Build eCommerce Web Sites!

Pictures of Olivia Newton-John

2006-06-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

This wouldn't be significant if it wasn't for the fact that she's around 56 or 57 in those pictures! How can someone age so gracefully? I'd like to find out what her diet has been like for the last 57 years...

read more | digg story

The Inefficiency of Visual Memory

2006-06-12T18:34:00.000-07:00

An article on how ineffective visual memory is. Has a video that demonstrates two actors switching place during distraction and a woman continuing directions without even noticing.

read more | digg story

Google AdSense Referrals

2006-05-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

Google now pays people for getting them referrals to adsense. Truthfully, I don't think I would ever add one of these buttons to my website, because I think any money that could come from it probably wouldn't be worth the traffic I sent them.

Regardless though, a lot of bloggers are finding it useful just to pick up some small change.
Here's a link to the google blog's latest entry talking about the makeover their buttons have had. At least they're not as tacky anymore!

FeedBurner

2006-05-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

I've recently been looking into a well-known service called feedburner. I've seen the name around so many times that I decided I just had to look into it and find out exactly what it is.
Apparently they are a service that is 90% free, with a few features that cost a little bit of money... all related to (big surprise) feeds and feed hosting.

Just to outline a few cool features that using feedburner to host your feed...
1.) They will convert your feed to the best feed for each individual user (RSS, RSS2.0, atom, etc.).
2.) They will allow you to put an email subscription form on the page that allows users to have the feed EMAILED to them.
3.) They have statistics on your feed, including total number of users subscribed (my personal favorite feature!)
4.) Their feedflare service can allow you to add links like to the bottom of every feed for things like email to a friend, add to de.licio.us, and add to digg...basically all the social tagging stuff. Anything that makes it easier for people to talk about your blog is a good thing.
5.) Can convert your feed to HTML to be displayed on sites.

These are just a few of my favorite features. Theres more than that, and apparently they're pretty frequently adding new ones. Expect to see me using feedburner in the very near future. Check out their website at www.feedburner.com.

ProBlogger on Finding Blog Readers

2006-05-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've probably mentioned problogger more than once before, but yet again I ran across another excellent post of theirs.

It's discussing tips and techniques for building up more readers (which I need to apply to this blog more at some point)...
Check it out here.

Fat, 40, and fired

2006-05-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

Article by a guy that risked it all and took a year off work on his 40th year off after reading a book. Very moving, and a top story on reddit. Highly recommend anyone feeling drained, and exhausted from the grind of work over years check this out.

read more | digg story

Wow... Are bloggers THAT wealthy?

2006-05-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

ProBlogger just put up a new post talking about his poll results. According to his poll, 4% of his readers make a six-figure income from blogging!

That is absolutely astounding... Check out his post here.
I'll also vouch for his blog. I read it a lot, and really like it.

Old School EverQuest Is Coming Back!

2006-05-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

"The progression server is a new server that will start with the original, just-out-of-the-box content of EverQuest, seven years ago. Some changes are not being taken out, and instead of waiting the usual 6 to 12 months for an update, new content will be unlocked by players finishing tasks and killing bosses."

read more | digg story

What's in your link quality?

2006-05-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

A fabulous article talking about the differences in "quality links" and true-blue "high quality links" such as those with dmoz, and yahoo! directory. This article gives some enticing tidbits of information that gave me some ideas, and even has made me consider shoveling out the hefty $299 for Yahoo directory links.

read more | digg story

HOW TO: Start Blogging

2006-05-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

Covering DNS servers, domain names, webhosts, hosted blog solutions, WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern, FTP and some tips for starting up a blog.

... And we all know blogging is useful to internet marketers and SEO people. If you don't, then you haven't been reading blogs and don't understand the technology. You're behind the times -- catch up.

read more | digg story

Link Building

2006-05-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

Alright boys and girls, today we're going to talk about link building. Every good SEO knows that link building is a critical process. Why? Because search engines use incoming links to a website as a metric for how popular a website is.

Infact, Google has a very well-known algorithm dedicated to this known as pagerank. While it's unknown how much pagerank (the specific number) plays into ranking, it's undeniable that incoming links is by and large one, if not THE most important factors in ranking well on search engines. So how do you get links, you may ask....

Well, if you make good content people will typically link to you just because they like your website. That's why Google thinks links are a metric for popularity. However, if one were tenacious enough, one might find that their website is not being seen by enough people to be established as popular yet so you could do activities such as the following:

Going out and asking to TRADE links with people in similar industries.
Seeking out directories that are specifically built to house links.

