Future Searches

Skills to Learn as a Web Entrepreneur

To be a successful web entrepreneur takes a range of skills and abilities. You drive and determination, you need skills and you need a great business acumen. But at the same time it also takes more than that, and if you want to be a true success then you also need versatility. The more skills and abilities you learn related to online marketing, running a website and selling products, the more you will be able to understand every aspect of the process, the more you’ll be able to fine tune your business model and your end user experience, and the more you’ll be able to handle the various aspects yourself – thus keeping tighter control and reducing overheads.

If you have dabbled in SEO and also enjoy writing then that will take you so far, but if you want to see multiple revenue streams, and if you want to really innovate and keep up to date with the ever changing face of technology, then you need to develop a range of skills. Here we will look at just some you can benefit from.

Four Things You Can Do Offline to Improve Your Online Business

Contrary to popular belief, online empires aren’t built on the internet alone. There are real world steps that need taken to ensure success. This brief guide will share four steps that any web entrepreneur can take to step their game up to the next level.

Naturally, most of the tips you read about improving your web ventures cover stuff that you do online. There are tips on web design, creating good content, engaging users, targeting your niche, and everything in between. And all of this stuff important.

Equally important, however, are the steps you take offline to bolster your reputation and improve the legitimacy of your operation. Despite often being associated with traditional brick and mortar operations, these offline actions are actually basic steps that every serious business should take. Without them, it’s difficult to differentiate serious, established organizations from those that merely exist on the internet.

Why does this matter, you ask? Well, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because anyone can get set up online and claim to run a business but not everyone takes what they do seriously enough to go the extra mile and establish themselves. And as consumers deciding who we’re going to do business with, wouldn’t we rather work with organizations that are established and care about their reputations? Of course we would. When it comes to buying goods, making investments, developing partnerships, etc. legitimacy matters.

Quora – What Makes it Different?

I’ve always been quite a fan of the “question and answer,” platform online. It interests me both in a general internet marketing context and also from a user perspective. The ability to share knowledge online and actually communicate directly with experts from various fields from all over the world is incredible on any level.

That’s why I was, in the early days, a bit of a Yahoo Answers fan. However, I started to find the quality of many of the answers (and the questions too) quite poor as time went on. Enter Quora.com. Dubbed, by some as “the new Yahoo Answers,” the site is growing at a rapid pace. 3.5 million indexed pages in Google in January, 5.9 million at the start of February and, as of today, 6.5 million.

But it’s not the new, ‘Yahoo Answers.’ Not in my opinion anyway. It’s like a higher quality Experts Exchange meets a much higher quality Yahoo Answers and somewhere along the line meets Twitter too.

But what makes this platform different?

Google’s Market Share Has Dropped by 2% in China

Alibaba has leapt ahead of Google in terms of the share of online advertising revenue it earns in China.  According to Analysys International, Alibaba’s Taoboa keyword advertising and development of interactive marketing ad business allows its ad revenue to grow substantially and therefore Alibaba has jumped to No.2 in China Internet ad market. The statistics below shows that Baidu, Alibaba and Google ranked Top 3 in China online ad market in Q3, 2010.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou, China by 18 founders including Jack Ma. It is the global leader in e-commerce for small businesses and the flagship company of Alibaba Group. The global trade platform is used by millions of buyers and suppliers around the world to do business online. In addition, Alibaba.com offers a transaction-based wholesale platform on the global site (www.aliexpress.com) geared for smaller buyers seeking fast shipment of small quantities of goods. Alibaba.com has offices in more than 60 cities across Greater China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe and the United States.

Online Purchase Behaviours and Brand Reputation

I was googling to find resources to analyse “internet purchase behaviours” and came across to a survey examining pre-purchase search activities across different sectors like apparel, sports, travel, computer hardware…

According to the survey, every one out of two internet purchases has been finalised after making a research in search engines and shoppers complete their purchase-related search engine research two or more weeks before their online purchase.

About half of all internet shoppers conducted a product research in search engines before making a purchase on the internet. The brand search terms were only the minority of all purchase research process however their click through rates are high and most of these searches are peaking during the purchase session–searches.

“For apparel buyers, 10% of clicks-throughs occurred during the purchase session, and 89% of these click-throughs were brand-specific. The same behavior held true to a lesser degree across the other categories: 9% and 54% for Computer Hardware; 9% and 49% for Travel; and 11% and 57% for Sport & Fitness.”