PandaBear Marketing

Create A Website That Sells In As Little As One Hour

There are many reasons to have a website. They range from personal vanity websites to photo galleries to full blown e-commerce sites. Making money on the web costs less than almost any other type of business you could start. There are countless ways to make money online. Learning to create a website that sells will get you started on the e-commerce journey.

Determine what you plan on selling. Information sells better than almost anything else on the internet. Best of all, it has little cost attached to it. Simply create a digital product, throw up a sales page and you could be making money within the day. Sites that can help you get started selling digital products include Clickbank.

Become an affiliate and sell other people’s products for a commission. This method is as specialized as any other listed here but is effective. Sites like Clickbank will let you promote digital products, hard goods – pretty much anything, and make a commission on every sale. You will still need to get traffic in order to make money but you can make money selling other people’s products and services.

You could also choose to sell hard goods. The easiest place to do this is through an auction site like Ebay. Using Ebay’s auction site, you can literally sell anything you would sell in a retail store. In fact, people even sell things like real estate, cars and more. The great thing about something like Ebay is that they have already paid millions of dollars to get traffic to their website. You pay Ebay a percentage of your sale in return for access to that traffic. There are lots of people making a very nice living selling goods through Ebay. It is even possible to sell digital goods like e-books through Ebay.

One of the simplest ways to get a website built fast is to use a web site builder. These web site builders will allow you to throw up a professional looking website in as little as an hour. Many have e-commerce capabilities and help you get started selling online in no time at all. Good web site builders will allow you to edit changes quickly and easily. They will offer things like unlimited pages, lots of disk space for images, lots of bandwidth where you won’t have to pay if anything extra if you get a surge of traffic.

Whether you build your website from scratch or use a web site builder, you too can cash in on the revolution sweeping the world that is the internet.

With more than a hundred e-commerce shopping carts to choose from, selecting one is really a matter of preference with careful product evaluation. But what makes one provider stand out from the rest? See the answer below.

Features

Different shopping cart providers offer similar and unique features that are useful to the consumers and beneficial for you as a merchant. While choosing which features to have may depend on the size of your business, a good shopping cart provider offer a wide range of feature options for different business needs.

Integrated Online Marketing and Promotional Tools

With a right shopping cart, you can increase traffic and increase sales virtually over night. How? Shopping carts affect the costumer’s response to your website. The more useful tools it has, the more it can attract new costumers and persuade existing costumers to buy your products. Through integrated marketing and promotional tools like catalog and product comparison, your costumers are able to make easy and wise decision on which products to buy.

Promos, sale, discounts, free shipping and coupons are powerful marketing strategies that can attract more costumers. Shopping carts offer these features.

Product review is another powerful feature that can increase sales. In a study conducted by CompUSA and iPerceptions, 63% of costumers are more likely to buy for the sites with product ratings and reviews.

User-friendly Interface/Ease of Use

Costumers are very impatient when it comes to purchasing products and services online. The last thing your costumers want to you is figure out how to navigate your shopping cart. A user-friendly website is important to keep potential costumers browsing. A user-friendly shopping cart is crucial if you want to keep your costumers stay and complete the transactions.

Payment Options

Different online costumers prefer to use certain types of payment. While most would like credit cards, many are still hesitant to enter personal information online and choose other alternative modes of payment like Paypal, checks and money orders. A good shopping cart service should cover all these.

Hacker-Safe Ordering Page

Earning your costumers’ confidence is important in any business. That is why you have to make sure that your costumers are properly protected when they enter their credit card information to your website. Wise costumers often look for SSL certificate seal on a merchant’s website. This seal is a guarantee that the site is hacker safe. Make sure that you have one.

Full Order Management System

A good shopping cart guides costumers throughout the process of purchasing, checking out, payment and shipping. These services can be provided fully by a hosting company or are linked from different services. Payments can be through major credit cards, PayPal, money orders and checks. Shipping can be linked to major shipping carriers like UPS, DHL and FedEx.

