Archive for December, 2009

3 Key Advantages E Commerce Offers

Were you that kid who set up a ice-cream stand in your location, perceiving of making enough so that you could select that GI Joe/Bunny doll that was all the rage? Have you grown into an adult who dreams of making enough to not have to worry about providing for your family or perhaps purchasing cool grown-up devices?

The Internet and Ecommerce have made global entrepreneurship dream comes true, and along with it your dreams of financial security and many more.

I read somewhere that if you want to market something, you cannot miss NOT to go online. You have to go worlwide. Why?
Market Size

There are a lot of advantages e commerce allows a merchant that a conventional business cannot (not without having to spending a ton of money, at least). For one, the online market is great. 17% of the world’s population or over 1 billion people are online today. In 2006, shoppers spent a $102.1 billion online. Be sure that your web store takes advantages of this significant market by selecting and utilizing a top-notch online ecommerce shopping cart solution.
Complement Your present Store
“90% of those surveyed say they have a better overall shopping experience when they research products online before shopping in-store.”

– Harris Interactive

If you already run a conventional brick-and-mortar store, an online store can actually boost the profit of your offline store. We live in an age where info is influence. Consumers like to know a thing or two about the products they’ll be purchasing before they make the purchase. Psychologists have recommended that different people research before they acquire for several reasons. Some like to be given the assurance that they are getting the best offer. Others like to know that they are doing the right thing by obtaining something that they need. From a marketing point of view, as long as you specially concocted your information to target these different groups, you can pretty much assured to have sales.
DIY – Not A Problem

To take full advantages e commerce opportunities that the Internet provides, you need to make sure that you pick the best ecommerce solution. If you’ve made the right selection, you can run multiple online stores with relative hassle free. This is one of the key advantages e commerce solutions provide. You don’t have to freak out about HR matters, storage space and boring department meetings. The best things to do as a merchant is ensure that you advertise your store well, see to it that your site is “sticky” and ready to win over customers, and finally make sure that you have time to allow payments (if you do not subscribe to a payment gateway/processor) and reply customer email.

That leaves plenty of time for golf, family and that vacation you’ve been hoping to go on.

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Internet Marketing 101

When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.

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