Could Use Some Help/Advice

[MarkAse]

I'm pretty new to the IM community and I'm hoping I can get some help from the experts on how to move forward.

I've recently started a wine club with a partner.

We're pretty well set to get the business off the ground, but obviously to move forward and really make a good living we'll need to find customers via the internet.

I've read through the board and done some basic keyword research. I've started building backlinks using different methods that I've found elsewhere on the site. My partner and I are both blogging and using Twitter and Facebook.

I realize these are going to take some time to work.....anything we can do to speed up the process?

Would anyone have an interest list of wine customers?

If you were in my position, what would you be doing?

Thanks so much for your time

[Sam Baker]

Do you have a brick and mortar business? If you do you can register it with Google and they will throw it in their local business listings.

[Scott Logan]

Look for your competition and see what they are doing (right and hopefully wrong)

reverse engineer what they are doing
ex.) buy from them see what their process is like , see what their support is like and see what you can improve on making your business different from theirs

look for wine experts on places like Twitter and Facebook, Myspace, ebook Vendors and start relationships with them and when the time is right have them endorse your service ( I know you said you were looking into this already - just thought I'd mention a quick what to do)

do not ask for the endorsement out of the gate - build the relationship

talk to local wine makers and get in good with them, possibly setting up some form of distribution channel for them through your service

search the internet read a few things, do a few things, read some more, dump the things not working and scale up the things that are working

biggest advice - Take Action

good luck

Scott Logan
Night Owl Marketing

[MarkAse]

Yes we've done the Google local submission, however we're based in Northern California...lots of competition for wine in general.

Thanks for the reply!

[artwebster]

Lots of competition for wine in general?

Don't sell wine - sell yourselves, sell your service, sell your benefits, sell your expertise, sell peripheral goods - the wine is only the comodity - YOU are the conduit.

[LanaKravtsova]

I would recommend starting a blog too, much easier to optimize for search engines. Always put your keyword in the title of the post-do 1 keyword per post.

[Booyaka]

Carrying out basic Keyword research is a start but ideally you want to be researching every conceivable keyword phrase that's applicable to your market. Writing good quality content for keywords and phrases you may have overlooked is key.

For example, research long-tail keyword phrases that your competition have maybe overlooked, write a single web page in the form of a quality article for each term you find and submit that article to the top article directories and use the proper anchor text for each term in your linking structure, could potentially be profitable.

I just researched a keyword term: 'californian red wine' and found that the top article directory Ezine Articles has only 2 articles for that specific term and none whatsoever for 'californian white wine'.

Ok, it may be a term that's searched for in Google less than 100 times a month, but it's these terms that bring the fruit to your business in the long term - especailly when you have many of these terms/phrases all designated to a single page/article on your site with good anchor text linking to other internal pages of your site.

Also, each article and new web page you do write, remember to submit these pages to the top web 2.0 sites for good quality backlinks

With regard to speeding up the process, why not use the services of an article writer and submission services etc - Unique Article Wizard for instance, offers this service, although I've never used them personally, I've heard good things about them.

Just Google: 'article submission software' and you'll find many sites that offer these types of invaluable tools.

Articles submitted to EzineArticles.com only take about 5 days to be approved and your article is then live on Google shortly after.

If you learn anything from this post, remember one thing - Forget trying to rank for terms that are too generic and competitive - research the low hanging fruit by means of long-tail keyword phrases and write quality content about these terms. You'll soon see your website ranking for 'California Wine' or 'Californian Wine Club' etc with very little effort.

Have you tried PPC for fast results? Depending if you ship your wines just locally or internationally - 'Monthly Wine Club' a targeted term obviously for people looking to join a wine club, has only one Google PPC ad'. Food for thought perhaps?

Hope this helps and the best of luck in your business.

If I can be of further assistance, just PM me - I will be only too happy to help.

Hans

The road to success is long but the time taken to get there can be halved, just by asking!

[FifthDimension5]

Start a directory type of site and provide listings for local business (a sort of specialized directory) is one such idea, its usefulness though is questionable.

[SuzanneH]

Check out what Gary Vaynerchuk is doing with Wine Library TV:

Wine Library TV: Gary Vaynerchuk's daily wine video blog

And Gary talks about marketing at his personal site:

Gary Vaynerchuk

Suzanne

[SuzanneH]

P.S. Gary tells the story of how he went to every forum, every blog he could find about wine and started a conversation/joined a conversation. He didn't spam; he became a part of the wine community, wherever he could find it.

Check out his Web Expo 2.0 talk here:

YouTube - Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine...

Suzanne

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by MarkAse

I've recently started a wine club with a partner.

We're pretty well set to get the business off the ground, but obviously to move forward and really make a good living we'll need to find customers via the internet.

Hmmm ... I'm curious about the business model, in that case.

What proportion of wine-buyers buy online?

I'm not suggesting that wine enthusiasts don't use the internet, far from it, but my own hunch would be that a significant proportion of serious wine-buyers, perhaps even the bulk of the market, are people who either respond to glossy magazines/catalogues, have contacts with preferred wine-merchants, or go to tastings (this is certainly true of all the ones I know, though this in itself proves nothing, I admit).

My suspicion is that one way and another it's going to be a more difficult market to reach online than some.

From my limited knowledge of the wine trade, I also strongly suspect that the answers to these and related questions are going to vary enormously from country to country, which makes it difficult to comment further with your own country not being specified in either your profile or your post.

[MarkAse]

Thanks for all the responses.

Alexa-believe it or not, we've spent quite a bit of time researching that exact topic. A couple of points from our end:

Our business model is fairly unique in the wine club business because we have access to export areas that aren't currently well served by USA based wineries.

Basically we're looking at substantial discounts for the wine we're buying and often we have access to wine/wineries that even your most adament wine buyer can't get at a tasting or at their local wine store if they live outside of the bay area of California.

I do agree though that not much true top end wine is bought online...yet. Up to about 5-10 years it didn't need to be. With more producers looking to segment their businesses the true high end is going to get rather exclusive rather quickly once the economy turns.

A couple of our wineries that we've started working with don't even ship their stuff, or work with a distributor.

James-I think the reason for my being here is fairly clear, we'd like to expand and find clients across the USA from an online presence. Why pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for an advertisement in Wine Spectator if I can reach more people using only my time...or $10 for someone to write an article for me?

Booyaka- Thanks for the reminder on long tail keywords. It appears my keyword research is grossly insufficient and I definitely got off track with it.

Suzanne-Thanks for the reminder on message boards, we're working on it.

[Jared Alberghini]

Originally Posted by MarkAse

Would anyone have an interest list of wine customers?

Hi Mark,

You should get in touch with fellow Warrior: WineBuddy
WarriorForum - Internet Marketing Forums - View Profile: winebuddy

How to Make Your Own Wine - Make Delicious Homemade Wine!

I'm guessing he has an interest list of wine customers/enthusiasts:

Your FREE copy of HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN HOMEMADE WINE

I'm sure he could help with some marketing advice for your specific niche, possibly joint venture together... who knows, can't hurt to send him a PM.

Jared

[MarkAse]

Thanks Jared. It appears I had missed the resident wine expert. Thanks for the message!