Starting an eCommerce Website with Magento : My Journey

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.

Twitter as a marketing tool? Is it right for you?

So you finally signed up for Twitter because everything you read says that Twitter is the new gold mine, you have to use it. Now you have a twitter account, can you condense your stories, memories, or pearls of wisdom down to 140 characters? Honestly I wish most people I meet were able to do that.

Twitter ettiquette says that you should follow people who follow you. With that in mind, the reasonable things to do would be to run out and start following people with the expectation that they are going to return the favor. Maybe they will, but in most cases – if they do, who really cares? Just because someone is following you does not mean that you are on their radar.

I am still having a really hard time coming to terms that Twitter is an effective marketing tool for ‘everyone’. I can see in certain circumstances where a direct line to someones ear would be a good thing, but you need to be realistic about yourself. Are you interesting? Do people tend to ask questions when you tell a story or do they just glaze over?

If you listen to the internet marketing gurus like Perry Belcher, you can create a million dollar empire overnight with a Twitter account and an internet connection at Starbucks. What Perry doesn’t make a big of is that he has a list of millions of people, so when he sends out an email telling people to follow him on Twitter, they will. They would probably cut their thumbs off if he said it was going to be an ‘over night cash machine’. I’m rambling.

I don’t know enough about Twitter to tell you how to use it effectively for business, which is actually a good thing. Because even without knowing much about it, I do know how to get followers and I will share it with you. Here it is. Tweet. I have set up my content hub to automatically post to Twitter whenever I make a blog post. I haven’t been posting about Twitter, I haven’t really even posted anything that interesting, but every time I do post, my Twitter account is notified and a link to my post is sent out. Every time I do this, I pick up 5 followers almost immediately.

My last couple posts have been about affiliate marketing and about my love affair with SENuke, nothing special. It’s clear that the Twittersphere is full of marketers who are searching for keywords and automatically following the author. What does this mean? Nothing. They are following me in hopes that I will return the favor and follow them, and I do, but they aren’t reading what I am writing. They are just taking a gamble that I am going to read what they are Tweeting about and that I will visit their site and buy their product, and I won’t. I don’t read other peoples tweets and in most cases people don’t read mine. Essentially what you have is a giant room filled with people, all talking at once, to no one. Occasionally there will be someone interesting but in general I find that the only people I actually pay attention to are people who I have actively gone looking for. Courtney Love is a good example, her Twitter account is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Its interesting in a really morbid way.

Twitter, to me, is the obvious electronic culmination of our innate narcissism. We are our own biggest fans. But Twitter is also necessary. Twitter is the beginning of true real time search, the new breed of search engines are pulling data in real time and using it to determine search importance. Spammers are already figuring out how to game it like we used to game lycos in the late 90′s. Twitter is a place that you need to be, even if you don’t know why. Again, rambling.

So now you’re sitting in front of your Twitter acccount, feeling obliged to write something but don’t know what to Tweet about. Let me give you a few very basic pointers to get you on your way. And as simple as these seem, people are charging for this information.

1. Customize your profile. Make sure you at the very least add a picture of yourself. Fill out your profile, be compelling, be interesting. Don’t be overly salesy

2. Don’t pollute your tweets with a bunch of garbage, if you do happen to make a Tweet thats interesting, people will see the rest of your tweets about your cat and they won’t follow you. Keep in mind that the people who do actually read what other people are tweeting about are following hundreds, maybe thousands of people, they don’t have time to sift through garbage.

3. Check out some of the applications like Tweetdeck for following your favorite people

4. Make sure that you include keywords in your tweets that pertain to your business. Those are going to be what put your Tweets up on people radar.

5. Make sure before you follow someone that is following you that you check out their follow vs followers, if they are following 50,000 people and have 100 followers, it’s a spammer.

6. If the profile of the person following you has a picture of a girl in a bikini – block them, it’s spam. Think about it.

7. Do not try to sell you services in 140 characters. EVER. Twitter is about news and opinions, don’t even try to recommend your own product anonymously – it won’t work. Use Twitter to show you are an intelligent, insightful person, that cares about improving the lives of other people.

8. Be funny. Legitimately. If you’re not funny then don’t try to be, but if you are witty, try to include it in your posts.

9. Be relevant. A good way to attract followers is to Tweet about things that are in the news RIGHT NOW.

10. Be open and honest. The one thing I do like about Twitter is that it mimics life and the thought process really well. Remember that first impressions mean everything. When you meet someone you can usually tell if you like them in a 140 characters or less right? It’s the same online.

