With the prices of keywords being driven up by large companies, many smaller online marketers have found the cost of buying keywords more than they are able to afford. While we need to be diligent in finding the unique keywords that the majority of large companies don't pay attention to, there is still a way that is emerging that can bypass a lot of those concerns and really make an impact on your bottom line.
I'm talking about the emerging social shopping site trend that is just starting to really take off. It's a very good time to look at it and take the plunge if it fits into your specific business niche.
What these fairly new networks do is attempt to make the online shopping experience similar to what is really done offline. For example, they take into account that the majority of people that shop, do it socially, or in groups. It offers immediate feedback like a group of friends looking over some item and letting their friend know what they think or have heard.
One writer says, "What's different about social shopping? For all its power, Google (GOOG) can't tell shoppers what's cool or what their friends or like-minded consumers recommend. Social shopping sites, on the other hand, do just that--which provides new opportunities for small online retailers to reach consumers. A search for "men's shoes" on a typical search engine, for example, yields the most prominent brands and retailers within the first few pages of results. The same search on a social shopping site not only displays a wider array of smaller, and arguably cooler, brands, it points users toward the haberdashery recommended by the site's most fashion-conscious and influential users."
In case you think things have changed online in this area of recommendations, a recent poll by Yahoo (YHOO) and Harris Interactive (HPOL) found that 60 percent of those planning to buy online for holiday gift buying, followed through based upon recommendations from family and friends. That's a large amount to consider.
Kaboodle, which has been around for a year now, has facilited this human behavior by empowering user with similar tastes or interests to be their own shopping group, and within their specialized community they can share recommendations or put up messages on what they think. Many have list of their favorite products and companies already posted for others to use to help make decisions.
Others offer ways to put up products of interest in something like a personal profile and others will clickthrough and check what it is on your site. Some have had increases of over 165 percent in sales and increase in web traffic of over 33 percent.
I think this is something that anyone selling products should really check into. The services have been around awhile now and so have some of the kinks worked out of them.
The key thing to remember on these types of sites is that they are like other online community sites, you can't market or promote things in the old way of push-marketing. Push and you'll be shoved out of the site. Do it right and it could offer all sorts of opportunities with no connection or reliance upon search placement at all.
Some Social Shopping Sites of Interest:
Here's a site that covers comparison engines in detail.
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