Department of Teaching and Learning’s Clinical Assistant Professor Dr. Josh Diem using Twitter in his lecture on advertising’s influence on children.

Stand in the back of any university lecture hall and look at what the students are browsing over. Most professors would be astonished that it isn’t the pythagorean theorem. More often than not, students are on Facebook, Twitter or chatting with their friends.  As social media marketers, and strong advocates for leveraging new tools, we saw an opportunity and challenge for professors to meet students in Twitter, the medium in which students had once used to better ignore their professors.

We took our social media communication skills to the classrooms of the University of Miami to help professors correspond with a large group of students without disrupting the lecture.

By using Twitter’s hashtags, professors set up a real-time message board for students to propose questions, talking points and arguments. Professors or Teaching Assistants (TAs) monitored responses and addressed those they felt appropriate.

“Twitter is meant to enhance communication, so we’re enhancing communication,” said Nick Santillo, 24, University of Miami alumnus and owner here at Voltier. “Even in staff meetings, training sessions, and the boardroom – Twitter is constructive when used this way.”

The study was inspired by this video created at the University of Texas, Dallas:

University of Miami Assistant Clinical Professor Dr. Josh Diem, Department of Teaching and Learning, uses mid-semester evaluations to see what his students think of his class. Using Twitter, he can get those updates daily.

“If people aren’t resistant to change,” said Dr. Diem. “[Twitter] offers a good tool to find out what needs to be changed.“

Tweets to the Staff

Just like the classroom, the likelihood of your employees absorbing everything in your staff meeting, training sessions, or even boardroom is pretty small. Not only will this enhance participation, employees will walk away with a makeshift outline of your meeting.

We wrote a how-to guide that’s going out to business owners and universities all over. “People always talk about all the useful benefits of Twitter,” said Santillo, who manages several client’s Twitter accounts, “but you never really see a practical use. This is just one we’ve found.”

Keep in mind: your Tweets are public. We don’t recommend trying to cram your competitive strategy into that 140 character box. You cannot interact in a hashtag conversation without having public Tweets, so be sure to uncheck Protect my Tweets in on the settings page.

E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services online, including via online stores, auction sites (like eBay), or online classifieds (like Craigslist). While eBay and online classified sites can be great places to sell products and grow an online business, for the purposes of this article, I will be discussing online e-commerce stores only.

2. Why E-commerce and why now?

In 2007 US online E-Commerce sales reached $175 Billion dollars. This number is expected to grow to $335 Billion dollars by 2012. (Neilson) Today, Business-to-Customer (B2C) projections are enjoying a double digit year over year growth. As the Internet becomes ever more ubiquitous, and more people become comfortable with the process of purchasing products and services online, the larger E-Commerce will become. The fact of the matter is that the new era of the Internet has opened up a window of opportunity that may never present itself again. Companies that are able to solidify their E-Commerce businesses online within the next few years will likely enjoy long-term popularity and success as a result of being early movers. Late-comers, however, will find it extremely difficult to break into already established and crowded niches.

3. E-Commerce vs Affiliate Marketing

When it comes to selling goods or services online, the two most common models are affiliate marketing and E-Commerce. Affiliate marketing is the selling of goods or services on behalf of another company for which you are paid a commission. E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services directly from a website that is maintained by you (you already own the product, or purchase it from a distributor). Affiliate marketing can be tempting for those who are not interested in working through the initial logistical steps required to acquire products, set up an online store, and manage customers, but affiliate marketing provides far less of a return.

Bottom Line: It pays to ‘do-it-yourself.’ Affiliates who sell other companies’ products can expect to make anywhere from 5-20% of the cost of the good or service sold through a click-through or referral style tactic. E-Commerce, by comparison, yields much higher profits with product markup usually upwards of 100% of the wholesale price of the good or service sold. There are some niches that have markups of 300-400% on their products or services. Many retailers or affiliates assume that the process of setting up and running an E-Commerce property is difficult, but this perception inaccurate. There are currently many new, easy to use technologies and services that make starting and running an E-Commerce business possible even for those with little or no experience with websites, E-Commerce, or marketing. The following steps will walk you through the process of setting up and launching an E-Commerce business in a do-it-yourself style guide.

Starting The Business

1. Choosing a Niche

The single most important choice you must make when deciding to begin an E-Commerce business is the niche that you are going to be working in, and the products that you are going to be selling. The following hints contain some criteria you should consider in making your decision.

A. Where to Start

With millions of potential products you can sell, it might seem a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, there is an excellent resource to explore all your options, and it is a source that is probably already familiar to you. The source is eBay! eBay is the largest auction site online and does huge volumes of goods transactions in every conceivable niche. eBay has done an incredible job of segmenting each market, and they have tools within their site to help users evaluate the popularity of each niche. If you start in the Categories section, you will get a feel for the scope of information available to you. After you have selected a niche from the category list, you can take a look at a “completed listing” and see how many products have been sold in that niche recently. My advice would be to find several that seem interesting and then evaluate them based on the criteria listed below.

B. Traffic Potential

If you are going to sell products online for money, you have to first make sure there are enough people out there willing to purchase your products. The best way to figure out if there is a market for your niche, and the easiest, is by finding out how many people are looking for the products you will be selling. You can find this by looking at the monthly search volume (total number of searches done) for ten or so of the most common keywords (usually products) in that niche. An excellent tool for analyzing those keywords is something that Google provides and you can access here. If the combined total number of monthly searches from the top ten or so most common keywords in one niche is less than 50,000, you are probably better off choosing a more popular niche.

C. Number of products

The more products that exist within the niche, the more unique opportunities there will be to attract customers looking specifically for those products. Congruently, the more products that exist within the niche, the more traffic you will be able to get from “long-tail keywords.” Long-Tail keywords are more specific, less general search phrases that aren’t searched particularly often individually, but exist in large quantities. For example the keyword “1995 used Chevy Blazer” would be considered “long-tail”, whereas the keyword “used car” would be considered short-tail. 80% of the searches done in any niche are of the “long-tail” variety. The more individual products within the niche, the more long-tail keywords will be used to find the products you are selling. **While it is good to be in a niche with a large number of products, and a strong “long-tail”, be careful of overextending yourself. Stick to one niche; don’t try to sell absolutely everything.

