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.

It took a while, but Realtors are finally coming around to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, whatever you want to call it. It is becoming clear to Realtors (finally) that building a website and waiting around for Google to find it simply doesn’t work. This is a good thing! It means that they are waking up to the reality that we are LEAVING THE INFORMATION AGE and that we are ENTERING THE PARTICIPATION AGE. While this is a positive step, and Realtors are using more of these social solutions online, many see them just as a tool for profit instead of a tool for SHARING THEIR KNOWLEDGE and building credibility.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. What does it all mean?

Web 1.0 was the “information age”. In regards to the web it was from 1995-2001. Building your website, getting a domain name, and having a presence with email were about all a Realtor could do with Web 1.0. Adding meta tags to your website and some other formatting is what web designers did to get you found on search engines. There were a LOT of search engines back then. Today there are just a few. The old meta tag days are gone forever. It will never again be that easy to spoof search engines and become #1 on Google with a meta tag or even a blog post.

Web 2.0 is about shared content, online applications, and syndicating content. It was also about mashups and the new nature of syndicating, cataloging, and making data discoverable by using tagging to create a more democratic search. Mainly, it was about applications and new ways of posting and sharing data. For Realtors it was the MLS systems, blogs, photo sharing sites, and other websites that are now indispensable tools for Realtors.

Web 3.0 (to me) is about relationships. It is the “participation age”. It is about much more than building applications that automate marketing (Web 2.0). It is about knowledge currency. Trust. Honesty. Transparency. Reputation. Networking. But you can’t have any of that if you don’t understand the unwritten rules of being a good net citizen, known as Netiquette.

Yeah, us geeks are full of ourselves, and we talk too much.

Well, hey… there is a lot to know with all this stuff. So in this article, I will answer the fundamental questions that I am getting from Realtors as to how to best use these new methods of networking to grow their real estate sales. How to come up high in Google. How to really use a Blog. And why how you use Facebook matters to your reputation.

Rule #1. There is no simple path to coming up number one in Google.

It can be a little draining explaining to folks how to come up high in Google because most people don’t want to hear the truth. Everyone wants to believe that there is a quick fix or trick to coming up high in Google, but there isn’t.
Some Truths:

• You need a site that has a lots of content.
• You need a site that has an old domain. The older the domain the better.
• You need a site that has well-formatted content.
• You have to have ORIGINAL content. Lots of it.
• You have to have a high Google PageRank, which can take quite a while to develop, and Google doesn’t update it often.
• There ARE formatting things that you can do to your website, like text linking, deep linking, adding a Google Sitemap, better page titling, and MUCH more.
• To get your Pagerank higher, you have to GENERATE A LOT OF INBOUND LINKS to your websites.
• You have to have time to wait – it sometimes takes a generous amount of time, especially to develop your site’s PageRank.
• There is more.

Stop thinking of Google as “something to be done” or handled, and think of it as a report card of your online work. ALL of your online work.

There are no free lunches with Google, no quick and easy tricks. But there ARE tricks and techniques. Most small web development shops don’t know all them. The more experienced web developers that understand how Google works charge a fee to work on your website.

Your blog can help you with Google. Your Facebook page can help you with Google. Simply adding tags to your blog posts WON’T MAKE YOU NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE! But if you do them right, then they can help. I really want all of my clients’ websites to come up #1 in Google. But only 1% of my clients are willing to do the work it takes and wait for it to happen. This creates a natural conflict for us, especially because it is complicated to make happen. This is why there is a strong cottage industry of thieves that will take your money to “get you ranked in the top 10″. I have looked at many of them, and 99% of them are thieves.

I will focus on additional things that you can do to come up higher in Google outside of Blogs and Facebook in a future article.

Rule #2 Your website solution company should be your SEO consultant too, not just your web designer

It is up to YOU to contact your web design company, perhaps every 4-6 months, to give your site a checkup. Going to Google and typing in some words to see your ranking is NOT how you should be testing your site. Did you know that when you are logged into Google they change your search results based on what they know about you? It is true. So typing words into Google is not the way to test your site. There are many tools for testing your site outside of Google.

Rule #3 If you use a template company for your website, your Google Pagerank WILL suffer.

