Most business owners who run Internet businesses heavily rely on generating a majority of their revenue from customers online. That means they are potentially missing out on opportunities found offline. This is why I want to explore in this post the idea of partnership marketing, which will compliment any Internet business.
What Is Partnership Marketing?
Partnership marketing is a strategic way to aligning one’s business with other organisations and businesses to equally expose partner brands to one another’s customers. Typically these partnerships are formed when two or more companies find value for their customers in each other’s products and/or their services. This type of partnership marketing is happening all the time on the Internet and an example online is John Chow’s partnership with Market Leverage. John Chow has an audience that Market Leverage can promote their products and services to, which in turn John Chow also receives greater exposure through Market Leverage’s existing client base. This makes it a win-win situation for both businesses.
Then we come back to the offline world and partnership marketing is about finding people who offer complementary services and products that work alongside your business or help expand the offering for your customers. Some more examples could be an arrangement between an electrician and a painter, or a hairdresser and a beautician. As you can see both businesses compliment each other and provide additional value to a consumer over and above their experience compared to just one product or service offered to them.
Where Can You Find These Partnerships?
The best way to find partnerships is to go about it the old fashion way – network with people by getting out, mixing and meeting them personally. It is about your brand being seen and the benefits are substantial. It gives you and your business the opportunity to:
Introduce your brand, your products and services and your company background
To learn new ideas and concepts for your business
Find out what is happening in and outside of your market
Meet new people
Be referred
Find new suppliers and consultants
Generate new leads and prospects who could be your potential customers
Connect with people who you know and like
Increase your sphere of influence
Through networking you will be able to also establish new ideas and share your thoughts, so be prepared to listen and learn. It’s also a great way to present your Internet business in a personal way.
Why Is Partnership Marketing So Powerful That Makes It Work?
When we start our Internet business, we have found that finding a customer and building a relationship with them is the key to creating a sale. Without customers you do not have business. The same is true, without a relationship with potential business partners your Internet business will struggle to grow and it will eventually die. This is what makes partnership marketing so powerful. Most business relationships start off either in reputation or directly in sales by referral or word of mouth. In my personal experience, 80% of the business that comes into the Dragonboat business comes from referral or word of mouth due to the business relationships I have build with clients over the years. This is also known as third party endorsements and is usually spontaneous, objective, honest and free! Therefore it carries more weight than most other marketing tools available. Additionally I still believe that face to face contact is vital to any Internet business.
How To Manage Partnership Marketing Effectively?
When you establish a partnership with other business and create a program that will benefit your customers you will want to manage it correctly. Here are five tips to help you:
Brainstorm what you can jointly sell and who can sell if for you. Are you finding businesses to partner with formally or informally? What other businesses around you have the same target market? What are your expectations of return on investment (ROI)?
Find Your Partners that have already build a database and would benefit from your business offer. Your offer should be win-win for both businesses and the customer.
Create great sales copy and provide your business partners with the sales pitch and the related promotional material. Make it easy for your business partners to promote your products and services. The less work they have to do the more likely they are to promote your business.
Continue to look out for new business partners. Once you have established a few business partners, continue to recruit new partners to add to your business. It helps to cast your net out and to have back up business partners just in case others do nothing with your products and services.
Look after your business partners. Contact them regularly, update them with new promotions and changes. Give them tips on how to successfully promote your products and services and how it will compliment their business.
Review and Monitor Your Partnerships.
Keep track of where you get your business from through scripts you can implement on your website or when you give a link to your business partners. Make sure you are measuring your responses from customers and to track your business partners who are bringing you the most traffic to your website. You can always reward them for their efforts when you are able to get good statistics and the results. That way you can be sure where to spend your time and resources on.
Over the last few days I have been helping my clients submit their sitemaps to Google, Yahoo and MSN to inform search engines to crawl through their websites. What I have noticed is that sitemap submission is a much faster way for websites to be found in search engines rather than using the search engine submission tool provided. After speaking to a few people and my clients I have noticed that people are not aware of this process because it is not shared. I personally think that it does help and is a must do for any Internet business as part of their search engine optimisation strategy.
