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Opening and Internet store (ecommerce)
- The Easy Way vs. The Hard Way
We've been through how scam artists
will cheat you into a losing business. We've talked about the basics
you should have for your computer to start an Internet business.
We've delved into the confusing world of the Internet, and
simplified that concept a bit.
So what's all this "Easy Way and
Hard Way" stuff I've been mentioning over and over again?
As I said before, there are two
LEGITIMATE ways you can start an Internet business. Neither one of
them involves sending money to any company with a name remotely like
"Ace Complete Internet Stores, Inc.", so let's rule the scam artists
out entirely and concentrate on reality.
I'm going to talk about the Easy
Way and the Hard Way once more, and then I'm NOT going to talk about
the Hard Way again. There's no point. It's HARD, that's why it's
called that. It's expensive, too, and you don't need to throw money
away any more than I do. So let's not waste your time.
So, here goes.
The Hard Way
The Hard Way to open a legitimate
Internet Store is to build it in the woods. Have you ever seen a
Wal-Mart on a dirt road in the middle of a forest? I haven't.
There's a reason for that. There's NO TRAFFIC. The same principle
applies to the Internet.
There are legitimate Internet
providers that will offer you a reasonable rate for an Internet
Store. I'm not talking about scams; these are legitimate companies.
They'll offer you Internet hosting (leased space on a Server hard
drive, remember?). They may even throw in a Shopping Cart (the
software program that holds your products and prices). If you're
lucky, they'll include some kind of Merchant Account (the "gateway"
software that collects money from your customers' credit cards, and
puts it in your bank account).
All these things are well and good.
Chances are you'll have to learn to create your own HTML pages, but
many of these companies even offer to supply pre-created pages FOR
you; and all you need to do is plug in pictures of your products,
and their prices.
So what's wrong with that? You
could probably do the whole thing for a couple of hundred dollars,
although when building your own store it's possible to spend a
couple of THOUSAND before you know it.
As I said, the problem is TRAFFIC.
When you open a store, you need customers. Imagine that your store
is a real, physical building. It's going to be called Toasty Buns,
and you're going to sell all kinds of Toasters. Where would you want
to set it up? At the corner of Logging Camp Trail and Boggy Swamp
Road, forty miles outside of town? NO! There's nobody there! Outside
of the three families who live miles apart on Boggy Swamp Road,
who's going to stop in and buy anything? Can you earn any real money
selling three toasters?
TRAFFIC is a very important key to
success on the Internet.
When you build a store on the
Internet, your number one concern is this: "How am I going to draw
people to my store? How, among the millions of internet sites out
there today, are potential customers going to find my one little
site and buy from me?"
Here are the conventional answers:
Banner Advertising: There are any
number of Banner Exchange programs out there. Many are free. They
operate on the idea that if you put an ad for my site on yours, I'll
put an ad for your site on mine. Well, that's just dandy, but almost
everybody on the free Banner Exchange programs are there because
they HAVE no traffic in the first place. You exchange banners with
another site that has no traffic, and end up with TWO sites with no
traffic instead of just ONE. Sure, you can PAY for banners, and that
may work a little better, but I've done it, and have not been
impressed.
Email Campaigns: Oh, they're out
there, aren't they! The people with Ten Million Email Addresses That
Will Bring The Whole World To Your Door! Two things I can say about
Email Campaigns:
The cheap ones will send your hopeful, starry-eyed emails out into
the world, only to crash-land in Servers that reject them because
the addresses are no longer valid.
You can't afford the expensive
ones. Not yet.
Search Engine Positioning: Meta
tags, keywords, jockeying for position with tens of thousands of
other webmasters who are trying for those same top ten listings that
you are. Rule of thumb: If your store is not found in the first
THREE PAGES of Internet search results on any given search engine,
forget it.
It takes a very long time and
hundreds of dollars worth of software to learn how to do this
properly. You'll wait for weeks, or even MONTHS to see how your most
recent attempt panned out, only to find yourself ranked number
13,426 in your latest search. Been there, done that, got the
T-shirt. Sure, you can pay the Search Engines for top listings. Got
a few thousand dollars to spare? The search engines have definitely
figured out how to make THEMSELVES rich. Does that really help you?
Not if you don't have the money.
Do any of these approaches work?