Thank fully the trials and tribulations of good link building is nothing new. There are directories out there listing people who specifically are seeking good link exchanges, as well as directories that simply house links to websites grouped together by category.

Not all such directories are easily read by search engines however! Some directories may not get indexed by Google or the other big-boy search engines simply because their website employs too complicated of scripts for the google spider to be able to decipher intelligibly. What good is having a link on a directory, if google will never find out about it?

Here we have a solution. A couple of absolutely wonderful, wonderful people in the Search Engine Optimization industry have actually developed a directory of SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY DIRECTORIES! Check them out. Use them. Submit your website to all the directories on the list... and for heaven's sake people... please use a valid title, and description for your website!

Forum Optimization

2006-05-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

I was recently putting together a new forum (non-SEO related) and it occured to me that this was a topic I had not talked about on my blog. Forums are an incredible way to get traffic to your website, and to keep it there.

The reason is obvious: if you're building a community that uses your website to communicate, obviously they're going to keep coming back... and the larger your community grows, the more your website will be a powerful resource to whomever seeks information on the topics your forum is discussing.

However, a major problem with forums is that because of the use of session ID's (the data proceeding the questionmark in the URL), and other forum conventions can keep search engines from indexing those pages well. That's a lot of content that your website's forum community is putting together that isn't being put to use! What a travesty!

Recognizing this, a number of wonderfully charitable coders have not only altered existing popular forums to be search-engine (especially google) friendly, but have provided the information to the public so that they can apply the same modifications to THEIR forums.

Here's one of my personal favorites for PHPBB: http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

You can thank me later. Also, their forum is running the SEO modifications so you can see it in action. (Notice that URL is a link to a post on a forum... but the address ends in .html? Nice.)

John Reese announced a new video...

2006-03-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

I haven't had the opportunity to check it out myself, but the guys over at the Warrior Forum and a few other marketing blogs has been talking about it. It's called "The $526,744.35 Video"... As famous as John Reese is I'm sure it can't be anything but quality!

Check it out at http://files1.reesereport.com/vrevideo.html

Leave me some comments and tell me what you thought of the video too... Maybe I'll check it out if I get a spare moment. :-)

Willie Crawford's Marketing Tools Sale...

2006-02-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

Hey guys,
A well known internet marketer, Willie Crawford, is having a sale on multiple of his products (around $4500 worth) for a combo package of $50. I've used one of his products before, and really liked it and enjoy reading his blog.

I'd be willing to bet that his internet marketing related materials is probably some really great stuff... Definitely check it out at http://www.williecrawford.com/blog/ .

Google Reader... subscribe to all your ecommerce blogs!

2006-02-20T19:54:00.000-08:00

I just recently ran across the Google Reader page, and thought it was really cool! And being that you're reading my blog right now, perhaps you may even find it useful yourself....

Basically you provide it with a site feed (mine is http://ecommweb.blogspot.com/atom.xml ), and it adds it to categories you've made for all of the blogs/sitefeeds you regularily view. Anytime you login it will show you the latest postings on any of the sites you've subscribed to, and I believe it will even prioritize them based on how much interest you show in the entries of certain blogs etc.

You can have it hide entries you've read, or list them all... and you can star entries you find interesting so that you can find them later. If you add my sites feed now you'll see this entry along with all of my previous entries on there. Check it out, and get your internet marketing blogs on there asap!

Google SMS - Totally Unrelated to Ecommerce

2006-02-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

This is totally unrelated to ecommerce but I thought it was so cool I needed to post it...
Send text messages to Google and get answers to basic questions. Wow. (This includes phone numbers, directions, and simple facts) All free, of course.
http://www.google.com/sms/

Overture Tool: Assessing Ecommerce Advertising Costs

2006-02-05T21:59:00.000-08:00

I ran across the overture price bid tool and was really surprised how easy it is to get prices on the costs for advertising for on any given keyword. Typically what something costs on overture is a pretty good guess at what it might cost on the only other MAJOR ppc company: Google Adwords.

If you're wanting to check out the cost of any keyword head over to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch and click BID TOOL on the right hand side about midway down the page.

Google Suggest: Find Your Ecommerce Keywords

2006-01-31T20:48:00.000-08:00

I ran across a really cool tool a while back while scrounging around on the net.
It's provided by Google themselves. It's called Google Suggest, and as you type it offers you suggestions for top keywords that match the criteria specified. I couldn't think of a better way to nab some keywords to try to promote or run ads on for my website.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Managed Hosting: The Death Knell of Colocation Services

2006-01-28T09:25:00.000-08:00

What IS Managed Hosting? This is a question I found myself asking recently when I took a look at a website I knew previously to only provide colocation services. At first I was a little bit upset, because I knew that this particular provider provided excellent colocation services and was a little bit annoyed at the fact that they'd apparently changed their company's services to some new fangled thing I'd never heard of: Managed Hosting.

