Ecommerce Beginnings - Part XIII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

If you remember, in my posting two weeks ago I discussed some upcoming changes that I am working on to improve the “Original New England Enterprises” website and also announced that we are working on a new website “Best New England Made” that will showcase the “Made in New England” Wholesale Product Theme that will provide a free, comprehensive database of New England manufacturers. The goal is to be able to provide a complete set of services on our sites that will allow one to:

• build a complete ecommerce business
• have access to a unique, focused and in-demand product supply
• have the complete tools required to effectively market this business online
• allow a person to be one of the top 1% of the people who know how to sell online

Well, our plans have changed somewhat from what was originally stated. You know how people always refer to Spring as a time of rebirth, for new things, etc. Well, we decided to get some outside opinions and to personally re-review the entire content of and the message that was being sent by each of our online entities. We are asking ourselves if they make sense, how we can improve the message, the overall design, the content, etc. to help our customers to become successful with their online business. The good thing, while this review is still underway, is that we have decided on some major changes. The one unfortunate part is that the expected release of the new “Best New England Made” site has been pushed back. Our present goal, if all goes according to plan, is to release our revamped business websites at one time (May 1^st is our goal!)

We’re really excited about all of these changes. We’ll keep you updated with the progress of these changes during the next few weeks as the target release date of May 1^st approaches.

As always, I wish you the best in your success!
We hope you found this weeks' article helpful. Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!
Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - Part XII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article. Most people who use the internet are aware of the explosion of the popularity of online video and audio, i.e. YouTube, Facebook, itunes, etc.

Well, as I suspect most online business owners do, I am constantly looking for ways to improve the marketing of my website. I did this by investigating the different options that are available for video and audio. I quickly dismissed the idea of a video for now. I just didn’t think that I would be able to make something that would pass for a professional marketing vehicle for my site. Instead I decided to record an audio file that would review and explain all of the key features that are offered on my website.

Step I – Develop a Script
This initially took me a couple of hours. I let it sit for a day and went back to review it. I ended up making multiple edits and then left it for one more day.

Step II – How to record the Script?
I really had no idea how to accomplish the recording of this script. So, I did what a lot of people must do and I did a Google search for information. I would need a program to record the script and a microphone to hook up to my computer. I was able to locate and borrow a microphone from a friend. Based on my research this saved me between $16 and $29. They are available at places like Best Buy, Staples, etc. and it seems the most popular ones are by Logitech. My friend told me there was a recording program that was standard on MS Windows. I found it in programs – accessories – entertainment – sound recorder. The only problem was that it only recorded for 60 seconds. My script was way to long for that. This prompted me to do another Google search for: "free music recording software". There were what seemed like hundreds of results. I really don’t know how I decided on the one that I did, but I am glad I did. I located a freeware program named Neosound v1.2.4 at the following website: http://audacity.sourceforge.net There was one small problem with this software. It doesn’t allow you to save a file as an mp3. In order to do this the program actually displayed a message that told me that I needed to download a file named: Lame 3.97. Back to Google for another search. After doing this I was now able to save my recording as an mp3 file. I was making progress!

Step III – Placing the mp3 file on my Website
I found an inexpensive program named: "Skinnable Big Button Welcome Message" for this that is offered through a company named Allwebco. Allwebco offers hosting services, full featured web templates and many free and/or inexpensive website add-ons. Their website link is: http://www.allwebco.com. All you have to do is pay $12, download the file to your desktop and install it. Then follow the instructions to install the files into your website. That’s it and, in addition, they give you around 12 different sets of skins to use if you don’t like the stock set. (see the notes below from allwebco’s site)

Skinnable Big Button - Hook a microphone to your computer. Record any message. Convert this to an mp3 file (help included) and easily add this to any website or template.Add a Flash sound message or mp3 music file to any website or template. Compatible in all newer web browsers this download includes: One message button, 24 different skins, all PSD files and step by step instructions to add this to any website. Includes help with converting .wav files. Flash software is not required to change skins.

