While Yahoo is the second most used search engine behind Google, when it comes to online shopping, it seems that Yahooers (Yahoo surfers) may actually be the biggest spenders online.

Wayne Perry, president of SiCap Industries, says that Yahoo surfers spend 30 percent more than other consumers on average.

SiCap Industries makes natural health products - distributing their products to around 10,000 stores worldwide - and also selling online via a number of partner web sites that sell natural health products.

“We haven’t figured out why, but our web stats show consumers referred by Yahoo definitely spend more money on our websites, and according to data collected from our retailers, yahoo surfers also spend more money in the stores that carry our products. This has been a consistent theme for nearly three years,” says Perry.
As they plan their internet budget for 2008 SiCap Industries is taking a closer look at their Yahoo surfers.

Do you have a very clear understanding of your customers ? Do you know who they are; what they like; where they live; what at else they buy; and what they like about your products ?

Perhaps more importantly what do you know about the visitors to your site (or shop) - who don’t actually end up buying a product. What encouraged them to visit (or pop in), but didn’t entice them to buy ? Were they really potential customers at all ?

If you don’t know who your target market is - if you don’t understand who your best prospects are (and I mean if you don’t know everything about them) - you’ll end up wasting a lot of blood, sweat and tears (not to mention time and money) marketing to those who will never buy from you.

Of course, you may be targeting several markets. But if you can’t properly identify all your audiences, you’ll almost certainly end up chasing after the wrong crowd. You’ll waste your time promoting your products and services to someone who, was never really interested anyway.

Spending some time and effort very carefully defining your customer and thinking outside the box for who might be potential customers can be very a powerful exercise. One of my clients recently doubled annual sales once they realised their best target market was actually one they had never considered would be interested in their products.

So, what are your best target markets? Can you clearly define them? Can you get narrower in your description? How are you addressing each in your marketing communications? Do you truly understand their objectives, key pain points and potential buying objections?

Whether your products sell for $10 or $1 million, make sure you’re absolutely clear about who’s going to “get it.” Then, go to market with a message that each of your clearly defined target markets can relate to.

There are many techniques for marketing and promoting you site - Paid Advertising is a fairly common one, but there are various options for getting into the Paid Advertising area…Paid Adverstising can be a very effective at generating traffic to a brand new site while the organic traffic builds up. 
 
an outline of some of the most common Paid Advertising options follows :

1. Pay-per-Click Advertising. (e.g. Google Adwords or Yahoo Serch Marleting) - offers very targeted
   traffic and you have a great deal of control over how and when your ads are displayed.. Excellent for promoting affiliate
   programs or selling products online. 

   As well as the traditional Keyword Targeted ads, Site-targeted advertising should also be considered.

2. Ezine or Newsletter advertising. Traffic is
   especially targeted if you can arrange for a personal recommendation
   within the newsletter/ezine by the owner. Might not be that useful to promote the same website
   several times on the same list as the members are largely the same.
3. Banner Advertising. Depending on the placement,
   banner ads are great for branding purposes. Click
   through rates and traffic can be strongly related to banner design, tagline
   and the relevance of the site you are advertising on.
4. Paid Reviews on Blogs. It’s important to pick
   quality bloggers with a decent amount of integrity, trust, reach and
   authority.The more objective the review, the better. Undisclosed reviews will
   generally work better but it is difficult to find high quality bloggers
   that don’t disclose.
5. Text Link Advertising. Useful because it can also provide you with some SEO benefits. Pick a high traffic site over one with a high PageRank. Design your anchor text to encourage click throughs and ensure
   that your link is placed in a visible location and not somewhere like
   the footer. 

   It may be better and cheaper to contact websites directly to inquire if they sell text links, instead of using a network.
   

6. Paid Syndication. This involves a sponsorship of a
   website, whereby your content will be syndicated and integrated into
   the framework of the site in question.

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While it may be relatively easy to find websites to advertise on through third party ad
networks, a strategy which will almost certainly result in higher referral traffic and greater brand exposure is :

1. Make a list of the search terms/keywords relevant to your website’s theme (products / services).
2. Enter these keywords into the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, etc…)
3. The best websites to advertise on are within the Top 30 search results
4. Contact each of these websites and inquire about advertising

Getting links from these related websites has the added benefit
of improving your own search engine rankings, not to mention that
you’ll save a considerable amount of money.

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The 30 day Challenge to create your own online business is just about to kick of again …. For the 3rd year - and starting on Wednesday 1st August, the challenge to make your first $10 online begins.

For the full 30 days of August (or 31 actually) Ed Dale and Dan Raine and Nicolas Messe are going to be showing you exactly how to start your own Internet business and generate your first income online, all without spending a cent of hard cash… although it will clearly involve some time commitment on your behalf.

I’ve not been involved in any of the previous 30 day challenges but this one promises to be bigger and better than ever… incorporating video tutorials and podcasts… and simple guides and instructions on some of the most sophisticated Web 2.0 technologies around.

I’ll be directly participating in the challenge myself… and encourage you to go and take a look and see what it’s all about.

see : The Thirty Day Challenge for more info