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Starting An E-commerce Business: Baby Steps
By Colleen Ryan

Starting your own e-commerce business can be quite the
adventure. There is nothing wrong with falling head over heels
in love with your ideas and plans and becoming overly excited,
but always remember, feet first. Creating a business from
scratch is like a child learning to walk. You need to grab on to
something solid, feel around, get a sense of balance, and take
baby steps.  

Risky Business

Before running full speed ahead with your brilliant business
brainchild, proper planning is required. Being an entrepreneur
is risky business, however you can improve your chances of
success with preparation and development.   

First, you need to research your target market, product and
services, competitors, the demographic of your potential
customers, popular key words associated with your business and
the probable cost involved. After compiling all this
information, you need to ask yourself, ‘is it worth it? If the
answer is yes, then carry on.

Step 1: It’s All In the Name

You have you business idea, you’ve conducted your market
research, preparation is complete, and now you are beginning to
get butterflies in your stomach from all the excitement that
comes with starting your own business. So what’s next? The Name.

You should start considering names for your company in the
beginning stages of your business’s development. Use a serious
name for a serious company and a fun name for creative company
or a company that markets towards children. But keep in mind
that the name of your business must earn the attention and trust
of your potential customers.

While selecting your company’s name, bear in mind the qualities
you would like your company to portray. If you want to represent
a very aggressive, high tech, corporate, and cutting-edge
company, you should not come up with the name like 'Sloopy' or
'Scroochy'.

Important Points To Consider In Name Selection:

•        Shorter is better. It is easier to remember names like Nike
opposed to 'Kransferst Bayer Colombo Association of Michigan'.

•        Make sure the name is easily pronounced. It's very hard to
pronounce 'Shmakhtnik', 'Kchichkus' or 'Xsassassas'.  

•        It may be helpful to have the name associated with your
company's philosophy. For example, a strong solid company should
use a strong, bold name such as 'Bamm', 'CastleDom', 'Gong'. A
high-tech company could use a more creative name such as
'Ampex', 'Freebee', 'Ciriu'. Design companies can use even more
creative names such as 'Venturius', 'BlueFrog', 'BlackInc'.  

•        Try to relate the name to the field of business. For example,
a food company - 'Bacon House', an office supplier - 'BluePin',
a construction company - 'GoldenBrick'.  

•        Create a recognizable image. Come up with a meaningful name
like an object name or a word that has a meaning like: 'Penguin
Solution', 'Flying Frog', 'Walking House', or 'Yellow Pot'.  

•        Do not forget your business's target market. Home insurance
companies target a more mature market. It would be absurd to use
a name like 'HipHop BangBang Solutions'.

•        A good way to test out your company name is to tell it to
your friends and ask them if they remember it in a week.

Step 2: Website Design

Marketing should start immediately after the company is created
and a name has been chosen and officially registered. You want
people to remember your company in a positive way. You need to
make an outstanding first impression. So, the first thing you
have to work on is your name and your face. In the e-commerce
world your website is the name and face of the company.  

The website is the most important marketing tool for an
e-commerce business. The website needs to look legitimate and
provoke a sense of trust. It needs to be appealing, simple to
use, eye-catching, competitive and unique. Therefore, it is
worth it to spend a good amount of time and money on your
website design. If you are not savvy with website design and
development, then invest in a talented website design company or
independent designer.  

Step 3: Website Marketing  

A. Search Engine Optimization  

Search engines use algorithms (mathematical formulas) to rank
website listings in response to a particular keyword query. In
order to protect themselves from webmasters and search engine
optimizers manipulating the search engine results to their
advantage, search engines do not reveal their ranking criteria.
However, there are many factors that are speculated to be
important influences in determining the position of a website on
search engine result pages.  

For example:

•        Build a content rich website: Search engine spiders and bots
like websites filled with informative and relevant text and
content.

•        Incoming links: Build up incoming links from relevant or
complimentary sites. The more relevant and authoritative the
incoming sites, the better your site will be in the eyes of the
spiders and bots.  

•        Keywords: Try to place as many keywords in the content of
your home page as possible without losing the sense and
aesthetics of the page.

•        Meta Tags: Meta tags are html text containing information
about the website that is not seen by human viewers. Meta tags
include title, description, and keyword tags. Considering that a
title tag is the text that appears, representing your site, on a
search engine result page, it is very important to choose a
title tag that emphasizes keywords on that page.  

•        Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5…) are used to
designate headers and titles. H1 tags should be used to
represent the first and most important header, H2 as the second
and so on. Search engines give importance to text that differs
from the text on the rest of the page. Bold, italics,
underlines, and various font sizes are useful as well.  

•        Make the site simple, easy to surf and navigate, and
eye-catching.

•        Keep your website updated with fresh content, new pages and
information.  

B. Free Advertising

Search Engines
As a business owner, your first priority should be to get your
website listed in the major search engines such as Google,
Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. This can be done simply by submitting
your website to various search engines.  