What Is A Sitemap?
I want to share with you the two types of Sitemaps. For the more technical terminology and detailed definition please read Google’s About Sitemap.
Sitemap For Your Website
This is what Wikipedia defines the term Sitemap as:
A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
Additionally having a sitemap for your website will help any visitor browse through all sections at just one page, rather than clicking through to different parts of the website. You can see my sitemap and get an idea of what it looks like.
Sitemap For Search Engines
There is a term that web developers refer to when creating sitemaps and it is called XML Sitemaps. Google introduced this term and it helps web developers publish lists of links from across their sites. Basically it is a simple version for search engines to use when they are crawling through any website. Currently Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support this. You can view my Sitemap XML to see how it looks like. Since MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the XML Sitemap, it is wise to have one on your website in your parent directory. Though, the search engines do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee being indexed, it is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to find your website. Also, XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of “submitting to search engines” by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page. Most web developers submit a sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.
The Importance Of A Sitemap
Easy Navigation
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
Having A Consistent Site Theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.
Search Engine Optimisation
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
Organisation And Relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organised site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
This is why it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organised for everyone who uses your website.
For further information about sitemaps, visit sitemap.org
Recently I was very excited to receive a special package in the post from the US. As most people know it takes at least a month to receive a mass produced item from a fulfilment centre in the US because International orders take time for them to fill. So I was very happy to receive it a week early! Check out my video to see:
Also I have a little something special for you to check out below, so keep reading as well…
Free eBook: Yaro Starak’s Membership Site Plan
As mentioned in my video a new eBook was released by Yaro Starak today. Yaro is a well respected blogger and Internet marketer that I admire.
His eBook is called the Membership Site Masterplan and as you would guess, it is a step-by-step guide for launching a profitable online membership site.
Last Thursday evening, Pow Wow Events held a seminar in Sydney with Brendan Nichols titled, Make More Money in Your Business Now. I attended the seminar to see what new ideas Brendan would share and it was a fantastic night.
The seminar ran for 2 hours and it was a jam packed room filled with people from full time jobs all the way to small and medium businesses. A majority of the people were from small businesses and were looking for ways to improve their current business situation due to a slowing economy. I personally thought it was an excellent time to prosper because a lot of businesses were going under (not good for them) and therefore competition is reduced.
How I Came To Know Brendan Nichols?
I have known Brendan for about 2 years now, which was at the time I took over the Dragonboat business from my business partner. I have attended his events, been part of his Inner Circle program and generated a lot of cash for my businesses from his information. Brendan is known as Australia’s laziest entrepreneur and has worked with the likes of great business trainers such as Tom Hopkins and Robert Kiyosaki. The techniques he teaches is powerful and he’s used these same techniques himself to create three massively successful businesses. These businesses have produced large amounts of cash profits and required him to work less than 10 hours a week. A lifestyle most people dream of….
What Did Brendan Teach At The Seminar?
The most important idea that everyone would have learnt from the seminar is the Nexus Point. Here is how Brendan defines the Nexus Point:
The only time a business makes money is when engaged in the NEXUS POINT. The nexus point is when you or your agent (website, salesperson, advertising etc) meets a client or customer. While accounting, paperwork, team meetings etc are essential, none of these endeavours create a nexus point opportunity – the opportunity to make money. There are only two areas that create a nexus point: Sales and Marketing. These are the only two areas that can actually make you money.
“Marketing is getting them to the door, Sales is getting them through the door.â€
Once again, the main focus of what a business owner must be doing daily is to focus on the activities that will bring in the sales and profits. The rest we should be delegating and outsourcing to others. Furthermore what I have realised over the years is that other people can do the same task better than myself and generate a better result. This leaves me to focus on sales and marketing for the business.
Other points Brendan briefly ran through that gave me more clarity that night were:
The Morale Factor - a lot businesses are feeling scared and cutting their marketing expenses in this current economic climate. This means that competition has been reduced and many new business can come in quite easily to take market share.
