When I say that ecommerce is hard, I’m talking about running an honest to goodness custom ecommerce store that hopes to gross over $50,000 per month in sales using a custom-built website.   Stores that sell a couple of thousand dollars worth of goods per month are usually not profitable, but companies that are just now becoming serious about their ecommerce stores have to start somewhere.

How to tell if running an ecommerce website is simply not for you:

1. If you hope to drop-ship all of your products so that you can avoid dealing with shipping and packaging.
   If you have a full-time day job, and you hope to grow an ecommerce store on the side, prepare for your online store to be your second job.  You will need to dedicate several hours a day to your store.  Its also difficult for a business to just add commerce and walk away without a plan to manage and grow the online store.
2. You can’t designate a person at your company who can manage the store once it is built.
   Who will answer the emails that come in?  Who will answer questions from customers?  Who will handle returns.   Typically customers will try a small order with your store to evaluate your customer service before they spend a lot of money on your website.
3. You don’t typically check email more than once or twice a day, and/or you don’t have a smartphone.
   You have to be somewhat of a techie to be successful with an ecommerce site.  All successful ecommerce store owners that I have met have a smartphone with push email and internet access to monitor their store.   A cheap flip phone and no qwerty keyboard is a bad sign.
4. You don’t experience editing photos on your computer.
   Your product catalog must be full of great photos.   One photo per product is NOT enough anymore.  If your store has hundreds or thousands of products, you will be spending a lot of time resizing photos on your computer. If the cost and learning curve of a photo editing program is too much for you, then so is ecommerce.   You don’t need to be a photoshop expert, but it helpful to know how to resize, rotate, crop, and sharpen photos.
5. You can’t designate an area to take photos of your products.
   You will need to create a small photo booth to take product photos.   If you intend to steal product photos from other websites, then don’t build an ecommerce site.
6. You use personal email addresses (comcast, verizon) to run your business on.
   A legitimate ecommerce store should have email addresses at your domain name.    If you can’t use Outlook or some other program to check multiple email addresses, that is a bad sign.
7. You aren’t the type to do research online, to learn about the latest search engine optimization techniques.
   The best place to learn about ecommerce, search engine optimization, and more is the web.   If you have to call your web designer to learn about all of these things, that is a bad sign.   Certainly your provider can help you take things to the next level, but you need to be able to do some basic research on your own to save time and money.   There are a LOT of buzzword topics that you will need to learn about quickly to be successful with ecommerce; SEO, cart abandonment, visitor conversion, Landing Pages, Optimization, tagging, payment gateways, APIs, inbound linking, etc.
8. You think that keywords and meta tags are the secret to coming up high in Google.
   It is a myth that adding a few keywords to your site is all you need to do to get found in Google and other search engines.  What will you do to get quality website to link to you, for example?  You will need a plan for this, and that takes time and money too.  If you have a list of terms that you think your business should show in the top ten results under in Google, then you must work closely with your web design team from the beginning to make sure that your site is optimized for these terms.
9. You have never used ebay, or done online shopping on your own.
   Again, you have to be a savvy web user and shopper to know what makes a good shopping experience.
10. You can’t/won’t write descriptions of your products (all of your products).
    Quality original content is what can make your site stand apart from others.   Your store will need to convince shoppers to buy, so you will need well-written product descriptions.  If you don’t have time to write these, then ecommerce may not be for you.
11. The products that you are trying to sell are a commodity that can be found anywhere.
    The sites that make the most money that I have seen sell products that people seek out.   Usually these are very specific or hard to find items.   Parts websites aren’t very sexy, but they make a ton of money. You have to have a niche with your business so that people will seek you out.
12. You think that $100 a month to cover all of your store fees is too much money.
    Ecommerce is expensive.  Our ecommerce hosting framework starts at $50 per month for an ecommerce website.  Add onto that the cost of accepting credit cards, and the payment gateway ($10/mo), and the fees can add up.  This is without spending any money on adwords with Google.   Be realistic with your recurring fees, not just your store development fees.
13. You wish to emulate stores online that belong to multi-million dollar businesses, on a tiny budget.
    Look for stores online that more closely resemble what you are trying to create.   Do a lot of Google searches for related products to what you are selling.   See what the competition looks like.   While it might be tempting to want to emulate a multi-national corporation website, be realistic.
14. You don’t have a database of people to market to right away
    This is why brick and motar stores do so well online.  They can market to their existing customers.
15. Your project’s goals aren’t realistic.
    If you are trying to build an expansive website in a matter of weeks, it just wont happen unless you have an extremely small or template-based online store. If the store is very small, then your sales will be small, and you may not make enough to cover expenses.

