Creating An Instant Ecommerce Web Site With Little Or No Money

By William Lockhart

Creating an ecommerce web site doesn’t have to be as difficult or as costly as you may think. Many forms of ecommerce solutions can be extremely intimidating to new online marketers.

Though many new online marketers quickly realize the benefits of offering products online that can be instantly purchased and processed by means of an efficient shopping cart system, many fine the process of establishing efficient ecommerce systems complex, costly and technically intimidating. This is totally understandable however these factors alone drive many new online entrepreneurs away from testing and implementing eccomerce solutions that could bolster their visitors web experience and earn extra income from their web properties.

This doesn’t have to be the case, particularly if you do a little research. Ecommerce enabled web sites don’t have to involve laborious activity and costly start up investments.

One way to add value to your web property is to find an ecommerce solution that is “pre-designed” and pre-populated with products that compliment your existing content. These ecommerce systems can be plugged right into your existing web site and many require very little technical skills. Some pre-designed ecommerce solutions offer web site owners the ability to customize content, design and product categories with design elements and products that easily fit into your current web scheme and enormous the value of your existing content and offerings.

Here’s a few reasons you should consider this option, especially if you’re new to online marketing and ecommerce activities:

1- Low start up cost to completely ecommerce enable your web site.

Obviously this is a huge advantage to those that want to determine eccomerce feasibility without spending huge sums of money.

2-Quick deployment with very low technical challenges.

If you simply do not have the technical resources for deploying an ecommerce site this totally removes the technical road blocks associated with deployment.

3-Scalability of the ecommerce solution is flexible and immediate.

Once you’ve tested the ecommerce solution you can quickly scale the product inventory and expand your offerings without having to call upon exhaustive resources and technical expertise.

4-Design customization of your ecommerce site for easy integration into existing content.There’s no need to re-invent the wheel here, simply extend your current design, color schemes and layouts to the pre-designed ecommerce solutions to easily blend into your web site.

5-An overall reduction of typical headaches associated with design, development and deployment.This is one area that totally intimidates many web site owners that are considering expanding their web properties to include ecommerce functionality. Pre-designed ecommerce solutions can totally eliminate these hurdles and allow you to easily test and deploy your ecommerce ideas.

6-Immediate niche level testing of your ecommerce ideas.

In many cases you may not be sure if your web site lends itself to ecommerce activities. Pre-designed, plug and play ecommerce web sites allow you to determine feasibility and test additional potential revenue streams that can bolster your existing web properties.

Although all of the factors listed above can prove vital with respect to adding ecommerce functionality to an existing web property, there are a few that are particularly important if you’re considering adding dynamic eccomerce functionality and additional monetization to any existing web presence.

One of the biggest advantages by far is the low start up cost associate with monetizing your web site with an ecommerce system. Low start up cost will allow you to test your ideas, offer targeted product lines for your visitors and evaluate the feasibility of expanding your ecommerce offerings without the fear of spending tons of money to do so.

Under typical conditions, testing any form of ecommerce system could be very expensive. Pre-designed ecommerce solutions eliminate this hurdle and allow you to accomplish this with very little effort, design cost and “back-end” administration cost. In most cases the products offered by these types of ecommerce systems are direct shipped to your customers and you never even have to become involved with the fulfillment process. It simply couldn’t be any easier than that!

Once you determine the feasibility of adding an ecommerce system to your web site you can migrate to a more controlled platform that allows more flexibility and increased profit margins once your initial testing is complete and you’re experienced positive results.

This process can occur after as little as a month or two of testing and satisfactory results have been observed.

One of the more pressing questions regarding pre-designed ecommerce systems is this… “Where can I find these types of pre-designed ecommerce systems that I can test?”

After researching a few of these options I’ve identified a solution that is easy, effective and quite simple to implement.

Here’s a simple solution that allows virtually anyone with a web site or web presence to start making extra money today. Amazon and Amazingwebstores.com offers a simple plug and play solution that’s quite easy to customize and integrate into almost any web site.

This is also effective because you can use the credibility of Amazon and the power of Amazon’s product inventory and technology to easily sell through your own customizable web store.

This gives you the ability to operate a fully functional web site powered by Amazon in minutes. Better yet they offer a FREE 7 day trial which allows you to familiarize yourself with the functionality and features associated with the program.

