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While reading the blog post on Google Reader, I realized that I have posted “Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies” in the past. It was one of my top visited blog posts. Looking at that post again, I felt that I was drawing on the white paper like a young child. It’s nothing but a kid’s play.

Doing serious business requires serious marketing strategies. If I don’t seriously plan my marketing strategies, I will not get anywhere I want my business to be. I have spent two days reading the book I just bought about marketing toolkit for small business. So let’s play like an adult in the business world.

Let’s cut to the chase. If you just start your own home based business or small business, the chance is that you will need to market your business here or there. To make sure your investment on your marketing is generating the best return, you have to do some work before we get into the marketing. The most important thing is to evaluate your business from different angles. Keep this in mind. There is no one business without a customer. So customer is always the most important thing you have to put into your business plan.

Here are the questions I asked myself.

What will the business do to me in my life?

1. Why do I want to start this business? Is that for fun, for real or for being cool? I think many new entrepreneurs started their own business like I did. For fun and for the reasons that we thought it’s cool idea. The research said that most new business with cool ideas will eventually failed. The cool business ideas that solve costumers’ issues will success after all. So make sure your business can solve something that your costumers are looking for.

2. Is it the business idea that I love, or is it the idea of running the business? I think a serious mind is the key lead to a success business. You have to have passion to what you love to do and turn that passion into a serious business and covert it into a cash machine.

3. What do I personally want to gain from the business? Personally, I am hoping to make living on the Internet and support my travel around the world. This goal has to be part of my business plan. If my business does not allow me to be absent from time to time, it will be wasting time. I won’t be able to fulfill my dream at all.

4. What are my real strengths as an entrepreneur? This is fairly important question, without knowing my own strength, I can’t really think straight and solve the problems that should not even exist.

5. What are my limitations? I think our weakest points can be harmful to our business. Knowing what we are lacking of can help us grow faster buy having someone fill in with the strength we are lacking of.

6. Where do I want the business to be three to five years from now? Growth plan is very important; many people just want to make some quick bulks on the Internet. Without the long term plan, you are lost and feel no confident to continue.

7. Will this business allow me to maintain my lifestyle? Again, we are trying to live to enjoy life, but not work to live. We want our work pay off our dream. Don’t let your business drag your life. You should be enjoying whatever life style you want and still achieve your business goals. Lifestyle entrepreneur is what we all are looking for.

What will the business do to my customers?

1. What problems or issues will my business take care for my customers? A successful business starts with solving problem. Without putting customer’s need in the first place, a business won’t less long.

2. What is my call to action and how will it get my customer to buy from me? What’s your selling point? I often ask myself, will I buy the products myself? Think like buyers for a moment.

3. How well do I know my customer’s needs? A lot of research needs to be done in order to answer these questions. That’s where your passion comes into the place. If you really love what you are doing, you should already know the answers.

4. Why do my customers buy from me? What’s my business’s value that leads to the sales? Can our business solve the problem and add more value to the customers too?

5. Who are my most valuable customers? Most of business generate more profit from the returning customers. Find out who may buy from you the second time is surely important.

6. Do those customer share common needs and characteristics that make it easier to identify them? These are the question that will help you define your customers and find where they are and how they spend their money.

7. How will I stay close to my customers? This is what exactly marketing company do to get your customer to knock on your door. Building relationship with your customers will ensure your success.

I think there are more questions to ask, but we don’t want to put ourselves in to a mood and think that it’s too much to take. I have put down all the questions and answers in the word documents, so I can come back to review my answers in the future to evaluate my progress.

Have you reviewed your business and where did you put yourself and costumer in your business plan?

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This afternoon, I spent 6 hours in the book store and tried to pickup a marketing book that will help me boost my online business. I pick one from the 16 marketing books. The book is written by Beth Goldstein, founder of Marketing Edge Consulting Group, LLC. The book name is The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit: All the Tips, Forms, and Strategies You’ll Ever Need!

I have a lot of reading home work to do. I may come back to pick few of the rest 15 marketing books.

