ECOMMERCE BEGINNINGS - XXXII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

My main website Original New England Enterprises is currently ranked at 437,238 by Alexa.com. While my site is receiving traffic and is ranked well, it is not getting very many final "click throughs", i.e. the purchase of the products that I am marketing. I have been puzzled as to why this isn't working the way I had hoped. So, I recently had a few people review my website to get their "unbiased" opinion on the layout, content, etc., etc.

Some of the feedback surprised me. Comments like: confusing, too many steps "clicks" to reach the main objective, etc.

Sometimes it is hard to have a completely open mind when people are offering you advice. It is easy to get a little defensive on the subject. It is almost like someone saying that your child, who you think is the best thing since sliced bread, may not be "perfect"!

After listening to this advice and thinking about it for a day or so, I realized that I completely agreed with what they were telling me. Sometimes the most obvious things are right in front of you.

So, I took their advice (the main advice I received was that my home page and my ecommerce solution page were too similar, i.e. they had duplicate content and therefore placed an extra step in the process to reach the main goal of providing useful content and of obtaining a sale.

I ended up spending several hours on Saturday and Sunday combining the best of both pages, eliminating duplicate content, and trying to get the new page to be highly focused and on target with the message I am trying to convey in respect to my three main ecommerce solutions:

• website development
• wholesale product sourcing
• successful marketing

Hopefully within the next few weeks I will start to see some positive results with the redesigned home page and the elimination of the "duplicate" ecommerce solution page.

My final advice for 2007 is:

• Keep an open mind

and

• Listen to the advice of others!

I hope everyone had a successful, healthy and happy 2007. And hopefully 2008 will be even better!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

That's all for this week! (and for 2007)

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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

Original New England Enterprises

ECOMMERCE BEGINNINGS - XXXI

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Yes - it's that magical day of the year again. The day that is so special for all of us - especially for the little kids (even for the little kid inside of the BIG Kids!) to have fun.

Well today I'm going to share two special links that I think you will find to be very beneficial. One is to help your online business to become even more successful than it may already be. Yes this information is completely free.

It is, as they say, my passing along a good deed, i.e. some very helpful and informative FREE information to you in the form of multiple very good website analysis videos and software provided through: STOMPER.NET

Click here to access their excellent free video library: STOMPER.NET

The second item that I wanted to share with everyone this week is an excellent video that one of my daughters found on YouTube. It is well worth watching and is an excellent reminder about why we should all cherish our lives to the fullest!

Click here to access this excellent video: SUNSCREEN

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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

Original New England Enterprises

Ecommerce Beginnings - XXX

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

CONTENT, TRAFFIC and HAPPY CUSTOMERS

This past week I did something that I haven't done in almost 10 years. I attended the Town Council meeting in the town that I live in. I won't bore you with all of the details of the meeting, but the reason I am mentioning this here is because of the analogy I see between the town council meeting and the internet. Both are very public venues where people can share information and interact freely with one another. This is very similar to the "new" Web 2.0 where everyone is promoting "user created content" as the newest fad! Well, this "fad" has been around for the past few hundred years in the United States. The Internet is just a new way of packaging "user created" content.

As I sat and listened to the different agenda items being discussed and to different individuals expressing their views, the whole time I kept thinking about shoppers and businesses and customers. I was thinking: " Do the town council members know that the citizens are their customers?" "Do they know how to treat their customers so that they will continue to shop, i.e. live in this town?" The analogy to people who shop online being a websites' "customer" and understanding that you only have one chance to make a great impression on your "customer" was all I kept thinking about during this meeting.

One of the reasons I kept thinking about this was because the council members weren't doing a very good job of listening to their customer's wants and needs. It seemed that they were more concerned with just how they looked to everyone, but they lacked substance. I guess the analogy here is a website that looks great, but as soon as you start to click and read through it all you find are ads and no content of any real value!

Why would anyone want to shop at a place like that? You wouldn't would you? No, you would leave this site and seek out a site that provided real CONTENT to you!

So, if your goal is to be successful online, make sure your website has real CONTENT, so your CUSTOMERS will be satisfied, and maybe even delighted, so that they will keep coming back to your site (TRAFFIC) and/or to buy products that you may be selling.

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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

Original New England Enterprises

Ecommerce Beginnings - XXIX

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

In addition to all of the other things I have done with my websites recently I have also been working on the "Re-construction" of the Successful Site Marketing page on the Original New England Enterprises site, and finally completed its redesign and uploaded the page a few days ago.

The page includes an excellent overview of the key ingredients to a successful web business. The ingredients being: Content, Traffic and Presell, which set the table for the 4th ingredient: Monetization. If you develop your web business along these 4 concept guidelines you too will achieve online success!

I've also tried to include new technologies to make the page more relevant, i.e., by having RSS links, which provide continuously updated, new articles and a complementary YouTube video to explain each of the 4 concepts of CTPM.

When you get a chance check out this great new page: Successful Site Marketing

Other very good news this week is that my just launched (2 weeks ago) site Best New England Made is doing fantastic in the search engines. To date I have found several keyword combinations that are ranking this site #1 on MSN Search. Keyword combinations like: complete new wholesale, new england made, new made wholesale, best new wholesale and best new made. I even found a result for "Best New" where the site ranked #39 out of 2,830,000,000. Now that made my day!

