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CutList Plus woodworking software

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Ken Evoy's latest book has just been released, and it's another winner. With tons of useful advice about writing website copy, it's called "Make Your Words Sell" (MYWS), and I think it may be his best work yet. As an engineer, my hardest task is coming up with the right words to market my software, CutList Plus. I just wish Ken had written this book a year ago...

If you're familiar with Ken from his highly recommended book on Internet marketing (Make Your Site Sell), it will come as no surprise that he over-delivers once again. I bought MYWS right when it came out, and have just finished reading the section about online stores. This isn't even the main part of the package, and I've learned enough to make it worth the trouble of downloading the whole shebang! Click here to learn more about MYWS.

Why Focus?

In the previous issue of this newsletter, I noted the critical importance of a laser-like focus on a single product, and I promised to explain my reasoning later. In this issue, I'll make good on that promise. If you missed it, issue #1 is available here.

Since the (laser-like) focus of this newsletter is Internet marketing, I'll not detail the standard "bricks and mortar" rationale for focusing. You probably know it anyway: As a strategy, it's usually called "Stick to Your Knitting," and the thinking is that everything you do -- design, production, marketing -- will be better if you concentrate on a single product market.

My experience is, when marketing a small woodworking business on the Internet, there are three powerful additional reasons to focus. I'll discuss these below.

AS BACKGROUND FOR THE FIRST REASON, recognize that the primary way the Internet can help your sales is by sending more (qualified) potential customers your way.

I'll repeat, since this is so important:

For a small woodworking business, the key role of your website is to reach a larger target market.

The objective is not to make your business seem "high tech". It's not to save money on printing catalogs. It's not to get more random surfers to check out your store, hoping they'll make an impulse purchase.

The point is to make it easy for motivated buyers of the product you specialize in to find you.

This is true for most small businesses, and especially for a custom woodworking business: the number one marketing challenge is not too much competition, but too small a market, or a market that is too expensive to reach using conventional media.

So, how does the Internet help you reach all these targeted customers? The "secret", of course, is that they'll find you! That's the beauty of search engines and directories. While not your only marketing tool, these will be the primary ones.

Getting search engine and directory placement right is a "make or break issue." If you manage to get good placement for your chosen keywords or topics, whenever someone searches on the web for your product specialty, your business will pop up.

The trick, obviously, is getting a good search engine ranking. While this is the topic of its own article(s) still to come, the best thing to do is focus. This is because:

1. There are fewer "competing" sites in a more tightly focused niche, and
2. A web page written on a single, well defined topic will automatically score better in search engine rankings, and
3. In pay-per-click directories (like GoTo.com), the more focused the keywords, the less expensive a top listing is, and
4. When people search, they use specific, focused keywords, not generic terms.

 
THE SECOND REASON TO FOCUS IS, if you have sufficient focus, you can create a "destination" website instead of just a cyberstore. This will help drive even more targeted traffic to your site.

A destination site provides various (usually free) resources that are directly related to the product you are marketing. For example, how-to articles, reviews, buying guides, bulletin boards, classified ads, etc. The key here is that these work best when there is a clearly defined topic.

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Remember, your website doesn't have to be a direct reflection of your "bricks and mortar" business. You can have a real-world business that offers a broad product line while focusing on just one area for your website. Or, even better, build multiple websites each with a sharp focus. 

This is just what I did last month. I decided my software business needed a site of its own separate from Bridgewood Design, so I bought a new domain name and launched a new site: http://CutListPlus.com . It costs about $30 extra per month, but if your Internet business doesn't cover that, you're still running it like a hobby. For my recommendations on website hosting and domain name registration, click here. 
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THE THIRD REASON TO FOCUS IS THAT a good focus provides a context for selling related items made by others. If you take advantage of some of the many affiliate marketing programs on the web, you won't even have to handle the orders for these related products; just collect sales commissions or referral fees. (More on affiliate programs in a later issue.)

A word of caution, though: make sure you only recommend or promote products that you believe in. For example, I am an affiliate of Ken Evoy's "5P" program because I feel so strongly that his products are of outstanding quality and value. Plus, his affiliate program is consistently rated among the best. (You can read more about the 5P program here.) There are many programs I've looked into but passed on because I didn't think they offered a worthwhile product. Only sign up to be affiliates of the best companies, and you'll be much happier in the  long run.

OK, enough of the marketing theory. Let's put the idea of focus to work in a real woodworking business...

 
How to Choose Your Product

Heirloom Woods Case Study: How to Choose Your Product

Remember Mike Glennon's business, Heirloom Woods, that we started looking at last month? His site, a work in progress, is at http://home.att.net/~mjag/ (If you missed it, issue #1 is available here.)

