Driving Traffic to your Site - The Real Story

There is tons of stuff on the net about driving traffic on your site - mostly by SEO/SEM marketers, but whats the real story?

An easy way to understand this is to imagine this - you are opening an restaurant - why do you think people would come to eat at your place? Here are common reasons:

1. Your restaurant is at a convenient location where people commute or work and don't prepare food
2. You have a cuisine that is unique and not offered anywhere around
3. You have healthy, tasty food at a good value - something that the overpriced restaurants around you are not fulfilling
4. You have a great atmosphere with live music where people can spend a happy evening.

and so on.

So what is it that you want people to know? Its your USP - what makes you stand apart. Your first target has to be to drive the "initial" customers, then if you believe you are doing a good job, they will come again and bring in their friends too!

So where would you start? If you are at a convenient location, you just need to put up a nice welcoming banner and people will start coming. If you have a unique cuisine, you can start targeting that clientele by showing a presence at community events or doing a targeted mailer. If you offer value, make sure your message covers it well.

Driving online traffic to your site works in the same way! Its all about people, place, product, price - Once you know your USP, it will be logical for you to find out who will be interested. Whats more, if you have an offering that is truly unique and benefits a particular community, people will WANT to talk about it.

The corollary is that if you can't figure where your offering fits, then you need to do that first. Driving traffic is not about some technical wizardry. Its about figuring your marketing USP and asking the basic question - "why would people be interested in visiting my site"

Then its a matter of contacting a few people who could help you and the rest will follow!

ERP or Accounting Software?

This this a question I have been grappling with for a long time:

What category do we fit in? Are we an accounting software or an ERP?

Here are the arguments either way:

Accounting Softwares are smaller in scope and are used by small businesses. They may also contain additional workflows for stock keeping, but usually are simple. There is not much scope to tag your data across territories etc and not much scope of setting budgets, rules on discounts etc.

ERPs on the other hand are traditionally used by large and mid-sized businesses. They have the capability to handle large volume of data. The core functionality is still accounting, stock keeping, pre-sales, invoicing etc. There are lot more options to categorize your customers, territories, sales people. You can set targets and complex rules.

So where does iWebNotes fit in?

My take is that it fits into both the categories, it has the multitude of options that required for real businesses and also is simple enough to use for small businesses. So we are trying to blur the gap.
Ideally, we must combine the functionality of the ERP and simplicity of the Accounting Softwares so that customers get the best of both world.