The guide is straight to the point and offers a ton of good information about how to jump into SEO, analytics, hosting, and online marketing. What I like most about the article is that they give specific resources and products to make it happen, rather than the blanket, “you need to do this, find a company to do that, buy something like…” that we all suggest, all too often. Additionally, they pretty much break the costs down to about the cheapest a business can possibly get them for.

Anyway, I highly recommend this article for those new site owners or site owners on a budget that need to just get started with SEO and online marketing…

I will say that the article does not cover anything related to usability, design, or the actual setup of a website, which are extremely important. This article is applicable to businesses that have a website but if you are planning on setting up a website for your business, this article will give you a good direction and options of marketing, seo, and analytics, once you actually get your site up and running.

So, the real question is, what makes these seals justifiable?

Realistically, if a site seal provides any increase in conversions, there is a point where the benefit surpasses the cost to obtain a site seal. But, where is that point?

My typical answer is that for a new website they will not provide a positive ROI until the business has a substantial amount of sales. Basically, don’t get one until you are already well established. Substantial is a very ambiguous answer, let’s look at what substantial sales actually mean.

Let’s say a site can benefit by a 5% increase in raw conversion by installing a trust seal, far below the 75% that some claim, but still high as far as I’m concerned. Let’s also say they are using a seal that costs $1000 per year, and are currently operating with a 20% profit margin.

Plugging this into an equation to calculate the sales required for a positive ROI:

(profit margin)(sales + increase in sales) = (cost of seal)
.20(1x + .05x) = $1000
.20(1.05x) = $1000
1.05x = $1000/.2
x = $1000/.2/1.05
Sales = $4761.90

This business would need an additional $4761.90 in sales in the next year, or $396.86 per month, to get a positive ROI on their site seal investment. If the business operates on a very tight profit margin (say 5%-10%), which is increasingly common with online businesses, this number goes up quickly.

As far as sales go, still assuming the 5% increase in sales, this business would need to currently be doing this much to break even in exactly 1 year:

(increase in sales)(required sales) = (monthly cost of seal)
.05x = $396.86
x = $396.86/.05
Required sales = $7937.80

So, you can see how much in current sales this business needs to break even on their purchase of the trust seal: $7,937.80 per month, or $95,253.36 per year.

This isn’t an astronomical number for an established website, however for a brand new website it’s probably a lot. Additionally, it’s not uncommon for a business to purchase multiple site seals. I can say that as the number of seals goes up, the conversion rate per seal goes down, making more sales required for the seals to generate a positive ROI.

If a business has 3 seals installed all for $1000, and the end conversion increase for each seal is 3.3% (we’ll assume an extremely generous 10% total for all 3 seals). This would require an existing monthly sales volume of $36,291.06 ($435,492.72 per year) just to break even on the trust seals.

These are all just made up numbers, but they’re in the realm of possibility as far as costs, increases, and profit goes.

The sneaky-tricky stuff!

The tricky stuff: There are many variables in measuring an increase in sales. It’s almost impossible to attribute an increase 100% to the installed site seal, even if a single variable A-B test is performed. There are factors outside the checkout process that have a lot to do in determining the type of visitors that are coming to a site, and the sales of that site. Even so, a single-variable A-B test would be the most appropriate way to test the conversion rate increase in adding a site seal.

The sneaky stuff: One caveat is that if a seal instantly increases conversions, you could be losing money by performing the A-B test at all. This creates psychological motivation not to test, and is one of the strongest retention methods of site seals in general. The majority of website owners have bought into the seal before they even install it and no test is ever performed.

As site owners we almost always get grossly skewed statistics on the effectiveness of site seals, especially if those statistics are coming from the person trying to sell it. I can honest tell you that you should not expect a 70% increase in conversions by installing a site seal, and I don’t think I would expect a 10% in most cases.