D. Would I enjoy this niche?

Starting and running an E-Commerce business requires considerable initial effort and sustained work over the long term in order to be successful. It is important that you have a passion, or at the very least, some interest in the niche you are going to be selecting. There is a high likelihood that part of your marketing and promotions will mean writing about topics within the niche, so don’t pick something you are uncomfortable talking about, or something that bores you.

E. Is the niche prohibitively competitive?

A common mistake of many E-Commerce start ups is failing to evaluate the current state of competition within a niche. Electronics, clothing, shoes, flowers, and sporting goods are probably poor choices for niches because they are already saturated and dominated by well known brands. If you can name two or more online retailers in the niche you are looking to enter, it is probably a good idea to look into a different niche. Make a list of the top ten current E-Commerce sites within the niche you are evaluating. You can do this by searching for common keywords within this niche and making note of the top ranking sites in Google’s search results. Evaluate each site on aesthetics, usability, features, the niche’s unique selling proposition, product selection, and prices. Another good idea would be to take a look at how difficult it might be to rank well in Google and other search engines for some of the most competitive keywords within the niche you are considering. SEOmoz.org has an excellent tool for evaluating how competitive a keyword is, which you can access here.

F. Online vs. Offline (buying trends within the niche)

You should consider how the products you are looking to sell are currently purchased. Are they available locally? Can your customer buy this item from their local Target or Wal-Mart? Is the product the sort of thing people don’t mind waiting 4-5 days to receive? The ideal product is something people would prefer to buy online, or something that is inconvenient or hard to find offline. Taboo products or unique, ‘throwback’, or closeout inventories often make great niche E-Commerce products, with the bulk of their sales occurring online. These markets do well for a few reasons, but the main reasons are E-Commerce sales are discreet and they offer more variety. Additionally, I would caution against products that people like to ‘try on’, or examine in person before purchasing (like Jewelry.) Selling Clothing or Jewelry online can be quite difficult and wrought with frustrating return situations.

G. Product Profit Margins

Selling a product that has very slim profit margins won’t leave you much room to advertise or market your site. It is important for you to consider both the cost and the profit margins of the types of products you will be selling. The higher the profit margin, the more leeway you will have to spend money on advertising and marketing strategies and still maintain profitability. Look at the wholesale prices of the products in that niche and compare them to the average prices of the top E-Commerce sites currently selling the same products to find out the average profit margins.

2. Acquiring a Product Source

A. Dropshipping vs Stocking Inventory

Once you have decided on a niche, you will now have to find a supplier for the products you are going to sell. There are two main ways to accomplish this: For those with enough start-up capital, you could simply by the products you will be selling on your site wholesale from a wholesaler or distributor. Depending on the niche you are in this could be a large initial investment. This option also means that you will be responsible for managing your inventory, packing and shipping the products to your customers, and dealing with returns or exchanges. Another option is to find a wholesaler or distributor that will drop ship products for you, which allows start-ups and small businesses to maintain the site and the marketing, and not be bogged down by customer issues. The second option also allows for a faster shipping time in most cases. If you find a company that will drop ship for you, you will only purchase products from them when a customer orders that product, and the dropshipper is responsible for packing and shipping, returns, and some customer service. Most dropshippers charge a fee of $3-$5 per order for these services, a fee that can be easily passed on to your customer.

1. Stocking Inventory Considerations

If you choose to purchase your inventory here are a few things to consider:

A. What is the shelf life of these products? (Do they spoil, go out of style, wear out, become obsolete, etc.)

B. What are the minimum orders? (Do I have to buy giant case lots, or can I purchase just what I need?)

C. What is the cost of housing these products? (Will you need to rent warehouse space?)

D. Who will do the packing, shipping, customer service, and returns?

2. Dropshipping Considerations

If you choose to use a dropshipper here are a few things to consider:

A. How reliable is the dropshipper? (Do they have good customer service and track record?)

B. What are their fill rates? (The percentage of orders that are filled 100% correctly and in full.)

C. Do they provide a product feed, which contains data and images of their products? (Can you get an automatically updated list of available, discontinued, and out of stock products?)

D. How do they handle returns, exchanges, and customer complaints?

E. What is their dropship service fee? (Does this make it difficult to price your products competitively?)

F. Do they have a minimum order amount? (This can present a problem if they have a $100 per order minimum, but you are only selling $25 per day on your site)

B. Finding Dropshippers

The following are some great places to look for wholesalers, distributors, and dropshippers.

1. Alibaba – Is a very large directory of business-to-business (B2B) suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers. Many of the companies you will find on here will also drop-ship.

2. Doba.com – Dropshipper

Simplest Business Model

Works Seamlessly With eBay

Excellent Training Materials

Guarantees the Best Drop Ship Price

Sells Name Brand Products

3. Salehoo.com 75,000 Members; 8,000

Unmatched Customer Support

Connect Directly to Suppliers

Access to Instant Imports

Supportive Community

Recognized by BBB

4. Worldwidebrands.com 8.1 Million Products

Top-Notch Video Training

Recognized As Best In the Wholesaling Industry

No Risk Of Scam Suppliers

Tested For Legitimacy

Over 9,000 Suppliers

Approved By eBay

5. Blackhatworld Forums – Dropship Wholesale Hookups – Forum in a Tech world setting

Wholesale/Dropshipper List via BHW

3. Buying a Domain Name

Once you have decided on a niche and figured out what you are going to sell, it’s time to select an appropriate domain name where your E-Commerce site will be located. The following tips contain some criteria that your domain choice should match with:

A. It should be as short as possible. Shorter domains are seen by users as having more authority and are generally easier to remember, and spell.

B. Your domain name should make it obvious to your potential customer what type of products you are selling. Unless you have huge start-up capital to build and launch an actual brand, stick with a domain/business name that reflects your product offering. Including the type of product you sell in your domain name can also help your site rank in the search engines for those keywords. For instance, if you are starting a Dog Clothing E-Commerce site, pick a name like “www.doggyclothing.com” instead of “www.bowwowscloset.com.”

C. Make the .com extension your main domain. If it is a commercial site, your visitors expect it to be .com domain, the .com domain extension is among the most trusted by searchers and search engines alike. You should purchase the .org, .net, .info, and .biz of your site as well, but your main domain should always be the .com domain.