Sure, they all have real value if you can afford them. There are
good banner programs out there, but they cost money. There are good
targeted email programs, but they cost money. As for Search Engine
Positioning, one of my sites is in the Top Ten on more than one
major search engine right now, but that took a LOT of time and
effort. The quickest way is to pay them, and that costs a LOT of
money.
Unless you have a lot of money to
throw at your website startup, you may want to do things The Easy
Way.
Ok, what's The Easy Way?
Let me explain it like this:
My teenage boys love to go to the
Mall. They'll spend an entire Saturday there, along with a week's
allowance. When asked what they've been doing all day, they'll just
say, "Um... chillin', that's all."
When I was a kid, it was called "hangin'
out", but it's the same thing.
Why do they like it there so much?
Well, according to them, the Mall has "EVERYTHING!" They're right.
People to see, places to go, things to do? everything they're
looking for, right there in front of them, within walking distance.
My Internet sites do the same
thing. They "chill" at the Mall. In this case, the Mall happens to
be Yahoo Shopping. I'm glad my sites are at the Mall. When they're
at the Mall, they're not laying around the house grumbling, they're
having fun, and they're probably not getting into TOO much trouble.
Just like my kids.
Why do I let my sites go to the
Mall? Because it puts them right in the middle of things.
Again, there are two things you
should be thinking about when starting out on the Internet.
Money and Traffic.
There's never enough of either at
first. To earn the Money, you need the Traffic. To get the Traffic,
you need to spend Money. I spent years telling all my kids never to
play in Traffic. My sites? I booted them right out there on the
freeway from day one.
Here's what I do when I build an
Internet site. I go to Yahoo Store, at http://store.yahoo.com. I
open a free "10 day test drive" store. I play around with it until I
have things the way I want them. Yahoo requires a credit card number
for this, but they will email you after about 8 days to ask if you
want to keep the store and open it. If you don't, your card is not
charged. It's a great way to get familiar with their Stores.
When I have a "test-drive store"
just the way I want it, I pay Yahoo $100 a month to open it. I can
access and edit my store from anywhere on the Internet. The Store
Manager is loaded with all kinds of easy to use tools, from Excel
spreadsheet exports to email forwarding to charts of my hits and
sales. But that's not even the good part.
The good part is this: 24 hours
after I place a product in my Yahoo Store, it shows up in front of
MILLIONS of shoppers, in Yahoo Shopping. Picture, description, price
and all. No banner ads, no email campaigns, no search engine
positioning. The last site my partners and I opened on Yahoo Store
paid that hundred bucks back in it's first couple of DAYS, and has
gone on to make very good money.
We generally open 50 item stores.
(Yahoo offers 50 item stores for $100/month, and 1,000 item stores
for $300/month). Why do we open 50 item stores?
Smaller stores are better. Focus on
a single product line; sell name brands, market to a niche. Your
site's keywords will work better that way too, if they all relate to
the same product line. (Keywords are descriptive phrases about your
products that you enter into your site's pages. They help Internet
Search Engines find and index your site). Make no mistake; you WILL
want to get those keywords out to the search engines. However, it's
nice if you can make money right off the bat while you wait for your
site to rise in the rankings. Who knows? Maybe you'll want to use
your profits to buy a good email campaign!
Is Yahoo paying me to say all this?
No. They don't even know I exist. I'm telling you this because it
works for us, and I believe it will for you, too.
We plan to open several more Yahoo
Stores. Lots of small income streams create one big one. Use some of
the profit from your first store to open the second one. Use some of
those profits to open a third one. You may decide you want to move
on later, but big, well-known Internet Malls are great places to
start your business. By the time Christmas comes around this year,
we plan on being VERY Merry.
Yahoo Shopping and other similar
Internet Malls are like miniature, self contained search engines,
and they're just BURSTING with people who are sailing around with
their wallets in their hands looking to buy something. THAT'S The
Easy Way.
We'll talk more about the mechanics
of opening a Yahoo Store later. If you're outside of the US, the
same principles still apply, and you will want to find a good
Internet Shopping Mall to host your store.
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Article by Chris Malta. Chris Malta
is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. He has worked with
computer Systems for 18 years. He's been involved in eCommerce
systems, networking and site design for more than 6 years. He's
taught college-level computer courses in Western NY. He developed
The Drop Ship Source Directory, and he and his partners at Worldwide
Brands, Inc., publish the Directory and run eCommerce sites of their
own using Drop Shipping as their only business method.
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