Building Your List Of Customers
July 23, 2009 by Tyrone
It’s time to attract visitors to your Internet business and to build a list of customers. Your customers will be your lifeline and without them, your Internet business cannot survive.
Build Your Foundation – The Email List
In the online world we communicate with our customers via multiple mediums and ultimately we need to collect their email address. Email addresses are used to send orders, updates and more information from your e-commerce website. Building an email list is very important because you will be able to deliver more information and convince your customers to buy more from your website. I strongly recommend you start building an email list at the beginning.
Here is a simple process of how collecting an email address is used to create sales:
- Sign up subscribers to your online newsletter through your website and send updates of new products and promotions
- Build rapport with these people who will be interested in receiving your online newsletter. Be sure you offer great advice and resources they can access.
- They become a customer of your website because they trust you and will recommend friends and family to buy from you.
This is a short process that is quite simple but very powerful. If you can build strong relationships with your customers via email, then imagine what your e-commerce business could achieve.
Marketing Your E-commerce Business Through Social Media Networks
May 28, 2009 by Tyrone
A popular way to generate traffic to your e-commerce business is through social media networks. You can market your e-commerce website through places such as Digg.com, Twitter.com, Facebook and MySpace. The goal with social network marketing is twofold:
- You are trying to enhance your site’s community by establishing outposts on social networking sites so people who share your interests, or are interested in your products and services, find you and your site.
- Getting involved in social networking multiplies the number of places that your site and your products can be found by search engines, which is critically important to the success of your e-commerce business.
How To Leverage Social Media Networks To Our Advantage?
Simply, we are trying to spread the word about your e-commerce business. You can take your product reviews or blog posts and spread them as far as possible online enlisting the help of these sites. It’s important to make sure the content you’re promoting is interesting and helpful to the audience you’re trying to reach. Remember, people like to do business with their friends if they’ve never met you offline. By being reasonable and participating in social networking, you’ll expand your credibility and potential customer base in many important and helpful ways.
It’s also important to recognize that these social media outlets were designed to serve as conversation platforms, and not as overt marketing channels. Sending messages that are overly promotional or commercial is often compared to shouting at a party where everyone else is chatting quietly, and the backlash can overwhelm the benefits of participation. As an ecommerce business owner I recommend taking a couple of weeks to monitor the various sites to get a sense of the patterns and informal rules before posting anything.
Setup Your Business Emails Using Google Apps
May 25, 2009 by Tyrone
Something very common new business owners overlook when starting an e-commerce business is not having a professional e-mail address. I have had people give me a business card and the first thing I notice is an email address that says “motorcyclestore@gmail.com”. Using free services like Google, Hotmail or Yahoo is not a smart option and I highly recommend moving away from this. In this post I will show you how to set up your own business email address that will cost you nothing going from “motorcyclestore@gmail.com” to “info@motorcyclestore.com”. If you know how to setup a Google Mail (GMail) account already, this will be a breeze for you and no one will know that you use Google Mail to send your emails.
Have A Professional Email Address
Here are the reasons why it is important to have a business email address when you are running an e-commerce website:
- A business email address makes your business look professional whether you are the sole operator or a company with 100+ employees.
- You keep all your business correspondence separate to your personal emails.
- You can have multiple email addresses for different departments such as sales, support or orders.
- The business email address can always be transferred without having to notify contacts.
The next question most commonly asked is what email addresses should we setup?
How To Optimize Your Ecommerce Website For Profit?
May 21, 2009 by Tyrone
In this post I am going to share with you more ways to optimize your e-commerce website. It will follow on from the article: 8 Steps To Achieve Top Rankings For Your E-commerce Business. If you have not read it, I would suggest you take a look now, as it will also help you optimize your content. Combine what I will show you in this post and it will give you a complete overview of how to get your e-commerce website optimized for profit.
Basic Optimizations For Your Pages
Optimize Your Headings
A lot of e-commerce websites do not realise the importance of having a good heading which can be the difference of having your product listed on the search engines to not being found at all. To understand this, I will be showing you how to place your keywords using heading tags that can be easily implemented. Since there are already many articles explaining what the <h1>,<h2> and <h3> tags are, I will let my friend Nicolas Prudhon explain it to you: Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong?.
Our focus will be optimizing the product and category pages within an e-commerce store. Do remember we are trying to optimize your e-commerce store so that more traffic is driven to your products that will lead to a sale. It is not as important to optimize other non-product pages such as your about us and contact us pages. Though I have covered on how to do that in my article: 8 Steps To Achieve Top Rankings For Your E-commerce Business.
How To Setup An Ecommerce Internet Business Website?
May 11, 2009 by Tyrone
Lately I’ve been reading through some e-commerce forums and I have noticed a lot of beginners asking the same questions. Just like myself, I once was a beginner in starting an e-commerce business and with time and experience I have gained a greater understanding of what is involved. In many ways I wish I had someone there who could show me a simple “how to” setup a successful e-commerce business, which would have saved a lot of the countless hours. Luckily for you, you won’t need to spend more time trying to search the information as I am going to give you a step by step guide on how to setup your own e-commerce website over a course spanning a few weeks. I will link everything back to this post when this course is finished.
Firstly, the assumption I am going to make is that you are looking to install an open source software. The one I recommend is Magento Commerce, which is an extremely powerful platform to use for any e-commerce business. If you want to see why I recommend this software, please read my review: Magento Commerce Review.
Here is an outline of what you will learn:
- Choosing your e-commerce business domain name
- Finding a reliable hosting service to host your e-commerce website
- Setup your domain name to redirect to your hosting provider
- Preparing your site for a pre-launch
- Uploading and installing Magento Commerce on the hosting server
- Setup your email servers using Gmail
- Configure Magento Commerce with SEO optimization add-on
- Which pages to include on your e-commerce website – about us, contact us, privacy policies, shipping and returns policy, etc.
- Uploading your products images and descriptions to appeal to your customers
- Launching your e-commerce website
By the end of this course you will be able to setup your own e-commerce website and start to see profits. If there is anything that I may not have covered, please leave your comments below and I’ll add it to this course. Any feedback is appreciated.
Tyrone Shum
E-commerce Resource Guide
