Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Wrapping
up your E-commerce site We’re
almost finished with our e-commerce site. You’ve
got an excellent idea of what to sell, you know your budget and expectations,
you have a Web site (with superbly designed home pages) ready to go, your bank
is ready to process your customer’s credit card purchases, and now you’re
ready for the big time. One last
piece of the puzzle: letting the world know we’re out there. Before
you broadcast your URL to the word, make sure you Web site is tight.
Check all the links, make sure pages display properly, and guarantee your
visitors an error-free visit. There
are many tools to help you check your site, some free, including NetMechanic (www.netmechanic.com).
For some tips on promoting your Web site, check out the Web Marketing Today site
(www.webmarketing today.com) where there is a list of twenty-six ways to promote
your Web site. The
traditional way of boosting Web site traffic (and hence purchasers) is through
advertising. However, this is a
very expensive way to generate business. Advertisements
in magazines, newspapers, radio and TV all cost big bucks, and are likely to
blow away your budget in a few seconds. There
must be a better way, and there is. Most
people who surf the Web looking for sites do so through a search engine. Therefore, the key to getting visitors to your site is to
list yourself with all the major search engines.
This makes sense from a targeting point of view.
Suppose you sell an esoteric piece of computer equipment or software:
advertisements in magazines are not likely to generate much traffic, but someone
searching AltaVista, for example, specifically for that subject will be directed
to your site. Registering
with search engines is surprisingly easy to do, and costs you nothing (more on
that in a moment). There are several Web pages that do nothing more than
register you with different search engines and portals.
At these sites, you enter a short description of your site’s purpose,
its primary products, your URL and e-mail address, and the site engine then
submits the information to dozens of search engines and portals for you.
The most commonly used sites for this process are Submit Away! (www.submit-away.com)
and Self Promotion (www.selfpromotion.com).
Some ISPs offer search engine submission routines, too.
For example, if you are using I-Direct as your Web hosting service, they
have a submission engine that hits the most popular portals and search engines,
free of charge. Search
engine registration using these free services works, but don’t expect to be at
the top of the list when you enter a keyword at the search engine site.
To move to the top of a list you need to have hits: lots of them.
There are many companies on the Internet that specialize in making your
site the top of the list by artificial means, and these companies charge for the
service. Are they worth it? It depends on your business.
If you are selling something fairly unique, you don’t have to worry
about being embedded at the bottom of a five hundred name list.
On the other hand, if you sell “computers”, you’re going to be far
down the list. But remember one of
our key tenants in setting up our e-commerce business was to have a unique or
special service or product, so this shouldn’t be a problem for you. You
can monitor your site’s popularity and progress with many search engines
through a few sites, too. The
Search Engine Watch site (www.searchenginewatch.com)
explains how the different search engines work and how to get yourself higher up
on the list. There’s some very
good advice on the site about how to improve your ranking in the engines. On-line
banner ads are ubiquitous on the
Web, and usually ignored by visitors. However,
they are a good way to generate ads for your site on other sites.
The way most of these banner ad exchanges work is simple: for every two
ads that are displayed on your site, one of your ads gets displayed on someone
else’s site. You need to design
the ads, and link the code for the banner site into your Web code, but the
process is not difficult. Some banner ad sites let your control what kind of ads
appear on your site, others don’t. The
most commonly used banner ad exchange sites are MSN LinkExchange (www.linkexchange.com)
and Flycast Network (www.flycast.com). The
primary problem with banner ads is that your site looks like any other
high-voltage Web site with lots of stuff to sell, and sometimes banner ads take
a while to load. Whether you want
to use banner ads is up to you: they can be effective if the subject matter and
ad design is good. The
best type of advertising is free: word of mouth. When you do get visitors to your site, treat them well, give
them excellent service, and they will tell friends.
Some sites like to get feedback from customers and permission to quote
from the feedback on the site. This
can be effective if used properly, but make sure you are not annoying your
customers with requests for good quotes and references.
This
wraps up the e-commerce series. Next
issue, we start with a whole new look at advanced networking techniques,
including Virtual Private Networks, Remote Access Servers, Proxy Servers, and so
on. All the columns in this series,
as well as all previous Help desk columns, are available on my web site at http://www.tpci.com. |
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Send mail to
tparker@tpci.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
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