Yesterday I came across and article by @ecoknowme relating an experience with a business and the subsequent discussion with them about them joining Steemit. You can read it here @ecoknowme/stop-treating-your-revolution-like-it-s-a-blog-ecoknowme-advice-to-the-steemit-community I decided the idea was worth pursuing and that is the purpose of this article. Addressing the issues facing online and offline businesses using Steemit. Warning, there are questions here, looking for answers and this will require thinking differently.
We will take a look at online business and brick and mortar business.
There are various kinds of online businesses. There are places like Amazon that have an online storefront and deal in tangible products. eBay is an online auction platform that allows average people to sell tangible products. (Amazon does too but it's not the quite same.) There are tons of small and some large websites selling information, run by average people. You may talk to someone who had an online business in the grocery store and not even know it.
There are websites that sell services. godaddy let's you register a domain name through them. HostGator hosts your domain for you. eLance offers the service of connecting people who need a service such as a website built or an article written, with someone who can perform that service for them.
There are brick and mortar businesses with online storefronts such as Walmart, Home Depot, Target, you name it. The brick and mortar businesses tend to fall in to three main categories, a large national or regional company, a medium company, and local mom and pop. The large and medium companies for the most part have adapted to having their own website, whether it specifically deals in commerce or has only information. The mom and pops are hit or miss. If they do have a website it is very likely just an online brochure, it may be created on a free service like blogger, but likely they don't have one at all.
Chances are the only companies that would look at Steemit for their business are the smaller businesses. The large corporations would be the last ones to the party. So we will address small business, both online and off, using Steemit.
Starting with online business, or internet marketing, these business people have one or multiple websites for whatever it is they're doing. They are easier to convince that they can make money online with Steemit because they're doing it without it. There are online marketers on Steemit already. There are people here who used to make money on their Youtube videos but lost monetization and found Steemit. These people learned the hard way that you have to diversify, many lost their whole livelihood when Youtube cut them off. And you should have your content on your own platform anyway. Youtube should have only been a repository, free hosting, and a traffic generator with the ad revenue as a bonus. However, the Youtube creators fit well enough here. They were producing the content anyway and this is a way to monetize it.
So how do they use Steemit? I recently posted about Steemit's lack of organization with ideas on how to fix it here @aboutyourbiz/steemit-we-have-a-problem-wtf-is-with-this-organization-2017710t6949274z but we will address this as Steemit is now.
Web content producers want to have ownership and control of their content. They always recommend to post your content to your own website first, before you put it out for curation. When you do this here, Cheetah points it out like you've done something wrong. True internet marketers will tell you to use Youtube, Facebook, etc. to develop a following, but not to use them as a place to keep your primary content. You always want to get visitors to your website.
Web marketers need traffic. Steemit has traffic, although it is not targeted traffic, at least not until you have developed a following that knows what to expect from you. Web marketers want you to visit their website, but it appears to me so far that Steemians prefer to stay on Steemit for the most part. After all, why go comment on someone's website when you can comment on Steemit and get paid?
You could create a post that is a sales letter with a link to buy, but how well received would that be, and unlike on your own site evergreen content does not produce residual income. Whatever traffic there was is likely gone within 24 hours. This appears to be a pretty good sized problem from their perspective.
So how do you use Steemit as an online business? Are you doing it?
And what about mom and pop who may not even have a website. They may try to use Steemit as their webpage like some do weebly or PennySaver. Lets just say it and get it out of the way, tacky! Unprofessional, but they don't know how to do it themselves and when they try they have to use these kinds of tools.
Some have hired out and have a nice online brochure. They may even have been set up on a wordpress site and told they needed to blog, be on Facebook etc., but they pretty much don't, even if they started off doing it.
Consider the restaurant owners. They have a nice looking website and have been told they need to blog. The Mrs. decides she can do it she did pretty well in English in high school, so she starts off with nice stories of the history of the restaurant, how they make some of their dishes and then she runs out of things to talk about. She didn't really enjoy doing it either, but felt she should, even though she would rather cook.
How can a business like this put themselves on Steemit? How can they be sold on the idea when they don't want to blog but want to cook?
How does a mom and pop business utilize and benefit from Steemit?
Like I said, questions here looking for answers. Ideas for these people? Seems like opportunity somehow.
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