Archive for October, 2007

Why Your Business Should Always Answer Email

admin Popularity: 31% [?] October 30th, 2007

Is Your Inbox OverloadedAre you running a business? Then you should answer your email. Period. There was a recent article post called, Treat Your Blog like a Business, where Ben made some very good points about how you should run your blog. I want take that a little step farther and state the obvious. You should treat your business like a business, and one of those steps is to answer your email, in a professional manner no less.

This will probably not be the most popular post in the world, after all, we all get to much email, and some we just don’t want to mess with. I am speaking about the necessity of answering your email if you are in business, but this includes those who run a small home based business, or someone that sells their services online as well, large or small.

If you are online just purely for personal reasons then, answer it, delete, do whatever you want, but I think this applies to personal accounts as well if you want to be successful online. It seems to be common place now to not answer your email. It is the easiest means of communication to ignore, and takes a lot of time.

So if you want to stand out among the others, respond to those emails.

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Popularity: 31% [?]

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Top 15 Monday Morning Stars of the Week, Oct 29

admin Popularity: 20% [?] October 29th, 2007

Chipseo Starred Items Oct 29Looking back over this past week, it was overwhelmingly dominated by posts on the Page Rank update.

It seems everyone found some way to be touched by this in one way or the other, even if it was just to read the rantings and ravings about Google’s Page Rank update. Especially over the weekend when page rank updates seemed to be just flying in every direction.

I did try to read as many of these posts as I could, and I even contributed to the mayhem myself in, What Happened to My Page Rank, Another Goal Reached?, when my Page Rank actually went up to my surprise. Being at a PR0 I didn’t have any place to go but up, so a PR2 was a welcome thing to me.

One of the funniest posts I have seen so far was posted over the weekend, Google PageRank algorithm leaked, it is certainly worth a quick read, and was quite funny.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

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What Happened to My Page Rank, Another Goal Reached?

admin Popularity: 20% [?] October 28th, 2007

chipseo Page Rank UpdateAfter all the posts I read this week about the page rank update I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything about the topic. I thought it had all been said enough (and that is still probably true), until I noticed my page rank actually went up. [A little disclaimer here, before last week I had a PR0 and now I have a PR2. So, I had no place to go but up.]

There are other examples surfacing now that also show increases in PR’s like, PageRank update in process, this time for real, where AdesBlog talks about a few of his sites that have increased their page rank. Another recent post from ProBlogger also touches on several of these current topics in, The Google Page Rank Pendulum Swings…. Again, and if you are still interested, there are hundreds (if not more) of posts on the Page Rank update.

Some PR’s Are Going Up, Some Down

In a recent post I did on the goals of this blog, Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others, a the Page Rank was not even listed as one of the top ten because I thought it was pretty much out of the question for the age of my domain, and the fact that I was still trying to build quality content on the site. Little did I know, all I needed was an update to Google’s Page Rank system.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

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Contests are Great? Get a Favicon Free for One Month

admin Popularity: 18% [?] October 26th, 2007

Contest Winner at AdesBlogDo you like the different contests that some bloggers use on their sites? It can be a good way to network with other blogs, increase traffic to your site, and increase traffic to the winning site as well. The only question I have is how the big G sees “contests” and how it ultimately effects your traffic or rankings. There seems to be some speculation that it is harmful to your rankings. In a recent post, Should “Weekly Top5 Sites Contest” continue?, a drop in page rank is starting to ask the question as to the relevancy or helpfulness of “contests” on your blog.

I am going to leave most of that is for a different post, so in this post, who cares, everyone likes to win something, sometime, right? I try to keep this blog on topic most of the time, and since my stated tagline is about eCommerce and online business, I did want to point out that you can take this approach with your online store as well.

About Coupons and Door Prizes

Our company has run many different contests, for years, and found them to be very effective tools, in person, or online. On a recent group my wife, DK, is running, she decided to do a give-a-way in the manner of door prizes. Her group went from a few hundred members to end at over 2,000 before she closed the group. The prizes are given away weekly, and most of them were donated by other members of the group, so she didn’t even have to supply the door prizes.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

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How to Make Money Drop Shipping on Amazon or eBay

admin Popularity: 51% [?] October 26th, 2007

Amazon Drop ShipperAre you tired of competing with a drop shipper or drop shipping company that does not ever touch the product, house, or package the product, seems to sell more, and make more money than your competing businesses? You probably are if you are a company that spends time finding wholesalers, buying inventory, cataloging, indexing, valuing, packaging, and all the normal business practices that go along with running a business that carries an inventory based product.