Create An Experience – consumers and your customers are willing to pay for a great experience and it is justified when you deliver.
The Value 10 Principle – Create a product or service that you can deliver 10x the value of what they are paying for.
As always at the end of the seminar, Brendan promotes his Entrepreneur’s Boot Camp and the addtional products you can buy to help you achieve success. If you want to find more information, visit Brendan Nichols dot com.
Over the last four posts we have been exploring the pillars of building a successful ecommerce business. If you have not read these posts, please visit them below as it will lay the foundation for this post:
If you want to get more technical information about building an ecommerce website, please read: Moving Your Business Online.
We have discovered how important it is to research and find a niche market, and to build your ecommerce business from what the market demands rather than what you want. Then we discussed about creating unique content to attract the consumers to your ecommerce business and then learning how to write quality content using a step by step method. The second last phase was to market your website’s content and how to promote it virally to spread the information quickly on the web. Our final post is how an ecommerce business will impact your life and what will be the future of ecommerce.
The Impact Of Ecommerce On Your Life
Running a successful ecommerce business can be very rewarding and no doubt will provide you with financial stability, time freedom and the ability to pursue other interests. In my ecommerce business within the niche market of Dragonboating, I have been very able to dominate the industry by providing excellent customer service and meeting their needs. It has given me time to focus on other ventures that I am interested in and also the ability to purse my hobbies in my free time. To get it to this stage, I did apply the steps and systems I have discussed about in this series. If you take the time to follow through and apply everything that I have discussed about you will be on your way to running a successful ecommerce business. Whatever market you decide to purse, remember to take time out and balance your life with exercise, spirituality, personal hobbies and long term relationships with family and friends.
The Future Of Ecommerce
As we move forward in 2009 with a slowing economy there are greater opportunities that are beginning to appear. There will be businesses that fall away and disappear and the competition within those markets will start to shrink. Particular brick and mortar businesses who have higher overhead costs and staffing costs will feel the pinch even more. This is why there is a strong trend for entrepreneurs to start ecommerce businesses and to capture a greater market share. There is no doubt consumers will continue to spend, it is a matter of how well you can market your products and services and to provide them with excellent customer service. This is where I see the future of ecommerce and I have a very optimistic view that opportunities are everywhere.
Tyrone Shum
Optimistic About The Future Of Ecommerce
Marketing a new ecommerce business looks like a big challenge when you start out and let me tell you it is. Let me assure you though, that everything happens with time and it is a matter of breaking down the bigger picture and taking baby steps. There are simple steps that you can follow once you have created content on your ecommerce website. Say you have been writing articles for the last 2 months and you have a collection of 18 articles relating to your target market, e.g golf. We can take these articles and compile them into one document which can be easily distributed on the web.
If you continue reading I will show you how to create and distribute your document in 5 easy steps and grow your ecommerce business two fold.
Step 1 – Create A Report.
Combine all your articles into a quality report with at least 20 – 25 pages of valuable content. Split your report into sections for easy reading and include the most important information about your niche within the report. It will help you to attract more leads, visitors and sales to your website. You can link this report with affiliate programs and make money along the way or you can give this report to your visitors as a free gift. Remember to ask your visitors to opt-in to your newsletter as well to build an email marketing database. If you want to learn how to create an email database, be sure to read: Why Your Internet Business Needs An Email List? You will learn that reports are a great way to help market your products and services through “how to†tutorials.
Step 2 – Create A Mini eBook.
Create a mini-ebook with 30 pages or more on your niche topic. This is another great way to market your ecommerce business. The difference between an eBook and a report is an eBook tells a story behind your product or service. It is a great way to engage your readers and capture a large audience. Simply rearrange your content in a structured manner in pdf format and offer your visitors a download link to retrieve the ebook. Ideally display your ebook next to your products and services, affiliate programs and lead pages as a way to entice visitors to read your content.
Step 3 – Make Your Report And Mini eBook Viral.
