Increase Market Share - Building Business Alliances
Everyone likes to hobnob with winners, and that’s why smart business people form alliances with reputable colleagues and organizations. Alliances build your company’s mystique, and encourage new customers to take you seriously.
A Link to Think About
Websites can be more successful if they work together. You can raise your site’s profile for free by offering informative articles to online publications. They win – because they’ve got on-target content to add to their appeal – and so do you, because your article showcases your talents, and offers a link back to your site.
Some site owners choose to increase their market share by engaging in an advertising link exchange, in which related sites agree to display each other’s banner ads in order to increase awareness of both sites. While banner ads may divert traffic away from your site in the short term (very short term if you remember to program your banner ads so that links open in a separate window), it will also help establish your site as the best place online to get complete information about a particular type of product or service.
Enhancing Your Business – By Incorporating Theirs
But increasing your market share isn’t just about getting people to your site – it’s about satisfying their needs once they get there. And one of the most profitable ways to do that is to welcome the bigger players into your site to do business, in exchange for a “kickback” referral fee.
For example, let’s say you run a home improvement site. You can significantly increase the usefulness of your site by incorporating links to recommended products available from vendors elsewhere on the web. In fact, many highly profitable sites are nothing more than referral engines that direct shoppers to specific sites, and in return, take a cut of the sale.
Not only does this kind of click-through alliance add up in terms of profits (assuming you’ve established a formal affiliate agreement with your partnering sites), it also adds to your site’s prestige. The more exciting the content you incorporate in your site, the more impressive you will be to visitors, and the more likely it is that they will return for additional visits, make a purchase, and tell their friends.
Conduit – Alliance-Building Made Easy
Conduit community toolbars are designed to create an aura of “success by association” around your site. Offered as a free download to site visitors, these toolbars sit in the browser window whenever subscribers are online, displaying a dynamically changing array of exciting, niche-specific features while serving as an always-on click-through to your site.
Conduit’s toolbar design engine makes it easy to include links of all kinds, in formats from audio, to video, to news feed. This leverages the attractive allure of your strategic alliances, keeping them in front of potential visitors’ eyes at all times.
Toolbar publishers can also enhance their site’s appeal with syndicated content from a wealth of third-party providers – from the New York Times to NBA.com – that use Conduit toolbars as part of their own site marketing strategy.
Lastly, they can increase their market share by exchanging toolbar features with members of Conduit’s most important strategic alliance – the 38 million people that have already joined Conduit’s network. And if you’re looking to expand into new markets, that’s an alliance worth strengthening.