Check out our $4 ebook
for more free ways to advertise
your business.
Social networking sites (like
facebook, twitter, myspace, and various blogging services) are great
ways to connect with customers. The services are likely to keep
your product in previous customers' minds so that they'll come back for
more or recommend you to a friend, both of which amount to free
advertising.
The problem is that you
could spend all day every day tweeting and posting. How do you
know when to stop?
We've had good luck
choosing one platform we enjoy (blogging for us, but it could be any of
the other options), then feeding those posts into as many of the other
sites as possible. That way, folks who like facebook can read our
information amid their daily quota of news, but we don't have to head
over to facebook and physically make a post.
Check out our $4 ebook
for more free ways to advertise
your business.
Want
to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the
RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed.
|