Internet Marketing for Online Business – How to Judge Your Online Success

Internet marketing for online business can be confusing, especially if you are not familiar with all of the aspects of website marketing. As a result, you may be wondering how to best judge the success of your online campaign. Here’s the answer: follow-up.

A website marketing campaign is just like any other marketing campaign. Once it is over, the results need to be analyzed and measured. Follow-up is especially important when it comes to Internet marketing for online business. By tracking your results, you can determine which methods of website marketing were effective and which methods were not. You can then adjust your methods accordingly.

To begin, view your website’s logs. These logs can help you determine where the traffic on your website came from. Most web hosting companies provide this service to their customers. If your web host does not allow you access to these logs, you may want to consider switching hosts. If that is not an option, you can purchase one of many software programs that are specifically designed to help you track and analyze your website marketing efforts. Results’ tracking is an essential part of Internet marketing for online business. Without it, you will have a very hard time figuring out exactly how effective your website marketing campaign is.

Comprehensive Internet marketing for online business is more than just launching a campaign. You must also take an active role in market research, strategy development, and campaign design. By carefully monitoring and measuring the results of your website marketing efforts, you can ensure that all of your hard work is not in vain. Effective Internet marketing for online business brings traffic to your website and then converts that traffic into paying customers. When you can accomplish this conversion on a regular basis, you will know that your website marketing strategy is truly a success.

How Relevant is your Ecommerce Web Site Design?

Ecommerce web site design can spell either success or doom for any business. In this internet age it is imperative to have an online site for advertising, selling or buying a product or service. There are numerous ecommerce websites doing business on the World Wide Web. Your website’s ecommerce design must be relevant to all the different elements needed for designing a good website.

If you want to add a personal touch to your site, you can design your own site. However you can also get professional help from the numerous website designing companies to get your online business site designed. Select a good web design company which has high credibility to design your ecommerce web site.

The purpose of any ecommerce site is to generate business for a product or to promote a service. Ecommerce web site designing is not an easy task and is not done overnight. There are some basic simple rules which you need to follow to make a good website. First of all ensure that your website is compatible to different types of browser and operating systems.

The purpose of an ecommerce site is to generate business leads, and if online surfers using different browsers and operating systems cannot even view your site properly, you will lose out on a significant number of prospective clients. Think about this aspect before you actually go about designing a website.

It is said that pictures have the ability to communicate messages which sometimes even words fail to say. Pictures have a very strong ability to portray strong emotions. Silence they say is sometimes stronger than words. Put up relevant pictures on your site to put forward an idea. Take care that you do not put up any irrelevant and outdated pictures on your website.

Color combination of a website is very important. Choose the color to be used in your ecommerce web site design only after a very careful consideration. Colors in an ecommerce site must not be garish and at the same time must not be too dull, so that it does not even invoke any response from visitors to your site. Choose a color pattern which is appealing to the eye, but at the same time refrain from going over the top.

The navigability and the functionality of ecommerce web site design are of big importance. Your site may be the best visually looking site ever made, but if it does not have proper functionality and navigability, no one is even going to give your site a second glance. No visitor is going to wait and search for information in your site if it is not properly navigable and functional.

Take care of the contents in your ecommerce web site design. Good and relevant content is a great means of bringing visitors to your site. Check out for yourself and see if the content in your site is relevant of not. Also see if all the links are properly placed or not and whether visitors are immediately transferred to the page that has the relevant information for their query.

Ebay Prostores Review

Thinking about buying a new content management system for your E-commerce site? Is a customized solution too much or too complicated for you? Don't even know what a content management system is? Well, look no further because I'm going to tell you all you need to know.

Content Management Systems Content Management Systems are web based software that allows web developers to publish and sell goods and services on the internet. There are literally thousands of websites that profit from selling goods and services online, they range in size from small mom and pop hobby stores looking to make extra cash on auction sites like Ebay to the well known titans of E-commerce like Amazon. As a result, a whole new industry has sprung up to cater to their wants and needs.

