As of the previous Use MyBlogLog To Increase Your Online Shop Traffic post, we talked about how you can use MyBlogLog to increase traffic to your online shop. Before we start talking about how to increase more FREE traffic with MyBlogLog, below is a short what-to-do after you have signed up MyBlogLog.

After you have signed MyBlogLog you will need to:

1. Add your shop or website
2. Claim your shop or website, green tick will be shown for successful claim
3. Tag your shop or website with relevant tags will allow your site to show up at appropriate categories
4. Add those social services you have, which will attach to your MyBlogLog Profile
5. Customize your MyBlogLog recent visitor widget and insert it into your shop or website

That’s it, just a few standard steps and you have your MyBlogLog setup, there are more things you can explore in MyBloglog, if you need help, you can leave your comment under this post.

Yes, now you have MyBlogLog setup so what’s next? By now, those who have read our previous post now know that MyBlogLog can really help you to drive FREE traffic to your online shop or site. Question is how are you going to STAND OUT and ATTRACT more visitors to your MyBlogLog profile and from there to your shop or website?

Here are a few great ways to gain more traffic.

1. Have an unique avatar or icon
   By having an unique avatar or icon for your MyBlogLog profile, you will attract more visitors to click when you leave your visual trace on other’s site recent visitor widget. If you need example, you can look at SpreeCrunch MyBlogLog widget at the bottom of this page under “Recent Spree-ers” and see which avatar attract you to click.
2. Expand your contact list
   MyBlogLog allows you to add other members as contacts. Beside, showing interest and building relationship. A few huge benefits, however are that it allows you to appear in the recent profile visitors of the contact you have added, appear on other news feed when they add you back as contact and appear in the FIRST page that people see when checking a profile.
3. Join communities
   By joining a new communities, your profile will appear as new neighbors to the communities, and your profile image will also appear on their profile, in turn allowing their visitors to visit your shop or website as well. To start you might want to join SpreeCrunch MyBlogLog Community, this will help other spree-ers to discover your shop or site.
4. Build your own community
   MyBlogLog is a social networking site, so having your own community helps you to gather site visitors and other members of the community to know your exist. This will also help to build your user base that will like to follow your shop or site updates.
5. Posting messages in other communities
   By posting messages on communities, it not only allow you to give an introduction of your shop or site. But it also help you to generate more traffic to your site which will more likely to find visitors who will consistently return for more.

Well, the basic ideas of all these are trying to be an active member in the MyBlogLog community and you can really gain a lot by giving very little. Try using MyBlogLog now!

Read More:

• Use MyBlogLog To Increase Your Online Shop Traffic

For those who do not know about MyBlogLog, this might help you to get some traffic to your online shop or site. You can sign up an account at MyBlogLog to enjoy this service. If you have a Yahoo email account, you can sign in MyBlogLog with your Yahoo ID. It’s great little tool for visualizing your online shop’s visitors. You can see it in action at the bottom of this page, labeled under “Recent Spree-ers” which link to our SpreeCrunch MyBlogLog Profile. Basically, it visually allows everyone to see the recent shop visitors that have a MyBlogLog account in your widget when new visitors are stopping by.

So how can MyBlogLog generate traffic for your online shop?

In order to attract traffic to your online shop, you will need to embed your MyBlogLog recent visitor widget on your shop. With that enabled, people will want to leave a trace in your widget, so they will visit your shop and you gain the traffic.

Next is for you to leave your trace on other shop’s MyBlogLog widget. With your MyBlogLog account login, you can start surfing others online shops or sites, and you leave your trace at their widget, thus you gain traffic when their visitors view your MyBlogLog profile. The more sites you surf that have MyBlogLog widget enabled the more traffic you will likely to gain.

Once you have signed up, you might want to come back to SpreeCrunch and check out our MyBlogLog. And because all other shop owners are doing that, you will able to get those targeted MyBlogLog enable sites that you can visit and leave your traces all over here.

This is a brief introduction for using MyBlogLog to increase traffic to your shop. In my next post, We will be sharing with you how to make use of the features available on MyBlogLog.

