The Net Impact Roadmap

One of the misnomers in e-commerce is that your store needs a shopping cart.  Sure, a store like Amazon.com or Buy.com with a huge, unmanageable inventory does need a shopping cart system, but a shopping cart could be a waste of time for simpler stores.

If you are selling a few individual products and don’t offer package savings or other special deals, shopping carts could be a waste of resources.   If the vast majority of your customers only buy one product or service, why implement a more complicated shopping cart that could actually frustrate your customers and eventually lead them away from your product?

There are several options if you don’t use a shopping cart.  Among them are the use of a “Buy Now” or “Add Product” button on each individual product, a contact us prompt for potential leads to inquire about services, and simply setting up a 1-800 number to take phone inquiries.

For the purpose of an e-commerce store’s shopping cart replacement, the “Buy Now” or “Add Product” buttons are probably your best option.  Possible payment processing solutions for this arrangement include Paypal, Google Checkout, Versign, and 2Checkout.com.

Examples of types of e-commerce stores that can possibly do without a full shopping cart include book authors, bands, companies with individual, customizable solutions, expensive products and other random items that are sold individually such as cell phones and server hosting plans.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Aside from offering advertising, affiliate programs are an excellent way to make money on your web site without producing or selling a product of your own. Before going any further, let’s clarify the definition of an affiliate program in this context.

“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” -Wikipedia

Affiliate programs can expand the value of your web site for your visitors, becoming a one-stop shop for the services that they use. However, the wrong affiliate programs can annoy your users and lead them away from your web site. When considering whether to add particular affiliate programs, a careful evaluation of the programs available is important. The following are four ways to help you choose the right affiliate program for your web site.

1. Reputation

Is the affiliate program reputable? This is by far the most important criteria when choosing affiliate programs. Not only do you need to know whether the program is reputable for payment purposes, but also whether the program will deliver on its promises when you send your own visitors elsewhere. If a visitor is not happy with a product that they received from your referral, that reflects poorly on your web site. Be sure to ask the right questions and get all the information before committing to an affiliate program. For every industry, there are several reputable affiliate programs. If you have doubts about one affiliate program, don’t hesitate to try others.

2. Compensation

Most web sites make compensation their first priority when considering affiliate programs. Certainly, your compensation is important, but you also must consider the type of products that you are selling in the affiliate programs and how likely your users are to buy these products. Even if your return for a computer-related affiliate program is great, you probably are not going to get much return on the affiliate program if your web site is about pets.

3. Service

How responsive is the affiliate program to problems and issues? How quickly do you get paid? Are your payments on time? Some of these issues are learned the hard way through trial and error, but once again, you can learn a lot by asking the right questions of your affiliate. Service may not seem like a huge issue before choosing an affiliate program, but it is definitely an important consideration as you start to generate revenue from the program.

4. Attractiveness

More than likely, your affiliate program has banners. These banners are meant to sell the products from the affiliate programs and drive traffic to the vendors. Like any other advertising, if the banners or messages are attractive, they are more likely to bring traffic. If your marketing message or advertising banners posted on your web site are unattractive, you could simply be wasting space. The same can be said for the landing pages and overall web site design of the seller.

May 2008 TNI Test: Theaudiobookstore.com 

May 2008 TNI Test: GoodCheapWineGuide.com 

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Not mentioned in the previous “free stuff” blog was the contest strategy.  Free contests are very similar to the aforementioned free strategies in purpose, and for some products there is more upside with drawing attention to your product and collecting potentially valuable customer information.

Artistic Sensations, an e-commerce toy and gift store, is an excellent existing example of this strategy.  They are driving traffic and interest with their Holiday Loft Bed Giveaway.  In the process, Artistic Sensations is generating interest in their products, learning what their customers like most, and drawing attention through the contest

Giving away free products can be an investment, but if implemented properly, the return on investment in new customers, attention, PR and additional customer information collected has the ability to generate value many times over. 

The key is to develop a well thought out, extensive plan.  In the right industries, this strategy has limitless potential.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager at The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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In the past, we have discussed the strategy of giving away items such as e-books and other products to attract visitors.  That strategy seems easy enough for an established web site to get their visitors’ mouths watering, but there is a real Catch-22 for upstart web sites.

If you don’t have any visitors already, how do you attract visitors to your giveaways?

This question would lead one to believe that giveaways are a poor strategy for upstart E-Commerce web sites.  Actually, that is not necessarily the case.  In fact, giving away free items can still act as your web site’s launching pad, as it gives visitors a reason to check back, stick around and browse your other items.