Review There are 4 different levels to choose from, "ProStores Express", "ProStores Business", "ProStores Advanced", and "ProStores Enterprise". At time of publishing this article they cost $6.95, $29.95, $74.95, and $249.95 respectively.

The best thing about a ProStore is the instant boost your profit margins will receive if you're using a 3rd party payment gateway because it only charges a .5% transaction fee. Chances are, your merchant account is taking anywhere from 5% - 10% of the purchase price on every sale you make! If you're doing a $1000 a month in sales or more, the money you save in transaction charages alone would more than pay for the cost of a Pro Store. Better yet, all transactions are SSL encrypted and billed in real time which means customer information is safe, secure and charged instantly.

ProStores is also an Ebay Company, which means your E-business will be backed by one of the top internet companies in the world, with offices worldwide from Japan to Germany. You'll have many resources at your disposal, including access to its extremely popular Ebay auction site. ProStores also provides a consulting service that pairs you with an E-commerce veteran who will review your goals and needs and set up a customized E-commerce solution that fits your business model and budget.

Domain name comes standard with every ProStore subscription (Except ProStores Express) allowing you to create a domain that includes your business name. They also have professional design services that have created numerous successful site designs including the popular ZStore.

Disadvantages Unfortunately, ProStores isn't the easiest content management system to work with. While the ability to upload mass product feeds gives gives the user a huge advantage over other competitors, it lacks a simple and intuitive interface to add a manage products.

Advantages ProStores's order processing really stands out. Real time credit card processing, inventory management, and customer processing still make it a great choice for any current or potential E-merchant

Use your own domain name Quickbooks integration Different subscription levels to suit your needs and budget

Final Analysis Would I buy a ProStores system? Yes! Despite its drawbacks ProStores is a great choice because of its price. A custom system that includes all the features of the ProStores Express would cost at at least $1500 dollars! ProStores are also backed by Ebay, one of the most powerful companies on the internet today. It's a great solution for everyone from E-Commerce veterans to somebody who just started competing in the E-marketplace.

The Magic of Flower Delivery

A few tips to make the miracle a little easier
A hundred years ago, it was a feat to get the simplest message across country. But today, with the widespread use of the Internet and the telephone, it is easy to express the appropriate sentiment to almost anyone in the world by sending a thoughtful gift of carefully selected flowers. You can order flowers by phone, online, by fax, or at your favorite local florist, with flower delivery available around the world. And just as technology has made the process easier, so will these quick tips.

Same day delivery
Most leading florists provide same day delivery nationwide, as long as you order by mid-day. This is especially useful for sudden emergencies or forgotten occasions. But whenever possible, it's a good idea to order flowers one or two days in advance, particularly at Valentine's and Mother's Day, or similar gift-giving occasions. In addition, you may want to consider having your flowers delivered the afternoon before a particular event, both to ensure they are are enjoyed throughout the big day and to provide a cushion for redelivery just in case the recipient is not home when your flowers first arrive. Being a day early never hurts, but being a day late can! Otherwise, for same day delivery across most of the U.S. and Canada, simply order in the morning. In most cases, your flowers can arrive that afternoon.

Work with your florist
If you order flowers by phone, tell your florist the sentiment you want to communicate. Remember, your florist is the expert, so don't feel that you have to know the name of every particular flower. Just mention the occasion, your relationship to the recipient, and if you have any favorite flowers or colors in mind. Allowing the florist to assist you with the selection of flowers and to design a bouquet just for you will often result in the best overall gift for your budget. So, you'll be more pleased with your flower delivery.

Before you order...
Have the spelling of the recipient's name and his or her complete delivery address ready, including any apartment number, company name, suite, or floor number. Delivery to "Susie" at "Rockafellar Center" probably won't cut it. The recipient's phone number is also very helpful to ensure delivery, and may sometimes be required. After all, you want your flowers to arrive at the right place on the right day. So, make sure you've got your facts straight.