If you have comment or questions about ecommerce success, please post a follow-up below.  I will answer your questions here.

In a startling news release on CNET News, it was just reported that Network Solutions and Monster Commerce, who host about 10,000 ecommerce stores, had their credit card data stolen from almost 5,000 ecommerce websites.   This is obviously a nightmare for their customers, and the cardholders that have shopped on Monster Commerce stores.  We can help them!

Delaware.Net offers an alternative to Monster Commerce called Store-Logic

Monster Commerce has been a large ecommerce hosting company that we have looked at for some time for ideas as we built our next-generation ecommerce engine.   Particularly, we liked how Monster Commerce handled category viewing when managing their stores (we had a demo account with them), and we like how they employed a theme engine for their stores.    We took these good ideas into account when building our new ecommerce engine, which was released late in 2008.

Importing Monster Commerce Stores

Monster Commerce customers can call us, and we  will help them export their data from their existing stores into our engine.   We will import their product data, sales data, customer data, and more.

Credit Card Data Storage

While we can import your store data, we won’t import your credit card data.   Modern ecommerce stores should never hold onto credit card data permanently, as the risks are just too great.   It is possible to pass credit card data securely from your online store directly to a payment processor such as Authorize.Net, or PayPal’s PayFlowPro system, or YourPay.  All of these systems are already integrated into Store-Logic so that you can accept credit cards right away.

Ecommerce SEO, Shipping, and More.

Our system includes real-time shipping for UPS, FedEx, USPS, and UPS Freight.  Most other ecommerce engines out there do not include these features alone.   We are a certified UPS Ready Ecommerce Vendor, so our store engine talks directly with UPS’ servers.    Our store engine has the latest search engine optimization features, to help your store come up in search results. For example, as you add products and categories to your store, they are added to a special Google Sitemap file that you can register with Google.

Get a Quote Today to Upgrade Your Ecommerce Store

Let us help you with your ecommerce website. You can get a quote from us online using this form:
http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/

What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.

Cities need to provide real-time bill payment options online

Municipal customers expect to find convenience features in their local municipal website. With the mass adoption of broadband, online banking, ecommerce, and web applications, it is no longer a novelty to add an online bill-pay system to a municipal website. Delaware.Net builds real-time online bill-paying services for small and large towns, as well as corporations and utility companies. When complete, city customers can look up their account online securely, and pay their outstanding balances using a credit card. We can integrate with any popular billing package that runs on an SQL database server, or that has an import/export API (Application Programming Interface). The API serves as a gateway that allows us to look up and insert successful payment information into a municipal billing system.

Who pays for credit card fees?

An important challenge we have seen in working with large municipalities and utility companies is determining who will pay the fees that merchant providers charge. To accept credit cards online, there will be typically two fees involved; the merchant account fee, which is a percentage of each transaction, and the payment gateway service (such as Authorize.net), which makes the transaction real-time in your website. If you simply tack-on these fees to the bill amounts that your customers are paying, then they will generally not use your online bill-pay system. Why? Because postage stamps are always going to cost less than the fees that you add to the transaction if they are percentage-based. Since your customers are able to gain convenience by using the website, and since your city employees won’t need to open paper envelopes and process checks (expensive in labor costs), the online fee amounts are generally a wash if the transaction amounts are under $500 on average. For this reason, you may want to limit the total amount that can be transacted through the website, to minimize fee exposure, or you can calculate your total cost of providing the online bill-pay service and incorporate it into your fee structures across the board.

How NOT to introduce online bill-pay to your customers

I witnessed one utility company that had a successful online bill-pay system, and then outsourced it all to a separate bill-pay company so that they would not have to worry about the fees any longer. The problem was, each bill had $20 tacked on as a service fee. It really looked and felt like a bait-and-switch to the utility company’s customers, because they would start to enter payment information and then get hit with the $20 transaction fee. As you can imagine, customers stopped using the service almost immediately.

How much are the credit card fees?

There are two primary fees involved in accepting credit cards online. The first is the payment gateway service, and the second is the merchant account fee.

