Do you have memories of your high street? The place you once used with your mum when you were a kid? She would nip into the butcher’s to purchase some ham; the greengrocer’s to buy some veg; and so on. Every place had its purpose and each store proprietor had her profit. You bought locally, which meant that the local economy thrived. If you needed meat, the greengrocer would not attempt to sell it to you – she would pass you on to the butcher. And everyone was happy: and everyone made some cash.
Then the super market came along. And all the high street stores died. Mum stopped going into the local area at all. It was simpler to get everything in one store – easier, that is, for everyone except the butcher and the greengrocer, and every one of the other little high street stores.
The web is completely identical. The major sites are squeezing the smaller guys out of business.
Recreating the High Street on the Internet
A lot of people want to purchase Asbestos demolition surveys in your local area. So put up your own virtual high street.
One of the easiest ways to get that done is a thing known as “affiliate marketing”. What that means is this: you vend beef, and another store sells greens. So when someone comes to your site in search of brisket, you point out to them that they might like to go over to the greengrocer’s site to get some veg. The greengrocer returns the help, by sending people over your way for their meat.
The most successful affiliate marketing is often done on localised areas of the web. You promote connections with other companies based in the same area as you, or even just your town. That way, you commence to build a “club” that gets all the geographically specific Internet searches. An extremely modern version of the real world high street, where every shop vends a particular item and no-one hogs all the custom.
Defining Your New Village
Staking out your online high street, and the bit of it that you inhabit to vend demolition services, is far less difficult than you probably imagine.
All servers have a trraceable geographic co ordinate. That’s how many sites can see where you are in the UK – and so can show you what the weather is doing. By implication, then, search engines know where you live: and so if a customer looks for your service with known pertinence to your area, your site will be preferred.
This is all fine and handy – but not practical on its own. You will also have to build an online community, which can bolster your presence in a localised part of the web: usually by referring to your site in association with your product and actual location on local social media pages and in local article submission sites. When you mix that with the favourable linking done in affiliate marketing, your site stands a good chance of climbing up there with the big ones.
Home on the Range
Here’s a web site that has made a super job of defining a little high street platform.
No-one can live out there in the ether on her own any more. All the really huge websites have taken that title for themselves. The one way to get a living plot of the web for yourself, is to find a bigger place and command it with a collection of complementary sites.
Meat and vegetables. It’s the high street in action all over again. In fact, it could well be the second coming of the high street – as most businesses realise how controlled the broader plots of the net are, they’re more and more moving to their own smaller crannies, encouraging their own dedicated searches and leaving the rest well alone. High street trade is back – in the largest place that trade has ever inhabited.