Energize Your Website...eCommerce advice from www.WebStoresLtd.com

Getting Started with Online Marketing

2012-02-10T06:17:00.001-08:00

Search engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are buzzwords in the Internet industry. As a result, website owners have been led to believe that a web marketing firm can “optimize” their site and they will then appear on the first page of Google. As a result, they will suddenly become uber-successful. It doesn’t work that way. First, you need to remember that you get to be listed number one on Google because you are already successful – not the other way around. A good website design, not just one that is visually attractive, but one that is clean and functions well can be a key component of improving your website marketing. If your website is more than three years old, it may be time to upgrade your site before you can address other online marketing concerns.

So how can you be successful with your online marketing? For most businesses, this is a long process – not something that happens overnight. I recommend establishing goals in three month increments. You should only select one major goal and perhaps one or two supporting goals during a three month period. Focus all your efforts on reaching that goal during those 3 months. The reason for a 3 month time period is that is how long it typically takes to show improvement and be able to see the results. You MUST measure your performance to see how you are doing with the goal you have selected. Use tools like Google Analytics and Social Mention to track how you are doing from the beginning to the end of the project. Once you have reached your first goal, then you can start a new 3 month cycle and start working on another goal.

All goals listed below must be quantifiable or SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-specific) goals. Here are some samples of marketing goals you might select (remember only select 1 primary and 1 or two supporting goals that can realistically be achieved in a 3 month period of time).

___ First page of Google search results for the keyword: __________________________

___ More page views for this page on my website: _______________________________

___ Improved ranking for local search for my company name and the keyword: _______

___ Lower bounce rate

___ Increase the number of visitors to my site

___ More targeted traffic to my site

___ Increase length of time visitors spend on site

___ Increase pages per visit

___ Better conversion rate (# of visitors compared to # of sales)

___ Increase average dollar amount per sale

___ Get more Facebook Fans

___ Get more YouTube subscribers

___ Get more newsletter subscribers

___ Increase number of RSS subscribers to blog

___ Increase online inquiries

___ Promote offline sales

___ Deliver more content to customers

___ Get more people to share your posts (stumble upon, squidoo, etc.)

___ Get More people to re-tweet your twitter posts

___ Increase the number of sites linking to yours

___ Increase the number of times you are mentioned on social networking sites

___ Other: ______________________________________________________________

You’ll notice that I have listed the typical SEO promise of getting ranked number one on Google at the top of the list. However, I qualified this with a single specific keyword or keyword phrase. I personally don’t think this should be a primary objective, but a result of your other marketing activities. And the good news is that many of these goals will actually cause you to rise in the search engine results! For example, if more and more people start to mention you on their sites, you lower your bounce rates, and people spend more time on your site, Google will start to notice and place you higher on the results page as your reward.

The Current Recession is a Forever Recession

2012-01-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

So asserts Seth Godin, because its the end of the industrial revolution. Here are some facts that support this:

The Post Office will likely disappear in our life time. They are in such deep financial trouble that there is now way out.
Checks will likely disappear in our lifetime. Brittan is already laying the groundwork to do away with paper checks by 2018.
The newspaper will likely disappear in our lifetime. The younger generation doesn't read it (and neither do I).
Books are already disappearing in favor of eBooks.
The Land Line Telephone - seriously, who needs it anymore?
The way we buy and listen to music has changed.
Television has changed and will continue to do so.
The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud."
Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone.
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe.

Regardless of the type of work you currently do, it's time to wake up and determine how you can profit and thrive in the new digital economy.

3D printing may change the way we buy products

2012-01-18T10:48:00.000-08:00

It has been a few years since I’ve been involved in the CAD (Computer aided design) space, but I recently visited Autodesk. While there, I was taken on a tour of their design gallery and shown a 3D printer. I’ve seen shows about 3D printing technology before, but had never seen an actual object printed in 3D. So what does this have to do with eCommerce? Perhaps a lot, as I’ll soon discuss.

3D printers can be used to create virtually any object directly from a computer aided design. An article about 3D printing and its potential impact by Michael Weinberg describes the technology thusly:

So what is 3D printing? Essentially, a 3D printer is a machine that can turn a blueprint into a physical object. Feed it a design for a wrench, and it produces a physical, working wrench. Scan a coffee mug with a 3D scanner, send the file to the printer, and produce thousands of identical mugs.

While even today there are a number of competing designs for 3D printers, most work in the same general way. Instead of taking a block of material and cutting away until it produces an object, a 3D printer actually builds the object up from tiny bits of material, layer by layer. Among other advantages, this allows a 3D printer to create structures that would be impossible if the designer needed to find a way to insert a cutting tool into a solid block of material. It also allows a 3D printer to form general-purpose material into a wide variety of diverse objects.

Because they create objects by building them up layer-by-layer, 3D printers can create objects with internal, movable parts. Instead of having to print individual parts and have a person assemble them, a 3D printer can print the object already assembled. Of course, a 3D printer can also print individual parts or replacement parts. In fact, some 3D printers can print a substantial number of their own parts, essentially allowing them to self-replicate.

Here are a few videos showing 3D printers in action.

Because of my involvement in the green industry and my background with using AutoCAD for landscape design, I was joking with the Autodesk employees about being able to print a flower or shrub in 3D. No, this isn’t possible yet, but apparently you can print with a variety of materials, including plastic, ceramics, and metal. They are experimenting with using human tissue as a printing material, thus being able to grow new body parts. If that is possible, printing a plant in 3D may just become reality.

So back to the question, what does all this have to do with ecommerce? We are already accustomed to many digital downloadable products from music to books. Certainly a manufacturer could create made to order products with this technology, but what if the price of a 3D printer drops to where they become as common as 2D printers (they are already surprisingly affordable at about $15-$19,000.) Then, you simply download a design, and print the product yourself! We all know what happened in the entertainment industry – it was easy to copy files and, as a result we did just that. What if you have a copyrighted design that is suddenly shared on the Internet? 3D printing will certainly change ecommerce as we know it since physical goods could essentially be downloaded.

What do you think? Will this help or hurt ecommerce?

Does Your Website Still not Offer Online Shopping?

2012-01-13T08:51:00.000-08:00

More than 80% of Americans now have a computer in their homes, and of those, almost 92% have internet access, according to a detailed study on home internet access from The Nielsen Company, which reports that this number is up from 77.9% one year earlier. It is estimated that 87.5% of Internet users age 14 and over will browse or research products online this year. Of that group, 83% will make a purchase online. That equals 148.1 million online buyers in the United States in 2011.

Yet, according to a Webvisible/Nielsen Online survey, only 56% of businesses even have a website! And Dreamhost has data that shows that, only 26% of those are offering some form of ecommerce. Hiscox, a small business insurance company, recently published a survey that showed that 47% of businesses are still not using any form of social media. Seriously?!! And you wonder why your business is struggling in these economic times?

To complicate matters more, a large number of websites lack credibility. In an effort to save money, many businesses attempt to do-it-themselves or they hire a relative or student. They are produced by people with little experience in what makes a website work. Often the information about products and services is sparse or generic. But information is critical to most people making purchase decisions! Informed customers make the best customers. You need to arm your customers with all the reasons why your products are the best and why they should do business with you. And then you need to give them a way to actually pay for your products and services.

Destroying Credit Cards

2012-01-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

How do you eliminate credit card debt? Stop using credit cards! Fans of Dave Ramsey know this to be true. Eventually, you have to pay for what you buy. Credit cards led to the destruction of our economy. Debit cards and Paypal are better options for those who participate in online commerce, but they still take significant amounts of money as part of the transaction.

Enter Dwolla. Dwolla is a brand new payment system that was designed from scratch to destroy credit cards. Instead of paying a fee plus a percentage on transactions (not to mention a minimum monthly maintenance fee), you pay just $0.25 for any transaction over $10.

Specifically:

Creating your own Dwolla account is free.
Transactions under $10 are free.
Transactions over $10 are a flat $0.25.
And there are no maintenance fees.

Dwolla is not as commonplace as credit cards (yet), but this small company is already moving $350 Million. With Dwolla, payments are made directly from your bank account. No credit or debit cards are allowed.

Dwolla’s advantage is not only in its low flat-fee transaction model. It’s also in Dwolla’s use of smart phones as a payment device to buy things at local stores and even order products online. I recently downloaded the Dwolla app for my smartphone. You can send money with an email address or with a phone number, but the most popular way to do it is to connect to Facebook and type in a friend's name.

Of course for Dwolla to be successful, it must have ecommerce shopping carts that support this as a payment system. WebStoresLtd has been building WordPress websites using the Shopp plugin, which already supports Dwolla. I strongly encourage you to check this out as a payment option for your online store. Visit www.Dwolla.com.

2012 is Going to Rock!!!

2011-12-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

I was watching a movie recently called "The Stone of Destiny". The story was that England had captured the Stone of Destiny from Scotland and placed it under the throne at Westminster Abbey. This was a symbol that Scotland remained under the rule of England. Scotland wanted to have a greater control over their own government, but England kept rejecting their attempts, so a young man decided that as a symbolic gesture he would go to Westminster Abbey, retrieve the stone, and return it to Scotland.

He solicited a mentor who had attempted this once himself. When the young man actually pulled the stunt off, his mentor said to him, "I never thought you could actually do it." To which the young man replied, "Funny, I never thought I couldn't".

The stone remains "on loan" to Scotland by the British government.

Positive belief that you cannot fail - that is what the new year is all about. 2012 brings with it new opportunities to take your business to a whole new level. The new year is going to rock!!!

The Space Store

2011-12-21T05:56:00.000-08:00

Here is a new video I just uploaded for one of my clients:

Enjoy!

Top 3 Reasons to Use WordPress

2011-12-14T07:32:00.001-08:00

Beating the WordPress Editor into Submission

2011-12-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

(for my technical readers)

WordPress is great. Except when it isn’t. Most of the time, WordPress is the ideal tool for small business websites. There are thousands of add-ons for WordPress as both plug-ins and themes that can extend it into a full blown content management system that can be customized to do almost anything. This is the real power of a WordPress website. But it is also its biggest weakness. Plug-ins can make your site actually stop working. Often this isn’t the fault of a specific plug-in, but rather a combination of all the plug-ins you may have installed combined with the server configuration of your hosting environment. Most websites are on a shared server, and the hosting company is not likely to change its settings to accommodate you.

In the instance above, one of the things you can do that can improve the performance of your WordPress website is to increase the amount of available memory for PHP scripts. As of version 3.1, this can be set in the file \wp-includes\default-constant.php. Look for the line:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

and change it to something bigger, like:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

In many cases, this will allow your plug-ins to work more effectively. Scripts that take a long time to execute may hit a time-out message, which unfortunately cannot be set except by your host. If you run into that issue, you will have to de-activate plug-ins until the time-out error no longer occurs. Here is another issue that I ran across recently: the plug-in was trying to use the exec() function, which the host has disabled for security reasons. In this case, I simply couldn't use this plug-in. Obviously, this shows that you must thoroughly test your selected plug-ins to see which ones behave well with other plug-ins and with your host. This is best left up to someone who has created multiple WordPress websites.

Another time I had my host implement a "open_basedir" change (without telling me) to PHP that restricts where you can write files. As a result, I had a site start throwing errors that was previously working well. The hosting environment support team blamed it on running an old version of a plug-in (which I wasn't). I had to edit the PHP files supplied by the plug-in so that it would once again behave properly.

Sometimes it isn’t a plug-in or the host that is at fault, but simply a matter of the core WordPress module dumbing things down to make it easier for non-technical users. An example of this is the Tiny MCE editor that is built into WordPress. Fortunately, you can overcome most of those shortcomings by installing the Tiny MCE advanced plug-in. This plug-in adds back in some of the functionality that WordPress took out, including being able to enter in some very basic HTML tags like p and br. Once the plug-in is installed, Go to Settings and and click on the checkbox to stop removing these tags as shown below:

Setting the Tiny MCE Advanced editor to stop removing the and tags will also make it so that the editor no longer removes div tags. This is very important, especially if you are using a plug-in like the Shopp shopping cart plug-in. In other words, you need the Tiny MCE advanced editor to make Shopp behave properly.

There are many other instances where testing plug-ins to make sure they behave well with other plug-ins and that they do what you expect them to do are critical to a successful WordPress website. Often, plug-ins enforce their own CSS (styles) onto the website, rather than using the styles defined by the current theme, meaning that the developer must go in and update the style sheets to maintain a consistent look across the website.

The point is, WordPress is a great tool for a business owner, but just because this is a free, open-source platform, don’t expect that you can build a quality website without involving a professional website developer. There is a lot of work that goes into a good WordPress website.

Here are two examples, both using the 2010 Weaver theme and the Shopp plug-in previously mentioned, which I recently completed for my clients:
www.MainStShoppe.com
www.ForHeavenSake.com

Using WordPress as Both a Website and a Blog

2011-11-29T21:07:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that WordPress is a great blogging tool. In the past couple of years it has also become a great content management system which can manage fairly complex websites. In simplest terms, this is done simply by changing the front page from your latest posts to a static page of your choosing, then adding a number of other pages. For example, rather than having your front page be all of your blog posts, you might have a page called "Home", and then you will add pages such as "Products", "Services", "About Us" and "Contact Us".

All of this is pretty simple and straight forward. But what if you want to not only have these standard website pages, with a front page that looks like a website rather than a bunch of blog posts, but also have a page named (for example), "Blog" that looks and behaves like standard WordPress out-of-the-box?

There are numerous plug-ins for WordPress that display various aspects of your blog, and you can create a page using one of the shortcodes provided with these plug-ins to display blog posts on a page. But none of them really behave exactly like a standard blog page. As it turns out, creating a standard blog page on a WordPress website is pretty simple, and doesn't require another plugin.

All you need to do is create a blank page with a name, such as "Blog". Do not add anything to the page, we just need a page name so it will appear on the menu and in the list of pages. Now go back to the Reading Settings as shown:

Right below where you specified the static page as your front page, click on the list to select "Blog" as your posts page. That's it! All of your posts will now appear on this page just as they would have had you used WordPress as a simple blogging platform instead on a content management system for a normal website. Simple, and no plug-ins required.

What else can I be doing?

2011-11-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

I attended a seminar recently where the speaker made a point: There isn't one thing, or even 10 things you should be doing that will get you to the next level." Instead there are hundreds of things that you need to do to become successful. Success with an online store is not a matter of doing a few things - it's a matter of doing as many things as you can think of. In fact, you should be working on your website on a daily basis. You should be blogging constantly. You should be posting on Facebook and Twitter. You should look at your analytics constantly and continuously tweeking your keywords. And after you have done everything you can think of to make your online business a success, then you need to ask yourself "What else can I be doing?"

I have always taught that you must work an online business just like you would any other business - you can't just put up a website and expect to get rich. An online business still requires work, yet many business owners don't get this. I have some clients who are doing over $35,000 per month in sales with one or two employees. I have others who are struggling to do $1000 per month in online sales. In many cases, the difference is those with traditional brick and mortar stores don't put in the effort to grow their online sales - they just expect it to happen or view it as supplemental revenue. Those who are online only businesses MUST make sales, and as a result are working several hours per day trying to get more sales.

So the question is: When is the last time you updated your website? Are you having a Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale? Did you send an email blast to let your customers know about it? Have you produced a newsletter this month? When is the last time you updated your Facebook business page? How frequently do you blog? When was the lst time you made a YouTube video about one of your products?

Now ask yourself: "What else can I be doing?"

Another Reason to Use WordPress: Google Freshness Update

2011-11-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

Google announced its freshness update on Nov 3, 2011. Here is what Google has announced regarding the Freshness update:
“Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

This means that it is an algorithm change and must be considered when trying to best optimize your site for Google rankings. Since it will impact 35 percent of searches, this means that about 1.2 billion searches a day will be impacted. That is 3 times more impact than the Panda update which had SEOs scrambling to work out new ways to get on top.

Here is what the Google Freshness Update impacts

Regular recurring events: One problem that plagued Google was old established event pages were generally ranked higher than newer more timely event pages. Doing a search for a popular trade show might result in shows from 5 years ago appearing at the top. Google is trying to fix this by having the most recent show rank best.
Latest News or trending topics: The goal for Google with this update is to look more current (ie, fresh). Thus, searches for recent events or trending topics are greatly affected. Searches for such topics will show a time stamp in the results where you can actually see how the more fresh the story the higher it ranks.
Frequently updated information: The algorithm tries to determine topics where freshness should be important to rankings. For example a review for best digital camera should show recent camera reviews of newer model cameras. Do a search for “ipod review” and you’ll see how “freshness” impacts the results.

How to Optimize for Google Freshness Update

When targeting fresh terms, now it is important to appear fresh. Google determines whether a site is fresh or not based on when your page was last modified. Using sitemaps you can timestamp your latest changes and Google will know how fresh your content is. The goal would be to make the content look constantly fresh. Rankings with Google “freshness” update can be a few days to minutes old.
I have always advocated updating your website at least monthly, and preferably weekly. Now top ten means having updates be hourly. The great thing is its all new, which means there is a huge opportunity to take advantage of this untapped method of SEO. An observation made by SEOmoz was the dates associated to content seems to be also closely corresponding to rss feeds of the articles. WordPress automatically creates rss feeds for the blog posts, which means people using it will have a slight advantage – another reason for using WordPress, which I advocate for most small business websites.
To recap, here is what you need to do:
1) use sitemaps
2) use rss feeds
3) update often

Christmas & Chanukah 2011 -- Birth of a New Tradition

2011-11-07T16:31:00.000-08:00

I would love to take credit for the following, but it was sent to me by a friend via email. This post is worth reading...

As the holidays approach, the giant Asian factories are kicking into high gear to provide Americans with monstrous piles of cheaply produced goods -- merchandise that has been produced at the expense of American labor. This year will be different. This year Americans will give the gift of genuine concern for other Americans. There is no longer an excuse that, at gift giving time, nothing can be found that is produced by American hands. Yes there is!

It's time to think outside the box, people. Who says a gift needs to fit in a shirt box, wrapped in Chinese produced wrapping paper?

Everyone -- yes EVERYONE gets their hair cut. How about gift certificates from your local American hair salon or barber?

Gym membership? It's appropriate for all ages who are thinking about some health improvement.

Who wouldn't appreciate getting their car detailed? Small, American owned detail shops and car washes would love to sell you a gift certificate or a book of gift certificates.

Are you one of those extravagant givers who think nothing of plunking down the Benjamin’s on a Chinese made flat-screen? Perhaps that grateful gift receiver would like his driveway sealed, or lawn mowed for the summer, or driveway plowed all winter, or games at the local golf course.

There are a bazillion owner-run restaurants -- all offering gift certificates. And, if your intended isn't the fancy eatery sort, what about a half dozen breakfasts at the local breakfast joint. Remember, folks this isn't about big National chains -- this is about supporting your home town Americans with their financial lives on the line to keep their doors open.

How many people couldn't use an oil change for their car, truck or motorcycle, done at a shop run by the American working guy?

Thinking about a heartfelt gift for mom? Mom would LOVE the services of a local cleaning lady for a day or a massage for an hour at the Spa down the street.

My computer could use a tune-up, and I KNOW I can find some young guy who is struggling to get his repair business up and running.

OK, you were looking for something more personal. Local crafts people spin their own wool and knit them into scarves. They make jewelry, and pottery and beautiful wooden boxes.

Plan your holiday outings at local, owner operated restaurants and leave your server a nice tip. And, how about going out to see a play or ballet at your hometown theatre.

Musicians need love too, so find a venue showcasing local bands.

Honestly, people, do you REALLY need to buy another ten thousand Chinese lights for the house? When you buy a five dollar string of light, about fifty cents stays in the community. If you have those kinds of bucks to burn, leave the mailman, trash guy or babysitter a nice BIG tip.