Even so, we still have the problem of getting people to find your free stuff.   The following are three strategies you can use to spread the word about your free stuff quickly and without requiring you to stand on a street corner and beg people to take your items.

1. Message Boards

In the world of internet marketing, message boards are one of the most underrated and effective tools available.  Popular message boards allow a quicker and easier way than even blogs for you to get your voice heard and become an authority on a subject.  Message board contributors tend to stick together once they find a message board that they like, and some of the internet’s most popular message boards have thousands of regular contributors.  In addition to these contributors, many message boards have “lurkers” who simply read message boards to learn and develop opinions.  While overtly advertising your products is against the service agreements of many message boards, most message boards do allow you to put a link and information in the “signature” of each post.  At worst, you should be able to attract a few message board readers to your website to sneak a peak.  At best, one of those readers will spread the word to their friends and the rest of the message board about your free stuff.

2. Blogs

Not only can you develop visitors and authority through the use of your own blog, but you can also develop traffic by using other blogs.  By no means am I suggesting that you should spam other blogs.  There is an appropriate way of indirectly pushing your products on the comments portion of blog posts without spamming.  Personally, I can’t even count the number of times that I have found cool, new products or leads on services during specific internet searches as a result of blog discussions.  The vast majority of blog comments are indexed in the search engines, and if your product or service contributes positively to the discussion, blogs provide you another chance to get the word out about your free service or product.  Just remember, there is a big difference between spamming the message boards to market your product and mentioning your web site or giveaway in context to help readers.  Be sure that you are doing the latter! 

3. Social Networking

With the number of Web 2.0 web sites growing with each passing day, there are new opportunities for you to spread the word about your web site and products.  Social networking web sites include everything from Facebook and MySpace to Digg and del.icio.us.  Social networking web sites that show what is popular in a public forum, in particular web sites similar to Digg and del.icio.us, give you an especially great way to attract visitors quickly if your free stuff is useful.  In particular, if your product is of a technical nature, it is likely that many of your users are utilizing social networking web sites.  If you have the time and resources to promote to social web sites, you might as well promote to every social bookmarking web site that you can find in order to attract the most possible visits to your web site and freebies.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the strategies mentioned above will be nice starting points to promote your free stuff.  Having giveaways on your web site can be a nice marketing move to get your web site going.  Just think of how many stores drop their prices on the day after Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Black Friday, in order to get people into the store.  This way of thinking, if developed properly, is an effective E-Commerce strategy that can spread the word about your product even more quickly through the World Wide Web. 

Good luck in all of your online free giveaway endeavors!

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Online stores that don’t want to deal with their own credit card processing always have a dilemma.  There are many options for payment processing, including online store platforms, checkout vendors and simply processing the credit card orders yourself. Two of the most popular options for online credit card processing are Google Checkout and Paypal.  Paypal has been around for years, while Google checkout has come along more recently.  Each service has some definite pros and cons, which are worth discussing if you are faced with this decision or are looking to switch from one service to the other for your credit card processing. 

The following is a description of how they square off: 

Price: Google Checkout Wins 

Google Checkout wins this battle, and it’s really not close.  They charge 2 percent of the sale price plus 20 cents per transaction, while Paypal charges 1.9-2.9 percent based on sales volume plus 30 cents per transaction.  However, Google checkout processing is free if you spend equal or less than 10 times your Adwords spend.  So if you spend $1,000 in Adwords, your first $10,000 of merchandise processing is free.  For most online e-commerce stores, it becomes almost impossible for Paypal to be cheaper than Google Checkout. 

Customer Trust: Tie 

At this point, the vast majority of online customers know about Paypal.  It has been around for a long time, and most online merchants accept it.   On the other hand, Google has plenty of name recognition as the largest search engine.  If your customers have used just one of the payment methods, it is more likely that they have used Paypal.  Still, Google Checkout is likely a trusted method of payment by your customers because of the name. 

Payment Flexibility: Paypal Wins 

Paypal allows customers to use their bank account for payment, while Google Checkout does not.  As most Paypal users know, Paypal also allows for peer-to-peer payments, which is a bonus for using the service. Both payment services now offer international currency and shipping. 

Miscellaneous: Paypal Wins

As already mentioned, the peer-to-peer payment feature in Paypal can be very convenient.  Paypal’s fraudulent return policy is also good for big purchases, as there is not a time limit on refunds, whereas Google fraudulent purchases need to be reported within 60 days.  Otherwise, the comparison seems rather similar for implementation. 