D. Avoid hyphens and numbers, they seem ’spammy’ and unprofessional.

E. Make sure the domain is easy to spell. Spelling something intentionally incorrectly just to have a .com name will come back to bite you in the butt when your customers get to your competitors because they spelled it right.

F. Make sure the name that you choose for your domain name is not similar to other company’s names and that it is not protected by copyright.

G. Some great places to research domains:

1. Bustaname.com – allows you to create lists of possible domains based on keywords you choose.

2. Instantdomainsearch.com – Quick domain availability search – also gives you a discount coupon for godaddy.com

3. Buy an Expired Domain – Domains that are recently expired could potentially still exist in Google’s index which means they already have authority (of some kind) and have some power to rank well in the search engines. If you can, try to find a good expired domain that makes sense for your niche, this will be your best bet.

4. Developing your site

A. Choosing a Platform

If you have no experience with web development, you will probably need someone to create your E-Commerce site for you. The good news is that in recent years many new and powerful platforms have been created that work well as E-Commerce solutions. The following are my top picks and some notable considerations for each:

1. OsCommerce – Free – Open Source – Huge active community that regularly develops free add-ons – Tons of options for customization, skinning, and templating.

2. ZenCart – Free – Open Source – User friendly – Easy Installation.

3.VirtueMart – Free – Open Source – Ajax Product Overview – Joomla Integration.

4. Magento – Free or Enterprise(Pay) – Full Featured and Very Professional – Excellent product views – One page checkout.

5. CubeCart – Free and Pay versions – Template Driven – Full Featured – Very easy to set up.

6. X-Cart – Costs $229.00 – $500 – Very full featured – Good back-end control – Compatible with many payment systems.

B. SEO considerations

When it comes to On-Page Search Engine Optimizations best practices for E-Commerce sites, there are many considerations to be made. For those of you who are not experts, or don’t have the patience to spend the time optimizing the site for the search engines yourselves, your best bet is to go with a shopping cart platform that has integrated proper SEO technique into their systems. Be sure to look into this before choosing your platform. Below is a checklist of SEO items that should be adhered to at a minimum.

1. Title, Heading, and Meta optimization

Each page should have individual Titles, Headings, and Meta Descriptions that match with the content on that page. This is especially important for individual product pages. You will run into major issues if all of your product pages use the same titles, headings, and Meta info.

2. URL Rewriting

Your URLS should contain appropriate keywords and should reflect your menu hierarchies. For example if you sell 1998 Ford Windshields your URL should look something like www.yoursite.com/cars/ford/1998-windshields.html or something similar.

3. Avoid duplicate content at all costs

Make sure that you don’t have the same content on multiple pages; this can cause serious indexing problems and drastically reduce the amount of long-tail organic traffic you get from the search engines. Additionally, make sure that the product descriptions you are using are 100% unique across the Internet. A lot of times drop ship companies will give you product descriptions, if they have been provided to you, they have been provided to others. Even if it is a huge hassle, REWRITE your product descriptions so you can make sure they are UNIQUE.

I cannot overstate how important this is.

C. Unique selling proposition

Success within a niche relies on a combination of factors, but one of the most important factors is your site’s ability to stand out from the crowd. Even in niches that are not very competitive, it is likely that there are already dozens, if not hundreds of E-Commerce sites already in business. Ninety percent of these will be mediocre cookie cutter E-Commerce stores with very little in the way of uniqueness. Becoming a top E-Commerce site within your niche will be much easier if you can add value to your site beyond what the other sites in your niche offer. A few things I would recommend are:

1. Product reviews. (Outsource this if you have to, having third party reviews can boost your site’s credibility, and help you convert visitors into sales.)

2. Stellar search functionality. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing a site probably has what you are looking for, but being unable to find it. Give your customers a superior search experience and you’ve done your job.

3. Product Sorting. Many E-Commerce sites have some product sorting features, but few do it well enough. Give your customers a way to sort by price, name, rating, and any other metric that you think would be helpful for your product.

4. Blog Entries. Give a voice to your E-Commerce site by writing and regularly maintaining a blog that is located on your E-Commerce site. This blog will serve a dual purpose (Link Building) which I’ll discuss later on, and keyword placement.

5. Marketing Your Site

A. Manual Link Building

Manual link building should be a long term consistent task recognized as an important tactic in growing your E-Commerce store. It can often be difficult to build links to a commercial web property like an E-Commerce site, so it is important to be smart about how you acquire your links. The following are strategies that have worked well in my experience:

1. Blogger Outreach

Requesting links from bloggers in who maintain blogs in your niche. Often times they will give you a link upon request, but you may have to give them an incentive to link to you. Some bloggers will want a link in return; others may be swayed by an offer to write a guest post for their blog. Just remember, flattery goes a long way! If you’re having trouble getting bloggers to give you that link, offering monetary incentives, while frowned upon, certainly does work.

2. Directories

With thousands of directories out there, it’s very easy to find and drop your link for some easy link building. Directories won’t give you a huge boost in rankings, but it is still worth it to get into the major ones (Yahoo’s directory and a select few paid directories) and higher pagerank directories within your niche. Also try to get your site included in a directory that showcases sites built on whichever E-Commerce platform you choose. Getting into the oscommerce directory can net several dozen visits per week, and provides a good link value to help improve your rankings.

3. Article Marketing

One major difficulty when link building for E-Commerce sites is getting links to deep pages, particularly deep product pages. One great solution for this is to build links to those products through article marketing. There are many sites online that allow submissions of well written articles and how-to guides (ehow.com, Ezinearticles.com to name a couple). By writing articles about specific products or types of products, you can build links to deep pages to help fill out your sites overall link profile. Make sure that you take every opportunity to link back to pages on your site within the body of the articles you submit. Make sure you vary the anchor text and keep it natural – don’t force it to fit because you want it to. Keep it relevant and interesting, and you will get longevity out of the article.

