If I dare bring up the subject of “passwords” to a customer I typically get an immediate response of an uncomfortable groan or moan. With the proliferation of social media sites, web service accounts, and other logins, managing passwords has become ever more daunting.

But, as painful as they are, good password policies are the cornerstone of any  sound security program. And, if you have an Ecommerce site and are serious about PCI Compliance, you want to formulate a password policy for your business and stick by it.

Here is a simple idea to help you with creating good passwords. You can think of it as a word game of sorts.

1. Start with a group of names that mean something to you. Perhaps the characters from Star Wars. Or maybe, your past spouses (okay, that one will only work if you have had a checkered marital past!).

2. Then layer on top a group of numbers that are already etched into your mind. Perhaps it could be the birthdates of your kids. Or it could be the uniform numbers of your five favorite basketball players.

3. And then think of a substitution you can use. For example, you will replace instances of the letter A with an Ampersand.

Using this methodology, I have come up with the following password: Y69d12n03&

What is that pattern, you ask? It is my brother’s name, Andy, spelled backwards, with his birthdate interspersed between the letters. For good measure, I swapped out the A with an Ampersand and led things off with an uppercase Y.

Compare this password to something like “Andy1234″ which would immediately flunk any password test. Why? Because a password with recognizable words, names, and number sequences is an easy target for a password cracking program. My more complex pattern only make sense to me.

If I used my password formula in conjunction with my other siblings’ names and meaningful dates, I could have a set of passwords that would be relatively easy for me to remember, but difficult to get hacked. The key is if I remember my formula, I can come up with a complex combination of characters without actually having to memorize a bunch of gibberish. The goal is meaningful gibberish.

Passwords and security are a dead-serious topic. But by having a little fun with your password selection you will help yourself in creating strong passwords that will serve your business well.

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, is a day for family, friends, and appreciation of the gifts in life. And, hopefully, you have the luxury to take the weekend to relax and spend time with those you love. But next week… I encourage you to set aside a chunk of time to start formulating your Ecommerce strategy for 2010.

Not that you need to nail it right away, but see if you can set the process in motion. Review your ‘09 numbers, look at the opportunities and threats before you, and begin to formulate a plan for how to best use your time and resources.

I will have more to say on strategic Ecommerce planning over the next week.

We have put together an article on the HEROweb website called “What’s Your Web Strategy for 2010?” to help get you going. Have a look when the time is right and see if it helps get the creative juices flowing. And, in the meantime, all the best for a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

In the Internet business, with rapidly evolving technologies and platforms, many ideas have a short half-life.

I was pleasantly surprised to revisit an article we wrote in 2005: Thirteen Ways to Evaluate an Ecommerce Provide, and to see the article was still relevant.

Ok, maybe the Google Page Rank reference is a little dated. But in hunting through the hundreds of Ecommerce providers, you really need to be able to seek out a company that is going to be able to grow with your business.

Back in ‘05 you could get away with selling generic products on a generic website. But those days are coming to an end as the web shopping audience matures and the competition continues to increase. Your Ecommerce vendor needs to be as much a service provider and strategist as a technology agent.

What factors do you see as the most important for choosing an Ecommerce vendor to work with?

I expected to wake on this post-Halloween Monday to the sight of ecommerce websites, plastered with holiday splendor. Surprisingly, the holiday spirit seems quite subdued.

Many of the big-boxers – Amazon, BestBuy, and the like – seem to have sparse holiday messaging and specials. They are taking the scattered snowflake approach. Target.com is pushing their Christmas message more strongly.

I can’t believe it won’t be long before we are hammered with the holiday sales blitz -  uh, I mean, spirit.

If you are a “little box” retailer it is time to get on your game. In the words of GaryVee it is time to Crush It!

We won’t repeat all of our past holiday strategical offerings, but in this year of high unemployment and frosty revenue forecasts, do your best to make some low-cost, high impact moves and dress up your website with your best holiday cheer.

We have two quick suggestions.

Task #1: Make sure you do in fact have a holiday strategy.

