What is ecommerce? October 31 2010
What is ecommerce?
Why is the term ecommerce so foreign to many business owners. When I am asked in for a business consult and mention ecommerce the first question I get from a puzzled business owners face is "what is ecommerce?".

I am sure that everyone knows what ecomerce is or at least I think anyone with a business should know what it is. So why when a simple "e" for electronic is added does it puzzle so many people?

In 1999 or 2000 I can see that people would be confused or maybe not have heard of the internet. But today there is not a business that does no use the internet in some manner to aid in its functions, buying, taxes, communication and so on.

So my question to everyone is why don't you use the ineternet to sell?

So many people think the internet is out of reach. That websites cost tens of thousands of dollars and are difficult to manage. Oh, so wrong they are.

Companies like pagebuzz.com offer website hosting for under $10 a month with ecommerce included and unlimited phone support. With a deal like that ecommerce is in any businesses reach.

This is where I generally slap them in the face and say "Wake Up" and "Welcome to 2010". How anyone can ignore the power of the ineternet in 2010 befudles me intensly.

The biggest problem with newbie ecommerce inductees is that they assume once they jump on the bandwagon they will start seeing rewards from their decision.

It just won't be that simple grandpa! You are about a decade late in joining the game and the playing field is full. Getting your share of ecommerce will be slow and difficult but in the end the rewards are huge.

Don't assume because you pay $10 and get a website that that is all there is to ecommerce. If the internet was full of a bunch of $10 websites it would have little appeal to anyone. The internet is dynamic and full featured and has websites that hae been developed over years and years of hard work.

If you want to join in on the internet millions that are available to your business you need to spend some time learning how to play the game. Develop a good website and then advertise the hell out of it to get people to it.

Most of the people hiring me for consulting already have a great business, so the website is just another tool to build on what they have. By creating content that is key to their customer base they can facilitate their existing clients with other resources that would otherwise not be available.

While ecommerce is important to any business it is also important to understand that it is not magic or does not entitle anyone to hords of customers via SEO and SERPS. The road is long and hard with many obstacles.

If you are stuck back in the last decade it is time to get online with ecommerce. Learn what it is, embrace it and make it part of your business model. You cannot run a business today without a website, so if you don't know what ecommerce is, you can prepare not to have a business in the near future.

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Building websites for search engines February 21 2010
Building websites for search engines
Building Websites For Search Engines

One of the biggest mistakes webmasters make is trying to build websites to be effective in the search engines. While it is noble to try to achieve op search engine ranking you cannot ignore the real purpose of the website and that is to be effective at selling your product or service to your customers.

If you move content around the page to try to trick or manipulate the search bots it will take away the effectiveness of the website with real customers.

The fact is, you probably won't get much search engine traffic anyway and if you do it won't necessarily be the customer base you need. In a successful business most of the website traffic will be generated by the business and it's outside advertising. No business should expect a website to generate traffic to that business but should use the website as a tool to support it's customer base.

If your website is set up to be desireable to the search bots then you ignore the customers that want to use your website to get information or buy products.

Of couse I am not saying ignore the search engines. It is absolutely critical to have your website optimized for the search bots but that just means use common sense when building the pages and don't over think the process.

Most webmasters believe that the search engines are king. But any business owner knows without customers they don't have a business.

A business can survive without a website but a website cannot exist without a business.

Webmasters in most cases are not business owners or business managers. They build fancy designs to impress people, they use SEO techniques they learn from other webmasters and they build websites that impress webmasters and not necessarily the average person.

Many websites that look impressive fail to meet the real goal of the business owner. In fact 90% of the brick and mortar stores have a website that does nothing more than site online cost money and look prety with little more than a couple of pages of information. If you have a 5 pages website with a home page, a contact page and an about us page then this means you.

A website needs to be a point of contact between the business owner and their customers. It should offer a portal to information that is not available in other places.

If you run a restaurant then you can advertise the menu for sure, but you have virtually unlimited space to add more to that. Show how fresh your food is, show the chef and his or her years of experience. Show your customers what they need to see to feel confident enough to eat in your restaurant.

Use the website to get feedback from customers and suggestions that you would not ordinarily get. Ask for menu suggestions and offer recipies that people can cook at home.

The site need to be more than 5 pages of meta tags and key words. The site needs to be a point of contact with your customers and a way for customers to contrubute to your business. Make your customers feel needed and tank them for their support.

Don't assume your webmaster knows more about running your business than you do. I can promise you they don't know jack about your business. They may know how to build a website but they don't know what the website needs to do for your individual business.

Try to think outside the box and use the website to build your business. Maybe offer your key customers a listing on your local businesses page or use cross promotions to post coupons for other business owners on your website.

If you had a webmaster build you a 5 pages website and you paid for SEO and you expect it to do more than drain your pocket you are in dreamland. A website is much more dynamic and needs to be built to suppliment your existing business.

Don't be afraid to use your website, don't worry about messing up the pages or losing search engine placement. That will all come with time and the best way to achive it is to get past the idea that you need some generic format to feed the search bots.

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Websites for Used Car Dealers February 20 2010
Websites for Used Car Dealers
Websites For Car Dealers

Not every website hosting company is right for every business, just because they have the best price or most features should not be the biggest factor in selecting a web host.

For example you look at godaddy.com and they have the most to offer in the way of services and options although they may not have the best pricing. If you are a used car dealer and need a clean efficient way to manage content, photos and inventory you won't find that at godaddy.com despite their involvement with Danica Patrick and the entire racing scene.

If you need to create galleries of your cars you will need photoshop to resize images and create thumbnails, an FTP program to upload the files and an HTML editor tobuild the pages.

