In building a great business, regardless of how big or small, it is wise to observe great business leaders and try and copy their secrets of success. Warren Buffet – the world’s greatest investor, one the best businessmen the world has ever seen – only invests in businesses with competitive durable advantage. Although he has quite a few elements to his criteria, this is one of the major pieces – that a business should have a competitive durable advantage.

What do we mean by competitive durable advantage? A competitive advantage is something a business has or does that is highly valued by the marketplace that its competitors don’t have or can’t do. The key aspect of this is that the competitive advantage should be valued by the marketplace. If its not, its not truly a competitive advantage. Warren Buffet also likes his the businesses he invests in to have their competitive advantage be resilient or durable – something that is over time able to still differentiate the business – perhaps even further form its competitors and is not likely to be just a short term advantage.  The idea is that you want to have an advantage that competitors can easily copy or replicate, or an advantage that will be easily superseeded with new technology. These type of advantages, while they may be lucrative in the short term, are not durable.

Having a competitive durable advantage ensures that your business will be able to leverage its advantage and enjoy greater profits over time because you will be able to increase your prices and still have customers wanting your product. Because you have an advantage over competitors  that your customers value, your products won’t be so price sensitive.  So by having and focusing on having a competitive durable advantage, you avoid relegating your company  into being a commodity – where there are many  substitutes. And that’s when you can avoid competing on price.

For example, in the airline industry, most people decide which airline to pick simply based on price. That is what we call a commodity product. If you have a commodity product, then your hands and the life of your business are not totally in your control. Why? You have to rely on what your competitors do, the pricing they set, and you’re just more vulnerable. So the question is how do you come up with a competitive durable advantage that your customers want?

The first and most important step is you have to really understand your customers: what they want and what they look for when they purchase a product in your market. There are two small examples from our own company that I can point to, that showcase some elements that we built, to gain a competitive advantage when we first entered the industry. While these two elements are not of the durable type (as we don’t want to reveal our secret sauce in public), they serve as examples of the sort of things you can think about to build your advantage.

One of the things that we implemented to be able to stand out from the crowd is month to month contracts. We found that most of our competitors at the time when we started that were trying to lock in new customers into long term contracts without proving themselves first. We changed that model, so that customers knew that if we didn’t perform from month to month they could fire us whenever they wanted. This gave (and still does give) clients greater piece of mind in choosing us as their SEO partner.

The other thing we realized was  that apart from being able deliver great results –  which is a requirement and a basic thing that everyone obviously expects when they hire an SEO company – that customers were really frustrated with the level of customer service in our industry. So we have purposely gone out to focus on customer service – with many points of contact with us. We try and encourage them to contact us whenever they have questions because we want to solve their problems. We actually even help them with issues that may not even be related to what we directly do for them. This has enabled us to build a very loyal client base. And it has basically helped us build loyal clients.

So in your own business, stand back, look at your client base: What problems do your customers talk about in your industry in general. How can you solve those, how can you stand out? If you can see the problems in your industry as opportunities that if you can fill would bring in very loyal customers, you’re on your way to developing your own competitive advantage. How can you brand your company?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you want to anticipate what the market will do if your competitive advantage works. You can be sure there will be copy cats. So anticipate that, and think about how you can proactively protect yourself? What could you do to make your advantage more powerful and harder to replicate?

Although the exercises above take time to work through, it’s worth the time because as a business owner, you are always going to have some problems. You however want to be able to have the problem of figuring out how to satisfy your customers to a greater level (and possibly charging them more) using your competitive advantage, rather than focusing on how much lower your prices need to be compared to your competitors so that you can attract customers to a commodity product.

While Blogging has been around the internet for years, there are still a great number of businesses that don’t have a blog on their site and don’t see the need for one. This article will help businesses that want to know more about blogging, and how to start it to give themselves more chance of driving leads and sales from the internet.  Let’s start with some basic definitions:

A “blog” basically refers to a journal available online.  “Blogging” is simply the act of publishing posts (or articles) to a blog. Someone who moderates a blog is called a “blogger”.

Now the definitions are covered, let’s get to some more detail. The following articles show why blogging is an important marketing strategy in today’s online market.

• It helps you Brand Your Business – When you frequently create compelling, useful and informative blog posts for your business, you earn trust with people who visit your business’s site thus increasing your Brand Reputation.
• Drives Traffic and Leads – The more frequently you post content on your blog that is useful to readers and visitors, the more search engine traffic you will get. A well written blog post also helps your website or blog post gain back links naturally. Links are important in getting your website ranked in the top positions of the search engines.
• Builds Community and Target Audience- When you help people within your industry through the content on your site and blog, you start to build up relationships with your readership. You may not see it direclty but as you blog, you can build up readers, facebook fans, twitter followers and a list of readers actively participating on your blog. As your community grows the easier it is for you to promote and share products and services.

Blogging for Beginners

• What is a Blog?  – Problogger listed a lot of definition of blogging for beginners to understand its terms and history from different sources over the internet.
• Blogging for Business – Blur-marketing listed reasons for your business to start blogging and how it will help to increase your revenues. There are a few shared tips and tricks that every marketer should know about business blogging.
• Importance of Blogging for Modern day Businesses – discussion with a lot of answers about the importance of blogging for businesses. Every beginners should read this before getting started.
• Business Blogging Mistakes to Avoid – Mashable listed 5 mistakes business should avoid while blogging
• How blogging will change your business -  Businessweek published an article discussing blogging as simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the internet itself.
• What a blog can do for your business – About.com listed the importance of blogging and what it can do for your business. They even listed examples of business blogs and their target industry so you can get references before you start yours.
• 5 Reasons Your Business Should Be Blogging – this article from social media examiner will help you understand the value of a business blog and how powerful a blog can become.

