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SEO Report Card: Shopwildplanet.com
This month’s recipient of an SEO critique is Shopwildplanet.com. Since my SEO how-to column this month is on RSS feeds, I thought it would be only fitting that the website that I critique have an...
Thralow.net's Daniel Thralow
In December of 1996, Daniel Thralow (pronounced Trah-low) sold one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses on the Internet.
A local guy said to me, “I’m starting this little group of websites. Give me a...
SEO: RSS Feeds Increase Visibility
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others’ websites. And, of...
Satellite Radio Superstore Finds Success
Three years after launching Satellite Radio Superstore, Matt and Aimee Moffett’s online business is pushing $3 million in sales and their company was recently named one of the top 10 independent...
Striking Gold With Diamonds
Patrick Coughlin knows that brick-and-mortar businesses need to think outside the box if they want to improve their bottom lines.
Coughlin has owned and operated American Diamond Importers, an independent jewelry store in St. Clair,...
Email as a Mini-sale
Sales professionals have a notion of “mini-sales.”
A mini-sale occurs when a prospect agrees to learn more about you or your product, but has not yet agreed to a purchase. Say, for example, that you sell cleaning supplies to...
Forums Offer Interactivity
If your looking for an easy way to make your business’ website more interactive, consider adding a bulletin board or a forum. They’re different names for the same thing, an application you can add to your site allowing visitors to...
Using RSS To Expand Your Online Exposure
Rarely in the last 10 years has there been a technology with so much potential to explode your business’s online exposure for such little cost. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it easy for non-techies to automatically display targeted...
Product Images Matter
One distinct advantage to a brick-and-mortar store has over a business in the virtual world is that customers can touch the products on the racks and shelves at the local mall. Local retailers know that if they can get you to touch a...
Podcasting Can Increase Brand Awareness
It seems like it was just yesterday that entrepreneurs were advised to start blogging for the purpose of marketing their businesses. Now, there’s a whole new technology out there that’s a...
Gaining Insight Into Live Chat
The irony of “live chat” is that there most likely isn't any “chat” at all. Live chat is usually a text-based communication that happens online between a customer and a merchant. It's akin to the instant messaging youmight do with...
Free Alternative to Microsoft Office
Anyone who ever priced the Microsoft Office Suite knows it represents a significant investment. A quick check of the www.compusa.com website shows Microsoft Office Standard costs $399 and Microsoft Office Professional will set you back...
Four Things You Should Know Before Starting an eBiz
Renowned ebiz author Sydney Johnson created the now-famous Auction Genius courses (www.auctiongenius.com) to aid people wanting to create their own ebusinesses. She shares some important tips for...
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 3
We covered the importance of keywords and content in our first installment and we covered customer testimonials, offering multiple payment options, diversifying sales channels and conducting...
Have You Ever Wondered How a Website Works?
In the most basic terms, a website is a collection of files on the hard drive of a server that can be accessed by the public. Since this is not a very satisfying explanation of what a website is or how one works, perhaps it is easier to...
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 2
We covered the importance of keywords and content in last week's installment. Today, let's take a look at four more important ways to grow your online sales: customer testimonials, offering multiple...
The Truth About Optimization
Gaining good positioning with the search engines is one channel for increasing your online business — but it’s not an end in itself. Your ultimate goal isn’t to increase traffic, but to...
SEO: Breadcrumb Trail Boosts Rankings
Breadcrumb navigation is wonderful for usability and for SEO. This text-based navigation shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and your location within the site,...
ChristmasNightInc.com Brings Light to the Holidays
If you are an admirer of nativity sets on the lawns of homes and churches during the Christmas season, chances are you seen a product from www.christmasnightinc.com. Claire Henderson launched the...
The Rising Tide of Alternative Payment Systems
Alternative-payment systems are flowing into the payment processing industry. During the last two years, many new options have been announced, re-announced, tested, trialed, released or re-released. Many others are in development.
Marc...
Shopping Cart Checklist
We’ve assembled a checklist to help you narrow your shopping cart requirements. The checklist is divided into six areas: function, shipping issues, payment processing, support, technical...
The Future of Ecommerce Solutions
Given the trends in the marketplace, what do you see on the horizon for ecommerce solutions?
This is such a dynamic field. Every day is a new day in the world of ecommerce. We see a lot of...
Hosted Shopping Cart Solutions
How would you describe the merits of a hosted solution compared to various software solutions that are in the marketplace?
I think it starts with the fundamental premise that people start...
Getting to the Heart of the Cart
If you came to this article hoping we’d tell you exactly which shopping cart you should choose for your business, you will be disappointed. We don’t know.
However, thanks to the expertise of a pair of industry veterans, the process...
Shopping Cart Software Solutions
What are some distinctive characteristics of shopping carts that you might share with a new ecommerce business?
I’d say everything has a place. Yahoo! Stores has over 150,000 merchants now...
Separate Content from Functionality and Design
A website can be broken down into three main development parts: content, design and functionality. To optimize a website for search engines, it’s important for developers to separate content, which is of interest to search engines, from...