However, after doing some reading I found that this new and mysterious service they offered drastically reduced the complication involved in the project I was intending on launching. Allow me to explain...

Before I get into defining what Managed Hosting I believe that I should first explore the details of what colocation even is, for those that may have stumbled onto this article unaware. Colocation is a service provided by an internet service provider. Essentially, you provide them with a computer with your choice of operating system and software installed on it (depending on their policies), and they provide you with the bandwith and uninterrupt supply of power you need to run things on the internet. This can be anything from computer game servers to webservers for websites that are in demand of a large amount of resources.

There's a number of problems with this scheme of doing things, however! If you're providing the computer and software than that means you're going to also be administrating every aspect of it. This means that you're going to have to get it initially setup in the first place, make sure it is secure against all the known forms of attacks that can happen to your server, doesn't go down for days while you're upgrading software, and keep your software on your system up-to-date! This can all be very time consuming, and is vital to running a safe and ecommerce business. Afterall, you wouldn't want the website taking in orders for your business that holds all of your customers information to get HACKED, would you? This is something that I've been very hesitant of risking myself.

The truth is, the risk of running your own ecommerce business through the use of a colocation can be such a gamble if you don't know what your doing, that it may not be worth taking. But colocation offers possibilities for expansion (because of the large amount of computer resources at your disposal) and control that something such as webhosting may not give you.

This is where Managed Hosting comes in. Managed Hosting bridges the gap between the ease-of-use of standard webhosting services to colocation. Managed Hosting is essentially a service where you have complete administrative abilities over a system provided by your internet service provider, but they set it up, provide the computer to your specifications, and keep it up to date. Many of the service providers, such as RackSpace, also offer a zero-downtime guarantee and 24/7x365 phone and email technical support -- perfect for the quick responses that an ecommerce web site may need. This, in a very real way takes away much of the risk associated with colocation while still giving you the ability to put up a system to your specifications and it be SECURE. This alternative to colocation is taking the internet by storm, and is quickly becoming the standard of the industry for an easy and safe solution for internet business owners.

An Excellent Pay-Per-Click Tip for Ecommerce Businesses!

2006-01-26T16:39:00.000-08:00

I ran across this tip on an article on a forum I frequent. When looking for keywords to throw into pay-per-click sites, check your website logs/statistics to see what keywords people have been getting your website from. A lot of times these are keywords that you may NOT be getting optimum placement for, and it gives you an idea of what kind of strange keywords that you could capitalize on that not many other advertisers may be considering!

RackSpace Customer Service: An asset to eCommerce based companies!

2006-01-23T19:33:00.000-08:00

An e-commerce company I'm currently working with (the same one that's going to have a modified osCommerce site soon) recently had a server setup at RackSpace using their Managed Hosting services. So far I've been nothing but impressed, and just wanted to pass on the word. For those of you who don't know what Managed Hosting is -- it's essentially the same as a colocation (you have full root access to the server), except they manage security and all of the core updates on it and also setup/own the server. So you get your own server, with all of the processing power you need as well as bandwith at a decent cost.

Our server cost $400 a month, but essentially what RackSpace is selling isn't the server or band with -- it's their "Fanatical Support"... and I'd have to say that their support has been nothing but fanatical. I can call them directly and get immediate technical help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Not only that, but if I'm in a hurry and would rather just submit a request for service online I can go to my own custom technical service area of their website (known as my.rackspace) and submit a request and see it as its followed up... and I can even give programmers, etc. access to the tech support features and be able to see what kind of service requests they're sending in and review their ticket history.

Overall I'm extremely impressed and will probably be writing an article on this type of hosting and it's benefits for eCommerce based companies! If any of you guys are interested in this kind of service, I highly recommend you contact RackSpace (they do have live chat to ask questions), and when you're ready to really consider buying give Rick Kline a call. He's the guy that helped set us up, and his information and help was nothing short of amazing. His phone number at rackspace is 210-447-4000 ext. 4193. Rackspace's website address is www.rackspace.com.

Enjoy!

W3C HTML Standards

2005-11-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

The guys over at the WarriorForum brought up the issue of W3C HTML compliance. Essentially W3C is what determines the standard for which all web browsers interpret HTML code... If you're compliant with W3C, your website is compliant with everything. So it makes sense to learn to write websites using strictly the standard, so they don't end up looking all funky in each different web browser.

