One of the most common misconceptions about starting an on-line business is, just build a website and you start selling to all those Internet customers. This misconception is also true with regard to the turn-key on-line stores. These turn-key solutions provide the product, pricing, payment options, secure certificates (the browser lock you look for when making a purchase), the look and feel, and so on.

Since they are handing you everything on a silver platter, you will need to provide a domain name  (if not included in the package), and heavily invest into advertising your on-line store. The lion share of the cost is in the marketing and advertising. Building a professional website with  all the bells and whistles is cheap by comparison when it comes to marketing the products and services.

Look and listen closely to advertising, you will find on-line businesses push their domain name across television, radio, newspaper ads, coupons, flyers, direct mailing etcetera. Businesses without a brick and mortar storefront are some of the better known brands. For example, Overstock.com is a large drop ship business, and Amazon.com is the largest reseller sales portal.

The Amazon.com, you know the people with the “Smile on the Box”, is known to just about everyone, and provides a heavily advertised sales portal. Searching Amazon for a product will produce results from a variety of vendors with different prices for the same item. Amazon makes it’s money by taking a piece of the action with the responsibility of delivery placed on the supplier.

Amazon.com at one time provided the Amazon book store sales portal. For every book sold via your website, you would get a stipend, a small price to pay on the part of Amazon.com as they would get a large number of back links to their site. Most of the time, the site owner with the book store would receive little if anything at all, but Amazon still had the back link.

Why would the back link be important? Because the larger number of back links you acquire to your website, the higher level of authority is perceived by the search engines. Thus better rankings.

Amazon did it right. The back links come from far and wide without using some link farm. Back links originating from known link farms will surely get you listed at the bottom of the search results pages. Link farms are just websites dedicated to generating thousands of links to your site for a variety of keywords, originating from 1 or more servers. Beware of SEO companies touting their ability to get you tons of back links. They could be doing more harm than good.

Another marketing pitfall is relying too heavily on search engines when creating brand awareness. Take a lesson from successful companies by utilizing their techniques where possible.

Pay close attention to the ads the next time you are watching television, listening to radio, reading the newspaper, magazine, receiving coupons, flyers and other forms of direct mailing.

Marketing across many of these mediums will help create brand awareness and plant the seed for a prospective customer to type in your URL into a search engine or browser address bar.

Best of luck in your on-line endeavors.

The sandbox with respect to search engines is a Google phenomenon where domains are spidered and stored in the search engine database but not in the general index. To see if your domain is listed on Google, all one has to do is search Google for your domain name. If you get links to your site, you are in fact in the Google database, otherwise you have a different set of circumstances. Knowing you are listed in the database, you can search for a related keyword. Assuming your domain is missing from the first 10 pages or so, may indicate a poorly optimized site, or in the case of a new domain, you may be in the Google Sandbox.

There are a variety of reasons a domain would live in the sandbox. First, new domains which have never been registered, often are kept in the sandbox for the first 6 months of their existence. Although this time period may not be held fast and hard, it is an approximation or average time the domain is limited to the index. Secondly, your content may not be unique, meaning the information can be found on other seasoned sites and therefore your site lacks authority.

Most people think of Google when it comes to search engines especially when you hear them say, Google it. Google is the dominant player in the SE market at present, you may consider making sure you are listed in the smaller engines as well. There are lots of people who choose to use other platforms such as, Yahoo, bing, AOL, Ask to name a few. There are literally thousands of smaller search engines on the net, including those in different countries.

Why is getting listed in the smaller search engines important? Let us assume we have a new domain name and website. We have done everything right with regard to structure, content, etcetera, and we are stuck in the Google sandbox. So as we wait for time to pass, we should begin focusing on listings in the smaller SE’s. These alternative search engines will often list your domain quickly exposing you to their users. Some engines offer free listings, while others may charge a fee for the listings.

The important aspect to this is being seen in as many venues as possible. Your business can originate from anywhere.

You also need to utilize this sandbox time to create as a number of backlinks. Backlinks are when other websites, with a similar theme link back to your site. Backlinks are a factor relative to the authority of your content. When more websites are linking to you, it is assumed you have unique authorative content, where you are the expert.

A note to the wise, be sure your content is “Unique”. This includes copying text published on your supplier sites. Assuming you have permission to do so, you lose your credibility and authority when it comes to search engines. You also need to change the name of the images you use as this may be looked upon as a duplication. Avoiding any duplication even using common names like “spacer” or “main-page-image” may cause a loss in authoritative analysis.

Having done all this will enhance your domain’s chances of listing well in Google when your time in the sandbox is done.

We are an NH Website Development, Optimization, and Marketing company. We have been building content managed websites since 1997, yes, back when there was Only dial-up.  In fact we offered our clients free dial-up access with their website product. We also do standard websites, those without content management systems, but our clientèle are not web developers, have little need to learn HTML (or any other programming language for that matter), and have little use for the hands on nuts and bolts behind producing a website for their on-line portion of their business. Our content management systems are written specifically for the client’s website giving them the ability to make the modifications they need when they want to and not have to get a book for dummies to learn some freebee out of the box generic CMS. There’s an acronym for you.

Although some folks make their entire sites out of blog software, we found the need for a bit more flexibility avoiding the need to hack the blog software.  Instead, we decided a blog is a useful addition to our website, hence we get the best of both worlds!

The blog is an accent to our current website giving us a platform to focus on and emphasize points needing more detail, or discussion. At the same time it provides the opportunity for interaction and further details for items needing disussion.

The focus on the articles in the blog are intended to be in plain language (english) without all the wow lingo and acronyms showing how well we know wow lingo and acronyms. After all what good is it to use those and have you wonder, what does that mean?

The information should be presented as informative and helpful to you. There are lots of techies I can banter with flashing acronyms like switch blades, to borrow a reference from Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungle Land”.

We want this to be informative to the non-techie, help with understanding the concepts behind the products we offer, and the reasons we feel they will be helpful to you.

The motivation is we all have to start somewhere, we all have to start sometime, so it might as well be here and now, It’s Time… Be Found… Be Seen!