The Verdict 

Paypal seems to have a few more advantages, but Google Checkout beats Paypal on probably the most important factor: Price.  Google takes out less money in nearly all circumstances, and that is probably the most important factor when choosing a payment service.  Paypal’s advantages are probably not enough to make the two services rank equally. Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.
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EBay has been one of the most popular web sites on the internet for a number of years.  Thousands of internet users have opened eBay stores, and millions have bought or sold products on the internet auction web site.  Chances are you have been impacted by eBay in one way or another through your online crusades. Still, many web sites and internet marketers have made eBay work for them.  At the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial, web marketers can benefit from eBay and promote their products cheaply in the process. 

Market entrants often lower the price of some of their products in order to get people to try their products.  eBay provides you with another opportunity to get your product in the hands of your intended audience, promoting your product as a result. The previous blog on mini e-books relates well to promoting your web site and products on eBay.  There are thousands of e-books for sale on eBay each day, and many of these e-books are being sold for one cent by companies participating in this market entrant strategy.  If the price of your product is negligible, your risk in basically giving away your products on eBay is miniscule.  Of course, eBay does charge you to sell products, but if the product that you are giving away is likely to provide you with further leads, then the money you spend is certainly well worth it. Even while digital, low-cost products are the most desirable for this marketing model, material products can be worth the risk depending on your rate of return.  For example, eating the cost of shipping to send out a sample brochure or magazine that you sell for free on eBay can be worth the investment if you receive a regular customer or subscriber out of it.

This strategy is used by many online companies already.  It is not right for every product and industry, but it is worth looking into for many online stores and products.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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With all the issues you have to think about regarding internet marketing, sometimes it is the smallest of details that turns into the biggest problem. One of those small details is website typosquatting, which occurs when someone registers a domain name with similarities to your domain name for the sole purpose of confusing internet users and getting your traffic to come to them. For example, if you own the .com suffix of a website, someone else would register the .net suffix for that same website or a very similar domain that is different than your domain only by a letter or two. In other words, website sniping is an indirect form of stealing your name and clients if the intent to do so is present.                                       

Typosquatting is a very real problem for websites and something you should be very aware of.  Many websites and even brick and mortar businesses have fallen victim to typosquatting, failing to register domain names similar to what they have registered.

Fortunately, preventing website sniping is not very difficult.  Lawfully, you can register your website name as a trademark in order to prevent other people from registering the same domain name with different suffixes.   

However, a cheaper way to prevent website sniping is to register the similar domain names yourself.  Registering a domain name is only a few dollars, and it is likely well worth the money in order to prevent someone from stealing your visitors.  Be sure to register the .net form of your domain name at the very least, and also brainstorm other ways in which potential customers could confuse your domain such as adding an “s” at the end or replacing one of the words in your domain with another word that sounds similar. 

This whole process seems unimportant, but it can prevent future headaches.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Technology is always changing, and websites change with it. One of the emerging technologies that website owners must be aware of, especially now with the emergence of Apple’s iPhone, is mobile surfing.

Most regular websites that you find on the World Wide Web are not optimized for mobile phones and other associated devices, and the procedure of optimizing these websites is more than just a one-step process.

So why go mobile? Mobile users are growing at a rapid pace, and in doing so they are becoming a huge market that you could potentially be missing out on. Mobile users are capable of participating in many of the same activities that happen everyday on the “traditional” internet such as research, viewing multimedia, and even in some cases, commerce.

While the intricacies of making your website fully ready to go mobile would take a while to sift through, here are a couple initial steps you can take if you do decide to go mobile:

Register a .mobi domain name.

The .mobi domain name is not required to make an optimized mobile site, but it can be a good idea. You will likely have to make adjustments to the pages on your regular website in some way and post those adjusted pages elsewhere, and a new .mobi domain is a good place to make these changes public. The .mobi suffix is somewhat new, but it is quickly becoming popular with .mobi domain names selling for inordinate amounts of money already.

Simplify your website.

For mobile purposes, stating the words “simplify your website” is really an oversimplification, no pun intended. The process of simplifying your website for mobile phones is one that can be daunting and take a lot of time. There are some resources that can help make your website mobile-ready. Ready.mobi is an outstanding resource to test your website’s mobile surfing compliance, whether you have actually created your mobile website or not. Google Mobile Optimizer helps to simplify your design, or the design of any website for that matter, if you need help while searching on a mobile device. The actual process of simplifying your website includes making your page file sizes smaller, eliminating menus that are difficult to navigate for mobile users, getting rid of large graphics, and eradicating pop-ups within your page, as explained quite thoroughly in the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 Basic Guidelines. It is also a good idea to prevent your website from being spidered by browsers so that search engines such as Google don’t see duplicate content and penalize you for it.

