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| Posted: 16 Aug 2011 09:00 AM PDT  Anya McCoy and her beloved jasmine plant You'd think it would be almost impossible to sell natural perfumes on the Web. After all, you can’t click your mouse on "smell this now" – at least, not yet. Anya McCoy isn’t waiting for the arrival of sniff-on-demand technology. She’s built a growing, profitable natural perfume business at her website, AnyasGarden.com. Two more web-based businesses are also thriving: Anya’s natural perfumery course at PerfumeClasses.com, and a natural perfumers' guild at NaturalPerfumers.com. Anya started selling her signature natural perfumes more than 20 years ago, long before the Web became the world's biggest marketplace. Today, her three websites – all started in 2005 and 2006 – have grown so quickly that she now employs three assistants. "And I'm making a great living," she adds. It's the story of a niche player's success in a huge market, aided by adept SEO (search engine optimization). All-natural perfumes are just a tiny segment of the $22 billion international perfume trade. Yet Anya has won national recognition for her scents, including many awards from independent perfume review sites. Martha Stewart's Whole Living magazine, for example, raved about Anya's StarFlower blend, calling it "an orgy in a bottle." It was Anya's quest for rare essential oils that first drove her to the Web. She built her first website herself, and her early grasp of keywords, meta tags and cross-linking has pushed her websites into the top results for natural perfume searches. People who make natural perfumes are driven more by passion for their art than by business concerns. After launching her own natural perfumers' group on Yahoo in 2002 – a group that now has more than 2,000 members – Anya re-launched a defunct online perfumers' guild to help publicize other artisan perfumers. "Lots of perfumers had just tiny websites," she says. "I knew if we could get some good content, it would drive customers to their websites, raising their Google rankings." Today, NaturalPerfumers.com has 200 members. Anya is proud that many small perfumers linked to the site have been reviewed by larger websites. Their businesses have grown, too, aided by Anya's careful search engine optimization. "SEO really does help when potential customers are looking for natural perfumes, or perfumers to create custom scents," she said. "Getting perfumers' websites linked on NaturalPerfumers.com and at blogging events builds your customer base and brand recognition. It's as if we had high-priced publicity firms working for us – yet none of us do!" While Anya has Facebook pages for each of her websites, she regards email as a more personal way of engaging with her customers and students. Email and blogs also offer a way of archiving valuable content for later use. "Content gets lost as soon as it scrolls off the Facebook page," Anya says. "Not many customers are willing to check older posts." As much as she loves creating natural perfumes, Anya is most deeply engaged in perfume education these days. About 100 students are currently enrolled in her natural perfumery courses, from countries as diverse as Australia, the UK, Mongolia, France, Taiwan – and yes, the United States and Canada, too. She recently added a private seminar on "marketing your perfumes" to the guild's Yahoo group, and plans to add it to her perfumery course. "I've poured my heart and soul into curriculum development," Anya says. "I'm happy to know I'm preparing a new generation of natural perfumers for their careers." Check out your site’s visibility to search engines – try the AboutUs Site Report for free.
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