B. Content Generation and Viral Marketing

Generating links to an E-Commerce site can be a difficult process, because other sites rarely have an incentive to link to a commercial web property. Editorially given links rely on having content considered worthy of linking to. Here are a few ways to accomplish this:

1. Blogging

By creating a blog, you can give your E-Commerce site a location for content that other sites will want to link to. It is important to make sure your blog is located on your domain; that way, any links built back to your blog will help the ranking of your site on a whole. There are several good blogging platforms that will accomplish this, including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad, among others. For this type of blog I recommend WordPress, it is a full featured blogging platform with a large development community. WordPress has thousands of add-ons, templates, and tools that make it easy to customize and maintain. Wordpress can also be easily optimized for on-page SEO factors, which is why it is the best choice in my opinion.

The goal of the blog is to give you a place for content that will hopefully stimulate others to link. Creating such content is easier said than done, but there are a few tips worth mentioning:

A. The goal is links, not traffic, but LINKS.

As you conceptualize and write a blog post, ask yourself “Would I share this with people?”, if the answer is no, start again come up with something compelling enough to share.

B. Resources for coming up with ideas:

1. Digg search: http://digg.com/search (organize by most diggs based on keyword)

2. Reddit search: http://www.reddit.com/search (organize by top based on keyword)

3. Delicious search: http://delicious.com/search (look for most saved based on keyword)

4. Stumbleupon search: http://www.stumbleupon.com/

5. Google groups: http://groups.google.com (look for popular topics within keyword relevant groups)

C. Evaluating Virility Potential:

1. Will the reader understand the content quickly and easily?

2. Does the initial impression of the blog post illicit further desire to understand the topic?

3. Does the reader have an incentive or desire to spread the content by sharing?

4. Will it enhance their reputation, income, friendships, status, or peace of mind?

5. Is the effort required to spread the content less than the benefits recieved from spreading it?

If you can answer yes to most or all of these questions, you have yourself a viral topic. Basically that means a worthy subject to put on your blog so that people will want to read about it, and share it with others.

D. Content that builds links has a hook to it. The following are the most common hooks:

News Hooks — Breaking a hot news story on your site will almost guarantee a large amount of traffic and keen interest from the social news communities. However, news hooks are not the most linkable. Once the story becomes old news, it’s no longer a valuable resource to link to.

Contrary Hooks — Playing devil’s advocate is a good way to get attention, traffic, and links. Contrary content must be created with great caution, however. Unpopular opinions can cause damage in the form of down votes on social sites and unsubscribes from your content.

Resource Hooks — Creating a great resource of links, tutorials, information, and more are some of the best ways to attract a large amount of links. The great thing about resources is they rarely go stale. You can always go back and update them, when the content changes or the information is dated.

Humor Hooks — Next to news, funny and offbeat content is one of the most popular to share. The advantage humorous articles have over news articles are their great longevity. What was funny yesterday is usually funny today.

Ego Hooks — Appealing to prominent community members’ egos will entice them to help promote the content with their honorable mention. This can be done in the form of interviews, spotlights and lists. Ego-based content has a high success rate of obtaining links from those people featured in your content, as well as their entire personal and professional networks.

Attack — This hook relies on pissing people off, so if your goal is to build a brand, this is method is not for you. If your goal is simply to build links, than it can be one of the most effective methods. Creating controversy can be one of the best motivators for building links. By inciting anger, outrage, or frustration, your message can be spread far and wide, just be careful, this can also result in unwanted attacks or slander lawsuits.

Whatever the Hook, it is necessary for you to think about the direction that content will take you, and to think about where you would promote that content once it is written and live on your site.

2. Quizzes and Widgets

Interactive content can be extremely effective at building links. Quizzes and widgets allow users to interact by answering questions about a certain topic for comparison to an average of the answers for those questions. By appealing to a visitors desire for introspection, and by giving those visitors easy ways to share the results, we have seen tremendous successes with our own Viral Quizzes and Widgets.

3. Videos

Expanding into rich media such as videos can be an excellent way to make your E-Commerce site more unique and more memorable. It can also be a great way to open yourself up to new areas of visibility online, and create more vectors for linking to improve your sites rankings. Video content can be centered around several different things including but not limited to the following:

A. Product Reviews

Doing video product reviews are great for a few reasons. First, they give shoppers on your site a better experience, and more information to help them in their buying decision. This added value makes your E-Commerce site stand out. Product reviews that are hosted on YouTube have the added benefit of ranking pretty well in the search engines, so if you own a golfing supply store, and do a product review of the latest TaylorMade Driver, you probably have a pretty good chance of having your video rank for the products name!

B. Tutorials

How-to videos are another excellent option. They provide added value for your visitors, while also giving you an opportunity to drive traffic from YouTube or Google video searches. There are also many niche “how-to” video sites that allow submissions of video content. Syndicating your videos can be a great way to build links and gain additional referral traffic to your site. Check out TubeMogul.com, a video syndication site that lets you upload one video to dozens of video sites like dailymotion.com, Howcast, Metacafe, and many others simply and easily.

C. General Video Blogging

If you don’t want to do tutorials or product reviews, creating a more general video blog can be a great way to attract more links and visitors. Select topics related to your niche, and try to structure them to be interesting in the same way your blog entries are interesting. They should contain a hook just as your blog posts would.

6. Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay Per Click marketing can be an excellent way for new stores to begin making sales and developing a brand almost immediately. Being profitable with PPC in E-Commerce can be difficult, but it can certainly be done quite successfully. The following are some pro-tips:

A. Organize your campaigns by Product Type —> Sub Product Type. A key to achieving good ROI with PPC is to segment your campaigns so that you can serve relevant ads and landing pages to those who are searching for the keywords you are bidding on. Providing clear organization with proper ad and landing page targeting you will be guaranteed high PPC quality scores with Google and optimum campaign performance.

B. Do extensive keyword research. You are looking for keywords that get a good number of searches, but are still not very competitive. One of the best tools for researching and evaluating keywords is provided by Google. The Google Keyword Tool gives suggestions on potential keywords. It also gives estimated monthly search volumes, and a rough guide to how competitive the keyword is. The Google search based keyword tool also provides good keyword information.

C. Don’t go CRAZY with keywords. Starting with small groups of keywords is preferable to giant lists of every imaginable longtail keyword. Start with 20-30 keywords per adgroup and add more as you build a strong account.

D. Do some Math: Calculate how much money you can spend on each campaign according to your conversion rates and profit margins. If you’re campaign on “Blue Widgets” has an average profit margin of $30 per sale (excluding advertising spend), and your conversion rate is 2%, then your average cost per click has to be less than $0.60 in order to make anything on the sale. You should know what this number is for each of your campaigns. This can be accomplished with Google Analytics quite easily as I will discuss in the next section.