Costumer Service/Support

One of the best ways to gauge if a particular e-commerce shopping cart provider has a good costumer service is by sending questions though their email address. How fast did they reply? Did you get a template reply? In business, time is money; and personal touch is a plus. Costumer service should reply a personalize message as soon as possible. Another way to test how good the costumer service is is through its technical support. In running an effective e-commerce store, the availability of good documentation is important.

Os Commerce – An Intro

Executive Summary

eCommerce platforms are being commoditized. Enterprise level solutions are coming down in price and new open source solutions are being made available to anyone with an internet connection for free.

The most robust of these open source solutions is OS Commerce (OSC) – a community driven eCommerce solution that is flexible, scalable, and user friendly. As eCommerce becomes even more a part of mainstream retail, OSC will provide businesses of all shapes and sizes with the functionality and capabilities of the big boys. This brief examines some of the advantages of OS Commerce and provides insights into how it can help your business.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Maybe so, but you CAN get an eCommerce platform for nothing. Offered for free at www.oscommerce.com, this eCommerce solution provides tons of bells and whistles and provides a user friendly interface to manage the administrative portions of the store. The code is based in the PHP scripting language and runs on the Apache web server – a user also needs access to a SQL database to initially upload the files that manage the categories and products within the admin section.

Now that sounds complicated, but really anyone can do it with some concentrated effort. Much of the documentation online regarding OS is very thorough and provides step by step plans on how to get your store up and running. Any newbie to this type of work will likely come across some roadblocks, but the OS Commerce community forums are only a click away to start trouble shooting.

The solution is community driven, meaning that like minded OSCers are ready to help out their peers with answers to posted questions. Yes, at times this can be extremely frustrating waiting for an answer, but it is very rewarding to overcome a technology bug on your own.

Contribute to the Cause

The best part of OSC is the number of contributions that can be added to your site at any time. Again, there is no cost for these enhancements and upgrades – just the need to be patient in your installations. In most cases, contributions are located on the OS commerce community section and are downloadable via zip files. After opening the file, read the “read me” file which will walk you through the file additions, subtractions, and code changes needed to make your enhancement work properly. If you explore the OS platform be sure to upgrade with the following contributions.

Ultimate SEO URL’s by Chemo

This cool contribution allows the site owner to create static URL’s out of a database driven site. This will dramatically help in search saturation as more pages are able to be indexed. Its no secret that search spiders like traditional urls better than ones that are dynamic and this contribution helps achieve that.

Easy Populate

No need to input product data manually, this contribution allows you to import data from a basic excel file into your store. A true timesaver!

Featured Products

If you have an ecommerce store – certain products are more attractive to sell than others. This contribution allows you to tailor the featured products that you want to showcase within both your home and category pages.

Final Thoughts on OSC

Myself, I am a marketer. But after learning OS I really feel like I have some programmer blood in me! This platform is easy to use and perfect for a small to medium size business in getting online. Yes, there will be headaches along the way but stay with it and you will overcome them and soon have an ecommerce store to bring you in a new revenue stream.

Hiring A Web Designer

It is very important to find a web design company that understands your online strategy. The company you hire must be dedicated to your business needs. Finding a company that is committed to your success can be challenging. Don’t ever higher the first company you interview. Even if you fall in love with the person you speak with you should evaluate other companies. Don’t make a decision until you have interviewed at least three design companies.

The company you choose has to appreciate your needs and not the other way around. You hire the web designer to help you create a website that helps you succeed online. The design is not about serving their ego. Their artistic ambitions are only of interest as long as they serve your needs. Don’t agree to any technology unless they can prove how it will help you sell more, create more customers, educate your visitors, generate more leads, etc.

Make sure that the company understands your goals. It also helps if they understand your business. When you interview Web design companies ask to see if they know anything about your industry. Find out if they understand the trends in your market. Of course, they don’t have to be experts in your area, but it helps if they have a basic understanding of your business.

