This week was a big week in my business life. I closed the sale for Northcedar.com, my very first ecommerce site opened in 2003. Northcedar.com was a five year learning experience for me. When I opened the store I new nothing about ecommerce, SEO, online marketing, or shopping carts. In the five years I have switched shopping carts three times, hired two different SEO firms, two different marketing firms, and a web designer or two.

Selling Northcedar got me thinking about when it really is the best time to let something you love go. No, we’re not talking about your grandmother on life support, or the girlfriend you can’t seem to get along with. We’re talking about business.

For me, I realized that I had lost my drive to work on the site. Without spending countless hours a week updating the site, adding products, writing articles, researching vendors, I was really just letting it rot. There’s something to be said for aging a domain name, but this was ridiculous. As you can see in my screen shot, I still had a promotion for my “Spring Sale”, and this was Fall.

Most of the internet markers and web-gurus I talk to own multiple online businesses. This is because unless you’re an Amazon.com (or the likes), you really do need multiple sites generating passive income to survive. I much prefer to focus my efforts on one or two businesses. So, with a couple of projects in the works I decided the capital gain from selling the site was far better than letting it sit. This may be the case for you too.

I’ll miss the site, even though I haven’t treated it well lately. It was my first introduction to the web, and my first really successful online enterprise. But sometimes letting go of the past gives you more momentum towards the future.

Many people think it’s difficult to find good wholesalers online. That’s why there is a thriving niche in the “wholesale directories” business. I assure you, finding quality wholesalers online is not that hard, but takes some effort. Don’t spend tens to hundreds of dollars buying directories or lists that in many cases are outdated.

Drop Shipping

Finding good drop shippers can be a challenge. That’s because a basic search for “drop shippers” will land you pages and pages of sites trying to sell you directories, not the website of quality manufacturers. Here are some tips for finding a good company that drop ship.

1. Once you find the product you want to sell, figure out what trade journals go with your industry. Believe me, every industry has some sort of trade magazine. These magazines are often free for those in the industry, and are packed full of manufacturers and suppliers who advertise in them. Some trade magazine sites will even have a searchable directory online.

2. Figure out what annual trade show is the biggest for your industry. Yes, every industry has some sort of annual conference or trade show. You don’t need to attend the show, just find a list of those who are exhibiting at the show (always available on the trade show’s website). You now how a list of companies in the industry, many of which should be manufacturers. Then, you have to pick up the phone or Google each one to find the ones that drop ship.

Buying in Bulk

Buying in bulk has become very easy online. There are a slew of good sites that list bulk wholesale lots for sale. Check out Liquidation.com which is an auction style site that sells bulk lots of everything! Also, I recently discovered Surplus.net which allows companies who sell bulk lots to advertise their listings.

Problems with buying bulk: Most bulk lots are sold “as is where is”, which is a nice way of saying, we’re not responsible for the condition of what we’re sending you! Keep in mind that a lot of bulk lots are “shelf pulls” or overstock. This means that the merchandise was sitting on a shelf and never sold. You may also find “returns” which carry the most risk. This is simply a bulk lot of merchandise that was returned to the store. You may get some good stuff in the lot, but chances are a lot of it is broken…. that’s why it was returned. The best way to avoid getting something you didn’t want is to talk to the supplier first. Surplus.net gives you the contact information so you can develop a relationship with the supplier before making a purchase.

I have to admit I was curious. I wanted to get the text message when Obama announced his VP choice. So, I went to the website for the first time. After realizing that I will probably get Obama-Spam for the next three months, I decided not to sign up. When I went to back out of the screen (using the back button in IE 7) I couldn’t get past the index page. HOW ANNOYING! I hate when websites do this, and have never understood the benefit.

Don’t ever force your visitors to stay on the webpage, even if you’re running for president. Actually, especially if you’re running for president. Perhaps this should be a campaign issue?

PS. this is NOT meant to be political at all. I just thought it was amusing.

It’s surprising that such a good tool is not easy to find on the Google Analytics website, especially when it makes measuring online campaigns so darn easy!

For those of you that use Google Analytics there is a tagging feature that allows you to create unique URL’s for all of your campaigns. It gives you the ability to tag every and all links in an email campaign, or even in your PPC efforts. Obviously, Google Analytics is integrated with Google Adwords (if you have your accounts integrated), so you can easily measure these campaigns. However, this tagging tool is especially helpful if you’re participating in other PPC efforts, yes there’s more than just Google Adwords!

Anyway, this tool allows you to enter your campaign information and then produce a unique URL with the tracking data integrated. It will give you a much more accurate picture of what your advertising and emailing is doing for you.