Allow your report and eBooks to be rebranded by your visitors and subscribers where they can put their name and website link on it. Another way is to ask your visitors to signup under your affiliate program and let them include their affiliate link in your report or mini ebook. This will help distribute your report or ebook virally at rapid speeds thus helping you reach more customers in a shorter period of time.
Step 4 – Create An Autoresponder Ecourse.
You can create a step by step ecourse and distribute it to your subscribers. Take some of your excellent “how to articles” and split them into a 5 part series. Take this series and email it to your subscribers using an autoresponder and spread the articles over a week. or a month. It will engage your subscribers and allow them time to digest and also take action each day. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you will receive a step by step tutorial on how to set up your Internet business which is sent out weekly. Also if you do not know what an autorepsonder is or where to find a reliable service provider, I would suggest checking out Aweber first.
Step 5 – Increase Your Website Content.
The final step is to use your articles to create step by step tutorials on your website within your niche. Free tutorials and quality information will help you to attract lots of visitors to your website as everyone loves information when it is free. You can then lead your visitors to your squeeze page, product sales letters or to your affiliate programs. You may have noticed this is what I have done with this series called Building A Successful Ecommerce Business. Another great example is Darren Rowse’s 31day blog challenge which you can see in action at 31 days to building a better blog.
Take action today and start implementing these steps in your ecommerce business. Be consistent and persistance with your marketing as it does pay off in the long term. In the next post I will be putting everything together to show you how to build the ultimate ecommerce business and to start making money today.
If you have been reading the previous two posts you will firstly understand the importance of finding a niche for your ecommerce business and how to do research for it. Secondly, I discussed about creating unique content that will be crucial to how well you rank in search engines, which will bring consumers back to your website to purchase more products and services.
In this post I will be sharing with you the method to write unique quality content for your ecommerce business. It is important to have a point of difference in the market so your ecommerce business stands out from the crowd. Otherwise you will be lost within the pool of millions of websites already on the Internet.
What Type Of Content Will You Need?
An ecommerce website is made up of informative content written within the homepage to product descriptions. These pages put together will form the foundations of your ecommerce business and helps consumers find your products and services. Listed below are some of the content pages an ecommerce website must have as a minimum:
Homepage content
FAQ
About Us
Contact Us
Testimonials
Shipping And Returns
Conditions Of Use / Disclaimer
Privacy Notice
Terms Of Use
Product Descriptions
Additional Sections To Boost Your Ecommerce Website Contents:
A post I wrote previously called How To Build Great Pillar Content For Your Internet Business? is a post I recommend reading first to gain a better understanding of pillar content. The post shows you the different examples of articles to write for your Internet business:
How To Article – shows people how to do a certain task or instructions on building something
Definition Article – defines a term in your industry
Present A Theory Or Argument – writing to present some unique thought
Release A Significant Resource – a report, podcast, video
A “List†Article – it’s very easy to scan and share. Can be a top 10 list or action points
Technical Or Visual Guide – a screen capture presentation or how to fix something using a video presentation. It is also a very detailed step by step blueprint on exactly how to complete a task.
You can apply these additional pillar articles to your ecommerce business to further assist in marketing your products and services. Most consumers enjoy reading how to articles which encourages them to take action, so remember to link your products to them within your ecommerce business.
How To Write Quality Content For Your Ecommerce Business?
There a few simple steps you can take to help improve the written quality of your content:
1. Page Structure
Search engines love page structure. The more your page reads like an outline the more search engines are going to like it. Put the most important part of your page (usually a product or category name for an e-commerce website) in a Heading 1 (h1) tag, put the next most important item in an h2 tag. This allows the search engine crawler (the computer that goes through your website to index it) to easily create a hierarchy of the content on the page. By doing this the search engine can determine what the topic of the website is and what any sub-topics may be.
2. Keywords
To find the right keywords to use requires you to find out what people are searching for. There are a number of free and paid services out there that will help you analyse what keywords will help your products be easily found. I discussed about the different methods to research keywords in the first part of this series in Determine The Amount Of Competition. Also you can run a Google search for ‘Keyword Analysis’ and you should find plenty of services. Once you know what keywords you need to include try to add as many as you can into your product names and descriptions. Though, and this is very important, never sacrifice the quality of your content just to cram in some extra keywords. If it looks like you just crammed a bunch of keywords on a page, consumers are going to be skeptical about buying your products. You want people to view your products because you wrote a quality description that included a few keywords.