Read More:

• Increase More FREE Traffic With MyBlogLog

Identifying your customer is also important as defining your products and your marketing strategy. If you do not have a concrete marketing plan, then prepare to fail. A product is only as good as it’s marketing strategy. The classic iPod Vs Creative Zen Mp3 players war serves as a good example. Before the iPod, Creative was one of the pioneer companies that made Mp3 players. The difference between the iPod and Creative Zen wasn’t that great - both Mp3 players had their advantages and flaws. With neither clearly a “better” product of the two, it boiled down to marketing. The rest as they say is history. As we have it, Apple’s iPod emerged the winner with the lion’s share of the Mp3 player market. Creative’s Zen crumpled under the weight of Apple’s well oiled and creative marketing.

Before you go and start planning your marketing plan, ask yourself a few questions. Identify your niche and needs and do not project too much of your expectations and hopes on them.

What kind and what gender of your customers are you targeting? Is your customer a male or female?
Knowing the kind and gender of your customers, help you cater to the right group of audience, and not being too diversify to accommodate everyone’s needs.

What age group are they from?
Are they high school teenagers ? If yes, what do they like? What are the current trends?

What do they do? e.g occupation
Occupation is important in determining or estimating how much your customer makes in a month or annum.

How much do they earn?
This question explores the possibility of pricing. If your targeted customers are high school college students, your marketed product must be within their range.

Which products is the most popular among your many merchandise?
Leverage on this knowledge, meet the demands of your customer and keep enough stock.

It ain’t all limited to these few questions, brainstorm and ask yourself more questions. Once you have these written out, you should have a good picture of where to start looking to place your message and how to write your message copy.

Still cannot figure answers and solutions to the questions above, we will help you with that in our future posts.

Read More:

• No Related Post

In order to maintain efficiency, adding a chat widget on your site will help to provide a more dynamic and instant way for your site visitors to interact with you. Your site visitor will saves the hassle of waiting for replies from your emails, if they contact you for any enquiries. If you have noticed at our SpreeCrunch top right corner, we also added our Google Talk Chat Widget.

What so good to have an instant chat widget on your site?

1. Increase sale convention on the spot
2. Better experience for your site visitor
3. Able to interact and build relationship

How to have the Google Chatback Badge on my website?

1. You will need to sign up for Google Talk, if you do not have a Google Account.
2. Download and install Google Talk on your computer. If do not want to install anything, you can add this Gadget on your iGoogle or just launch Google Talk Gadget whenever you want to use.
3. Now is to get the code of your Google Chatback Badge to embed into your website, You might want to customize the appearance of your chatback badge to match your site.

For any help you can check out Google Talk Help. If you still need any help, you can also leave a comment here.

Read More:

• No Related Post

Here’s 1 Important note, if you have subscribed to our All SpreeCrunch Update RSS Feed earlier on, please remove it and subscribe to our new Full RSS Feed link.

Here come to our new features breakdown:

1. 
   Subscribe Widget will enable you to subscribe to our RSS feed to any of your favorite RSS Reader easily. If you prefer receiving updates by email, you might want to Subscribe by Email to receive our updates.
2. 
   If you have notice at the top right corner of the site we added a Chat Widget powered by Google Talk. Feel free to drop by for a chat if you manage to catch any of our team member online.
3. 
   We added Social Bookmarking to SpreeCrunch Shop Profile, check out any shop profile on SpreeCrunch at the right side under the Online Shop section, and you can find all these icons at the bottom of the shop information. These icons allow anyone to share or vote the shop profile you come across and find it interesting, publicly.

Like some of the features on SpreeCrunch? We will share with you how you can have them. Subscribe to our RSS Feed for our latest updates.

Read More:

• No Related Post

Networking

It is one of the cheapest and mostly commonly used approach by people who own a small business. Owners tend to print as many name cards as possible and take the wrong approach in handling them out. To the people you are handling out your name cards too, you are as emotionless as the name card that you have printed. Instead, make friends and get to know the people around you. Having made a couple of friends in the same industry is definitely more productive and effective than handling your name cards out like brochures in a shopping complex.

