Google, Yahoo, Merchant Circle, SMBLive, Yellowbot and various IYP sites have induced hundreds of thousands of small businesses to sign up for free websites and landing pages. Merchant Circle alone reports 750,000 signups.
These kinds of companies are providing state-of-the-art features that many full-priced websites didn’t provide even four years ago, including (in some cases) landing pages, SEO, photos, video, blogs and reputation management. But from a business perspective, the SMB website players remain a work in progress.
SMB customer support issues are big ones. Many SMBs infrequently update their information or engage with their customers. And while the sites can make healthy revenue from search-related advertising, conversion rates to premium tiers that include Search Engine Marketing packages have been on the low end – generally, five percent or less.
MerchantCircle, for instance, reports that 15,000 of its signups now pay for a premium tier. It is an increasingly sizeable number, supplemented by “tens of thousands” of leads to SMBs from its partner sites. But 15,000 remains a low percentage of its overall signups — two percent.
The sites also haven’t made a huge dent getting SMBs onto the Web in the first place. According to the latest wave of Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor, 61 percent of SMBs that advertise now have websites. That’s significant progress, but the game clearly isn’t over — especially among SMBs that haven’t advertised in the past.
Industry trends present new challenges. This is especially the case with the rise of social networks like Facebook, which can isolate profiles if they aren’t “ported” by the SMB from their site.
SMBLive CEO Matt Howard has been working with over 350,000 SMBs in the UK as a vendor for BT Tradespace. He says these are universal challenges for the industry. His answer? A “Cloud Profile” that allows small business owners to author content once and syndicate out to a wide range of different sites, including Twitter and Facebook, where consumers increasingly share and discover things.
SMBLive’s Cloud Profile also enables SMBs to publish updates using email and SMS text messages – tools that they’re already comfortable with. The service also includes a “virtual coach” to remind and encourage SMBs to regularly update their profiles and engage prospects in online conversations.
The Cloud Profile was released a few weeks ago in a private beta. SMBLive expects to distribute it via third parties, such as directory publishers and broadcaster sites. Howard hopes it will move the needle several inches in terms of boosting penetration, updates and interaction, while minimizing customer support issues.
This came into the Kelsey site.
Only problem with the “cloud profile” is if the cloud goes out of business. It also appears somewhat distracting. It’s like if I’m an actor and I use the IMDB profile as the marketing website for my acting career. It’s great that they’ve signed up millions of clients, but any small business that’s serious about its business is going to have something that’s a bit more within their control.
(This was sent by SMBLive CEO Matt Howard in response)
In the case of SMBLive we’ve built our software on top of Amazon’s cloud. There are definitely no guarantees in this world – but I am willing to take my chances that Amazon’s cloud is not going out of business.
That said, as with any IT infrastructure environment, it’s certainly possible “the clould” could go down for a period of time. Indeed, Amazon has suffered a few outages – but their overall reliability is terrific. Also, I agree 100% with you that SMBs need to be able to “control” their profile so they can:
1. Regularly promote themselves online
2. Listen carefully to what people are saying about their business
3. Actively respond and engage customers in conversations
4. See reports so they can properly track conversations and convert them into sales leads
Giving SMBs “control” of their online profile means making things truly simple – and it requires significant innovation and evolution beyond web 1.0 tools which are overly complicated and expensive. If you’re interested in seeing our CloudProfile service in action – let me know. I’d be happy to set you up with one.
As a small biz owner with three franchised locations, who has been trying to get a handle around all of the sites you metioned in the first paragraph, I agree there are TOO MANY for us to keep up with, corrected and current. What I can’t tell is what kind of cost if going to be involved in the CloudProfile service? Could you share that with me? I’m also willing to be a “test” project if you need one.
Thanks
Beverly,
Thanks for your interest in CloudProfile! Each CloudProfile will help you to be discovered and then engage the people who discover you in an ongoing dialogue and relationship. The key question to ask yourself is whether you want to drive an independent “identity”, traffic, and customer relationships to each of your three franchise locations. This is most appropriate if your franchises are spread out across several communities or geographies and each have a separate customer base. In this case, you would simply create a separate CloudProfile for each of your three locations. If your three locations all share a common identity, market, and customer base, then you could go with a single profile. In either case, for our premium offering, you would pay $50 per profile per month after a 30 day free trial. That includes everything – unlimited content publishing, search optimization, syndication to Facebook and Twitter, engagement tools, our listing service that will push your business details to over 50 different search engines data sources, and more.
In your business you also have an opportunity to act as somewhat of a hub for your local business community. With this in mind, you may be interested in the CloudProfile affiliate program as well. Through this program, you could help your business customers to solve this critical problem for their businesses and participate in the revenues that are derived from that.
We’ve had some really great interest and success stories building and we would love to work with you to help you to be successful – I would also be happy to provide you with a discount in return for your feedback and willingness to act as a case study once you have achieved some positive results with CloudProfile. If you’re interested, contact me at http://hawkinson.cloudprofile.com and I’ll help you to get rolling.
-Ale
CloudProfile appears to be a low barrier to entry option for small businesses that need a web-based presence. However, leaving your online fate in the hands of another should be cautioned. SMBs should at the very least have their own branded website with some content that they alone control. The world is going online more and more and SMBs will need to get more Web savvy. Choosing an option like CloudProfile is a good start in their education and Web presence, but they shouldn’t by any means stop there. It costs very little to build a website with a content management system like WordPress.
I guess I’m just not seeing the full benefits of using CloudProfile as a business owner. I spend quite a bit of time keeping my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles updated daily, and this just seems like all three of those sites meshed together into one. How are you planning to get users on this site? And what is the benefit of having to pay for this site when the above three (and numerous others) are free?
How about software that allows updating your bisiness address on every site your biz appears on (resource boxes, articles posted, etc.) for when you move with a single entry. That would be nirvana for me, having moved this year.
The concept of the cloudprofile is great, and very simple. Perfect for those who are too busy to individually market to a large variety of websites.