Prosper Newsletter: November 2007 > Ecommerce

You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.

Starting a new Internet business—best bets to get something started quickly

Are you hoping to cash in on the holiday shopping season, but don't have a business going yet? You are not alone. Wondering what to do? So are many others. Ready to get started? The hugely popular online auction site eBay may well provide the simplest way to get started in enough time. That's because it's become not just a place where millions of people buy stuff, but also a serious place to sell stuff-which means you can use it to generate holiday profits. It is also easy to get started, so you can get in before the season is over.

The eBay platform pretty much epitomizes what can happen when you combine the old-fashioned desire to run a business at home with twenty-first-century Internet technology. It has truly become "the World's Online Marketplace," where an estimated $100 million changes hands daily. It provides a marketing stage for an estimated 430,000 Internet entrepreneurs who individually gross anywhere from $100 to $1 million a month.

With the eBay approach, you don't have to be rich or spend a lot of time to get started. Your products can evolve over time. You can do your own research and conduct business in your spare time. You don't have to carry or process a lot of inventory. You can "test" the feasibility of any product you like, and your profitability is limited only by your own resourcefulness and creativity. Some of the most successful eBay retailers started out with no other goal than simply to see if they could get some money for all that junk cluttering up their garage. Others were more strategic, recognizing eBay as perhaps the most potent sales tool the world has ever seen, and deciding to use it to grow their own empires.

One of the things that make the world of online auctions such a sensible alternative for people looking to get started quickly is that eBay makes it easy for newbies to get started. The eBay Website (at www.ebay.com) is chock-full of chat rooms, services, tutorials, and tools-many of them free-designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible. Additionally, with gas prices rising, shopping malls crowded, and people wanting the convenience to shop when they want, online sales are expected to rise again this year.

Probably the best route for beginners is the eBay Learning Center, where you will find free tutorials that cover the basics of buying and selling on eBay. The Learning Center also contains links to an impressive array of tools and services, including eBay University, where you can take excellent online courses covering all the basics of setting up an eBay-related business. The "university" also offers more advanced one-day classroom seminars in various locations around the country for $39 each.

One of the greatest resources eBay has to offer is the eBay Community, a vast collection of message boards, chat rooms, answer centers, and community groups that attract everyone from first-time fun shoppers to senior managers of Fortune 500 companies. What all these people have in common is a desire to learn more about how to do business on eBay. As a result, the Community sponsors countless workshops and events on a variety of practical topics.

With crowded parking lots and long lines, more shoppers are bound for online stores. Will you be selling? Time is running out to take advantage of the prosperous holiday shopping season. If you are wondering where to get started in time, eBay may be just the place. Let's get out there, take action, and make this the best holiday season yet.

In January we signed up with Prosper Learning to learn how to build and market a website. We had already built a website, which was getting a lot of visitors, but no customers. Naturally we were frustrated and confused. After only a few weeks of classes with Prosper we realized our website was not that bad, but we were targeting the wrong audience. People coming to our site were looking for information, not to buy our products. So, we started over, built a new site, which targeted a more specific niche, and learned how to market it properly. Within a few weeks of completing the site and the marketing strategies taught to us by Prosper; our site is in the top ten of allinanchor for Google. We still have not gotten any customers to buy our product; but we now know that is because of the product, not the website or the marketing. We are continuing to market the site using the techniques taught by Prosper. What we have learned from Prosper has been invaluable and has sent us in a whole different direction, one we never anticipated.

My sister, who works for an advertising agency locally, called and asked us if we designed websites. Her boss had some clients who either needed websites or were unhappy with the people who were supposed to design one for them. We told her what we had been doing and told her to show her boss the site we designed. After looking at our site, she called and asked us to come in to talk. We went home with the information, did some research, and went back to her with an estimate to do the work. She gave us one of her toughest clients to work on first. A week later, we had designed a new website for him, showed it to him and told him what else we could do if he decided to hire us. That day he hired us and wrote us a check!! In the meantime, we decided this was something we could definitely do on our own; so we set up a business called NetDzyne, made up some business cards, and were ready to go out and find some clients on our own. Well, so far we haven't had to because we sold this first website that we created for her client and now she wants us to design a website for her! We've been trying to find time to design a website for our new business; but have been so busy doing work for other people, we haven't had time.

This is exciting and fun and something we can do together at home, which is exactly what we were looking for!!!! Thank you Prosper for giving us the knowledge and tools to succeed!

Mary Ann R.

Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Do you have a site ready to make holiday sales? Do you want your customers to find your site? Below is a checklist that will help you gain some ground in the search engine race and draw customers to your site:

Focused Keywords-use 2-3 phrases, not just single words (Wordtracker is a great site to help you pick keywords).
The Homepage-should focus on the 2-3 most important key phrases for your site (subpages should focus on the rest). Do not try to pack every keyword into your homepage (use a few of the most important ones that you want to focus on and then create subpages that focus on others).
Subpages-give your subpages names, such as "key-phrase.html".
The Title-make your title 4-8 words, while including your main keyword phrase. Make sure keywords for the page are in the title. The title is the most important area of your website (from a search engine point of view).
Heading-have headings on the pages in an H1 font that includes keywords.
Alt-tags-add alt-tags to ANY images that have keywords in them.
Keywords-add keywords to the Meta area of each page (to focus on the individual page content). Also make sure the description is modified for each page.

Keyword General Rules:

Make sure your pages are full of keywords. Some engines rank a page high if it has at least 100 words, so make that your minimum. Directories include pages based on the quality of their content, so make sure your pages are not simply lists of keywords.
Keywords and Text-many search engine spiders index the full text of each page, so it is vital to place keywords throughout your text. Every keyword phrase on each page should link to a page that matches that phrase.
Content Concepts—when creating your page's content, keep the following four concepts in mind:
- Keyword Prominence—the best area of the page to place your keywords is at the top of each page. The closer your keywords are to the start of the page, or to the start of a sentence, the better. Some search engines also say the bottom of the page should contain keywords as well. Link your major keywords to other information pages of your website, or to the product page directly. These links should be placed towards both the top and the bottom of your page.
- Keyword Proximity—some engines use the concept of keyword proximity as part of their ranking formulas. As suggested by the name, keyword proximity means how close keywords are to each other. Put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.
- Keyword Density—this concept, also known as keyword weight, measures the relationship of keywords to other text. The higher the percentage of keywords, in relationship to other text, the better your score. The recommended density is 3%-7%. This means that your keyword should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words.
- Keyword Frequency—keyword frequency is a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a page's text. It is tied to the concept of keyword density. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it is not an isolated case. The recommended repetition ratio is 3-7 times for every 100 words.
Navigation—make sure there are two forms of navigation on each page. At least one set of internal links should be text and not graphics.
Site Map—create a site map for your entire website. There should be links to every major page within your site. There should be a short description next to the name of each page. Within the description, there should be hyperlinks for the key phrases.

Prosper welcomes your feedback. Do you have a suggestion for a topic you would like us to address in the next edition of the monthly newsletter, or an idea for a great elective class webinar? Send us an email at newsletter@prosperlearning.com