You see, Christmas is no longer about draining American pockets so that China can build another glittering city. Christmas is now about caring about US, encouraging American small businesses to keep plugging away to follow their dreams. And, when we care about other Americans, we care about our communities, and the benefits come
back to us in ways we couldn't imagine.

THIS is the new American Christmas tradition. Forward this to everyone on your mailing list -- post it to discussion groups -- throw up a post on Craigslist in the Rants and Raves section in your city -- send it to the editor of your local paper and radio stations, and TV news departments. This is a revolution of caring about each other, and isn't that what Christmas is about?

Can WordPress really be used for most websites?

2011-10-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

I was recently at a seminar where the gentleman next to be insisted that WordPress was limited. He admitted that WordPress could be used to build simple websites, but felt that WordPress was limited to blog posts and pages. As a result he couldn’t do what he wanted with WordPress – it simply wasn’t good at organizing large amounts of data. This is no longer the case! There are three basic ways that WordPress can be customized:

1.) Themes. Themes are basically WordPress templates or skins. Thousands of free themes are available and make a good starting point for creating a customized theme. Themes can actually include functionality as well. I recommend using the “Weaver 2010 theme”, which is extremely flexible. You may need a web developer to create a theme, but once you have a theme built, it is a simple matter for a business owner to maintain their own website.

2.) Plug-ins. WordPress functionality can be extended with add-ons known as plug-ins. There are over 10,000 plug-ins available for WordPress, most of them for free. This actually creates a problem – how do you know which plug-in is the best for your purpose? If you are looking to extend WordPress with a plug-in for displaying video content on your site, add a shopping cart, or build email forms, how do you select the best one from the hundreds that are available? And then, once you find the right one, how can I modify it if it isn’t exactly what I want? Again, the answer to this may involve a WordPress web developer who knows PHP programming, but once the plug-ins are properly installed and configured, they are easy for a business owner to use (in fact, many are seamless and require no interaction at all).

3.) Custom Post Types. The misconception that my friend had about the limitations of WordPress is that “real content management systems” would allow for different data types, not just pages and posts. WordPress uses five major types by default: posts, pages, attachments, revisions, and nav menus. For more complex websites, you may need a custom post type, such as a library document, a product for sale, or a rotating ad. When WordPress 3.0 was released in May of 2010, WordPress began accommodating custom post types, allowing a web developer with database skills and PHP programming to do anything that any other content management system can do.

WordPress might have begun as a blogging software, but it is now the best choice for a content management system for most business owners. I’ve been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. About a year ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here’s why:

WordPress is solid – it has quickly become the most popular website platform and is now responsible for over 50 million websites. As an open-source platform, it has a community of developers that continually update it.
WordPress is easy to use – you may need a web developer to set it up or a PHP programmer to add functionality, but any business owner can easily add pages and keep their site up to date.
Unbeatable Feature Set – With thousands of plug-ins available, WordPress is the most comprehensive content management system there is. Period.
Powerful SEO – Google and other search engines love WordPress. If you are concerned about search engine optimization, you can’t do any better than a WordPress website.
WordPress is Easier to Maintain – because of the huge community of web developers supporting WordPress, your website will not become obsolete. Updates happen almost automatically. Even if you decide to change your theme in a couple of years, you won’t have to start over.

If you are looking to update your website, you won’t find a better answer than WordPress. Webstores Ltd will be conducting a free webinar on using WordPress for your business.We will be offering this Webinar twice for your convenience: Tuesday, November 2nd at 7pm MST and Sunday, November 6th at 4pm MST.

Click here to sign up or call us at 1-877-924-1414

WordPress as a Content Managent System

2011-10-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

Make a Dent in the Universe

2011-10-06T11:23:00.001-07:00

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something…almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
- Steve Jobs

The passing of any celebrity often causes us to give pause, and ask ourselves how we have been enriched by their lives, and what we have done to enrich the lives of others. This was true with the passing of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. And while those individuals certainly contributed to society, few people have affected as many people as Steve Jobs. He literally touched the lives of almost everyone on the planet.

He has been referred to as the Thomas Edison of our time. Just as the light bulb changed the way we looked at things so did the innovations that Steve imagined and produced. And it wasn’t just the computer industry that he changed – he changed the music industry (iPod and iTunes), the movie industry (Pixar), and the phone industry (iPhone). He took on the status quo and made the world a better place. Whether you personally use Apple products or not, your life has been altered by this one individual who wanted to “make a dent in the universe”.

Yes, the world has lost one of the great visionaries in history. Yet he continues on as in inspiration to all of us that seek innovation, perfection and success. Now it our time to make a dent in the universe.

RIP Steve.

Steve Jobs Dead

2011-10-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs has died. This is certainly a businessman who made a "dent in the universe" as he liked to say. the world has lost a very creative and unique human being.

See this link for details.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-dead_n_997223.html

Google won’t index my pages

2011-09-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

Dynamic, database-driven websites are great. They allow business owners the ability to use a content management system (like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal) or an ecommerce shopping cart platform to add hundreds of products or pages without having to create individual html pages. I have created hundreds of such websites for my customers over the years, and normally, Google can find these sites without a problem and view their content. But sometimes it can’t. For no particular reason, Google simple seems unable to index some sites, no matter how many SEO tactics you employ – including having hundreds of in-bound links to your site. If you go to Google and type in “MySite.com”, you would certainly expect Google to bring up “Mysite.com” at or near the top of the search results. Sometimes it doesn’t and you have to ask: why? I have found that problem appears to happen most frequently when moving from a static html site with lots of indexed pages by Google to a database driven website where none of the previous pages exist. Instead your url’s now contain a question mark with variable parameters such as mysite.com?id=2.

Here is the “solution” I have come up with. (Note: If this is too technical for you, employ your webmaster to do this for you).

First, go to Google webmaster tools:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home

Add your site. Upload the file provided by Google and verify that you own this site.

Now that your site is identified by Google, go to the menu on the left and select
Diagnostics ->Fetch as GoogleBot
This will allow you to see whether or not Google is able to crawl your site.

If you get an unreachable error, Google is unable to find your pages. This is a problem and you MUST correct it. Even if you get a success message, when you have a database-driven website, Google may only be finding a single page because it thinks that index.php or index.cfm is a single page and is not reading variable data behind the ?.

Go to your website’s home page, right click on the content and select “View Page Source”. Save this file as a simple htm file, such as "home.htm". Alternatively (and perhaps better), is to manually create a simple page with all your important links and save this as a simple htm file. Upload this simple htm file back to your website, and test it.

Now find a free xml sitemap building tool such as this:

http://www.zitemaps.com/

Many of the sitemap building tools cannot crawl dynamic database-driven websites any better than Google can. The one I’ve listed above can. Generate the site map by supplying both your domain name and the file you just created, such as:

www.MySite.com/home.htm

After the sitemap has been generated, save it and copy it up to your website. You should place this file in the root folder of your site.

Now go back to Google webmaster tools. Select “Site Configuration – Site Maps” and click on the button to submit a site map.

Select “Diagnostics -> Fetch as GoogleBot” again. This time, enter in the name of the htm file you created, not just your domain name. For example: www.MySite.com/home.htm. You should now get a “Success” message!

Click on “Submit to index”. Pick on the radio button to submit both the URL and all linked pages.

Give Google about 24 hours to include you in their index. From now on, Google should be able to find your site (and all of the pages that link from your sitemap)!

Finally, you should tell Google about the url parameters that your site uses (the variables after the “?”). Go to “Site configuration -> URL parameters” and add the parameters used by your site and tell Google what they mean. For example, you may have a variable called ItemID, as shown below:

This isn't the end of course, but the beginning - you will still need to monitor your site to make sure that you are getting the results you want, but at least now you are in the game.

Beyond the Hit Counter

2011-09-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Why would you just want a "hit-counter" when you can not only see how many visits your site has had, but where they came from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed on each page, and more. this video is the first few minutes of a recent seminar I gave on Analytics. A complete webinar is forthcoming, so stay tuned!

My website isn’t working!

2011-08-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

I frequently hear the comment that “my website isn’t working!” “How come I’m not showing up on Google?” “Why aren’t I getting any orders?” If this is how you feel, read on…

In order for Google to know about your site it is absolutely critical that you have inbound links to your site. All to often, the people who can’t be found on Google simply don’t have anyone linking to them. YOU need to go out and start doing some link building! Link from Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, coupon sites, directories, etc. all links to your website where ever you can. These are also called "backlinks". Notice we are not talking about you linking to other sites, we are talking about other sites linking to you!

The links that you add should contain the keywords as the anchor text. For example, if you want to get found in a Google search for the term “horse blankets”, then the link from the referring site should use the words “horse blankets” to link to your site. Preferably the page that this link points to is a page that is named “horse_blankets.htm” and has a title tag of “horse blankets”. The page should also use the words “horse blankets” within the text on the page.

What this tells Google is that here is another website that thinks your site is important for the term “horse blankets”. When the Google robot follows that link, it finds a page named horse blankets, has a title of horse blankets, and the content is all about horse blankets. Therefore this page must be pretty important for that search term. Now if you can get 100 different websites all linking to your website for the same search term, I can assure you that you will start to get noticed. The problem is, no one is doing this! So 100 links for a particular search term will make you look really important to Google – it’s like someone voted for you 100 times! (You usually need about 100 of these inbound links however, 3 or 4 isn't enough).

So how do you know which keywords / search terms to target? Obviously, you want to target terms that are actually relevant to what you have to offer. If you want to learn more about keyword research and how to track where your links are coming from, join us for a free seminar in Denver on August 29^th. Sign up by clicking here.

There’s Never Enough Time

2011-08-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

Over the course of our seminars and newsletters, we’ve talked extensively about all the things you need to do to make your Internet marketing work. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Blogs, Newsletters, website content – how can you possibly do all this while running your real business? Isn’t there a way I can just post things one time and have it update everything else automatically?

The answer is, “sort of”. Depending upon how you have your various profiles set up, doing something on one platform, can create an update on another. This article will describe some of the methods for doing this. I will describe some tools that can help you spread your reach without eating up your time.

Seesmic, Hootsuite and others: There’s actually a number of services that allow you to update multiple social media platforms simultaneously. Seesmic and Hootsuite are the two best. Using either of these tools, you can create a single post that will update most of your social media feeds with a single posting.

I would however caution you to consider a more strategic approach. Different platforms are for different things. Each social media platform serves a different . Cross publishing some updates are fine but considering offering unique content to fit the audience. For example, on Facebook videos and photos are a great way to showcase your business. Twitter is perfect for short tips. LinkedIn offers an opportunity to offer industry insight. So as tempting as it is...be careful with using services that let you post to multiple social spaces at once.

Facebook applications: There are numerous applications that you can add to your Facebook fan page. Here are a few that I recommend:

YouTube for pages – whenever you post a new video to your YouTube channel, it will automatically be displayed on your Facebook page under the YouTube tab.
Networked blogs – this is one of my favorites; whenever you create a new blog post, it will post a summary of the blog directly on the Facebook wall.

Website: You can also configure your website to display updates from various social media platforms, depending upon how your website is coded. Here are a few options:

Blog posts – websites creating with a blogging software like WordPress do this automatically. You can also add some code to most other websites to read your RSS feed and display it on your website.
YouTube channel – not only can you embed individual videos into your website, you can embed your entire YouTube channel onto one of your pages
Plugins – WordPress and other content management systems support numerous plugins that allow you to read posts from various social media sites and display them on your website.

Repurpose content: One thing you can (and should) do is to simply re-purpose the content you develop. For example, this article will be used on my blog and in our newsletter. It can also be re-worked into a new article and put on an article site. The point is, you don’t need to start over each time you want to create lots of content. Once the article has been posted to my blog, I’ll use Seesmic to let people know about it on my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles.

As you can see, you still have to generate unique content. But you can greatly reduce the number of things you need to do by using a few tools to help you be in multiple places at the same time. If you need help configuring your various platforms to accomplish this, please call WebStores Ltd for a consultation.

The Distributed Web

2011-07-28T22:25:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, your homepage was the most important part of your website – after all that is where someone entered your online business. Soon it became apparent however that customers didn’t just enter your website from the home page – they might enter on a specific product page or some other lower-level content page because that is where either a search engine or external link brought them into your site.

So your home page was no longer the center of your online universe. Instead, it is just one of many points of entry to consider as you fashioned your online business presence.

Today, your online presence isn’t just distributed across your website, but across multiple channels and platforms. You need a consistent online brand presence that includes not only one or more websites, but also mobile phones, social media sites, e-mail, video sites, and blogs. And you must also mange incoming links from sources such as directories, news sites, coupon sites and more. The web has become highly distributed and it is not easy to keep up with everything you must do to really brand your online presence.

Does this mean the end of your website as you know it? Not now, and maybe never. But for many firms, a website accessed from a desktop or laptop computer is no longer the hub of their digital business world but just another spoke. For most companies however, your online presence still requires a hub, and your website is the best place to accomplish that.

But whether your website is the hub of your internet business of just another spoke, to thrive in this new digital model, you will need to make your brand accessible and relevant to people regardless of how they choose to interact and purchase from you. You cannot simply repurpose existing website content for other platforms. You must create new experiences that make sense for the media on which they are consumed. I have always promoted the fact that you can’t just put up a website and expect to make money. And today, you can’t just put up a YouTube channel of Facebook fan page either – you must work every aspect of your online business just like you would any other business. If you don’t dedicate the time and resource necessary you will not achieve the results you are looking for.

A New Era

2011-07-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

On my recent visit to the Library of Congress, the tour guide showed us the Giant Bible of Mainz – one of the last bibles to be totally transcribed by hand (1452-3). This effort took 15 months of solid work by a single scribe. And what an amazing piece of work – every letter meticulously created with a feather pen, each perfectly aligned on the paper. This bible marked the end of an era – when knowledge was available to only a select few.

On the other side of the room was the Gutenberg Bible – the first book printed using moveable type on the Gutenberg Press during approximately the same time period. This bible too was impressive, even if it was printed on a machine. And it marked the beginning of a new era, one where knowledge was available to many, rather than just a select few.

But ink fades and paper deteriorates. Both of these Bibles had to be in specially controlled cases for both light and temperature.

That night I went back to my son’s house and watched the news. The lead story was how Borders Bookstore was going out of business nationwide. Many newspapers had already suffered the same fate, but now a major national bookseller was unable to keep its doors open. The digital era of the Internet and ebooks had forced it to shut down. Like hand written books 600 years before, this passing of an era was in many ways sad. Yet at the same time, the new digital age marks a significant time in human history – where knowledge can now be both consumed and produced by anyone at anytime and any place.

We no longer need the skills of a scribe, nor do we require paper printing to transmit information. But the need for quality information is greater than ever. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to not become a victim of the Internet, but to change, adapt, and master it. You have the ability to not just copy what others have written about the products and services you sell, but to develop your own unique content that others will find useful.

A 3D Printer?

2011-07-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

This isn't mine, but as a techo-nut, I had to share this with my readers.

So, now you have a website.

2011-06-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

But do you REALLY know what is happening on your site?

Your site is a microcosm of your business – a digital representation of all the functional areas that make up your business: technology, marketing, sales, and service. Your web site provides you with a lot of valuable data about your customers, and you must learn to harness this information and use it to your advantage. Understanding how to get this data, how to read it, and most importantly, how to react to it is what web analytics is all about.

Web analytics gives you insight into the who, what, when and where of your web site and marketing efforts. Not using website analytics is like flushing your money down the toilet. Unlike traditional advertising, the Internet gives you the capability to measure how well you are doing. This in turn allows you to adjust your strategy.

Web analytics allows you to ask questions like:

How did they find you?
Which way did they go?
Which pages are popular…or not?

Most business owners ignore web analytics. Even those who have taken the time to install an analytics tool like Google Analytics often don’t check the results. And when they do, they are usually given a brief glance with little thought as to how this information can improve your business. But if you are actively looking at how your website is performing, you can adjust various factors to change the results you are getting. For example, if you have a high bounce rate (visitors coming to your site who only visit one page and leave after a few seconds), you can implement strategies to change this behavior. Typically, sales are made only after someone has visited a site multiple times – how can you get someone to be a return visitor?

Be careful when looking at your site statistics. There is a big difference between a “hit” and a “visitor”. A hit is any file download. A hit can be a page of text, an inline graphic, or a downloadable movie or sound file. Thus, if you have a page with 10 pictures on it, a person coming to that page will generate 11 hits. Many people confuse hits with accesses or visitors, which makes 10,000 of them by noontime sound as if their site is packed with people (when it really isn’t). Hits are the pennies of the Web.

An access is an entire page served. Accesses (also called page views) are the smallest unit to track, because they help you determine where people go in your site.

A visitor is the true one-dollar bill of the Web. Unfortunately, unique visitors are more difficult to define. That’s why there’s so much incentive to get visitors to register – people are anonymous as they view your site. Programs are available to help webmasters track visitors going through their sites, but only if a visitor registers can you get their email address and other contact information.

A repeat visitor is the ten-dollar bill of the Web. If a visitor bookmarks your site, it means she is willing to come back. In the mail-order business, such a person is called a responder.

If people order things from your site, they turn from visitors into customers, the ultimate goal. A customer is the highest level of status a visitor can attain. A good web site strives to turn random surfers into customers.

Remember that web analysis is not about understanding, it’s about doing. Your goal should be to understand your site’s statistics as a means to implement changes that will result in more sales. The good news is that you have this information available if you take the time to understand it.

Let customers easily share your information with a QR code

2011-06-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

A QR (Quick Response) code is a square barcode that makes getting URLs, location coordinates, any text or contact information onto a phone quickly. With a barcode scanner app installed, you just point your phone's camera at the code to read its contents. Here is the QR code for www.webstoresltd.com:

You can put these codes on anything: business cards, brochures, websites, storefronts, receipts, products - whatever you want. Because of their increased popularity, I frequently have customers asking me how they can generate these codes. Here is a free QR code generator that you can use, even for long, complex URLs or text strings. Now that you know how easy it is, you may want to generate a QR code for everything! Here are a few ideas:

Business cards with your contact information
Link to YouTube videos
Name Tags
For Sale signs
Restaurant menus
Links to product pages on your website

Good Design is Good Business

2011-06-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

While I’ve been in the software business for over 25 years, and specifically in the Internet business since 1995, but I have a confession to make: Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Landscape Architecture. What does Landscape architecture have to do with website design and user interfaces?

As it turns out, quite a bit. One works with land and plant materials, the other works with graphics and words. But both use the concepts of user experience and aesthetics to create the desired result. In other words, site design, whether it be a physical building site or a website, is a creative skill and uses basic principals that are common to any design profession.

What is interesting is that today, both web designers and landscape architects use computers to create their designs, in large part because of the pioneering efforts of myself and my colleagues at Landcadd. Our efforts to bring computer aided design to the profession resulted in a program that became a world-wide industry standard that is still being used today. This is a testament to good design.

In 1896, American architect Louis Sullivan coined the phrase, “form follows function”. This has become the basic principal of design. While this principal is primarily associated with modern architecture and industrial design, it applies equally well to websites and software interfaces. The principle is that the shape of an object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.

The functionality of a website is not much different than a building site. We need to design a user experience that is easy to navigate, providing circulation to the major features and controlling the user experience. We need to engineer the site to make sure that nothing breaks when we are using it. The layout of related features should be in close proximity to each other. Overgrown landscapes or cluttered websites simply don’t work as well as simple ones.

"Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

The form of the design allows a designer to utilize color, balance, proportion, and other visual factors to create the attractiveness or aesthetics of the site. Some website designers begin with these tools thinking that “artsy-craftsy” is the end-all. But like landscape architectural design, these factors should be an extension of the functionality of the site. All of these things working in unison with each other create a good design. And as IBM’s Thomas Watson Jr said, “good design is good business”.

