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Zella Evans is one of the most successful resellers of EZ-NetTools™. With her innovative programs such as Idahomall.com, her creative problem solving for Joe Rocket, and her intense work on Search Engine Optimization, she has found many ways to find and keep satisfied customers with EZ-NetTools™. She presently has nearly 100 active accounts! Find out straight from the source how she has achieved such tremendous results.
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Listen to the Interview >
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Read Excerpts from the Interview
Was IdahoMall the first thing you did with EZ-NetTools?
Idaho Mall evolved out of other ideas that we had but as the newspaper we wanted to build a business model that would specifically help local Idaho businesses succeed.
How are you affiliated with the Newspaper?
We are the Online Services Division of the Post Register. We put the newspaper online each and every day as well as help manage and maintain the T.V. station web site.
So Idaho Mall is a product of the Newspaper?
Idaho Mall is a product of our department in that we build the web sites, manage the web sites, maintain the web sites and facilitate sales for the web sites under a really unique model which is that we don't make any money at all for any of our work unless we facilitate sales. So we take a small percentage of the sale.
How many sites do you have on IdahoMall.com?
I have about 50 sites right now. Note: She has almost 50 other active sites that are not affiliated with Idahomall.
What do you do to help facilitate sales for your clients?
The key is the search engines optimization. The way we facilitate sales for each site is to use EZ-NetTools™ and put a title on each page and Meta Tags on each page and then we submit them with a program that does 800 search engines at a time.
Then we play this "king of the mountain game," I call it, where we go in to the top 10 search engines and submit them by hand. EZ-NetTools™ allows us to go in fairly easily to change the Meta Tags so that as you are playing "king of the mountain," and if you are listed number 21, you go find out who is in number 1, 2 and 3 and see what they are doing that you are doing differently. You play around with it and try and make yourself higher on the search engine.
Some of the search engines are hard to get rankings on or even listed for that matter, what are you doing to get listed on them?
Well, we have staff that is devoted specifically to search engine optimization. They play the game pretty well. Yahoo is a hard one. The secret to getting listed well with Yahoo has to do with choosing which category you want to be listed in. We do not play the game of, I'm going to pay you to come to my web site. At this point in time we are not paying for listing anywhere for any of our clients. That day may come. You need to stay flexible enough so you can make it work.
The rules change. There are search engine list bots that we are members of. There are different online magazines that I subscribe to that I get updates from on a daily basis as well as search engine optimization magazines that send us e-mails on a regular basis. Getting onto those lists has helped tremendously.
Good old fashioned work is playing into this as well. Do we sit around here and just simply wait for success to come? The answer is that if we did, we wouldn't be successful at all.
We had over $8,000 in sales in the month of December for various sites within the mall and that's not bad for a start up company thats just barely getting out of the shoot.
A lot of our resellers don't have any idea how to work with local newspapers. Do you have any advice for our resellers to help them be more successful?
There is an ad term that most newspapers across this country use called "TOMA." Which stands for Top Of Mind Awareness. If you place a small 2 X 2 ad in a newspaper on a regular basis, weekly, bi-weekly, daily ... same ad... over and over again in different sections of the newspaper eventually people are going to get it. They are going to understand that they need to come to your web site for the exact product they are looking for. A simple little TOMA ad will work for you. It doesn't need to be a full page ad.
Tell us about JoeRocket.com.
JoeRocket.com is our biggest client. They are a manufacturer of motorcycle gear. We manage and maintain their web site and have for the last several years. They manufacture motorcycle gear they are not interested in selling motorcycle gear from their web site but what we have found that people want to be able to buy from their web site.
So, Joe Rocket had to make a decision. Do they sell directly as a manufacturer to the customer who wants to buy a Joe Rocket product or do they help their retailers facilitate sales? The (manufacturer selling direct) business model doesn't work. It doesn't work because you are cutting out so many of the middlemen that you are shooting your feet out from underneath you.
Joe Rocket, instead, has chosen to allow their retailers to sell directly to their customers through their JoeRocket.com web site.
We have some (retailers) selling in the West and some selling in the East and some selling in the South. The customer chooses who they want to do business with. They make their choices from our web site and as they get to the checkout portion of it, that is when they are taken directly through EZ-NetTools. We are still relying on the "simple to use" tools on your end in order to facilitate the sale.
The beautiful part about this is, I am now able to give each of these different affiliates a separate login, a separate password, so they can go in and pick up their orders. Allowing them to do what they do best which is to sell motorcycle gear and allowing me to do what I do best which is to build a web site and make it work.
The affiliates are thrilled because they have sales that are coming to them from a revenue stream that didn't exist until we thought of this brilliant idea. All the revenue that comes to their business from that new revenue stream is like icing on the cake. We helped facilitate those sales in traditional marketing ways in the way that we do for all Joe Rocket affiliates.
Editor's Note: The new EZ-SiteDuplicator™ tool can be a powerful tool for manufacturers who have dealers or retailers that might all need web sites! If you are presented with this kind of opportunity, please contact Jake Klein, your Reseller Support Representative.
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