If you read my blog post in the past few days, you probably feel my anger about the marketing company. I have decided to fire my marketing companies and do Internet Marketing on my own. The goal is to lower the marketing cost and boost the sales.

Why is this book my pick for the day? First of all, I am looking for a marketing book that actually tells me the truth. I want a book that tells me from the scratch. I know there are many ways to do marketing for small business, but I need a book tell me why I need those methods and how to execute them. While glance through all 16 books, my common sense told me that they are all talking about the same things. You have to do this and do that. Some books tell you how important it is to use direct mail, e-mail marketing, PPC and even cover the SEO.

The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit: is the only three books that cover the why. It also give me a worksheet of questions that I should ask myself before beginning my marketing works. The CD come with the book give you all those form. The books also give you examples from the real companies and show you the ways they do their marketing.

I have read more in order to tell my real comments about the book. So far, the book have my attention and have me bought the book. There are many reviews on Amazon about the book. Here is one of the quick reviews about the book.

1. Practical, and one can apply/use the information immediately

2. Has real-life stories of entrepreneurs

3. Great interviews with experts in the field

4. A strong focus on sales and marketing and how they need to work together

5. An important focus on developing customer surveys…everything you need to know in order to develop your own and make sure the information is valuable and can help you make decisions

6. A CD-Rom is so well designed it makes it really easy to use the information in the book and apply it to your own business…whether it’s still a concept or a business you’ve been running for years

7. A down to earth, easy to read format

There are few things that I have to say about the book. This book won’t solve my challenge on increasing my online store conversion rate. This is not a technical book, web site design guide and not even a SEO book. This is a book that tell a marketing novice like me to start my planning my own marketing strategies for my own small business.

If you ever bought this book or already have bought this book, please leave your comments about the book.

Few days ago, I posted “The key to turn your traffic into cash – Conversion rate.” I realized that conversion rate is the key to identify your success of online business. Web site traffic is important, but it doesn’t bring your profit until the conversion rate kick in.

I have been misled by so-call marketing experts. They promised to generate traffic and increase SERP, but none of them can actually bring me the good conversion rate. Of course, there are many facts that will make your conversion rate up and down. So I decided to learn it the hard way. I truly believe that an e-commerce store can sell anything and still become success, if you know how to find your customers and make them pay. You can read my E-Commerce Golden Rules.

Why those marketing experts failed to bring me a good conversion rate?

First of all, I have to admit that I am no expert in marketing, but I have the basic common senses to identify “Working” and “Not Working.” It’s all about cash flow. If your ROI (return of investment) is negative for 3 months, you need to re-think about your investment strategies. Running small business like mine, I don’t have a lot of money to invest. 3 months is long enough for me to change my strategies.

Here is the list of things that stop me from paying marketing companies.

1. Too expensive and zero conversion rate!

2. Zero understanding about my niche and the products I am selling.

3. Can’t identify my true competitors. I get a list of 100 competitor web sites. Most of them have lower traffic and SERP than mine. Few of them are selling different type of products.

4. Sub-contracting to other marketing companies for viral marketing, web directory, link building and article marketing.

5. Drag me to sign up marketing network, marketing tools, so they can get affiliate commission.

6. I can do better job analyze my Google Analytic data then they do.

7. Told me my site is not working, because I don’t have free shipping, buy one get one free deal, free e-book, and long text landing page for marketing.

8. Ask me to deposit at least $200 at front for Google AdWords. It turns out they bid every key phrases for $0.80+, which is much higher than the average rate for my keywords. No wonder they promise me to get at least 250 unique visitors a day. Yeah. Right. I only get 250 unique visitors a day and I have to deposit another $200 for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and so on?

9. Recommend me to sign-up StumbleUpOn, Digg, Mixx, Entrecard and so on. I have done that way before they started their marketing business.