Creating a Custom Facebook Page

2011-06-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how to create a Facebook page for your business that contains unique content, and the content is different for someone who "likes" your page versus someone who hasn't? this post describes the technical details for how to do this. If you need help, don't worry - you can always contact me at WebStores Ltd! There are 12 basic steps to doing this, and 4 files that you will need to download here.

Step 1: Create a business page. Go to http://www.Facebook.com/WebStoresLtd and in the lower left portion of the screen click on "create a page"

Step 2: Choose the type of page to create. In this case, we'll choose "Local Business or Place"

Step 3: Fill in basic information and agree to terms of service

Step 4: Add your profile image. OK, now you have a basic page, you need to add a profile image. the image size should be 180 pixels wide and approximate 350 to 450 pixels tall.

Step 5: Create an "app". To create a new application, go to:
https://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php

Give your application a name and agree to the terms of service.

Step 6: Set up the facebook integration.

Step 7: Fill in information for the Canvas and the Tab Settings as shown.

Things you need to know:

The "canvas" page can be any unique name, but must NOT contain spaces or special characters.
The "canvas" URL is a webpage that exists on another server - typically where your website is hosted. This MUST be a dynamic page, such as facebook_tab.php and must include a url variable, such as ?id=fb. In this example, I have entered: http://208.106.231.71/MyWebsite/facebook_tab.php?id=fb
You must also specify a secure canvas page. If you do not do this, those visiting your page with a secure connection (the current Facebook default), will be unable to see your page. If the server hosting your website does not have a secure connection, you cannot do this.
Under Page Tabs, give the tab a name, such as "Welcome".
Copy the canvas page ans secure canvas page to the Tab URL and Secure Tab URL.

Step 8: Click on Application Profile Page

Step 9: Add to Page. Now that your application is built, it must be added to the page you created in steps 1-3 above.

Step 10: Pick which page to add it to:

Step 11: Go to the page, and "Edit" the page. You are now going to make the new tab be the default landing page whenever a new visitor reaches your page (Visitors who have previously "Liked" your page will always be taken to the "Wall").

Click on "Manage Permissions", then change the "Default Landing Tab" to the tab name you created in step 7.

Step 12: Create the Pages and upload them (ftp) to your website server. In step 7, you specified "facebook_tab.php as the filename to reference when someone lands on your page. this file actually references two other files that you must also have on your server: "Like.htm" and No-Like.htm". Additionally, the file "facebook_tab.php" must be editted to contain your unique appID and applicationSecret from facebook as shown in the image below.

There are a total of 4 files needed to make all this work:

facebook_tab.php
facebook.php
fb_like.htm
fb_nolike.htm

As I indicated, you need to modify facebook_tab.php to include your unique appID and applicationSecret. There is no need to modify the facebook.php file - this contains the code to determine if someone has liked your page or not.

The fb_like.htm and fb_nolike.htm SHOULD be modified with your own content - this is what gets displayed to your visitors. As a general guideline, these pages should fit within a 500 pixels wide by 800 pixel high area. In order to insure that your content displays within this fixed area, it is a good idea to force your page to this size (via table widths or CSS).

Here is what all this looks like when you are done:
Facebook Page for Bollinger Design Group

Now it's your turn - send me a link to your business Facebook Fan page when you have it ready!

Why Should I LIKE You?

2011-05-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Don't just send visitors to your Facebook Wall - give them a unique experience that is consistent with the rest of your Internet marketing. A business page for Facebook can be a mini-website that you control through your content management system on your own website.

Do you have a business page for Facebook or just your personal profile? (Hint: If the button says "Add as Friend", you do not have a page; the button should say "Like").

Why should someone "Like" your Facebook page? The number one reason that people like a brand or business on Facebook is to receive special offers or incentives that are not available anywhere else. You must offer something different to fans who have "Liked" your page than to those who haven't. You can't do this by just posting specials to your wall - everyone has access to those. You need a custom Facebook page where the content displayed to visitors who Like your page is different than what is displayed to those who haven't. That way you can provide incentives to those who like you!

Incentives and coupons are not the only thing you can give to your fans - with a custom Facebook page, you can give them access to anything you want - free whitepapers or ebooks, widgets, calculators, games, digital downloads, etc. are all possible. And since you control what is displayed, you can change this page on a regular basis. Here is an example:

Before Liking

After Liking

OK, so how exactly do you do this? Stay tuned - the answer will appear in next week's post.

Of course once someone Likes you, what will get them to return to your Facebook page over and over again? This is similar to the question about what does it take to get people to return to your website consistently, and the answer lies in updated content. This is where you wall comes in - frequent posting with lots of people commenting on your wall will drive more traffic to your page. Your posts should let your visitors know that this week's "special" is available only to those who have Liked your page.

Have you done this for your business page on Facebook? What types of incentives do you offer that work well for you?

The Holy Grail

2011-05-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

Getting listed number 1 on Google seems to be the Holy Grail for most website owners. If you've heard or read any of my past rants about this, you'll know that I think there are better uses of your marketing time than worrying about search engine placement. This is due largely to the fact that most sites get their traffic from direct entry or in-bound links, not from search engines. This is what makes you popular on the Internet, and only after you are already popular will you start to rank well with Google.

I basically own the first 2 pages of Google for a search on my name "Greg Jameson". Still, I think SEO, or search engine optimization, is an expense that can be easily avoided if you follow my 10 simple steps that I've outlined below. Organic search results should be just that - if you do your job well, the search engines will take care of themselves.

Consider this simplified example. If you have 3 pages of content about a particular subject and your competition has 10 pages about the same subject, most likely your competition will rank above you. It makes sense that your competitor's site will appear to Google to be the authority on the topic, doesn't it?

Of course there are many variables that Google uses to determine which site is the most authoritative. If your competitor's site has been in existence for 5 years and you just started yours, then that also gives them more credibility.

If all the information on your website is sales copy and the information on your competitor?s website is more informational, then again, your competitor's website will likely outperform yours. The platform you are using doesn't really matter, it's the content that is important. Remember, people come to the Internet looking for information, so give it to them! Comprehensive descriptions with personal opinions are better than minimal descriptions. This serves another purpose as well: When you provide people with engaging content, they will stick around longer on your site to consume it, which reduces your bounce rate. This also gives you more credibility with Google.

If important facts are buried in hard to find corners of your website or perhaps in PDF form or Flash, and your competitor's information is front and center, again, your competitor will outrank you. And most importantly, if don't have any in-bound links that include your main keywords, you will never rank well. Each link is like a vote for your site, and the more votes you get, the higher you rank. The good news is you can vote for yourself! Here then are my 10 simple steps to give you a leg up with your internet marketing:

Greg's simplified steps to Internet marketing:

   1. Write a description of what you offer, telling a story "as you see it". Do NOT use a canned description (if you must use a canned description, include your own commentary as well).
   2. Come up with a list of 5-10 keywords that you think someone would use to search for your product or service.
   3. Go to Google Adwords / keyword selector tool and enter each of the search terms you came up with.
   4. See which words and related topics are actually driving traffic and make a note of them. Try to get additional domain names that contain the keywords.
   5. Review content from competing websites to see how they are incorporating the keywords into their site. Are they including keywords in file names and Alt-tags? You should too.
   6. Using this revised keyword list, re-write your copy to include each keyword at least twice within the description. For example:

These properties in the Colorado Mountains offer spectacular views with numerous great building sites on each lot. Join this secure, gated community in the Colorado Mountains and find the property of your dreams!

   7. Have another set of eyes look at the revised copy to make sure that it still sounds like it was written for a person and not Google.
   8. Create a YouTube video. Since YouTube is owned by Google, they give well-documented videos lots of importance. Add your keywords into the meta tags for the video. Include a description that contains the keywords at least twice as shown above. Put in a link to the desired webpage (not necessarily the home page), with the full url: http://www.mywebsite.com/featured_page
   9. Write various posts to your blog and Facebook page / press releases / articles / classifieds / coupons / directory listings etc. that use the keyword as the anchor text to link back to your site. For example: Colorado Mountain Property (which of course links to the desired page). This is the most important step and must be an ongoing effort - you are voting for yourself for the selected keywords every time you do this!
10. Check your analytics in about a week. If you are not getting the desired results, repeat step 9. If you still don't see results after about 3-4 weeks, tweak your copy (and continue doing step 9).

Doing these 10 steps will put you way ahead of what most people are doing with their websites. Let me know your results and other suggestions in the comments area.

3 ways to increase your sales

2011-05-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

"Get more new customers" and "sell more to existing customers" are 2 common trains of thought for increasing your sales. Watch this video to learn a 3rd, very effective way to sell more on your website.

Here is what I'm talking about when I say you can increase the size of an order by including additional products as options. This comes from a website that sells saddles and other horse tack. While you could take the Amazon approach and cross sell reins, breastcollars, saddle pads, water bottle holders etc. as separate products (i.e., people who like this also liked...), you can also make them be optional with each saddle purchase. Let them add the reins and saddle pad right now if they want to without picking on another product. Very clever!

Your thoughts?

What strategies work for small businesses selling online?

2011-04-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to my recent post about "What makes a customer buy from you?", I posted a question on LinkedIn asking for examples. As expected, I got the usual array of vague answers and clichés, but I enjoyed this specific answer:

"Offering some sort of risk free trial can be a great way to enable new customers to try your product or service and increase new business.

At WAKA kickball, we host free pick up games so new players can try it out before the season starts (most haven't played since 3rd grade and are a little nervous!) The players love it and its a great way for them to build a network and feel apart of the family before they register.

I also work with a fitness studio that offers a free first class to new students via an online coupon. It has been a huge driver of new students and makes it easy for their existing customers to invite their friends to the studio.

Premiums are also useful and can help drive sales. Offer a free ebook, gift, or exclusive experience with purchase. I work with a nutritionist who gives a special healthy recipe book to every new client. She makes these herself and has them printed at kinkos - cheap, easy, and they look great! "

Links:

http://www.kickball.com

Note: This site does a great job of promoting kickball first, and then offering items in their store as a benefit to those who are interested. Thanks to Sarah Nelson for her response. What case studies would you like to share? What worked out well for you? Have you tried anything that didn't work?

What makes a customer buy from you?

2011-04-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Are you selling what the customer is looking for? And if you are, do you provide enough extra value that they want to buy from you instead of someone else? In this video I explore these questions for small business owners who sell or want to sell online.

I recently asked a question on LinkedIn: What strategies work for small businesses selling online? As a follow up to this (my 100th post!), I will share some of the best answers with you from the perspective of a business owner, not just web developers and internet marketers. If you have any stories you'd like to share as well, please contact me.

How Does Design Affect an Ecommerce Website?

2011-04-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

I recently read a blog post that said that design was the most important aspect of a good ecommerce website. Really? At first I didn't believe it....After all, look at the old school websites that still sell lots of products. What I later came to realize was that these "old school" websites have withstood the test of time precisely because of good design. Just like a well-designed car that is 20 years old and still on the road, design is more than just looking pretty, it's about function. At WebStores Ltd we pride ourselves in creating websites that will last.

Things You Never Noticed Before

2011-04-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, I was skiing in the Blue Sky Basin on the backside of Vail. It was a beautiful clear day, and I noticed for the first time, that you can actually see Steamboat from there! I’ve skied Vail lots of time, but never noticed this before. Of course, Steamboat has always been there, it’s about 2 hours to the northwest. But due to clouds, distance, or perhaps just not looking, I couldn’t see it until someone pointed it out to me.

Is your website like this? The ability to sell goods and services on the Internet is real, yet most companies are ineffective at making money online. Perhaps your goals are being obstructed by the everyday demands of your business. Maybe the effort required to run a website is just too far out there. Or perhaps, you simply aren’t focusing on the right ways of getting there.

Every successful business needs help now and then, regardless of how big you are or what you sell. Large corporations hire consultants to help them solve problems. Small businesses don’t have the staff to do everything themselves. It may seem tempting to go it alone when it comes to creating your online presence, or to hire your nephew because he can do it for almost nothing, but this is not necessarily in your best interest. Even as an Internet professional, I’ve hired consultants to help me with my own online presence. WebStores Ltd can help you see things that you never noticed before.

Why Unique Content is Important

2011-03-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

Google’s “farmer” algorithm has received a lot of attention as it relates to SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Basically, Google changed it’s formula earlier this year so that websites that copied content from another website were no longer given as much credit. What this means is that if you are a reseller of a product, and you copied the manufacturer’s description of the product and put that on your website, you are less likely to be found, because every other reseller is also using the exact same description.

The solution of course is to simply create unique content. Rather than just using the stock description for the products you sell, you have to write your own descriptions if you want to rank well with the search engines. For those who have been reading my articles for any length of time, you will know that I am not a big fan of trying to manipulate search engine rankings in the first place. I believe that if you are actively engaged in numerous marketing efforts, from social media to blogs, videos, emails, etc, that the search engines will take care of themselves. As I’ve said before, “you don’t get to be popular by being number one on Google – you get to be number one on Google because you are already popular!”

Google’s “farmer” algorithm serves as an important reminder of this fact. And while creating unique content rather than simply relying on stock descriptions may help you to rank better, there is an even more important reason for creating unique content. The goal of your ecommerce website should be to sell product. If all you are offering is the same information as every other web site that sells the same product, you have added nothing of value. As the reseller of the product, you are the salesperson and it is your responsibility to sell the product, not just list it. Give your customers a reason to buy from you. Pretend that a customer has just walked into your physical store and is asking questions about the products you are selling – would you simply read the canned product description to them, or would you take the time to explain the advantages and features of the product based on your experience and that of your other customers? Whatever you would tell a customer in person, you should write down and put that in your product description – that is your unique content and that is what will help you sell the product.

You can still include the standard specifications (some manufacturers may even require this). But add your own insight to this. Remember, people come to the internet looking for information, so give it to them!

So forget about the search engines. Just do your job. It may help with search engine rankings, but more importantly, it will help your sales.

Security issues with custom tabs on Facebook using iframes

2011-03-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

The new facebook method for creating custom tabs has a serious flaw: Users who have their account settings set to force fb to use SSL get errors when the iframed page is not using an https site (and most are not). This is noticeable in Chrome and Safari. Here is the problem...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had his own account hacked into, so they added an option in the account setting that lets users use Facebook using SSL (secure sockets layer), which can be visually detected with the https prefix instead of http.

On March 11, Facebook depricated the use of FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and began using iframes. This makes it more difficult for your average Facebook user to setup a custom tab on their business page, as there are more steps involved. But now you can do anything on your custom tab that you want. Because the page actually resides elsewhere, you can use Flash, videos, and any type of database programming desired. This is a real plus for business pages. But...

If the user has set up his security setting as shown above, they may get an error like this:

This seems to be the case when using Safari as a browser as well. Or, the page simply may not display (when using Firefox). The reason is that Facebook is using a SSL connection, but the iframed page is not. If your external page is also using a SSL connection, the framed content appears correctly. Of course, hardly any external pages are set up to use SSL, so your Facebook visitors only see an error, and think you are incompetent.

Users who do not have their Facebook setting to use SSL, and visit a tab that does use SSL, appear to be OK (although I'd like feedback on that). So the work-around is to use SSL for any custom designed tab. Facebook needs to resolve this issue, but until they do, set-up your custom tabs on a secure server. If you don't have a secure server, there is not a solution.

WebStores Ltd builds custom Facebook fan pages as one of its services, including the ability to display different content to users who have "Liked" your page versus those have not. Visit www.WebStoresLtd.com or call toll free 877-924-1414 for more information.

Check the Can

2011-03-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

I received this email today and it got me to thinking....

I WAS BUYING FOOD THE OTHER DAY AT the grocery store.
ON THE LABEL OF SOME PRODUCTS IT SAID 'FROM CHINA '.

FOR EXAMPLE THE "OUR FAMILY" BRAND OF THE MANDARIN ORANGES SAYS RIGHT ON THE CAN 'FROM CHINA '.

I WAS SHOCKED!! SO FOR A FEW MORE CENTS I BOUGHT THE LIBERTY GOLD BRAND OR THE DOLE SINCE IT'S FROM CALIF and Hawaii.

TAKES FOREVER JUST TO BUY FOOD AND DO LABEL READING ! !

Are we Americans as dumb as we appear --- or --- is it that we just do not think? While the Chinese, knowingly and intentionally, export inferior and even toxic products and dangerous toys and goods to be sold in American markets.

Yet 70% of Americans believe that the trading privileges afforded to the Chinese should be suspended.

Well, duh..why do you need the government to suspend trading privileges?

SIMPLY DO IT YOURSELF, AMERICA !!

Simply look on the bottom of every product you buy, and if it says 'Made in China ' or 'PRC' (and that now includes Hong Kong ), simply choose another product, or none at all. You will be amazed at how dependent you are on Chinese products, and you will be equally amazed at what you can do without.

So what does this have to do with emarketing or online businesses?
It's the same as what I talk about when it comes to getting in-bound links to your website or other exposure on the Internet - DO IT YOURSELF!!!
Post your coupons to coupon sites, submit articles to article sites, guest blog for someone else, create a YouTube video, Post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.etc...Don't wait for someone else to do this for you. (And if you really don't have time or don't know where to get started, call Webstores Ltd at 877-924-1414 so we can help you get started). It is not up to Google to make you successful anymore than it is up to our government to stop the influx of Chinese made products. You are responsible for your own outcome.

Disenchantment

2011-03-03T08:26:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I talked about Guy Kawasaki's new book on enchanting your customers. Today I'm going to talk about the opposite of that - pissing off your customers. This is something you do NOT want to do.

Almost 3 weeks ago I had a water pipe break in my basement destroying thousands of dollars worth of possessions. After continually hounding my insurance company, I was finally notified today that they were going to give me a pre-paid credit card so I could re-buy the damaged items. For over 16 years I have paid for replacement cost insurance and now that I have a claim, they are giving me what they perceive to be 5% of the original value?!?! Is this legal? Can a company that sells you something essentially change the rules after the fact? I have been waiting for weeks to put my house back in order and now I'm told that replacement cost insurance is basically a lie?

Business owners - do not piss off your customers! Listen to Guy Kawasaki - go buy his book.

Enchanting Your Customers

2011-03-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

I first became acquainted with Guy Kawasaki when he wrote "Selling the Dream" in 1992. I've been a fan ever since and have read many of his books. All contain great advice for business owners. But in approximately 1 week, Guy's latest book "Enchantment - The Art of changing Hearts, Minds and Actions" will go on sale (March 8). This book is not just for business owners, but for anyone who wants to enchant others.

So why am I writing about a book that isn't yet available? When I wrote "Grow Your Online Sales", I asked Guy Kawasaki to review my book. He returned the favor, asking for a review prior to his book being released for sale. So I've fully disclosed that I am a fan and that I might be biased. Still, this is the first time I've devoted my blog column to a book review. I guess you can say that Guy enchanted me!

Like Guy's other books, "Enchantment" is easy to read. He doesn't use a lot of technical terms; rather he explains things in everyday language that anyone can understand. Guy is a technologist, and this still shows in this book, even though the subject matter borders on self-help rather than being a business book. Many business books are motivational in nature, but few are inspirational. Motivation doesn't last, which is why you need to keep attending seminars and reading motivational books. Inspiration does last, and I found "Enchantment" to be an inspirational book. Highly recommended for business people and anyone who really wants to help others.

Watch this video to learn more:

And be sure to visit his Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/enchantment#!/enchantment?sk=app_4949752878

~Greg Jameson

On Becoming an "Expert"

2011-03-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

During the past week, Greg Jameson (myself) has done 2 live seminars, 2 virtual webinars, 3 customer presentations, 1 radio interview and 1 speech. The live seminars in fact involved speaking for 2 hours without notes and actively engaging with the participants. Each of these have been very well received, with attendees exclaiming about how much Greg Jameson knows about Internet marketing and building websites. While these comments and reviews are certainly appreciated, it got me to thinking about how anyone becomes truly knowledgeable about a subject in any field.

