Why Should SEO Matter?

When you have an ecommerce business, you don't have a building or other forms of presentations to fall back on. All you have to make your impression on the Internet public at large and all your potential customers is your website, but if you haven't made your website search engine friendly, you're going to be basically invisible on the net and none of your potential customers will find you.

A quick look at Google shows if you're an ecommerce business selling watches, you have 479,000,000 sites competing with you. That can seem daunting, but if you know your customers and you know what they are looking for, you can make your site extremely search engine friendly and blast your site to the top of the return search listings, enabling potential customers to find you.

No one knows better than you what your customers are looking for, use those words, called "keywords" on your site. Be careful how much you use them though, over use of those words can lead the search engines to blacklist your site for spamming.

Use text wherever you can. Search engines don't notice your cool flash animation or your spiffy graphics. They read and index text. The more text you have that is truly relevant to your website, the more important your site will be.

Update your site frequently with fresh content. Changing and updating your site with fresh content on a regular basis will keep the search engines interested in your website and keep your page ranking high because you update on a regular basis. It needs to be unique and not published anywhere else on the net (yes, the search engines check). If the content is found to be duplicated, it will cost you in the form of driving your page's relevance down in the search engine page rankings.

Consider a blog. The blog for business is a powerhouse when used correctly. Search engines index them quickly and come back to check a blog often. If you want your site to appear quickly in search engine results, get a blog going. To make sure it's done right, talk to Merchandizer, they can design a plan for your website that will get your website found by the search engines and your potential customers.

Confused About Ecommerce Providers?

In the time it takes you to read this article, someone could visit your website, pick out some products, put them into their shopping cart, have them gift wrapped with a message if need be, and pay with a credit card. You could have just made a sale and you didn't even have to stop reading to do it. That is the sheer beauty of ecommerce when it works right.

Ecommerce providers can seem tricky to choose because so many companies offer some services for free, others are value added services (read: we charge) and others will offer limited time free use. If a company has to use these gimmicks and yet they don't show their shopping cart on their website, you have every right to be suspect.

Using Merchandizer as an example, not only are they well known in the ecommerce industry, they spell out exactly what you get with each level of shopping cart package so you can pick the best one for your business needs right now. Just starting out? Don't over spend; you can get a lot for less than $20-dollars per month. If you have a lot of products, there is a shopping cart program for you and best of all, Merchandizer will configure it to your website and you don't to deal with uploading and tweaking out your shopping cart and losing customers because you missed a file here or there.

Merchandizer will set up your shopping cart, make sure it works properly and then you can open it up for business, knowing it will work seamlessly and flawlessly with your website - taking orders, processing payments and notifying your customers and telling them, "Thank you for your business...". All the while you can read this article, have a sandwich or even go out and take a walk because with a good ecommerce set up, you don't have to be glued to your computer 24/7 processing orders!

Take what you've learned here and if you don't have a shopping cart program, get one. If you do have one, does it do everything you need it to? Talk to Merchandizer and get the ecommerce tools you need to make your business success happen!

What is PPC and How Can it Benefit Your Business?

PPC is a term you will hear a lot online but you may not know the whole meaning of the term. PPC stands for Pay Per Click and in a nutshell, it means that you have advertising on your website, usually from search engines or directories such as Google Ad Words or Yahoo Search Marketing (which was formerly called Overture).

You are given a tiny bit of code to imbed in your website and then the code is read whenever your page loads on someone's computer screen and ads are served up that are relevant to that page. If someone clicks on an ad from one of your web pages and a purchase is made, you receive a commission, or in essence, payment for a click of someone else's mouse.

See how profitable that could be if you have your website completely optimized to show ads that are relevant to the traffic your website receives? If done correctly, it is almost like having a business within your business. The more pages within your web pages that you have that snippet of coding on, the more pages that will show ads that will give your website visitors the potential to click and make you more money. It's normally only a few cents per click, but it does add up.

The other end of the PPC story is for you to be one of the advertisers yourself that appears on people's web pages. This can cost you a lot of money for not a lot of results if done incorrectly. Talk to the professionals at Merchandizer before you start randomly bidding on keywords that you want associated with your website. Mesothelioma may be a $40-dollar keyword but if you sell watches on your website, a lung disease isn't going to target the website traffic that is going to be interested in your watches.

If done correctly, PPC can be a very powerful marketing, sales, and income tool. Look into adding it to your website today.

Can an Ebook Bring You Customers?

You bet. Ebooks can be powerful marketing tools for your ecommerce business. They are fairly easy to write if you have the soul of a wordsmith lurking about in your bones, if not hire a ghostwriting service to write one for you.

Ebooks are very economical marketing in that they require no paper to be expended in their creation, besides the time it will take you to write it, very little investment is required on your part. Since you're offering it on your website, people who want your ebook will download it when they want and no effort on your part will have to be involved in emailing or sending your ebook.