There are a LOT of companies out there offering turn-key Realtor websites with MLS listings in them. For the non-technical Realtor on a budget, these sites are an easy way to get a site live with listings. A Realtor was in my office the other day, and we pulled her site up to look at it. She is a friend, so I wasn’t charging her. I was just taking a look at what she has. Her site is build by a company that does Realtor template sites. So I check her Google PageRank, and her ranking is ZERO out of 10. That’s right – zero. So no matter what this company can offer her, the site won’t come up high in Google. I pointed this out to her, and she quickly back-peddled saying “most of my sales aren’t from my website anyways”. But it is pretty obvious that this is a copout, because why have the site if it isn’t going to generate leads?

So you might be wondering, why do template sites get penalized form Google? Duplicate content. Google is now smart enough to notice when a bunch of websites all look the same, and it hurts your score when your content isn’t unique.

Rule #4. Blogs are great for SEO, but are you using your blog correctly? Probably not.

I recently had a Realtor asking me for tips to make their website come up higher in Google. It happens all the time. Looking at their site, I saw a lot of things right away that could be done to make them come up higher in Google. It would take me….. 5 hours to explain all of it to them. It would take…. 20+ hours of work to implement it all. At $110 per hour, that gets expensive. Would they pay for that? Probably not. But some of my clients do. So, an easy to fill, glaring gap in their online marketing efforts that I saw was to add a blog link to their website. Why a blog? Because a blog makes it easier for the Realtor to add UNIQUE, ORIGINAL CONTENT to their website. Rich, juicy content that Google will respect when it reads it. Is that all there is to do? Fire up a WordPress blog, enter some articles, and sit back and wait for the Google gold rush? Hell Friggin No. There is still lots to be done.

Your blog needs articles that people actually give a shit about. Articles like this one! A rule in the new web world is that you have to stop holding onto your “secrets”. If you are an expert, you have to prove it with valuable information and less hype. The realtors that blog about Obama’s stimulus bill and who post their opinions about politics or their political affiliations on Facebook and their blogs are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT OF HOW THEY CAN HELP MAKE NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Why would you alienate 1/2 of all of your prospective customers by being political? Leave your ego and your confrontational political opinions at the door in this new web world. If I am a potential home buyer that wants a Realtor that can be trusted (and some can’t be), then SHOW ME that you are an expert and that you can be trusted. TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD KNOW about what it is like to live in this area. Posting a list of links to area parks and restaurants is a cop out.

OK, so how to choose content for your blogs…. Ask yourself “If I was a home buyer, will this content help me?”. If the answer is “no”, then don’t post it. Also remember that blogs are chronological. They are for telling the story of the moment. The top ten tips of the moment. The top recent problems that you are solving for customers. The top resources for customers, etc. etc. It is OK if these get old over time, because if you are a TRUE PROFESSIONAL, then you will constantly have new subject matter that is unique, easy for you to write, and relevant for your customers. THAT is what blog content should be. Content like link pages, information on neighborhoods, taxes, employers, zoning, entertainment, restaurants, mortgage lenders, all that content that isn’t time sensitive – that content should be on static pages in your website. That content is not time-sensitive. It isn’t storytelling. It is resource stuff, not blog content. Don’t repost listings into your blog – it looks desperate. It looks even more desperate on Facebook.

Rule #5. Blog Content Needs to Be Described AND LINKED to Be Found

So you wrote a great post to help potential home buyers. Terrific! Then you go to Google and you don’t see it. Not even a month later. Something must be wrong, you say! My web designer led me astray with all of this blogging malarky! Those bastard web designers. Well, before you blame the web designer, you have to ask yourself these questions:

1. did I add tags to my blog posts?
2. do I even know what the hell the tags are, how they work, and what they do?
3. does my blog have a decent number of posts in it?
4. am I linking my blog to other blogs?
5. are my tags formatted as complete keyword phrases?
6. am I linking to my blog from lots of other websites?
7. am I emulating this blog content and posting strategy to match the leaders of my industry?
8. have I created adequate categories in my blog so that I get the quality text links in the blog?
9. is my blog IN my company website, or is it linked from my company website? (hint: link it).
10. am I using the right blog software? is it the latest version?
11. am I using link directory websites like Digg.com, delicious.com, Technorati.com, and the other MANY sites?
12. am I tagging and linking words WITHIN my blog posts to other websites? hrm?
13. am I getting press coverage to get inbound traffic and links to this valuable blog content?
14. am I tweaking the permalinks in my blog posts to create adequate search engine safe URLs?
15. am I using Wikipedia to lookup all this crap that John McKown is telling me?
16. if I don’t want to learn all the blog crap, can I honestly blame my web designer for not doing it for me for free?