If you are going to install a site seal, I strongly recommend performing an A-B test for a few months, or at least until some statistical significance is reached, to see if it will be worth spending the money on the seal again. Also make sure you are getting outside opinions as to the seal’s effectiveness (although this may be impossible). It is extremely difficult to find objective and statistically accurate comparisons of site seals or any single site seal for that matter. There is simply so much hype as to their effectiveness, there’s no honest information about them anywhere. Proceed with caution…

The site seals I recommend that could possibly work

These are the only site seals that I could possibly recommend looking into. There are probably a million out there, but there are very few that anyone cares or knows about. Most seals just add clutter to a page, potentially decreasing the sales potential the page would otherwise have.

Verisign SSL
Mcafee
Truste
BBB
and finally, any EV SSL (I recommend Comodo EV SSL)

Even if your website consists of only a single page, make sure that it has no less than the following, in no particular order.

1. Store hours
2. Telephone number
3. Street address of all locations
4. A list of products and brands that you carry
5. Specials, sales, and web coupons

1. Store Hours

Make sure that your site clearly lists the standard operating hours and holiday scheduling. If you aren’t operating an ecommerce site, try to put these on every page. If you have multiple locations, make sure to put the hours for every location if they are different.

Don’t make it difficult to find your operating hours. Putting them prominantly in the sidebar or footer of every page is a great way to do this in a clean and elegant manner.

2. Telephone number

Your local, and toll free if you have one, phone number should be clearly listed on every page of the website. If your business provides any sort of continuous support, make sure you put your after hours or other pertinant support numbers on there as well.

3. Street address of all locations

Every location that you operate should be listed on your site. If you only have 1 location, put the street address and a link to a google map on every page. The footer is an excellent place to do this.

If you have a handful of locations, use a dedicated page for all locations, and make sure to include a google map link, and the business hours for each location on the same page.

If you have many locations, a “find nearest location” search function should be accessible from every page. These are best placed in both the header and footer of the site. You can put a quick zip code based lookup in the header of every page to make it extra-easy. Again, on the detail page for each location, make sure to put a maps link, the phone number, and the business hours for that particular location.

4. A list of products and services that you carry

You know a lot about your business, but a new customer probably won’t know specific details just from your name alone. You should always list major brands that you carry, or if you provide services, and anything else a customer might want to know before coming into your store.

“We sell sporting equipment” is not a good description.

“We sell the finest rock climbing, kayaking, and camping gear, and a full lineup of outdoor supplies and equipment” is much better!

5. Specials, sales and coupons

When you market to an audience on the internet, you are just one of a million other websites trying to sell to the same people. By providing web coupons, listing specials, and current sales, you instantly connect with your customer and they are far more likely to stay on your website, bookmark it, and later come into your store.

This is probably the least utilized marketing effort by small retail businesses, and it makes a big difference. You’ve paid someone to design, program, and host your website. If you aren’t getting the people that visit it, to take action, you’re wasting your money.

Where does your business fit-in?

The once a year rush…

The every holiday surge…

The B2B…

Or the product launch…

With Google’s and others’ free tools on the internet, a small business owner can get very good insight into business seasonality, and shopping search trends. If you have good relationships with your suppliers and manufacturers, it’s often possible to design pre-release campaigns for upcoming products. Search engines place some weight on the first websites to write about specific products or services. If you’re that website, you can gain considerable traction in natural search rankings, and possibly a huge sales boost once the product is launched. This is just one example of how trends like this can be used, but the possibilities are endless and the data is free.

A great example that I found this weekend, is B&H Photo. They sell a variety of non-photography related computer and technical products. What quickly caught my attention is that many these products are being sold well below any other online retailer’s price, even cheaper than anyone on eBay. I don’t have access to wholesale computer accessory costs, but I imagine that they aren’t making much money, if any, on their computer product sales.

So how is this smart marketing?

When an established website like B&H draws sales from non-core products, they gain additional customers and brand exposure. What they gain by selling at cost, is the opportunity to sell other products for profit, and they gain repeat customers. In the end, if the amount of money spent marketing and supporting non-core products is minimal, there is absolutely no downside to this practice. If they aren’t making money from those computer related sales, they’re making money from those additional customers that are also interested in cameras, memory cards, photography accessories, and more computer accessories.