That shows you that if I can that almost anyone can do well at this search engine ranking game if they want to! I have had no formal training on Search Engine Optimization, but I do a lot of research and am constantly reading, and then doing more reading on website related material. So, again, if this sounds like what you love then I'm sure you will be able to be successful too. It's all about being passionate about what you do! Oh well, enough preaching here!

That's all for this week! Have a Great Thanksgiving!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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

Original New England Enterprises

Ecommerce Beginnings - XXVIII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

I would like to start this week's article off by making an announcement. BEST NEW ENGLAND MADE is finally live. After several months of working in the background to develop this site I uploaded it this past week. It's Alexa.com ranking is already around 700,000, which to me is a fantastic beginning.

Remember, to gain access to our FREE Wholesale Products Database you have to sign up for our FREE Newsletter, which when you signup you also get a FREE copy of our ebook on New England Made Gift products sourcing, with advice and links on how to develop your own online business. Go ahead and join our FREE Newsletter to get all of these great freebies. See the form immediately on the right hand side of this page to sign up now. You'll be glad you did!

The addition of this website now completes my marketing circle concerning the New England Market. The sites that I now have posted that are focused in different niches are:

Original New England
Focused on ecommerce website development, product sourcing and site marketing.

Best New England Made
Focused as an online product niche guide of unique New England Made Wholesale products.

Original New England.net
Focused on home internet education and education opportunities through eBay, Clickbank and Google.

Original New England Auctions
Great product auctions and lots of information on developing your own business through eBay on our About Me page.

Best of Original New England
And last, but not least, our blog that you are reading each week that describes our online business development learning adventure.

This is our 28th posting on this blog and it has been a lot of fun so far. I keep being surprised each week at the variety of issues and changes that have been occurring. If you had told me a year and a half ago that all of the above would have been created I would have found it hard to believe. I guess the key to all of this is that it has to be something you enjoy. And I definitely do enjoy doing this.

Thank you to everyone who has assisted me to date for all of your support and help!

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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

Original New England Enterprises

Ecommerce Beginnings - XXVII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

I've been trying to determine the best method for my site navigation. At one point I listed all of the pages on the site on the left hand navigation bar together with all of the links also being listed at the bottom of each page. Then I shortened up the pages listed on the left hand navigation bar to only include what I considered to be the main content pages with links to the second tier pages on each of the main pages. Ying and Yang, Yang and Ying??? After doing an informal survey and considering both the short and long versions I have decided to go with the long version, which I feel will make it much easier for people to locate information on this site. That is the whole purpose of the internet, isn't it? To provide information!

Together with the expanded left hand navigation bar I have also installed a free script from a company named Allwebco. This script, which "floats", i.e. remains on your page on the right hand side as you scroll down, allows you to list key site pages and to navigate instantly back to the top of the page you are on, bring you back to the home page, etc. You can configure the script any way you choose. And, don't forget, I still have all of the page links listed at the bottom of each web page and on my site map page. Again, the idea is to make the site as easy to navigate and as friendly to use as possible for all visitors.

PS The link to allwebco above is to their FREE scripts and add-ons page, which contains all sorts of free website add-ons!

I am still building the new "Site Marketing" page and hope to have it live by the end of this week.

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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 - XXVI

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

Where to begin? The past week and a half has been another whirlwind for me. I've noticed a pattern that has really become pronounced during the past several weeks. Each time I have done a posting on my blog I give a few highlights of what I have worked on recently, what I plan to work on in the short term and some advice based on what I have been learning along the way.

The one thing that keeps everything on an even keel is my "To Do" list. Without this list I would probably be a little lost and unorganized. As the rule says: Always have a plan! The funny thing about the "To Do" list is that it becomes almost a living entity, almost like it takes breathes as it expands one week and contracts another. But just like a hike I recently did in New Hampshire - using the "To Do" list is just like following the trail map so I don't get lost along the way.

Ok - enough preaching on being organized. During the past week or so I revised at least 6 pages on the site to make them flow more smoothly and to make the content more focused. One of the pages was completely restructured and renamed. What used to be Sitebuild Masters Courses is now: Success University This page contains 11 different FREE ebooks that are completely focused on helping you to develop your website business.

The next priority on my "To Do" list is to develop a new page: Successful Site Marketing A rough outline of the information that this page will include information on: Content, Traffic, Pre-Selling and Monetization of your website, website promotion, internet marketing and network marketing. Also included will be an RSS based feed of an SEO article database (continuously updated relevant articles) and several FREE ebooks.

I've just got to keep working on that "To Do" list and enjoy the ride!

PS I'm going to give myself a minor kudo this week. My 3 month average site ranking on Alexa is now at: 563,166 (top 1% of all websites) and the weekly average is at 255,522, but who's counting anyway! That "To Do" list or something must be working (I think the content, keywords, and links are doing the trick)

That's all for this week!

As always, I wish you the best in your success! We hope you found this weeks' article interesting and/or 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