Start A Profitable Online Business Now

desmond — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:01:15 +0000

The forecasts for ecommerce in 2010 look good. Projections indicate that ecommerce will continue to grow even if the economy hasn’t yet fully recovered from the downturn. This can be attributed to many factors but all of which point to the same conclusion: this is a good time to start a profitable online business. If you’ve got an income opportunity home based business idea, don’t just sit on it – start a profitable online business now.

We’ve presented quite a few viable home based business ideas in previous posts. This time around, we will take a look at what we can do to take full advantage of the expected growth in ecommerce.

It has been predicted that ecommerce sales in Europe will top 300 billion Euros by 2011 with the UK having the strongest growth rate. This is certainly good news to those thinking about starting a new business in the UK. Figures show that there will be more people looking to purchase online. That said, whether or not they can find your store and end up making a purchase depends on a few factors.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a crucial element in getting your store ranked for certain keywords. Be sure to check to see if the keywords you’ve used for the past year or so are still relevant. There is no point in ranking well for keywords that people hardly search for. Most merchants just optimize their main store page and main category pages. However, many merchants have reported success in targeting less competitive keywords for their product pages as well. Targeting less competitive keywords for your sub categories, info pages and product pages could result in more visitors to your site. The more pages your site ranks for, the more chances of drawing in visitors.

SMO

Social Media Optimization is also an important element in promoting your brand and products. There are tons of social media, micro blogging, video and image sharing sites out there with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube having the most potential for businesses. Many major brands have at least one account on these sites. Nike has 3 on Facebook alone. SMO affords a business a very cost-effective way to get word across in a relatively short period of time. Many companies have utilized sites like Facebook to launch viral marketing campaigns to good effect. Popular sites like Facebook have 250 million active users with half of them logging in every day. The potential is just too great for any business to ignore.

Conversion

Of course all the traffic in the world means nothing if visitors to your site remain just visitors. Traffic conversion is what it’s all about. In order to achieve as high a conversion rate as possible, all the elements on your site – images, content, layout – must be designed to convert visitors into buyers. In order to find out what works and what doesn’t, conduct an A/B split test (to determine the better of two variations) or a multivariate test (to test multiple combinations). You should carry out these test periodically as visitor trends tend to change. These tests also come in handy when you want to maximize your marketing efforts. You’ d be surprised to find that just tweaking the layout or changing certain colors can result in a conversion spike.

We hope that the advice we’ve given here will be useful to you should you decide to start a profitable online business soon. With an affordable and full-featured ecommerce solution and a rosy economic outlook for ecommerce in general this year, this could be the right time to find success online. With the right products, good research and well-targeted marketing, your very own successful web store beckons. Good luck!Recent Posts:

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Retain Customers With Reward Points

desmond — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:28:26 +0000

Ecommerce statistcs and starting a new business gurus constantly state that customer retention is an important factor in the survival and growth of a company. It does not matter if you are a manufacturer specializing in the production of specialized instruments with two or three clients or an online web store with thousands of customers — every customer is important. Remember that one bad remark can go a long way towards destroying a company’s credibility and eliminating a customer base regardless of its size.

In this article we will explore the use of reward points (a feature available with InstanteStore’s shopping cart service) in retaining customers as well as improving sales conversions for new visitors.

The reward points feature is available with the InstanteStore shopping cart service. This is a wonderful income opportunity home based business feature which is easy to use and can potentially lead to better sales. As we explored in these two previous posts – Cross-sell Your Products To Better Sales and Selling Variations To Improve Sales – repeat customers are very important to a store. If customers come back to a store and make follow-up purchases, it means there are a few things about the store that are working right, either in general or for a particular customer niche. Happy customers tell friends and make recommendations. In short, they’ll do a lot of your advertising for you.

In this article we will look at Reward Points. Reward points work the same way as reward stickers or point coupons that conventional offline stores use to very good effect. Many marketing strategies that are often used by offline stores can be adapted for online stores as well. The reward sticker system has been used for years because, plain and simple, it works. The use of accumulative point systems by credit card companies, airlines and fuel kiosks are testament to their effectiveness in retaining customers.

Merchants usually reward customers for making purchases but they rarely reward visitors. You might wonder: What should a visitor be rewarded for? In earlier articles we talked about making pages sticky and getting visitors to carry out certain actions like taking surveys. Merchants should reward visitors who take part in quizzes and surveys with reward points which can then be redeemed for discounts at the store once these visitors have collected enough points.

Visitors are more likely to return if they have a good reason to. Make sure you convey how easy it is to gain reward points. Ensure that your surveys and quizzes are updated weekly to keep it interesting. This is the bait that will lead to a first purchase for many customers.

To summarize, maximize your shopping cart service features and use reward points to retain customers as well as to convert visitors. This may well result in a slower conversion rate for a period as it takes time to accumulate points but in the long run, this investment should have a positive effect on your sales.Recent Posts:

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Ecommerce Shopping Cart Blog by InstanteStore » income opportunity home based business

Start A Profitable Online Business Now

Retain Customers With Reward Points