Step IV – FTP your new files onto your Server
All that is left now is to upload your new files and you’ll be all set. Even I, the non-technical person that I am, was able to accomplish these tasks. All it took was a little bit of research and a lot of patience when I was recording the script (my phone rang in the middle, the dogs barked, the doorbell rang, etc. – no kidding). I finally waited until real late one night when everything was quiet to do this.

As always, I wish you the best in your success!
We hope you found this weeks' article helpful. Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!
Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - Part XI

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article. I must admit that I have been playing a little bit of hooky lately. I guess I just needed a little bit of "mental" as well as "physical" rest. To do this I escaped to the wilds of New Hampshire during the past week to do some skiing. I brought one of my daughters along to make it a father/daughter trip also. The conditions and the company were excellent. As they say: "Just what the doctor ordered".

The point behind this story is that I believe most of us can relate to the fact that our lives are much more fast paced, no hyper-paced, than they used to be! The reasons for this are varied, but the fact remains that they are. Many of us are overworked and stressed out with what seems like a million things to do and not enough time to do them in. Can you relate to this? Does this describe your life? Unfortunately, it seems like this is the norm for us. One area that highlights this frenetic, fast paced life is the in-box of your email account. This is the new home (vs. the nightly dinnertime phone calls) where we are constantly bombarded with all sorts of solicited (non-spam) and unsolicited (spam) information.

If you are like me, most of the time you probably don't bother to open and/or read the majority of these emails. You quickly reach for the delete key and poof - they are instantly gone!

My advice to you, as hard as it may be to take with the limited time we all seem to have, is to take a couple of extra minutes to screen these emails. The reason I am recommending this to you is that buried amongst the majority of plain old garbage can be some real gems. Just like the old-time miners sifting through tons of dirt to get to the small bit of gold. I have discovered a few of these gems that contain excellent, quality information, in just this manner, when I wasn't looking for them.

Below are a couple of the ecommerce advice gems that I have come across in the past few months, by following my own advice, that may be of interest to you:

Practical Ecommerce

Practical eCommerce magazine was launched in July 2005 by Kerry and Joy Murdock in Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. Its mission from the start has been to provide down-to-earth articles and advice to help smaller businesses succeed online. This editorial content was originally delivered primarily through a monthly, printed magazine, but it now (2007) includes this website, podcasts, and an email newsletter (EcommerceNotes), as well as the printed magazine, which is now bi-monthly.

Real folks are behind this company. We are a small business ourselves, and we take seriously the notion of helping other small businesses decipher the complexities of migrating online or improving their online operations.

Web Marketing Today

Dr. Ralph Wilson formed Wilson Internet Services at the very beginning of the commercial Internet in 1995 to help small to medium businesses and organizations learn how to use the Internet effectively.

As always, I wish you the best in your success!

We hope you found this weeks' article helpful. Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!

Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - Part X

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article. After the past month of persistent cold we finally got a taste of spring today, with the temperature around 50 degrees, together with bright sunshine and light winds. So, my friend and I took a ride during lunch down to the beach (we work less than a mile from the ocean in Rhode Island. Yeah, I can hear everyone now - tough life right?) and watched around 20 people who were surfing on some really good waves. Dreams of the summer that is soon to be!

Well with the approaching spring there are several large New England Product Tradeshows coming up. They are the 23rd annual New England Products Trade Show on March 17-19, the Cape Cod Gift Show on March 18 and 19, and the New England Gift Show on Oct. 1-3. All three of these shows showcase the "Made in New England" product theme. Together there are several hundred unique "Made in New England" product manufacturers represented at these shows. So, if you are looking for products to sell on your online business, be it on eBay or on your main business website, don't miss the opportunity to check out one or all of these shows.

