People shop online and most stationery companies have been obliged to provide consumers with an online alternative. For many years, people thought that Jane or John Doe consumer would either buy online or exclusively at a bricks and mortar store. As we well know, they are likely to do both depending on circumstances which are not easy to predict. The industry has been tip-toeing around channels of distribution for quite some time and it is clear that bricks and mortar stores require some level of online presence to engage clients who may wish to visit their store or purchase products online.
I recently picked up the Summer 2011 Instore Magazine that was published for the Dallas Gift Show. In this magazine, there are several interesting articles that are most useful to store owners getting their feet wet in online marketing:
- The ABCs of SEO by Cindy Baldhoff
- Use YouTube to Engage with Your Customers
- Getting Social with Email Marketing by Ron Cates and,
- Where’s your ‘Stupid List”?
Now, I have no way of knowing if anyone is going to read these articles, let alone act on them, but they contain plenty of very good advice and suggestions. I suspect that people’s eyes will glaze over and they will get back to business as usual. It’s understandable, but a real shame.
Crane and William Arthur now have affiliate marketing programs. There is no reason why bricks and mortar stores can’t share in the online revenue stream if they do a little work. Will they? I suspect not, because they lack the tools and the knowledge to do so successfully and are perhaps frightened that they may end up cannibalizing their existing business. Is this a reason to stay out of the fray? No, but most will choose to sit on the sideline and surrender the bounty to professional affiliate marketers. Let me explain.
Online affiliate marketers will hype anything and many have become quite rich by focusing on key words and building website devoted exclusively to capturing affiliate income. The acai berry diet (14 million search pages) that is hyped by online marketers is a perfect example of how this works. In fact, I have attended several online seminars that teach you the techniques to optimize your site for acai berry diet searches so you can capture affiliate income. Even if you decide not to activate your affiliate program with Crane or William Arthur, someone else will to your detriment.
Let me give you an example of a website I setup over a year ago (no affiliate links as yet) to test various automatic “content-generating” products in the market. The site is nycweddinginvitations.org. I have done relatively little to this website, but will soon be adding graphics to make it look attractive and begin to add affiliate links and perhaps add an online store. This website was FREE and costs about $1.50 a month to run. I then use several Wordpress tools to skim the Internet to look for articles that use my key words (“nyc invitations,” “nyc wedding invitations,” nyc wedding stationery,”) and then these articles are automatically “spinned” (term for substituting synonyms and rearranging sentence structure to avoid duplicate content) and then published automatically on the NYC wedding invitations website. You can establish multiple websites using the same strategy built around different key words but perhaps using the same graphics. All of this is basically FREE and by using the appropriate Wordpress Plugins, ALL OF THIS IS FULLY AUTOMATED (i.e. no human intervention).
Now, you may have a much prettier website than I do, but because my website has been optimized for search, it is far more likely that it will appear higher in a Google search result than your store. The first listing in Google’s Organic Search (not paid!) statistically receives between 30% and 46% of the clicks. Pretty scary, isn’t it?
This is how professional affiliate marketers work. Sure, there are a lot more wrinkles using Facebook Fan Pages, YouTube, Landing Pages and other strategies, but I can assure you that just because you decide not to actively and aggressively support the Affiliate Programs kindly provided to you by your Vendors, others will!
Is this good for the industry? I think not, but this is why Tiny Prints and many other online “printing” companies who wouldn’t be able to pick out an engraving press from a lineup of toilet bowls will eat your lunch and mine too!
Isn’t it time to figure out what we can and should do to preserve the quality standards in our industry? Together we can do this the “right” way and preserve the integrity of our industry Rest assured that there are plenty of people out there who will and can sell anything and make a fine living doing so. They are real pros and I admire their spunk.
Call me at 203-661-2927 or email me at rmay@stationersguild.org with your ideas and suggestions.
Richard W. May
Thérèse Saint Clair