If you have a service business you are going to have very different needs than if you were an online retailer with 500 products. Web sites for service businesses are usually very rich in content. For example, an accountant’s web site may include a large number of articles about accounting advice or tax strategies. A website created for e-commerce is going to be focused on selling products. Such a site is going to be equipped with a shopping cart, a database driven backend solution, online chat, etc.

The functionalities you desire for your website is going to have the greatest impact on expense. A three-page web site that serves as an online business card is going to cost much less than a fully functional e-commerce site. A complex e-commerce site is going to cost significantly more because of the technology required.

 Web Store – Why Do You Need One?

Internet has opened a new era of business opportunities. Each day, thousands of new consumers are joining the Internet. More and more companies are adopting Internet as their primary sales and distribution channel. According to Forrester Research -The survey of 130 U.S. companies indicates consumers spent $76 billion shopping on-line in 2002. This represents a 48 percent increase over 2001, and projections for 2003 come close to $100 billion, representing 4.5 percent of total retail sales.
As a business you probably understand that in order to stay competitive you must integrate ecommerce to your present business strategy. A little research will show you that there is an extensive array of technology and solutions for enterprise and web store building available in the market. You also perceive that ecommerce sites can cost you from a mere couple of hundred bucks to hundreds of thousand of dollars. How to choose something from so many options that will exactly fit your present need?
Although, this might look like a daunting task, a little preparation will definitely help you taking the right decision in your quest for an appropriate ecommerce solution. To understand your requirement better and create a proper ecommerce strategy, you have to ask yourself a number of questions. Below I jotted down some of the questions that, hopefully, will spur your imagination.
What should be the look of my web store?
Do I need a database for my product catalog?
How should the purchase order generate on my web store?
Do I need to handle different pricing system for dealers, wholesalers and end customers?
How do I bill my customers?
How easy can I make my web store to navigate?
How many search options should we have?
Can I show my customers a product comparison table?
What should be my merchant account gateway system?
Finally, how much should I invest to build my web store?
If building an ecommerce site from scratch feels too overwhelming to you and you are a small business, my suggestion is – to build a web store with one of the providers similar to Yahoo, Bigstep, Rusbiz etc.
The web stores that you can build directly on the Internet have all the necessary features like shopping cart, product catalog and payment gateway as any regular ecommerce site. In most of the cases, you construct web store online from templates and easy-to-use editor and you hardly need to know html or other script languages.
You can order your Web Store from Rusbiz right now.
The benefits of using a web store that you can build online are enormous.
Quick to build: If you have all the materials handy, you can build a web store within a day.
Easy in use: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to build a fully functional ecommerce site. Step by step procedures of making pages from templates allow anybody to create a professionally looking web store in no time.
Affordable: Although, some of the providers charge commissions on your sales, as Yahoo does, in most of the cases your expenses are less than US$ 100 a month to have a good web store.
The only disadvantage you have with this kind of web stores is you might not be able to give the customized look and feel to the site as you intend to. Then again, once you start generating enough sales through your web store, if you must, you can always build an ecommerce site by hiring web design companies.
If you are still hesitant in starting online business using web stores I would suggest you to read the following eventual benefits that you may have from ecommerce.
Increase your sales & profits
If you are a brick and mortar company, online commerce will definitely increase your sales and with it profits.
Enhance your company image
Today, even small companies understand the importance of having a website. Planned, sophisticated and professional website creates positive image of the company and help building brand name.
Reduce costs and save money
If required features are available on the website practically all business processes are possible to carry out on the Internet, which allows you to reduce overhead costs, costs incurred due to documentary mistakes, document processing costs, etc.
Improve customer service
Frequently Asked Questions pages, forums, Internal Messaging Service, chat lines, etc. all these features help you effectively running your customer service.
Become a global player
Thanks to the reach of Internet you are no longer confined to a certain geographical boundary any more. You can sell products to any place of the world 24 hours a day.
Add sales channels
By joining e-marketplaces and B2B exchanges you can significantly increase the number of sales channels available to you.
Reduce supply chain cycle
If you automate supply chain processes through Internet, you will be able to shorten the entire cycle from months to days. You will be even able to eliminate certain phases of your supply chain process.
Market products and services
There are numerous ways of getting traffics on your site and popularize your products. In fact, you can get more people in your web store than it is physically possible to accommodate in a bricks-and-mortar shop.
Compete with large companies
On the Internet you may successfully compete with the behemoths of your industry and even curve market shares out of them.
Low start-up costs
Normally, starting a brick and mortar business requires significant cost involvement. On the Internet – opposite is true! To start a business online you hardly need any major investment.
No entry barrier
As you know, many businesses in real world are tightly controlled by certain groups. On the internet there is no such barrier! Anybody can start any business of his choice.
No need to close existing sales channels
By adopting Internet as a sales channel you do not loose anything as your web store only complements existing sales conduit.
If you are new to ecommerce world, I would advise you to go slow! First create a plan with long term and short term objectives. Try implementing your plan gradually. Make sure that you do not spend too much money on your initial ecommerce project. Remember! Over 80 percent of all software projects do not finish in time within the budget; and do not work as planned!