E. Avoid hyper-competitive keywords. Focus on finding more focused “long-tail” product specific keywords for much higher conversion rates and ROI.

F. Take hints from your competitors. Use tools like Spyfu.com or others to figure out what keywords your direct competitors are bidding on and adjust accordingly.

G. Create multiple ads and do ad testing almost constantly. Try adding coupon codes to your ads, it worked wonders for us!

H. Bid on your competitors brand names and manufacturers names. Unless they have submitted an exclusion request, you are allowed to bid on your competitors names or even URL’s. Many people will type in the URL they are looking for into a Google search instead of the address bar. By bidding on these terms, you can pick up a large amount of very targeted, cheap traffic when searchers click on your ad instead of going to your competitors site.

7. Tracking and Conversion Optimization

A. In-Depth Analytics

Utilizing professional analytics tools like Google analytics to better understand your visitors is extremely important to having a successful E-Commerce business. Even if you are not doing PPC marketing, you should be aware of the keywords and referring sites that are driving the most traffic to your site. A few key metrics that should be understood and examined in order to optimize your sites conversion rates include:

1. Total Traffic: How much traffic is your site getting daily?  How does this break down between Direct, Organic (from the search engines), and Referral traffic from other sites.

2. What is the average number of pages per visit? By increasing the average number of pages per visit you are getting, you will also increase your sales.

3. What is your sites bounce rate? Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave after looking at only a single page. High bounce rates indicate a lack of interest or an inconsistency in what the visitor wanted to find, and what they actually found on your site.

4. What are your conversion rates, broken down by product category, and sales channel? You should use your analytics to understand how Organic, Direct, PPC, and Referral traffic is converting to sales. Knowing this information is the only way to make informed decisions about where to best spend your money.

B. Heat Mapping

The second piece to proper tracking and conversion optimization lies in understanding how your customers interact with your site. Your analytics data may let you know where you might have a problem that needs fixing, but you need to know how to fix this in order to progress. Tools such as CrazyEgg allow you to see more specifically potential problem areas in your site, including places that customers find confusing, frustrating, or simply unappealing. CrazyEgg, and other similar offerings allow you to see where on the page users click, giving you an opportunity to change styling and layout that can create big improvements in site interaction, length of stay, and ultimately in conversions(sales).

C. Better Conversions Through a Personalized Experience

One of the major differences between online and offline commerce is the personalized service you can get in a brick and mortar store if you need help. Most E-Commerce sites do a very poor job at addressing customer concerns while they are on the site. There are several ways to give your customers that personalized experience and superior customer service.

1. Livechat – Having a live person available to answer questions can be an excellent way to convert visitor to buyers. Liveperson is an excellent paid solution and Crafty Syntax provides a decent open source version.

2. 800 number – Having an 800 number adds authority and legitimacy to your site.

3. Extensive FAQ – Try to answer any potential questions a customer might have. A few important ones to address that could mean a lost customer if not answered included: “what will appear on my credit card statement?”; “will my item be shipped in discreet packaging?”; “What is your return policy?” etc.

8. Email Marketing and Social Networking

While the majority of your sales will likely come from first time customers, repeat business is essential to the success of any online store. Email marketing and integrating social networking can be an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers and encourage repeat business.

A. Email

1. Collect email addresses from all customers. Email address should be a mandatory field for all purchases. This email will be used to contact customers about their orders, but can also be used later on to solicit new business, to tell them about deals, or to introduce them to new products. Make sure you give them the option to refuse further communication though.

2. Use an email service like IContact.com to send email blasts. Sending the emails yourself will result in poor results. IContact.com and other email marketing providers have white-list agreements with many ISP’s, meaning more of your emails will get through and less will be sent to your customers spam folders. IContact also provide tracking features which can help you track your email campaigns efficacy.

B. Social Networking

Integrating Twitter and Facebook into your site and email blasts can be a great way to reach new customers and develop brand loyalty with your current customers. With each email blast, be sure to include links to your Facebook group page and your twitter account. Incentivize your customers into being your friend on Facebook, or following you on Twitter by offering bonuses through these channels. Exclusive coupons or deals work great.

9. Affiliate Programs

An excellent way to increase both your sales and your organic search engine rankings is by starting an affiliate program for your ecommerce store. Affiliates act as your sales people, spreading the word about your ecommerce store online. Not only will you gain more sales through the traffic they drive to your site, but their marketing efforts will increase the number of links pointing back at your site which can significantly improve your organic search engine rankings. By utilizing an affiliate program you can also get your site included in many reputable affiliate directories, which can provide additional benefit.

A. Affiliate Software

1. idevdirect.com – iDevAffiliate offers inexpensive software that is highly compatible with most shopping cart systems. There is a small initial fee but no monthly recurring fees.

2. Post Affiliate Pro – Post Affiliate Pro is an award-winning software program designed to empower or establish your affiliate program. Post Affiliate Pro is easy-to-use, and easy to set up to manage your own affiliate program. Cost varies depending on features, but is one of the more expensive options.

3. Affiliatewiz – Is a decent solution for tracking your affiliates online. Similar to idevaffiliate, but with a few different features and a bit more expensive.

4. Direct Track -Direct Track is powerful software that is used by many including CPA Networks, Affiliate Networks, etc. Infact. DirectTrack currently powers more affiliate programs and affiliate networks than any other technology in the world. DirectTrack is an intuitive, turn-key ASP platform that can easily be private labeled and tailored

5. Affiliate Trail – Another low cost, highly featured affiliate software solution.

B. Affiliate Directories to Join

One of the best ways to attract new affiliates (and also build links) is to add your new affiliate program to affiliate directories. There are hundreds of such directories out there. Here are a few good ones:

affiliatescout.com

affiliatesdirectory.com

affiliateseeking.com

associateprograms.com

jamaffiliates.com

10. User Generated Content

Writing your own content or having it outsourced consumes both time and resources. It is, however a very valuable piece of marketing your site and building links. An excellent way to increase the amount of quality content is to ask the visitors and fans of your site to contribute to its content. This works particularly well for niche sites, where readers are well invested in the topic, and likely knowledgeable and eager to contribute. Although you will find some altruistic people who will write for you free of charge, having some incentive to contribute is usually necessary.

