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 - 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 - XXII

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

Well, we had another very busy week with several new additions to our business.

A couple of months ago I created a short ebook on sourcing wholesale products in the "Made in New England" niche. My thoughts on how to use this product to assist my business is two-fold. First, we are using it as a free give-away to entice people to join our newsletter. Second, I thought that it would be a good idea to list it as a digital product on eBay for those who didn't wish to join our newsletter. This was the first time that I had attempted to list a "digital product" on eBay. I started by doing some research through the eBay site on how to sell. Here is the link to their help section on digital items: eBay Digital Items The directions are very straightforward and clear. I only had one issue during the entire process and that was a short-term technical issue that eBay was having. I used eBay's live online help for the first time (the service was very timely and the representative was very knowledgeable) to resolve this issue. By the way here are the links to the ebook:

• Join our newsletter: Original New England
• Buy the ebook: eBay Listing

Either way I think you will find the book to be very helpful for wholesale product sourcing!

Last week I also reviewed my goals for the business and decided that for one of the goals (SEO) it would be a good idea to start generating and submitting articles to Ezine Articles again. I had started this process with two article submissions last spring, but somehow got sidetracked from continuing this effort. Submitting articles to Ezine Articles is a great way to build traffic to your website. There are also many other well known article submission sites that are available. My personal decision to choose this one was based on research that I had done.

Another task that I accomplished was the increased monetization on my website. I added some display ads for eBay and also for a company named Maine Goodies I have been doing some research to locate "Made in New England" companies that I can represent as an affiliate and/or that have some sort of a dropship program with their products. So far I have only found the one company, Maine Goodies, and many companies that will only sell on a wholesale basis to you. The search will continue in this area. (Help in this area would be deeply appreciated)

Next on the list for the upcoming week is to begin publishing our monthly newsletter (Original New England Home Business Solutions) again. To see prior issues go to this page: Newsletters
My goal here is to provide relevant and helpful information to people who are developing their own home based online business. The information that I include in each newsletter is contained in 5 categories:

• Article of the Month
• Product Review
• Free Download
• Website of the Month
• Free Giveaway

with the goal being for me to do have done the research for people to save them time developing their business.

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 - XVI

Welcome to this weeks' Ecommerce Beginnings article.

As I mentioned last week the wholesale products database is still under construction, but I have been promised that it will be completed within a few days. That should allow me to input all of the information that I need to into it. The next step will be to go live with the revamped sites. I can't wait to do this!

In the meantime I focused on the creation of my ebook this past week. I am proud to say that it is complete and ready to be published. It ended up being what I would call more of a guide than a book. It is 32 pages in length and provides information on the following:

• A Real Business with Real Business Requirements
• Finding Products to Sell for Your Niche Business
• New England Wholesale Product Shows
• New England Fairs
• Creative Product Sourcing
• Appendix of Helpful Business Links

Once I completed this my next step was to convert this to PDF format so that it could not be altered. An additional requirement was to make sure that all of the hyperlinks contained in the book would be clickable. This is where I ran into some problems. Long story short, if you don't own Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0, ($499) which is more than adequate for this task, there are much less expensive alternatives available.

After doing some research I found out that Adobe has an online service that they charge for, $9.99/month or $99/year that will allow you to convert your word documents into PDF format, and will make it so that your hyperlinks are clickable in your new PDF formatted document. It is a personal decision, based on cost and need. If you think you will need this service full time on a continuous basis then maybe you should buy the full Adobe program. If you only need to use this service occasionally then I think the online option is much more economical. This is the route I chose and it works like a charm. You upload your file, it is converted and a link is sent to your email notifying you that it is complete. Next you click on the link to open the file. If it is ok then you can save it to your desktop, folder, etc. The link to access this is: http://createpdf.adobe.com/

PS You will at least need to have Adobe Reader if you use the online method. Adobe Reader is a free download. Click on this link to access the free download: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

That's all for this week!

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 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