It can be a little tricky to setup at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be tagging everything!

Check it out.

When I first started using Google Adwords years ago, I always had trouble thinking of good keywords to try. It is a great place to test the effectiveness of keywords, before you invest in optimizing your site with the. Then, shortly after, Adwords added a suggestion tool to their PPC admin area. I thought this was great! Now Google was telling me what the most popular keywords are, basically taking all of the need for research away!

??WRONG!

Google is not offering their Keyword Suggestion tool so you find new relevant keywords to use. Google is simply showing you the most popular keywords that other merchants are bidding on. There is a HUGE difference.

The Google Keyword Suggestion tool is telling you what other keywords are popular with other advertisers, NOT with searchers. So, what you’re doing by selecting these “popular” keywords is raising the CPC of the keyword, because more advertisers are going after it!

When setting up your Google Adwords account be sure to do your own independent keyword research. Don’t follow the crowd, and pay more for the privilege.

CHEAP PLUG

Check out my new ebook “101 Ways To Improve Your Online Store“! It’s full of tips and tricks to improve all areas of your website, from SEO to PPC, Product pager design, and customer service. It’s all in there.

Ok, “great” might be overstating it, but it should be interesting. The Great SEO Experiment was born a couple of weeks ago when Godaddy announced it would start selling the .ME extensions. This was an ultra-rare opportunity for people to get their hands on some premium domain names with the .me extension. Granted, .me is not widely known, and it may be many years before it has the branding power that .com has. But, this doesn’t mean that online gurus should ignore .me.

I was able to get on Godaddy and grab a bunch of great names. What I couldn’t find information on is the search engine optimization ability of this new extensions. So, here it is. I am going to optimize one of my new .me websites and see what happens! Will Google accept it? Will they bury it? Who knows.

The Guinea Pig

JimmyBuffett.me, which was register in July 2008, will be the source of this experiment. I want to optimize the site so it appears at the top of the SERPs for “Jimmy Buffett“. Now, if this were a .com, it would be no problem. The keyword is in the domain name, so that makes it pretty easy. Well, I am going to do some standard things to optimize the site, so we’ll see where we are. Usually it takes me about 2 months before I notice that search engines pull up the site when I type in the actual domain name.

So, stick around and check for updates. This is only part 1! If I can optimize a premium domain name, with .me, it will open the doors to a lot of other sites. Look out .com!

ACTION LOG (here you’ll find everything I have done since my last post)

1. Added site to three major directories; Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ.

I have been doing search engine optimization for several years now and what has never cease to amaze me are the prices some SEO’s are asking for their work. By no means am I saying that SEO’s are con-artists, but I do believe there are some dishonest firms out there.

When I talk to a prospective client they often tell me about other quotes they have received. They range from $1,500 to $30,000 for the service. Some charge by the month, and usually fall into the same range for a year of service. What I honestly don’t understand is what the difference is. Now I understand all to well that there is a difference between a good SEO and a bad SEO pretending to be an expert. But in my many years of working in ecommerce I have never come across an SEO worth $30K.

Some will argue (and with some legitimacy) that if an SEO can rank your site well, you???ll often see a great ROI, so what’s wrong with charging a lot? I agree to some degree, but I know that the amount of labor that goes into the actual work does not justified that amount. One SEO’s proposal I saw was for $22,000 for 6 months. The package included 100 links, and five pages optimized. I am sure some other work would have been involved, but when you break down the amount of labor involved, you’re probably looking at $500 per hour.

I know many will appose this, but to add credibility to the industry I really think it needs a major association, or governing body that can set standards. This would ensure that there are a set of standards out there, and any legitimate SEO would adhere to them.

Let me repeat, I know there are a lot of good, honest SEO’s doing great work. But I also know, from talking to my clients that there are folks out there charging outrageous fees to clueless merchants who don’t do their homework.

I am interested in what you think? What do you think is fair to charge for SEO services?

Rarely do I comment on political issues in this blog, but this really has more to do with business. I watch a lot of cable news and what really strikes me is how dedicated to tragedy the media seems to be these days. They have been talking down the housing market like crazy, to the point where you have to give your house away in most markets. Oil prices are through the roof, and this too leads the news because it???s more bad news for you to eat up and accept. Well, I don???t accept it. Perhaps I know something all of the talking heads don???t know. Perhaps they are so out of touch they have forgotten the golden rule of capitalism??? the marketplace sets the prices. Next time you think the world is ending, and gas is going to reach $10/gallon, please remember that.