Digg.com and Delicious.com are nice, solid ways to get your blog content indexed by Google. It isn’t foolproof, and no SEO tip is. They are all part of what is required today.

Rule #6. Facebook is a powerful networking tool. But no one wants to be friends with a jerk Realtor.

Am I bashing Realtors? No. I am not bashing Realtors. There are a lot of great Realtors out there, some are my close friends. Some, unfortunately, are jerks. There are also jerk web designers and definitely jerk mortgage brokers. Hang with me here…. I think it is great that Realtors are using Facebook. I have a Delaware real estate license and I pay the National Association of Realtors and KCAR dues. So I AM a Realtor, at least technically. So are you a “Jerk Realtor” you ask? Well, that depends totally on your behavior. If you joined Facebook because some guy in a marketing seminar told you to add everyone in your address book to your Facebook account to make money, then yeah, you might be one. My point is, I will help you. I don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. I help people because, quite frankly, when I do so it ends up helping my business and it makes me feel good to share what I know. My ego likes me being considered an expert. I’d be a jerk web designer if I used my knowledge to exploit people like I see happening EVERY DAY from other companies in my industry. If you are HONESTLY interested in me, my experience, what I have to say, how I can help you, then great. Add me as a Facebook friend and I will accept you. Again, I really don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. If I help you and gain your trust by doing so, then you should return the favor and recommend me as an expert too. But….. if you sponge me for information and then blame me because you didn’t do ALL of the things that Google and Facebook and your website require for online success, then you are a Jerk Realtor. If you use your Facebook account to post all your listings, then you don’t look professional. Why do I want to see all of your listings in my Facebook account? I don’t. And you will be removed from my friends list in a hurry. I bet other people feel the exact same way. Relationships are built on trust, sharing, and listening. Not by adding a hyperlink to someone. Use Facebook, but don’t be a ….. you know.

You are on Facebook. Is your company?

You can create a FREE business page for your real estate company. I added one for Delaware.Net, check it out and become a fan real quick: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dover-DE/DelawareNet-Inc/41553338643?ref=s . This a great way to get traffic, and to mass email your friends list with news from your organization. But BE CAREFUL. Don’t overdo it. Add content that matters, and don’t do it too frequently. Get all your business friends to add themselves to your new business page. There is a link at the bottom of the page when you look at my business page. That is how you can add your business site to Facebook.

Are you syndicating your OWN content?

If you are posting a good article to your blog, you should also use that article for an email newsletter. You don’t have an email newsletter? You should. The content that you mass email people is almost as sensitive as what you blog and post into Facebook. One thing that email newsletters are better at, is letting the visitor choose what content they want to get from you. For example, they could chose to get emails about new properties. So it is totally acceptable to email them property information. It is much different to dump your listings into your Facebook account.

Build a link share network – it is important

Earlier in this article I mentioned getting inbound links to your website to build your Google Pagerank. Google Pagerank can be thought of as a multiplier. Meaning, if your site has lots of jucy articles and keywords, but your Google Pagerank is a 1 (out of 10), then you are going to get beat in the search results every time. So your Google ranking can be thought of as this formula: Google PageRank * Relvance of Content = Ranking. One of the things Google looks at to determine how “important” your site is, is by measuring the number of websites that are linking to yours. It also takes into account RECIPROCAL LINKS. This is critical. So you should link to other large websites that have a good pagerank, and most importantly you should try to get them to link back to you. Start to look for sites that have a high pagerank, and then try to get a reciprocal link between their site and yours. Now repeat this dozens or hundreds of times, and you will start to see your Google Pagerank climb.

I wrote this in one sitting while watching TV. Ask me questions about any of this and I will do my best to answer you and explain further. Use the form below this story to post your questions. Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped.

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!