Local Business Marketing : Small Business SEO : Ecommerce Optimization

Starting an eCommerce Website with Magento : My Journey

July 07 0 Comments Category: eComm Journey, magento

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I have been working in online marketing since Al Gore created the internet. I have marketed everything. I am an SEO expert, PPC, Social Media, etc. I know the ins-and-outs of marketing eCommerce sites. It has been in the back of my mind that I am really foolish for being so complacent that I continue to make money for other people. I should be doing this myself.

I currently work for a company that specializes in B2B ecomm sites. I work with them from inception up until they are rocking the sales. The pieces that I am missing are unfortunately very important parts of the puzzle. So, I have decided it’s time to take the plunge and do it myself. I am have decided to use Magento as the shopping cart, and I will use WordPress for the blog. I am loaded up with Magento modules, WordPress themes, all that stuff is covered.

The hard part about starting an eCommerce site is deciding what you are going to sell. It helps if you have your own products – but if you don’t – you need to create relationships with manufacturers that will give you a good price that you can mark up enough to make money with, but still stay competitive. Deciding on what you are going to sell is also difficult. Hopefully its something you enjoy. The problem is that even if you enjoy something, that doesn’t mean you are an expert. You also need to know if there is a market out there, and how competitive it is. I love music, but I am not an equipment expert, and I also do not have the relationships or capitol to start re-selling high end equipment. The advertising costs are also expensive, and the competition is stiff. I have been giving this a lot of thought.

I am not prepared to announce what the site is, and I will be vague in the theme of the site. Domain age is crucial in getting respect from the search engines, so part of the task was looking through my domains and pulling one that had some age on it. I have decided on a domain that works for the products I am going to sell. It doesn’t have the keyword in it which is unfortunate, but its a pretty good domain and its 8 years old. The domain has 27,000 page in Googles index, but those aren’t going to do much for me so I will probably lose those. The site isnt a high PR site so I am not too stressed about losing them. The amount of pages and the age of the domain at least tells me that Google will visit it frequently so I wont have too much of an indexing problem.

So, I am going to embark on the first part of the project and install Magento on the server. I might document the process that I go through to help out others who are thinking about taking on the same project. I plan on doing this all on my own with no outsourcing so that will be a challenge, but I have a huge advantage when it comes to the marketing of the site. The challenge is going to be opening up the relationships with the manufacturers of the products I plan to sell, the dropshipping, credit card processing etc.

I have been very lazy about keeping this blog up to date, but I will give it a shot and at least try to write short entries with any lessons learned.

If you would like to help contribute to the project, feel free to check out some of the advertisers on this blog. Any bit of revenue will help.

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