Tech Support: September 2006
I keep reading about the Web 2.0. What is that?
Web 2.0 is a term that has come to represent a new way of thinking with regards to developing websites. While there is an origin to the name, that is less important than what people mean...
Who Runs Your Business?
I love to cook. It’s something my husband knows well, and new friends learn quickly. Those visiting my home think I’m going out of my way, but to cook a savory meal, regardless of the time it takes, is how I relax. I’ve been known to...
Quick Query: Mark McGuire
What is Jellyfish.com?
Jellyfish offers merchants a risk-free channel to sell products. By listing on www.jellyfish.com, merchants control the price of the product and the amount of profit...
A One-Second Review
I was recently reading a study published earlier this year by Carleton University in Ottawa. They suggest that web visitors make an instant assessment of the overall “quality” of a website in less than a second. This contradicts...
Does Google Checkout Affect Your Business?
On June 30, 2006 Google launched a service called Google Checkout. This is a new application allowing businesses to process online orders through Google. It serves as an alternative to PayPal or regular credit-card processing.
It’s...
Legal: Copyright Registration
Copyright registration is a great concept. In order to put the world on notice of your ownership of certain creative works, the government allows you to send a copy of your work to the U.S. Copyright Office, and it will maintain the...
Customer Conversion: Testing Brings Science To Marketing
There are two things every ecommerce business should strive to achieve. The first is increasing conversion, turning a higher percentage of browsers into buyers. The second is optimizing marketing...
Email Marketing: Open-Rates and Click-Throughs
The "FROM:" line in an email is the most important factor to getting it opened.
“Email marketers should use a consistent ‘From:’ address, and it must be recognizable to their customers,”...
Usability Report Card: FugitiveToys.com
Josh Pigford was confident enough to put his site, www.fugitivetoys.com, up for the inaugural “Usability Report Card.” While a lot of attention is paid to search engine optimization and online...
Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson
In the good old days of rock and roll, one of my tasks, as a program director for a top 40 radio station, was to wade through 300 or 400 new records that came in each week from distributors, record...
SEO Report Card: Yarnware.com
For this SEO Report Card, I’m responding to the Yarnware’s heartfelt plea for a site grade. Meredith Bright of Yarnware writes: “I used to have much better organic search rankings, but they...
Product Sourcing: Six Questions
If you’ve got a question about your ebusiness, someone else has probably already asked it. Matt Hedges, customer support manager of www.worldwidebrands.com, answers the six most common productsourcing questions he gets from customers...
Create Your Own Online TV Station
It will happen! TV and the Internet will eventually merge into one giant multi-media "melting pot" that includes everything from live footage and old reruns to garage videos posted by your next door neighbor's kid. Just like cable TV...
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 1
These days, setting up an online storefront is easier, less expensive and more valuable than ever as more and more people get comfortable shopping online. Setting up an online storefront is a great...
Nine Things to Consider Before You Blog
You’ve heard a lot about web logs or blogs. That’s because during the past six years blogs have evolved from a highly personal form of communication on the Internet to a powerful new medium for business. Not since Procter & Gamble...
Growing Your Sales Using eBay Sales Data
Understanding product markets can help you determine what you should sell online and how you should sell it. The right product at the wrong time or sold the wrong way can be an eBay seller’s downfall. There are many resources for gauging...
What Should I Sell Online?
Everyone who starts an ebiz faces the question: What do I sell? And most everyone seems to make two classic mistakes in the beginning:
They try to sell what everyone else is selling ? DVDs,...
The Price is Right!
Avoiding Common Mistakes
A trap many eBiz owners fall into is trying to set their prices by simply adding a percentage or flat amount to an item's cost– they buy a watch for $20, slap another $20 on the price tag, and pass it along to...
Stay Safe with Your Wireless Network
A wireless network can bring tremendous flexibility to your office, freeing employees to use laptops, tablet PCs and other devices at any desk-side meeting or conference-room presentation anywhere in the office suite. It can also eliminate...
With Limited Ad Dollars, What's The Answer
Each small ecommerce business tries to squeeze every drop of value out of his limited advertising dollars. Online advertising options have grown very congested in the last few years, saturating the marketplace and making it more difficult...
Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Evaluating Options
Practical eCommerce recently conducted a pay-per-click advertising test with four search engines — Google, Yahoo!, Ask and MSN. On behalf of two online businesses, the magazine purchased $50 of identical ads for both of them on each...
Analysis: Search Engines Are Not Created Equal
The pay-per-click test Practical eCommerce conducted on search engines Google, Yahoo!, Ask and MSN netted some interesting data, but perhaps the most valuable information came outside the numbers.
I have never set up this type of...
Q&A: Outlook for Search Advertising Prices
Will ecommerce firms pay more or less for paid search ads in the near future?
Google’s net profit in 2005 exceeded 30 percent of gross revenue. This is a huge profit margin compared to many other companies and industries. Yahoo!, MSN...
Vertical Search Could Mean Better ROI
Raise your hand if you’ve implemented or managed a Google AdWords campaign for your online business. Instantly, thousands of hands just touched the sky.
According to JupiterResearch,...
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