I received an email this week from a “buyer” on Amazon. He purchased one of our books and the subject of his email said, DON’T SEND PACKING SLIP OR INVOICE PLEASE, in all caps, but it was his email to me that told me the story:

Would you mind sending this package without a packing slip and/or invoice? I would really appreciate it. Also, please use delivery confirmation, if possible - I only make this suggestion, as the USPS is far less likely to lose the package.

[item sold and order number was inserted here]

If this item is a different condition (used/new/etc.), binding or media type softcover/hardcover/tape/disc/etc.), edition or version (international/etc.) or differs in any way from your listing, please refund this order immediately.

You don’t need to respond to this email unless there is a problem with the order.

Besides the fact that Amazon requires you to send a packing slip with each order, the shipping address was completely different than the email name or company, so it was obvious to me that this was a drop shipper and we were now the fulfillment company. This email was automatically generated and I had no choice at this point other than to just ship the order.

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Popularity: 51% [?]

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Is FetchBack Retarget Marketing Right for Your Company

admin Popularity: 27% [?] October 25th, 2007

Fetchback Retarget MarketingInternet business owners have many different options when it comes to online marketing, but what is the best method or methods to promote your store. Fetchback is a specific type of marketing that might not be for everyone, but it looks like it has the potential to get some of those customers lost in cyber space back to your specific eCommerce store, or even monetize your products or website in some way.

When I first started looking at Fetchback I was pretty excited about the prospects of getting those customers who left an online store without making a purchase or signing up for any newsletter or email, back. Their techniques are unique in that they, as far as I can tell, as one of the few companies that targets those visitors that left.

CNN Money on FetchbackWho is Fetchback

Fetchback is a company out of Arizona that specializes in retarget marketing, founded by Chad Little. Little has past experience in the online marketing field and was also the founder of AdOn Network, a keyword target marketing company. The domain registration info shows that the name has been registered for about a year and is good through 2011, and it looks like Fetchback has been actively operating and adding new clients for about 6 months, launching its service on April 11th, 2007.

Their aim is to convert those “lost” customers into repeat buyers, called behavioral targeting, and they do this through a patent-pending application on your online store pages. I could not find a patent for the application in a patent search but patents can be pending for years and are not easy to search.

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Popularity: 27% [?]

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Using Worpress Next Random Blog

admin Popularity: 18% [?] October 23rd, 2007

Wordpress Random BlogHow many features and options have you used on Worpress? There are a lot of options and features that Wordpress has put into the program and I try to go as deep into the code and options as I can, without really messing something up, to get to know the ins and outs of Wordpress. I came across one I sometimes forget is there, but it is great fun.

Have you ever used the Worpress next function? It is very similar to Blogger’s next blog feature where you click the button and it pulls from a random blog in their system. I actually didn’t know that Worpress had a similar feature, located at http://wordpress.com/next/, where it redirects to a random Wordpress blog, until I looked at my stats page one day.

Wordpress Random Blog

This feature is located in your blog admin pages, on the dashboard, then the stats page (be sure you are logged into your Wordpress account). There in the upper right corner you will find a link to the random blog. Once you click on the random blog it redirects to the url above with a tool bar where you can view the next random blog, view a random post from the blog you are viewing, and a few other options.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

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10 Ways to Set Goals for Your Online Business

admin Popularity: 22% [?] October 23rd, 2007

After registering this domain name and setting up this blog I wanted to set some goals for its effectiveness. After all, how can you tell if what you are doing or want to do is working without some kind of ongoing self evaluation of goals reached or not reached. This goes the same for a small business and certainly is in place in large companies as well. I reached one of those goals this week, Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others, and I wanted to look at some of the ways we set goals for our companies and what we can do with that information.

Some of the suggestions below are specific, some are much more general in nature, but without a goal of some kind, how do you know where you are going or have gone? Remember, all goals are not the same. Setting a lifetime objective for your business is not the same as a goal to reach a certain sales revenue volume by a certain date. Some people set goals by the length of time it will take to reach them, others set goals by the accomplishment itself, but I would consider for the sake of this article there to be minor, intermediate, and long term goals, all of which are necessary for a well rounded business.