3. Be Descriptive, Not Deceptive
Never compromise the quality of your writing or product descriptions to jam a few more keywords into the page. Make sure you maintain a balance of good keywords to solid and descriptive writing. Nothing will turn off a potential customer more than feeling like they were tricked into visiting your site because it is so loaded with keywords where the content doesn’t make sense. Don’t get so caught up in getting potential customers to your site that you forget what to do with them when they get there!
In the next post I will be showing you how to market your ecommerce business and to utilise everything we have discussed.
In this post, I am going to explain to you why you need content and how it has a significant impact on your ecommerce business. Have you heard the term “content is the king� If you have, then you will already know the significance it has on any website. This is what Wikipedia describes it as:
The phrase can be interpreted to mean that – without original and desirable content, or consideration for the rights and commercial interests of content creators – any media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors.
Content can mean any creative work, such as text, graphics, images or video.
“Content is King” is a current meme when organizing or building a website. Text content is particularly important for search engine placement. Without original text content, most search engines will be unable to match search terms to the content of a site.
Why Do You Need Powerful Content For Your Ecommerce Business?
The Internet is a huge web of words linked to each other in an amazing way that allows visitors to search information that they require. To sell your products or services online you need powerful content that will be easily found by consumers. Each time a consumer searches for a product or service, they want to find a reliable website that will provide the relevant information and accessibility. The different types of powerful content that can be provided are:
A report describing the product’s or service’s benefits and advantages
An article or review giving a biased opinion of the product or service
A podcast of an interview done with an industry expert about the product or services.
These are some of the ways you can create powerful content that will attract a consumer to our website. This is why it is crucial to provide good quality content.
Leveraging Blogs On Ecommerce Websites
Since the introduction of blogs, the search engines have leaned towards indexing their content more frequently than ecommerce websites. Most blogs are updated daily and provide unique content for search engines, which makes it very competitive to achieve higher rankings. Therefore for your website to stand out amongst the crowd, you should be integrating a blog within your ecommerce business and writing unique content. If you would like find out how to integrate a blog with your website, read: e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging).
You can have unique content on your blog by writing to:
inform consumers about new products you are reviewing
what you are adding to your range in the near future
interviews you conduct with industry experts
new reports on how to use your products and services
launch dates for your products and services
what ideas and opinions you have certain products and services
These are just some of the ways you can utilise a blog. The beautiful thing about having a blog integrated in your ecommerce business is that search engines will love indexing your content and will move your website’s ranking higher much quicker.
In the next post of this 5 part series I will show you the different methods to write unique and fresh quality content that will drive lots of traffic to your ecommerce business.
Over the years of running my own ecommerce businesses I have learnt to find markets, rather than create markets. Finding profitable niche markets is the smarter option than to create a new untested market. Many ecommerce businesses fail because they tried innovating new products that no one wanted and spending all their time and resources on a product they wanted for themselves. I can tell you from experience that I have tried an unknown product in some of my ventures and unfortunately they did not take off the way I hoped. I also did research but not thorough enough and I went by instinct rather than relying on the facts. The facts told me that it was not going to be viable and I was forcing myself to make it work. When you have a feeling of uncertainty, it is a signal to say get out or do not do it.
I want to show you how to find profitable niche markets and how to overcome some of the mistakes I had when I was starting a new ecommerce business.