Make More Money with Marketing Metrics

Do you measure the results of your marketing tactcis? You should. Knowing which marketing endeavors pay dividends will save you time, money and effort by allowing you to focus your marketing budget on tactics that work. Learn how to measure the effect of your marketing efforts to make more money.
Do you know how effective each of your individual marketing tactics is? Many small business owners market in a vacuum. They spend money on brochures, advertisements and web sites with no real way to tie specific results to specific endeavors.
If you are unable to associate leads and sales with the specific marketing efforts that generate them you have no way of knowing what is working as an effective marketing mechanism and what is not.
The money you invest in marketing your company is precious. In order for you to maximize your marketing dollars you need to know the results individual marketing efforts generate. When you know the results of your marketing tactics you can make intelligent decisions about how to better allocate your marketing budget.
For instance, if you concurrently run a direct mail campaign, a search engine advertising campaign and weekly ads in industry periodicals without some method to discern results you will not know which effort generates the lions share of any new business.
If you don’t know that your direct mail campaign yielded 90% of your revenue with a 2% response rate, you are powerless to make the wise decision to reinvest in the direct mail campaign and make changes to or drop entirely the other campaigns. What’s more, if you can figure out how to double the response rate of your mail campaign, you can nearly double the revenue your marketing campaign without spending money on search engine marketing and periodical advertisements.
Measuring your marketing results will help you save money by allowing you to eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and at the same time, will help you make more money by allowing you to reinvest in productive marketing tactics.
Do you have a method for measuring the effect of your marketing?
Here are four tips for gathering the information you need to make wise marketing investment decisions.
Use a Database
Start by designing a database to keep track of individual marketing efforts and the leads and sales they generate. Make sure you include fields to track the dates of your campaigns, campaign descriptions, the number of leads generated and sales made. Once you have a central storage location for this information you will be able to make queries to glean the information you need to make wise marketing decisions.
Ask Questions
When you or your staff speaks with a prospect on the phone make sure you ask how they heard of your business; was it a referral or an ad in the local newspaper? It’s such simple way to gather valuable information many small business owners overlook it.
Be sure to ask your prospects how they heard of your business.
Make It Easy for Your Prospect to Help You
Make it easy for your prospects to properly identify the marketing piece to which they respond. If you have multiple phone lines into your office you can easily accomplish this by assigning a unique phone number to individual marketing efforts. This way, you or a staff member can ask what number your prospect dialed or, if you have the right phone system you can look at the phone to see which line the call is on.
Data Entry Should Be Easy Too
Once you or a staff member have garnered the information you seek from your prospect, make it as easy as possible to have this information to be entered into your database system. If you employ a staff, make certain everyone is up to speed on your latest systems. Training is a must.
Move Your Marketing Forward
The idea is to gather as much information as you can about which marketing mechanisms generate the best (and worst) response, who is responding and why they chose to respond.
Once you have this information you will be better able to think like a future client, cater your marketing material to their needs and generate more leads and sales.
What are some other steps you can take to measure the effect of your marketing efforts?

