BUSINESS,eCommerce,SEO

How to Grow Your Online Business in Singapore

19 May , 2015  

Online Business Team

Singapore is one of the primary business hubs in the Asian region. Anyone doing business in Singapore is dealing with a location that actively promotes positive online and offline businesses. It’s an opportunity for any online entrepreneur.

Growing your online business is a slow process, but it’s also a lucrative process. In this article, we’re going to show you some easy ways to grow your online business in Singapore.

Master of One
Concentrate on a sector and drill down into the various sub-sectors. You’re not Amazon. You have no business attempting to cover everything. It’s always better to master a specific product type before expanding. That way, you can build a small yet reliable online clientele.
There are a number of ways to pick a specific niche:
· Choose what you’re passionate about.
· Research your chosen market and find out what sells.
· Invent a new product (this is not for the faint of heart).
Is Your Online Selling Platform the Best it can be?
With so many companies selling online, there’s no compromise when it comes to the platform. If your site is clunky and difficult to use, your customers will flock to someone else. In Singapore, you have a market that’s extremely savvy about technology. They expect the very best.
If you can’t afford to build your own selling platform, consider where else you might sell. Companies have made fortunes by making stores on eBay and Amazon. That takes away much of the work involved with maintaining your own platform.
Tracking Results
This is for businesses that have been selling for at least a few months.
Every month you should set aside some time to track your results. This works best when you have at least a year’s worth of data to compare to. Seasonal changes happen, but you have to take note of any major slumps or spikes.
Part of growing an online business is to react to mistakes and discover leaks in your plans. Here are some of the things you might look for:
· Are all sales coming from one or two selling channels?
· Is one product more popular than another?
· How have revenues changed?
These results can tell you about the success of your marketing efforts and your position in the market. They can also illustrate consumer trends.
Online Placement
Singapore is like any other localized market. To reach this market, you have to gear yourself towards it. This means choosing proper keywords for your store. Discover these keywords through proper research using the tools Google provides you.
Social media is just as important for correct optimization. Changes to Facebook mean reaching your audience organically is more difficult than ever. Learn to use Facebook ads. Insert relevant interests and conduct split testing on the images you’re using. Spend 20 minutes per day monitoring Cost Per Click (CPC) and click-through rates.
Does Your Niche have a Glass Ceiling?
Sometimes you have to consider whether you’ve reached your apex. Not all markets have a great clientele. Selling low-cost products to a limited number of people is a recipe for hitting the glass ceiling.
In this case, you need to look at the results and be honest with yourself. Singapore only has so many people. If you’ve reached the glass ceiling and no amount of marketing will change that, it may be time to consider expanding into other niches.
Too many online businesses fail because they can’t look outwards when the time is right. You can’t underestimate the importance of reviewing your results and constantly innovating.
Do all this and you’ll soon see your online business growing at a remarkable rate in Singapore.

ONLINE MARKETING,SEO

How to conduct SEO Competitor Analysis in 5 Easy Steps

10 May , 2015  

SEO

Many business owners approach SEO professionals armed with two things: a keyword, and a very limited budget. This leaves SEOs in the uniquely precarious position of explaining to a disgruntled potential client why a $500 budget cannot propel his business to the top ranks for the keyword ‘golf balls’.

In order to stand a chance at succeeding in SEO, a careful balance must be attained between gaining domain and brand authority, improving search volume/traffic and, of course, the all-limiting budgetary allocation. One helpful method to achieving this is comprehensive competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis can help a business create a concise, practical and solid strategy. All other faucets of SEO, from keyword research to link-building, stand to be improved by researching and analyzing competitors’ strategies.

Below is a breakdown of the process:

  1.    Keyword research

In keyword research, you must be realistic as a site owner. Say you opened a business selling furniture. Unless you have the same budget that IKEA has, you cannot realistically hope to rank anywhere near the first page. Small to medium businesses can ill-afford $5,000 monthly on SEO, where larger companies like P&G, Coca-Cola and IKEA spend hundreds of thousands on internet marketing annually.

