| LED Digest 2142: Keys to Selling Online |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. April 19, 2006 Issue #2142 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Beginning Marketing ==-- ~ Anthony Kirlew "I would add a site navigation bar..." ~ James Miller "I always tell people to create a nice postcard and stick this in with the order..." ~ R. Neilson "The key to selling any product on the web is good photos along with clear descriptions." --== Site Loading Times ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "I guess it is always a trade-off between design and speed." ~ David Spahr "Know the visitor and the product before making assumptions." ~ Tom Aman "Dial-up is likely to be with us for a very, very long time yet." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Help with Backups ==-- ~ Bruce Garrett ~ Rob Bishop ~ Bob Cavanagh ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Anthony Kirlew Subject: Marketing > We are a small American Ceramic design and craft production > company. We have not been doing any marketing of our website... > I want to develop a plan to increase our internet business. - Mackenzie Andersen, LED 2141 Mackenzie, I looked at your site, and it seems to have lots of element that would make it profitable given some "SEM TLC". Here are a few recommendations: 1. Given your page rank, if you optimize your title tags I think you will derive a tremendous benefit. 2. I would add a site navigation bar to the page and make sure it appears on all of the pages. This will help with your search engine marketing, but also make your site more customer friendly. 3. Last, I would considering a professional redesign as you want to instill confidence in the borrower from the moment they reach your site. This is important, especially if you are asking people to make a purchase. LED is a great place to post specific questions about marketing your web site, and many people will respond and give you lots of helpful suggestions along the way. There are also a lot of great resources that will allow you to learn the ins and outs of Internet Marketing, but keep in mind that this can become a full time endeavor and distract you from your craft (and your business). Here are a few solid recommendations: www.searchenginewatch.com - The most (legitimate) info you can find on the topics of Web Marketing. They have a free section and also a great blog. www.planetocean.com - Not a free site, but of significant value. www.marketingtips.com - Not often mentioned in SEM circles, but they can guide you to web profitability through many of their courses. We also have put together a free web marketing guide if you are interested in downloading it from our web site, http://www.webtrafficteam.com/ebook. If gives lots of tips and discusses some of the latest Internet Marketing techniques as well as things to keep in mind as you build your web business. I hope this is helpful. Anthony Kirlew Web Traffic Team www.webtrafficteam.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: James Miller Subject: Marketing My first advice to you is all pretty simple and you might be doing it already. You have a physical product that has to be delivered, so the first question is do you publicise your web site with your delivery documents. I always tell people to create a nice postcard and stick this in with the order, with all of your details on the front. If they stick it on the fridge or a notice-board, you're a fair way down the line. If the value of each order is more than about $200 say, and the margin is good, why not number the postcards and give a discount or kickback for an introduction. Lots of very successful companies like www.figleaves.com and www.virginwines.com have done that. Make sure that your web site is fully submitted to the search engines. This is actually quite easy and takes no more than a few minutes. You only need to do Google, Yahoo and MSN Search to get about a 90% coverage. I've always found that you go high up the search engines with good quality text on your web site. So put up nicely-written testimonials, ideas on how to use your products etc. You didn't say, but if you make tiles, why not have detailed instructions on how to fix them. All of this will help you rise in Google's estimation. None of this costs you any serious money and you should start doing it now, so that when the web site is complete, all is ready. James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: R. Neilson Subject: Marketing While Mr Andersen has a modest sales expectation of $500 a day, he has to realize no one can determine how much your sales will average with a website. Since he mentions he wants to start doing online sales I would suggest adding a shopping cart to the website. I don't know what exactly your company sells but if they are individual pieces or case lots you can still use a shopping cart format to sell them online. I would suggest using something like Miva merchant so that you can list each item with attributes for items like size, color and quantity and then link the appropriate images to each attribute as needed. I like it as I sell leather which can be sold in fractional amounts and this is the only shopping cart I have found that works for me. The key to selling any product on the web is good photos along with good clear descriptions. If your product has warranties make sure you highlight that and your reputation in your industry. Another nice thing with Miva is you can specify individual item weights and set up your shipping charges by weight or dollar sales for UPS, USPS and FedEX and more, which is very helpful with letting your customers know up front what shipping costs are. This program also has a variety of payment options from credit cards, PayPal, and a variety of other options to fit your business. Regardless of which shopping cart program you choose if you plan to manage it yourself make sure it is simple to use and access. Otherwise you will need to pay for someone else to put up your cart and manage it. I personally like to manage my own as I know my product better then most programmers I could hire and I like to be able to change my shopping cart whenever I want. Many of the shopping cart companies have a variety of options available, e.g. 1. Selling the program outright. 2. Offering hosting and / or programming services thru them. 3. Refering you to authorized resellers that offer hosting and / or programming of your shopping cart. Either way you go you will have to experiment and see what works best for you. Sales will usually be small to non-existent the first few months or more till you get spidered by the search engines and folks find you are there. But by linking it onto your exisitng website you should get faster results. Good luck. R. Neilson H. L. Supply www.hansons.net -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Loading times > I've found that the tables-based sites give the visitor > that "blank screen" display for several seconds, and > sometimes that can stretch out to minutes on a very > slow connection. - Martha Retallick, LED 2141 If you want to speed up table based designs, make the first table contain a small banner only and put the body into another table. The header will display almost instantaneously and users won't get that blank screen display. One thing we can do for most browsers is to send compressed files (gzip or deflate) to decrease load times. Although my home page is almost 19K (HTML), it is sent to the browser compressed (5K - 72% saving). This makes the page load about 3.5 times faster; about 0.7 seconds rather than 2.6 seconds on a 56K modem. Images are small but add another 48 K