Every day I am bombarded with questions on not only how to make a website, but how to make a website GREAT. This is tough to do in the current market, because places like GoDaddy, Network Solutions and others have made it easy, a little too easy for the average Joe Schmoe to make a website, and a poor one at that. The people that do this are 90% fully employed at another job besides making the website grow, and they wonder why, after a year or so their website has died making them end up pulling the plug. But what happens in that year and a half is what ruins the business.
Say you buy a domain, use a pretty WYSIWYG template and built in shopping cart, load it with a few products and sit back and wait for people to flock to your site. During this time if they don’t know what SEO is, they may stumble on a few articles that tell them they need a Google Analytics account and Ad Words/Ad Sense account. They learn enough just to be deadly, and what I mean by that is they are adept enough that they take away a few sales from bigger, more established websites (people in the business for a long time, have a vested interest in the website, use it as their primary income etc) ruining the market because they feel free to drop prices so low that they make 1-5%. So on an average order of $65, after shipping they may net $1.95. Whoopee! They hit it big time!
So now, website A sees what website B is doing and does the same thing, thinking that only “price” is the main competing point, not copy or well written original content, just a few lucky keywords that landed them a few customers that now come back as repeats. This goes back and forth for about a year until website A sees that with the influx of costs associated with SEO, their low prices aren’t enough to keep them in business. Remember, they work all day so when they get home they may have a few hours to work on the website. It reminds me of dreams of hitting the lottery, if I build it, they will come.
So website B sees the same thing and now goes back to the distributor and asks for a bigger discount to compete, using tactics like “if I am not selling anything, you are not making any money”. There are a few out there in wholesale world that buy into this way of thinking, and they drop their drawers expecting the lower cost, lower profit to have higher volume.
But remember, since the owner of the website is not spending 100% of his time optimizing his site, he just lowers costs to get more customers, and then website B does the same thing again and so on. So now we have effectively ruined the wholesale pricing of the products so that neither distributor makes money and they go looking for other manufacturers “willing to work with them” and the cycle continues. Once wholesale is ruined, retail is not far behind.
But the big boys on the block understand that volume does speak, and since they work the website DAILY, they get the most stage presence. This enables them to now bypass the distributor and go right to the manufacturer. And instead of the manufacturer saying “no, we only support sales of our products through distributors xyz”, they take the money and send product at an even lower price, enabling the big boys on the block to keep prices low and keep a barrier to entry for anyone else trying to get into the game.
So how do we fix it? MAP is one way, the other is to not sell direct from manufacturer to anyone except wholesalers. There is where the battle should lie, the distributor that treats the customer the best, give the most attentive service wins hands down every time over price. Maybe not at first, but if there is a shitty distributor out there that like to blue ball the industry by selling so low they only make 5%, eventually the cash will dry up and they won’t be able to buy from manufacturers any longer, sending the websites and store owners back to the better, and a bit more expensive distributor that puts money back into the business and can support large buy ins for extra overhead.
No one wins in a price war except the consumer. If you expect to be in business for a long time, you should be able to keep customers by keeping them happy, informed and fairly priced
So here are a few tips for new supplement website owners out there to take into consideration. There is enough market share for everyone to play nicely, share the wealth and keep the consumers happy. Here is what I sent a new customer recently; I have removed pertinent info to keep them anon.
1. The rotating banner should be products for sale, as they are negotiating tools you can use with manufacturers when working rebates. Front page space is prime $$$ territory.
2. All your meta data is great if you want to be only found locally. Remember, this is WORLD WIDE WEB
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="xxx Nutrition, California- xxxxxxx supports nutrition and fitness franchises, Smoothie Franchise for all customers and body builders. It provides weight loss pills which helps for diet and build muscles in xxx xxx xxx." />
<meta name="keywords" content="xxx Nutrition, Smoothie Franchise, Bodybuilding Supplements xxxx, Fitness Franchise xxx, Best
3. Your title tags need changing, they don’t accurately tell the spider what the page truly is
<title> xo Nutrition| Bodybuilding Supplements xxx, CA |Smoothie Franchise |Fitness Franchise xxx| Best Weight Loss Pills </title>
4. View the source code of xxx.com, see how their analytics are high up and look at their meta data and key words. There is a reason they rank well.
5. Make sure the pages you are indexing with Google have proper meta data and title tags. When someone is typing in a general category, that’s what you want the home page to represent. If someone is searching a brand, make sure your brand home pages have proper meta data and tags. When someone is searching for a particular item, make sure that page is properly tagged and titled so that its relevancy to the search is higher. This is what we call organic SEO.
6. Rotate your key words/ad words with what you have on sale
7. Purchase some pay per click PPC advertising to get you on the front page of some results until organic SEO kicks in.
8. The product selection on the home page is incomplete, and it looks incomplete and frankly, a little amateur.. I would have featured brand, then featured products, with areas for hot products and sale items.
9. Make the newsletter sign up (raffle) higher on the page. Also, you need to print original copy (blog, reviews) so that when people give you information (leads) you give them something back.
10. Tie in your lead generation with a newsletter and blog. Every time you send a sales request to a customer (sale ad, coupon etc) you should also be providing original content. This keeps them on site longer, leading to more sales.
11. Have social media tie ins visible and opened in a new window. You don’t want to redirect someone from your site, you just want them to partake in the call to action.
12. Invest time and money into getting some t shirts or shaker cups with your logo on them. Key chains and magnets are also cheap ideas that when properly used put your business in front of a buyers face (refrigerator, filing cabinet etc)
13. They say 1 in 7 people will buy, and if we go off the average order of $65 and profit of $1.95,
1 | In 7 | =$1.95 |
10 | In 70 | =$19.50 |
100 | In 700 | =$195 profit |
You can see what your traffic needs to be like to make enough money to make a living. This does not include possible rebates manufacturers are willing to give you based on volume of sales and visibility.
Just my $0.02
Have a great weekend everyone.