A good idea for some but not for everyone:

This practice can be a strong marketing technique, however, it will not create a sustainable business model for everyone. A businesses that can most effectively harness this technique must have a strong search engine presence, or the ability to draw sales and traffic at little to no additional cost. This technique is probably not a good idea for a startup business unless you really know what you are doing. A business must also have access to related but non-core products at a very competitive price.

Obvious potential pitfalls:

• Some strong reserve must be used to not cannibalize existing profit margins, as it extremely easy to sell short on everything. Don’t make everything a loss leader, only those non-core products that you are adding.
• Another danger is accidentally migrating from one core product type to another. It needs to be clear to yourself and to your customers what your business is there to do. If you are a photo shop, that sells some computer accessories, it should be clear that you are not a computer accessory seller that has some photography equipment. This is absolutely key in protecting your brand, and sustaining your business model.
• The other products that you decide to sell must be related to what your business does. If would make no sense for an online flower shop to start selling car parts. You need to be careful not to dilute your brand, message, and what it is you currently do with completely unrelated products.
• You do not ever want to enter an arena that will create a lot of additional customer support requests. This is a quick way to nullify any gain you get from additional customers and sales.

The big picture:

It’s sometimes difficult to grasp the concept of loosing money on one place to gain money in another. If you have the ability to step back and look at the big picture, you will find that there are numerous areas where a loss here can create a huge gain somewhere else. Small steps should always be taken when testing out a system that has both the potential for a loss and a gain, but I think that many will find that this is a useful, appropriate, and completely possible marketing technique.

Do people actually respond to fake, photographs? Only your own testing can tell for sure, but one thing’s for certain, if the images on your site are actually unique and speak to your customers, you have an advantage over everyone else.

Here’s my favorite examples of the too-stock photography that we see everywhere!

The collaboration

Great ideas come from conflict and discussion, not cooperation. If everybody’s happy, then chances are nothing is getting done.

The corporate team

When you take a picture of a bunch of models in business suites, you end up with… A bunch of models in business suites!

The business professional

Hmmm. Just out of college and standing around dreaming. My advice is to stop standing around and get to work.

The customer service rep

If it were this much fun to work in a call center, they wouldn’t have the highest turnover rate of any job.

The grunge factor

Nothing says professional like a scruffy face or a crumbling wall…

However, You shouldn’t take this as a recommendation to put a bunch of low quality pictures on your site. But, trying to find some realism isn’t a terrible thing.

Do this:

• Show realism!
• Connect with your visitor!
• Don’t choose a photo just for a pretty face!
• Choose photos that have some relation with your service!
• Use only clear, sharp, and high quality photos!
• Take time when choosing any stock photo for your website. Make sure you can easily explain why you chose that image!

Here’s an interesting article about how people in photo’s can affect your website’s conversions.

First thing you need to do to make sure you are using yahoo’s built-in analytics or configure your own analytics to report on all traffic from your yahoo campaigns and run a report by the domain that the traffic is coming from. You want to sort that report by the overall clicks from a particular domain.

Here’s an example of the report that you need (signifigantly reduced for readability).

Now if you look under the conversion column in this report, you will see that a few of these sites have provided no conversions.

These are the sites that you want to block from your PPC campaign. In this case the wealthygeek.com (3/1039 = .29%) is a conversion rate that I am not willing to pay for, so I’ll block it and others with poor converting traffic.

I would make sure that you have at least one month of traffic and PPC statistics, three months or more if you don’t get a lot of PPC traffic. Remove domains that tend to provide a lot of traffic but no conversions. If a site can’t provide a 1% conversion rate, it’s probably not worth keeping. Depending on your past history you may want to set your threshold above 1%.

Just remember that even if your PPC traffic goes down a bit, your overall cost is going to go down with it, and your overall conversion rate is going to go up.

