Picking your target audience

Every business has to market, advertise, and promote their services or products to a receptive audience to be successful. Notice, I said a "receptive" audience, because it wouldn't be a good advertising plan to promote auto parts on a "new moms" Facebook group, or promote local landscaping services on a national car repair forum.

First, you have to recognize what you sell. Let's just say for instance you sell natural vitamins, but you don't know much about the demographics that are interested in owning them. First, you should check Alexa.com for a site similar to yours. Assuming you sell natural vitamins, let's check out vitaminshoppe.com:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vitaminshoppe.com

As you can see in the graphic to the right, the majority of shoppers are women, more college educated, and shop from home. From all of these you can get a general idea that these women are either married, have children, or physically active, so this gives a good starting point. Scrolling down you see that 2% of the traffic comes from and "increase testosterone" search, meaning possibly this is the top product keyword for the visitors and likely for the male shoppers. We can also see India sends a great deal of international traffic compared to other countries, so this is the third approach.

From Alexa, here is what we have for vitaminshoppe.com that you can focus on for:
1. Married, or mothers, or active females
2. Men (or possibly women) concerned about low testosterone
3. International traffic from India.

From here, you could search out Facebook for groups or pages related to these areas, and begin posting responses under your page's ID.
Next, take to Twitter and hit the hashtags #low-t, #children's vitamins, #vitamins india, etc. and build your followers. Don't forget, you should have a feed with automatic hash tags enabled through your shopping cart.
From here, write a blog after conducting research on vitamin needs for Indian consumers, mothers, active women, and middle aged me, and begin publishing articles that include coupons to your store.
Last, begin your shopping feeds to the correct shopping sites. Don't just pick shopping.com, Google, or Bing. Target your feeds to your selected groups by checking their Alexa statistics for these highlights.

It's not hard to pick your target audience, just don't forget to attack that audience once you have picked them.

Weekend Warrior Project: Free Webstore through Blogger, part one.

About three months ago, I started looking for a way to begin accepting Dwolla online. My current cart doesn't offer that integration, and I can't place "Buy Now" Dwolla buttons on my site because the settings will not allow it. I tried Zen Cart which had an integration module which worked, but the script kept having glitches including my entire store going blank. I floundered for a while with it, considered Jugem Cart (see an example) but that looked too confusing with the "Add to Cart" on the screen also.

About a week ago, something hit me. I was in the process of adding new products to my site, and I remembered what I tried with Google Checkout buttons several years ago on Blogger, but never really had the time to finish. I setup a new blog with a clean white template, and attached a Dwolla button to the blog post. The result was surprisingly clean and shoppable.
Check out the first post
See the blog: http://wrestlingoutlet.blogspot.com

It took several tries to get it right, but once I did this became a piece of cake.




First, I had to setup the columns. I set my width to 1080, and the sidebar to 200. Go to your blog dashboard and select Template. Under the thumbnail of your blog, click on the Customize link, and set your widths until you are happy with it.

From here you can change the layout, column widths, background, or just scrap the whole template and start fresh.















Next, every store needs categories, right? I found a useful way to do this too. Blogger allows labels on all posts. Add your label as the name of the category with each item for sale. Blogger also saves the labels you have used for quick click and add.

After you have set your labels, you will go to your dashboard again and select "Layout" on the left. Click the + beside Labels, and edit your label title as shown in the next photo.

Once you have the layout all set, upload a logo or input a heading text, now you are ready for the first post, or product.
To be continued!

Weekend Warrior Project: Payments through 2Checkout

This will by my first "Weekend Warrior Project" posting. I will randomly pick some obscure selling information you may have never heard of, and pick it apart, break it down, and give you the real skinny on the service.