The payment gateway service is straightforward and inexpensive. Typically they are $90 – $140 to setup, and then you have a $10 per month fee, and a 15 cent transaction fee. The payment gateway talks to the card issuing bank, the card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover), and your merchant account. The payment gateway service is required for real-time transactions.

Merchant account fees are where things can get expensive. With fees generally between 1% and 3% of the total transaction amount, with the average being about 2.3%. In my opinion, a municipality should never pay more than 2% for merchant account fees. This is because merchant account providers use a risk assessment chart to calculate your fees. I have seen these charts, and you can find them if you do a web search. The lowest credit card fees are 1%, and this is typically the rate for a grocery store – they ALWAYS get the lowest rates. A typical mom-and-pop web business can get about 2.3%. As a municipality, your transactions are much more trustworthy than a typical online retailer. It is important to note that ALL MERCHANT ACCOUNT FEES ARE NEGOTIABLE so you MUST shop around.

Why you shouldn’t just sign-up for a merchant account from your bank:

A common mistake that I see is when an organization goes to their bank for a merchant account. This is because the vast majority of banks simply RESELL merchant accounts from one of the large merchant account providers. You should shop around and get a quote from several companies so that you can get the best rate. Even a fraction of a percent difference in cost can add up to big dollars in savings when you obtain a merchant account. I have dealt with MANY different merchant account providers over the years, and you need to be careful to make sure that they have experience with online transactions. Surprisingly – many do not. We have worked with PNC Bank corporate as a reseller of their merchant account, but we in the end, they too were simply reselling someone else. Today, we have a close relationship with a merchant provider that has superb rates, and they offer great customer service. I can’t post the name here, but contact me directly (888-432-7965 x100) and I can give you their name.

Integration with billing systems

While it may sound impressive to have a real-time synchronization between your billing system and your website, this is typically not how the two systems interact with each other. A batch import/export system that can be automated to run each day (or each hour) is much more reliable than a live data connection between both servers. This is the only way that we build our payment systems. The payment transaction is real-time, but the synchronization with your billing system is not.

Security and Data Storage

Unless requested by our customers, we do not store any credit card data or financial data that comes through the payment systems. We simply pass the transaction information to the payment gateways, and insert the “approved” or “declined” codes into the data tables that we synchronize with your billing system. All of our web accessible payment forms are secured with 128bit SSL security, which is the same as an online banking website.

If you have any additional questions about municipal online bill-pay systems, visit our website at www.delaware.net and shoot me an email.

Cuil uses the same preview graphic of the web sites in it’s index, like Ask.com does. So this part of it really isn’t new. What seems to be different about it, is its size – Cuil states that they contain over 121,617,892,992 web pages – much larger than Google’s number of indexed pages. I look at a lot of news sites each day and evening, and I sometimes look at Google news (news.google.com). The problem with Google news is that they basically pull in news headlines from around the world, and they massage the data a bit. After the announcement of Cuil on CNN and other news sites Monday, Google news had articles on it about how lame Cuil is. I really don’t trust Google that much anymore, so I decided to try out Cuil so that I could compare it against Google and Yahoo.

The first thing that you notice about Cuil is that their site is black, and there isn’t anything on it but a search box. The founders of the site are being tight-lipped about how it works, but just as we have reverse-endineered how google ranks sites, I am sure that over time we will be able to pull out some useful techniques to help sites come up high in Cuil (if it gets any traction).

The second thing that I noticed about the results I was seeing in Cuil is that when you add a local state name or place name to your search, there really isn’t a fair set of results that come up. When I added state names and area names to searches, what Cuil returned were mainly very cheezy directory sites. This is bad, and it could be easy for spammers to trick Cuil in this way by creating bogus directory sites. Some of these sites were obviously stuffed with keywords. For example, one search that I entered came back with many different results for the same web site, and that web site had made a page for every state name. Google would have been better at filtering that out, and that spam filtering is necessary to have a good search engine. So to sum this up, it looks like for right now, it will be incredibly easy to spam Cuil with some doorway pages, and old-school black hat SEO. But why would you want to do that, and get kicked out of Google? Cuil will need to work hard at getting lame directory sites out of its index. Who cares how many pages are in it if they are all lame?