You know your product or service very well, tell others. You know the how's and the why's of your industry - pass it along. If people interested in your product or service, they will want to know more ways to use it, the history of it, and more.

Some people sell their ebooks; others give them away on their websites. Either way, when you write your ebook, create plenty of links to your website, your products and other relevant information about your company. Not only will someone who already knows your firm be tempted to click and visit your website (and thereby purchase something), they will pass that ebook on to other individuals who have the same interests and those people will find your website through the humble little ebook that you wrote and purchase your service or goods.

There are a myriad of programs free and otherwise you can download to create ebooks, complete with music if you like, however steer clear of these. Only people with PCs can read them. Just as you made your website accessible to everyone that surfs the Internet, you also want everyone to be able to read your ebooks. Make them in .pdf format. That is, use Adobe http://www.adobe.com and you will be able to make your ebook something everyone can read and share with their friends, thereby creating more traffic to your website.

Start putting your fingers to the keyboard today and share what you know in an ebook for your customers and future customers.

What is Black Hat SEO?

When your ecommerce website is up and running, you'll suddenly find yourself searching Google and other search engines and directories quite often to see where you stand in the search results.

If potential customers can't find you, how can they buy your products or services? And you will start looking for techniques to raise your website's search engine ranking so your web pages appear higher in the return search results.

Be careful of the methods you use to make your website search engine friendly. This is called search engine optimization or SEO, if done correctly - it will pay off big time, if done poorly you will get buried by the search engines or worse -blacklisted.

When you think black hat, what does it conjure up in your mind? A bad guy in the old west wearing a black hat? Well, it's kind of like that. Black hat techniques are looked down upon by the legitimate net community at large and worse, most of them will get your site blacklisted by the various engines and directories for spamming.

Overstuffing your page with keywords is a big way to get your site blacklisted. Another way is to only stuff your web pages with information that has nothing to do with your site.

If you sell electric dog polishers on your website, don't write "Paris Hilton" repeatedly on your pages because you think you'll generate a lot of traffic because she gets a lot of look ups on the search engines. Be more selective, even if you did get a little traffic to your site, they weren't looking for your product anyway.

If you aren't sure of the methods to make your website SEO strong, talk to Merchandizer, they are pros at SEO and get your site noticed by the search engines and directories for the right reasons!

Leaving 9-5 For Your Own Ecommerce Business Part III

Now that you've decided on a business you'd like to run online, you have a website that is up and running and appealing to the eye of the discriminating web surfer, you're going to need two last things to make your ecommerce site, just that: a fully functional ecommerce business on the web.

Those last two things you will need are a shopping cart program and a payment gateway. Those two things go hand in hand and it can seem confusing at first but just remember it like this, a shopping cart takes the orders and the payment gateway takes the payments.

Merchandizer has some of the easiest to use shopping cart programs out there today. When you're first starting out and every penny really counts and must be accounted for, check out the starter plan for small businesses, you can have up to 10 items to sell for less than $20 per month and if your business booms, there is a shopping cart program that can handle over 500,000 items.

Shopping carts can be a real bone of contention for some people, if it's slow or asks too many questions, people will just click off your site and decide they didn't really need what they were attempting to buy that badly in the first place. These shopping carts were designed to be fast loading, easy to use and work using minimal input from the customer while maintaining full socket security so anyone making a purchase from your site can rest assured their purchase is safe and secure and that's a heck of a good advertising point for you.

And here's the greatest thing about shopping carts, they allow you to make money when you sleep. Imagine it is 3AM and you're fast asleep. Someone visits your website and decides they simply must buy that electric dog polisher for Aunt Myrtle's next birthday. They click and it is in the cart.

After the customer has put their desired items in the shopping cart, check out is a breeze. They simply fill out their method of payment and where they want their purchase sent, either to themselves or directly to Aunt Myrtle. The payment gateway will verify the credit card information, which cuts down on fraud and will process the order.

The customer will receive a thank you notice and purchase confirmation and you're still fast asleep. Now you see how an ecommerce business can free you from your 9-5 entrapment, start looking around for a business you'd like to put on the web and get ready to be your own boss!

Leaving 9-5 For Your Own Ecommerce Business Part II

After you have made the decision to start your own ecommerce business, be smart about it. Even a brick and mortar business can take up to two years on the average to show a profit, the same can apply to an ecommerce business as well. So, don't stroll into your CEO's office and announce your resignation the next day.

Do a little planning and if you run your ebusiness part-time in the beginning and grow it slow and steady, you can eventually leave your day job and work full time for yourself.