A more useful approach is to narrow your field to a specific niche that is achievable for your business. This may be through narrowing your target location, or keyword concept. A great tool to help in this process is Mindmapping, which helps you organize keywords into concepts. You can create your keyword list using various tools:

  •         Using SEMrush: types your competitors’ sites in order to identify which keywords they have been ranked for.
  •         Using Spyfu: find out what keywords your competitors are bidding for on Google AdWords
  •         Using Keyword Planner: identify a list of all possible search terms relating to a primary keyword in your niche.
  1.    Know your competition

Using your list of keywords above, search Google and note down which sites are ranking in the top 10. Usually, the same sites will appear for multiple keywords. Identify those which appear the most, and separate them as your top competitors.

Using SEMrush, type their domains to find out the number of keywords they rank for on organic search as well as their search traffic. Sites that have higher search volumes for major keywords have higher authority hence make stiffer competitors.

From this list, identify sites that present ‘true competition’ for you. For instance, if you have a small jewelry shop, Tiffany.com would not be considered your true competitor. Long-tail keywords/location-specific search can help you to identify this.

  1.    Competitor analysis

This is where the real work begins. The first step is to find out their general performance metric. For instance, use Juice Tool from LinkResearchTools which provides metrics like Domain Age, Link Velocity, Domain Authority, Social Shares, and Inbound Links, among others.

Next, download their backlink profile through Ahrefs. Sorting according to Domain Rank reveals link authority from the greatest to the least. Using the backlink tool from Majestic, analyse their trust-flow and identify the semantics of their link profile.

LinkResearchTools’s Competitive Landscape Analyzer can help you find out averages in your field to give you a starting point to work from.

  1.    Content and Social Media

Next, delve into your competitors’ social media and content marketing strategies. Key pointers include frequency of social media updates, engagement ratios, number of fans/followers, and nature of content shared. Look into their blog as well to determine how active you must be in content creation, sharing and follower acquisition. These provide useful starting points for you.

  1.    Barriers to entry

Having understood your competitors, it’s time to map out a strategy to beat the odds given the data you have collected. These include number and quality of links to raise, keywords to use and avoid, content to build and frequency of updating, social media strategies, among others.

BUSINESS,ONLINE MARKETING,SEO,Website DESIGN

9 plus 1 Important Things to Have in Your Website

7 Apr , 2015  

best-way-to-drive-traffic-website

Need Ideas on Website Design?

Need Ideas on Website Design

Need Ideas on Website Design

Websites are fantastic tools for all businesses and those without one are certainly not in touch with modern world trends. Any business that wants to succeed and stay above the competition must get a website up and running whereby they can present themselves to the entire world and conduct online transactions. More…

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DEVELOPMENT,ONLINE MARKETING,SEO,Website DESIGN

How to Ensure a Successful Website Revamp

2 Apr , 2015  

web-revamping

So you are thinking about revamping your website?

Why are you revamping? Are you bored with your current site already? Or do you think it could look better?

Whatever you have in mind, the bottom line is: You want to revamp your website and you are certain it will work. But it cannot work if you don’t carry out the renovation correctly. Below are steps that will help you to ensure a successful website revamp:

 

  • Set Clear Goals

 

Your website is naturally the determinant of how many leads you generate. Therefore, as you think about redesigning your website, generating as many leads as possible should be at the top of your mind.

Think about the business goals and then what you aim to achieve by redesigning your website. Set clear and SMART goals concerning the new site.

  1. Take the Stock of Existing Site

Up until now, you have been building assets each day with the best intentions. These assets include blogs, inbound links and the content. You don’t want all that to go to waste. In fact, you want to use those assets to build a better and more functional website.

To protect these assets, take a stock of them and ensure that they link into the redesigned website. More…