Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Big Difference Between Retailing and eTailing

By Ben Hart

Many laws of sound business and marketing apply equally to the offline and online world.

But there are some key differences.  You need to know the differences – especially the key difference -- to succeed online.

So what is the big key difference?

I’ll explain it this way.

Let’s say you own a traditional brick-and-mortar store that sells a lot of different products.  Let’s say you’re a sporting goods store.

A physical brick-and-mortar store would probably not survive long if all it sold were tennis rackets.  That’s just too narrow for a traditional physical retail store. 

Not enough people living near by to support a store that only sold just tennis rackets, or even just tennis stuff. In fact . . . notice that the big successful physical stores are going much more toward the big superstore. 

Dick’s sporting goods and Sports Authority are examples – big super stores selling just about all sporting goods equipment imaginable.

The trend in the physical world is toward superstores such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot.  You go to one store and buy everything you need.  One-stop shopping.  People want convenience. 

They don’t want to hop from one store to another – pack the kids in the car over and over again and so on.  But that’s not the way the Internet works.  The Internet is the exact opposite of this.

When people conduct searches on the Internet, they are looking for something particular. They are not looking for sporting goods in general.  They are looking for something specific – maybe a tennis racket, or a particular brand or model of tennis racket.

So if you want to succeed on the Internet, you would want to set up a site that sold only products related to tennis – and highlighting tennis rackets.

You would want to make sure you were selling every major brand of tennis racket.  On this site, you would also want to include lots of unbiased reviews of tennis rackets.

The site should be full of useful articles on “How to buy the right tennis racket for you child” “How to buy a tennis racket for a woman,” “The Pros and Cons” of certain kinds of tennis racks, strings for rackets and so on.

Don’t try to sell one particular tennis racket.   Carry all the major brands.

By the way, I just ran a quick check on GoDaddy.com.  As I write this sentence, TennisAllTheTime.com is available if you want it.

Fundamental and basic to your marketing strategy, of course, is that you want to make sure you capture the email addresses of your visitors.

So you would want to offer something of value free – an ebook on tennis . . . or even several ebooks as incentive for your visitors to give you their name and email address so that you can continue to follow-up with more tennis offers and more tennis info.

The more bonus gifts the better to encourage your visitors to fill out your form. 

One ebook might be on how to select the right racket.  Another on an exercise program for tennis players.

Another on “How to Teach a Child to Play Tennis.”

Another on “The Fundamentals of the Modern Tennis Stroke.”

Plus perhaps a “[Insert Year] Tennis Equipment Reviews Guide.”

The more valuable the bonus gifts, the higher your sign-up rate will be to get visitors on your email list.  You want to get that name and email address because you have just found your tennis player. 

And you want to have a site that will be of interest to tennis players – lots or articles and features on tennis and tennis gear.

These articles and unbiased reviews of products will also make your site attractive to search engines, so your site will start to rank high on search engines for your keywords related to tennis.

While waiting for your tennis site to creep its way up the organic search engine rankings for the keyword “tennis,” you will then want to launch a pay-per-click ad campaign on Google AdWords and maybe also on Yahoo Search Marketing to start generating traffic fast.

Let’s see, I just checked what I will need to pay per click to be in the top three ranking on Google for the term “tennis racket”?

What do you think that might be?  Perhaps, $5 a click? Or maybe $2 per click?

Nope.  If I pay just 55 cents a click, I’ll be in the top three on the first page of listings on Google . . . if my ad is any good.

The headline on your Google Ad should say something like “Tennis Racket Review.”

That will get you lots of clicks visitors to your site of people looking for tennis rackets.

You would think the term tennis racket would be expensive – with all those big manufacturers of tennis rackets out there – Wilson, Head, Dunlop, Prince and so on. 

But no.  As I write these words, you can be in the top three listings on Google by bidding 55 cents a click for the key word phrase tennis racket.

So the big difference between retailing and e-tailing is that it’s much more difficult to have a physical store that sells just one product.

But your e-tail store should focus on one product . . . or on one line of products that targets a specific narrow niche.

You probably could not have a retail store that sold only peanut butter.  But you could have a thriving Internet business that sold only peanut butter.

I happen to be a peanut butter junkie and would be happy to find a site that sold all kinds of peanut butter and buy it in bulk. 

Peanut butter stores well and keeps for a long time.  What I would be most interested in is natural peanut butter that does not have all those preservatives. 

But the trouble with the unprocessed peanut butter you buy at the Safeway is that the oil and peanut butter separate and you have to stir it.

But there is natural peanut butter that doesn’t have that problem. It’s just hard to find.

The point is to have a site dedicated to peanut butter – one that sells all kinds of peanut butter. 

It would have reviews of peanut butter, recipes of that use peanut butter, charts comparing peanut butter and so on.

Your free incentive to get people to give their name and email address might be a book of recipes using peanut butter.  Or you might offer a free jar of your peanut butter of the month.

Remember the value of finding your peanut butter lover – certainly well worth the free jar you are giving away as the price you are willing to pay to find your peanut butter lover (including all their contact information, which they must give you to get their free jar of peanut butter).

You test different free offers to see what works best.

You could not have a local store dedicated to selling only peanut butter because your trading area is too small – not enough people in your trading area to support your physical brick-and-mortar store that sold only peanut butter.

But your reach on the Internet is global – worldwide.

In a world of 6 billion people, there are millions of peanut butter fanatics out there.

Okay, so lets check what it would cost to rank in the top three in Google if you were to bid on the keyword “peanut butter.”

Well, I decided to check. 

Is it $5 a click?  Is it $2 a click?

Nope.  Wrong again.  For just 50 cents a click (a click representing a visitor to your site) you can rank in the top three for the keyword phrase “peanut butter” – ahead of Skippy, Peter Pan, Jiff and the big brands.

Pretty incredible.

You could be shipping crates of gourmet and specialty peanut butter to tens of thousands of eager buyers.

And, by the way, the domain name PeanutButterAllTheTime.com is available.

You can probably think of a better domain name that’s not taken.    That’s one I just thought up off the top of my head as I was writing this. I checked. It’s available.

People keep telling me that all the great niches are taken – that keywords and keyword phrases are getting more and more expensive.

Nonsense.  Yes, most niches are filled by someone – but usually very poorly.

You might think coffee would be a very expensive keyword – with Starbucks, Maxwell House and all the big coffee companies out there.

Nope.  You can be in the top three on Google for just 60 cents a click for the word “coffee.”

Are there coffee fanatics out there?

Gee, is the Pope Catholic?

So why don’t I occupy these niches I mentioned?

Because I’m doing my own thing.  I’ve found my niche.  My niche is providing information, advice and tools that entrepreneurs need to grow their businesses.

That’s my niche and I’m very happy with it.

My job is to show you what you can do – and the relatively easy and simple opportunities that are out there for anyone who wants to grab them.

The big advertisers have still not figured out how to market on the internet effectively.  They are clueless about how to do it.  They still use the old advertising model.

So what if you are a general store?  How do you make money on the Internet?

Well, you don’t promote your general store.

Instead, take your bestselling product, and build your Internet store around that.  Build several stores, each focused on a specific product and see what sells best and what makes the most money for you.

Does life really get any easier than this?

The Internet is still like the wild west. It’s the new frontier.

The sky’s the limit for anyone who want to grab the limitless opportunities that are out there. 

It’s like the gold rush of 1849 all over again, only a whole lot better. 

Next Chapter >>>