5 Benefits to an Internet Marketing and Advertising Company

Companies generally rely on outsides sources for their regular advertising needs. They turn to graphic designers, advertising agencies, and communication firms to handle all of their communications, both external and internal. With that being said, many companies buck this trend in terms of Internet marketing and advertising, attempting to do it on their own.

There are various companies that will provide you with the Internet marketing and advertising help that you need. They will provide you with the tools necessary to grow your business through Internet marketing. You simply need to agree to hire an Internet marketing and advertising company for this style of marketing.

There are plenty of reasons for you to turn to one of these marketing companies for your needs. These five benefits will help to show you how your own company can benefit from the professionalism of an Internet marketing and advertising business.

Walking you Through the Process

An Internet marketing company is going to hold your hand through the entire online marketing process. They will be able to show you all of the right moves in marketing, taking you step-by-step through the process. They will be able to show you things that you never would have considered on your own, making your marketing campaign more successful and sustainable.

Brainstorming Ideas

Internet marketing companies are going to work with you to try to make your business successful. They are going to bring ideas and creativity that you would not have on your own. This brainstorming push will help to come up with new ideas that will push your company forward.

Writing the Copy

It can be difficult to write clean and concise copy that connects with your target audience. Internet marketing companies have the experience necessary to write this copy. They will be able to write directly to your consumers, clients, and potential customers. This connection is crucial for the overall success of your company.

Presenting Multiple Options

An Internet marketing company will be able to provide you with multiple options and possibilities. You will be able to see what you can do with Internet marketing and choose the package that is right for your company.

Feedback

Many Internet marketing companies will be able to provide you with the feedback that you need to understand the success of your campaign. They will be able to show you how successful the campaign is, how your target has responded, and will break down the tactics that worked and the tactics that didnÕt work. This information will be crucial for your Internet marketing future, helping to you be as efficient and effective as possible.

Professional businesses will help you to get the most out of Internet marketing. An Internet marketing and advertising company is going to give you the best that they have to offer, providing you with the marketing tools that you need for success. They will help you to come up with new ideas, will write your copy, and will help you to evaluate the success of your strategies. If you want to have successful Internet marketing you need to hire a professional company.

Attractive Enhancements For Your Blog

Deciding on a blog design solution and implementing it is certainly a sound business decision and should reward the online web site owner with a vast amount of traffic as well as paying customers. Creating a blog is simple, painless, and easy to maintain. Popular blogging sites like WordPress and Blogger offer personalized services, numerous template designs, friendly search engine rankings, and helpful tutorials. Taking advantage of these opportunistic offerings should be a component of any successful online business venture. However, there is more to a blog than simply setting it up, performing routine maintenance, and providing periodic entries. Potential customers and visitors need to have good reasons for visiting your blog and remain as regular loyalists. Several enhancements to a blog can entice and deliver more web surfers when used effectively.

One enhancement that should be seriously considered is the use of video clips. Written text is obviously important and it’s the cornerstone of any blog, but adding the occasional video clip can only serve to magnify an online web site’s existence. Stephanie Collen, an online business marketer for a major clothing firm, describes the changes when video was introduced to the retailer’s site. “Our site was text driven with many pictures and it seemed to be working effectively. When we added video clips to the mix, the results were amazing. A thirty-seven percent increase in traffic and sales rose by twenty-one percent. Video clips are here to stay at our site”. Video supplies and software can be found at many places on the internet.

Another blogging business tip involves the use of audio clips and should be another feature for your blog. Collen also suggests using audio as an enhancement for your blog. “When we added video to the site, audio clips were phased out. Many customers complained and the audio section was restored much to their delight. We quickly learned that sound bites sell and never go out of style. It will continue to be a part of our marketing”. Adding a few audio clips at opportune spaces on your blog will increase traffic flow and yield new customers. Audio equipment, supplies, and software can also be found at many places on the internet.

