It is amazing how time flies. How long has it been that you first unveiled your Ecommerce website? If it has been 5 or more years, it is likely time to take a step back and take stock of your site.

I am not just talking about the visual design. A good design is important, but there are many aspects to a successful, high-performing web business. Have you been keeping up with the Jones (or Amazons)?

With each passing year (actually, with each passing day!) the web economy keeps evolving. Customers are more sophisticated and have developed certain expectations. So the question is – does your web presence provide what your customers are after?

If you want an  in-depth overview of some of the key areas to assess, head over to our HEROweb Marketing and Design site and read our latest article, called Take Your Ecommerce Website to the Next Level.

As a side note, if your website has evolved quite a bit over the years, it can be fun to go to The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) and take a moment to appreciate the evolution of your site, and your business. Perhaps you have already come a long way!

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.

I just came across this tweet from Matt McGee in my Twitter flow :

@mattmcgee if you don’t believe in the power of exact-match domains, you’re nuts.

If you are unfamiliar with the term “exact-match domain” it is referring to the words of a domain name that exactly match a popular search phrase.

It is a little hard to believe that in 2009 the search engines put so much weight on the domain name, but some quick searches easily bear out the importance of the domain name.

Here is just one arbitrary example: go to Google and search for “model boats”. You will see that virtually every one of the matching urls on the first page has one or both of the words in it.

You can easily do some more searching on your own to verify the importance of the domain name.

Sure, there are still many other important SEO factors, but the domain name is huge. If organic search placement is critical to your success, don’t overlook the importance of securing a name that matches your top phrase.

URL shorteners are web-based services that allow you to input a long url and have a shortened version generated that you can use to direct people to the original address. You can use the shortened url anywhere where you don’t want to show a hideously long url.

With the explosion of Twitter, which has a 140 character limit to each post, the use of URL shorteners has also exploded, since every character in a 140 character post is precious.

Here are your options of using url shorteners, in conjunction with Twitter:

Plan A. Twitter has url shortening built in. Up until May ‘09, Twitter was using the TinyURL service, and since May, they have been using bit.ly. If you enter a url that is longer than 30 characters, Twitter will shorten it for you. However, if you paste in a url that pushing you over your 140 character limit, you need to go to Plan B.

Plan B. This plan involves using one of the myriad of url shortening services that will shorten your url for you. I use bit.ly. It works well and has a range of “features” that I like. You’d be amazed at how many features a url shortener can have, like automated posting to Twitter, a Firefox widget for easy integration, customizable short urls, and historical tracking.

Search Engine Land has a nice feature grid, which I won’t repeat here. I am linking to it, using a shorten-url, of course! http://bit.ly/XyOej

Here are the steps for using bit.ly.

1. Go to bit.ly and add an account with your Twitter info.

2. Drag the Bookmarklet to your browser.

3. Go to a web page you want to reference in your Twitter post.

4. Click the “Shorten with bit.ly” bookmarklet.

You will be directed to the bit.ly site with your shorten url displayed as well as a text entry area for you to post directly to Twitter.

5. Either copy the short url and go back to Twitter to do your posting or create your post directly at bit.ly’s site and click the Post button. Your post will show up in your Twitter account.

It is really that easy.

URL shorteners are a way of life if you are a die-hard twitterer. Some people are wary of them because if the service breaks or goes out of business you could have a trail of broken urls in all your posts. We might cover that topic on another day.

For now, we are shortening to our heart’s content. Because 140 characters does not give you a lot to work with.

Web shoppers are getting smarter all the time. A website that you created five years ago might have passed muster for the typical shopper, but with increased competition from other small merchants as well as the big players you need to make sure you are covering every aspect of putting forth a professional and trustworthy presence.

How are you doing in these areas:

1. Providing relevant third-party certifications.

2. Developing on-site and off-site reviews of your products and services.

3. Keeping your website up-to-date and filled with relevant information.

4. Building your personal identity and credibility.

5. Creating a professional-looking web presence.

We have just posted a detailed article on our HERO-web.com website discussing a range of areas you want to consider to build your credibility.

View the full article:  Establishing Your Credibility

As many of you know, Internet Marketing is a key element of our business at this point. I feel like I am pretty much living in Google Analytics these days.

My most recent article at Practical Ecommerce is on using Google Analytics for traffic segmentation and keyword analysis.

Practical Ecommerce: Using Google Analytics for Keyword Segmentation and Analysis

If you are serious about having a successful website business you really need to wrap your head around this topic. The more specifically you can dig into your users’ behavior and what is happening on your site; the more effectively you can make changes to your site and marketing strategy to produce more sales.

I love Practical Ecommerce and the wealth of info they provide.

We are proud to announce the launch of customized product feeds for websites running the MightyMerchant platform! What does this mean, you might ask?

