How to Start Selling Online

The thought of selling online is always exciting for most entrepreneurs. How awesome would it be just to have a supplemental income that would pay for a new car, send your family on vacation, or pay some of your bills? Let me first say that this is very well possible and is done by thousands of people across the nation. They did not do it without hard work though. If you want to begin selling online, you should refer to the small three step process below.

Step 1: Determine what you will be selling

This may sound like a silly step, but it is often overlooked and it is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. There are hundreds of people that fail simply because they did not do proper market research. I understand their thinking, I have been there! They thought, “Hey, nearly everyone on the internet has a computer, so they will probably all buy computers or computer related products.” Sure, this is the case, the problem is that a few companies do the vast majority of the selling. There are literally hundreds of other computer component companies that are struggling to get by. In reality, finding a product to sell online is not just about finding a product that will sell online, but a market that is not too overcrowded where you can not compete.

Step 2: You Must Have a Website Developed

Assuming that you are not a web developer yourself, you should have your website professionally developed. Sure, there are a lot of books out there which promise that you can develop a website in under 24 hours worth of reading. Generally though, you have much higher expectations for your own website in how it should work and look. And so will your customers! Your website should be easy to read, manage, and the products should be easily purchased. This is a good recipe for a successful business. The problem is that it does require some upfront funding, but it is money that is spent very wisely if you have high hopes for your new ecommerce business.

Step 3: Marking Your Products or Service

Please, if there is one thing I can tell you and one thing that you will remember from this page, it is that you should expect to have to market your products or service. The unfortunate part about selling products online is that the internet is not always crawling with people who randomly go out and find new websites. Google and the search engines are not just going to assume that your website is a great place to buy the products you are selling. There is an art to bringing traffic to a website, and without that, you will never be gaining traffic that you could convert into sales. The unsuccessful businesses on the internet are not failing just because they have a terrible owner or are neglecting to respond to emails, it is because they do not have anyone visiting their website in most cases. Keep in mind this and do your research on how to market your products and services when you open your doors. Unlike brick and mortar companies, you will likely not have a flood of customers coming to your site without some effort into website marketing.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – Link Building

If you are like me you enjoy being independent. Regardless of the reason, you probably came to this article to find out how to start the link building process for your ecommerce website. Whether you simply ran out of funds to have someone else do it or you would rather invest that money elsewhere, you came to the right place. While this next question may throw you off guard if you are not familiar with SEO at all, it does have a lot to do with link building.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a short name given to a any link that is from another website that has a destination of your website. Therefore, if you own an ecommerce website called johndoesbikeshop.com and the webmaster from reallycoolbikestores.com linked to it on his website. That link would be considered a backlink.

What is link building?

Link building is any process that you take to obtain backlinks in effort to rank better within search engines. In a nutshell, anytime you are going out of your way to get a link from another website back to your own website (also referred to as backlinks) then you are link building. Therefore, there are many things you can do that could be considered link building.

How should link building be done for ecommerce?

Now that you know what backlinks and link building are we can move on to the more in depth stuff of the actual process. For an ecommerce store, it is imperative that the anchor text used in your backlinks is relative to the products or services you are offering. For example, many times people will get a backlink but the anchor text might be “click here”. Google does in fact count that as a vote to have your site rank when someone searches for “click here”. However, this does little to help considering you probably will not convert traffic that come to your site after searching for that term. Therefore, if you have any say in the process you should make the anchor text of all backlinks relative to your products or services. For example, if you are selling bikes, you want people who search for “buy bikes” or “bikes for sale” to find your website on the search engines. This, then, should be the anchor text used on your backlinks.

How do I start link building?

Link building is not a one time thing. You will never be able to say, “Okay, I am done with my link building for this website.” Instead, even if you are number one for a specific keyword, you will still have to do more link building because you know that there are other competitors trying to take your spot. Not only will they try, but if Google sees that there is more interest in their website than yours, you will quickly be replaced because Google will think that they are more relative than you are. It is safe to say this is a process that will never end during the time that you own an ecommerce store. You will constantly want to tell people about your site and gain links back to your store’s website.

The upside to this is that the methods of link building can be quite simple. Sometimes people will use services such as linkxl.com or text-link-ads.com but this has been spoken plainly by Google that they frown upon such services. Therefore, other methods can be taken that are also effective. Below is a short list of things you can do to help build backlinks for your ecommerce website.

1: Directory Submissions – Submit your website to directories online.

2: Article Marketing – Place content online at article directories with a link or two back to your ecommerce website.

3: Social Bookmarking – Link to content on your own site through sites like digg, delicious, and reddit.

4: Social Networking – Talk to others and link back to your website when you feel that your website is relative to the conversation.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – On-Site Optimization

On-site optimization is a key element to any ecommerce website hoping to get traffic from search engines. Generally, search engines use software or robots that view your website. These robots then have to determine what your website is about based on what is on it. The problem is that if your website is not optimized properly it could land unfound in search engines or maybe even in search results that will never generate any buyers for you.