Incentivizing UGC: Incentivizing people who come to your site to write for you can be done in many ways. If your site is heavily trafficked and receives a lot of visitors, the visibility will likely be enough to entice others to write for you. If you’re just starting or have a small readership or low traffic, it might be necessary to incentivize writers monetarily or by offering them products from your E-Commerce store in exchange for their services.

Examples: There are many sites that have utilized user generated content well. One excellent example is Youmoz.org/UGC. Youmoz is an excellent SEO and Internet Marketing site with a very high reader base. They allow submissions for content from anyone, and when approved post the content in their user generated content section. They post many of these articles written by users per week, and they have seen increases in their rankings as a result of the success of articles written by their viewers.

Wordpress MU: Wordpress Multi User is a great way to provide a way for your visitors to have their own blogs that are hosted on your domain. Check it out.

11. A Few Notes on Outsourcing

Outsourcing can provide a huge competitive advantage if you can learn to do it properly. There are huge numbers of qualified cheap workers available to help with almost any aspect of your E-Commerce business. The following are some resources for finding these workers.

MTURK: Excellent for menial and repetitive tasks. Mturk is a service of Amazon.com and there are many qualified workers who can do a wide variety of tasks. As I discussed earlier, having a 100% unique site is very important in avoiding duplicate content issues that can hurt your E-Commerce stores rankings. Mturk can be a great resource to have people re-write content, especially product descriptions so that they are unique from the product descriptions being used elsewhere online (a lot of times generic product descriptions are supplied by dropshippers or manufacturers and most E-Commerce stores don’t go to the trouble of rewriting them.)

ODesk: Odesk.com is a website that allows for the hiring and monitoring of outsourced workers. You can hire workers here with almost any skill from around the world. Odesk is unique in a few regards. First is that you will find more workers from foreign countries than on other freelancing sites. Workers are generally cheaper because of the foreign workers. While they are not the best for more advanced writing jobs because many are not native English speakers, it is easy to find programmers, link builders, low level content writers, and other basic tasks. In order to get the most out of workers here it is essential to provide very detailed instructions about the tasks you assign and the deliverables you expect. Odesk does a great job of helping you monitor your workers by providing keystroke counting, screenshots of what they are doing, and even the ability to monitor them to see if they are at their desks.

Guru/Elance/Scriptlance/Rent-a-coder Etc: These sites are for hiring freelancers, most of whom are native English speakers and are from first world countries. You can outsource almost any task on these sites from design to writing to programming to illustration to marketing. Expect to pay freelancers a bit more on these sites than Odesk, but they will produce higher quality work more autonomously.

Conclusion

While starting and running an E-commerce business can require more upfront work than some other methods of making money online, it provides significant benefits. By creating a sustainable and profitable E-commerce store that ranks well in the search engines and gets significant organic search traffic, you will have also created a very valuable web property that can be sold for many times its yearly profit.

In the field of search marketing, there are a ton of different areas where skill proficiency is a must.  If you are new to the arena, back from a hiatus or just need something to help you focus on one area at a time, I have something for you.  I use a short and simple equation that organizes all of the search marketing tasks into different groups.

Here she is:

Research + SEO + Link Building = High Search Rankings

Seems like a elementary equation to represent such complex tasks and systems but I assure you, it will help when you need a frame of reference or you get lost in the weeds.  As always, the better you become in each area of the equation the better results you’ll achieve.

Part One: Research

The most overlooked area of search marketing is in my opinion, the planning and research necessary to the success of any website online.  You should be engaging in keyword research, niche analysis and competitive analysis before you construct your plan of attack or develop any target keyword spreadsheets.

• Analyze keyword difficulty
• Analyze the competitors that currently rank for the keywords you want
• Compile a comprehensive keyword list with at least a metric for keyword difficulty
• Develop your SEO plan of action

Part Two: Search Engine Optimization

Of course, before you decide how the website will be optimized, you’ve got to have a firm grasp on which keywords are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Obviously, you should scoop up the keywords that are easiest and put in solid consistent effort in improving your rankings for more difficult long term keyword goals.

Before you build your first link, write your first blog post, submit to digg.com or tell a friend about your website, you must:

• Create unique page titles
• Create unique meta data/information
• Create unique urls using mod-rewrite or something similar
• Fix any canonicalization issues
• Check site-wide architecture and make sure the infrastructure is in tact with no server error pages
• Make sure unique content is on every page
• Don’t ever serve two pages with the same content

If you can’t master the aforementioned tasks, don’t tell anybody until you can.

Part Three: Link Building

So, you want to get your website fully indexed by the search engines and you know you’ve got to get some juicy inbound links to it.  Sorry guys, ultimately, if you suck at link building, you’re going to have an impossible time getting the rankings you/your client is looking for. If you’re giving it a shot anyway, here are a few popular ways to accomplish this task!

• Manual Link Building (slow): this usually consists of contacting website owners and convincing them to put a link on their website that links to yours.  This is totally cool for the more popular websites whose link would benefit your rankings greatly but don’t just go contacting any old Joe with a PR1 blogger blog for a link.

• Blog Writing (slow/medium): One of the best ways to build links to your domain is to create an active blog that offers content to an eventual community of users.  The topics can usually be directly or tangentially related to your company/product.  The con here is that creating a successful blog takes time, creativity and patience which a lot of us don’ t have.  If you can weather the storm, the pro of keeping a successful blog severly outweighs the con with thousands of visitors per day becoming the “talkers” for your company often linking your site to others and spreading offline word of mouth as well.

• Social Media Marketing (fast): If you engage in social media marketing correctly, this can turn into a link-building powerhouse for you.  By far, the most difficult part of this process is creating link-worthy content and refining your promotional skills, two activities that even “web 2.0” experts struggle with.

There are many more link-building examples that could work for you, check out some examples over at SEO BOOK.

Remember when optimizing your website and campaigns, you’ll want to make sure you’re using analytics data to make decisions about which tactics work and which ones do not.  The power of the search marketing equation should get stronger and stronger over time.

Note: this is by no means the end to the work done in search marketing, but it does illustrate in a quasi-mathematical way, what areas you must focus on for success with your website.