When we last spoke, Mike was investigating the purchase of his own domain name, and had (grudgingly?) accepted my advice to focus on a single product. He was trying to decide between Jewelry Boxes and Baby Cradles. I'm going to walk through the details of one technique for making this type of decision.

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If you're still not convinced about the need for a single-product focus, neither was Mike Glennon. Here's what he had to say:

"My thought was to present a spectrum of individually made, non-production goods and hopefully establish myself as a maker of these to high end customers. Unfortunately, it seems that most of my calls are from people who want production work: 500 of this, 250 of that, 1000 of something else, which I am not equipped to handle. Nor am I inclined to do. To keep things going, I am taking small production runs, 10 items or less, and am getting some local repair and refinishing work (something I also enjoy but the return isn't all that great)."

Does this sound familiar?

Mike wanted to showcase all the different types of work he can do (and enjoys doing). The unspoken strategy is to broaden the target market by offering various items, and help generate repeat business. This is a great strategy -- for his bricks and mortar business. It doesn't work on the Internet, and here's why. People simply don't search for a generalist. They search for the specific item that they need. By offering many items, Mike hurt his chances of getting a good search engine ranking.

Here is the "keywords" tag from the Heirloom Woods home page:

"Custom woodworking, presentation quality pens, writing instruments, Hand Crafted, Custom Shelving, Detached cabinetry, small furniture items, cradles, baby cradles, boxes, jewelry boxes"

When someone is ready to buy a cradle, for example, they will go to a search engine or directory and type in "cradle" or "baby cradle" or something similar. Because this is only one small part of Mike's current keyword and website content, the Heirloom Woods website will not get a good search engine ranking. To over-simplify, the search engine does a "word density" calculation and says to itself that Heirloom Woods is 10% related to cradles because 2 out 
of 22 keywords are "cradle".

Mike's site is currently set up to get a good ranking if someone searches for cradles and jewelry boxes and cabinets and pens. That just doesn't happen.
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The essence of my approach for choosing a focus is to try to get a feel for supply and demand in the product markets you are evaluating. A large company would commission specialized market research to answer these questions, or at least get close to the answer. In previous jobs, I've paid $50,000 for such work to be done.

Fortunately, we can accomplish what we need to for free on the web. Now, I'm NOT suggesting that we're going to get the same information that you would get from an expensive study. I'm just saying we'll find out *enough* information to make a decision. Remember, all we're trying to do is evaluate the relative attractiveness of two product markets: cradles and jewelry boxes.

What we need are proxies for supply and demand for these products.

By "supply", I mean competition. How many website are there already trying to sell roughly the same item to the same target market?

By "demand", I mean how big is the target market, on the web, for each specific item.

Obviously, we want to pick the product with the largest demand and the smallest supply.

SUPPLY. There are several good proxies for supply, or competition. We can do a search on Alta Vista and see how many hits were found. We can look in Yahoo and see how many relevant sites are in its directory. We can also search in Yahoo Shopping and see how many product and store matches are found. Finally, we can search for our product at GoTo.com and look at how expensive a top listing is. (If you're not familiar with GoTo.com, now is a good time to check it out so you'll understand what I'm talking about.)

DEMAND. There is really only one good proxy for demand right now. We'll see how many searches were conducted at GoTo.com last month for our specific product. To do this, go to the "suggestion tool" at  http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml and just type in your key words.

I've done all this work for the keywords "baby cradles", "jewelry boxes" and a few others for comparison. To make sense of all the numbers, I like to make a couple of graphs. Here's how the graphs work. Both of them have different measures of supply (competition) along the axes; Points high and to the right are more competitive. The circles are drawn with their areas proportional to demand; larger circles mean higher demand for that product.

So, reading the charts is simply a matter of looking for big circles (high demand) in the lower left corner (less competition for good search engine placement).

The way I read the tea leaves is this: there's a relatively decent market for jewelry boxes, but it's too competitive. Baby cradles are a smaller market, but there's not much competition. Now, look at baby cribs. Here's a market that has more searches than jewelry boxes, but much less competition. My recommendation to Mike is to focus his site on baby cradles and cribs. The justification for combining them is that you are serving virtually the same target market. In fact, some people use the words cradle and crib interchangeably. 

This will give Mike a reasonably sized pool of people who are actively searching for his featured product, combined with few competitors for getting a top search engine ranking. Perfect.

 
Of course, there are many other important factors to consider when choosing a product. Chief among them is what do you like to build? As Mike told me a while back, "I'm leaning towards cradles; they are fun and easy (no drawers!)" Sometimes, you don't need all the "sophisticated" marketing analysis after all...

In the next issue, we'll talk about keywords and what to do with them. Then, we'll step through the process of choosing specific keywords for Heirloom Woods.