We live in a very complex world

Details: Tuesday, 17 May 2011 00:14; Published on Tuesday, 17 May 2011 00:33; Hits: 559

It’s fair to say that nothing is simple today. All the simple things of the past are now being done by a machine somewhere or a few lines of code. This leaves all the difficult things for us, humans to do. In the 21st century the ‘simplest’ things require us to exercise our judgement and knowledge and our connected, always-on world makes everything that happens in it critical.

Evidence of this comes from an unlikely quarter. As news of a sex scandal involving the current leader of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, unfolds the world of business, finance and politics feels the ramifications. What would (and should) be a localised matter for the New York police to handle now is affecting the price of the Euro (which tumbled against the dollar), the fates of Portugal and Greece (currently embroiled in a financial bailout by the IRMF and the EU), the pride of France and the fate of its politics (with Strauss-Kahn rumoured to be ready to take over the reins from Sarcozy).

As a result business everywhere is feeling the pinch, webmasters who price their goods in Euros are suddenly a little more competitive for those buying in dollars whereas the opposite is true for many US businesses and websites which sell goods and services priced in dollars.

As business dips and rises affected by factors which appear to be so rarefied that it becomes next to impossible to predict them, it becomes obvious that success hinges on one’s ability to become as exceptional as possible, rising high enough above the competition to have a margin of safety when it comes to unforeseen ‘dips’.

Sex Scandals and your website's SEO are linked for the first time

How to have an Exceptional Web Presence

Being exceptional on the web is no small thing. It requires your website to be optimized to the max in order to deliver top results in organic searches. That’s called having a dominant presence in search results. It then needs you to have an online marketing identity which clearly differentiates you from your competition.

It is only in this century that having an online business has become a viable proposition for almost anyone with an idea and some cash. This has resulted in the web becoming, suddenly, very crowded. It has also made it difficult to differentiate what you do from what everybody else does. This sameness in services and products has commoditized both and has resulted in a drop in price.

The moment something becomes a commodity you get two things which happen almost simultaneously. First, the plethora of those offering similar services or products results in a drop in the average price as the market becomes price-sensitive. Second, a base standard becomes the acceptable norm below which no service or product dares fall without losing market share.

Both of these impact negatively upon a business trying to stand out from the competition. If, for instance, you had the notion to offer a cut-price service, undercutting everybody and cuttings some corners in the process hoping that those who go for it will understand, now you can’t. Yes, you will probably attract customers flocking to the lower price but the moment you mention that you do not offer all they expect, because it is cheaper, they will not go for it. It’s human nature to want more for less, rather than take the logical approach of ‘you get what you pay for’ and the classic example of this is the PC market.

The moment PCs became a commodity few went for anything cheaper that offered less than the acceptable ‘average’ unless it happened to be a second, or third or back-up PC.

Upscale to be Different

If you planned to be different by offering an upscale experience and charging accordingly for it, again, you will hit the wall of customers who are used to paying less rather than more.

As the luxury PC and laptop market has shown (to hark back to my earlier example) upscaling can work but it automatically limits your share of the market and let’s not forget that for every laptop big brand names bring out which is over the $1000 mark they also have half a dozen or more which are well below it, so when they target upmarket they have already got the lower end of the market covered.

This leads us to you. You have a website. You run an online business and you really want to be apart from everyone else. You just found out you cannot do it on price alone and cut costs. You know that going upmarket is also not going to give you the income you need. So the question is what can you possibly do?

The easy answer, one which even Seth Godin has often blogged about is to be truly exceptional so that those who come to your website to do business with you are converted as far as your services or products are concerned. This is not easy to do which is exactly why you need to go there in order to be different.

How you achieve this potent mix of eclecticism will depend upon:

Your experience
Your ability to create something unique
The demographics of your customers
Your customer’s expectations
The type of service or product you offer
Your ability to ‘package’ it innovatively

Get all this right and you have a sure-fire recipe for online business success. Get it wrong and you will be one the many online business owners whose fortunes will hang on the balance every time the unexpected and unforeseeable happens, like the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which affects the way purchases are made online.