If the aforementioned enhancements are too much for your budget at this time, consider using pictures as a tool for driving more visitors to your site. Visual enhancements can sell far better than text only and is appealing to virtually every visitor. Also, if you have a blogging site such as 360 Blog Yahoo, Blogger, or WordPress, you can insert custom-made graphics . Graphics and photo editing software can easily be found with an internet search. Be sure to use the tools that meet your standards.

A blog design solution that incorporates stunning enhancements will make every blogging experience a rewarding endeavor. By using video, audio, and graphical improvements, your online business blog will witness a surge in visitors and customers.

SEO Paradigm For 2006?

It is now two months since we started to regroup our efforts in contemporary SEO strategies. A real estate start-up was taken as the guinea pig for the exploration of our new SEO techniques – and with staggering early results. As one can imagine, a huge uplift in the site hits of a property company is worth a awful lot of money.
The site is still only four months old and therefore in the pending tray of Google’s, and to some extent Yahoo’s ‘sandbox’. Still, the strategies we have employed this year has seen site traffic quintupled, after taking advice garnered from a raft of sources, especially SitePro News and ProBlogger.
The days of organic submissions are still with us but those of reciprocals, unless of specific benefit, are moribund – thankfully. Our latest methods have been passed on to our partners in the UK, Strategy Consulting, and they have been integrated into their new year’s marketing efforts.
What we did was to install WordPress as a seamless addition to the website, fill it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, register all of its pages with Google Sitemap and ping a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogcrawler now dominates the referrers list.
Alongside the on-site blogs, we saw that a certain blogspot was appearing above many of the established estate agents in Bangkok. We therefore researched (via Overture) all the property-related keywords and set up blogs with Blogspot for each, slightly amending the on-site copy – so as not to get blacklisted – and optimised the selected keywords, linked them all together with them all pointing to the website. Now, when searching for ‘tenancy management bangkok’ the site completely dominates the stage: the website plus blogs are #1-14 on MSN. As the site does not reciprocate, they now have twenty quality inbounds, helping the site’s real keywords to succeed.
Another helpful addition is article writing for sites having high PR. They seem to burn and fade very quickly from the search engine’s perspective, but very still a valuable part of our strategy.
So, in 2006, we can now offer our clients a five-pronged assault on the majors: quality, well-researched SEO on url, title, metas, alts, content and outbounds; relevant one-way, high PR link building; on-site blogging, thus elevating PR, building relevant content and auto-pinging RSS feeds; intelligent registration of keywords on Blogspot with specifically-crafted copy, with headline and alt tagging key phrases, linking them all together with links into the main site; last but not least, writing atricles for sites such as this to get feedback from experts to further enhance the strength of these strategies.
Now, we can also offer small companies templated but effective CMS solutions through WordPress for $250.
But how to relate this information to clients outside of demonstrating results?

Learn Affiliate Marketing The Right Way! Leave No Room For Mistake

Affiliate marketing is ideal to start an internet business working from home. Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing marketing channels on the internet. Affiliate marketing is considered one of the best ways to earn money online. Affiliate marketing is great because anyone with a laptop, Internet connection and some imagination can set up an affiliate marketing business.

Affiliates generally attract traffic either via paid search or Search Engine optimisation. Affiliates can also be search engine marketers who run pay-per-click campaigns in order to drive traffic and sales for an advertiser. Millions of affiliates send billions of visitors to tens of thousands of companies in return for a payment. Affiliates will continue to grow larger and more professional.

In a nutshell, publishers — also known as affiliates — display ads supplied by advertisers. However, it is also true that many affiliates do not earn big money online because they do not have a proven system to follow and thus unsuccessful in earning an income on the Internet.

No matter how you go about it, affiliate marketing is a proven, effective way to increase your traffic. If you own or want to start your own Internet Business, affiliate marketing is a must for your marketing strategy. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most effective home business opportunities online today. In simple terms, affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.