Best Business Deals!

If you want to make it online, you need three things:

1. A product or service
2. Potential Customers who know you are selling a product or service, and
3. Potential customers who trust you enough to purchase from you.

I cannot reinforce the importance of point 3 enough. Whether you have an online or an offline business, people are more and more going online to find out what they can about you.

The thing about the World Wide Web and Google is that they may not just find your website. Other people may be talking about you, your company or your product. Do you know? Have you checked to see what others are saying?

There may be people making negative comments on forums or in blog posts and you may not even know about them. There would be nothing worse than just leaving these comments be as these can create doubt in people’s mind about the trustworthiness of you or your product. You do want your existing clients and customers to be happy, don’t you?

If you haven’t previously seen what other people are saying about you out in internet-land, I would suggest you open up a new tab or window, go to google and get searching. Search for your company name, your product name, and then your name.

Also, set up feeds and notifications so that you get notified any time someone mentions your name or your product name. Some great services for this include:

• Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) – Bloglines gives you an easy web-based platform to monitor updates from other blogs in your niche.
• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) - Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Go for as it happens so you can see if there is a crisis developing. You will have to learn to scan pages to see which are important, which should be filed away and read later and those pages that can be ignored.

Forums are a great way to communicate with and influence your target audiences. They are a place where a plethora of individuals from your target audience gather together to discuss issues. As such, forums are also a great way to identify and monitor issues you may face.

If you are going to participate in an audience, you need to follow these rules.

1. Lurk first in the forum and see what other people are saying and how things run.
2. Make sure you follow the rules. A forum is a privately owned website, not a democracy. There are rules you need to follow to participate in any forum
3. Don’t preach to people in a forum. Speak to them as equals- even if you think they are stupid. Also, avoid fights- this makes you look stupid and a web page can be permanent.
4. Don’t lie. Online, if you lie, you will get caught.
5. If you are going to make a comment in a forum, make sure yo quote the relevant post you are replying to.

Blogs

Do you have a Blog? If not, why not. A blog gives you the opportunity to establish contact directly with your audience, bypassing traditional media outlets. Blogs are great because they are a platform that provides you with instantaneous publishing as well as the opportunity to receive instantaneous feedback from your audiences or target customers.

A note of caution: Do not use your blog to just publish your press releases. Use your blog to engage in two way conversation with your audience. Give them the opportunity to leave comments, and reply to any comments that are left.

Another question that is often asked is whether you should moderate comments. This is a tough question to answer. You should delete spam, and any commentary that is illegal or defamatory, You should not however just delete comments that are negative to your organisation. You should engage these people in conversation.