Referrals
This marketing strategy places a close second in preferred methods of generating new business leads. The key here is to ensure that you take a proactive approach rather than a passive one. Instead of assuming that a satisfied client will refer someone to you, ask for that referral. Tell people who your ideal client is and ask for their help in finding these types of clients. The real estate agent who represented the seller when we bought our house sends us a card every year and reminds us that she loves referrals. It is not pushy, does not sound like she’s begging, and I’m confident it helps generate new leads.

Writing
This often under-utilized marketing strategy is an excellent way to become recognized as an industry expert. Every industry has trade magazines and most are hungry for good content. The Internet is also filled with web sites and e-zines looking for material to send to their subscribers and customers. This marketing strategy alone will help you drive more traffic to your web site more than anything else. It is sometimes challenging to come up with ideas and to write an 500 words article but the investment of time and effort is definitely worth it. You can also consider submitting to us, simply write a review about your shop and email it to marketing@spreecrunch.com and shortlisted will be published on SpreeCrunch homepage for FREE.

Newsletters
This is another powerful marketing strategy to keep your name in front of your customers and prospects. Provide key insight into business challenges and offer solutions to them. In other words, help your prospects and customers solve problems. Some newsletters are nothing more than advertising so be sure to provide valuable information to your customer. You might want to subscribe to our newsletter, we call it mailing list at the top of this page, to get a better idea on how we share value with you.

Offer a Guarantee
A concern many people have when changing suppliers is the risk associated with the change. They may not be completely satisfied with their existing supplier but the risk of choosing a supplier who may be worse can prevent them from changing. Eliminate this concern and offer a guarantee.

Read More:

• No Related Post

Millions around the world has jumped onto the bandwagon of blogging since it’s inception during the late 90s. Since then, blogging has evolved into an effective source of social media. But few people realize the potential and power of blogging, like the Malaysian elections a few months ago - political blogs were credited with swaying potential voters to the opposition. In a a country where media is closely watched and censored, blogging provides readers a different alternative and perspective. As more and more people migrated to the internet, traditional media lost its stranglehold on being the sole source of information.

Blogging was clear to anyone, anyone who is hoping to use the internet as a faster and cheap way to reach out to a targeted audience. It is an effective way to read out to influence large numbers of people instantaneously. Businesses like Lenovo recognized the need for blogs and created Thinkpad blogs to listen to their customers’ feedback. So far, it has been very positive.

Let’s say you have an interest in designing t-shirts and coincidentally you also have a business in selling clothings. You should write and detail about your chronicles of your t-shirts design. If you are contributing to your blog something that is relevant and informative, people will be interested to read. They also stand a higher chance of buying your merchandise, because of the fact that they will feel alot more connected to you. Readers are easily influenced by words and pictures, if your postings are interesting and useful, they will also forward it to others who share the same mutual interest. This way, traffic to your blog and shop will increase.

Blogs do not just stand alone. They are part of a social network of blogs that are linked to each other. Join a community, comment on other blogs, make sure that you include a backlink to your own blog. This is how word spreads so fast and reaches so many people. This community is commonly referred as a blogosphere. Try it out and you will notice a few positive results.

Read More:

• No Related Post

Every online store thrives on the need of traffic - it is the heart and soul of an internet marketing strategy. Having a site that is beautiful isn’t enough, the real world logic of beauty turning heads doesn’t apply here. In the cyberworld, an ugly site can easily generate more revenue and traffic just with a clever internet marketing plan, than one which is aesthetically beautiful but simply lacks the latter. It’s a very hands on business which involves some hard work. You literally go out and beat the bushes to bring people in. A successful internet marketing plan is one which succeeds in driving traffic to their site and services.