I spend an average of 10-12 hours per week attending seminars and webinars myself, as well as doing active research. I then test the ideas I've learned on my own websites to see what really works and what is the most effective. Finally, I distill this information and apply it to our customers and their specific industry. The results may end up in a new book, a new seminar topic, or just increased sales for our clients.

Some of my readers may know that I am an avid skier. I've skied 12 months out of the year and have not missed a season for 40 years. I've skied with some of the best in the world, including Phil and Steve Mahre, Billy Kidd, and Wayne Wong. And, I skied competitively on my college ski team. Recently I was skiing with some friends and one of them asked how I could ski so fast. My other friend replied that I had lots of "time in the saddle". And it's true that longevity helps to build expertise status - you can't just start building websites or doing internet marketing and become an expert overnight, anymore than you can with any other field of knowledge.

But what is relevant is how this applies to you. Everyone is, or can be, an expert for their particular niche. For example, I met yesterday with the owner of a tack store (they sell horse equipment, not thumb tacks!). The same principles apply here - don't just sell something because it is available or because you have a high margin on it; rather, research the equipment that is out there. Find out what makes the best bit for a horse and why. Then test it yourself against the other types of bits that are available and see which one performs the best. It may be that one type of bit works better for one type of situation than another. Repeat this process for many years. Finally, take this knowledge and share it with your customers. They will think you know what you are talking about (and they'll be right), because you've done your homework and are willing to educate them about your your subject matter and how it applies to them.

It takes a lot of work to become knowledgeable about a particular topic. David Meerman Scott, a colleague of mine, explains this well in a recent blog post of his "The Secret to Getting 50,000 Followers on Twitter". So do your research, become educated, apply this to your profession, then freely educate your customers.

Why would a customer go anywhere else after this type of experience? Greg Jameson can be reached at www.GregJameson.com or www.WebStoresLtd.com.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

2011-02-21T11:46:00.000-08:00

I recently had a water pipe break in my basement due to freezing. It made a huge mess, covering the basement floor in about 2 inches of water. Because the water was “clean” as opposed to sewage, the insurance company decided that they should restore the carpet and pad (I truly believe they are in bed with Service Master). The cost: about $3000. The fact that they could have replaced the entire carpet for $2000 seemed irrelevant to them. This doesn’t make economic sense - just because it was technically possible to dry the carpet and then re-install it, didn’t mean that they should. But it gets better…

In the closet below the leak were a large number of photo albums, some board games, and stuffed animals. When we put together the list of damaged goods, we told the insurance company that the stuffed animals were worth about $5 each. Rather than simply paying us $5, they insisted upon getting them professionally cleaned and restored!!! (My kids are now grown and I don’t even want the stuffed animals – when they come back from the cleaners I am just going to get rid of them). Sure, it might be possible to restore them, but why pay this money to the restoration company just because it is technically possible? Is anyone listening to the customer (me in this case?).

The one thing that got damaged that the insurance company refuses to pay for, other than the cost of the albums themselves, is the photos. I have a friend who restores old damaged photos – why doesn’t the insurance company have a preferred provider of these services and pay to restore the only thing I really care about – the photos – and just make a decision on the other items based on value rather than trying to appease their service providers. After all, I am the customer and one who pays my premiums each month.

OK, enough ranting. What does this have to do with your online business? Quite simply, give your customers what they want, not what you want to sell them. Don’t use your website as a way to dispose of excess inventory – use it as a way to promote your best-selling items. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!

What is the Internet?

2011-02-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

I was watching this amusing video of Brian Gumbel and Katie Couric from 1994 asking this question: What is the Internet? Today, we might find this humorous as it seems like an obvious question. But the answer is not simple. The reason is that the Internet is constantly changing. The Internet is no longer just about having a website. Social media, blogs, videos, directories, ads, coupons and even mobile devices all contribute to your Internet footprint. And all must be managed to maximize your presence on the web.

I recently heard that 99 percent of all websites have a page rank of zero. The reason is that your typical website looks like this:

There is nothing to connect this site to the rest of the Internet. If your website is going to be successful, you MUST add some roots to this plant. These roots are the way that other people find you. There are lots of ways to do this, but this diagram shows you some of the more common methods including content, social media, videos, and email.

This is a good start, and may start to get you found, but simply having these in place is still not enough. Simply creating a fan page for example for the sake of “Well, everyone else is doing it,” isn’t going to land you results. You need to work each of these channels just like you do other aspects of your business. The way you do this is to continually post to each of these roots. Adding 1 or 2 new videos per month to your YouTube channel can provide greater exposure. Blogging weekly (or more), posting to your Facebook fan page 3 or 4 times per week, and tweeting 2 or 3 times per day are necessary to really grow the roots or foundation of your website. Now we have a diagram that looks like this:

Combined with testimonials and word of mouth, you should now start to see sales as a result of your efforts. But it is not enough to know what you need to do – you must take action. 94% of people who try social media marketing fail. The problem most people have is time. You may do this sporadically, but consistency is what wins the Internet marketing game.

Webstores Ltd can help! If you want to get results on the Internet but don’t have the time to do this type of marketing yourself, Webstores can do this for you, and all for a very reasonable investment. Call toll free 877-924-1414 to get started!

Email subject lines

2011-02-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

In personal contacts with one another, we all like to hear the sound of our name - it makes us feel special. But do people like to see there names in an email or an email subject line? Adding the person's name to an email subject line or to the body of the email creates an element of personalization. Does this make it more likely that you will open an email, or does this make it look like spam and you delete it without looking at it?

Research shows that personalized emails have a higher open rate, but this topic is highly debated - including at our office. Will adding a person's name to an email backfire and produce less results? Please take a moment to fill out the poll on the right and voice your opinion in the comments.

Using your internet footprint to get more sales

2011-02-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

The internet is no longer about just having a website! It is a combination of activities and strategies that define your success in the online marketplace.

Certainly this still includes your website and getting it found by the search engines like Google. But it also includes social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also includes any banner ads or adword programs you may run, affiliate marketing you participate in, press releases, coupon sites, and YouTube videos. It also includes blog posts – both those that you have written and those that you respond to on other people’s blogs. Email newsletters remain a viable component of internet marketing, as does being found on industry-specific directory sites. And the list continues to expand – mobile sites, Google places, foursquare and more.

You can’t afford to not take advantage of the digital marketing age or just limit yourself to one tool. But this is obviously overwhelming to many business owners. You may not have the time or expertise to do all of this. Which of these can actually make a difference to your sales? How can you manage all of these for maximum exposure with minimum effort on your part?

Stay tuned!

Free Lunch and Green Industry Internet Seminar

2011-01-19T15:54:00.001-08:00

The Colorado Pro Green Expo is coming back to Denver and Greg Jameson will be presenting his highly acclaimed "Grow Your Online Sales" seminar at the Denver Hilton Garden Inn, Weds. Feb. 9th from 12:00 noon to 1:30 pm. come join us for lunch and learn about:

Facebook
YouTube
Online Shopping carts
and more!

You must RSVP Click here to register!

Your website is not a place to sell unwanted merchandise...

2011-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

...unless you are a pawn shop. Your website needs to be the focal point of your business, online and off. It is a place where you want to put your best foot forward and really showcase who you are and what you have to offer. Know your customer and their needs, then sell them the stuff they want.

All too often I see business owners think that if an item isn’t welling well in the physical store, they can unload that item on the Internet. It might be OK to do this on eBay, but doing this on your own online webstore is a bad idea. Items that sell well in your physical store are the items you want to list on your online webstore. If an item really isn’t selling at all, maybe you should give it away as an incentive, rather than trying to push items someone doesn’t want.

Let’s say you a garden center and you have an excess inventory of Poinsettias after Christmas. No one wants to buy them, so don’t put these on your home page and try to push them. Instead, give them away and make your customers feel like they got a bargain by purchasing something else. No one is looking for Poinsettias in January, but they may be looking for roses by Valentines day.
So put together a great page about roses. Add lots of custom content about roses, so the search engines will find you. Talk about roses in your blog, on your Facebook business page, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn groups. Make a video and post it on YouTube and Vimeo – discuss the origin of roses and how they came to be a symbol of love. Go beyond the standard description that everyone else uses – your customers may already know the basics about rose plants (but they may not, so include the standard description as well, just add your own information so you are giving them details they can’t find elsewhere). Talk about how there was a Spring Festival in the Middle Ages where young couples met in the garden to listen to love poetry and romantic music, then afterwards paired off to stroll through the trees and flowers. Explain why if roses were symbolic of love and romance, how come there are thorns? Give your customers a reason to view your information rather than someone else’s – because you are giving them content they can’t find anywhere else. Mention how daises, violets and bachelor buttons are also considered romantic and cross-sell your rose plants with these other flowers.

So back to the poinsettias – how do we move this unwanted merchandise? Well, poinsettias are also a symbol of love – the red of the traditional poinsettia symbolizes the blood of Jesus, and the central seeds resemble the crown of thorns he wore upon the cross. Poinsettias are a symbol of God's love for us. Because we love having you as a customer, we will give you a poinsettia for free when you purchase our roses at regular price!

Get the idea? Provide your customers what they are looking for, not the stuff you don’t want. Instead, figure out how to tie that back in to what they are looking for and offer it as an incentive. This is much more effective for growing your online sales.

Greg Jameson is now on Speaker Wiki

2011-01-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

Greg Jameson
Greg Jameson Reviews
powered by Speaker Wiki

Which works better?

2011-01-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

Which works better? Learn this and more at my presentation "Turning Website Visitors into customers" during the Ecommerce Extrvaganza January 13th at 3:00pm MST.

Special promotion for my blog readers: Use the promotional code "Invited" and you can attend for FREE! Click on the image above or go to http://www.ecomectra2011.com

2011-01-12T06:33:00.001-08:00

Overcoming Negative Online Reviews

2010-12-21T07:44:00.000-08:00

***Special Guest Blog ***

Do any of these statements apply to your business?

You are not gathering customer testimonials in a consistent or systemized way.
You are not leveraging the social proof of your existing customers in order to grow your business.
You do not have a strategy for handling your online reputation and are not prepared to counteract negative comments.
You are not leveraging mobile search.

If any of these are true then this you should continue reading.

Are you prepared to handle an online negative commenting and reviews attack?

It is not unusual to have a customer that is not happy with the service provided by a business. Most will not ever say anything but occasionally there will be those that feel they need to “warn” others about your poor service or bad product experience.

What if you received the message: “We will spend 25 million dollars to ruin your business name if you do not comply”?

Imagine the challenge of a threat of having to give in to someone who wants something from your business and will go to great lengths to coerce you to comply.

I was recently privy to just such a situation. It was an unusually brutal online attack by an individual trying to force a business to capitulate to their requests. The attack was massive and fierce. In fact it was so cleverly devised that the customers of the business being attacked were left with the idea that the business was either no longer reputable or not even in business any more.

The attack came from online. It used social media, video, email, cleverly devised surveys, etc. The business being attacked which has been around for more than 45 years was not ready to deal with this. They were left scrambling trying to fight its way through this digital online barrage. In fact they are still fighting the battle today. They had no digital marketing or reputation strategy to be ready for such an attack.

Now this is a worst case scenario. I hope you will never experience anything that extreme in your business. However it does beg the questions, “What is my online reputation strategy or How do I overcome a negative online attack?”

Online the term “testimonials” has been replaced with the word “reviews” or comments. A small local business should have a system in place to leverage the variety of options to collect these reviews. The reason for the use of the term reviews is primarily because of restaurants and entertainment venues that depend on foot traffic.

It is also a fact that testimonials on your website are less effective than testimonials (reviews) on a third party site.

Search engines like Google are now including reviews as a part of their search algorithms. So now search rankings are even being impacted by online reviews. How are you doing compared to your competition?

Some things to consider:

For businesses dependent on foot traffic you should be leveraging check in mobile services like Foursquare and Facebook Places.
Build processes and scripting for you or your staff to request reviews from happy customers.
Provide a common place where you can send your customers so they can easily give you the review. (Like a special place on your website)

Should you want more information on how to manage online reviews please request my special report “Overcoming Negative Online Reviews, How to survive a digital attack” by emailing me at peter@dmdude.com. You can also sign up for my weekly digital marketing tips at www.dmdude.com.

Peter Brissette

Digital Marketing Dude

Mark Your Calendars Now!

2010-12-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a great way to kick off the New Year for your business! On January 13-14, 2011, WebStores Ltd will be hosting an event called the "Ecommerce Extravaganza!" This will be 2 full days learning by some of the world’s top experts on all aspects of eBusiness from online marketing to sales and order fulfillment.

This event is different than anything you have ever attended. It is going to be a combination live event and a virtual event. In order to get all the industry experts in one place, we will be using a new webinar software allows each of the presenters to broadcast from their own location. Attendees will be able to see the presenter as well as any slides they are using for their presentation. As opposed to seeing only the powerpoint, this makes for a more exciting event when the viewers can also see the person giving the speech.

For those in the Denver area, the event will also be a live event - that is, many of the presenters will also be presenting to the attendees in a traditional seminar format. The location is still to be determined. It is your choice as to how to attend the "Ecommerce Extravaganza!" - by joining us for the live seminar or signing up to view the webinar on your computer. Either way, this event promises to deliver an incredible amount of information for any online business.

Day-long or multiple day courses like this often cost $500 per day to attend. And then, the course may only be taught by one person. We are breaking ground once again by combining a number of the top experts at a single event.

http://webstoresltd.com/ecom-extra/signup.htm

Alert! Alert! Alert! Incoming!!!!!!!

2010-12-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

I'm going to see the Blue Man Group in concert tonight. What does this have to do with Internet marketing? We'll, I heard about this concert through an alert that gets sent to my email. Alerts, such as those available from Google are a great way to keep track of any topic you want, including seeing what others are saying about you. Once you have an alert set up, whenever you, or your product or service have been mentioned anywhere on the internet, whether through a blog, a press release, or a new web page, Google will let you know. As a marketer, this is invaluable - you can then respond almost in real time.

Let's say for example that I have Google alert me whenever "Greg Jameson" is mentioned (which in fact, I do). If someone attended a speech that I gave and really liked it, I could then go to their blog and post a comment thanking them. On the other hand, if they didn't like it, I could post a rebuttal or at least engage in a conversation with them. This is a great way to interact with your customers and to address any negative comments that are being made (as well as responding to positive ones).

It's interesting to me that I have mentioned HubSpot and Brian Halligan in my two previous blog posts and did not get a response from him or his company. A Google alert should have let him know that I was talking about him. Now I didn't totally blast him, but not responding to negative publicity can come back to bite if you don't address it quickly. Some well known examples include Dell (who does use social media to manage their reputation), and Sony (who lost market share after negative publicity about the PS3 on YouTube). If you want to control your brand, you MUST monitor what is being said about you.

Setting up a Google alert is easy - just go to alerts.google.com. From there you will be able to specify the words you are interested in, how often you want to receive the alerts, and whether the alerts should be sent to your email or an RSS feed.

Now to really monitor what is being said about you and your brand, you want to see what is being said about you in the social media world as well - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You can set up an alert to monitor these sources at www.SocialMention.com. Employers for example may find this invaluable if they have unhappy employees that are venting on Facebook.

Using a combination of Google Alerts and Social Mention, you can always be aware of what anyone is saying about you (or your competitors) at any time. Setting this up does not require a lot of effort or a technical person - its easy. Do it now so you can start managing your reputation.

A Failing Grade

2010-12-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Many web design professionals, myself included, use a number of tools to help evaluate a potential customer's website to show them areas where they can improve, as well as things they are doing right. One of the more popular tools for doing this is Hubspot's website.grader.com But humans, not software, are still the best judge of what makes a good website. In some cases, website grader does not do an accurate job, especially with database-driven websites.

For example, I recently evaluated a website that this software gave a grade of 59 (out of 100). That in or of itself isn't so bad, but the reasons it gave for down-grading the site included the following:

No blog (there is in fact a blog associated with this website and it even displays the latest posts through RSS on the home page)
Readability: undetermined (I assume because this is a database-driven site and unlike Google, website grader can't see the content)
Permanent re-direct not found (there is in fact a 301 redirect that ties the domain and the www.domain together)
Twitter grade: no twitter account found (there is one, by the same name as the website)
Conversion form not found: (in fact, there are 3)
Google page rank: 4
Alexa on the other hand puts this same site in the top 11% of all websites, and Google shows 455 indexed pages, and 934 inbound links. When you look at the site (as a human), not only do you see these issues, but the site itself looks visually appealing. I would give the site at least a B.

Contrast this to another site I evaluated. Website grader gives this site a 83. When I do a manual evaluation of this site, I see absolutely nothing that would make me want to do business with this company. I would grade this site as a C-. So why the discrepancy? Here is what website grader says about this second site:

Blog analysis: blog not found (just like the other site)
Readability: secondary/high school
Twitter grade: no twitter account found
Conversion form: 1 found
Google page rank: 2
Alexa rank: top 37%
Inbound links: 926 (fewer than the site above)

Obviously, this isn't just an issue with HubSpot's website grader. It's a problem with relying on software to do the job of a human. So go ahead and use these types of tools, but don't figure that they give you the final answer. Remember that your site is meant for human customers, not some robot or software code.

Note: I have purposefully not provided the names of the websites above to protect their owners, but if someone from HubSpot contacts me I will be happy to show them.

This advice is just plain wrong!

2010-12-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

Most people selling on the Internet don’t get it. Even authors like Brian Halligan and
Dharmesh Shah in “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” state that people should be spending 80% of their efforts getting more visitors to their sites and only 20% of their efforts trying to convert visitors into customers. This advice is just plain wrong!

Everyone thinks that if they can just get thousands of visitors to their website that this will make them successful. But you are in business to make money, not see how many visitors you can get to your website, how many followers you can collect on Twitter, or how many fans like you on Facebook. Your goal is to make a sale! And once someone has expressed an interest in you by doing one of these things, you absolutely MUST spend your energy into getting them to become a customer.

Jim Palmer, in “Stick Like Glue”, states that “It’s far easier, and much more cost effective, to keep the customers you have rather than trying to attract new ones.” I contend that it is also more profitable to convert your current visitors and leads into customers than it is to continually work on getting more visitors.

Almost all of the advice available is related to marketing – getting more visitors to your site. There is also information about testing, utilizing analytics and understanding your conversion rates – all important topics, but not much is written about HOW to turn a visitor into a customer once they get to your page. Watch this video to learn more...

What Is IRS 6050W?

2010-11-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

Under the new legislation, PayPal will be required to report to the IRS the total payment volume received by PayPal customers in the US who:

Receive more than $20,000 in gross payment volume in a single year, AND
Receive 200 or more payments in a single year.

The IRS changes will apply to all payment providers, including PayPal. They will take effect on January 1, 2011, with the first reports going to the IRS in early 2012.

If you meet the stated thresholds, you will be required to verify your identity by adding a SSN/TIN/EIN to your existing PayPal account. If you are currently using a Personal or Premier account, you will be required to upgrade to a Business account.

Merchants who receive over $20,000 in gross payment volume AND receive 200 or more payments in a calendar year will receive Form 1099-K electronically or by mail. In other words, you can no longer hide PayPal income from the IRS.

BestBuy Return Policies

2010-11-28T19:45:00.000-08:00

This was sent to me via email - I usually don't post negative comments about other companies, but their is a lesson to be learned here as it applies to your business. If you run an online store, take heed:

If you purchase something from Wal-Mart, Sears, etc. And you return the item with the receipt, they will give you your money back if you paid cash, or credit your account if paid by plastic.

Well, I purchased a GPS for my car:
a Tom Tom XL.S from 'Best Buy'. They have a policy that it must be returned within 14 days for a refund!