Don’t allow the possibility of adding eccomerce enabled functionality to your existing web properties to intimidate you. Sure cost, administration factors and fulfillment are all challenges however these issues can be addressed with solutions that are quite easy to implement. All that is require is a little research, testing and of course a little creativity.

Statistics show that online shoppers are steadily increasing. Test your eccomerce options by using pre-designed ecommerce web sites and systems that provide full functionality and credibility to expand your web presence and add value and functionality to your web properties.

As email marketing continues to become a key element of any online marketing campaign, it’s important to make sure that your recipients are actually “receiving” your key email messages & promotions.

Spam filters have become increasingly sophisticated, therefore online marketers must adapt to the changing strategies implemented by Spam identification technology. Failure to do so will invariably land your key offers in “Spam” folders.

If you use email marketing to reach “opt-in subscribers”, there’s a number of approaches you can consider if you’re trying to avoid the possibility of your email communications getting tagged as “Spam”.

The first and obvious choice is to perform a “Spam check” inside your autoresponder platform. Though this is a good approach, it doesn’t guarantee that your outgoing message won’t be tagged as “Spam” once it reaches it’s destination.

Here’s a different approach that will enable you to avoid the Spam filters and increase your web branding and retention rates all rolled into one simple strategy. Not only will you avoid the Spam filters, your “key” email offers will get more exposure and possibly reside on the recipient’s computer much longer. As you know, most email messages have a very limited “exposure window”. This is the length of time that your email may be seen, read or acted upon.

Let’s assume your email advertisement was lucky enough to escape the “spam police” and it arrives in your recipient’s inbox as planned. When most people open their email, they quickly scan for messages from family, friends and “senders” that are easily recognizable.

These emails are considered “high value” emails. Once the reader addresses all “high value” emails, they’ll quickly scan “subject headers”, to see if anything else “stands out” as a topic of interest.

Let’s further assume that you’ve taken the time to create an “eye catching” subject header that motivates the reader to actually click on your email and open it.

The reader quickly recognizes your email and mentally tags it as “promotional” in nature, a much less “valued” email. This is true, even if they are somewhat interested in your offer.

Let’s further assume that the email refers to a product or service of interest to the reader. They scan it, and think to themselves…

“This is interesting, I’ll have to visit that web site and learn more about this product/service, WHEN I HAVE TIME”.

Occasionally they’ll click on the link provided to visit your web site at that very moment, however most email statistical research indicates, more likely than not, the reader will move on to the next email. This is done with good intentions for they assume they will “revisit” your email at a later, a more convenient time.

Bottom line, the reader never returns to your email that informs them of your important offer and most often your email is deleted in a few days during a “mass delete” action when the inbox is being “cleaned”.

Here’s one way to make your email offers different and extend the life of your important promotional messages.

1 – Create a promotional email just as you normally would but convert your finished message to a PDF file. This allows you to use color, graphics and additional elements that usually are omitted because they increase the probability of having your email tagged as Spam.

This approach also gives you more flexibility as far as the creative process is concerned and allows you to be more descriptive about your offer.

Once converted, have the PDF file uploaded to your web-hosting platform.

2 – Create a second email that you will actually send to the subscriber. This email “touches” on the major benefits of your offer and instructs the reader to “click here” for more information. Of course the link should point to the PDF file you just created. The message within the email should be short and to the point. It should also be structured in a manner that raises curiosity. The primary objective of this email is to motivate the reader to click on the link. If the reader responds and clicks your link, you’ve just accomplished two key things…

1 – You’ve shortened the length of your email communication substantially, thus reducing the chances of having your email filtered by the “Spam police”.

2 – When the recipient clicks on the link in your short email and the PDF file appears in their browser, if they are interested in your offer they will most likely “SAVE” the PDF to their hard drive. Even if they don’t return to it immediately, it remains on their hard drive and the possibility of a “revisit” to your offer is increased.

They may even forward your offer to a friend or family member. This is a substantial increase in the “exposure window” of your email advertisement.

Try linking key promotional messages to PDF files for SPAM avoidance and extended “email shelf life”. Email marketing doesn’t look like it’s going away, neither are spam filters.

Develop new strategies for reaching key subscribers and prospects when using email marketing as a promotional tool, you’ll be glad you did.