First, we must look at what a keyword is. Essentially, it can be a single word, but is typically a group of words that people might search for to find your website relevant to what they want. So for example, you may have an ecommerce website that sells curtains. A possible keyword would be “curtains for sale”. This might be a term that people would search for in order to find your website. I am not saying that this is a definite good keyword because you need to do research to determine if people even searching for that, how much competition, or if there might be better untapped keywords out there that you could rank easily for and convert into sales.

So now that we know that you have to have a keyword for on-site optimization, you may be asking yourself, “How does this relate”? Generally, it relates in every way because you will be using your keywords throughout your website. Let me give you a perfect example, the Title of your page is very important to robots. It is intended to be a brief overview of what your website is about. This title is the text that appears at the top of a browser but is generated through a tag in HTML within the section. If your title is “Welcome to my awesome curtain website” then you might rank well for “awesome curtain website” which probably has little traffic and is not relevant to you actually selling curtains.

Now here is the kicker, you do not want to use the same keyword on every single page. You should perhaps use your best selling and most popular items in the keyword on your front page as well as the actual page selling those items. However, if you also sell curtain rods or drapes on a different page, you can change that title and use a different keyword for that page. Google actually recommends this and you may hurt yourself if you simply throw a single keyword around everywhere possible. You must have a title and use keywords that are relevant to what is on that page.

Where else other than the title can I place a keyword?

There are numerous places that robots will look. Below are a few places that I would highly recommend using your keywords at.

#1: H1 HTML Tags – H1 tags are HTML tags that help outline a page. For example, when you were in English class you probably had to have an outline. Google prefers that you do the same thing on your own websites. H1 is generally an overview of what is below. The next level would be H2, which should contain contents of H1. H3 is generally the lowest level that website will go and it should be the littlest details. Below is a brief outline based on previous examples of a curtain ecommerce website.

H1 – Curtains for Sale

H2 – Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Pink Ruffled Curtains

H3 – Purple Ruffled Curtains

H2 – Straight Curtains

H3 – Pink Straight Curtains

H3 – Purple Straight Curtains

#2: Within the Content of Your Website

The robots these days are quite complex. They actually read what you have on the website including your entire content. The words on the page about having curtains for sale should indicate that you do have “curtains for sale”. You should have that placed somewhere in your content and you should make easily visible. At the same time there has to be a balance, your content should flow naturally and you should avoid placing your keywords in areas where it does not make sense or read well. The goal is to help your website visitors at the same time find what they are looking for.

Please note that Google claims to have roughly 200 things that they judge a website on to see where it fits best. Many of these are based on what you have on your website. While I just touched the surface on other places to use keywords, there are numerous other techniques that you may find beneficial for your website. Generally, if you follow the rules of placing keywords that are relevant Google and other search engines will reward you.

Grow by leaps and bounds with software to skyrocket your business: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

The Ecommerce Setup Process

I have one rule for you while you read this ecommerce setup guide. This single rule states that you should read this guide in its entirety. I am going to give you the truth about converting your business from a brick and mortar company to having an online presence to help increase your revenue. In the process, I will touch on some of the obstacles you may encounter. This is not to scare you, but I want you to realize that they are normal. I will offer solutions to these problems as well. If you leave in the middle of the guide, it may leave you with a bad taste in your mouth of whether you truly want to jump into online business.

Let’s get started. I am going to assume that you have an offline business and are just now starting the beginning phases of having an online presence for your company. I am also going to assume that you are well aware that some items and services are great online sellers, others are not. In this process you should have already thought of this and know that you do have a product that is going to sell well online.

The Development of Your Website

This is the first phase to making the transition to online business. You will need a place for people to buy your products or services. While this seems like it would be the most important part of an online business, it really is not. Do not get me wrong, it is important, but having a beautiful website is only the beginning of the process.

You likely have a good understanding of what your capabilities are. If you have absolutely no clue about how websites work, you may want to hire someone who can handle the whole development process for you. However, if you want to give it a shot, there are actually three common steps to building a website.

1: Purchase a Domain Name

The domain name is what people remember you by. Internet users will type in domainname.com into their web browsers to access your website. It is very important you find something relative to what your business is about. For example, pinkpolkadots.com says very little about who you are if you are selling motorcycles.

2: Begin the Web Design Process

The web design process is not something you will want to tackle on your own if you have never designed a website before. You can always hire someone to specifically do the web design for you. Generally, they will want to know what features you want on the website. You should always give them this whether they ask for it or not. This way you stand a better chance of getting exactly what you want.

3: Begin the Web Development Process

This is probably the most costly and time consuming part of building a website. While the design is the graphics and the way the website appears, the backend programming is what will make the website work the way it is intended to work. Having separate pages, making it easy to update (frequently called a content management system), and processing payments are some of the things that you will almost always find on an ecommerce website. The web developer should also be familiar with what features you would like on the website and what they are expected to do before they get started. This may keep you from having to pay an unexpected amount of money. After this stage, you should have a fully functional website.

Keep in mind that most websites will cost less than $1000.00. Considerably less if you work with freelancers rather than an actual business for developing your website. If you are asked to pay more than this, you might consider getting other estimates on pricing.

Grow your online business with software web designers love: ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.