Do you remember your high street? The place you used to go with your mum when you were small? She would dive into the butcher’s to get some beef; the greengrocer’s to purchase some veg; and so on. Each store had its business and every premises person had his profit. You purchased things locally, which made sure that the local economy succeeded. If you were after beef, the greengrocer would never try and sell it to you – she would pass you on to the butcher. And they were all happy: and everyone made some cash.
Then the nationwide supermarket came along. And all the high street businesses failed. Mum stopped going down the local shops at all. It was easier to buy all you needed in one hit – better, that is, for everyone excluding the butcher and the greengrocer, and all the other tiny high street shops.
The Internet is completely identical. The big sites are putting the little sites out of business.
Taking Back the Virtual High Street
The only way you can sell 6F2, outside of an Internet hypermarket, is by making a cybernetic high street for yourself.
One of the most effective ways to do that is something described as “affiliate marketing”. What that is, is this: you supply meat, and someone else vends greens. So if a visitor comes to your site in search of meat, you point out to them that they might like to go over to the greengrocer’s site to find some trimmings. The greengrocer returns the help, by sending people over to you for their flesh.
The most successful affiliate marketing tends to be done on geographically specific parts of the web. You make connections with other companies based in the same county as you, or the same town. That way, you begin to build a community that catches all the geographically specific Internet searches. An online version of the old high street, where every shop vends a single type of item and no one business collars all the custom.
Marking Out Your Territory
You will define a smaller space for demolition company Loughborough in one or two easy ways: using geographic location, or by fostering a community.
All online servers get a defined geographic site. That’s how some sites know where you are located in the network – and so can show you what the weather is supposed to be. By default, then, search engines know where you trade from: and so if a visitor searches for a product with specific relation to your area, your website will be chosen.
That is all fine and handy – but not enough on its own. You’ll also have to foster an exclusive community, which can back up your presence in a defined part of the web: usually by naming your site in tandem with your service and area on local social media pages and in local article submission sites. If you strengthen that with the reciprocal linking done in affiliate marketing, your web site stands a better chance of climbing up there with the major ones.
Home on the Range
This site is an example of just how making a local space can make a great space to trade.
No business can thrive out there in cyberspace on its own any more. All the really massive websites have collared that privilege for themselves. The only guaranteed way to take a working slice of the Internet for yourself, is to collar a bigger place and command it with a collection of complementary sites.
Meat and vegetables. It’s the old high street in action all over again. In fact, it’s the second rising of the high street – as most businesses realise how monopolised the wider plots of the web are, they’re frequently going on to their own smaller crannies, encouraging their own localised searches and leaving the rest well alone. Small town trade is back – in the widest place that trade has ever inhabited.