Cuil – not ready for prime time
I really wanted to see more from Cuil, but I am not giving up hope for it yet. I want them to succeed because I want to see a viable alternative to Google. Something new that won’t be “evil” for a while. Cuil isn’t ready yet because there is no way to add a website to their engine. Also, as I said earlier, it appears that it would be incredibly easy to spoof Cuil and get sites to come up high, as I kept getting results that had blatant black-hat spamming techniques right in the body text of the websites coming up at the top of Cuil searches. Even a non-technical person could scan the results that Cuil spits out, and tell that the websites listed in the results were not trustworthy. It has that spammy aftertaste to the whole site when you look at the results.

Why Google has Become Evil
In my opinion, Google is about to start a long, painful decline. Some have said that this has already begun. Google’s stock price had a high of $714 per share in December 2007, and today their stock price is down to $483.11. That is an enormous drop. I think it still has a long way to go down. Why am I hating on Google? Because they are modifyng search results for each person that logs into Google, and that is bad news for your web site, for the web design industry, and for piracy. Here is how we discoverd it… A while ago, we started to notice that our search results in Google were changing if we were logged into Google, and if we weren’t logged into Google. We would have two computers in our office that were getting different search results for the EXACT SAME SEARCH in Google. If you use GMail, or Google Analytics, or any other “free” Google service, and you don’t log out of their site(s), then your next Google searches are tracked and altered to match your physical location and preferences. They are tracking who you are, what you search, and your results (and advertising) are then modifed to match your profile. I don’t like that at all.

Modified Google Search is bad for Ecommerce
It MIGHT sound like a good idea, but imagine trying to sell products to people around the country with an ecommerce site. Instead of showing sites that rank the best, Google might show the LOCAL sites that rank the best, when what you really wanted was a nationwide search for results. Once we realized this was happening, and we were able to duplicate it over and over again, I was convinced that the beloved Google is now in fact as evil as any other corporate behemoth that puts provits above customers.

Yahoo is now better than Google? Huh?
After seeing the privacy issues that Google is now presenting us, it caused us to go back and look more at Yahoo, and other search engines so that we could compare raw search performance and accuracy. The result was surprising – Yahoo had much better and more accurate results for just about every search we did. And believe me, I am no Yahoo fan. I haven’t used their site in a loooong time. Pretty much since Firefox put a Google search box in the upper right hand corner. So I decided to make Yahoo my default search in Firefox for a couple of weeks, and see if it works better for me. I’ll let you know how that goes.

So try out Cuil.com, do some searches, and let me know what you think!

SEO work can sometimes be less expensive than an AdWords account

Here is an example of how SEO can be more important than AdWords. We recently helped get a client up to the number two spot in Google’s organic (free) listings for their very popular search term, simply by working on their site. The client was spending over $5,000 per month, and they were able to drop their adwords account entirely because we got them so high in the organic rankings. This took a fair amount of work, and it cost them money, but the cost was much less than their monthly AdWords buy. Naturally, the cost of Google Adwords accounts can vary depending greatly depending on the search terms / industry / competition / and ad buy strategy in question.

Usability and conversion rates are much more important than search engine ranking alone

In regards to search engines, I am always amazed at business owners that spend a LOT of money to come up high in Google, and yet when you get to their web site, it is riddled with problems that prevent visitors from buying. I’m talking about sites that are nothing more than a brochure. They contain a logo, some “about us” text, and a photo. Lame. Even nicer sites than that have the same problem if they are hard to use, have a cold design, or don’t communicate the value of the product. No one buys on a site like that. Usability, conversion, social networking, blogging, vlogging, back-end business process integration, commerce, email newsletters, Intranets, content management, crm…. all of those things are really my specialties. Getting people TO the site is almost the easy part, to be honest. If you get people there but they don’t buy, I really don’t see the point. I’d rather sell 20% of 2000 visitors, than 0.5% of 10,000.

Before you spend money on an AdWords account, you had BETTER know your web site’s performance numbers first. you can start with installing a free Google Analytics account to get some tracking on your numbers. Doing this early will give you some benchmark numbers that you can use later to track your progress.

Conversion is the rate visitors that are “converted” into buyers after viewing your web site. It is very important to make it as easy as possible to buy from your web site, pay a bill, or ask questions. The easier you make those tasks, the more likely folks are to buy from you. Likewise, be VERY up-front about additional charges, like shipping fees or other steps. Naturally, I can’t post all of our conversion secrets here in my blog, but if you would like a free consultation with me, I can give you lots of additional conversion tips in person.