So after 4 days I returned it in the original box with all the items in the box, with paper work and cords all wrapped in the plastic. Just as I received it, including the receipt. I explained to the lady at the return desk I did not like the way it couldn't find store names. The lady at the refund desk said, there is a 15% restock fee, for items returned. I said no one told me that.
I asked how much would that be. She said it goes by the price of the item.
It will be $45 for you.
I said, all you're going to do is walk over and place it back on the shelf then charge me $45 of my money for restocking? She said that's the store policy.
I said if more people were aware of it they would not buy anything here! If I bought a $2000 computer or TV and returned it I would be charged $300 restock fee? She said yes. 15%.

I said OK, just give me my money minus the restock fee.

She said, since the item is over $200 dollars, she can't give me my money back!

Corporate has to and they will mail you a check in 7 to ten days.! I said 'WHAT?'

It's my money! I paid in cash!
I want to buy a different brand..
Now I have to wait 7 to 10 days.
She said well, our policy is on the back of your receipt.

I said, do you read the front or back of your receipt? She said well, the front! I said so do I. I want to talk to the Manager!

So the manager comes over, I explained everything to him, and he said, well, sir they should have told you about the policy when you got the item. I said, no one has ever told me about the check refund or restock fee when I bought items from computers to TVs from Best Buy. The only thing they ever discussed was the worthless extended warranty program.
He said, well, I can give you corporate phone number.

I called corporate. The guy said, well, I'm not supposed to do this but I can give you a 45 dollar gift card and you can use it at Best Buy.
I told him if I bought something and returned it, you would charge me a restock fee on the item and then send me a check for the remaining 3 dollars.
You can keep your gift card, I'm never shopping in Best Buy ever again, and if I'd been smart, I would have charged the whole thing on my credit card! Then I would have cancelled the transaction.

I would have gotten all my money back including your stupid fees! He didn't say a word!

I informed him that I was going to e-mail my friends and give them a heads-up on the store's policy, as they don't tell you about all the little caveats.

So please pass this on. It may save your friends from having a bad experience of shopping at Best Buy
It's true! Read it for yourself!!
Best Buys return policy

Are You Ready for the Holidays?

2010-11-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is officially starting and many retailers won't have time to work on their websites until after the new year. Incredible as it may seem, I've actually had customers turn off their websites during this time of the year! Folks, now is the time to make online sales as well as in-store sales. This coming Monday (the Monday after Black Friday) has become known as Cyber Monday, because shoppers that can't find what they want in the stores then turn to the Internet.

So get busy, create some specials and let your customers know about them.

This is also a good time of the year to update your website or finally add a shopping cart. Why? Because while retailers are busy, web designers may have time to build out your site so that after the Holidays are over, you are ready to launch a new look, starting the New Year off without any slow down. Now that is something to be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Don’t believe the hype!

2010-11-12T06:56:00.000-08:00

Internet sales are hard. Much harder than selling product offline. Perhaps that is why 94% of all sales still occur in brick and mortar stores. Amazon is the exception - most ecommerce websites are struggling. With online sales you have many obstacles to overcome:
-    the customer can’t physically touch your product
-    the customer has to wait to get the product
-    the customer has to pay you first
-    shipping costs can be high
-    concerns over privacy
-    concerns over credit card security
-    return policies and costs
-    and more!

Maybe that is why most customers research products online and still shop offline. Yes, you can make money online, but the internet isn’t a very good “get-rich-quick” scheme – it takes work and patience. You need an edge. This video shows you how you can increase your odds of closing a sale.

Amazon's Dirty Little Secret

2010-11-08T12:07:00.000-08:00

When you do a search for products that you sell, you probably are listed higher than Amazon for those keywords. But Amazon sells more online than you do. How do I know that? Because Amazon sells more than anyone else does online. And they have a secret as to how they do this, which I am going to share with you.

One of the most common complaints I hear from website owners is not that they aren’t getting any traffic, but rather, that they aren’t getting any sales! But when I go to look at their websites, I almost always find the same thing: nothing that makes me want to buy!

You need to give your visitors enough information that they can make an informed buying decision. People come to the Internet looking for information, so give it to them! Web pages do not have physical limits like print ads do, and studies have shown that the more information you give someone, the more likely they are to buy! Since your customers can’t physically see or feel the product, the information you provide is critical if you are going to make a sale. One more time: Give your visitors all the information they need to buy from you – you are the salesperson, and your web page is the only way you have to communicate with this virtual customer – use the space to sell them!

What exactly does this mean? Well, you need to give them more than one photo of your product. Show the product from all sides, various angles, close-up and far away. In fact, add a video to show how the product works. Don’t just use the manufacturer’s description of the product – as the expert who is selling the product, provide your customers with your own insights and observations. TigerDirect.com does a fantastic job of this – every product has multiple tabs as shown below:

Notice that they also have 20 different images of the same product.

I recently did a web site review for a customer. This was a typical product page:

My recommendation was not that they just add a little more text, but a whole bunch of text that gives exact product dimensions, specifications, and a description that really appeals to the buyer’s emotions. It should look more like this:

Now for Amazon’s dirty little secret: let your customers sell each other! Include product reviews with every item that you sell. Customers trust other customers before they trust the manufacturer or the salesperson, and Amazon uses this to their advantage. Most shoppers will visit Amazon before they visit other sites, simply to read their product reviews. Amazon also does a great job of cross-selling (would you like cheese with those crackers?). Both of these things are critical to your success in selling online.

Here is a quick review of how to sell products on your website:
1.    Provide detailed descriptions that appeal to your customer’s emotions
2.    Include multiple images of the product from various angles
3.    Include complete specifications and dimensions
4.    Add customer reviews and testimonials
5.    Cross-sell with other related products

Understanding the New Facebook Groups

2010-11-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced a re-vamping of the "groups" feature, in part because people were not using the Friend's "Lists". The press releases seemed to indicate this would now be the preferred method of aggregating your friends based on how you wanted them to view posts. Thus, if you wanted to post that you were pregnant, but you didn't want your boss to find out, you would simply post to the group, not your wall.

So I decided to give this a try. Well, this was NOT what I expected! I created a group called "high school classmates" and set the privacy settings to "secret". I then proceeded to add about 140 of my friends into this group. Every single one of them was notified about this group via email and they could all see that I had added each of them. I thought I was creating a secret group that would simply allow me to combine my friends - wrong!

Fortunately, I did this before I created a group called "Facebook Stalkers who I am friends with but really don't want them to see what I am posting". Or even a group of various business friends. If you want your friends to remain anonymous, groups are not the answer. To do this, you should still use "Friend Lists" and set your privacy settings accordingly. To create and customize your own Friend Lists, please follow these steps:

Go to the Friends page. Click the Account drop-down at the top of any page, and then click on "Edit Friends."
Click the Create New List button at the top of the page to create a new list.

You can use friend lists to create different privacy levels for different groups of your friends. This allows you to selectively open more of your profile to the people closest to you. When you edit your privacy settings, clicking "Customize" for any setting will open a Custom Privacy pop up dialogue. Under "Make this open to," select "Specific People" from the drop-down menu and enter the name of the Friend List with whom you’d like to share the content. But this is not a way to separate some wall posts from others - it's all or nothing based on the list.

The good news is that creating a Group did have some positive side effects:

I got lots and lots of thank you's for putting the group together (even though this was unintended)
Many friends have now re-connected with other high school friends as a result.
I have also found other high school classmates whom I've been out-of-touch with.

So go ahead, combine your friends into groups like "classmates", "family", "co-workers" or whatever, just be aware that even "secret" groups are not so secret. And always remember that anything you post on the Internet, regardless of privacy settings, is stored forever in some database - Big Brother IS watching!

Why static pages are bad

2010-10-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

Clean, hand-coded HTML pages with short URL’s are a must in order for people as well as search engines to find and index your web pages, right? Wrong! This is another myth propagated by the SEO community, and I can prove it.

Do you think that Amazon or eBay hand-codes every page on their websites? Of course not. And their url strings are not pretty either. They usually contain variables that point to a record in their data page, as seen with a “?” and a “=” sign in the url. Yet both sites are among the mostly highly indexed sites on the Internet. So why do SEO companies insist that short, pretty url’s are the only way to get a page indexed? (Hint: they want your money.)

SEO “experts” call these cryptic or unfriendly URL’s and insist that search engines have problems with them. This isn’t true. Humans may have problems with long URL’s, but machines simply don’t care. Here is the word directly from Google:

The other thing that these same SEO “experts” will tell you is that clean HTML helps with search engine placement. In other words, having extra lines and proper indenting will help you. Really? This may help humans to read your code, but it does nothing for the search engines. Search engines employ software robots or “bots” to spider your web pages, not humans. And the software doesn’t care if your code looks pretty. In fact, you may want to use an html scrambler program to make your code less readable by humans, just to keep prying eyes off your work and protect your source code. Try this: go to Amazon.com and select a product, then right click and do a “View Source” for that page. On the page I selected, the tag doesn’t start until line 70. Then there are multiple blank lines throughout the code, which is common with dynamically generated pages. The tag doesn’t start until line 3266. You see, the software that analyzes these pages just scans for content, it doesn’t grade the site based on whether you are following recommended coding practices.

Now software isn’t always as smart as humans are. I frequently run a number of diagnostic programs against various websites to insure that they are performing optimally, and many of these programs do in fact have problems with dynamically generated pages. Fortunately, those programs are not the same ones that Google uses.

I have a much smaller website than Amazon, but my dynamically generated site still has 342 pages indexed with Google. This is accomplished using inbound links to the site, of which there are 2,583. That puts my website in the top 11% of all web sites on the Internet. No, it isn’t Amazon, but that isn’t bad for a small company.

But here is the real down-side to static pages: The menu must be included as part of the page. If I want to add a new topic to my menu, that new topic would not show up on any of my previously created pages, unless I go back and re-build every one of those pages to include the new menu items. It is much more efficient to build the menu dynamically every time a page is retrieved than it is to keep it as part of some static source code, just because you think that helps with internal link building.

Static web pages are bad. Search engines can in fact find pages that are built dynamically. Dynamic content that is created from records in a database, even with long, ugly URL strings are much easier to maintain. If you need a short URL because of size limitations (such as for paid advertising campaigns that limit your URL to 32 characters), try using a service like TinyURL.com. Dynamic content that can be updated frequently wins every time. Just ask Amazon. Or eBay.

Now go out and build some inbound links to your site and stop trying to analyze your code – leave that to the robots.

SEO is a Waste of Time

2010-10-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading articles claiming that “SEO is Dead”. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of determining what it takes to get your website listed highly with sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But the problem is, these sites are not that effective at driving traffic to your website, so getting listed on page one often takes considerably more effort than its worth. SEO may not be dead, but it is a waster of time. Here is the reality:

Google remains the number one search engine, with about a 52% share of all internet searches. The number two search engine is neither Yahoo or Bing, but YouTube! YouTube accounts for about 18% of searches, and since YouTube is owned by Google, this brings Google’s total to about 70% of the search industry. This is what I refer to as the “SEO Trap”.

This does NOT mean that 70% of the traffic comes from searches, only that 70% of search traffic comes from Google or YouTube. While Google still dominates search, the primary way that people are finding out about new websites is NOT through search engines. Today, only about 25 percent of traffic comes to the average website from search engines. The primary way people discover websites is through word-of-mouth. This can take the form of emails, links from other sites, YouTube videos, and most noticeably, Social Networking sites like Facebook.

What is much more relevant than getting on the first page of Google for some obscure search term, is to work on the total “Findability” of your website. Since people are using numerous ways to get to websites, you must expand your total footprint across the Internet so that you can be easily found on any and all of them. It is far easier to drive traffic to your website from Facebook and YouTube than it is to get on page one of Google. And since Facebook now drives more traffic to other websites than Google does, it is also more productive.

Here’s the kicker: this works just like the chicken or the egg theory. Once you have increased your “findability” across every avenue of the Internet, you will start becoming popular. And after you have become popular, then Google just may put you on page one after all.

A quick example: I recently posted a YouTube video for a client on “ironwood figurines”. Within 24 hours that video was listed on page one of Google (yes, it is easier to do this with YouTube than with SEO). And now that company’s website is also listed on page one of Google for the search term “ironwood figurines”. So don’t waste your time with SEO – focus on becoming popular on social network sites and drive your traffic from there.

YouTube Marketing

2010-10-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

A significant trend over the past few years has been the massive growth of the online video sharing platform YouTube. But what is really interesting is how consumers are now using YouTube.

YouTube has shed its reputation of being strictly an entertainment site. Sure, people still tune in to see popular videos such as laughing babies or pop music, but recent data shows consumers are also turning to YouTube for how-to information, providing new opportunities for marketing and business.

For example, my son recently did his Eagle Scout project – installing new carpet squares in a church. Neither he nor any of the other scouts had ever installed carpet squares, so he went to YouTube and found a series of videos on how to do this. He ended up purchasing the carpet from the company that had provided the instructional video. This is not an isolated incident – it is a means by which many consumers are now looking for information, as evidenced by the fact that YouTube has become the second most popular search engine after its parent, Google.

A great feature of YouTube is the ability to create customized “channels” to which viewers can subscribe. Posting relevant content on these channels can make an immediate impact on your search engine placement. For example, I created a new channel for a customer last week that sells ironwood figurines. I posted a video on their channel about this, and within 24 hours, that video was on the first page of Google. Now the company that sells those ironwood figurines (Amer-i-Mex.com) also has a page one listing on Google, which they did not have prior to this video. Marketing your products and services using YouTube by providing instructional information that consumers are looking for can be very powerful.

On Monday October 18th, WebStores Ltd will be hosting a webinar at 12:00 noon MST. This free webinar will show you how you maximixe your use of YouTube for your business. To reserve your spot go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/873730713. Or simply visit us on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/WebStoresLtd.

Facebook Marketing

2010-10-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

The movie, “The Social Network” doesn’t portray Facebook or its founders in a very positive light. It seems as though Facebook exists in spite of itself. But a movie about a website? There is no mistaking the fact that Facebook is more than just another website – it is a cultural phenomenon. This was made even more clear when I went to Walmart last night and saw on the bottom of my receipt a “Like Us on Facebook” logo.

Clearly, large companies are taking Facebook seriously. This is not just a place to play Farmville or for college kids to hang out and socialize anymore – it is a mainstream avenue for business. With 400 million users, over half of which log onto the site every day, its no wonder that even Google has its own Facebook Fan Page. And since Facebook now sends more traffic to other websites than Google, it’s easy to see why businesses are focusing a lot effort at Facebook. Studies now show that 1 in 2 Americans are now on Facebook (and my guess is that those who aren’t live with someone who is and use their account to find out about their family and friends). We are now a nation of Facebook users.

The fact is, it used to be that you had to have a website for customers to find you. Today, you not only have to have your own website, you have to have a Facebook Fan page. But the problem is, most businesses are not very good at leveraging their fan pages into bottom line results. Some companies continue to try to use personal profiles as their corporate image (which Facebook does not permit), while most simply let customers land on their “wall”, making their page look exactly like everyone else.

An effective Facebook strategy requires that businesses provide a reason for customers to connect with them. The number one reason that people “Like” a brand on Facebook is to get exclusive offers and deals that aren’t available anywhere else. But in order for this to work, the company has to be very proactive – simply putting up a Facebook page because everyone else is doing it won’t produce results. You need to create a custom fan page that really engages your audience – perhaps with a unique application. You need to post specials on a weekly basis, and make sure these are exclusive to your Facebook fans. You need to provide customer support and interact with your customers. You need to provide fresh relevant content for your customers to consume. And you need to push out messages to your fan base with the “Send Message” feature.

On Monday October 11th, WebStores Ltd will be hosting a webinar at 12:00 noon MST. This free webinar will show you how you can not just increase the number of fans your company has, but to actually grow your business using Facebook. To reserve your spot go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/775188936. Or simply visit us on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/WebStoresLtd.

Recipe for a Quick Product Video

2010-09-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

Simple video for a still product. Can be uploaded to YouTube and then embedded on the product pages of your website.
Skill level: beginner

Prep Time:
30 Min

Production Time:
30 Min

Ready In:
1 Hr

Yield:
(1) 2 minute video

Ingredients
•    1digital camera, any make
•    1 Royalty Free music file (download from http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/)
•    Windows Movie Maker program (included with Windows)
•    1 product to photograph
•    1 backdrop, contrasting color to product
•    1 tripod (optional, but recommended)

Directions
1.    Set up product to be photographed on a table in front of backdrop
2.    Attach camera to tripod, making sure there is adequate lighting
3.    Take 6-12 static images of the same product, including close-ups and various angles
4.    Copy the images from the camera to your computer
5.    Open Windows Movie Maker (Start > Run C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\moviemk.exe)
6.    Import Pictures. Locate the photos you just copied and import into Movie Maker.
7.    Go to “Storyboard” and drag each picture onto the storyboard.
8.    Go to “View Video Transitions” and drag the desired transition onto the storyboard BETWEEN each photo.
9.    RIGHT click on the star in the lower left of each photo and select “video effects”. Choose either “ease-in” or “ease-out” and select add. Alternate for each photo.
10.    From the left menu, choose “import audio or music”.
11.    Click on “Show timeline”.
12.    Drag the imported music file into the timeline.
13.    Click on “Make Titles or Credits”. Choose “Add Title on the Selected Clip” and enter your text in the box provided.
14.    Click on “Change the title animation and choose the style desired.
15.    Click on “Done. Add Title to Movie”.
16.    Click on the triangular “Play” button in the preview pane.
17.    Continue to edit movie as desired.
18.    When satisfied, select “File – Save Movie File” and follow the prompts.

For Best Results…
•    Make sure you describe how the product can be useful to your customer. If you want people to view your video, make sure it is informational, not a blatant commercial. Add humor if appropriate.
•    If possible, demonstrate how the product is used. Show various features in use. Video clips as well as still images may be used.
•    Keep the video to under 2 minutes.
•    Use the title feature to display your website and phone number in the movie.
•    Once the video has been uploaded to YouTube, tell everyone about it! Enjoy!

Does ecommerce work for everyone?

2010-09-22T16:50:00.001-07:00

Today all organizations, from the most modern to the most traditional, must have at least a Web presence. Like it or not, the Internet is a fact of life for competitive business in the future. But Businesses of all sizes are told that any company not investing in ecommerce will be left behind. Is this true? Just because an organization adopts ecommerce technology does not insure success. I create shopping cart software for a living, so the following information may surprise you.

I’ve worked with a number of companies that simply are not in a position to sell products on the Internet, even with the most basic of shopping carts. For whatever reasons, from technical know-how to the ability to ship certain types of products, some businesses may find that using the Internet to drive traffic to the bricks and mortar store is a better solution than trying to sell products online. A meat-packing facility, pet food store, car dealer or tree nursery are examples. The relative lack of tactile and social interaction during an online purchase is a major challenge facing e-tailers. So even though Internet sales are growing faster than offline sales, ecommerce still accounts for less than offline sales. But if ecommerce can increase your total sales by 10 or 20 percent, it may still be a critical factor in making your business profitable.

A mixed strategy that allows people to find you on the web, get information about products, and print coupons that can be used in your store may be the right approach for your company. Or maybe selling just gift cards online, or perhaps only one or two key items will work best on your website. You can also sell products on eBay and Amazon without having a shopping cart on your website. Or perhaps you do need a full-blown shopping cart to sell the hundreds of unique products that you offer.