Directories
You can also submit your site to web directories, which are
databases of categorized listings of websites. Focus on
directories that are popular and specialize on your industry.  

Link Building
Considering that the World Wide Web was created with the
concept of discovering new websites and web pages by following
links between documents, link building is an important factor in
optimizing your website for search engines. Effective link
building consists of exchanging links with authoritative and
information websites that relate to and/or compliment your
e-commerce business.  

Specifically Google, but other search engines included, believe
that when web page A links to web page B, web page A is casting
a vote for web page B. The more votes web page B has, the more
important that page is perceived to be by search engines. The
value of the web page linking to the web page B also determines
how important that vote is. Google determines the importance of
a web page by associating it with a Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is
another factor that plays a significant role in determining the
position of a website on the search engine result page. To view
the Page Rank of websites, you can download the Google toolbar
at http://toolbar.google.com.  

Building links is not difficult, however, the challenge is to
develop links that are relevant and complimentary to your
business. You can join link exchange websites which are a venue
for webmasters interested in building valuable links. Don’t
exchange links with just any site though, relevancy is very
important. Try to exchange links with sites that can be
associated with your industry or that compliment your business.
And stay away from sketchy sites such as online gambling sites
and pornography sites. These will only cause you trouble.   

As well, you can do a web search for relevant businesses and
simply contact them and suggest a link exchange (some sites may
have a section with information pertaining to link exchanges).
Check out the backward links (inbound links) of your top
competitors. Find out what sites are linking to them, and then
contact the valuable sites to participate in link exchanges.  

Articles
If you are quite knowledgeable on your business’ industry, then
publishing articles online is a good start to building a
reputation for your site. You can submit articles to free submit
directories (where others can download your article as content
for their own sites, giving you full credit), online magazines,
ezines, and websites relevant to your business.  

C. Paid Advertising

Pay-Per-Advertising
a. Pay-Per-Click: Pay-per-click advertising consists of a
search engine or directory that places your website in their
database, and charges you a specified amount every time your
website comes up in a search and is clicked on, thereby,
generating traffic to your site. The amount of the fee is
usually determined by bidding on keywords and ranking.

b. Pay-Per-Impression: Similar to the concept of pay-per-click
advertising, advertisers pay the affiliate based on the number
of consumers that view their promotion or ad.

c. Pay-Per-Sale: The advertisers pay the affiliate based on the
number of consumers that make a purchase based on the direct
result of the promotion.  

d. Pay-Per-Lead: Advertiser pays for each sales lead generated
from the direct result of a promotion. Leads include a viewer
filling out a survey, form, downloading a demo, software, etc...

e. Pay-Per-E-mail: Similar to pay-per-lead advertising,
pay-per-e-mail affiliates receive a commission for each
consumer’s e-mail address they refer to a mailing list or
newsletter.  

Paid Directories
Some directories charge a fee, increased visibility is
associated with a higher cost. If you choose to place your site
in a paid directory listing, consider the offer carefully.
Compare the price with other effective methods of advertising.
Make sure you get the biggest bang for your buck.  

Banners
A more popular marketing mechanism consists of banners (large
strips) of advertisements that are specifically positioned on a
web page in order to promote your website. Costs vary according
to the placement of the ad on the web page and size of the
banner. Try to advertise on websites that contain relevant
content, receive a significant amount of traffic and have fair
banner advertisement rates.  

Ezines
Ezines (electronic magazines/newsletters published online or
sent via e-mail) have been experiencing explosive growth in the
past few years. There are thousands of ezines covering a vast
number of topics. Considering that ezines cater to readers
sincerely interested in the topic covered, you should get a
higher response rate to your ads. For a new business, publishing
your own ezine right away may be too overwhelming, therefore
paying for exposure of your website in online magazines and
through ezine ads may be your best bet. Ezines can provide you
with valuable traffic at a smaller investment than banner ads.
Ezine advertising is more likely to attract a significant
response because the readers trust the editors and therefore
trust the ads.  

Step 4: Monitoring Your Site

Almost all server providers have counters and tools to monitor
all the traffic your website attracts. You can find out where
the traffic is coming from and the regions from which the
visitors are originating, how many visitors have entered your
site on a given day, how they entered, and how long they stayed
to browse. You can learn about the demographics of your viewers
and track trends and patterns. By gaining a better understanding
of the popular pages on your site and your site’s overall
performance, you can plan future development, and focus on
specific aspects of your site. Depending on how precisely you
wish to track your site’s success, you can also purchase
software programs that do this as well.

The first few years of the birth of an e-commerce company are
usually the make or break period. Revenues may be stagnant and
expenses may seem overwhelming. It takes time, patience and
determination. Sometimes you just need to take baby steps, then
wait and pray.

About the Author: Colleen Ryan is the Art Director of Logobee
Inc., a logo design firm that designs high quality logos and
corporate identity design for businesses worldwide. Logobee Inc.
was founded in 2000 and since then the company has grown at an
exponential rate.  http://www.logobee.com  

Source: http://www.isnare.com