RSS Feeds
Certain features like RSS feeds are nice to have, they give your user base the ability to keep track of the latest offers and organize the information you are broadcasting. You might want to check out Feedburner, beside allowing your visitors subscribing to your RSS Feed through a RSS Reader, they can also choose to subscribe through RSS Email. Feedburner not only allow you to keep track of your feed, there many other features worth checking out. To know how it works, you might want to subscribe to our RSS Feeds.

Participate and comment on other blogs
You will be surprised with the amount of people who actually reads and comments on blog. Leverage on this trend by making constructive comments to your name. Visitors will naturally come to your website when they are curious. Try writing healthy comment, and not to spam. You can try commenting on SpreeCrunch, and certainly you will receive some traffic.

Define yourself, be unique, be yourself
What makes your site different from the rest? Are you selling something unique and only available from your site? Are your prices significantly lower compared to others? Do you offer extra after-sales service? These are points to properly consider when you want to define a special selling point. If you are following the crowd, it is going to be hard for you.

Want to know how to be unique? Remember to check back often.

Link to other sites
If you want other sites to link to yours, you will have to do the same. Readers from the other sites might find your stuffs interesting and end up inside your website.

On SpreeCrunch, if you come across a shop profile you like, consider linking to that shop profile, the linkback HTML codes are just right below. If you want SpreeCrunch to link to your blogshop, consider submitting your shop and we will create a shop profile on SpreeCrunch that link to you.

Submit to search engines
If you are on BlogSpot, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com, Multiply or other free blogging platform, you don’t have to worry about submitting your site for indexed, because the search engines already know all these major sites and they crawl them very often, thus your site will be indexed very soon. You will need to submit your site if it is a self-hosted domain to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. This will help to speed up the crawling from all these search engines to your site.

Read More:

• No Related Post

Different websites utilize a different combination of marketing strategies to reach out to a wide audience. You must choose which specific action you will undertake and which tactic you will execute. All these are a matter of preference and resources available to you. What is important is that you must keep in mind your goal and achieve the results. Here’s a look on one of the few different ways to maximize internet marketing.

Area of interest - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for keywords. Optimize search engines traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Companies usually engage an agency to perform search engine optimization and marketing. It usually consists of full time staff person to continuously optimize pages of a corporate or a selling site. But with tools available easily on the internet nowadays, it is easy to do a SEO for your site. We will talk about SEO on a more in depth level soon.

Trust - For example getting SpreeCrunch Verified, increases the trust and reputation of your site. Since it is validated, buyers’ confidence will naturally elevate. Also, ensure the sites you submit to validate the quality of their service providers.

Satisfaction - Implement polls, customer ratings and reviews to increase click-thru. Allow users to comment on your products, find out how they feel about the products. With this reviews and comments in mind, set out to improve and innovate. Your customers will get a sincere feeling that you are not out just to make a one time sales.

Loyalty - Having a loyalty system in place can work wonders for frequent buyers. Work out a programme to keep track and reward buyers if possible and within the means of your blogshop. Buyers will feel the need to return and check out for new products in order to maximize their purchases.

These are the few usual common strategies that most shops employ. Take a look and think about it, maybe you can use it too.

Read More:

• Identifying Your Customers Needs
• The Different Faces of SpreeCrunch
• Journey with SpreeCrunch

Successful internet marketing is built around a partnership with the customer. The promise of internet marketing is that it makes life more convenient for your customers. They expect, they demand and you will fulfill.

Online customers are as diverse as the general buying public. There used to be a time when typical web surfers were mostly male youth and tech savvy professions.Those days were long gone. Web users today consists of a wide demographics consisting of grandparents to the schooling teenager. A Successful blogshop has to appeal to the unique user, your targeted audience who will want and keep coming back for more.

Online buyers are people, like the rest of us. When people take time off to shop, they come to a website hoping that these needs will be satisfied. They do not want to spend the rest of their precious time navigating for important info.

A successful internet marketing strategy can only be successful with a recognition of these needs of online customers. There is where you need to identify the online needs of your potential customer base.

Read More:

• 4 Basic Marketing Strategies For Your Online Shop
• The Different Faces of SpreeCrunch
• Journey with SpreeCrunch