After all this hassle and painful experience, I lost the trust to marketing companies. I may be treated better and getting better results, if I have million dollars to spent and redesign my online stores. I just don’t believe that I have to have million dollars to make my marketing effort working, otherwise, there won’t be so many small businesses running in the USA. Just like Zappos CEO – Tony told me on Twitter.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of $.

You can read that at Start Last – Finish First – Are you the next Zappos?

What should I do next?

I know this is going to be hard for me to do all these by myself, but I am very exciting to make it works. I will put together my marketing plan one step at a time. I am going to do it the hard way and earn my own victory. The idea is this.

If I can figure out the tips and tricks about Internet Marketing, I can sell anything at anywhere I want on the Internet.

To be continuing…

Image Source: Welcome to…. Courtesy of Ingorrr

First of all, I have to admit that I forgot to post my weekend confession last week. I don’t quite remember what I was busy for. I did spent time on the Internet promoting my online business. It turns out that my online stores have getting more traffic everyday. The shopping season is official started.

In the past week, I have been working extremely aggressively to increase the traffic to my online store. I know the economy is down, but I still believe that people are buying stuff online. According to my conversion with one of the Zappos staff, Zappos is still going strong this year. They must done something right to drive their business forward. You can read my blog post about that at Start Last – Finish First – Are you the next Zappos?

Now I have generated traffic to my stores, how do I turn that into cash? We all know that conversion rate is the key to make good profit and the key of the online business success. I want to turn the red light into a green light for my business.

I have been doing research on conversion rate. I have to say that I am very disappointed by the promise out there. I post questions and sent email asking for help. I got so many emails from marketing companies telling me that they can definitely increase my conversion rate, but none of them gave me a firm guarantee. They don’t even understand my niche. Those companies can’t even make good pitch on selling their service to me. I guess there is no guarantee in the marketing world. No one can promise the ROI and a successful case without costing your fortune.

I am going to learn increasing conversion rate myself. There is something that I want to share with my readers.

1. The average conversion rate for online store is 1%. It means there will be one buyer in 100 unique visitors.

2. Most of the small online store has conversion rate lower than 0.1%. It means there will be one buyer in 1000 unique visitors. This is very low conversion rate.

3. If your conversion rate is lower than 0.1%, you need to find out what you did wrong.

4. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on Marketing, according to Zappos CEO.

5. It takes time to increase your conversion rate. Generate traffic first and work on conversion rate.

6. High web site traffic != Better Conversion Rate! You can have huge web site traffic, but zero conversion rate.

7. Conversion Rate != Profit. You can sell 1000 items a day with $1 profit on each, which makes you $1000 richer. You can also sell 100 items with $50 profit on each, which makes you $5000 richer.

8. Higher returned visit rate = higher conversion rate. How many of your unique visitors coming back? If you have high returned visit rate, you have better chance to make sales.

9. Organic search engine traffic seems to have more buying power. Affiliate program and PPC actually decrease your conversion rate.

10. Narrow your niche and focus on the right buyers will increase your conversion rate.

Here are things that I will be focusing on in the next few weeks.

1. Find the target customers in the right salary level. Not many people is willing to pay for what I am offering because their salary level.

2. Find the target customers in the right location. I have been getting web site traffic from the countries that I don’t do business with, which will not do any good to my business.

3. Offering something unique and free.

If you are reading this far, I bet you either have the same concern about your business or you are capable to help me on increasing conversion rate. Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Image Source: White Ligth… – This image has been cropped, rotated and enhanced.

Oh! Sexy Pink! I can’t really resist the eyes with the pink heart looking straight at me. It turns me on. Oops! It turns my business revenue up! Have you got my attention?

This is another example of using blog post header image to demonstrate the power of image. Picture speaks for itself. I have used this image on my fashion jewelry blog. I meant to spice up my sales a little before the Valentine’s Day.

The question is “Does sexy image drive your business revenue forward?”

Did you get the signal about what the post is going to tell you? Read it at Valentine’s Day Gift Guide – Spice up your romantic night with fashion jewelry. My intention is to attract my reader to click on the links in the post and go to my store to shop. As a reader myself, I see the blog title and the image. My first impression is the PINK color. The content post mentioned PINK few times with two pink CZ pendants. That’s enough PINK in the post.

