Our blogging focus has been to analyze the office products industry while strongly emphasizing the aftermarket office supplies segment. Office products are a big, mature industry where the most prominent players exert significant control over the distribution channels and market shares.
In my recent blog post, "Office Products, New-Build Cartridges, and Clone Hysteria!", I made the statement that "instead of being a threat to the independent reseller and the aftermarket industry, legitimate new-builds are a threat to the established order and may be the single biggest chance of survival for those that some elements of the media purport them to be the ruin of!"
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's been an increasing amount of coverage in the industry press about the impact of the Chinese and their technology in the imaging supplies marketplace. This coverage is primarily negative and appears designed to confuse and intimidate potential resellers of these products and to delay or block their introduction into the distribution channels.
At the end of November 2016, I concluded an eight-part series of blogs titled "The Aftermarket, Office Supplies, and a Major Tipping Point." During that series, I argued the OEMs appear to have effectively orchestrated a cartel-like structure from which they can effectively control market share and pricing.
In my recent article, How the Office Products Industry has Failed the Office Products Resellers, I built my argument for this failure around various internet terms, such as domain age and authority, the website's "grade," backlinks, and global traffic rankings.
As I conclude this seven-part series of articles, I'd like to remind you it started with my argument that the aftermarket Office Products Industry has failed both itself and the independent resellers. The industry has failed to transform itself for the digital age, and it has been unable to provide a leadership position for the resellers to accomplish the same for themselves.
In this, the sixth of a seven-part series of articles, I will explain the concept of social authority as it may relate to office product resellers in the United States. Many may wonder why I believe the need to establish social authority has become such an essential component of our increasingly digital environment.
It's difficult to escape the general gloom in the office products and supplies industry. We've entered a period of significant change that's creating uncertainty which, in turn, is unsettling even the most prominent players and further contributing to the general malaise.
In this fifth of a seven-part series of articles, I will explain the importance of social activity, particularly social shares. Sometimes described as the "social currency," or the accounting for information that people share as they go about their everyday lives, for which Russ Klein provided a concise definition in an American Marketing Association blog:
In this article, the fourth of a seven-part series, I will explain the Importance of website traffic, how it's measured, how it can be managed, and its development motivated. For small business owners, just like winning a new customer is hard work, so is developing web traffic.