Express yourself
As important as the flowers are, if you don't take a few moments to think about the card message, your sentiment could be lost. Florists will include a small enclosure card free of charge, and larger gift cards are also available. Have a short message ready when you call, or ask for your florist's advice. If you order flowers online, most sites will have suggestions for you. The important thing is to express yourself simply and personally. It makes your flower delivery gift all that more special. Also remember to include the sender(s) name(s) on the card, so the recipient knows who to thank.

If you are ordering flowers online...
Remember that web sites can't show every flower arrangement. There is an infinite number of combinations possible, so don't be afraid to call if you don't see what you are looking for. Florists excel at creating beautiful one-of-a-kind designs for almost every taste and budget to help you send just the right message with every flower delivery.

The magical result
Sending flowers is a wonderful way to say, "thanks", "cheer up", "feel better soon", "congratulations", or "I love you". You can send flowers almost anywhere on almost any day, and there is something magical about how they make people feel. Floral gifts show how much you care, and at the same time they say a lot about you, the sender. Look to your local florist for help or visit your favorite online flower shop. You'll find that the age-old tradition of giving flowers is very much alive, and easier than you may think.

Submit your Products to Froogle

It costs nothing to reach thousands or possibly millions of online shoppers by listing your items with Froogle, Google's free shopping search engine. You can link each one of your products in the Froogle search directly with your website.

For example, if you sell coffee mugs and someone does a search in Froogle for mugs then your products will be listed in the search results.

Click to see an example of a Froogle product listing

What is Froogle?

Froogle, Google's shopping search engine, applies the power of Google's search technology to one very specific task: locating sellers that offer the item a buyer wants to find and pointing them directly to the website where they can buy it.

The search results also provide multiple sites where the product can be purchased, with the ability see and compare the various prices of each vendor.

How do I get my products listed in Froogle?

In order to list your products, a product feed (or bulk upload file) must be submitted directly to Google by uploading either a tab delimited or xml file. The file is then processed by Google and within 24 hours your products will be listed.

There is however, one catch. Unlike the Google search engine, the products listed in Froogle are only listed for a few weeks. Google does this to maintain accurate and up-to-date product information. Therefore it is suggested that you re-submit your product file once a week.

How can Froogle Help My Business?

Froogle provides you with the opportunity to have your company’s products indexed and accessible to thousands of buyers looking for products like yours. The Internet is a numbers game; the more content you have indexed, the greater chance you have to be discovered.

If you are an online product company then listing your products in Froogle should be one of the first priorities to help increase the exposure of your products on the Internet and offer the opportunity to be discovered by your consumers.

At Hudson Horizons, we provide automated product submission to Froogle for only $15 / month. We submit your products once a week to Froogle to ensure that they are always included in the search results. If you, or a client you know, has products and would like to increase company sales then contact us today and have Hudson Horizons submit them to Froogle once a week.

Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be "The New Light for e-Business."

10 Steps to E-Commerce Success

What makes one e-commerce web site a raging success, while another similar one barely gets a visitor much less sells anything? Ask any small business owner and you're likely to get a range of answers from "Cool technology" to "A really sexy web site", and more likely than not: "Being Number One on the Search Engines".

Important some of these things may be, they're not actually the core elements for success! And it's for this reason that most people go wrong when they go online. In fact, the main factors, or decisions, that make a web site successful or not, take place long before a line of code is written, or a graphic designed or anyone puts finger to keyboard to write any copy. We list below, in order of importance, the ten things you should concentrate on if you want your e-commerce web site to be a rip-roaring success:

1. Do Your Research The first thing that you must remember (and this is the bit that everyone seemed to forget in Internet "Gold Rush" of 1999) is that the same business principles apply to your internet business as any other. You must: a) Have a product/service with a solid perceived need; b) you must be able to sell it at a price that is profitable and provides good value to the purchaser and; c) you must be able to reach a sufficient number of potential purchasers (and convince them to buy) to generate enough revenue to make your business viable. And to find out that, you need to research your market. Thoroughly.

