Internet marketing

My lamp manufacturing business primarily markets on the Internet, leading me to spend much time, energy, and thought on how to best use the Internet and various tools available for marketing, selling, and analysis. It looks like we’ve done some things right, as our primary product, a music lamps for organs, is currently at the number 1 position on the first page of Google searches when the key words “organ lamp” or “organ music lights” are entered. We’ve not been quite as fortunate, yet, with other product categories. As an aside, we have not used pay-per-click marketing proving that Google does not necessarily give preferential treatment to sites using pay-per-click.

What we have done is to constantly “tweek” our web page content making sure that we are doing everything we know how to do to improve the SEO (search engine optimization) of our sites. We also frequently get a rating of our sites using www.websitegrader.com and follow its advice for improving our SEO. Several months ago, when we first stumbled upon websitegrade, we improved our grade from 15 to 60 in 24 hours by simply implementing what websitegrader recommended.

Any business relying on the Internet for business needs to constantly find ways to improve page content and SEO. It’s also vital to analyze the statistics for your site. Part of my daily routine is to review the statistics for all of my sites.

While we’ve not used pay-per-click, a strong argument can be made for this marketing tactic. Diana Ransom has written a nice Wall Street Journal article on the subject, called “Seven Ways to Make Pay Per Click Pay“.

The Internet is crowded with companies selling their wares. Those businesses that pay attention to the Internet marketing details will certainly rise above the fray.

Good luck with your Internet marketing.

Will Limkemann

A better pizza site

Over the past few months I have become very sensitive to effective and ineffective web sites as we have worked hard to continually improve and measure the effectiveness of the site for our line of lamps – www.ektralamp.com.

One of the best commercial sites I’ve run across lately I discovered when my grand-daughters wanted pizza. In particular they asked for Dominos Pizza and suggested that I order over the Internet. This was new to me, as I’ve always ordered pizza by phone. No more!

At 2:30PM I visited www.dominos.com and discovered an amazing site. The entire process of ordering a pizza to be delivered at 6:00 PM took just a few minutes with outstanding navigation. I selected the types of  crust, then visually built each pizza with the desired toppings. I did not need to create an account (but could have if I had so desired) and was given the choice of paying by credit card or paying the drive upon delivery.

Out of curiosity I followed the progress of the order through the later part of the afternoon. A progress bar shows when the pizza is being made, when it has been put in and taken out of the oven, and at what time it left for delivery. I’m happy to say the delivery was made just five minutes after six.

I hold up this site as a masterful piece of customer-oriented engineering. It is fun, easy to navigate, and very effective. Dominos does a good job of promoting their products while you order, but with uncluttered screens. Anyone looking to build a customer-centric commerce site would do well to carefully examine this site.

Will Limkemann