Site owner greed creates unrealistic expectations

That is a pretty powerful statement, but it is so true. It isn’t the SEO marketers or PPC Adwords marketers that are to blame… There is a TREMENDOUS need that some site owners seem to have to simply “pay a bill, and come up high” in search engines, as if that is a magic bullet that will make their site profitable. It won’t. Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, but more than 90% of the time, the people that I speak with that want to come up high with AdWords really need to take a step back and make their web sites work better first. Most are terrible – especially if I didn’t work on them

I am practicing what I am preaching in regards to our own web site right now. We’ve been so busy this past year that even our own site is really awful right now, even though our applications and work are getting us a lot of exposure. We have a new site in development that will change all that.

An example of powerful, free marketing from our blog (better than search engines alone)

If you go to http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver, you will see that Adobe put a quote from me on their homepage. Priceless marketing. Did I get that from AdWords? No. It came from one of my blog posts. A movie can make people cry – it can get an emotional response – and buying is an emotional response.

AdWords are great, but they are only part of a strategy. They aren’t the entire strategy. There is a long list of things you need to do to your web site to make sure it is READY for AdWords before you begin to bid on words and phrases through Google.

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

• Syndicated Superstores for Manufacturers and Distributors
  It is now possible to have one very large ecommerce web site store that can syndicate its products to other stores. In the past, we accomplished this by adding designs to categories within the main store, or custom-designing categories that we linked to domain names (these were called ‘mini-stores’). What we have now is much better.Here is how syndicated stores work:
  A master store is created, usually for a manufacturer or a distributor that has a large product catalog. Inside the master store, product categories are chosen to become syndicated. Retail stores (or “child” stores) can then be created with Delaware.Net that can seamlessly pull these products and categories as they are added or updated, which saves the retail store owner a tremendous amount of time getting their store populated with products. So drop-shipped or standard items don’t have to be updated. The great thing is, each retail store remains 100% standalone and fully-functional, so retail store owners can have a custom design, and enter additional products to their store. The retail store’s customer data and sales data is also kept private.A retail store example would be a vehicle dealership that sells parts for their vehicles. The company that sells them the parts could offer them a complete up-to-the-minute parts catalog from their master store that is syndicated into their web site.
• AJAX Technology Added to Store-Logic
  AJAX stands for “asynchronous Javascript and XML”. Its the technology that makes Google Maps work without constantly refreshing web pages to make the maps zoom or move. We are using AJAX in all of our new applications, and it really helps to make the Store-Logic administration interface more responsive.
• UPS XML Gateways Finally Complete
  Store-Logic (at long last) communicates with UPS’ XML gateways. UPS recently upgraded their gateways, and these have been implemented into Store-Logic. This allows Store-Logic to be used for international and domestic shipping with real-time lookups, tracking, and more. UPS rates change with fuel prices, and there are also separate rate tables for residential and business addresses. Additional features also include dimensional weight shipping calculations. Testing of Store-Logic shipping with a third-party company is underway and should be complete by early June. This will make Delaware.Net a “UPS Ready” partner with UPS, which many other small ecommerce vendors won’t be able to say because their shipping charges will not be accurate.
• Multiple Photos Per Product
  Store-Logic can now manage many more photos per product than it could in the past.
• Additional SEO Fields
  We have added an entirely new SEO section to Store-Logic, and URLs are also going to be “search engine safe”
• Lots more on the way!
  There is a lot coming to the Store-Logic engine that will be announced soon. One thing that we can tell you is that it will work more tightly with our other marketing and sales applications.

For more information, call Delaware.Net at 888-342-7965 or get a quote online.

The site is www.leapfish.com. The domain name that I tested was “ce.net”, which will be the domain name that we are going to use for our upcoming version of Store-Logic, which we are going to call “Commerce Engine”. It’s a nice, short domain name that I have had for some time. LeapFish says that the domain name is worth $450,846.00.

That is really good news for me, right? I own a domain name that is worth half a million dollars. The sad thing is that the estimate isn’t accurate. There is no way that a web site could accurately determine what someone would be willing to pay for the domain name. Sex.com was a domain name that was recently sold for $12 million dollars, and at one point leapfish said the sex.com domain name was worth $60 million dollars. Now when you enter that domain into leapfish it says it is worth $14 million. Who knows?