Warning: If your ads attract poor visitors, it wont matter what website they’re on, so don’t use this method to optimize your account if you aren’t getting sales. This tool is useful only to remove sites that just send bad traffic. You should always be testing new key phrases, and new ads, and eliminating the ones that can’t provide cost effective traffic.

Yahoo also has a Q&A post as there have been a ton of question since this feature was launched.

Initially many website owners will go with the shot gun approach because they can get a lot of affiliates promoting their business, and the idea, if you get enough traffic someone will eventually buy something, generally works. It’s easy, doesn’t require a huge commitment of time, and theoretically runs itself.

The sniper approach, which I prefer, allows you to closely monitor and cater to each individual affiliate, and when affiliates are given good support and all of the tools they need to succeed, the results can be amazing. This type of program requires constant attention and thorough investigation of affiliates that want into your program.

Despite all of the hype of how much an affiliate program can do for an e-business, they fail the majority of the time. Affiliate programs are very difficult to make successful no matter what approach is taken.

Why the shotgun method often ends miserably:
When you let everyone into your program, you are going to be at some point letting people into your program that want to rip you off. Especially in click or lead based affiliate programs, it is extremely easy for an affiliate to click on their own banner, or fill out a form themselves. This may not seem like a huge problem, but once you start getting 50 affiliates making fake transactions, the ability to control the situation becomes impossible. What started out as an easier approach to affiliate marketing, just became much more expensive and far more time consuming. When programs enter this state where lots of affiliates are scamming the owner, they will most likely destroy themselves. The affiliate owner can’t find value in keeping the program going because they aren’t getting a positive return on their affiliate spending, and eventually they scrap the program. These programs can be successful, but fraud to any degree must be dealt with swiftly.

Why the sniper approach also often ends miserably:
While the sniper approach usually has the best long-term outlook, it is very difficult to get off the ground, and keep in the air. Finding high quality sites to join and promote your program, is very difficult. For every ten decent sites that join your program, only one or two will ever send you anything, and probably only one of fifty will ever be a really good affiliate. You will also need to actively seek out potential affiliates for your program, as passive promotion will rarely produce good results. Find related but non-competing sites and market your program to them.

Whatever approach you take to your affiliate program, treat it like another product, and market it like another product. “If you build it, they will come”, doesn’t apply anymore to an affiliate program than to a website.

My rules for protecting your program:

1. Don’t start an affiliate program if you don’t have time to manage it. If you can’t allocate at least an hour a day to running your affiliate program, you shouldn’t even start it in the first place. With the exception of outsourcing your affiliate program, it will cost you more than you will get back from it.
2. Use a 3rd party affiliate management platform. Affiliates generally have a lot more trust in a 3rd party managed program. The most trusted, but most expensive, program is commission junction, while shareasale, clickbank, and linkshare are a few other popular platforms. 3rd party platforms help maintain honesty between affiliates and program owners, and provide an existing base of affiliates for your program. Unless you have a very strong brand, a program on a 3rd party platform will be beneficial.
3. Don’t be afraid to reject an application. You pay to have an affiliate program, you pay people to put up your links, you are the only entity that takes any risk in setting up a program. You have every right to deny, deny, deny. If the site looks spammy, if they aren’t related to your industry, if you just get a bad vibe, deny them.
4. Automatically decline all mega-mall, and shopping directory sites. No offense to any of these site owners, but these affiliates are almost always the ones who commit affiliate fraud. Anyone that has been marketing online for a while, knows that unless a site is offering something vastly unique and special, the site is essentially worthless.
5. Deny unrelated affiliate websites. If you affiliate program is a pay per sale program for car parts, it’s unlikely that a website offering jewelry is going to provide any valuable visitors to you. Even if they get 50,000 visitors per day, those visitors are most likely not looking for car parts and therefore are not valuable to you. Adding affiliates that have little chance of ever sending relevant traffic will only junk up your program, and make it harder to manage.
6. Closely monitor transactions from new affiliates. Affiliates that are gaming your program will usually send a few real transaction through and then slowly send fake ones. Once you have a program for a while it gets easy to spot a bad affiliate. If your best affiliates send ten transactions a month, and a new one sends ten in the first day, there’s a good chance they’re up to something. Also, monitor things like exactly what website the transaction originated from, the IP address of the transaction, etc.
7. Go out of your way to support very good affiliates. A few really good affiliates can single handedly make an online business successful. If you start seeing a few affiliates performing ahead of the pack, contact them and see what you can do to help them out. Raise their commission if necessarily (Do this before they ask for it), and just do everything you can to help them out. In the end, they will reward you for it.
8. Track everything. This goes without saying, if you aren’t tracking your conversions, then you don’t know if your marketing is worth it.