Does reader click on the link and go to my store to view the items? I am testing it out. In the past few weeks, I have started working on my store conversion rate. I have been successfully boosting my traffic. It’s a good time now to test the conversion rate and increase my store sales.

I will find out that in few days.

Do you buy into the sexy image? Share your thought with me.

Image Source: Support – This image has been chopped and enhanced

Do you have e-commerce online stores? Do you sell goods for profit? How do you market your site in your niche? Do communicate your customers without interact with them on the phone or face to face?

If you are running e-commerce online store and are having some troubles to reach your customers, you need a blog to rescue your online store. Personally, I am a believer about marketing and branding. I am also a believer of my e-commerce golden rule. I believe that spending time marketing is somehow more important than spending time make perfect products. You can read my golden rule at How to succeed in the e-commerce world? Follow the 30/70 golden rule. You can also join my discussion about your thoughts on that.

What can a blog do for your e-commerce online store?

Have you even nailed a piece of wood on the wall? Do you remember that your teacher told you to put at least two nails on the wood to make sure it’s done right? Personally, your online store and blog are the two nails to your online e-commerce business.

If you have an online store, you have a niche. Without a niche, you will get lost in the Internet jungle. As an online store owner myself, I build my store front-end first. I have all my store elements ready before starting my blog. Once my store is ready to lunch, I did the following tasks to ensure that my store will be seen on the Internet.

• Register domain name to all Search Engines.
• Register my store URL to free web directory in your niche.

Now You are ready to start your blog for you online store. The goals are to use your blog or blogs to promote your online stores to achieve the following in very short time. I mean less than three months.

• Get good Google Page Ranking – PR3+
• Drive traffic to your online store
• Get a good Alexa traffic ranking
• A great branding and exposure to the public
• To interact with your potential customer
• To compete with your competitors
• To show your customer that your are serious about your business
• Be the number one blog in your niche
• Make extra money off your blog

Let’s take a look at each goal and see how we can achieve that.

Get good Google Page Ranking – PR3+

In the past few months, I have implement a way to get a huge amount of quality backlinks back to your blog and online store, in order to get a better Google Page Ranking. It’s simply a DIY strategy by using RSS FEED between your niche blog for your online store. You can find out how I did that at Increase Google Page Ranking with RSS FEED – No buying, selling and bribing and DIY – Build quality backlinks with RSS Feed on blogger and wordpress. With the RSS backlinks to your blogs, it increases your page ranking in less than three months.

Drive traffic to your online store

It’s your blog. It’s your choice to link and direct your traffic to your online store. I post my hot deals, discount coupon, new products, news, announcement and industry news on my primary blog, which send traffic to my online store. Ideally, you will need to have your own unique domain name for both your online store and blog. For example, my fashion jewelry online store is at www.profashionjewelry.com and my primary blog can be found as subdirectory of my online store at www.profashionjewelry.com/blog/. It’s very important to your success. I will mention that later.

Get a good Alexa traffic ranking

Why you need a blog under your subdirectory, but not your subdomain like blog.your_domain.com? A subdomain is a totally separate identity and site. In other words, Alexa count those two URL as two different sites. When you send traffic from your subdomain blog to your online store, Your traffic is divided into two sites. It gives you no benefit to gain Alexa Traffic Ranking.

Why is Alexa Traffic Ranking important? It simply represents how much traffic goes to your store. The lower number means the topper position your store at in the huge Internet jungle. If you have better Alexa traffic ranking, it will give your store more credit. That’s why you need to have your blog or any other sub-application for your store under the same primary domain. For example, you can have your forum, Wiki and FAQ under the same domain with different subdirectory. Alexa will combine all your traffic into one.