The most important reason for businesses to have an online presence is to cultivate relationships with consumers. As a result, you may not even need a website, if you have a strong enough presence in various online channels like Facebook, YouTube, and coupon sites. The reality is that every business is different. Which of these strategies is most effective and which of them can be more profitable for your business? In order to determine what is the most effective web strategy for your company, I recommend having a professional website evaluation done for your company. If you already have a website, this provides a good starting point, but a current website is not necessary to create an evaluation for your business. Typically a comprehensive manual evaluation (done by people, not just software) will range from $100 to $500 or more. However, for the month of October, WebStoresLtd.com is offering this service free of charge to readers of this article. Call 877-924-1414 for details.

Grow Your Online Sales

2010-09-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

Plants require all of the following to be healthy: soil, water, air, light, and fertilizer. Certainly, it is possible for a plant to exist without one of these, but only when all of these are provided does a plant really flourish. The same is true for online businesses. Let’s examine the corresponding elements on the Internet.

Soil: The foundation of any online business is a website. It may be possible to run an online business without a website using eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and other sites to sell products for you, but a website allows you to capture emails, post information about your company, brand yourself, and highlight relevant information about products and services. Its makes you credible and allows you to tell customers why they should do business with you.

Water: Incoming links feed visitors to your website. These can be accomplished using blogs, articles, coupons, directories, press releases and even advertising. The more incoming links you have, the more popular you become, so this also benefits your search engine results. A steady flow of links coming into your website is necessary for growth.

Air: Social media sites like Facebook are like air to your online presence. Both air and water contain the same elements (oxygen and hydrogen), so there is an overlap here as well – using social media to provide links and drive traffic to your website. But Facebook and other social media sites also allow you to breathe new life into your marketing efforts. With Facebook driving more traffic to other websites than Google, it is critical to your overall marketing success that you create a fan page and fully embrace social media as a way to interact with customers.

Light: Video sharing sites like YouTube provide the mechanism for you to grow your marketing efforts by providing how-to information, product demonstrations, testimonials and reviews. YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the Internet, with millions of people looking for information. By embedding these videos back on your own website, the effect can be a rapid generation of customers, just like light causes a rapid generation of plant cells known as photosynthesis.

Fertilizer: Email newsletters, tips, coupons, specials, and reminders can add critical food for growth to your online business. Plants that are given fertilizer (organic or otherwise), produce better foliage and larger fruit than those that do not, and the same is true with websites that are complimented with a regular email campaign.

All of these elements work together to grow your online sales. You’ll notice that search engine rankings are not listed as a marketing element – search engine rankings are the result of doing all of these other things well. More importantly, getting new customers and improving customer retention are also the result of doing each of these things well. Only by using a blend of all these elements can you really grow your online sales.

Detailed information on how to implement each of these elements can be found in my book “Grow Your Online Sales”.

An Unusual & Odd Invitation!

2010-09-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

Today, almost every business has a website. Many business owners have established a relationship with their webmasters and are proud of what they have created. Still, most websites fail to be as effective as most business owners would like. In fact, studies show that the typical business website only receives about 6 orders per month. Often, it is not the fault of the website itself, but rather the knowledge that it takes to market your presence on the Internet to its full potential.

You see, your website is only one small piece of the total exposure your company needs on the Internet. And while most webmasters are very good at the creative aspects of putting a site together, few have experience with implementing a robust shopping cart and almost none are able to provide a comprehensive emarketing package. And those that do all seem to think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine marketing – read paid Adwords) is how businesses drive traffic to their website. In reality, most websites only get about 10 to 20 percent of their traffic from search engines. No wonder your website isn’t making money!

In order to really make a website become a sales tool, you have to go way beyond search engines – you have to use email campaigns, Facebook, YouTube, directories, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Coupon sites and a number of other items that may be industry-specific to your business. Remeber, you don't get to be popular by becoming number one on goolge - rather Google rewards those who are already popular with a page one listing. It is your responsibility to funnel traffic from other sources to your website. If you are not managing your total footprint on the Internet and are only concerned about your website, you may need help such as that provided by an emarketing expert.

I am offering my book, “Grow Your Online Sales”, free to the first 100 people to sign up at www.TheEmarketingCoach.com. Go there and watch the video to see how you can claim your copy.

Is Your Website a Money Pit Instead of a Money Maker?

2010-08-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

Today, a website is a “must have” for every business. Different businesses have different goals for their websites. The goals of a sales website might be different than the goals for information sites. But every website should be providing a positive value to its owner. This might be as simple as improved communication or it may be a revenue generator. As an Internet specialist, I see far too many websites that are not performing to their owner’s expectations.

Over time, many business owners have invested a fair amount of money in their websites, and are still not seeing results. With a slow economy, they are understandably reluctant to spend money upgrading their websites. They have a website and are happy with their webmaster, whom they’ve established a relationship with over time. Or, to save money, they have brought their webmaster duties in-house and are doing much of the work themselves.

As it turns out, a site upgrade may not even be needed – it may be that the website simply hasn’t been properly promoted. Often, it is not the fault of the website itself, but rather the knowledge that it takes to market your presence on the Internet to its full potential.

You see, your website is only one small piece of the total exposure your company needs on the Internet. In the past, business owners were concerned with getting listed number one on Google. But Google is no longer the only factor you need to be concerned with. You see, the problem with Google is that it only drives about 10 percent of the traffic to an average website. Today you must be everywhere – and you must market your business to the other 90 percent using YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other virtual locations where your customers expect to find you.

Most webmasters are very good at the technical and creative aspects of putting a site together, but they do not provide a comprehensive emarketing package. If they provide any marketing help at all, it is with SEO or Search Engine Optimization, which you just learned is a very small piece of the action. Business owners today need an eMarketing solution, and WebStores Ltd provides such a program. If you are not managing your total footprint on the Internet and are only concerned about your website, you might benefit from an emarketing coach.

Facebook 101 for business

2010-08-18T07:02:00.001-07:00

With Facebook now sending more traffic to other websites than Google, businesses of all sizes are taking advantage of this phenomenon. It is interesting that you must have a personal Facebook page in order to create a business fan page, so if you don’t have an account yet, you need to set one up. The go to another business fan page like Facebook.com/WebstoresLtd. Look for the link on the left that says “Create a Page for My Business”.

Of course creating a fan page is just the beginning. You can certainly post things to this page to let customers and potential customers know about what you have to offer, but it is possible to make your page much more compelling. For example, you can add the application for FBML (Facebook markup language), that allows you to utilize standard HTML code to create a custom welcome page. The basic steps are:

-    add the FBML app
-    change the application settings to add a tab
-    change the box title to the tab name you want, such as “Welcome”
-    edit your wallsettings to make this the default tab so it is the first thing visitors see when they arrive
-    after you have 25 fans, go to Facebook.com/username and set up your facebook name to make it easier for people to find you

Now that you have a custom fan page, use your personal Facebook page to let your friends know about it. A large part of Facebooking is “preaching to the choir”—most of the people who will “like” you and follow you on Facebook are those who already know your company exists. However, you also want more customers and for more people to discover your business. Last fall, Facebook introduced a feature similar to Twitter that allows you to create hyperlink tags within the status updates by prepending with the “@” sign. When you post something to your wall, you can use this to link to your business fan page. Now other people can follow that link, and hopefully become a fan of your business as well.
If you are confused about any of this, WebStoresLtd can help you.

Your Website Doesn’t Matter

2010-08-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

Your Website Doesn’t Matter. At least your home page is no longer as important as it once was. Individual product or service pages – now those are still relevant. You see, we now live in the era of what I call “distributed marketing”. Distributed marketing goes way beyond individual web sites – your internet presence consists of Facebook Fan Pages, YouTube Channels, Twitter pages, Blogs, text and video responses to other people’s blogs and reviews, and even photo sharing sites. It’s your total footprint on the internet that is important, not any one piece.

Of course, I hope your total footprint includes your own website with a shopping cart so someone can actually buy something from you. But if you are really using all the marketing tools available to you, and you have accomplished getting all your product pages indexed by the search engines, not just your home page, and each of the various products include customer reviews, blog comments, Facebook links, videos, etc., then you are truly taking advantage of the current state of the Internet. And your home page, where you tell people who and what you are, doesn’t matter, because everyone already knows that information from everywhere else on the web!

Update! Update! Update!

2010-08-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

Updating your website on a regular basis is critical for any business, regardless of size. The more frequently you update your website, the more the search engines like Google treat you as if you have an active website, which improves your page rankings. That is why search engines think blogs are so important – most blogs get updated regularly, so when the search software looks at a blog, it sees new content and places a higher emphasis on it.

All websites should be updated at least once a month. This is important not just for search engines, but because your customers expect it as well. If your site looks the same every time someone visits it, they will think that nothing is new and move on. The best way to update your website is to utilize content management software like that available from WebStores Ltd. This makes it easy for the business owner to easily change the content on the homepage while the basic structure of the site remains the same.

Of course, a more complete update of your website should be done every couple of years – where you actually change the underlying look and feel. You want to make sure you keep your company image consistent and possibly retain the basic navigation hierarchy, but reviewing your site for a more modern interface can improve customer perceptions about your business. Websites get tired just like any other aspect of your business and it important to keep the fresh. If you are in need of a website makeover, call us.

In keeping with this advice, WebStores Ltd. has just updated our homepage. I invite you to take a look.

Don’t Get Your Tubes Tied!

2010-07-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

Tubal ligation (also known as having one's tubes tied) is a permanent form of female sterilization. Totally unrelated is YouTube, the Internet’s premier site for sharing video content. YouTube attracts over 2 billion users each day, so if you are in the Internet marketing business, rather than becoming sterilized on this site, you want to become a fertile video marketer.

Almost 60% of Internet traffic is now video! There are now more keyword searches performed every month on YouTube than are performed on Google. Over 1 billion videos watched on YouTube everyday! That's nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined! 70% of web surfers watch video online. 150 million people view online videos each month in the US. The average duration of an online video viewed is 3.5 minutes and the average YouTube visitor spends 27 minutes a day watching videos. And it’s not just funny videos getting all the attention. Commercials such as Evian Water’s “Roller Babies” have been viewed over 25 million times – for a commercial!

Here is the exciting part – When you create a YouTube account, you are automatically set up with your own “channel.” Viewers can subscribe to your channel and be notified whenever you upload a new video. Short 2-3 minute videos work best, so if you have 30 minutes worth of information, you can easily create 10 videos, then combine them into a playlist. Anyone can create “good-enough” videos using a simple webcam, or a digital camera like the Flip or Kodak. You can use the free Windows Movie Maker program to add titles and overlay music.

For ecommerce websites, there are several types of videos you should be doing: commercials, product demonstrations, testimonials, tutorials and training, and video responses. Video is a surefire way to establish yourself as an expert authority and market yourself online. But of course you need to get found (and hopefully have a creative enough video that it becomes viral – where other people pass on the link and suggest friends watch it). To get found, make sure you put keywords in the title of the video. Add a description, again using the keywords people are likely to search for. Mention your website in the description. YouTube also allows you to put in tags (a list of keywords) – use as many as you need. And don’t forget to choose an appropriate category.

You will want to make you “Channel” look creative as well. Big corporations like Disney and The Outdoor Channel have sexy looking YouTube channels, but other large corporations have very generic looking channels. It is easy for you to have your channel look as good as any of the big chains – take a look at my channel for Cyberbase Trading Post to see what I mean. This is Internet business at its best – free publishing and viral marketing potential. If you need help creating videos or creating a professional channel presence, don’t hesitate to call.

SEO: You’re Doing it Wrong

2010-07-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

I read lots of books, magazines and blogs about making money online. After all, that is my business. And it is incredible how many web designers and marketing “experts” still don’t get it! The prevailing mindset seems to be that there is a magic formula (controlled by the great god of internet search, Google), and that if you can just crack this magic formula, you will get listed as number one on Google and subsequently become rich.

Now understand that there is in fact a formula that Google uses to determine who gets listed in the number one spot for various search terms. And this formula actually changes regularly, keeping all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies on their toes. It also does involve many of the things that SEO firms will tell you to do: clean up your code, use keyword-rich content, add bold tags and heading tags, etc. etc. But when it comes to Internet marketing, most of that is just an exercise in futility, as these things will not get you to be listed number one on Google. And even if they did, you wouldn’t see you sales increase.

One person who does seem to “get it” is David Meerman Scott in his book World Wide Rave. Scott recognizes that the way to get listed number one on Google is to create what he calls a rave about your product or services – a phenomenon where others are automatically linking to your content and passing it on to others. A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. It’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

This is what I refer to in my book “Grow Your Online Sales” as digital word-of-mouth marketing. And it is the ONLY sure fire way of getting listed number one on the search engines. Regardless of what else you do to “optimize” your site, if everyone is talking about you and creating links to your content, the Search Engines will reward you with being on the first page. In other words, you have to provide content that is so compelling (be it funny, informative, or controversial) that everyone will want to pass it on to their entire email list, Facebook friends or blog posts. The only thing that matters is getting others to talk about you.

I can hear you thinking out loud: “That’s nice, but I’m an accountant (or whatever) – how am I going to get people to talk about my website?” Believe it or not, there are ways you can do this regardless of what business you are in. Go to www.GrowYouOnlineSales.com and pick up a copy of my book to learn how.

Maximizing YouTube

2010-06-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

As the second most popular search engine on the Internet, YouTube is a must for any business to promote itself. YouTube offers some great tools, from being able to create your own “channel” to which viewers can subscribe, to embedding uploaded videos on your own web site. The problem is, that if you use the default settings, you may end up promoting your competitors without even know it! Here are a few simple (though technical ways) to make sure you are maximizing your YouTube embedded videos:

The Search Bar
By default on all YouTube videos, that really annoying search bar always pops up at the end, allowing people to search for videos by your competitors! Of course, you don’t want that at all! To fix, just add “&showsearch=0” as a parameter at the end of the YouTube URL, and that search bar goes away.

Related Videos
At the end of your video, by default, YouTube will pick a bunch of related videos (usually by other people) to show to the viewer. The same as for the search bar, you want to get rid of the related videos to keep people viewing your content, and not your competitors. (Related videos usually equals competitors’ videos because, well, they are kind of related… you just don’t want your viewers to know about them!) To remove the related videos, just add the following code to the the YouTube URL:
&rel=0
That’s all you do. Attach that code to the player, and that cluster of “related videos” that shoots across the screen at the conclusion of your movie will no longer show up!

Captions
You can also remove the YouTube annotations on a video. You might not want to do this for your videos, but if you’re embedding someone else’s and you want to turn their annotations off by default, add this to the end of your URL in the same place as before:
&iv_load_policy=3
And no more captions!

So there you have it… a few simple tricks to make your videos work better for you.
Use these on your sites and you’ll no longer find yourself sending visitors to your competitors’ videos! If you want to take your video marketing to the next level on the Internet, WebStores Ltd will be holding a special YouTube class on July 12th for people interested in creating their own video channel.

Effective Use of Your Website

2010-06-23T15:18:00.001-07:00

A number of years ago I was asked if I thought that every business should have a website. Of course I answered yes. “Even a business like a hamburger stand?” was the reply. “Why would anyone bother to visit a website for a hamburger joint?” The question was valid then and is still valid today – people do not want to visit a website when all you do is tell them about your business. They don’t care. But if you have something to offer them, they will visit your site over and over again.

Here is an example: I just returned from a trip to Washington DC. While we were there, we came across a street vendor selling cupcakes out of a van. There was a long line waiting to buy cupcakes, so we figured they must be good. On the side of the van, they had their website address painted in big bold letters: CurbsideCupcakes.com. Now this is a mobile business and it doesn’t park at the same place everyday, but the next day my wife wanted another cupcake (yes, they were good!). So using my mobile phone, I went to their website. They had a link for “Where is the truck?”, which in fact told us where the truck was currently selling cupcakes. Unfortunately, it was too far to walk there, but the concept was great. Curbside Cupcakes also has a Facebook account where they post information about their location and current selections, which is displayed in real time on their website with a RSS feed.

We also went into a very crowded sandwich shop called Potbelly. Potbelly had a sign over their counter that if you had ordered on their website, you could go right to the front of the line and pick up your order. Again, this is a great use of a website by a small business. If CurbsideCupcakes.com or Potbelly.com had only included a coupon on their Facebook page to drive people to their website (and thus to their store), the web experience would have been great. As it was, it is clear that any business can profit by having a web presence. With a mobile society using smart phones to look up your business wherever they are, every business not only should have a website, they NEED a complete web-presence.

Get on TV!

2010-06-15T06:24:00.000-07:00

I saw a show recently where the guest was being interviewed and he brought all his kids, who wanted to be on TV. In fact, it seems like everyone wants to be on TV. And now anyone can be, simply by starting your own web TV show. This is exciting and easy to do.

Guess what the number two search engine on the Internet is after Google? It’s not Bing or Yahoo, its YouTube. People go to YouTube to find video results based upon information they are looking for. If you aren’t there, you are missing a major opportunity. YouTube attracts more than 2 billion visitors per day who spend an average of 20 minutes per visit! That's nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

Start Your Own YouTube Video Channel
A YouTube channel lets you post all of your videos in one location. A person can visit your channel and see every video that you want on your channel. If he likes what he sees, he can subscribe. Every time you post a new video, he is notified. You can divide your channel into playlists. A playlist is a single topic. Someone interested in just one topic on your channel can find it rapidly. This increases its value to him.
At the end of each video, promote your Web site. You should put the URL in the lower left-hand side of the screen. This can be done with any video editing software. Put your webpage in the description of the video as well. Google owns YouTube. It places YouTube videos high on its page searches. This gives you another opportunity for people to find you and your site.

You can link the videos on your channel. A person sees one. He can see the others merely by clicking, one by one. This is great for instructional videos. Videos allow people to tune in to your unique personality more completely than by words alone. There is perceived credibility in a message that is delivered face-to-face rather than via an anonymous web page.

Creating your channel.
Just go to YouTube and you will be offered a menu selection that is simple to follow. You can choose your channel name and address which is usually just the YouTube address followed by a / and your channel name. I recommend you take some time to fill in your profile details including interests and if relevant, your web site details.

To assist your research I would suggest finding a YouTube video that you like and clicking on the link that represents the channel name. This will take you to that person's channel, where you can see how they have structured their material. You really will be surprised at how simple it all is. There is no reason why you shouldn’t have your own. If you really want to get started, I will be holding an all day workshop in Denver on June 21 where you will actually build your own channel and upload your first episode. Call toll free 877-924-1414 to register.

This page was viewed 15,576 times!

2010-06-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, over 50 percent of those visitors left. Have you ever done a Google search for something like vegetarian shoes and landed on a page for swimsuits? Since this was not what you were looking for, you immediately leave without visiting other pages on the site. In marketing terms, this is called a “bounce.” Bounce rates are used to measure the effectiveness of a landing page. If you have a high bounce rate on your website, what is causing this? Perhaps the search engines are bringing you bad traffic. Perhaps you website needs work. If you have a database drive website, bounce rates may not be able to be measured correctly because you are simply referring to a new set of data but displaying it on the same “page”. As a business owner, you must figure out if people truly are bouncing off your site and why.

If you are getting your traffic from paid ads and have high bounce rates, the fault is your own. For example, I recently did a search for camping books. One of the “sponsored links” was from REI. When I clicked on the link, it took me to a page with tents and backpacks – not a page with camping books. Now I happen to know that REI does in fact sell camping books. If someone is doing a search for something specific, why would I waste my money taking them to a page other than what they were looking for? Not only does this cause a bounce, but it makes the company look foolish.

On the other hand, you have less control over free search results. Google or Bing is simply trying to determine what each of your pages is about in order to return accurate search results to the user. If you happen to have a page on your site about tents, and your content includes the fact that “many camping books recommend this product”, then the search engine might be confused. Carefully crafting your descriptions can improve natural search results, but unlike paid ads, you do not have as much control of what is being returned.

In my book and other articles, I’ve shown that much of your traffic will come from inbound links rather than search results. Links that clearly describe what your landing page is about should never have high bounce rates – the customer should know in advance what to expect when they follow a link to a page on your site.