Find Your Niche
Research is the key to your success in finding a profitable niche market. No matter how good a product sounds or how good someone else says about your idea, you need to do your own thorough research. Sometimes just reading one article or hearing a few testimonials from others is not enough. There are 3 major qualities to determine a profitable niche market:
Exists already
Easily identifiable
Marketable and targeted
Looking for a profitable niche market is about finding the buyers first. Most people start off with the wrong idea and look for a product to sell first. Find out what their problems or needs are and then provide a solution. A classic example from my experience is how I started the Dragonboating business. I was frustrated to not find any company in Australia offering carbon fiber paddles to the dragonboat teams. Furthermore, to order and delivery one from overseas took months. So I decided to create a company and become a distributor of carbon fiber paddles in Australia and guess what happened? Paddlers came flocking to my company and buying dragonboating gear from me and I made money whilst I continued to dragonboat.
Determine How Hungry Your Buyers Are?
Once you can determine whether or not your idea or passion works, then it’s time to really test the market and see how hungry these buyers are. The easiest way to determine how strong the demand will be for your idea is to do research on keywords in that market. Here are the 3 steps in determining if your idea is viable:
Step 1: Investigate Traffic Volumes.
This is the first and most important step. If you find out that your keyword only has 20 people searching for it, it may not provide a good income from that niche. To investigate how much traffic you will get for your niche market keyword, go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com or any other similar site and type in a broad term such as golf. The site will give you a list of the top 100 search results for that word. For example, you will find golf clubs, golf carts, golf buggies, golf gloves and so forth. Next to each phrase you will see the number of daily searches. Using this list, select the results that have enough searches to determine your targeted niche market.
Step 2: Determine The Amount Of Competition.
Your next step is to find out how many people are competing for the keyword you are wanting to market your idea to. Ideally you want to find out who are the advertisers and marketers and take note of this:
Few competitors = great keyword
Lots of competitors = not a good keyword
To determine the level of competition, go to Google.com and type in each of these potential key phrases from step 1 and make a note of how many competing sites there are in that market. See the number of results near the top right of your Google results page? Write that number down next to the keyword you searched.
Step 3: Find Out If There Is Money In This Niche.
The final step is to find out if the buyers you are targeting are willing to spend. There is no point targeting a market where everything is free because these buyers will expect this as well, meaning it is not a good market to target. Continuing your Google search from Step 2, record the number of advertisements that appear for each keyword that you search. If there aren’t any ads, then it is not a niche worth targeting.
I would suggest spending at least a few hours and compiling the information together as part of your research. This will help you determine if your idea is viable for your targeted niche market. If you follow this to find out if there is a niche market for your idea, then you will be on your way to building a successful ecommerce business.
There are many ways to go about getting traffic to your website and some do take more time than others. Ideally the best source of traffic is from search engines which are organic and free. We know it does take time and requires a strategy to build great traffic to your website, but what if there was another way to generate free traffic while you are surfing the web? I recently decided to explore a method called traffic exchanges.
What Are Traffic Exchanges?
Traffic exchanges are another alternative to get traffic to your website. They can provide a cheap source of traffic and continually deliver it when used properly. In essence, it is a cooperative form of advertising and generates free traffic to your website. You view a members website for credit for a set amount of time in exchange for getting a view on your website for credit for a set amount of time. In other words, you get a visitor for a visitor.
However, the timed limit of these views means that viewing the entire inventory of a store or reading a long sales letter is not going to happen often or even likely. Because of this many people do not use traffic exchanges effectively to advertise their sites. They promote a generic affiliate page or sales page hoping that someone will stop and look long enough to buy their product or purchase from their affiliate link. This is wrong on many different levels and is why 95% of “online marketers” fail to use traffic exchanges properly.
How To Effectively Use Traffic Exchanges?
Traffic exchanges are best used as list-building tools using either splash pages or squeeze pages. The reason is people who are using traffic exchanges are also doing the same thing as you, trying to drive more traffic to their website and earning more credits. Therefore, they will not spend too much time reading through a long sales page or see the front page of your website. The best way is to set up a short squeeze or splash page to capture a first name and an email address. That way you can effectively market them your products or services using your back end systems.
My Top 10 Free Traffic Exchanges
Simply visit their websites and register and follow their instructions and you will be on your way to getting free targeted traffic to your website.
Tip: Why not use all of the top 10 programs all at once? It will leverage your traffic exchanges much faster than going one at a time. Work smarter, not harder!