Why Pizza Giants Want Customers to Click, Not Call, for Delivery

"The major pizza chains now do 20% to 30% of their business online, but they want that figure to climb a lot higher, to 50%."

Businesses of every type are adjusting their business models to take advantage of the Internet. In the case of pizza delivery, there are several driving factors:

• It's more efficient than answering the phone. Employees can be making pizzas instead of talking to customers.
• Customers are more likely to respond to promotions for new products.
• The customers tend to be higher income and less resistant to economic downturns.
• Customers tend to be younger, which is a strong demographic for the pizza business.

These chains are also changing their web sites to be more responsive to customers and make for a better ordering experience. One example is the use of cookies to identify returning customers. When a new customer is detected, there is a delay in ordering because they have to enter their address and phone number so the delivery can be made. To compensate for this, the companies offer special promotions to new customers. returning customers are rewarded by the process being so much more efficient because the site remembers their information and they can place an order in under 15 seconds!

This is one more example of ways that businesses have to rethink their operations in order to make the best use of the Internet. The whole world is changing and your choice is to get on board the train or get run over by it!

To read the entire article, click on the title at the top.

Blogging Has Come a Long Way, Baby

"“Blogging activity presents new opportunities for marketers to monitor and influence conversations relevant to their businesses,” says Mr. Verna. “Opportunities no marketer should ignore.”"

Research cited in this article reports 86.8 million Internet users in 2008 who read blogs at least monthly. This is estimated to be 45% of Internet users! These are big numbers and command the attention of anyone who is marketing on the web. These numbers are projected to grow over the next five years, both the absolute count and the percentage of total users. One major rule of marketing is that you have to go where the audience goes. For someone interested in marketing on the web, that means you have to get involved in blogging!

To read the article, click on the title link...

The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow

"At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company."

If you are thinking about starting a business, here is an article that might give you some good ideas and some inspiration.

Don't get the idea that we are talking about easy money. This is not "easy" for most people. It is hard work and can be lots of work. What you can learn here is that there is lots of opportunity if you can find it, and you can do it for very little money if you are capable of putting everything together.

The article describes the startup of a web site that would summarize car reviews from other sources and rank every model of new car. The creator put it together himself by contracting for development help through various sites on the web. He is not a developer himself. The article provides links to many sites where you can find contract help.

One of the investors quoted in the article says, '"The biggest problem facing any website is distribution." In a world where it's so easy to start a company, how will anyone find yours?' For participants in our free Internet Marketing Clinics, this sounds like an invitation! That is exactly where the skills and techniques we teach can become a competitive advantage to help make your business one of the successful ones.

One other point made in the article is that the cost of failure is low, and that is important because it means you can try lots of ideas in order to find one that works for you. In other words, you might expect that your effort will not succeed, but that does not mean that it was not worth trying. With a low cost of failure, you can go on to try other ideas which might become successful.

My grandfather always told me, "There's more than one way to skin a cat!" (apologies in advance to cat lovers, I never actually skinned a cat, nor intended to!!) So keep that in mind as you start out on your business venture and be prepared to regroup and start over if it doesn't work out. Successful entrepreneurs often have multiple failures before they hit a success. Keep swinging until you connect with the long ball!

Work from Home Opportunities?

Lots of ads and lots of unsolicited email messages offer opportunities to make big incomes while working from home. Most of these are pure junk, but their sheer volume testifies to the interest in the topic. This article describes what appears to be a real opportunity to work from home in a flexible environment where one can make real money.

As you might expect, it does not offer you a chance to become a millionaire, and it involves real work that is monitored and measured. You can't "put something up on the web and watch the money roll in!", as so many ads seem to offer.

On the other hand, you can get a real opportunity to free yourself from a daily commute, work flexible hours at your own discretion, provide a real service, and collect real pay. The better you are, the more you can work and the more you will make. And, you can review your own performance statistics by which you are evaluated!

If this is of interest to you, read the story behind the link in the title of this posting and look in the article for the name "Dawn Linseman". Her story will give you an example of a real opportunity. Keep in mind the statistic cited in the article, "...the company accepts only about 2 percent of all applicants..." This is a competitive situation, but that reflects the real world, not the imaginary one featured in the compelling ads!

The article describes other sites that feature freelance programmers and other contract services that may be of interest to you, either as an applicant or a consumer. You can list yourself as a resource there, or you can look for the kind of support you may need to start your own business.

I am seeing a lot of articles about how people are starting up their own businesses today specifically because of the downturn and the current job market, and I will b eposting more information about some of these in the future. Keep your eyes on this space for more information!

Online Advertising Pushes Through

"“Digital marketing offers compelling benefits, especially for cash-conscious companies,” he says. “Marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with most traditional media. This produces more-efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn pushes traditional media to compete with lower pricing.”

Which puts more pressure on traditional media’s bottom line.

“At the same time, successful Internet advertising creates a new paradigm for marketing on other media,” adds Mr. Hallerman. “Search is the prime example of the new model.”

When marketers link ads to an individual’s stated interest at the precise moment that interest is expressed—as happens with a search query—relevance breaks down the usual resistance."

More evidence of the changing impact of Internet marketing is shown in this article. There is a chart in the article showing an increasing growth in the rate of spending on online advertising in the years from 2008 through 2013.

Note the explanation of at least one of the reasons for the movement toward online activity; the information is presented at the exact moment when the prospect is expressing interest in the topic! This is one of the keys to effective promotion on the web.

In our clinic presentations, we continually emphasize the importance of bringing the searcher directly to the page that is most directly relevant to the search term used. We do not want visitors going to the home page on the site! We want them to immediately see the part of our site that is most relevant to what they were searching for.

Local Search Growth Outpaces Overall Online Search

"The study found that local search -- the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services -- grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches."

Interesting statistic from an article pumping the value of internet yellow pages. What they are promoting in the press release is the idea that it is important to be listed in online yellow pages. I am not going to say that this is not a good idea, but it is one that you will have to pay for. I am interested in how you can improve your web site to perform better in these local searches without having to pay extra for the traffic increase!

The first interesting aspect of this report is simply the growth in use of the internet for searching for things in the neighborhood (that is, "locally"). Since the Internet covers the entire world, we often lose sight of the fact that it is useful in finding things that are near to us. The user community is waking up to this fact, as shown by the growth in those kinds of searches.

The question is, "How do I make my site more productive for local searches?" That really brings up another question, "What distinguishes a local search from any other search?" No doubt people will search for something they are interested in and scan the results for something that might be considered "local", but is that really a "local" search? I would say not.

To me, a local search is one that contains a local reference such as the name of a community or a zip code. I know in my own use of the web, that is how I focus my searching if I specifically want local results.

In our bi-monthly clinics, we teach the use of specific community names and zip codes on the site as a means of ensuring that the site will perform well for people searching in that fashion. There are specific techniques that we use to get the impact without cluttering up the site with redundant place names.

But there is another technique worthy of mention in this arena, and that is the use of Google and Yahoo Local features. Both search engines allow the free placement of business information on the web in a way that often comes up when users are searching for neighborhood specific resources. With a little effort, you might also find other local oriented directories that you can post your business information in without charge. These are very good ways to draw in that local traffic without breaking your budget. All it takes is a little effort on your part and you can boost your traffic substantially!

And then, you can always pay for another listing in the Yellow Pages!