Figuring out what the customer’s intent is for visiting your website and comparing that to what the purpose of the landing page is should be your first step in improving bounce rates. Your goal should be to bring these two as close together as possible. When you have a large overlap between customer intent and webpage purpose, you’ll not only have lower bounce rates, but happier customers and more sales.

We Suggest You Buy Elsewhere

2010-06-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

I came across a web site recently that was bragging about why they didn’t have a shopping cart on their site. Their reasoning was that they liked a more personal touch and they wanted you to pick up the phone and call them. Of course they didn’t provide a toll free number, but even if they had, don’t they realize that ecommerce is done on a computer, not a phone? And not every customer wants to pick up the phone and call a store to find out availability and pricing. If you are selling something on your web site, you should have a shopping cart – make it easy for the customer to do business with you.

While not every web site is as blatant about their technical inadequacies as this one, many still show their attitude about making it convenient for the company rather than the customer when it comes to the checkout page. I’ve had numerous store owners tell me that they only want to accept credit cards as the payment method because “they don’t like PayPal”. Let me be clear – it doesn’t matter whether or not you like something, it matters what the customer expects. And many customers expect to be able to pay for their purchases with Paypal. Do yourself a favor and take as many payment methods as you can so the customer can tell you how they want to give you their money.

I’ve seen other web sites that have a “terms and conditions” page that would fill a small book. This page goes on and on describing all the reasons why a customer shouldn’t do business with you. I strongly recommend having a terms and conditions page to provide information about shipping, payment methods accepted, privacy policies and returns. But this page should be about why someone should do business with you, not why they shouldn’t.

It never ceases to amaze me that in today’s customer-driven world companies still behave like they are the ones in control. They put up websites describing how wonderful they are. Page after page talks about all their accomplishments and how they are the best in the industry. Guess what? The customer doesn’t care! Every page on a web site, with the possible exception of a single “About Us” page, should be about the customer, not about you.

Back to the shopping cart issue: some companies sell items that don’t ship very well. They may sell perishable items such as food, or heavy, (relatively) low cost items such as dog food or potting soil. Shipping costs make selling these things over the Internet impractical. Do it anyway! Just make the only “shipping” option be in-store pickup. This has other side-benefits as well, such as driving the customer into your store where they may purchase something else. But the big thing is that customers want the convenience of finding prices and information before coming to see you. (And they don’t want to pick up the phone to do it). Instead of telling the customer to shop elsewhere, make it easy for them to do business with you.

Creating a World-Wide Buzz

2010-05-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

How much does it cost you to use Google? How about Facebook or Twitter? To place a call with Skype? What does it cost you to upload a video to YouTube? To start a Yahoo group? To create a certificate at Cyberbase Trading Post? The answer of course to all of these is nothing – those services are free!

Most wildly successful Internet business models are based on the concept of free. And just giving away a free whitepaper in exchange for an email address is not enough – the actual product or service needs to be free. Free by itself is not a business model. But free coupled with a compelling path to paid services, is. And free is what drives word-of-mouth marketing.

Hotmail was the first Internet based email service and it was totally free. At the bottom of each email message was a short ad – “get your free email account at hotmail.com”. Talk about word of mouth marketing! Everyone who used hotmail ended up promoting the product to everyone they emailed! As a result, hotmail grew by tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands a users daily!

VistaPrint is one of the most successful ecommerce companies year after year. They process over 54,000 orders on more than 100 products every day, serving over 8 million customers worldwide. They give away free business cards. You select the card style and put in your name and contact information. They print up 250 cards and send them to you for free (you do pay for the shipping). Like Hotmail, the only catch is that on the back of each card is printed a small message: “get your free business cards at VistaPrint.com”. This type of viral marketing obviously didn’t happen by accident – it was done on purpose.

I had a customer who sold popcorn – the very best gourmet popcorn available. His idea was to give away free samples of his popcorn on his website, then promote this by dressing up as an old-time popcorn maker and making a video for YouTube where he advertised his free popcorn. This is an incredible idea; sadly he never did this because he was afraid the response would be too great! He may have been right – but the idea is to generate exactly that type of word-of-mouth marketing.

Now it’s your turn – what can you give away for free that will generate a world-wide buzz? Can you use this to drive people back to your physical store? Can you use this to get customers who will pay you?

Interactive Virtual Dressing Rooms

2010-05-18T08:48:00.001-07:00

Have you ever been in a dressing room trying on clothes and you want to try on another size? You have to put your clothes back on and go out and look for it. Not for long. Interactive mirrors, 3D scanners and holographic sales assistants may sound like they belong in a sci-fi movie, but they'll likely soon be part of your future shopping sprees. Someday soon you will be able to type what you need: color, size and style, into a hand held device and view your selections on a “magic mirror” mounted on the wall.

These mirrors will be able to show you how an article of clothing or an outfit looks, from every angle. They will also record everything you try on. If you can’t remember how the first thing you tried on looked, a responsive mirror will allow you to simultaneously see everything that you have tried on. These mirrors aren’t far in the future; some high-end retail stores are already implementing them. If you need a friend to offer her opinion before you buy you might appreciate being able to send an image of you trying on clothes from the dressing room to your friends phone or email. Shoppers can connect live with friends and family members and get instant feedback, just like they were in the room with you.

Check out this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDi0FNcaock
Interactive dressing rooms can suggest complimentary products—matching accessories, shoes, or even shirts and pants. These dressing rooms can also convey useful information; including, price, materials and care instruction. The next logical step is a consumer version of the interactive dressing room, which is then configured to work with ecommerce websites so you can shop this way in your own home.

Then we get to the checkout process: You simply walk out the door! Automated sensors will quickly add up everything you’ve purchased and the amount is simply deducted from a card. This is grocery shopping made easy! If an item isn’t in stock, or if you simply don’t want to carry it with you because you have other places to be (such as not wanting perishable food to go bad when you are on your way to a business meeting), the items can simply be delivered to your home at the time of your choosing.

Would you like to learn more about ecommerce and how you can have your own online store? Greg Jameson’s new book “Grow Your Online Sales” is now available from www.GrowYourOnlineSales.com.

Search Engines are a Waste of Time

2010-05-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you run a website (and even if you don’t) you probably get email messages guaranteeing that some company can get you to the top of Google, implying this is going to make you rich. Search engine optimization (SEO) companies insist that what they do works. In fact, I had one person tell me to do a Google search for “credit cards”. The first result on Google is not Visa, but “creditcards.com”. See, SEO work they insist!

Well of course the search term credit cards returns creditcards.com first; after all that is the name of their site. If I do a search for “walmart”, I would expect walmart.com to be listed first. That is the name of their website. Any time the search term matches the website name, it is most likely to come up number one (that by the way is a major hint when selecting domain names).

In fact, the number one search term for people going to most websites is the company or domain name. For example, most of the search results taking people to Amazon.com come from people typing in “amazon” in the Google search box. I consider this a “non-search” but it makes search engines look good. In the case of Amazon, even the word “books” isn’t a very good search term. “Harry Potter and the deathly hallows” is a valid search, but Amazon is not number one for this term. So why don’t we just go to the address bar and type in where we want to go instead of using Google to do a search? Perhaps it is laziness, habit, not knowing any better, or the fact that Google forces you to their search box instead of the address bar in order to make it look like more people are using search and they are driving traffic to your site. But many people do continue to use the address bar.

Here is the simple truth that search marketing “experts” don’t want you to know: only about 25% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines (yes, Google does control 80% of that 25%). This is true even for companies like Amazon and IBM – only 25% of their web traffic comes from search engines. The other 75% of traffic comes from either direct entry, such as using the address bar, or from links. Links typically account for more traffic than the search engines do! And it is the number and quality of links that determines your search engine rankings in the first place.

My advice then is simple: concentrate on building quality one-way links to your website. This will improve your traffic. The side-effect is that this will also improve your search engine rankings for the keywords used in the link (i.e., “Harry Potter and the deathly hallows”). As long as this text link points to a page that is actually about Harry Potter, you have done more to improve your place on the internet than any SEO company can do for you. In other words, work on the other 75% of where your traffic is coming from, and the search engines will take care of themselves.

Colorado’s New Internet Tax-What does it mean to you?

2010-05-04T17:02:00.000-07:00

The Internet has certainly changed the way we do business and now state governments want a piece of the action. States are desperate for tax money so it’s no surprise they would go after any and all revenue streams. Colorado is the most recent state to pass an “Internet Sales tax” law trying to increase its revenues from goods sold via the Internet. Unlike New York, which includes affiliates in it definition of nexus, the Colorado bill focuses solely on collecting use tax, and nothing whatsoever with affiliates.

Let’s start with the term “nexus.” Whether an entity is required to file business tax returns depends on whether it has nexus with a state. Nexus is defined as some definite link, or minimum connection, between the state and the entity it seeks to tax. Normally, sufficient nexus for income tax purposes is established when an entity owns, leases property or employs personnel in the state.

If you are an in-state business selling to someone who resides in Colorado, you have always been obligated to collect sales tax whether you sell online or in a store. If you are an out-of-state business that sells tangible personal property in another state, you normally would not collect sales tax, and the final consumer is responsible for paying a “use tax” to their state.

Starting on May 1, 2010, the law requires retailers that do not have nexus in Colorado to do three things:
(1) put a lengthy message on their web sites and on all invoices sent to Colorado customers informing the customers of their obligation to pay Colorado use tax on their purchases ($5 penalty for each failure);

(2) send to each Colorado customer an annual statement, similar to a Form 1099, describing each purchase that the customer made during the year, including the date of purchase, amount of purchase, and whether each purchase is or is not subject to Colorado sales tax ($10 penalty for each failure); and

(3) annually send to the Colorado Department of Revenue a list of the name, address, and detailed purchase information for each Colorado customer who made a purchase from that seller during the year ($10 penalty for each failure).

This last part brings up some serious concerns about the constitutionality of the law, but for now, out-of-state sellers are compelled to comply. Out-of-state businesses selling into Colorado are not required to collect the taxes, but it is certainly makes it more difficult for them to do business in Colorado. Many questions remain unanswered: What about individuals selling on eBay? What about local sales tax? There are more than 280 local taxing jurisdictions in CO, each with their own ability to set rates and bases which the Colorado law does not address. As eCommerce continues to become more popular, expect more states to look for ways to jump on the tax bandwagon. And never expect life on a medium as dynamic as the Internet to be dull.

Add a “Like” button inside your shopping cart!

2010-04-29T10:20:00.001-07:00

You can easily add a Facebook “Like” button to any page of your website. Here is the simple code for doing this:

< iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://www.YOUR_COMPANY_WEBSITE.com" style="border: medium none; height: 80px; width: 200px;"> < / iframe>

Does anyone really make any money online?

2010-04-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

“I’ve had my web site for almost 6 months and have yet to make a sale. What am I doing wrong?” Does this sound like your business? Here’s the problem: On the Internet, your business is competing against hundreds or even thousands of websites all doing the same type of business as you. Many new website owners submit their site to the major search engines and then sit back and wait for customers to come. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. When you first start out, no one on the internet knows who you are. They don’t know where to find you, and even if they did, they probably aren’t going to buy from you. It doesn’t matter which shopping cart you have, who your webmaster is or what SEO firm you use.

Let’s say you make chocolates and want to sell them online. You have the best chocolates anyone has ever tasted. Guess what? Consumers don’t know that – they are still going to buy Godiva, Russell Stover or Cadbury. Even if you take out pay-per-click ads and submit your site to hundreds of specialized directories you aren’t going to make any sales. Depending upon what you sell, they are going to buy from Amazon or eBay which together account for 70% of the market.

Now the good news: you can sell your wares on Amazon and eBay! Granted, these platforms may all take a piece of the action, but you will get more sales. It’s kind of like being in a major mall versus a remote shop. But until you can create a word-of-mouth marketing about your products, you are stuck – people are still going to buy the name brand products. So in addition to listing your products on the major marketplaces, you need to create a buzz about your products. This is the hardest thing for business owners to do, but the most critical. Here are a few things that seem to work:

•    Create a funny YouTube video commercial
•    Give away something for free
•    Win an award and promote it
•    Be the first to do something
•    Get a celebrity endorsement
•    Be controversial, but stand for something
•    Create your own Facebook application

Once you start making sales, you can start referring your customers to your own webstore. You can build brand loyalty and you can start taking advantage of search engines. You can create blogs and provide lots of content. You can send out press releases, coupons, email newsletters and do all other sorts of e-marketing like Google Adwords. But until you start getting customers talking about you, you are throwing away your time and money.

If anyone has any ideas for other methods to generate buzz, I’d love to hear about them.

Selling on Facebook

2010-04-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

In 2009 social networking overtook email as the number one activity that people spend time on while using their computers. Let that sink in – if you aren’t promoting your business on Facebook, you are missing out on the most popular trend on the Internet. Unless you choose to support your efforts with advertising, all it costs is a little time. Because you must have a personal account in order to create a business page, this move was clearly targeted at small business owners. But 65% of the top 500 e-tailers on the Internet already have a Facebook page.
Facebook now has 400 million users, 50% of whom log in daily. There are 60 million status updates each day, three billion photos and five billion Web links, news stories and other pieces of Web content shared each week on Facebook. As a result, it has actually surpassed Google in total U.S. visitors for the third time this year.

All that content is one of the explanations for Facebook's relative growth compared to Google. People are relying on other people for getting their content versus going to look for it themselves.

Another great feature about Facebook is “groups.” It is better to join an existing group than to start your own, as there are already thousands of people with like interests that are already members of groups. For example, if you are a garden center, join the group, “Id rather be gardening”. From there you can post information about your fan page.

Facebook is set to allow developers to create shopping apps directly on merchants’ fan pages. This means that fan pages, which were once mainly marketing channels, can now be used as a point of sale, if merchants are willing to pay a developer to implement the apps. Even if you don’t want to sell products via Facebook, you can use your fan page to promote coupon codes and provide links to your ecommerce webstore. To be successful on the internet, you need to be where your customers are, and clearly they are on Facebook.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

2010-04-13T07:14:00.000-07:00

Online retailers spend a lot of energy getting people to visits their sites, and once there, getting visitors to make a purchase. It can be discouraging then to view reports and see the number of people who have placed items in the cart, then don’t complete the purchase. This is called cart abandonment, and it is a problem that faces most online stores. But is it really a problem?

How often does a customer begin their shopping experience online, primarily for price comparison, but then completes the sale at the physical store of the same merchant? This question is difficult to track. Frequently, however, someone will place items in the cart, then complete the sale a few days later. I know I do this often – for example, I have a customer that I was ordering some business cards for. She wanted a price before ordering, so I went through the entire cart process, then abandoned the cart, only to complete the sale a few days later after she had approved everything.

The average online shopper delays making a purchase by almost two days after initially visiting a retail site, according to data from a leading Internet security company. After monitoring the shopping behavior of 163 million consumers completing 2.52 million transactions, McAfee SECURE discovered that the average customer waited 33 hours and 54 minutes, or nearly two days, between first visiting a retail site and making a purchase. In 64 percent of the cases, the shopper waited at least one day to buy.

This seemingly cautious behavior, which McAfee calls "digital window shopping," is really a somewhat normal shopping behavior wherein a potential customer loads items into a shopping cart and then leaves the retailer's site in search of more information, price comparison data, or even information about the merchant to ensure that the transaction and any customer service will be handled well.

What this suggests to me is that retailers should have a function to “save this cart”, so the customer can log back in at a later time and complete the sale without having to start over. Dell computers has this feature, but most online stores do not. Combined with an email reminder that they still have not completed the checkout process, this could be a major enhancement to sales.

The single biggest reason for cart abandonment appears to be shipping costs. Some 46 percent of consumers surveyed in 2009 by PayPal and comScore, said that they did not complete an online transaction because the shipping charges were too high. I have always recommended that etailers build the cost of shipping into the product price and/or have a low flat rate charge for shipping. This let’s consumers know up front what the final cost will be, greatly reducing the number of lost sales. Don’t let the customer get away!

Establishing Your Online Business

2010-04-05T15:00:00.001-07:00

It seems that the internet has remained fairly immune, even during this time of economic recovery. In fact, according to recent Forrester Research predictions, e-commerce is on track to account for 53 percent of all purchases by 2014. Read that again – within 3 years over half of all purchases are going to be made on the internet! If your small business is not yet selling on your website, you had better start now.

But with Walmart controlling the vast majoring of purchases in physical stores, and Amazon doing the same for online purchases, what is the small business owner supposed to do to compete in today’s economy? The answers may surprise you.

1.    Differentiate yourself. Face it – you cannot compete with Walmart or Amazon, so don’t try. Instead, you need to figure out what you can do that these giants cannot do. Remember the old advertising slogan from Avis, “We’re number two – we try harder!”? As the industry leader, Hertz was unable to compete with this because doing so would admit that they were not the leader. The problem with Amazon and Walmart is that they are trying to be all things to all people. You can beat them by finding a niche and serving that niche very well.

2.    Sell a single product. OK, so you’ve found a niche – now select a single product from that niche to create a website. Here’s where I get lots of resistance, but single item websites actually out-perform many multi-item websites. Let’s say you sell fine quality writing instruments. If you put up a website showing the 10 brands of luxury pens that you offer, your site will look like many others offering the same 10 brands of pens. But if you have a website that sells a single hand-crafted pen, customers will look at you as the single-source expert on that style of pen, and your sales are likely to be better than if you offered it along with 9 other brands. If you are really worried about this, create 11 different websites – one for all of your brands and one for each individual brand and see for yourself.

3.    Create customer loyalty. Loyal customers can be your best advocates for evangelizing your products and brand, while helping you to dramatically gain new business. New online store owners are often overly-concerned about search engine placement. Rather than concentrating on becoming number one on Google, concentrate on creating customer loyalty. Word of mouth is still the number one reason people visit websites, so give your customers a reason to recommend your site to others. High quality content, video demonstrations of your products, and free tools or widgets are just a few ways to get customers to pass your site on to others with similar interests.

Are you sure your website is working?

2010-03-24T07:46:00.001-07:00

Firefox recently made some changes to their popular browser software. Many of our customers updated this software automatically, and then called us to complain that their website wasn’t working. Neither of us had made any changes to their site, yet a problem had occurred. What this means is that simply because your site worked last week, doesn't mean it is functioning reliably today. There are many reasons why site problems can occur. For example:

•    Webstores Ltd automatically updates software for our customers that includes email, databases, web server administration, and shopping cart functionality.
•    Most likely you are on a shared server with many other websites. Changes in bandwidth used by these other sites or the addition of large new accounts on the same server could affect you.
•    The data center where your site is hosted could experience problems from server changes or power outages.
•    Browser changes can affect not only how your site appears, but as mentioned previously, how it functions.
•    Links on your webpage to external sites can fail if the target site deletes the page or changes the URL. I even see our customers deleting or changing the names of their own pages, without also updating the links that point too them.
•    Third party providers such as credit card processing services can make unannounced changes that can cause failures with essential pieces of your site.
•    Security failures could cause your site to be hacked or attacked.

It is impossible to prevent these changes from occurring, and even if these changes are positive, they may create a temporary problem for your site. One method for insuring that you know when your site has stopped working is to use site monitoring services. Site monitoring takes place invisibly without you having to change anything on your site. Their software just goes to your site on a regular basis to perform a test. You select the pages to test and the alerts and reports you want to receive. Testing options include test frequency and the emergency procedures to follow when a problem is detected.

In a previous article I recommended testing your site after doing a website makeover to insure that all links, signup forms, and cart transactions were working. Testing these items on an hourly (or even daily) basis is not feasible except by using a software service. Site monitoring may just protect you from revenue loss, making it a cost effective insurance for your web business.