You should also not be overly protective. You do still want people to be interested in your program. Your goal is to prevent the bad ones from ever joining, and help the good ones promote your program.

Bad affiliates poison an affiliate program for good affiliates, so keeping them out is in the best interest of you and your good affiliates. When you can put more time into helping your good affiliates, the results can be great, and both you and your affiliates benefit from each-other.

Some good affiliate marketing blogs:
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/
http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

This should also work on myspace, and other networks that allow html, but do not allow javascript or flash.

HTML-only tracking systems:

• HitsLog
• StatCounter

There's going to be a lot more tracking programs than these, but a lot of them are unprofessional or require you to link back to them. Your current analytics program may already allow image only tracking, so I would check there first to be sure.

Configuring your tracking:
When you put html into a craigslist ad, you need to format the entire ad in html, not just the tracking image. If you don't there is a good chance that something is going to get messed up.

The best way to do this is to use an html or text editor to make your ad. On craigslist in general, I have had the best results with a writing very clean copy that reads straight through. The ad needs to be clearly written, and should be very concise. Once you are done making your ad, paste the tracking image code at the bottom of it. Then copy and paste the entire html into the craigslist ad (Don't copy the <body> or <head> tags). You should also place one or more good images at the bottom of the ad, assuming it is for a product. Pictures make a huge difference for any classified ad.

Example of complete ad code:

Now when you log into your analytics account, you should see reporting from this specific ad. This type of tracking lacks a lot of the data that full-featured analytics will have. But if you can't use any scripting, it's basically the only way to track.

There are so many how to guides that people need for running their ecommerce website's. With that in mind, this is a list of very useful how to's related to ecommerce. Hopefully this post will be a good resource for site owners, and those looking to get into ecommerce. Topics include everything from setting up a web server, marketing, to integrating a website with a payment gateway.

Please send me some feedback if there are some good how to's that should be on here.

Servers / Networking / Programming Setup:

• The perfect Fedora 5 server setup - While I don't like the virtual control panel that the guide recommends at the end, this is a perfect step-by-step guide to setting up a Fedora 5 Linux server. This guide covers setup for PHP5, mysql, SSL Support, ProFTP, and a few others. The guide states that it is for 64 Bit systems, but I have setup five, 32 Bit systems without any additional modification.
  Fedora Core 4, Fedora Core 3 setups are also available.
• Setup a Windows XP Web Server - Also php.net has an excellent guide on the overall steps to setup php and Apache on windows. The php.net version tends to leave out some things that later may cause errors, but the comments section of the article probably cover all of the missing information.
• Windows XP Apache Virtual Hosting - Having needed to setup a Windows XP server recently, this guide covers both the setup, and how to use virtual hosting on the server allowing multiple websites to exist at the same time. I have a company server that was setup using this and the previous guide running several websites, very effectively.
• How to make Cat 5 / 5e Patch Cable - I've saves myself a few hundred dollars in under a year, by making all my own Ethernet patch cable. You can get cat 5e cable and connectors really cheap when you buy them in bulk. If you think you may be needing a lot of cable in the future, this is the way to go. It may take a few tries to get your cables nice, but once you get it down, you cables are just as good as anything.
• 13 *nix command line tricks - A quick tutorial on a few command line codes that are very useful but often not known, not used, or one's that we forgot.
• Top 5 PHP security holes - After running a server scan I was referred to this excellent resource on the major security problems that websites commonly have with php. Since almost all of these problems are due to use error and poor programming, they are all fixable.
• Integrate Linux PHP with a MSSQL database - After working on a few of these integrations, one successfully, and one failing, this is the best overview on the topic that I have found. Easysoft.com also has another good guide, but it is geared to using their own paid extension, which is expensive. I don't recommend performing this integration unless you absolutely have to (Just save yourself the time, and switch the site to a windows server), but these should get you pointed in the right direction.

