Are you struggling to build you an e-commerce web storefront on the web?  Perhaps these few tips will help you as you embark on this exciting venture; of joining the other ecommerce site builders.

First things first, you should plan your website carefully.  Determine your goals and lay out which marketing strategies and what outcome you expect from each.  Is it your goal to generate leads?  Do you want to have an online catalog?  Would you like to compile a database of possible clients?  List your objectives in quantifiable form (i.e. increase sales by 20%). This will help you to determine the success of your e-commerce site as time goes on.

Your next task will be to determine the things your possible clients will want and need to know prior to making a purchase.  These things may be:
•    A detailed product/service description complete with pricing guides, key features, product specs, et cetera.
•    Customer reviews and testimonials, reports and studies, customer success stories and positive remarks made by prior customers.
•    A section that covers frequently asked questions (FAQ) to answer questions and cut down on the need for one-on-one assistance.

When planning the construction of your site, you should focus primarily on customer use.  Potential clients will want a site that’s easy to use, easy to navigate, and answers the many questions most consumers have prior to spending money on a product.  You should strive to create a site map that will outline each page of your site, starting with the home page.  You should also plan to implement the use of tools that will track and measure your site activity (i.e. where do customers click most often, and whether or not those clicks lead to a purchase).  This way, as you build your e-commerce web site, you will be able to compare your goals against your results.

As you build, you will want to make certain you’re using the right tools.  Your solidly laid out plan is just the beginning. Next comes the actual construction of your e-commerce web site.  Many business will turn to professionals (a very powerful tool in web building).  The professional web site builders design and create outstanding web sites.  There are unlimited sources of contact for professional web builders.  Use the phone book, or better yet, look online and you will quickly find a firm in your area.

On the other hand, maybe you’re not budgeted to have professional help building your web site.  Many successful e-commerce sites are constructed using tools that are designed to help the layperson create a professional and polished site on their own, without the aid of HTML experts.  Again, resources for such sites can be found all over the Internet and you can even find great web building programs to download for free.

Let’s review.  In order to build a successful e-commerce web site, your primary goal is to keep your customer in mind.  Determine what you’d like to see if you were investigating a product and do your best to build a web page that meets those specs.

Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

If you want to get started quickly and easily in internet marketing, then affiliate marketing is for you. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is sendvisitors to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of developing the product, making the sale, delivering the product and supporting the customer, and you keep 50% or more of the sales

These are a some of the benefits

1. You can get started really quickly because you don’t have to create a product, set up a website and sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
2. You have basically zero investment of your time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

There is one major drawback…

Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
2. By providing great content without a sales pitch, you put them in a buying mood. So when you do send them to the product website, they’re much more likely to buy.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:

1. A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.
2. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

You content mini-site builds the good will, so that when you send them to the product sales page, they are in a buying mood. And even if they don’t buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your affiliate marketing.

When you’re promoting your business online, it’s important that you carefully watch your internet marketing statistics. While marketing statistics can often refer more to industry statistics than your own personal marketing results, you’re going to be most concerned with the statistics that apply only to you and your business for right now.

Your internet marketing statistics include everything from the number of pages views for each page of your website, to how many clicks a particular link in an email or advertisement bring you a new customer, to how many of those click-throughs actually purchase something or sign up for your mailing list so you can contact them later.

These statistics are vitally important, because they tell you if your plan is working or not. For instance, if your internet marketing statistics show that an advertisement you placed in a newsletter drew very few people to your site, and few if any of those signed up for your mailing list or purchased anything, you’ll want to reconsider paying for advertising there again. It could be that your ad was ineffective, and it could be that it’s just not a profitable place for you to advertise. Try an ad there similar to one you’ve used somewhere else with good results, and see if the same thing happens. If it does, then the market is probably just not right for your product or service. If the new ad gets a good response, then you’ll know it’s the first ad itself that didn’t do well, not the market.

If you don’t keep a good eye on your internet marketing statistics, then everything becomes guesswork. Since you’re operating a business and not running a psychic phone line, the guesswork isn’t a wise way to run an internet marketing campaign. Are you getting tons of website hits from a particular link, but few are following through and signing up for a list or buying? It’s still possible that it’s just simply not the market for you, or it could be you don’t have very compelling content on your page designed to make people want to sign up for your list.

You’ve probably had your website search engine optimized for certain keywords pertaining to your business. Type them in to a few different search engines and see if your site is in the top 10 or so listings. If it’s not on the front page of listings, most searchers won’t see it at all because so few ever click as far as the second page of results, unless necessary. Page rank is one of the more important internet marketing statistics you can monitor, right along with link performance.

Another way to make your statistics work for you is by looking at page views referred from within your site. The customer is there, and begins looking at different pages. Which ones get the most hits that way? This is one of the internet marketing statistics that can help you see what searchers like the most about your website.