A goal properly set is halfway reached. Abraham Lincoln

Make Goals Realistic to Reach

Many goals set are realistically unobtainable goals which will breed disappointed when they are not reached. It is important to set some milestone goals that are realistically obtainable by your company, business, or blog. When you have achieved these goals, set new, higher ones knowing that you have reached a minor goal you set forth to reach.

Another question to ask here would be, do you have all the resources you need to be able to achieve this goal in the first place? If not, it may not be very realistic. One of the goals may be to get the resources to achieve the next goal.

Make the Goals Measurable in Some Way

You need some good way to measure the success or failure of a certain goal. This is pretty easy on a blog, just check all the traffic rankings, feed subscriptions, ad spots filled, but you do need some kind of standard to which you measure how close you are to obtaining that goal.

Set Minor, Intermediate, and Long Term Goals

You don’t want to just set short term minor goals either. Set a well rounded mix of easier and harder to reach goals so you can judge when you have made some real progress. Whatever your goals, they will be reached, or not, over an extended period of time, setting a mix of goals will get your head out of today and now and get you looking at the future of your business.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

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Top 15 Monday Morning Stars of the Week, Oct 22

admin Popularity: 20% [?] October 22nd, 2007

Top 10 Stared Items ImageAre you a list junkie like me? I love top 10 lists, top 25 lists, whatever, I love the readability and the resources they provide. I try not to do to many top lists but decided to start a weekly one here for my stared items of the previous week.

Each Monday I put together a list of the top 15 starred items from the previous week that have caught my attention or I want to go back and read again. These articles are all published throughout the previous week that I am pulling feeds from into my feed reader. This is a little bit different list than my shared items list which is mostly seo and marketing type posts, my stared items come from a growing list of 300+ feeds that are updated each week.

You can always subscribe to my stared feed (or just view the stared page) but each Monday I will publish a list of the top 25 starred items from the previous week (if there are that many). If you don’t utilize the stared or shared items feature (if you are using Google reader) it is a very handy way to mark something of interest that you may not have time to read right away.

Stared items by default are not public, you have to change the private settings, but your shared items are always a public feed. I really enjoy reading other peoples stared and shared items because we all have such different interests that they are bound to be items on someone else’s list that we don’t have on ours, and for one reason or another, can’t find.

I have to give credit for the idea of the stared items list to Randy Smythe who provides his stared items in a feed also. While a feed from a reader is nothing new, the stared items list was new to me, thanks. Below is the link to the post, a link to the actual site, and a snipit about each post.

Next Monday I will not have all the commentary listed above, just the top 15 of the previous week.

Top 15 Stars of the week of October 14-24nd

[$520] SEOCrunch.com - Original Design, Content. 400 Uniques per Day.

via SitePoint Marketplace - Established Sites For Sale on 10/15/07

Custom WP Design, Custom WP Admin, Unique Articles, Generated Profits — ** Uniques Visitors & Pageviews above are estimated for the month based on the sites existence (5 days) Up for sale is SE

[$30] ShortSermons.net - Original content, 5,000+ visitors in the past 30 days

via SitePoint Marketplace - Established Sites For Sale on 10/15/07

Religious site with sermons, original content, not monetized — Up for sale is www.shortsermons.net, the domain and website. The site was established in January 2006 and the domain is good

The DayJobNuker Interview on Jobacle.com

via Day Job Nuker.Com by DayJobNuker on 10/15/07

I was interviewed by Andrew at Jobacle.com! Check out my interview right here. It is podcast #71 and my interview begins at the 4:50 mark of the podcast.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

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Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others

admin Popularity: 18% [?] October 20th, 2007

Alexa Ranking for chipseoI have have an upcoming article I wrote on goals, 10 Ways to Set Goals for Your Online Business, that will be ready to post next week, but in the process I have reached a milestone goal of my own for this blog, and I also thought I would list 10 goals of my own I set for chipseo.com and what progress has been made. I consider milestone goals something very obtainable and a way to see movement in the desired direction, and also something to recognize along the way.

Although this blog is new, I set a few goals for it that I wanted to reach in a relatively short time period, and although it isn’t the greatest determination of traffic, this week chipseo.com reached its first Alexa ranking of 1,026,512 835,454. Yes, I know… nothing at all to write home about, much less putting into a blog post, but this is the first ranking on Alexa it hit, and it hit this with the domain registration 14 days old.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

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