2Checkout has been around for more than a decade. They once charged a lot of fees, but over the years with competition from low cost alternatives, they reworked their business model to a flat rate per payment that is similar to Paypal and others that can greatly benefit smaller sellers. They offer something that others like them do not though. On top of a competitive rate, they also give sellers the ability to accept Paypal payments through their account. Why may this be a big deal? Because we all know Paypal can be notorious for holding payments and setting limits for non-eBay sales on smaller sellers in the name of buyer protection.

2Checkout acts as a middleman to Paypal and a merchant account. Instead of signing up through 2-3 accounts, you carry one payment provider and accept either credit cards, or Paypal, all in a window that you can setup to match the colors of your website. View more here:

View the "Hosted Checkout"

So, what is a middleman in the payments world? 2Checkout uses a processor like Verisign, Linkpoint, or similar credit card processor with a rate of maybe 20¢+2.5%/transaction. They charge you a fee of 29¢+2.9%/transaction, and make a profit on the difference. And here is why it makes sense to use a middleman, instead of signing up with the processor yourself. 2Checkout absorbs all the responsibility of fees paid to the account (up to $50/month) and all the responsibility of maintenance for the merchant account. They also receive a reduced rate due to the sheer volume of payments they accept on your behalf by credit card or Paypal, that you would pay at minimum the same rate or higher to accept payments through the same processor.

Some of the features include Buy Now buttons, email invoices, buyer coupon codes, and electronic good sales. Here is an example of a buy now button linked to a test account. (This button will show an error because the account is not live)

2Checkout.com Inc. (Ohio, USA) is a payment facilitator for goods and services provided by eSellers Journal.

As always though, there are some drawbacks. For instance, smaller sellers tend to use online marketplaces, which are prohibited through 2Checkout likely because of agreements with their processors. There is also a $50 chargeback fee for fraudulent transactions, but this would occur with any processor as well.

They offer checkout through dozens of shopping carts, including Big Commerce, Magento, Prestashop, and Zen Cart, and give direct checkout integration through about 20 carts that are simple to setup.

2Checkout Shopping Carts

Sign up for a free trial at 2Checkout.com, and you can get nearly unlimited access the seller area without actually signing up for the service first.

See you next weekend for the Weekend Warrior Project!

Unwinding from work, my way

After a long day at work, or working on your website or business, you do need to unwind. Some people have a glass of wine, some eat a bag of popcorn and watch a movie, and some do yard work or jobs around the house. However you do it, you need to unwind. I personally have a pretty mentally demanding job, but am fortunate enough to have a long drive home and XM radio to unwind me. I will turn on the news first, then after about 10 minutes of getting mad at the world I switch to one of my favorite music stations.

Last night, I switched to XM Octane, which is hard rock, and heard a song that just floored me. I don't hear many like this, but once a week I will post a song of the week. Maybe you'll like it, maybe not, but maybe you can unwind with it just like I did.

Enjoy, and let me know how you like to unwind too.

Cart of the week for Feb 4: Jugem Cart - $9/month

Jugem Cart is a very easy to setup, modern "floating" style cart, that is fully functional and ready to sell within a few minutes of setup. It has a 15 day free trial, afterward just $9/month for unlimited items.

Pros:
Unlimited items
5GB of storage (photos)
Mobile templates, good for Facebook/Twitter followers
Plenty of templates
No extra fees
Bulk import system

Cons:
Only 2 payment options: Stripe and Paypal
No Google shopping feed.

The 2 cons are minimal in my opinion for small sellers. Spending money on Bing or Yahoo search marketing is actually a better investment than competing with large retailers on Google shopping now. Spending money overall though isn't that great of a proposition anymore for me, since I mostly rely on eBay sales to draw customers to my site. It all depends on how much time you have to spend marketing yourself online. The payment options aren't that much of a drawback since most online sellers already take Paypal on marketplaces, and Stripe is a very easy to credit card processor.

Give it a try if you are, and let me know how it works for you.

Read more: http://esellerscafe.boards.net/thread/62/cart-week-feb-jugem-month?page=1&scrollTo=276#ixzz2sPWRuaYI