If you just passively sit on the sidelines and hope that holiday shopping is just going to happen, you are likely to be in for a few lumps of coal and not much else.

Task #2: Start to tune  your site with some up-beat holiday cheer. Make it clear, when your shoppers arrive, that you are ready for them with the best you have to offer.

If you want some feedback on your site and your plans, let us know. We would be happy to talk.

Greetings at 1:03 in the morning on November 1, 2009. We are upping the ante with the MightyMerchant Ecommerce Blog by jumping on the NaBloPoMo express.

What the heck is that, you ask? NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month. It is, among other things, a commitment to do one blog post a day for the entire month.

Our ground rules are simple:

1. We will post at least once every day in November.

2. Each post will be LONGER than 140 characters. If not, then why the heck not just tweet it.

3. All posts will be somehow related to Ecommerce and web marketing for small business.

Blogging is a regular habit that needs to be cultivated and it is also a key piece of a successful social media strategy that many small ecommerce businesses should consider. A significant percentage of the businesses we work with often get stuck and frustrated right out of the gate and end up in the pile of dead and discarded blogs. (Ooh, that is a disturbing image.)

Of course, there are also the superstars who stick with it and learn to post great content on a regular basis and develop a loyal following.

Big talk ain’t worth much in the web business. We see a lot of so-called social media experts regurgitating all the bullet points about what you should be doing to be successful. Well, we are putting our money where our mouth is by getting in the daily blogging habit ourselves. And, hey, if NaBlogPoMo is inspirational to you, please join us and let us know.

Game on!

I had a great conversation with a new Ecommerce customer, Ann Marie, yesterday. She was jazzed about launching into our new website project. And the first thing Ann Marie did was go out and buy a little notebook. Smart move!

Whether you opt for the virtual/electronic notebook or the good old-fashioned spiral bound, you need to put some organizational tools in place before you plunge into the Ecommerce world.

To put it a little more sternly, unless you can keep a handle on your various accounts, web presences, administrative pages, and key business relationships, you will be sunk.

Ecommerce has evolved over the past decade. Success doesn’t hinge on just having a simple website. You need to also do some or all of these tasks: incorporate a merchant account, interface with shipping vendors, be on top of your domain registration, possibly manage social media accounts, and keep up with PCI security scanning.

A first step is to keep a list of all the mission critical accounts, usernames, and access urls that make up your Ecommerce business. You will also need to devise a system for tracking your passwords without actually writing down the complete passwords in a non-secure location.

I don’t mean to over-state the importance of good record-keeping, but we have seen too many horror stories of site owners who can’t get on top of the basics of managing their business.

The classic example is when site owners set up a new email address and neglect to change their original email address associated with their domain registration. The next steps in this saga: they don’t get their domain renewal notification, their site is off-line, and then they end up going through some heartache to get the situation resolved.

Get your Ecommerce house in order. You will be glad you did.

I came across this article about what to look for in an E-Commerce package. It’s really good advice. It’s practical, easy to understand, and covers what’s essential. Turns out, Michael knows of the author, Ian Lurie, follows him on Twitter and met him at an SEO conference in Portland a few years back. Ian is one of the most respected voices in internet marketing and his blog has a ton of great content.

If you’re in the Ecommerce business, your long-term success is tied to your ability to skillfully use web technologies.

Whether it is tools like your on-site Ecommerce system, your email marketing campaign manager, or Google Adwords tracking tools, you will live or die by the way you harness all the the available technologies to present your products and offer good old-fashioned service and value to your customers.

Are you still doing the same stuff, with the same tools, as you were five years ago on your website? Maybe, today, this approach is still producing the revenue levels that you need, but chances are you won’t be able to stand still too much longer before competitors who “get” the latest technologies and are able to deploy them will leave you in their wake.

So what is a small business owner to do?

1. Realize that success in the Ecommerce industry is about continually learning and taking action. If you enter the game with that mindset, you will be off to a great start.