Another site that has a domain name valuation tool on it is called NameBoy. NameBoy will email you valuations for several domains at one time, and the valuations are a little lower (more reasonable) than LeapFish.

I don’t trust either of these sites, but I think it’s fun to play with them and see what a domain name might be worth. Try out the sites, and let me know if you get a decent valuation on the domains that you own.

$450,846.00

First, a note about my search engine services…

My company (Delaware.Net) offers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services, which help web sites come up higher in search engines like Google and Yahoo. This is one of many services that we offer to help customers market the web sites that we build and/or host. Unfortunately, some of our customers are not aware that we offer this service (we are fixing that with our new 2007 marketing plan). This story is an example of how there are many SEO scam companies out there that will try to take advantage of you, and why you need to be careful when choosing an SEO company.

Now for the story….

I got a phone call from a long-time customer that is in the eye care business. We host their web site, and we designed it about 4-5 years ago. She said, “John, I got a phone call and a proposal from a company that says they can get me number one on Google under the words ‘Delaware Lasik’” (an important search phrase for this eyecare company). She asked if she could stop by my office to look at the proposal and to see if we could offer similar services. I explained to her that we are now routinely performing targeted search engine work for our customers, and we scheduled a meeting.

When she stopped by, she showed me the proposal from the company that she spoke with. The front page of the proposal said “Invoice”, and it was written using a basic Microsoft Word template. It looked pretty unprofessional. The quoted amount was $8,000. It then said that they were giving her a AAO (American Association of Ophthalmologists) discount, bringing her total down to $3,750. Naturally, the quote also had a deadline.
On the second page of the quote, was the scope of search engine services that she would get with this proposal. I could almost tell immediately without reading the page that this would be a scam, because the entire scope of work that she was getting was only 3 paragraphs of text. Here is where it gets interesting – the first paragraph said “client will get a #1 listing under the search term ‘Delaware Lasik’ on the developer’s web site“.
Did you catch what was wrong with that statement? It didn’t say that they would get her #1 on Google. It said that she would be #1 on THEIR web site. Obviously ANYONE could guarantee top placement for a search phrase on their OWN web site. I pointed out to her that fact as proof that this was a scam. The other two paragraphs in the scope didn’t offer much more. One paragraph mentioned that they would offer her support, and the other said that they would forward leads from their web site to her. The name of the scam company is “Einstein Medical”. I am sure that the AAO has no idea of who Einstein Medical is, so I intend to give them a call as well to let them know about this scam.
What was most interesting to me is how badly my customer wanted to believe that this scam is true. Even after showing her that it was a scam, she kept saying “but they said they could get me high in Google“. I replied “they may have said that, but what this proposal is stating is totally something else“. She then asked me if I thought there was a Google benefit to her being listed in their site. I told her that it depends on how popular their site is.

This begs the next question: “is a link on THEIR web site worth $3,750?”. Since my client was sitting in our conference room with me, I used a digital projector to show her some online tools that we use to accurately estimate traffic to any web site. A few years ago we would use Alexa.com for this, but there are now better tools than Alexa (we actually don’t recommend Alexa because it is now inaccurate). The results were pretty interesting. The scammer’s site was ranked at about 9,000,000 in popularity. Not good. So a link from that web site wouldn’t do squat for her. Looking a little more closely at Einstein’s site revealed that their web site designs were actually pre-designed templates that were imply modified for their clients. Not exactly a “custom” design.

Note: There is no such thing as a quick-fix to building a quality search engine campaign for your business

OK, so back to the point that my customer wanted this scam to be a reality – and bad. Why do you think she wanted it to be true? I think that more and more businesses are realizing (finally) that they MUST have a Google/Yahoo/SEO campaign as part of their marketing plan, but they simply don’t have the time that is necessary to develop a good search engine strategy. They need help. And they would LOVE to pay one fee to one company, and just show up number one on Google. While this IS possible, in most cases it is a fantasy without a fair amount of work. We recently performed some SEO work for a client and got them number on within Google’s rankings. How we did that is proprietary. So even though I CAN make someone number one in Google, I wouldn’t guarantee it because I am not Google. Only Google can guarantee what is number one in their search results. If a company ever promises you that they will get you the number one position, you should be wary. Marketing professionals just want the search engine part of their marketing handled by someone else so that they don’t have to worry about it. Typically, the people I meet that want this fantasy to come true are marketing professionals that have fallen behind when it comes to online marketing. They may be very talented at newspaper, TV, print brochures, billboards, door hangars, and other traditional forms of marketing, but when it comes to email and search engine marketing they are lost. They just want badly to be able to say to their bosses that the search engine stuff is “handled”.