A great branding and exposure to the public

With your blog, you have a greater chance to be known by million people who search on the Internet. Especially for people who search on Google Search Engine. Google has recently implemented Universal Search, which includes blog post. In many case, you blog post is searchable or on the top search result in your niche one hour after you post your article. It gives your reader a strong message that you are active site and store.

Just to make sure that you register your blog with FeedBurner and add your store site map and blog site map on Google WebMaster Tools. Now, you just need to update your blog post at least once a day. It will make your blog expose to million potential readers and customers.

To interact with your potential customer

Two best article topics to post in your niche to attract your potential and interact with them are the HOW-TO and FAQ articles. Regardless what you are selling, people are looking for solutions. If you are selling cell phone, you post topic about how to fix iphone, clean iphone DIY tips and trick. You give your potential customers a sense of your care. They will come back for more.

To compete with your competitors

A blog is a great way to show your competitor that you are making progress while they are not. You can also show your competitors why you are better than they are. One good suggestion is not to write anything crappy or bad mouth about your competitors. It will destroy all your hard working to build your business.

To show your customer that your are serious about your business

Just like I mentioned above, your frequent blog posts will show your customers that you are updating your site and you are serious about your online business. Blog is also a place to answer your customers question and knowing what they are looking for. Keep eyes on your most searchable keywords and make them a blog post or FAQ entry. Your will notify your customer that you have answer for them on your blog. They will come back and give you some love.

Be the number one blog in your niche

Be the number one blog in your niche is very difficult, but very possible. It takes time to get you there, but will pay backs the big time. It’s basically branding your business with a corporation image. That is where my Golden rule becomes the reality. Your brand and market your blog to the top of the world and business opportunities come after that.

Make extra money off your blog

OK. This is not the original intention about your online business. When your e-commerce online store becomes so popular, you will find people coming and go. They search a lot of stuff and get to your site, and they found out that you don’t sell the stuff they are looking for. It’s your chance to fulfill their desire by offering your customer something you don’t sell. For example, I don’t sell really diamond on my store. So I re-direct my customer to a really diamond store for their need. What I am getting is the commission from the sites I list on my blog.

Just to make sure that you do NOT sell any other items on your store. Only do that on your BLOGs.

You want people to buy your stuff, which should be the primary source of your business income.

Do you have an e-commerce online store? Do you have a blog to support your store and nailed down your business?

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Are you thinking to start a new online e-commerce store? Do you have great products to sell online? If so, you will need to follow the 30-70 rules.

Who invent this concept? What is the 30/70 rules?

I, Terence Chang, invented this concept. After running few online e-commerce stores for years and being an e-commerce IT consultants for years, I finally come up this concept, which will guide the store owner to a better success. There may be argument about this concept, but it does lead me to a better profit in my cases. It’s my golden rules of doing e-commerce online store. It’s also my golden rules when I deal with my manufactures and suppliers.

The golden rule is basically described as “30% quality and 70% marketing.”

What does that mean? Regardless what product you sell online, it will be either a service or physical goods. Don’t get me wrong. The quality of your services and products are very important. However, the effort to make a perfect quality product is only 30% of your total effort to make a good sale. The rest of 70% depends on your marketing strategy, which including the after-sale customer services.

If you are running an online e-commerce store like I do, marketing and branding is definitely more important than managing your inventory and find good products to sell online. It’s not saying that find a good products and managing your inventory are not important. Basically, it’s more important to market your products. In other words, a perfect product won’t be sold without a good salesman. A good salesman can sell a crappy product in stead. You can make crappy product hot items on eBay, but you can’t make a diamond shin if no one knows.

I have received the same question over and over again from many of my families, co-workers, blog readers, manufactures and suppliers. They ask me what to sell. Personally, what to sell is not important. How to sell is the key. Without a correct marketing strategy, you will end up selling a GPS device to the tennis players and selling tissue paper to taxi drivers.

Here is one of the success story. Small ugly idea makes big success. Can you be the next one?

Got the point?