Blogging Tips and Tricks

• Tips for Marketing Your Business With Your Blog – Problogger pubished  13 tips that will help Businesses that want to use blogging in their marketing mix.
• Creative Tips to Increase Blog Traffic and Boost Your Business – Social Media Examiner listed 5 creative tips for blogs to increase traffic and boost business. Discover why some blogs fail and what you can do to boost traffic for your business
• Better Business Blogging Tips – Listed here are a few tips to follow when building a successful business blog
• 7 local business blogging tips – Most of the tips online consist of tips and tricks for blogging to attract traffic and publicity on a global scale,  this article on the other hand focuses on targeting local customers through your blog.
• Bloggings: It’s not simple when it’s for business – discuss how blogging is different from business blogging.

Blog Platforms

There are a lot of blogging platforms available and the internet. Even though most of them are similiar to each other, there are differences. Listed below is some of my favourite and most popular  blogging platforms .

• Blogger – A free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger’s advantage over the other platform is its ease of use and nearly instant setup. You can go from zero to hero publishing your first post in less than 15 minutes thanks to its very easy setup process.
• Tumblr – Different from any other blogging platform, tumblr focuses on short and frequent posts that favour images and videos.
• WordPress – A popular open source blogging platform, armed with different features like plugins, themes and widgets. Easy setup and user friendly dashboard makes it so easy to use.

So what do you think of the above resources for blogging? Have you ever tried blogging for your business with success? Let us know and leave your comments below.

We, at QuantumLinx, talk to many business owners – in all different types of industries. What’s very apparent is that when clients come to us, they’re looking for more and more customers. However, most only focus on getting customers by getting more and more traffic to their site. That’s very legitimate – they should always do that. However, there are other things that they can also influence – those they don’t seem to believe they can change (but they can)– in order to get more customers.

This topic is relevant to established businesses that already have traffic to their site. If you have a brand new business, then yes, the sole focus has to be on getting quality traffic first without doubt. Traffic is extremely important, and if your site isn’t getting much, then it’s definitely where you want to start. On the other hand, for an established business, we want to focus on getting quality traffic AND increase the conversion from the site to the sale.

Let’s say you’re a plumber servicing the Sydney area. Let’s assume that your website is one source of leads for you. People come to your site, fill out a form and then you follow them up by phone to see if you can convert them to a client. Let’s say your website gets 1000 visitors a month. 5% of these visitors fill-in a web form that asks you to call them: equivalent to 50 enquiries per month from your website. Once you get on the phone with them, 20% of these enquiries become actual sales, giving you 10 customers from the original 1000 visitors.

In this situation, many business owners come to us whose focus is only to grow traffic. Again, that is important and definitely should be done. However, many business owners don’t realize that the conversion rate on their website (currently 5%) and conversion rate from enquiry to customer (currently 20%) is under their influence. They just kind of take it, believe it’s just there and it can’t be changed, that there’s nothing further from the truth than that. They think that getting more traffic seems to be the best and only solution to all the problems and to getting more customers.
Actually, if you are in this situation, there are a few other things you can do, which don’t cost anymore but that can even double the number of customers you get. To increase the conversion rate on the website, there are many ways that can be done. A very common problem we can see in many of our clients, for example, is that they have their phone number on the ‘Contact Us’ page and nowhere else OR maybe at the bottom of the page in the footer. Just the simple act of making their phone number appear on the top right hand side in very clear writing (relative to the background) can increase conversions drastically – even double it.

So in our example, where 5% of 1000 visitors to the site fill in the form, simply putting in the phone number at the top right hand side of the website increases the conversion rate to 10%. We’ve seen that happen so often – we’ve even seen increases of more than that. So, if you do that, instead of getting 50 enquiries a month, you’re now getting 100 a month without any increase in traffic.

Further to that, if you didn’t increase any of your sales conversion from enquiry to sale, which is 20%, still you get 20 of customers instead of 10. But other than increasing conversion rate on your website, you also do some testing on sales and try a couple of new sales technique that actually increases your sales to 25%.

The result? Out of your 1000 visitors, 10% website to enquiry (100 leads), you close 25% (formerly 20% only) – that gives you 25 customers. So simply by increasing your conversion rate (or even doubling it, which is not hard to do) and do some sales testing and monitoring, you can find that you can drastically increase your sales conversion as well: you can actually get 25 customers instead of 10 from the same 1000 visitors. That’s a 250% increase in your business every month just from increasing, optimizing what you’re already doing than increasing your traffic.

Now, if you’re also able to increase your traffic, then you can just imagine what the growth will be in your business. Simply by paying attention to ALL aspects of the sales process: the traffic, the conversion on the website, as well as the conversion to sale – you can drastically increase the value of your company. If you just focus on traffic, you will increase the value of your company but, you will be leaving a lot of potential on the table – that’s not a good thing. That can make a massive difference to the viability of any business. That’s why we encourage you to focus on your conversions as well as your traffic.

NOTE: If you currently aren’t tracking anything on your site, you should. Its free with Google Analytics and its simple to set up. Just forward it to your web developer and they’ll be able to do this for you. We do this as a complimentary service for all of our clients. If you would like to talk to us about increasing traffic while you increase your conversions, give us a call on 1300 891 181.