Unfortunately, the fact is that various mobile devices will view web pages differently, even if the pages are optimized for going mobile. In the process of optimizing your website for going mobile, the goal is to make a website that looks sufficient on each device. This goal is hardly different than making sure that your real website looks good on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc., on the traditional internet.

It is important to keep in mind that mobile website optimization is not right for every website at this point. Plenty of websites provide little value in a mobile format. That is certainly not a knock on these websites. As the technology in mobile devices evolves and improves, more websites will find it necessary from a usability and financial standpoint to make the jump to true mobile accessibility.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Q: My web site is on Page 1 in Google, but it is almost nowhere to be found in Yahoo! What have I done wrong?

A: The easy answer to this question is, “Why do you care?” After all, Yahoo! holds less than a quarter of the search engine market while Google has almost 60 percent, according to ComScore.

Q: But that market share in Yahoo! could still net significant revenue for my web site….

A: Good point. There are some things you can do to increase your Yahoo! ranking, if you really desire to make the effort.

Q: Where do I start?

A: Submitting your web site and sitemap to Yahoo! is a good start. Beyond that, there are paid strategies working directly with Yahoo! which could help. Yahoo! has paid entities associated with their search engines such as Yahoo! Directory. This solution can be pricey, and there is no guarantee that your web site will go to No. 1 with it. However, the general consensus is that the strategy can’t hurt, and for the relative investment it can be a low-risk strategy to help your traffic.

Q: Are there any other paid inclusion tactics from Yahoo?

A: I’m glad you asked. There does happen to be a fairly new Yahoo! feature called Search Submit Pro. This feature is rare since it allows you to purchase pay-per-click listings which appear among the organic search results. Using this feature ensures that pages which would otherwise not be included in the organic Yahoo! search are included, yet the results look the same as other Yahoo! search results. Of course, Yahoo! recommends a budget of $5,000 per month or 1000 URLs in order to participate.

Q: Without giving money to Yahoo!, is there another way to move up on the organic search?

A: Of course! Most of the methods involving Yahoo! organic search are similar to Google. For example, content is still king, links are still important, and the methods for optimizing particular pages are pretty much the same. However, the importance of linking seems to be lessened in Yahoo! compared to Google. In some cases, quantity seems to be stressed by the Yahoo! search engine more than quality compared with Google. Additionally, some on-page features that have been recommended for search since the beginning of time are still stressed by Yahoo! more so than Google, such as keyword meta tags.

Q: Doesn’t this strategy create a user experience that is less friendly than Google?

A: User experience is very much in the eye of the beholder. Still, simply based on the user stats and market share among search engines, Google’s user friendliness seems to be greater than Yahoo! Yahoo! generates much of its revenue with aspects that have absolutely nothing to do with search and little direct contact with technology interests such as games, chat rooms, and editorial content. Search is likely Yahoo’s largest priority, but they are able to make revenue and survive by other means.

Seth Trachtman is a Web Marketing Account Manager for The Net Impact Web Design St. Louis.

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Return on investment is the most important factor when deciding on a marketing tactic for most internet companies.  There are so many different forms of internet marketing and places to spend your advertising dollar.  It can be a daunting task to choose what type of advertising (online or otherwise) to invest in and how much to put into your campaign.  No matter what type of advertising you choose, it all comes back to one thing: Return on investment.  After all, what is the purpose of advertising in the first place if you are losing money on it in the long term?

Calculating return on investment for your search engine marketing campaign is not an impossible task, and in fact it is easier to track than other forms of advertising such as various forms of media (television, radio, and print).  Unless you are forcing customers to visit by typing in a specific landing page URL and setting up a toll free number, it is very difficult to specifically track the actual effectiveness of those other forms of advertising as they relate to websites.  This is not to say that these other forms of advertising are ineffective or don’t have their place, but most forms of internet marketing simply provide a clearer picture of where your money is going and what it is doing for you.

One of the biggest advantages of internet marketing is its measurability – whether you are seeing how far you have moved up on the search engines or calculating your conversion rate on your products.  With the use of this information and knowledge of the lifetime value of each customer, a very precise calculation of return on investment can be completed.

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