 Let’s face it, blogs (or weblogs) are getting incredibly popular amongst people with an internet connection due to the ease and practicality of setting one up. Despite this however, there is no value in having a blog if no one is visiting and reading it! Therefore, it is important to know exactly how to drive traffic to your blog if you desire to increase your readership or monetize it. To do that, here are 10 quick tips to generating more traffic to your blogs:

Tip 1: Reciprocal Linking
One of the most proven ways to gain targeted traffic is to exchange links with other bloggers or site owners.
This is a task which requires a little work – by sending an email request for a link exchange with a few follow ups but the results are worth it.

Another linking method is to simply write a testimonial for a product you have purchased. If your testimonial is good, product owners will usually publish it on their sales page with your blog URL included. If you want to skip the traditional way of exchanging links and go for the easier way, you can automate the process with various software and services found on the net. Just do a search at Google.com and you will have a list of these.

Tip 2: Blog Commentaries
Do you know that your comments also have high potential in generating targeted traffic to your blog and is an effective linking strategy?

All you have to do is find a blog related to your niche and post your comments. At the end of your comments you can include a link back to your blog, this way people who are interested will be able to visit your blog as well. However you should never misuse this to spam other blogs.

Tip 3: Blog Directories
Blog directories are similar to search engines just that they cater only to searches for blogs. It is advisable to submit your blog to the major directories, some of which include feedster.com, technorati.com and blogstreet.com.

Similarly, there are many blog services like pingomatic.com which you can use to ping your blog. Pinging your blog notifies the service that you have updated your blog. These services will then publish your new posts and you get traffic from interested readers and search engines.

Tip 4: Writing Articles
This is one of the best ways of pulling targeted, steady and long-term traffic to your blog. By writing your own articles and submitting them to article directories, you can invite a lot of targeted visitors to your blog.

In order to generate traffic by writing articles, you need to include your resource box at the end of every article you have written. The resource box is where you promote and introduce your website or blog.

To truly maximize your results, you need a system to create, submit and leverage off your articles easily. One of the best available is seen at http://EzineArticle.com/aa.htm

Tip 5: Writing Press Releases
Press release is a very effective way of generating instant traffic to your blog. Although press releases only pull in short-term traffic, they can work very well if you continuously write and submit press releases regularly while monetizing the traffic received.

PRWeb.com is one of the oldest and most trusted sources for news distribution on the web. Or you can use an automated press release service like http://www.SubmitYourPressRelease.com to do the work for you quickly.

Tip 6: Start A Blog Mailing List
The phrase “the money is in the list” is true in all businesses. If you want to succeed online, you must start building your own list of targeted subscribers. You can send your subscribers to your blog anytime you have new posts.

By the same token, you can also get your blog readers to subscribe to a ‘blog update’ list which can be used to notify them when you have updated your blog. REPEAT traffic through returning visitors is a key traffic strategy and you can control that with this method.

Tip 7: Publishing Your Own Ezine
You can also provide your subscribers with useful information in several series with an autoresponder. An ezine is often called an online magazine. By publishing your own ezine, you are able to attract readership to your blog when you advertise it in your ezine.

Tip 8: Pay For Traffic
If you have a good monetization strategy for your blog through affiliate programs, Google Adsense and a mailing list, you should consider using paid advertising to drive traffic to your blog.

Recommended options include pay-per-click advertising, ezine advertising and huge banner exposures.

Tip 9: Giving Out Free Reports
Give out free viral reports to promote your blog. Providing useful information in your free reports can trigger readers’ interest to know more about you and your websites. More information on this tactic can be found at http://www.MiniEbook.com.

Tip 10: Niche Discussion Boards
Discussions boards or forums can deliver targeted traffic to your blog. If you have a blog about gardening, try searching for a related niche forum with huge traffic to participate in.

Most forums will usually allow you to include a signature file where you can write a few sentences of words. You can invite people to visit your blog through the signature file by posting more regularly.

In conclusion, realize that getting traffic to your blog should not be viewed as a one time effort. Commit and focus on a long-term strategy in order to succeed. It is all about gaining the momentum.

Once you get a decent amount of traffic to your blog, you will attract more visitors to it everyday as you work on it. As time goes by, you will have an amazing amount of traffic to your blog which you never thought was possible!

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