2. Don’t get so wrapped up in technology that you forget the core values in your business and you end up pursuing technology for technology’s sake. You need to be up on technology, but charging after every bright and shiny object that grabs your attention is a recipe for disaster.

3. You don’t need to be a technology expert yourself, but if you aren’t, you should surround yourself with people, resources, and tools that keep you where you need to be on the technology front. There are so many great resources available. My favorite site for the ecommerce site owner is http://www.practicalecommerce.com

4. Watch the competition closely. The Internet is the greatest research tool out there. Do your best to glean what your competition is doing on their sites. You might even be able to do some searching of competing site owners’ names and learn from some of the thoughts they are sharing about doing business.

5. Embrace the changes that are happening in the social world. This doesn’t mean that you need to rush out and spend all your time Tweeting or posting on Facebook. But you do need to understand the rapid shift that is taking place in the relationship between buyers and sellers and the role technology is playing in that process.

Does this challenge sound exciting and fascinating or like a form of slow torture? Of course it helps if you love the web, computers, technology, and all that these tools have to offer. If not, it could be time to seek out some help from the pros or start grooming your ten year old to be your chief technology officer.

Many of our customers would be categorized as micro-ebusinesses. They have 1-5 employees. Quite a few of those customers are quite successful. It is tough to go up against the likes of Amazon.com and the myriad of big box online retailers. And maybe “going up against them” is not the best approach, but the small-ebiz entrepreneur can compete on their own terms.

So how do they/you do it?

We would like to suggest that you use the small size of your company to your advantage. You need to be ready, willing, and able to establish your personal brand and push it across the many social avenues that are now available.

We have just posted an article on our HEROweb Marketing and Design website called Competing by Being Small.

Hopefully we have provided some food for thought for the micro-ebusinesses of the world. Let us know what you think.

There are a few tools I use quite often, either in creating these blog posts, writing informative articles for posting on the MightyMerchant site, or in creating our monthly email newsletters.  These tools really help me create a professional, attractive finished product, and I know they will help you, too. Best of all, they don’t cost any money to use! (Exception being istockphoto, which is inexpensive enough that it’s practically free.)

I wanted to share with you three of the tools I use to create visually appealing documents, and also introduce one resource for inspiration that a client shared with me.

As a business owner, you have probably had many occasions to create PDF files. These file types are pretty standard in the business world for sending and receiving documents. A suite of three downloadable programs is available from pdf995.com for Windows users. Pdf 995  allows you to create and save files in PDF format and offers a ton of features.

As I’m writing blog posts or articles, I frequently find that I want to take a screenshot of something I’ve come across to illustrate whatever point I’m making…a screenshot of a Google search result, show a how- to of something I’m writing about, or just capture a web page image to send to someone as an example. I use Skitch constantly. It’s is incredibly easy to grab anything happening on screen to share with someone else–an image of an IM screen, an email, anything. And once you’ve grabbed the image, their built-in editing menu lets you add text, resize, and save your images in a history folder. When you’re ready to use the images, just drag and drop. One drawback is it is only for Mac users, however, anyone using Windows who needs a free screen grab program can check out Mirekw.

In case you have ever wondered where the images that illustrate most of my blog posts come from, look no further. istockphoto.com is an invaluable resource for low-cost high quality images. For as little as $1 apiece, you can download images to use for newsletters, blog posts, brochures, or your website that illustrate any theme you can imagine, from business success to happiness.

Finally, Karen from InnocraftDesigns.com, shared her favorite website, simpletruths.com. InnocraftDesigns specializes in home remodeling  which allows people to remain in their own homes as they age–walk-in showers, wheelchair access and other home accessibility projects. It’s a rewarding job and one that allows people to live more comfortable lives as they age, but it’s also a job that leaves Karen feeling like she needs her own inspirational lift every now and then. (We can all appreciate that, can’t we!) She appreciates the weekly uplifting videos she gets emailed to her in the newsletters, and if you ever wanted to know where to get some of those inspirational slogan posters, this is your place!

Got your own essential resource you use in managing your business? I’d love to hear about it.

Tags: Free, Business, Tools, Resources