The next step is how you will present yourself to the world: your website. I cannot stress how important this is. Even though you have well meaning friends and relatives who may create websites on the side, you're not going to get the slick result you need to present on the web to give people the security that they want to do business with you. "Homemade" web pages tend to look just that way, and while they are charming, they aren't professional and give the impression that your company may not be in business for the long hall. Talk to professional web designers such as the staff at Merchandizer and they can get a feel for the "voice" you want to present to the world.

Take a look at some of the biggest websites everyone knows and uses. Yahoo and Amazon to name two. They are low on the graphics, fast loading and low use of color. Easy for everyone to navigate.

You can have a sense of humor and still present a professional image to the world, look at Google. Every April Fools day they still put a joke on their website, most recently it was Pigeonizing, an in-depth look at how search engine results were tallied through the use of pigeons pecking the keywords. Just leave out the blinking words, 4-inch tall letters and other items that will make people leave your web page almost immediately.

You can present a professional image for not a lot of money. You may have been lead to believe that a professionally done website was out of your price range, look at the packages Merchandizer offers and get your business launched on the web!

Leaving 9-5 For Your Own Ecommerce Business Part I

Day after day, do your mornings feel frantic? You get up and try to quickly eat some breakfast, while you get the kids ready for school and find out they didn't do one last homework assignment that they need help with right then and there. Plus, the baby needs breakfast, your shirt isn't even ironed yet and you realize that you're already 15 minutes late leaving and now your kids have missed the bus so you need to drive them to school along with dropping the baby off at the baby sitters.

Once at work, you're already late so the boss is chewing you out because you missed an important conference call. You day is hassled and hurried. You work through lunch and play catch up all day and then fight traffic all the way home. Make dinner for the kids, help them with their homework, play and feed the baby. Attempt conversation with your spouse, and you both fall exhausted into bed. You awaken to an alarm and it's time to do it all again. Tired of feeling like you're running in circles? There might a solution for you.

If you're a self-motivated individual and you are organized, having your own e-commerce business might be the way to go for you. Are you a craft person? A lot of people supplement their incomes selling candles, soaps, and gift baskets. If you're not, but you still want your own ecommerce business, look into drop shipping. Drop shipping is where you sell products at a higher price than where you get them from, and when you make a sale you merely contact the firm whose products you're selling, and have them ship your order. It's a great way to sell multiple products without a huge investment on your part.

After you decide if you're going to supply your own goods or services or you're going through a drop shipper, you will need a website, a shopping cart program and a payment gateway. That's it. That is all you need to get an ecommerce site going on the web. That will be covered in part II of this article series.

Merchandizer Can Make Your Ecommerce Website More Accessible

If you're going to sell online, your website must be accessible, but what does that really mean?

Not everyone that surfs the web has the same abilities, your website should be designed so someone with disabilities can use your website. There are web users that are blind, and there will be people visiting your site who are mobility impaired. If your website isn't easy for these potential customers to navigate, you're going to lose the sale.

How websites are tested for usability is interesting, the website is brought up and tested for ease of navigation. A poor color design can be hard to use for a vision impaired website visitors. Also, have you tried navigating your site with out using your mouse? Try using your tab key and space bar to get around your site, this will give you a good idea of the usability level of your website.

A website full of bright graphics, colored boxes, too much flash animation, and lack of text can make your site very hard from someone with disabilities to use. You're losing a good portion of your potential customers by not making your site accessible for everyone.

Look at some of the most visited sites on the web like Amazon and Yahoo, both are extremely user friendly and you can actually navigate their pages quite easily using a tab key and your space bar, that is one of the secrets of good web design for all your site visitors, make your site accessible for everyone.

If you're interested in making your site more user friendly to maximize your sales, talk to Merchandizer about the accessibility of your ecommerce site.

Should You Sell B2B?

Absolutely. There is a huge market for most businesses to sell to other businesses. Whether you have a service or an actual product, there is usually a market to be found in other forms of other companies. Normally B2B sales consist of wholesale orders, which usually mean a lower profit margin but a great amount of product moved out of your inventory.

You can customize your shopping cart program to organize B2B sales and allow businesses the option of buying wholesale. Another great feature you can offer other businesses, is to work as a drop shipper.

In drop shipping, you allow someone else to sell your products at their own price, turn the orders in to you and the product is shipped directly from you to the buyer. You can set up shopping cart to take those orders and even charge a drop-shipping fee if you choose. This is like having your own sales force out selling your product.

You can't be there to answer your phone or take emails and answer questions 24-hours a day; this is why you need a fully automated and customized shopping cart program to take care of this for you. Your shopping cart from Merchandizer will process orders, send confirmation emails and even allow tracking of orders.

There are a number of great ways to utilize your company's service or products to other businesses and you can automate the selling by customizing your shopping cart on your website to accommodate other businesses who wish to do business with you!