Lately, in addition to focusing on fine tuning and the marketing of Original New England Enterprises , I have been working on the development of my next website. The idea with this site is for it to complement Original New England Enterprises by focusing on the "Made in New England" product theme/niche. The name of this site is going to be Best New England Made. My goal is to have this new site online by the middle of March at the latest, to coincide with the spring "Made in New England" product shows.

The focus and goal of this site, as reflected by its' name: "Best New England Made" will be to showcase the made in New England product niche. Additionally, as part of this site, we will be providing a free, comprehensive database of New England manufacturers, as a complement to the services we offer with Original New England Enterprises complete Ecommerce Solutions. So, now you will have the ability and option to:

• build your complete ecommerce business
• have access to a unique, focused and in-demand product supply
• have the complete tools required to effectively market this business online
• be one of the top 1% of the people who know how to sell online.

Whew - that was a mouthful! It almost sounds too good to be true, but in this case it is 100% true and backed by solid guarantees! The key is to follow the process that is taught in these solutions, by working smarter, not harder and by being persistent in your quest for success.

There is a fantastic book that I think everyone would benefit from by reading. It is: Pushing Up People, by Art Williams. You can find this amazing book on Amazon.com. The main idea of this book is that by showing others how to be successful that you too will become successful. I hope you take the time to read this. I truely believe you will benefit from this if you do.

As always, I wish you the best in your success!

We hope you found this weeks' article helpful. Make sure you stop back each week for our latest installment. Take care and have a great week!

Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - Part IX

Hello and welcome back to this weeks' article on Ecommerce Beginnings.

Well I think we all know what time of year it is, don't we. Yes - it's tax time. This is that wonderful time of year when we need to make sure that all of our records are in order so we can submit our tax forms to Uncle Sam and hopefully don't have to pay any additional taxes.

This year will be my first year completing my taxes as an official business. I incorporated as a single owner LLC. This means that any income, etc. will pass through the corporation and will be treated as personal income. Well, I started off the year doing everything I thought I was supposed to do correctly. I went out and bought Quickbooks Professional and spent some time setting up my company file, with the chart of accounts, etc. This program is an excellent and fairly straightforward piece of valuable software to keep your books with. Don't just take my word for it, you can trust the thousands of other satisfied customers opinions on this matter.

Well, I kept fairly good records throughout the year, but I didn't enter the information into Quickbooks like I should have. This neccessitated me spending an entire day with a friend who is an accountant to input all of my data around 2 weeks ago. I learned a valuable lesson here, because it can be difficult to try to remember what all of the transactions were throughout the year and we know what the result of this can be - CHAOS!!!, which for people who are over 40 know is the opposite of CONTROL. Remember: GET SMART!

The end result is that I now have a nice, well organized balance sheet, a profit & loss statement together with all of my records now accurately documented. I also have a clear picture of the current state of my new business. Shame on me for not doing this along the way, but I definitely learned my lesson going forward.

Two links that I am recommending:
QuickBooks and Janelle Elms to help you with your finances and general business advice. Both are excellent sources of information to guide you in your business.

That's it for this week. I hope you have a great week and please stop back next week for another informative and possibly entertaining article.

Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - VIII

Welcome back to Ecommerce Beginnings. This weeks' posting is a little late because I have been having some issues with my website and its' ranking on Google. You see, my main site: www.original-new-england-enterprises.com has been, as they say: "kicking butt" in all of the search engines, with a large number of #1's for multiple keyword combinations. That was until this past week when my site all but disappeared from the Google pages. What happened??? I had no idea, so I started to do some research. It seems that there is some sort of a correlation between my website and the service I had been using for my blogging posts (Serendipity). Each time that I sent out a new post on my blog approximately two days later my website would drop out of site on Google, to reappear a few days later after the Gogglebot had revisited.

Now, I'm not positive about the correlation between Serendipity and my website. I have also been using pinging services each time I send out a new posting. These services are Pinggoat and RSS Junky. This issue has only effected my rankings on Google. My rankings have not been effected on Yahoo, MSN, AlltheWeb,etc. by this. It is definitely perplexing!!!