The first and most obvious thing you need to find out is the "need" factor. Note I said "perceived" need, perhaps better described as a "want". We buy lots of things we don't need, because mainly we think we need them. So, will people benefit from your product or service? Do you genuinely believe you can convince people they need it? To find that out, you have to ask them! But we're not there yet: it's one thing having a product that people do actually need, but if there are already lots of people supplying it, then you might have a problem with part b. You are only going to be able to sell your product/service at a profit AND and a price people think represents good value if 1) Not many other people provide it or 2) yours is better (and/or cheaper - but for reasons explained later, this is not usually a good route to take). Again, you must do your research and find out before you do anything else. And finally, can you reach this market cost-efficiently and find enough people to buy from you? This is the one great strength of the Internet and e-commerce: it's much cheaper, it's faster and has a much wider reach that any other communications channel so far invented! But it still costs time and money, and you have to be realistic, so you need to research your market and work out if you have the time and money to reach it.

2. Work on your Strategy OK, so now you know, hopefully, that there is a need for your product or service, that not many people offer it at the price/profit/value level that you can, and you know that thousands of people who use the internet a lot and who you know from your research can and do buy online, will want to buy it from you. So now you work on your strategy. This is key. You cannot simply say "Hey, we've got a great product and a big market, let's slap up a web site and we'll get rich!" You need to sit down and carefully work on how you're going to do all of this. You need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to "sell lots" you'll sell nothing! I Guarantee it. You need to work out where your want to be in 1, 3 and 5 years time at a minimum and then work back from there. If you start with that and work back, then a lot of the pieces will fall into place. Your strategy should apply to all your business, and your web site or Internet bits will only be a part of it (a big part, perhaps...). For example, if you have a product with a big ticket price, and you only sell 5 a year, then you don't want to start planning in a shopping basket system and credit card payments! Selling on that scale will need lots of relationship building and face-to-face interaction, so you need to work out how your Internet/e-commerce strategy will enhance and benefit that. A good web site to that will impress people who pay £50,000 for your product? A newsletter system to help keep in touch during the long sales cycle? It's a completely different approach to selling £20 watches....

3. Concentrate on Existing Customers If your business is already up-and-running and you're simply adding an Internet presence or improving on it, then your existing customers should be treated like Gold. They can actually help you bring your business online. Test the waters with them, ask them what they think at each stage, build the system around them and their needs and you'll end up with a template that will help you expand online in the sure knowledge that it will attract and help keep new customers. And, of course, if you do it right, you can start making extra money online right away, without a single new customer, by using your web presence to save money and improve relationships with your existing customers so they buy more from you.

4. Make Service a Priority While the Internet can help you cut costs and make your business run more slickly, you've got to remember that it can also be very impersonal. One of the most valuable things I've ever learnt is that people buy from people they like. And they don't like to be let down. The media is littered with stories of people who managed to click and pay for something online only to wait weeks for it never to turn up. Emails don't get replied to, phones don't get answered (if the web site even publishes the number!), and they get constantly fobbed off. Yet the Internet is an ideal tool for delivering better customer communication! But many businesses use a flash web site to hide behind... That's another quirk of the Internet - it's possible to gain customers more quickly than traditional methods, but you can lose them like lightening if you provide a poor service. News travels fast on the internet - even faster if it's bad news...

5. Work out your Communication and and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) policies and procedures As I mentioned before, the Internet provides excellent tools and opportunities to build relationships with customers and clients. By this stage of your planning, you're chomping at the bit to "get something up and start selling" but winning a customer is a bit like wooing a woman (please forgive the sexist nature of this analogy!). You don't run up to a woman you like a scream in her face "I want to have babies with you, NOW!" So why do people do this online? You need to build into your plan ways and means of starting and growing relationships with your customers and clients. You need work out ways of opening a dialogue, finding out about them, and helping them find out about you. Did you know that research shows that people generally visit a web site seven times before they feel confortable enough to buy anything? So what are you going to do that makes your web site interesting enough for people to visit seven times just to look at it? And when they do, what then? Is it like a one night stand? Or do you send them emails asking if they are happy with the product/service? Can you send them a regular newsletter that they find interesting? And do you have a system in place to manage all of this - for example, can you track how many times a customer has been contacted, by what method, and what was said? You can and should build up a valuable database of detailed customer information, their buying habits, what they like/don't like and a system for contacting them on a regular basis.

