Posted by: Andy on October 31st, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,074 times
This time of year kiosks pop up in local shopping malls hoping to capture a chunk of the holiday shopping frenzy. Ever wonder how they manage to survive the slow days before frantic holiday shopping begins. Shawn Ellis of Tropicari sells jewelry in a mall in North Carolina - he’s a one man shop but has managed to add a couple of other sales channels to his business plan. When the kiosk is slow, Shawn is busy managing his sales from both his Yahoo! store and eBay. He keeps a computer at his mall kiosk, so he can maintain his site and handle online orders between handling live customer orders. Have a read about his three-pronged business plan and it will give you a whole new respect for those kiosks.
Initially, the mall offered faster revenue, he says, “but now the Web sites — eBay and Yahoo! combined — are starting to catch up with the mall.”
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Posted by: Andy on October 30th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,330 times
Major search engines like Google love weblogs like this one as they are full of easy to spider content. If you’re having trouble being found by the search engines, maybe a business blog is the answer.
Search directories crave fresh and new information that is frequently updated, sometimes many times a day. Business blogs consist of many links, written with fresh content that is propagated everywhere on the web.
The more search engines like Google find daily and updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit that business blog, resulting in high search engine rankings for a good part of your business blog-powered data.
Still have doubts. Type the title of our first post to this weblog - “What’s the eBiz Blog all about?” - into the Google search box and eBizBlog.ca will be atop your search results. It works!
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Posted by: Andy on October 29th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,734 times
1 Research your keywords so you know what people are looking for online relating to your product/business
2 Copywrite your press release to (subtly) match these search terms
3 Have special ‘hotlinks’ on hand and use them wisely to track readers and drive traffic to targeted areas of your website
4 Distribute via a wire service that hits the Web
5 Test a variety of releases (this is important if you are targeting more than one audience)
Doesn’t sound too complicated…
So, then, I checked out PR Web Direct, an online press release distribution service, and found out that, for a reasonable entry level price (in US dollars)– sherpa’s case study quoted $80.00 but I couldn’t find anything under $119.00 — this news service will ensure your release shows up on Yahoo! News, Google News, MSN, eMedia Wire, altavista, excite, overture and many more. You also get tracking features which show you how many click-throughs your release has received, how many prints, forwards and so on.
And, if you can afford to spend a little more, you can even hire a SEO PR specialist to do it all the research, writing, optimization and distribution for you.
We’re going to test this service to promote our e-business blog… I’ll keep you posted on the results.
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MarketingSherpa says:
“Getting your press release into searchable news sites is a great way to catch press attention – more than 80% of reporters surf search engines looking for news to write about. But reporters are only a tiny percent of this audience. Most search news site visitors are end-consumers.â€
This comes from a recent case study released on how Southwest Airlines sold $1.5 million in tickets simply by posting 4 press releases online. The best part of this study is that the company’s development process is described. It’s actually quite straightforward and not out of reach for small businesses – especially if you understand the concept of search engine optimization.
Here are the steps to optimizing and distributing a press release online:
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by: Andy on October 28th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 1,682 times
Paystone is gaining ground as online merchants look for alternatives to PayPal and traditional credit cards. Paystone’s business model was designed to support micropayments, which means very low fees on high volumes of transactions. Paystone is one of the few online payment solutions that has been able to scale a low fee schedule online. Some e-commerce solutions have per sales fees which do not make it cost effective for small businesses that want to sell online to do so. Paystone enables “online entrepreneurs” to more profitably sell online. Paystone charges $.10 and 2.8% per sale for items costing from $.25 - $5. This makes it more economical for content sites to make money by selling their content and accepting micro-payments.
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Posted by: Andy on October 27th, 2004
Category: General eBusiness
Viewed: 924 times
Looking for a new way to generate traffic to your website? Get your current visitors to tell their friends about you! A good way to drive visitors to your site is to ask your existing customer base to do it for you. If your site offers something that visitors might want to share with their friends - a free enewsletter, a contest, or a “tip of the day” - include an “e-mail this” button to promote online sharing. There’s nothing more powerful than a personal recommendation from a friend or colleague.
If you had your website professionaly designed, have your current webmaster build this functionality for you. If you’re on a tight budget, there are lots of sites that offer free “tell-a-friend” buttons you can place directly on your site. I’ve gone ahead and added 1-Hit.com’s free tool to this post as an example. Keep in mind that companies that offer ‘free’ tools related to traffic generation may have hidden agendas - be sure to research these tools carefully.
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