My inability to solve this problem has led me to shift my postings to this venue (Google Blogger). Maybe that will solve this problem. If anyone has had a similar problem or knows of a solution to this please let me know ASAP! If your solution works I will put your children through college. I will paint your house for free - you get the idea!!!

That's it for this week. As always: Thanks for stopping by and please stop back next week for some more interesting and hopefully informative information.

Mark@original-new-england-enterprises.com

Ecommerce Beginnings - VII

Monday, January 29. 2007

Welcome back for this week's article on Ecommerce Beginnings. I hope everyone had a great week!


Research

During the past few weeks I did a lot of research on Email Management Services providers. I needed to find a solution to manage my email marketing efforts. So, like many people I went to the Google Search Engine and typed in: email marketing solution. This query returned 4,120,000 possible results. What to do next? To save some time I pretty much did what most people probably do - I investigated the options presented on the first page. All of a sudden I was faced with another entirely new language to learn. Terms like: permission based email marketing, pop-up creator, double opt-in confirmation, unlimited autoresponders, and on and on the list went????


Decision

I ended up narrowing the list down to 4 different email marketing solutions. I read each of their features offered lists, checked out their price options, some were by the month, some were set up to charge based on the number of emails sent each month, some were set up based on your birth date, combined with your mother's maiden name and if anyone on the list was named Smith.

Well, I almost felt like this after trying to compare all of the apples to apples to oranges options offered by each company. In fact most of the options were very similar, which made the decision process a little more difficult.


Note: I am currently signed up to recieve several ezines from well known and reputable businesses and online marketing gurus. Each one seems to use a different provider and they each mention how happy they are with their email service provider. Just another curveball thrown at me in the decision process.

Well, I like things to be fairly straightforward and simple. You know, I like lots of features, but I also like the options to be easy to understand and implement. I don't need to load my brain up with too much more as it is! I ended up choosing GetResponse because of several factors:

* their website layout (logical and well organized)
* online video tutorials (very helpful - also provided in PDF format)
* streamlined plans to choose from (you know the KISS principle)
* and last, but not least, their pricing, (either a limited free plan to start out with, or a Pro version)

Note: You know those marketing types. They use terms like: basic, intermediate, etc. and then they use the term: "PRO"! Well, who wouldn't want to be a user of the "PRO" version? Doesn't "PRO" sound so much cooler? Guess which one I chose? Those marketing people are geniuses aren't they?


Learning to Use

As I mentioned above, GetResponse has 4 well organized videos that you can watch to learn "how to" set-up and manage your email marketing campaigns. I will admit that I watched the videos twice. It definitely helped and was prompted more by my lack of knowledge in this area.

I decided that I wanted my website's newsletter to be formatted on one of my website pages vs just a text email message with links. I felt that this was a better choice for marketing purposes. Next I had to create several new web pages and an opt-in form. Click here to see the NEW FORM

The new pages I created were to support the process of capturing an email address, verifying they meant to make this choice, sending another email for their free e-book download, then the actual newsletter notification email, the newsletter itself, with the multiple articles and product download options. Whew!!! It was a lot of work, but I actually enjoyed it. I was just like a proud new father showing off his new child to the world! Click here to see my 1st NEWSLETTER Please let me know what you think of the newsletter and/or if you would like to see other options/choices offered in it.


Conclusion

As I stated above there were many excellent email marketing solution options available to choose from. Here are links to 4 that I felt were the best options to choose from:

* GetResponse
* Constant Contact
* Aweber
* Vertical Response

I'm sure there are more excellent options available, I just didn't have the time to keep researching all of them. I hope this information proves helpful to you. Make sure you stop back next week for another entertaining and informative article and Have a great week!

Mark@Original-New-England-Enterprises.com