I guarantee that gas prices will not drift much pass the $5 mark, if it gets that high at all.?? Ok, I can???t guarantee it, because I don???t have that much to offer you if I am wrong, but at least consider the possibility. People tend to believe that the market is manipulated by a bunch of rich dudes in a mansion on the hill. To some degree that may be true, but the market always has the last word. Eventually people will say NO to buying gas at a certain price, and the prices will come down. If your facility made widgets that were in very high demand, you would probably start to push the price up with the demand. However, if you pushed it too high, and people started buying less of your widgets, you would adjust the price. You would have to, or you would be sitting on a lot of widgets. The same rule applies to every commodity in a free market.

Now I am not denying times are tough. My wife and I have had our condo on the market for nine months, and I have a 70 mile commute each day, so I am feeling the pain too. I just am a bit more optimistic than many people out there. Unfortunately, if you???re waiting for the government to help, it???s not going to happen. Anything they could do would be superficial anyway. The answer is in the marketplace, and when the time is right, it will say ???uncle???.

One of the most frustrating parts of working in search engine optimization is the time it takes for your efforts to bare fruit. In fact, many of my ecommece buddies have given up on their home-grown efforts, and hired an SEO thinking that it would speed up the process. While there is real value in hiring a professional SEO, this is simply out of reach for many smaller merchants.

As you???ll read throughout this blog and many other blogs there is a countless number of ways to improve your search rankings, and improve your website too. Sometimes, the number of things you should be doing get in the way of growing your business! For example, when I first opened my furniture website I spent countless night-time hours researching different website tips, and studying my own SEO practices. What I lost sight of is that my website needed to grow and improve. I was so busy with learning and researching, I didn???t work on adding new products, writing more product descriptions, improving the images on the site, working on the navigation of the site??? all the things a site visitor looks for!

What I slowly came to realize was that there were too many things that need my attention, and not enough hours??? what a clich??, huh? Anyway, I decided to create two lists??? One list was ???Things To Improve Website??? and ???Search Marketing???. I created goals for myself, so that I could get a little of everything done each night, and slowly grow all aspects of my business.

For example, the ???Things to Improve Website??? list included all the things I mentioned above. I would pick one thing to work on during the week from that list. Then I would take one thing from the ???Search Marketing??? list and work on that too. By setting small benchmarks each week, I was able to organize and balance the work I was doing on my website.

Here???s what a typical week looked like???.

MONDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

TUESDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Improve meta tags on category pages.

WEDNESDAY: Improve images for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

THURSDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Check Alt-Image tags, submit site to 3 new directories.

FRIDAY: No working tonight, my eyes are burning and my wife is pissed.

SATURDAY: Check rankings on main keywords, see if Redbox has any new movies out

SUNDAY: (See Friday)

I would highly recommend writing a small schedule for yourself for a week, and see if that helps you achieve more. This is especially beneficial for the small merchants that slave away at a 9-5 during the day.

Good luck! Please leave comments highlighting your weekly tasks so others can see.

Well, it???s one of those slow Tuesdays, when my motivation is a bit low, and the list of things I have to do is a bit high. So today I figured I would think about some different ways to drive quality traffic to a website???

1. On all of your content (or product pages) add a ???Send to Friend??? function, so a user can easily click a button and email a link to your content to someone else. Every time I have added this functionality for a client, they have received many quality hits from people who never would have found the site. This functionality is a MUST for web merchants to have on all of their product pages. Remember, a referral from a friend is the most valuable and credible way to promote your product.

2. Contests are also a great way of driving traffic. The one mistake people tend to make with contests is they do not make the offer (prize) compelling enough. Offer a good discount on your product or service, and you will get people buzzing.

3. How-To???s make great content. Any time you post instruction on how to solve a common problem you???re going to get a lot of inbound links from other sites, and of course, traffic.

4. My father-in-law emails me nearly everyday with a joke or humorous story he found online. This type of content is always good to get people to link to you, or send your link to their friend. Though it does not work as well for merchants, it???s a great strategy for bloggers. If I had something funny to say, I would put it on my blog, but sorry, I have nothing.

Sharing content on the web is a huge opportunity that your site needs to be leveraging. Sites like StumbleUpon, Myspace, Facebook, and others make it easy and fun for users to share content. Make it EASY for your site visitors to either link to your content, or send it to someone. This is the best way to insure lots of buzz and traffic.

I found this statistic interesting. It was taken from a course that SEMPO offers on search engine optimization, though I don???t have the original source.

CONTENT THAT IS SHARED THE MOST ONLINE
Jokes ??? 88%
News ??? 56%
Medical Info ??? 32%