10.5 ( I really want a clean 10 things list but this just popped into my head) don’t have someone else Tweet for you. It’s OK to have someone represent your business, but not you.

I hope you got something out of this post. I actually didn’t write it for you, I really wrote it to get more followers on Twitter. I think I mentioned the keywords that I wanted enough times. This should be good for another 5 or 10 followers who are never going to read what I have to say, and I plan to return the favor.

Marketing your website. Social Networking and a couple analogies.

I was thinking yesterday about what I’m going to say in the tele-seminar today. The tele-seminar is essentially going to be for owners of bowling centers, how to market their business maintain a strong presence online. my part in this whole company is essentially search strategy and that includes social networking, and all of the new social network fads. I find it easier to explain with analogies that people can understand. Everybody has heard of MySpace.com, Facebook.com and of course now the big one, twitter. The DVD of the metamorphosis that is taking place in online marketing is that the Internet is really just becoming a series of networks. They used to sort of explain to new, website owners that the Internet was sort of like a neighborhood. I never really liked that explanation, because it really wasn’t a neighborhood now. It seems to be moving closer to that original explanation.

The Internet really is now just a bunch of communities and portals and if you want to look at something like Google. I would almost say it’s like a map. Or rather, a guidebook. For the most part, the days of manipulating Google, and I use Google in place of search engine. They pretty much managed to become the name of all search engines. The best example they used to use for that in marketing class or xerox. At any rate, it is becoming harder and harder to manipulate Google, they have put so much of their resources into trying to get their search engine to act like a human being, to listen and pay attention to what’s going on outside. In these other communities. So, in order for you to have a successful presence online. You need to participate in as many communities as possible. You need to have a constant steady flow coming in and out of your space, you need to have people talking about, you, hopefully in a favorable way, and you need to make an effort to get out there at least once in a while. Show your face and interact with people. I hate saying that the days of iif you build it they will come are over, that analogy has been beaten to death. However there are still so many people and businesses that believe that if you just throw up a website that you are. Or rather, they are owed their place in line, and because they run a quality business that is somehow going to guarantee them a favorable spot in the search engines. And that’s just not the case.

We have developed a plan, right now we’re calling it the $2 million plan, which I’m not going to go into. Actually, I will never go into a publicly. However, it is a plan that literally covers all the bases. I read an interesting article from someone at Google. I don’t remember who it was but I’m pretty sure it was not Matt Cutts. Actually it was not an article at all it was a phone call that I had with my Google representative. I was asking him if he could possibly give me any insight into the Google algorithm, and how to rank well, of course, everyone they talk to, tries to get them to admit something. And of course they don’t. But what he did tell me was that Google likes to see a steady flow of information. It does not like to see a stopping point. So there should be many paths into your website and there should be some paths out of your website and the pads out of your website should lead to other websites that have passed out of their websites, etc. etc. They said that the algorithm or the spider automatically get suspicious when it finds a website that is sitting by itself. Essentially, if there are some links going into the website, but the website is not saying anything about anyone else. Google does not like that. Now I don’t really see how this applies to websites like target.com. I don’t really see any links from their website to anyone else but a perfect example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always going to have the top spot for just about any search term that matters. Its just the way it is is the perfect website.

I don’t really know what going with all of this and I really should be spending my time doing other things, the clock is ticking, and I’m obviously procrastinating. So I’m going to cut it off here, but I am very interested to find out what the people on this tele-seminar tonight. No, and more importantly, what they want to know. Explaining search engine optimization has become easier and easier of the people that own a website are familiar with the terminology but trying to explain the importance of social networking, at least I have found, is incredibly difficult to get people to grasp. I know MySpace.com is for 16-year-old kid rock bands, and I know that Facebook is primarily for generation acts to look up friends from high school and see how fat they’ve gotten. But as far as the value of having some sort of a presence there, it’s absolutely necessary. Social networking, article writing, social bookmarking, twitter, you name it. The only way for your website to succeed today is that you have to take an interest in it or you have to pay someone to take an active interest in it. In either case, it’s expensive, it’s definitely more expensive than it used to be, because you are either making a constant investment in someone like me to create a constant buzz about your website or your spending hours out of your day learning about the different promotion methods, and the new technology in the new science. Its never-ending.

If you had asked me even a year ago I would have probably said that I thought that the Internet, or at least marketing on the Internet have for the most part, found its bottom or rather, where it was going to stay at least for the time being. I certainly didn’t anticipate something like twitter coming along then again. I constantly underestimate the narcissism that is so common in today’s society.