Localism Works: Making the Internet Small Again
Do you recall your local shops? The place you used with your parent when you were small? She’d pop into the butcher’s to purchase some ham; the greengrocer’s to buy some veg; and so on. You knew each shop had its purpose and each store person had his money to make. You utilised n town, which ensured that the local economy thrived. If you wanted beef, the greengrocer would never try and sell it to you – he would move you on to the butcher. And every store was happy: and everyone made some cash.
Then the supermarket came along. And all the smaller businesses died. Your mum stopped going to the local area at all. It was easier to buy it all in one place – simpler, that is, for everyone except the butcher and the greengrocer, and all the other tiny high street stores.
The net is completely identical. The major players are squeezing the specialty companies out of business.
Turning the Superhighway Into a High Street
Plenty of net users have to use wool in your local area. So make your own online high street.
One of the easiest ways to do that is a process described as “affiliate marketing”. What that means is this: you vend meat, and another store vends vegetables. So if a customer comes to your website looking for brisket, you mention to them that they might like to go over to the greengrocer’s website to buy some trimmings. The greengrocer reciprocates the help, by shunting customers over your way for their sirloin.
The most successful affiliate marketing is usually done on geographically specific areas of the net. You foster links with other sites trading in the same area as you, or even just your town. That way, you begin to make a community that takes all the geographically specified Internet searches. An Internet version of the real world high street, where each shop sells a single item and no one business hogs all the trade.
Defining Your New Village
So you will be making your cyber space high street; you are promoting best rate loans UK. How are people going to reach you?
All online servers exist in a defined geographic location. That’s how some sites can see where you are in the UK – and so can tell you what today’s weather is doing. By implication, then, search engines can see where you live: and so if a visitor searches for a service with specific reference to your area, your web site will be highly ranked.
This is all fine and useful – but not practical on its own. You’ll also have to grow an Internet community, which can back up your business in a specific portion of the net: usually by naming your website in tandem with your service and location on local social media groups and in local article submissions directories. If you bolster that with the two way linking done in affiliate marketing, your website stands a better chance of getting up there with the big ones.
Home Sweet Home
This site illustrates exactly how marking a local space can make a really profitable niche.
No site can survive out there in cyberspace on his own any more. All the genuinely massive web sites have taken that privilege for themselves. The only way to take a living piece of the web for yourself, is to find a bigger area and command it with a group of dovetailed businesses.
Steak and greens. It’s the old high street in action all over again. In fact, it could well be the second rising of the high street – as businesses realise how controlled the bigger spaces of the web are, they’re frequently moving to their own smaller corners, conducting their own specific searches and leaving the rest well enough alone. High street trade is back – in the biggest land that commerce has ever known.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 5:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.