You Might Need a Website Makeover

2010-03-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

How old is your site? If your website is over a couple years old and there hasn't been any changes or updates made to it, you might need a website makeover.

Do your competitors' websites provide a more informing, easier experience than your website does? Take some time and check out the websites of some of your competitors and compare their overall look and feel as compared to your website. Compare your experience while surfing your website as opposed to the competition. If your competitor’s sites are easier to use and more informative than yours, you might need a website makeover.

Are you getting traffic but few sales? The need to convert visitors into paying customers is a sure sign of needing a website makeover.

Has the traffic to your website continued to decline over the last few months or years? You can check the traffic of your website since its creation to see if it has lessened or hit a plateau. If this is the case, you definitely need a website makeover.
Think about what content you have and how it should be organized. This is at least as important as what your pages look like, so actually spend some time on it. Put as few clicks between your visitor and your information as possible. Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer. What are you offering to your visitors? Are you providing personal recommendations or just the boilerplate text and photos from the manufacturer that every other website is using? Why is it worth their time to visit your site? Please focus on that before you move on to how it should look.

Every page (except “About Us”) should be about what the reader is looking for – not about you! Let them know what the site will do for them. Provide engaging content such as a widget that will keep visitors returning to your site. Include customer reviews and testimonials. Make your website unique and provide lots of information the customer can’t get anywhere else. Decide the purpose of your website. Follow through with that purpose in your design. For example, if your site is meant to sell something, make it easy for the customer to make a buying decision and actually purchase your product!

Don’t get sucked in to thinking that you need a website makeover just to improve looks - after all, aesthetics are a matter of personal opinion. Remember, your website is there for the customer, not for the business owner. The primary reasons for a website makeover should be improved performance and user experience. If these issues are not addressed, your makeover will fail.

What non-technical ecommerce merchants must understand

2010-03-01T15:31:00.001-08:00

Many of the factors affecting the running of an ecommerce website can be outsourced. Things like design and development, fulfillment, search engine optimization, and even accounting can be out-sourced. But there are some things that will improve your business if you have a basic understanding of how things work, even if you do hire contractors to do them for you.

First, be aware that not all web browsers behave the same. Things often work differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Test your website on each of these browsers. To complicate this further, computers all have different screen resolutions. Just because your website looks the way you want it to on your screen, does not mean that it will look that way on every visitor’s screen. Be sure to look at your website on a variety of computers with a variety of screen resolutions.

Content Management Systems, or CMS are what allows you to separate content from your web page so that you can update what is being displayed, without having to create a new design. Ecommerce shopping carts are a type of CMS – you input information about each product you are going to sell including photos, descriptions, prices, and categories, without designing a new page for each product. This is critical – it might work to have a hard coded page if you have one or two products, but if you have several hundred, this is impractical.

A CMS solves this problem by storing content in a database and using page templates. When it needs to render a page for a shopper, it grabs the proper product specification from the database and places that specification into a template. The combined content and template are rendered and you have a dynamically created web page. If you need to change product information, you only need to make a single change to the database.

Marketing is a key factor in making your website successful. You can have a beautiful website, properly coded so that search engines can easily find it, with great images and the best prices on the web – but if no one has ever heard of you, you won’t make a single sale. This requires marketing, and it is not your web designer’s responsibility. That responsibility ultimately relies on you. You can of course out-source the technical aspects, but the core message must come from the merchant themselves.

By far the best way to market your website is with word-of-mouth. Put a widget on your site that everyone will want to use (preferably over and over again and email it to all their friends). Create a video that is entertaining as well as informative and get it on YouTube. Reach out to your customers with social networking sites like Facebook. The more people that you can get to link to and to visit your site, the higher your position will be in the search engines. When a merchant understands this, and makes marketing a priority rather than something else to be out-sourced, sales will often improve.

Passing the Buck

2010-02-19T06:07:00.001-08:00

When a customer enters their credit card on a webstore to make a purchase, they often look for a site prefix of “https” (as opposed to just “http”) and/or a padlock symbol to verify that the site is a secure site. This is a first level of protection known as SSL or Secure Socket Layer that encrypts any data being transferred. But what happens after the intended company receives the credit card information?

Depending upon the store, any number of things can happen with your credit card. It is not unlike giving your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant. After the waiter takes your card, they take it to their cash register and in most cases swipe the card through their machine, which then charges your card. Once they give your card back to you, they no longer have your credit card number. On the other hand, if they use the old-fashioned imprint machine, the store retains a copy of your credit card number until they can manually key it in. The same goes for placing an order over the phone. And in many cases, this is what happens with internet sales as well.

Once your credit card information is received by the webstore, the shopping cart software can be configured for how the money is eventually received by the company. One of the most popular ways for small business is to process the transactions manually, using the credit card machines they already have in their physical shop. This means that they can see the customer’s credit card number.

Another way is to use a payment gateway such as Authorize.net. In this case, the credit card is transmitted to the bank in much the same way as a swipe machine, and the store does not keep a copy of the number. These payment gateways transfer the credit card information to the processor and back, which then send an authorization code to the shopping cart software. The payments then get reconciled in a batch, usually at the end of the day. The downside to this method is that another entity is involved in the transaction.

In the ecommerce business you will hear the tern PCI compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to any organization that processes credit or debit card information, including merchants and third-party service providers that store, process or transmit credit card/debit card data. Since the end of 2007, any organization that accepts payment card transactions must be in compliance with the standards.

However, according to the PCI DSS documentation, "PCI DSS requirements are applicable if a Primary Account Number (PAN) is stored, processed or transmitted. If a PAN is not stored, processed, or transmitted, PCI DSS requirements do not apply."

This has led to a series of credit card processing capabilities that are both the gateway and the processor in one. Rather than collect credit card information on their site, the store simply collects the customer information, then passes the PCI compliance buck to someone else by handing off the payment collection process to another entity. This is known as a “hosted solution”. Once the payment has been collected, the processing company returns the customer back to the webstore. This is similar to how Paypal is used – the store owner never sees the customer credit card information. Other companies that do this include Elavon and Element Express. For most website owners, this is the recommended approach.

Going Global

2010-02-11T11:52:00.001-08:00

One of the questions I frequently get asked is “does your software translate my website into other languages?” Historically, the way this was handled was through a database, with text stored in multiple languages and the page would display based upon the language chosen. The cost to translate a website could range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, localized sites have to be maintained, and the on-going costs to keep up a website to reflect ongoing changes to the local language could cripple most companies. As with many things on the internet however, there is a better way, and it’s free! You don’t have to spend large sums of money and month’s of a translator’s time.

Google has developed a method for translating web pages that uses the same type of statistical data as their search engine. Rather than doing a word-by-word or even a phrase-by-phrase translation, Google uses statistics. In the case of search engine placement, Google figures that the site with the most other sites linking to it for a particular keyword, the more important that site must be (as it relates to that keyword or phrase). The site with the most links is the one that gets listed first. The site with the second most number of links pointing to it gets listed second, and so on.

The same logic is applied to translations: the more native speakers who say that a particular phrase is used in a certain way, that is what Google figures the best translation must be. Many professional translation companies have scoffed at this approach and discourage people from using any type of machine-translation, claiming that machines don’t understand the context in which a sentence was written. However, using this approach, translations are more accurate than trying to translate using rule-based models. As a result, you simply have to call the statistical translation engine, and Google will translate your web page as quickly as it performs a search.

OK, that’s great, but how can I put this on my website? Great news! The Google translation gadget is free. Just go to http://translate.google.com/translate_tools and follow the steps outlined. You can copy the code one time onto your homepage, and the user can then select the language of their choice. Your entire site gets translated in real-time and you can now start selling products into other markets around the world.

A final thought: Google is working on instant speech translation for cell phones, so in a couple of years you may be able to communicate directly with your global customers, not just on the web!

What's in it for me?

2010-01-29T12:02:00.001-08:00

I sell more in a day on my websites than many of my customers do in a month. After being in the ecommerce business for over a decade, I have figured out how the game works. Sadly though, most online store owners still don’t get it. It continues to amaze me that business owners think that just because they have a website, that they should be selling something. The same problems exist in the virtual world as in the physical world. The store owner must do something to bring people into their shop. And once they get them into their shop, they must get them to buy something, and then to come back for more.

Just because I set up a physical store on some side street downtown, doesn’t mean that people are going to walk into my shop and buy something. And even if they do, will they come back? Will they tell all of their friends? No matter what “search engine optimization experts” may tell you, a new website will not appear on page one of Google. You get listed on page one because you’re the most popular website for a specific search term. You have to become popular first! You have to get people linking to your site, then get people to click on those links. There has to be something on your site that is going to get them excited enough that they will tell all their friends about you. Then, maybe, you will finally appear on page one of Google.

So what about paid links like Google Adwords? How about free shipping? Free content like a whitepaper? Security seals? Do these things work to bring in and create more customers? Sure they do! That’s why everyone does them. But your competition is doing all these things too – you have to do something that no-one else is doing. That way people will start promoting your site for you.

Here are two simple examples that I’ve implemented:

1. CyberbaseTradingPost.com. This site sells campfire and ceremony supplies to scout units. I created a little program that dynamically generates printable certificates for any award you want to give. You can create as many as you want – free. The only thing I ask for is your email address prior to being able to print the certificate. You better believe this generates a lot of word of mouth! And yes, I do suggest they buy something to go with the certificate – many don’t, but some do. An almost everyone recommends my site to many other people who do end up buying.

2. MasterNursery.com. this is a site I developed for a garden center coop, primarily for their own use. But it has one great feature called “Green Buyer”, where a member garden center can search for plant stock from national and regional growers, and compare availability and costs in real time. Then, they can place orders from multiple growers simultaneously – no more looking through availability/price sheets and placing numerous phone calls. If a grower isn’t in the system, the garden center is the one pressuring them to upload their data. And each of the 800 members tell each other how they are using the system, creating buzz about the site.

Now it’s your turn! What can you do on your site to generate word of mouth?

Inbound Marketing

2010-01-19T08:54:00.001-08:00

The world of marketing has changed. Today, most of us have TV’s connected to a DVR so we can easily skip the commercials. When we are in the car listening to the radio, we change channels when an ad comes on. We no longer read newspapers and we throw away junk mail without opening it. We even delete messages that come to our email inbox. All of this marketing has one thing in common – it is what I call outbound marketing, and we pay little to no attention to it.

Rather than using outgoing messages, today’s successful marketing has an array of techniques for inbound marketing – where customers actually seek you out. Inbound marketing refers to those marketing methods that help consumers find your company based on their interest. Unfortunately, most people think the way to accomplish this is through search engines. But as I’ve discussed in the past, search engine rankings are the result of doing other marketing methods well, which then results in higher search engine placement. You don’t get higher search results first and therefore become popular – you must first become popular in order to get higher search placement.

Inbound marketing consists of methods such as blogs, podcasts, videos, photos, presentations, articles, ebooks, social media presence, and news releases. Basically, the more content there is about you, the great the chance of getting found. Companies need to have an ongoing content development strategy. Each of the methods mentions gives you an opportunity to create content that your customers may find important. In turn, they may “tweet you”, “digg you”, or otherwise create a link to your content, which in turn provides links to your website. Companies who blog or otherwise create ongoing content tend to get more visitors. This creates a snowballing effect – more content and more links makes you more popular. The more popular you become, the more sales you make, and the higher your page appears in the search results.

This is the reason why web professionals will tell you that content is more important than design. Graphically pleasing websites are nice, but they don’t bring more visitors. Only content and others linking to that content will do that for you. Customers today have a choice and most will not listen to your message. You must get them to come to you by using inbound marketing.

Eating your own cooking

2010-01-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

This past year was tough on businesses. Many of our customers, both large and small, closed their doors. The internet was supposed to shield them from a down economy, and perhaps it did, but ultimately it wasn’t enough and some, even after decades of serving their customers, were forced to close. What happened? And is the economy really going to rebound in 2010 so this doesn’t happen again?

The reason for so many businesses failing is not a matter of the economy or of the business itself being viable. It’s not even a matter of the business not serving the customer, which has historically been a reason for businesses not being able to make it. The reason lies with a changed world. Customers no longer have the same needs as they did even a few years ago. A continuing array of more and more gadgets to complicate and fill our lives simply doesn’t seem necessary when you are in survival mode. Additional software features and buying software upgrades are certainly not on most people’s minds (Which is one of the reasons why updates are included automatically for our WebStores customers). Getting the most out of your current customers is key to growing your business. As an ecommerce consultant, am I willing to take my own advice?

In addition to developing shopping cart software and creating online stores for others, I run a number of ecommerce websites myself. The advice I offer each week relating to search engine optimization, niche marketing, email lists, blogs, and other internet marketing techniques are all things that I try myself on my own websites. But turning each of these sites into a sustainable business requires a lot of work, not casual tinkering.

One such website is NaturesPillbox.com. Nature’s Pillbox is a website based on a very narrow target market – Baby Boomers and Seniors looking for all natural health supplements to enhance their active lifestyles. The ingredients in our exclusive product line of “Colorado Natural Supplements” are based upon two decades of research focusing on beneficial plant properties rather than synthesized chemicals found in many supplements.

Regular readers of this column will know that businesses cannot rely on search engines to drive business to their websites, but that you must provide other means for customers to find you. Offering significant content about your products and services is an important way to get people to visit your site, and NaturesPillbox.com does just that. There a numerous pages describing the benefits of each plant ingredient used in the supplements. Driving people to your site through traditional marketing is important, and NaturesPillbox.com is doing this through a team of medical advisors, many of whom are offering Colorado Natural Supplements as part of their practice. Email newsletters, testimonials and word of mouth are all important components of creating a successful website. While the products themselves are proven, this new website is a testing ground to insure that the marketing techniques described in this column work. I encourage you to take a look at this site to see how these methods can benefit your business.

Stuff Happens

2010-01-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

You will experience a system failure sometime. As a computer professional, I know this and take the steps necessary to protect myself, but it still happened in December – twice!

The first time was a failure of the Windows operating system. Being diligent, I had (most of) my data backed up to an external hard drive, thus this was mostly an inconvenience when Dell told me I had to reformat my hard disk, re-install Windows, and start over. I even had my software installation keys saved in a separate file so I could re-install the various programs I had purchased via download. All except one – my McAfee anti virus software. Since I had lost my record of this purchase during the computer crash, they refused to talk to me.

After several days of re-building my laptop and transferring my backups, now I have a clean hard drive with newly re-installed software. According to Tiger Direct, here are the costs for re-building your data on a 20 Gigabyte hard drive (mine was 300Gb):

Sales and marketing 19 days $17,000
Accounting 21 days $19,000
Engineering 42 days $98,000

As a software developer, I easily fall into the engineering category. I was back in business – or so I thought. But one of the features of many modern programs, including Windows, is that they automatically check to see if there are updates available. Sure enough, the Microsoft site installed a virus on my computer (they would never admit that of course and it has since been corrected). Of course I still didn’t have my anti-virus working because McAfee wouldn’t let me re-install their software. Now nothing worked! I had to start over again! Only this time, some of my files, including my email folder had been infected. Weeks later, I have gotten everything back, but it was not easy, and it would not have been possible without backups. I have now added another layer of backups to my routine. And I use a different anti-virus other than McAfee.

So what does this have to with ecommerce websites? Everything! Even if you are running a website and all your data is stored on an offsite server, it is critical that you make your own backups yourself. If a hacker ever finds his way into your database or deletes all your images and html pages you will be glad you did.

Asking for the order

2009-11-17T06:04:00.000-08:00

eCommerce websites are supposed to sell products, not just take orders. Often, site owners don’t understand this key concept. As a result, the website looks as if it was designed with the understanding that the customer already knows what he or she wants to buy, and is just there to buy based on price. As the site owner, you are supposed to be the expert on the products being offered. Since you can’t be there in person to make a sale, your site has to do the selling for you.

Of course, a great way to do this is to have comprehensive product descriptions. I’ve discussed this in several past articles. Putting in specifications and detailed information can help a customer make a buying decision. But even that is not really selling, it’s just presenting facts. How can you sell? Customers expect you to be an expert on what you are selling, so don’t be afraid to make recommendations.

A method that has seen increased popularity is a walk-on video, where you (or another salesman) appears for a minute or two over the top of the other content on your website and make a simple sales pitch. This works great and can really help increase conversions. A more economical way might be to simply create a YouTube video and embed it on your product pages, again making a sales presentation about the product.

Allow your customers to interact with your site by including 360 degree product views so they can examine an item on all sides, a Flash application that allows them to try things on, such as jewelry, clothes, glasses, etc. or a “preview” feature so they can see how their personalized shirt or hat will actually look.

Customer-generated product reviews and ratings allow your customers to become your sales force for you. After implementing this on their site, Zales Jewelers increased their conversions by 50%, causing them to say “Our customers are better sales people than we are!” Take advantage of this feature. If your shopping cart software doesn’t have this capability, upgrade to WebStoresLtd.com. Don’t remove negative comments – make this real for your visitors. Put your phone number on every page of your website or include a “Chat with a salesperson now” button, so you can really sell your product.

Cross-selling (or up-selling) can be used in multiple ways. This is similar to “would you like fries with that hamburger?” Amazon does a great job of this by saying, “Customers who bought this item also liked these items…” Vista Print puts in additional pages between the “Proceed to Checkout” button and the order confirmation page, asking the customer to consider other additional items.

The goal of your eCommerce website should be to turn visitors into customers. Just like personal sales presentations, you should ask for the order. That is why “squeeze pages” or single page websites designed solely to sell a specific product work so well. Virtual rejections are easier to take than personal rejections, so don’t be afraid to sell.

Is the Internet destroying small businesses?

2009-11-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

Given that the Internet is no longer new and almost everyone uses it on a daily basis, it’s amazing how much misinformation there is out there. Buyer’s perceptions are significantly different than that of sellers. This fact became obvious to me at a recent party I attended, and the conversation revolved around the Internet.

It seems that my friends believe that people shop offline in physical stores to get the information they need, then they go online to buy the product on the internet because they can get it cheaper. As a result, retail stores are suffering and will soon be put out of business! Wow, I never realized people thought this was the case. In reality, the opposite is often true – people go online to research a product, find out what they want, then go to a physical store to make their purchase. If they do purchase online, they often buy from a mom-and-pop shop anyways, thus helping the small retailer, rather than putting them out of business.

The sad truth is that retail stores have always struggled. The overhead costs of leasing a building, investing in inventory, and hiring help so that you can stay open during peak times puts an incredible strain on small stores. Malls tend to make matters worse, because they often take a percentage of your overall sales. An online presence call help mitigate this and is often the reason why a small retail shop can survive, rather than being the reason for going out of business.

At the same time, the Internet does invite price comparison. Because your overhead is lower than a physical store, prices do tend to be less. But the number one reason people buy online is convenience – not price. As a retailer, you simply need to find ways to add value so that you can keep your margins high enough to make a profit.

Another huge misconception is that Google will drive traffic to a website, and the best way to get noticed online is to be number one on Google. This is like the Field of Dreams thought, “If you build it, they will come.” Anyone who has been managing a website for over 6 months soon realizes this simply isn’t the case. The way to get people to visit your website is to do lots and lots of creative marketing to generate word-of-mouth. YouTube videos that become viral, emails that get forwarded, press releases that get picked up and blogged about, social networking links, newsletters and other marketing efforts that provide links back to your site all help to drive traffic. Using coupon sites, your own blogs, and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay (and soon Walmart) help you to establish your own presence. Then, once you have already become popular, Google and the other search engines start to notice you, and your position begins to move up. You don’t get to be popular by being number one on Google – you get to be number one by being popular in the first place!

In other words, an Internet business is still a business and you are going to have to work at it to be successful. The good news is that small businesses can still compete with large business on the Internet. If you own a small retail store and are not selling on the Internet, or you want to improve your online sales, visit WebStores Ltd. today!