When I started my fashion jewelry online store at ProFashion Jewelry, I apply this 30/70 golden rule. I have spent a lot of time finding the high quality fashion jewelry myself to ensure my products won’t fail. I am still working on my marketing strategies to get my products out to the public and to the right customers. I may have over 10000 items to sell, but they won’t sell if I don’t promote them correctly.

Do you have an e-commerce store? Make sure you follow the rule.

I am thinking to start a series posts about running e-commerce stores. I want to show people how easy to setup an e-commerce store and make good profit.

Just one day after post my weird credit card issues with VistaPrint on Warning – VistaPrint Free Business Card will rip you off, I saw two strangers in my web log. One is from Vertrue, the marketing company who has charges me twice for not signing up their crappy deals. And one from VistaPrint, who released my credit card information to Vertrue and trick me to be charged for nothing.

Obviously, they do care about what people say about them. They search Google and found my post about their problems. I am still dealing with my credit card company and trying to dispute the charges. If you are interested in using VistaPrint as your online printing source. Please do yourself a favor! Read their privacy and security policy.

In addition, we may share the information we collect with other companies with whom we have joint marketing arrangements.

…..

It is also possible that VistaPrint may partner with or purchase another company to continue to do business as a combined entity. In the event that this occurs, it is possible that our customer information may be transferred to the new business entity as one of VistaPrint’s assets. In such an event, we will update this policy to reflect any change in ownership or control of your personal information.

I want to clarify that I was a VERY VERY HAPPY customers of VistaPrint. It’s over!

Image Source: Experiment II

Would you like to gain web site traffic and increase SERP by joining The Exponential Linking Program? A reader of min, came from “Steve’s Blog of the Web“, recently sends me an invitation about his greyhat SEO techniques. He starts this free email program that will help you and help all attendee to achieve this.

The catch is that only the first 10 emails will be accepted. I would like to give him a lift to let everyone know about his program. If you are interested in his program, Please visit his contact form page and send him your email.

Well. I think there are less than 9 left.

Who is Crocs.com? What do they do?

Just read the article on MSN Money about “How Crocs is outpacing the pack“. The company Crocs.com is the hot company, which producing some ugly shoes that made over 200 millions sales in 2006. Yes. You heard right. This is what their magic growth number. According to the report list above, Corcs is making huge profit by selling those unique, ugly, but very interesting plastic shoes.

Then a funny thing happened. The ta-da moment, if you will. By the fall of 2006, Crocs’ first full year of earnings reports as a public company showed that it was a phenomenal grower, and that it wasn’t just generating profit-less revenue like an empty-headed dot-com. It was making massive fistfuls of money with its wacky little shoes. Check this out: In 2002, records show the company earned a gross profit of $1,000. In 2003, $27,000. In 2004, $6.3 million. In 2005, $60.8 million. In 2006, $200.6 million.

Can you believe that? I still remembered when I first saw these ugly shoes in the local store. I was shocked by the color and the looking of the shoes. I was wondering what the ugly shoes it is and what people is still buying that for? Now many parents buy at least two pair of these shoes for each one of their kids and all families. Now, Crocs has over 5000 dealers all over the world selling their products. They keep creating new style, new color and new way to wear the shoes.

Who would think that ugly shoes are making this huge profit in just few years? Their stock is growing faster than the Stock King Google. So do we learn from this unique and ugly shoes maker?

Can we be the next one like that?

I believe we all have some unique ideas that we never thought it will make such dramatic impact on the market. Being a small business owner for a while now, I have to re-think my strategies of making buzz.

So here is what I learned from them.

1. Make sure your product is unique and right on the targeted niche.
2. Don’t be afraid of making negative impression of your products, which could make positive impact to the generic market
3. Be creative on the things people use everyday.
4. Move forward faster, so your competitor will never catch up.
5. Protect yourself by making your product so unique that no one knows how to copy it.
6. Your target could be different than your buyer. Pre-teen are the consumer force, while parents have the buying power. When it comes together, there is business.

What do you learn from this company? It’s now your turn to tell me what you have learned from Crocs.