Since you prbably don't know how to use those programs or the proper syntax for linking pages and installing images in the correct directory paths your life won't be so fun on days you need to manage your website.

So you wil be shopping for one of the online car lot management systems that comes with a website for about $200.00 to $1,000.00 a MONTH! In order to pay those fees you must have a very succesful car lot and if you do, do you want to share your profits with a web guy?

The best option for used car dealers is at pagebuzz.com which has a simple web based content management system or CMS for used car dealers. The most attractive thing about their program is that it is just $10 a month which will save you a bundle.

The pagebuzz used car dealer system lets dealers upload sets of images and automatically resizes and creates thumbnail images and formats the pages with descriptions and links to photos. Adding cars to your inventory takes just a few minutes. They have over 1000 premade templates that can be customized or replaced with your own design.

Companies like pagebuzz can offer insanely low prices because they specialize in that market meaning they have a load of people using that system. Primarily because there is nothing else like it online. I won't say they have cornered the market but I will say they are close to monopilzing that niche.

That is good news for all used car dealers becuase they can save thousands of dollars ayear on hosting and still have the tools they need to manage their website.

If you are interested in trying a demo of the websites for used car dealers just go to pagebuzz.com and click on their demo. If you are struggling with your used car website you need to look at changing website hosts.

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How to make money from your website February 19 2010
How to make money from your website
How to Monitize Your Website

Now that you have found the web the next step is how you can make money online. Everyone is looking for an extra income and there are many great opportunities online that pay and pay well.

The most popular method of monitzing a website is by selling advertising space. This was a big problem years ago, you had to find people who wanted to pay for space on your website, charge them and then add the content to your website for some time period and then remove it.

It sounds like a lot of work because it is. But in comes google with its adsense program to change the way people monitize their websites. Just copy and pastes the google ad code into your html pages and you are making money.

The google adsense program does all the work for you by finding the advertisers, creating the ads and collecting the fees and paying you by direct deposit. All you have to do is sit back and collect the money. It is almost like a dream that is too good to be true.

Well, I never said you were getting rich from it, just that they do all the work. In actuality they pay bout $0.05 for each click on the ads. Although every ad is different over the pay periods it always seems to end up at about the same PPC (pay per click).

It is great if you have a million visitors a month and everyone clicks on one ad, you make $50,000.00 a month. That is a nice chunk of change in anyones pocket. Unfortunately there are not many people with a million visitors a month and they need something with a higher percentage.

Affiliate marketing has been the backbone of online income particularly in blogs. Just make a blog post about website hosting and link to your favorite web host. Website hosting is about the highest paying affiliate program online with payouts of 100% or more.

pageBuzz.com runs a hosting affiliate program at bumblebeesales.com that pays 70% and pays every week like clockwork. It is the fastest payout online and all people have to do is link back to the pagebuzz website.

Imagine making $70.00 just because someone clicked on your link. Get 10 people clicking and you make $700.00. The numbers are staggering and you know the companies pay or they would be out of business in weeks. Affiliate marketing accounts for billions of dollars in revenue each year and all you need to do get a slice of it is to add some links to your website.

The market is so huge that google paid $3Billion for Doubleclick which only had an annual gross revenue of $500 million. Google has begun expanding and building on that revenue and hopes to make the venture worth wile. Regardless of how well they do the market is huge and open to anyone that wants to participate.

Some of the top affiliate networks are Google, Commission Junction, Share A Sale, Linkshare and Clickbank. It is not impossible to generate millions of dollars in income from these companies.

With affiliate marketing much like google adsense the main company does most of the work. You act as an outside sales person and direct targeted traffic to participating merchant websites. When somone buys they pay you a percentage of the sale. Commissions range from 1% to over 100% with the average being around 6%.

The advantage of affiliate marketing is that you can make a large sun of cash with a small amount off traffic. So for the small webmaster with just a few hits a day it is still possible to reach that $50,000.00 a month you wanted to make with the google ads.

For people that don't think there is money to be made, think again. It is out there and it is in the billions. You can tap into it any time with your own website, blog or just by posting ads on other peoples websites.



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So you want to start a website business? February 19 2010
So you want to start a website business?
Starting Your Website Business

Today it seems like everyone has caught the bug and wants a piece of realestate online. People without websites seem to be in a lower class that those of us that can say "check my facebook status" or "follow me on twitter".

With the web becoming more and more affordable and easier to use it has become common place to have a home page or a business website. For as little as a few dollars a year almost anyone can have a website and in the case of bloggers there are endless free services and tools to use.

But what is a website and how does it work?

A website is nothing more than a folder on a computer which is accessible online. Just like a folder in your PC you can put files, picture and pages inside it. Then when anyone goes to that location they canaccess all of your files.

It is not really that complicated when you get down to it. Most people have been using computers for the last decade either at work or at home in some capacity. So none of this is shocking or confusing to most of us.

But still, when people talk about website hosting, having a website or website design they appear to be lost in space. People don't have a clue about how it works or the general operation of the internet as a whole.

With this blog we will attempt to explain it in a manner that everyone can understand. How your computer accesses web pages, what a web browser is and how to make a website successful on a limited budget.

This blog will feature articles to help the general public understand somthing they use daily but still don't get what it is or how it works.

If you have made it this far and are reading this article you are on the right track to understanding what a website is and what it can do for you.

If you are starting a web business the first step will be to understand what a website is, how to manage it and how to make money from it.

The web has endless opportunities and endless scams, so having a basic background in website understanding will be critical to not losing the farm on a long shot.

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