Building eCommerce

Rather than belabor the obvious fact that an eCommerce website is about selling something, I want to ramble a little about how that works.

In this case, I want to discuss the old standby, the content-based site. Supposedly much beloved by search engines and so forth. Oddly enough there are a couple interesting cases with extremely high (like #1 rankings) for sites with essentially no content. There’s more to this game than having a lot of text on your main page. With the right linking, you can put a text-free main page in the number 1 spot. Of course you need some serious linking from from highly authoritative sources, can you say say DMOZ?

So if I’m talking content what’s this stuff about? You need to recognize that the best text in the world won’t necessarily get you decent ranking. Not without some good linking strategies and often a fairly long wait (for certain SE’s, like Google, unless you are one of very few pages competing on those keywords). And you do need to work on at least doing a reasonable amount of optimization. Terrific content, poor linking, and lousy optimization aren’t going to get you traffic.

So there you are, ready to start constructing your eCommerce site. What’s it’s point? And that’s a singular there, you’ll notice. If you want it to do well, you need to focus it. If you’re a genius, maybe you can get it to do 2 or even 3 entirely different things well. But that’s very tough unless those 2 or three things fit into a connected, logical sequence that flows for your visitors. After all if you have two or three desired responses, you’re probably going to need multiple return visits to achieve them all.

Let’s say you’d like a sign-up for a mailing list and an on-site purchase. Obviously you need to put your primary focus on the sign-up. If you get the sign-up, you will have other opportunities to make the sale and convert the visitor and subscriber to a customer.

Your content then has two main, immediate purposes. One is keep the visitor from clicking off. If you succeed at that, then you have a second immediate purpose. A content rich site has the power to draw visitors back, over and over. That means providing value - which can be information, tools, opinions, ideas, resources, entertainment, etc. You have a lot of possibilities which are gong to depend on the nature of your site and the product or products you eventually want to sell.

In the best of all possible worlds, every visitor will be part of your target group. Not too many of us live in that particular world, so your content should also sift your visitors. Don’t provide irrelevant entertainment. The value you offer should be of value to YOUR target group. Nobody’s going to sell to everybody. So there’s no point in providing off-target value. You’re just wasting your time and energy.

You’ll see that a lot of sites make this mistake in the hopes of being sticky. You want to be sticky for your target group. The rest are just eating your bandwidth. If you want to provide content and value and entertainment to everybody who stops by, don’t call it an eCommerce site because what you’ve got is a free family fun center. Having said that, IF you can reliably turn non-target group visitors into members of your target group, then by all means entertain like crazy. As long as what you’re doing is converting them to targeted visitors. As long as it doesn’t defocus your site. But for most of us it’s probably much easier to just focus on people who are already in the target population.

Your content should be pre-selling your visitors. The questions you should be thinking about as you put together your content are things like:

Why should they give you their email address?

What’s in it for them?
Why should they come back?

What’s the problem they have that you’ve got the answer to?

And how do you want them to self-select?

Again, there’s no point in getting a sign-up from someone who’s never ever going to purchase a thing. That’s one of the problems with freebie handouts. If the freebie isn’t pretty directly related to what you’re selling, you can hand out a zillion of them and never make a sale. So if one of your inducements for the sign-up is a free something, be certain that it’s a something your target group is highly likely to want AND that it will further qualify a subscriber as a potential customer, AND that it will point them toward you for the solution to their problem. That solution is the one your site is ultimately about - the one you want to sell them.

For your long-term well-being, a really good product that you know will really solve that problem is what you should be selling. You’re going to be putting in a lot of work to make that first sale and there’s no point in throwing away a potential life-long customer by pushing trash.

Going to stop here even though I didn’t cover quite everything I wanted to. I need to save something for the next time you stop by.

Dsn

I haven’t been able to get here for a while and when I did - today - it turned out that I had a lot of work to do to build up the site. I added a bunch of articles and then never put in a link to the article index. Duh.

All that effort and for nearly a month the articles have been hidden and inaccessible, Smart, huh? This is one of the problems with being busy and doing too many things — really obvious stuff falls through the cracks and just vanishes into nowhere land.

And I’d been thinking that I’d added the digitalpoint co-op to the pages here, but NO. Never did it. Apparently just thought about it. So this evening I’ve been busy changing every damn page on the site to include the links for the advertising co-op. This is a really excellent deal. For one, it’s free. Gotta love free advertising and free links. And for some reason it really boosts your pages in Google. I’ve seen some nice results on other sites and other users have reported some incredible stuff.

I can hear it now - isn’t he going to tell us where?!@#?. Oh yes, here’s the link:

Digitalpoint Ad Co-Op

Here’s the catch - you need to have a dynamic site - phpNuke, blog, all php pages. You can do it with static html pages but you’ll need to have mod_rewrite working on your server. If you have just a few static pages you can change the extension from htm or html to php. There’s a forum to provide technical advice also. EVERY page on your site needs to have the code on it or the spider will not like it and you won’t get any credit. You’ll also need to sign up individually for each site, but you can bind the accounts together and direct the “weight” to whichever of your sites you want. Check this one out, it works, it’s free. Very nice deal.

I have to remember to add the code here for the blog pages too.

Site building never really ends, does it?

Dan