Check out some tutorials on W3C HTML... http://www.w3schools.com/

Peace,
-- NYC

Modifying osCommerce for better search engine optimization!

2005-11-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine will be, over the next few weeks, modifying osCommerce to be extremely search engine friendly! I'm really looking forward to seeing how ranking pans out with it, because we'll be using an already existing domain that has links going to it. It's going to be moderately unique in the fact that it will be SEO optimized, since osCommerce in and of itself is extremely good software! Modifying it in such a way should be truly like.. unleashing the beast.

Keep checking back and I'll let everyone know on the details of upcoming ecommerce goodies related to oscommerce! By the way, osCommerce is an open source shopping cart software (meaning it's FREE), and can be gotten from www.oscommerce.com.

What’s Toll Free Numbers Got To Do With Ecommerce?

2005-11-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes skimping on things can save you good money. But skimping is not always the wisest business strategy. For example, I could’ve written this article in the windows program notepad as opposed to Microsoft Word, and saved a good $500 and never had to buy the latest version of Microsoft Office… However, wouldn’t it be worth the $500 if the improved impression of professionalism put forth in all of my writings some how garnered ten times that in profit? Would you have read this far if I had unknowingly published this article with a horribly obvious typo in the title? That’s right – an insignificant error caused by “saving money” can actually COST you money in the long run.

Impression Is Everything!
If you have spent months developing a beautiful ecommerce website to give people the impression that you are the safest choice for whatever product or service you’re trying to sell them, then it’d be pretty stupid to have all of that professionalism dismissed by a simple mistake: assuming you’re going to SAVE money by not getting a toll free number!

The fact is, the sight of a toll free number is something that subconsciously stirs an idea of professionalism – something we’re accustomed to from corporate America. Area codes are for calling your relatives and friends, after all. The phone prefix “800” or “877” or “888” for some reason, as if by magic, stirs in us the image of a phone operator in a tall skyscraper that deals with hundreds of clients a day – someone that doesn’t make their living off of ripping people off. The appearance of professionalism is the embodiment of confidence within the business world.

Okay, so you’re convinced… now what?
Not having a toll free number for your ecommerce business (no matter how small) will cost you more in the long run than the short term savings will save you. The best part is though that toll free numbers are not NEARLY as expensive as one might be inclined to think! In fact, at the moment the prices for toll free numbers are as low as 2.7c/min from places like www.patricklongdistance.com .

What other services can I benefit from?
It just so happens that toll free numbers are not the only affordable telecommunications service that might be useful to the owner of an ecommerce web site. Conference calling (for those teleseminars), low long distance rates, broadband or t1 internet access, and more are all examples of things that can be gotten more cost effectively off the internet via web pages such as the one I provided in the last paragraph.

What are EMAIL AUTORESPONDERS?

2005-10-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Basically, the idea of why an email-newsletter would be helpful for a website SHOULD be obvious enough to most people. You want to be able to not only attract visitors once, but to also get them to come back for more! A second look at YOUR products and services, and a second opportunity to convince the customers that you really are the company selling the product they're looking for.

There's a few way you can do newsletters, but simply periodically sending one out with any information off the top of your head is NOT the way to go! Anything you can pump out that quickly, and randomally won't really have any targetted information! Joe Schmoe won't have any idea what your newsletter last month said, capiche?

What if you could have the emails sent at a pre-determined interval and order? You could introduce products, and sections of your website in the order that you want... and not only that... you could guarantee that every one of your members was being brought back to the website just in time to prevent them from ever forgetting who your company is!

I use Aweber Autoresponders, and like them because of their excellent interface, they're immediate customer service via live online chat... annnddd..... they offered a free trial when I signed up (and still do).... Aweber Autoresponders Free Trial

Building My Ecommerce Web Site: Where Do I Start?

2005-09-08T17:44:00.000-07:00

Building a web site isn't something that is really cut and dry. There's a huge variety of products and services that can either help you get your web site where you want it or simply confuse you. It's also important that you make the right choices upfront so that you don't end up having to restructure your whole web site because of some problem in your design layout. The level of time investment neccessary for mastery in a lot of these software packages can range from little to a VERY significant amount. Because of this I feel it's important to be lead in the "right" direction to make sure you don't spend time in the wrong areas, or learning some software that might not be all that useful for you later on (*coughs* Frontpage *coughs*).