6. Offline/ Online Marketing, Search Engines & Pay Per Click Ah, search engines. The magic bullet of marketing... or so the Search Engine promotions "experts" would have you think. The holy grail for many is "being number one on the search engines", and great though that is, your success or failure actually hangs on what happens when all that traffic gets to your web site - it's got nothing at all to do with being No1. In fact you can actually bankrupt your business by being No1. A sudden flood of traffic can burst your bandwidth budget, have you running to Dell or HP or whoever for more servers, bring your web site to it's knees, and, if all those visitors turn up and don't find what they're looking for, you make virtual enemies of thousands - even millions - of potential customers. Once again, before you even think about Search Engines, you must go back to your research and your strategy and start again from there. Ask yourself: What is my ideal customer? What search engines do they use? What key words do they use to find services/products like mine? What's my USP? What magazines do they read? Are there cheaper/better ways of reaching them than via search engines? There are, of course, certain low-cost/no-cost golden rules that everyone should follow. Your web address and email address should be printed on all your stationery. If you send out catalogues, promote your web site in it. Add a promotional message (including a link to your web site) at the bottom of all your emails (this is sometimes called a signature file or sig file). The key is to think about your promotion from your customer's perspective. If you do that, then, at least as far as Search Engines are concerned, you can focus on relevance. Make sure that people who find your site via search engines are actually looking for what you have to offer and are ready to buy. You are relevant to them and they are relevant to you. If my sales target in my strategy is to sell 100 units a week, then all I really need is 100 buying customers from Search Engines. If I use all the tricks in the book and haul a million visitors in who aren't even vaguely interested in my widgets, I'm wasting their time and my money. To sum up, you should:

Your Fast Merchant Account Is Waiting!

A Fast Merchant Account is waiting to usher your business into the technology age! All you need to do is choose a lender that will work with your company and then enjoy the benefits of a fast merchant account. Here are some of the ways in which your company can advance with the help of a merchant services account:

1. A Fast Merchant Account will link you to a stable lender with the authority to help your company get set up to accept credit card payments. You will enjoy the prestige and security of working with a top-notch banker or a dependable financial institution that can provide the know-how and a safety net for your credit processing transactions. Take time to find one with a solid financial reputation that offers equitable terms at affordable rates. Enjoying the reputation of providing credit card processing options will secure your position in the local business community.

2. A Fast Merchant Account could bring in more customers. Many consumers dislike the hassles of paying by cash. Some don’t like to carry along a checkbook when they go shopping. When they visit your Website or shop and learn that you do not accept credit cards, you may have lost your chance forever to court their favor and curry their patronage. But offering credit card processing can move the checkout line quickly along and help paying customers avoid problems associated with cash-only transactions. Post a sign on your Website or at your door to let shoppers know that credit will be accepted.

3. A Fast Merchant Account may prompt your clients to shop often and spend more. Some studies suggest that customers who pay with credit cards buy more than those who pay with cash. While you don’t want to encourage reckless spending in your customers, you want to provide them with the freedom to choose the most convenient payment method rather than restricting the way they can do business with your company. They may get in the habit of shopping with your enterprise, and they could even bring along family members and friends. Many company owners who open merchant accounts claim that their client bases grow along with their profits.

4. A Fast Merchant Account might increase your sales volume and profit margin. When customers feel comfortable in shopping at a company where they can use credit payments, they may be inclined to buy more and to return often. They could let others know as well, and before you know it, your client base could double. But if you continue doing business the old fashioned way, you may never see these benefits materialize. Before you know it, your local and international competitors will be doing business light years ahead of you if you do not open a merchant account and provide credit processing options like credit card swiping and Website credit payments to your clientele.