Posted by: Andy on September 30th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,785 times
To test out my earlier recommendation regarding the ‘do-it-yourself’ email marketing solution, Constant Contact, I’ve set up an account with them to show you how easy it is to collect your website visitors’ email addresses and keep in touch with them through an e-newsletter. The email sign-up box you see above was generated within our Constant Contact account — I simply cut and paste the html code they provided me into this post. Sign up if you’re intersted in receiving monthly updates on the progress of our blog — we’ll highlight the most popular posts of the month and answers reader’s questions.
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Posted by: Andy on September 30th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,284 times
I frequently get inquires regarding e-commerce and how to process credit card payments online. The majority of these inquiries come from small or start-up businesses looking to sell their niche products on the web. Unfortunately, the cost of setting up an online merchant account to accept credit cards is often prohibitive for many of these new businesses.
As an alternative, more affordable e-business solution for small businesses that want to get started selling online, I often suggest PayPal – www.paypal.com. Unless you are a regular eBay user or a routine online shopper, you may not have heard of PayPal, an easy to use real-time payment solution that is quickly becoming the global standard for online payments. Widening acceptance of PayPal as a payment method has helped them become the leading payment network for online auction websites. In fact, PayPal’s market dominance was confirmed when they were acquired by eBay in 2002.
Well known e-business advocate Dr. Ralph Wilson has this to say about PayPal:
The lowest-cost, broad-featured system I’ve found for receiving payments on the Web is PayPal — and it doesn’t require a merchant account or payment gateway. What’s more, many international merchants can use it with relative ease to sell products in US dollars. With its integrated shopping cart feature, it is finally mature enough for small online merchants to use to launch low cost e-commerce sites.
Stay tuned to learn more about online payment solutions. In future posts, we’ll be looking at other solutions designed specifically for small business.
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Posted by: Andy on September 29th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 976 times
To fill this gap in the market, colleges ARE beginning to offer basic web publishing programs for novices and those wanting to learn web design/publishing to supplement their skill-set.
For example, Langara College in Vancouver, BC is offering a ‘Plus 50’ Introduction to Web Publishing Series for people 50 and over and small business owners wanting to learn the basics of web design. Courses offered include HTML, graphics for the web and how to transfer your site to your web hoster using FTP. And prices are reasonable at about $100 per course, which makes the investment of time and money worth it, even if you simply want to use your learning to ensure you hire a skilled web designer who can meet your online business needs.
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Small business owners on a budget often feel compelled to handle every part of their business themselves — this includes building and managing their own websites.
The task of building your own website can be daunting, even when you have the basic technical aptitude to do so. But for those of you who haven’t been able to successfully use Photoshop’s magic eraser to doctor that photo that would be ‘‘perfect if only that pimple on my chin was gone’’ it can seem an insurmountable chore.
Because the learning curve that comes with most web design applications can be high, I don’t usually suggest that small business owners design and build their own sites; the time you’d spend fighting with Frontpage is probably better spent making money at your business and paying a designer to build you a really professional website.
Further, until recently I hadn’t seen much out there in terms of education which would allow a small business owner to quickly gain the skills necessary to build and maintain their own site without spending a bundle, or without committing to a full-time web design program that primarily functions to turn out web designers.
That is, until now.
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Posted by: Andy on September 28th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,055 times
Paying an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialist to optimize your website can be expensive for businesses just starting out. However, for hands-on business owners, there is a do-it-yourself alternative that will defintely pay in the long run: “Organic SEO”. Organic SEO is simply writing keyword-rich website content, properly naming your title and meta-tags, and establishing a linking strategy. If you’d like to read more about organic vs. non-organic SEO, check out Vishal Rao’s article article on webpronews.com.
Most SEO specialists use a combination of organic SEO and non-organic SEO. Although non-organic SEO may give you quicker results, organic SEO has longer staying power because it focuses on content, meta-tag enhancement using proper descriptions, keyword enhanced copy, and link exchanges.
In today’s ITBusiness.ca’s smbextra e-newsletter, Matthew Friedman discusses Web Marketing basics and sums it up with:
In fact, search engines are the place where [small businesses] can create word of mouth… [by building] sites that contain text that search engine webcrawlers can read and file in their databases. Loading pages with hidden meta-text has become next-to-useless. More important is a site that is clear, explicit and whose URL appears throughout the Internet.
SEO trickery may appeal to some as an easy way to quickly improve your search engine rankings, but ultimately focusing on the basics will pay off in the long run.
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Posted by: Andy on September 27th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,184 times
Looking for more details about how recent privacy legislation changes are affecting how you do business? Be sure to bookmark David Fraser’s Canadian Privacy Law blog. This online journal presents the writings of a Canadian privacy lawyer. Here, Fraser outlines the developments in privacy law containing information related to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (aka PIPEDA) and other Canadian and international laws.
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