For the next hour, I educated my customer about all of the aspects of a good search engine strategy. Both how to come up for free in the organic listings, and how to manage a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. She left very happy, and she now knows a lot more about how search engine marketing will help her business. She asked me for a quote to both create and manage a campaign for her with a web site overhaul, which we will do for her. And it will cost her less than she would have paid the scammer. $3750 may or may not be a lot of money to you, but I am sure that there are many other people out there that would fall for that scam. Then the money the scammers are making adds up pretty quickly. And for what? $3750 for putting a link into their own web site. Be careful selecting an SEO company.

1. He designed his site, we didn’t. It’s a pretty basic, small site.
2. He does not use a high-end analytics tool to monitor traffic.

First you need decent traffic reporting
Every web site needs an analytics program (traffic reporting software) to track how many visitors your web site receives. All hosting companies, including mine (Delaware.Net) provide these services for free. If you don’t care about giving your web site’s traffic statistics to Google, you can use their Google Analytics service. This free service allows you to gain very simple traffic reporting results, like page views, referring sites, etc. For most small web site owners, like the one that asked me the questions above, this is a good choice. Google Analytics is very limited though, if you plan to track many campaigns and you want to see the IP addresses of your web site visitors, you will need something that has more power. Google analytics is really based on Urchin, which is a great product that Google purchased in March of 2005 for around $30 million. But what you get from Google for free is just part of Urchin.

Your top visitor to your web site isn’t a person at all – its a search engine spider
So, your site has an analytics program. When you start looking at the top pages that are viewed, you might see wh
at this customer sees – that your error pages come up as your number one page. This shouldn’t happen all the time, but if it does, you should look for patterns in WHO it is that is visiting your site. This is where Google Analytics comes up short. In the traffic reports, you can see the browser type that is accessing your site (also known as the User Agent). You will probably see spikes in visits from search engine bots, like MSNBot and GoogleBot. These are the programs that come to your web site to scour it and rank your site. You will also see MANY other user agents visiting your web site. I have noticed that MSN’s bot doesn’t stop looking for pages that don’t exist – ever. It is a real problem with MSN. There are MANY MANY nasty user agents out there as well, and many of them are used to scour web sites for email addresses for spammers. There is no sure-fire way to block these bots from hitting your site, but adding a Robots.txt file to your site is a good start.

Look for, and block Bad Bots
A robots.txt file is a file in your site that good robots look at before they scour your site. You can read about them here.
It is also possible to block bad bots from scouring your site by creating a script that looks at the user agent, and then blocks them if they are not legitimate. Since it is also possible to impersonate a user agent, this is not foolproof. But it does work well. I’ve done this and after monitoring the bad bots that hit one of my sites, I ended up blocking about 35 or so of them. There are a lot more than 35, but this reduced the number of hits to my traffic reports from bad bots. Even though MSN’s bot is broken, I wouldn’t block it.

Make your own custom error messages
This is a hot tip that should get you more sales from your web site. You should also look at the requested pages that are causing the 404 messages to happen. If you have an old page that you deleted, and MSN and other legitimate engines want to keep trying to search for it, then you could either recreate that old page, or you could make a custom 404 page, that pushes people to your home page. If a visitor were to type in the direct addresses to pages within your web site incorrectly, should they see a 404 error message? Or should they be redirected to your home page? It IS possible to design custom error pages to your web site, and they don’t have to be redirects (which can hurt you with Google). You could simply make a static 404 page that has links to the main sections of your web site. Remember that if ALL of your bad pages are redirected automatically, then bots won’t know a good page from a bad one. So it can still say “404 Error – Page Not Found”, but you should put links and your logo into it so that people aren’t trapped in your web site.
Don’t assume something is wrong with your site or your web site host because you get high page views on your error pages. Instead, you can actually use this information to get more sales.

If you have questions or comments, post them and I will give you more info.