Web Design / Hosting / Usability:

• How to make a horrible Oscommerce site - From Jason Chance, this is a great, humorous guide on how not to make your oscommerce website.
• 10 Ways to ruin visitor experience on your website
• 10 easy steps to a horrible ecommerce site - Another from Jason on sitepoint.com, this is an extension of the oscommerce version, and covers mistakes that all websites should avoid.
• B2B Usability - From Jakob Nielsens Alertbox, a guide to usability from a B2B vs. a B2C standpoint.
• Top 10 mistakes of web design - One more from Dr. Nielsen, on the top 10 mistakes that website creators make. Weblog mistakes is another valuable article for blog owners out there. I admit that 'Irregular Publishing Frequency' is one that I rarely adhere to...
• Shopping Cart Abandonment - Don’t do this… - 3 simple tips to lowering shopping cart abandonment rates.
• How to ruin a web design - This is a good article covering how to not over think a design project, and that often more people working on something means less quality.
• How to choose a web host - This is a good overview to help people that aren't quite sure what they need, pointed in the right direction in choosing the company to host their website.

SEO and Marketing:

• How to Conduct Keyword Research - This is a great introductory guide on finding relevant keywords for a SEO or PPC campaign.
• 5 most common SEO mistakes - 5 simple SEO mistakes that are often overlooked.
• Ultimate guide to link-baiting and social media marketing - From one of the most authoritative persons on link building anywhere, Andy Hagens tells us how to properly build linkbait. I would consider this the definitive guide to linkbaiting. What is linkbaiting you say?
• List of the best directories - This is the best list of web directories out there. Directories are separated by value, and prices are listed next to each directory.
• How to market to other business owners - From entrepreneur.com, this is my '7 commandments' on marketing B2B products and services. I highly recommend printing this one out and looking it over any time you need to deliver a message to a B2B audience.
• How to add $1 Million in revenue to your business in 1 year - From Andy Beal at marketingpilgrim, this is written with an SEM agency as the intended industry target, but it can be applied in theory to almost any ecommerce business.
• How To Generate Targeted Site Traffic Without Search Engines - This is an awesome guide on building traffic without completely relying on search engines for it.
• Top 10 business mistakes, marketing firms make - Another from marketing pilgrim, this can also be applied to just about any business.

Payments:

• Six Payment Gateways Reviewed, The Chargeback Challenge, and Solve the Payment Processing Problem are all written by John Conde from the merchant-account-services.org blog. These are all great articles and should be considered essentials for website owners looking to accept credit cards on their website.
• How to accept credit cards on your website - This is a simple guide that I wrote a few months ago covering basic option to accepting payments online.
• Integrate a website with Authorize.net using php 5

Other / random useful stuff:

• Microsoft Windows Power Toys - If you don't know what these are, check them out. Extremely helpful, and can safely change a lot of things on your computer that you couldn't before. I highly recommend the Tweak-UI, Clear Type, Virtual Desktop, and the Image Resizer toys.
• Magazines for small business owners This is an article covering some good business magazines for print and online for business and website owners.

Web Server Control Panels:

• Plesk
• cPanel
• Webmin
• cube panel
• CWIPanel
• ISPConfig

Getting Information (Where I go when I need help):

• Digitalpoint Forum
• Sitepoint Forum
• Webmasterworld
• WebProWorld

Freelance Marketplaces (If I need programming/ design work):

• GetAFreelancer - #1 choice
• Rent A Coder

If you know of any really good how-to's or guides for ecommerce do-it-yourself'ers send them to me. I may add them to the list.