Mark Shrago’s Online Marketing - Home Business Blog

Community and network marketing has been in existence for centuries and with the emergence of the Internet, it has gone online. Social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook have become hugely popular means of staying in touch with friends and family and also customers, prospects and partners. If you are new to this phenomenon which is taking the internet by storm, here are a few social networking ideas to get you started.

Take a look at each of these sites and find where you belong. Each networking site is a little different. While it is important to have a small presence on each, you must choose one as a primary online home. Find out which site is more aligned to your needs and temperament. MySpace is organized in terms of age groups, Facebook in terms of city; school and country while LinkedIn in terms of workgroups and companies. There are overlaps in most of these sites so choose the one which is most comfortable for you. You can always use feed engines to post your content to all the sites simultaneously.

Take some quality time to create your profile. This is the place to define your online personality – who you are, what you do, what is your objective in being a part of this community, what do you have to offer. You need to be extremely honest about what you put up on your profile because the whole idea is to build a solid reputation and credibility which cannot be built on the foundation of half truths or lies.

Building relationships, as in the real world, will take some time. Building relationships with other people in the network is much more than making friends and clicking some buttons. Building long term relationships involves constant interaction, sharing and receiving. It takes time and effort because there is no “flesh and blood” involved as in a live human being. In online social networks, one image is interacting with another. Just like in your home business, you will probably never meet all your customers face to face, yet you can have strong relationships with some of them.

As in real life relationships, you need to invest your energy and time in maintaining online relationships. There has to be a constant open line of communication. What you communicate must be relevant to the group you are communicating with and it must not mislead anyone. Never spam or scam. These things will inevitably lose you business in the long run. While it is important to promote your business and products, it is much more important to stick to online etiquette.

If you are patient with your activities, consider social networking as planting seeds. You will not see immediate results. First, the seeds will sprout, then they will grow and eventually, they will give you vegetables or fruit. But it is always worth the wait!

Just because you sell the same product or information as your competitors, you can not assume you know how those competitors operate. Take Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart; he knew better. When he was starting out, he spent more time in K-Mart than most K-Mart managers! He knew that the best way to make Wal-Mart successful was to know the competition extremely well, to know it inside and out.

When your store and your competitors store is online, it makes this task a whole lot easier. You can visit stores selling the exact same product as yours, or if your product is unique you can see how other marketers of, one of a kind products, promote them. Think about what customers you want to target, then find those websites that are also marketing to that customer base. You can easily do that by spending some time on Google or Yahoo searching for the kinds of products you think your customers will be searching for when hopefully, they find your website.

Knowing your competition, however you do it, is the best market research you’ll ever do. It will probably be the least expensive also, so it will provide you the best return on investment. Look at your competitors sales process, so you can do it better, faster and easier for your customers. Find the one company online that you think will be your strongest competition, and go ahead and order something from them. Than you can examine all of this up close:

1. How fast did you recieve it?
2. What else was in the package when you got it?
3. What are they offering as an upsell or back-end product?
4. How do they handle customer service complaints?
5. How do they handle returns?
6. Was their product as great as they had hyped it up to be?

As you can see, there is a wealth of information to be gained by checking out your competitions product up close and in person, so to speak. Doing this research before you bring your products to market or put up your first website, will help you develop your Unique Selling Position or USP. It will help you set up a unique set of advantages for you to offer your prospects and customers so they will order from you! Ask yourself, what great value, service, or benefit will people receive from my business that will justify them doing business with me?

When you finish researching your competition online, you will see how important having a USP is to your business. While it’s true that a lot of people shop according to price at least occasionally, they are often willing to choose goods and services based on benefits. If you can provide a clear USP that gives your prospects a great reason to do business with you instead of the low-priced guy, they are going to choose you. With a strong USP, you can easily justify higher prices and get them, because you are not competing on price; you have better things to offer! You are going to get better customers to deal with, who have money and are willing to spend it and will probably complain a lot less!