-Nicholas Santillo

Here’s an exercise: picture yourself when you first started search marketing and the level of knowledge you had.  Got it?  Now picture your old self as a current prospect.  Isn’t that image scary?  Where do you even begin?  I usually start with day one of the internet.  No really, I give it to them straight up old school, considering the average persons understanding of how the internet works is stuck back in the 90’s with altavista and meta tagging, so, if you want to hook them, you’ve got to start there.  If you can keep them interested all the way to 2009, you’ve got a shot at a healthy relationship.   Its important that you feel out the level of understanding your prospect has about the search engine marketing before attempting to connect the dots.  So, during that process be aware of these misconceptions that you’ll undoubtedly run into. You can choose to run for the hills or expect to ramp up your communications, leaving no gap in knowledge or room for misunderstanding.

Myth Numero Uno: “My Domain Came SEO Optimized”

First of all, SEO can’t possibly come with your domain.  A single domain with no pages or content is only as good as its name, there is nothing else to be “SEO’d.”  That said, picking a name is extremely important, because, in our world, you’re stuck with it.   You can’t decide that on one random day that you’d prefer another domain and just change your name and that’s that.   To avoid a giant seo nightmare, when you’re planning your concept, leave the name for last… right before you develop the site.

Myth Numero Dos: “I was Told Flash is the Best Type of Website… and I Want it”

Flash is so pretty.  I love flash.  My website won’t work without flash.   I can’t achieve the same objectives without flash. SEO websites are ugly, mine is flash based. I know the secret to ranking an entirely flash based website.

I have heard all of these comments. Let’s set the record straight, flash allows you to do some pretty awesome things from a design/user experience basis but for SEO, it’s still useless garbage. So, what we usually go for if the client is hellbent on flash movies and loading bars is to seamlessly integrate the two.

Having a website whose infrastructure is built with solid html, thousands of indexable pages with dynamic content and tastefully created flash movies is the perfect combination of glitz, glam and pragmatic design.  Your customers will be pleasantly surprised and so will the search engines.

Myth Numero Tres: “You Can Achieve #1 Position by Injecting Some Tags and/or Submitting to Google”

Meta tags are SO TIRED AND OLD.  I mean, yes, all websites should have them just so when a client looks at your source code, meta tags exist, then your client will immediately assume that you’ve must be doing something right.  Thats about all they’re good for nowadays.  The days of SEO being a quick index.html file open, find/replace, use of permutation tools is over (unless you’re doing some PPC). There are literally hundreds of more important factors than how many meta tags you’ve got shoved in.

My buddy knows someone who can submit my website to the top of Google.

Yeah? What does that even mean? Where do you go to submit your site? Is that like the DMV where you go to register your car? Do they take credit cards?

The odd thing is that there are others within this industry that make money by convincing ill-informed people with money to pay them in exchange for submitting their website to the top of google. Lies.

Build an awesome website that is compliant with 100’s of SEO rules of thumb (which change often) + Build 1000’s of quality in-bound links = a start to a successful website.

After you can master that equation, we move onto calculus and testing.  Its not an exact science, every website is different and operates in a niche with unique limits/obstacles but getting your website to the top has nothing to do with contacting google. In fact, they contact you. robots.txt

Myth Numero Quatro:  Anything Worthwhile Usually Takes More Than a Day to Build. Rome did. Your Successful Website Will Too.

Just like there is no Google submission committee where you’re website is denied or approved, there is no such thing as overnight results in the seo/sem world.  If you’re looking for that, PPC is your way to go and in some cases, a great way to test your longer term SEO efforts and keyword targeting.

In fact, the process of working on a search marketing project should be a long term, healthy relationship based on a slow to moderate rise in rankings, traffic and sales.  Depending on the talents of the SEO firm, this may take 2-3 months or 2-3 years based on the strategy they execute and the tools they deploy.  What is strange to me is that its common in the SEO world, despite the better judgement of any mildly successful SEO to oversell and under-deliver.   Logically, if you tell someone to expect a filet and give them ground beef, they’re going to be unhappy.  Be sure to educate your prospect on what to expect, how long they will have to wait for gratification and why it takes so long to achieve the outlined results. Or, if you like being dropped like a fly- show ‘em a filet.

Myth Numero Cinco: “Rankings are Permanent”

There is nothing permanent about the search engines besides fluctuation in the SERP’s and the need for a stellar SEO team to make sure your website is growing at a rate faster than anyone else in that niche.  The goal is to become competitive and continue the rate of progression so that no other website can catch up.  Sounds easy, right?   Some niches are easier than others.  If you’re just starting, make sure your research is done meticulously well and the pro’s outweigh the con’s.

Myth Numero Seis: “Ranking Number One for One Keyword is an Actual Search Strategy”

“I want to rank number-one for cleaning.”  Sure you do.  But why not expand your horizons and realize that while ranking number one for cleaning, if achieved, is probably only a fraction of the relevant traffic on the internet looking for what you’re offering.   The process of getting your website to rank for 10000 tangentially related keywords (long tail) vs. “cleaning” would consist of an inherently different strategy and would need to be planned from the get-go.  Again, I can’t stress the words “Keyword Research” enough here.

Myth Numero Siete: “My Sister is a Social Media Expert”

And my poodle is a brain surgeon.  The hot marketing buzz word right now is SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.  Just because you poke your girlfriend on facebook or retweet her useless comments of the day, does not mean that you know social media marketing. Knowing how to operate an account and leveraging an entire network of people for the benefit of a single user are two different things and the latter takes a skill that can’t be created overnight and should be taken much more seriously than most people do.

Lets start with the uber official wikipedia definition of what social media marketing is.

“Social media marketing is a term that describes the act of using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other collaborative Internet form of media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.”

So, when your client asks for more sales, and you tell them you’re going to use social media marketing as a way to make that happen, what are you actually saying?  You have got to be clear as day. You’re going to create 30 viral youtube videos that drive X amount of traffic resulting in X amount of links, bringing your rankings up 20 spot and sales up by 400%? Or, are you going to use a power tweet account to build brand recognition and quality links to internally produced content and other media?   With the almost perpetual advent of new social networks with popularity increasing on some and decreasing on others, where should you bring your clients website to be social?  A celebrity blog on reedit? Probably not. A techno-nerd blog on digg? If the content marries the social characteristics of the community, then give it a go.  If not, search for a more targeted venue.