Where you should start greatly depends on what you plan on attempting to do, and how deep you're going to dive in. For a moderately professional, clean looking web site without a lot of automation or intensive animated graphics you can probably get by with some basic knowledge of html, ability with a good WYSIWYG editor, and an image editting program. On the other hand, if you're someone that's looking to build something that will really wow your audience then you might consider spending some major time and developing some animation skills with a program like Macromedia Flash. I personally always spring for what I believe will bring me the greatest amount of profit with a minimal amount of effort, and because of this I usually end up spending all of my time diving in deeper with ONLY my WYSIWYG HTML editor, and my image editor.

What is a "WYSIWYG" editor?
A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is what allows you to get by with minimal knowledge of HTML. Yes, that means you don't have to know EVERYTHING about HTML to have a decent looking website. When you use a WYSIWYG editor it interprets what you're doing (inserting an image for example) as being a certain series of HTML tags with attributes, and does it for you... Thus, what you see on your screen is what you get. Instead of seeing a bunch of HTML code in text format, you'll mostly see what will actually show up in your browser once your web site is up WHILE you're making it. I highly recommend using the latest version of dreamweaver -- it is well-known as one of the best HTML editors by general consensus. Dreamweaver's interface is very friendly, has a built in FTP client, and is specifically built to be flexible enough to suit both the coder and the everyday amatuer webmaster.

Image editing? What do I need that for?
Okay, let's be realistic here: If you're going to make a professional *appearing* web site it's important that you can make some basic, decent looking graphics. There's a lot of graphics problems that can truly get the job done, but as far as power and flexibility goes I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop definitely takes some time getting used to, but in the end it's VERY rewarding. I've ended up using my knowledge of Photoshop to make not only graphics for multiple web sites, but also touched up portraits, made business cards, flyers, and other online advertisments such as banners. Infact, I've used it for everything except animation... But it also comes with Adobe Imageready which is very good with animation. This software is amazing, and if you're going to learn ANY image editing software I recommend you start with Photoshop because of it's widerange of overall... usefulness!

Let's get me some sales!
Kick off your new web site you've gotten up from your knowledge of webmastering and image editing with a few new sales... Sounds like a plan? Well a great way to do that quickly is with pay-per-click advertising. BUT WAIT! Doesn't that cost money? Well... Yes. But with the tools brought to us by some of the biggest pay-per-click advertisers out there we should be able to make a good evaluation of how much profit we're going to make without much investment upfront.

The big question behind pay-per-click advertising is whether or not it's worth the cash when you can simply get traffic from regular search engine ranking (otherwise known as organic traffic). Afterall, there are plenty of companies out there that promise to help get you all the traffic you need through optimizing your web site for organic ranking. The answer to this question is quite simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools such as those offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords anyone can calculate exactly what their profit is after cost of PPC advertising is taken out. In my opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among the PPC advertisers. Google Adword's interface makes it very easy to see which keywords are pulling you in the most sales, and which ones aren't even worth your advertising money.

Let us not forget, however, that in order to make those conversions we're going to be needing a shopping cart! There's a lot of diverse software packages out there you can use, but I've been using Mal's E-Commerce Free shopping cart for a number of years with great success. The cart's server is hosted on their machines so that means you not only get away with not having to pay for the software itself, but you get out of having to buy an SSL security ticket too! Nothing's a better bargain than free, eh?

Getting those sales leads you've been building up to BUY!
Once you've scored a few sales it would probably be a good idea to start using some kind of lead management services. I highly recommend the use of autoresponders for this purpose. Autoresponders are, essentially, a newsletter sign-up that allows you to strategically determine what you want to send each lead after a certain alotted amount of time. For example, let's say someone visits your web site and you offer them a free newsletter. If you were selling an ebook on some very complicated topic, you might consider sending them only information on the most basic concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn those visitors that might have left your web site and never have returned into some serious revenue!

As far as autoresponders go, I highly recommend the use of Aweber. Their customer service is superb (seriously, these guys really know their stuff!) and can be contacted at any point during the business day via online chat or phone. They also offer tons of free information, and guides on making the most of their services. Check out their month long free trial at http://www.getaweber.com/.

Mal's Ecommerce Shopping Cart

2005-08-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd drop a note...
Everyone make sure to check out mals-e.com and view the shopping cart software provided there. This is one of the topics I'll be discussing, or more specifically, one of the shopping carts I'll be discussing.

Welcome

2005-08-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been building, and marketing eCommerce websites for a few years now and I am now confident that I have ample knowledge to share and give back to the community. In the coming weeks I will be discussing instructions and advice for building eCommerce websites that will help you pull in the sales. Bookmark this page, and check back often!