Simply put, product feeds are a way to send your website product data to countless other websites and comparison shopping engines, including the big ones like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo. They give you the opportunity to get your products in front of many more shoppers and drive them to your site for purchasing.

One popular service is Google Base (Formerly called Froogle), a free service which allows you to submit items to Google, which then come up in searches in Google Product Search. Sometimes, these products will even come up in a standard search. As an example, try searching for “simax heavy wall tubing” in Google, and you will likely see Shopping Results near the top of the page showing specific products available on one particular MightyMerchant site, glass supply distributor Winship Designs. Talk about great exposure!

Although MightyMerchant has offered Google Base feeds for years, we are now offering managed feed services to ensure your products are optimized for maximum exposure, as well as target a much broader range of comparison shopping engines. There are many other services online that allow you to submit a product feed to increase your product’s visibility. Some of these include:

• Yahoo Shopping
• Nextag.com
• Shopzilla.com
• www.become.com
• Shopping.com
• Pricegrabber.com

…and many more! Chances are if you find a site that accepts a feed, we can build a custom feed in the required format and get your products an online presence far beyond your site.

If you would like more details about this exciting feature, or feel like this is something your site must have, then Contact Us and we’d be happy to discuss how custom product feeds could help your business.

Let me start by saying there is no foolproof way to prevent people from downloading images off your website. However, there are a number of strategies that will deter the average visitor to your website.

1. Disable right-click. There are a number of javascripts available that will disable a user’s ability to right-click and download an image to his or her computer. There are a number of javascripts available at Dynamic Drive. However, these javascripts may not work in all browsers and even if the javascript works, an easy workaround is taking a screen shot.

2. Watermark your images. A watermark directly embedded into your images will make it harder for someone to use the images unless they have really good image-editing skills. However, watermarks can be cropped out unless they’re fairly large.

3. Transparent gif. A transparent gif the same size as your image with, for example, the word “Sample” can be placed over the image. If someone right-clicks to download the image they will end up downloading the gif file, rather than the image itself. Screen shots and editing are still problems, but this method may be easier than embedding a watermark.

4. Post low-resolution images. Low resolution images (72 dpi) are unlikely to be used for hi-resolution printing.

5. Have a copyright statement on your website. This lets people know that the content of the website is officially yours.

Sample copyright statement: “Contents of this web site and all original works are © copyright your name here – All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of owner.”

If you find that someone has used your images on another website, DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) rules require the website host to remove the images if, after notification and any counter-claims, it is found that the site has violated copyright. DMCA official website: www.loc.gov/copyright

Life presents us with learning opportunities at every turn. Staci and I just finished teaching our last session in a 4-week series of classes on getting started with a website. We were the instructors, and we still learned a ton.

The course was called “Making Your Mark Online” and was run through the Lane Community College Business Development Center.

The class was a great challenge for us as we were attempting to distill down everything we have learned after 13 years in the web business down to four 90-minute sessions.

Were we successful? Well, kind-of, sort-of. The participants were an interesting mix of eight individuals, most of whom were considering getting started with some kind of web venture and wanting to gather information so they could make the right moves.

And, boy oh boy, did we give out information. The broad outline of the class was as follows:

1. Planning – Putting together a plan for developing a successful web business.

2. Technologies – Learn about the range of technologies that are involved with a website.

3. Providers – Assessing the different types of providers that you will want to consider working with when building your web business.

4. Marketing – Surveying the range of online marketing strategies for promoting your business.

Our goal was to allow each participant to understand what they need to know to make the key decisions in getting their online business going. I think we were successful in getting people to focus their thinking in the right direction. But, in hindsight, we were way too ambitious in packing all of our material into four sessions. In the wrap-up marketing session, I don’t think I had time to take a breath in the 90 minute session.

Next time around (and, we are teaching the class again in the Spring term) we will tone down the material and provide some more outside resources.

The topics that we covered in the class were ones that we talk about every day with our customers. But, by structuring our knowledge into four concise presentations, we gained a clearer perspective for the challenge a newbie faces when jumping into the web business.

The main lesson I “re-learned” was the importance of creating a plan before diving into a web venture. Every decision point needs to refer back to the original plan, and, the truth is, the plan is going to need to be re-shaped along the way. But if you start by clarifying your vision, defining your metrics, and understanding your current resources, you will be in a much better position to evaluate the range of options before you.

We have posted the PowerPoint slides from the class and some other materials on our website. We will see you at the next session!

We all know that it takes some work to build incoming links. And, good incoming links are worth their weight in gold. So why not give your site visitors a little incentive for linking to you?

Here is the plan.

Create a link invitation/instruction page. Preferably you will give several options that include a good sentence or two of keyword-rich text along with a link going to one of your internal pages.

And then make an offer of $5 off a purchase on your site.

Include a simple form, so your linking buddies can send you a link to their site and you can verify the incoming link.

Once you verify the link, reward them with a coupon code.

Give it a try and let us know how this strategy works for you.