Myth Numero Ocho: “Buying Non-Unique Content or Copying Content From Article Databases is Smart”

A successful blog can do wonders for a business online.   But its got to be original, unique to your website and consistent.  Blogging can do two very important things for your website and business, the first being an instant way to communicate with your constituents, customers, vendors, investor or anyone who has a stake/interest in what your business does.   These people can begin to or even continue building a relationship with you without taking up a huge amount of time so in a sense, blogging is realtime public relations. Blogging can also have the power to build very relevant, fresh links that will help your site rise the rankings as your authority becomes stronger online.   So, no matter if you’re selling widgets or cupcakes, it’s always positive to keep a blog.

Myth Numero Nueve: “I’m going to cut long term costs by buying all of the necessary links.”

Like the millions of other people on the internet looking to cut corners and get rich quick, Google knows who you they are and if you engage in the activity, in that fashion, you will be found out too – and most likely penalized.  So, don’t do it. Build real, quality links to content that is worth while to the consumer and the search engine alike.

Myth Numero Diez: “I Have Someone Who Will Get my Website to #1 for $299″

Really? Thats Interesting.  You are buying into the rubbish that someone can get you valuable rankings in less than a days work?  They are either lying to you to get your business or you’re asking for your website to be ranked for weak terms in a non-competitive niche. The truth of the matter is that no matter the source, the volume of work in getting anything ranked number one for nearly any term can’t be done for that rate. Read the fine print, check their references and ask questions if you don’t understand the proposal.

Article Title: “15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started as an Internet Marketer”

Summary: Chris Tynski outlined the challenges, solutions, trials and tribulations that most internet marketers are faced with when they enter into the online marketing arena.  From choosing an appropriate online business model to choosing a correct method to scale your knowledge and accomplish more work per hour.  This article is a great read with some general advice to those of you who are new to our community.

Traction: 20 Marketing Pilgrim Comments, 197 Tweets, 1149 Dosh Dosh Hits (30 Days), Finalist in the Annual Marketing Pilgrim Contest

Article Title: “How to Get Strong Referral Traffic from Social Websites: A Simple Link-bait Tactic”

Summary: If your website serves content for an audience that does not particularly align well with the culture or interests of a specific social networking community, this article offers some pragmatic advice for benefiting from those communities. Perhaps the way to go is to research tangential topics to write about, promote those now appropriate topics on your target social media outlets and watch the links pile up. Discretion and selection is key to your success with this method.

Traction: 19 Dosh Dosh Comments

Noteworthy Commentors: Andy Beal, Chris Winfield

Article Title: “The 7 Deadly Sins that Hurt You as an SEO or SEM”

Summary: Daniel Tynski wrote an article about the potential pitfalls a new internet marketer could face and how to avoid getting bogged down by ambiguity and tangents.  Gain confidence quickly, don’t trust too many people and test your hypothesis ad nauseam.

Traction: 20 Marketing Pilgrim Comments

Article Title: “Anatomy of a Super Digg”

Summary: We we’re contracted to work with a local used card dealership here in West Palm Beach, FL and they wanted to experiment of Social Media Marketing.  We got some ideas together and executed them primarily using digg.com – the community of choice.  Daniel recounts his experience and results of the content being promoted using our internal Social Media Marketing methods.

Traction: 73 SEO MOZ comments, Promotion to the main Seomoz.org blog from YouMoz

Noteworthy Commentors: Rand Fishkin (CEO of SeoMoz.org) made a special note that said:

Note from Rand – Daniel’s site, Voltier, was taken down by an insane traffic load from Digg, Reddit, & others today (which is why the hosted images above aren’t displaying). Given time, I have no doubt they’ll recover – many congrats for putting together some great linkbait, and better luck holding together the server next time; it’s certainly an issue we at SEOmoz can empathize with.

Article Title: “A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg (part 1)” & “A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg (part 2)”

Summary: If you have been charged with the necessary task of generating high quality links for your website and you want to get the biggest bang for your buck, Social Media Marketing may be your best choice.  Just to scratch the surface on how to get something that you wrote to go popular on a website like digg, read more.

Traction: 19 SEO MOZ comments, Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007 (Tamar Weinberg/Techipedia.com)

Noteworthy Commentors: Sugar Rae, Rebecca Kelley

Without further ado, I present to you:

15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started as an Internet Marketer

Enjoy!

The e-myth theory suggests that the founders of the organization remain “technicians” working inside their business instead of working on their business. They usually lack the growth and management skills needed to increase revenue and keep down costs.

During the E-Myth Mastery Book, Michael Gerber suggests what he feels are the “seven essential disciplines” to master in the process of developing a world-class organization.

1. The Enterprise Leader
2. The Marketing Leader
3. The Financial Leader
4. The Management Leader
5. The Client Fulfillment Leader
6. The Lead Conversion Leader
7. The Lead Generation Leader

Before I started applying the principles outlined in e-myth to my business, my thoughts remained unclear and a source of frustration for me as to how to properly develop and execute them. A specific quote in the book helped me channel my frustration into productive business decisions that have only increased the bottom line and customer satisfaction. These seven disciplines are the “means through which you articulate your vision” for your organization. For me, that quote changed my prospective forever about what I do as a business owner and leader.

After embarking on the journey to fully embrace, understand and execute the techniques developed by Michael Gerber and his e-myth staff, I have had multiple programs developed to help automate and further organize the processes that we’re impeding our growth. In my mind, efficiency is one key to optimizing costs. If a specific task is taking 10 minutes to complete but with the aid of technology, could take 3 minutes, then you need to assess the cost in producing that technology to reduce the time to complete that task.

However, if you have an in-house programmer like myself, the said cost is less than if were to have it developed externally. The result? Hours of saved time, thousands of saved dollars and absolutely no need to hire additional employees. The biggest gain is the ability to complete ten times the amount of work we could have without the implemented system.

The ability to derive and create technology to assist in my business has helped us phenomenally. Even if your business isn’t mostly centered around technology, there is a way to integrate it throughout your business to help optimize your operations and expand margins in places you thought we’re completely needed in the beginning.