to page size. Users can read HTML while graphics are downloading. We also strip out all white space and use cache control. If you go to another page where the banner, images or left menu is the same, the graphics are not downloaded again but we tell the browser to use the images in the client's browser cache. Martha's HTML is small but she has a couple large graphics (100K + 40K). I guess it is always a trade-off between design and speed. Someone else previously mentioned the fact that getting a fast server is important. Using a tool like http://internetsupervision.com/ I notice that some web servers are faster and others are 2 to 4 times slower. Nancy Cardinali mentioned [issue 2141] her phone line will be fiber optics. Copper wire phone lines can already handle high speed DSL. I have a 2.5 MB DSL over copper. It is her ISP's infrastructure that gives slow dial up. Although every one is predicting the death of dial-up, we now have to contend with Wi-Fi, which generally seems as slow as a 56 K modem. I'm working on redesigning my site to load faster for Wi-Fi. I do want to sell to customers at Starbucks or bored business persons at the airport. Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. http://www.centralhome.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: David Spahr Subject: Loading times > Not paying attention to loading times is just sloppy. - James Miller, LED 2139 There is a lot of assuming going on here. Assuming that loading times must be fast is painting with too broad of a brush. The nature of the site content and the visitor's expectations must be assessed before making any such judgement about the need for fast loading times. I sell photographs. Selling photographs requires loading lots of jpgs. Visitors to my sites realize this. They know up front that photos take time to load. Moreover, they need to be delivered a photograph online that has adequate size and resolution to be able to determine if they want to buy it. If you are a photograph buyer / collector on a regular basis as most are, you quickly realize how much you need broadband. Obviously, persons with enough disposable income to collect vintage and art photographs probably have the money to pay a few extra bucks for broadband if they can get it. Some people with dial-up can't get broadband but many are living on a budget that does not allow it. These are not the ones that are likely to be my customers. Know the visitor and the product before making assumptions. David Spahr http://stereoviews.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Loading times > Our local newspaper recently reported our local phone lines > are to be replaced with fiber optics, making dial-up a lot faster. > So, dial-up may not be on its way out after all! - Nancy Cardinali, LED 2141 Dial-up is likely to be with us for a very, very long time yet. One big factor is that, for many people, high speed connection to the Internet is just not available. Here in Ontario, Canada, there is one county I know of locally where the only access is via dial-up. Work is under way in that county to make high speed available, but that will take some time to become a fact and even then, for some locations, it will still not be accessible (too remote from the necessary connection). I know from reading various articles that this kind of situation is repeated in many areas both here in Canada as well as in the USA. While I realize that satellite communication makes high speed access for download (site to user) available to almost anyone, the response will still go out via a *much* slower telephone connection. In addition, compared to the dial-up rates, satellite can be expensive and may also require the purchase of special hardware (like a satellite receiver) so this does not really represent a viable option for many home users. So the reality is that, for many people, high speed access is just not an option - either due to location or cost or both. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com Home of CyberSpyder Link Test ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Bruce Garrett Subject: Backups > I have never backed up my hard drive and I know I really need > to. Sometimes I'll be working and the computer will freeze... - Sherry Faye Rodarmor, LED 2141 Sherry, backing up is easy to do. Microsoft offers these instructions for Windows 98: http://snipurl.com/pe88 [microsoft.com] The safest thing to do is to install a second hard-drive and direct the backup to that drive. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days. Before you back up your hard drive you might consider: - Defragging the existing hard drive. That will free up some space and improve your performance. Please be aware there are different view-points on this. - Upgrading your operating system. Windows no longer supports WIN98 or Windows ME. I hope this helps you, Bruce Garrett www.archive-cd.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Rob Bishop Subject: Backups Sherry; I like simple too ! In the past, for my company, I spent over $1,200 on an HP Surestor backup solution. It backed up on a 20/40 casette tape. (20 Gigs uncompressed and 40 Gigs compressed). Had multiple tapes, and exchanged them out. Backing up took several hours (even incrementally) so it was not convenient. I really never kept it up, since restoring data was a pain, and backing up took so long. (just my opinion) Today, I have two hard drives ($60 - $120 each depending on size) that are housed in USB2 enclosures ($30 each) http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=914890 I plug in the hard drive and XP will recognize it on it's own. For 98 I believe it comes with drivers. I use ViceVersa Pro http://www.tgrmn.com/ ($29 - $59 depending on version) which backs up fast. What I especially like, is that the back up is easily readable. I can grab a file from the back up, just like on the original hard drive. There is no big event to 'restore' data. For $200 to $300 you can have two hard drives (one stored off site at all times) which you can swap out and make new copies. This will keep you as safe as you need for a small business. This keeps our data for 9 people, on a 120 Gig hard drive. Just be sure to mark it on your calendar weekly, or as needed. Hope this helps. Rob Bishop Binkley Custom Products www.customplushtoys.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Bob Cavanagh Subject: Backups Sherry, Ghost is actually quite easy to use and has the advantage of allowing you to quickly rebuild your whole system in the event of a hard drive failure. The down side is that it really isn't designed for regular backups as it creates a complete image of your hard drive including lots of stuff that you don't need. I'm told that it might take 12 or more CD-Rs to fully back up a 40GB hard drive. I don't see this as a viable approach for regular backups. What you might find a better solution is an external USB hard drive. You should be able to buy one of these units available from a number of vendors (we use Maxtor) for several hundred dollars max. You can and should get a unit that is at least double the size of your hard drive. You can then do a complete copy of your hard drive to a directory on this drive and then keep multiple copies of your data say on a daily or weekly basis. The one complication with the USB hard drive is that you will need to install a driver for Windows 98. Later versions of Windows support these drives natively. Check that the manufacturer of the USB hard drive has a Windows 98 driver available. Bob Cavanagh, Director of Technology Queen's School of Business ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep." - Navajo |
