Thursday, August 19, 2010
Link To Full Story: Flippa Blog | Buy & Sell Websites
It’s been a huge seven days at Flippa: over $1 million worth of web property has changed hands here in the last week! It’s a new sales record! And on top of that, we’ve passed $40 million of website sales for the life of the marketplace: Yesterday’s sales and auctions brought the week’s total to [...]
Link To Full Story: flippa.com
In order to get started with drop shipping, I typically suggest that etailers have some form of value proposition that can be offered to the vendor or suppliers. The notion that you are going to carry their products and just throw them up on pay per clicks is not very persuasive or compelling. Moreover, competing on the basis of pricing is oftentimes not the best solution either, as it creates a “race to the bottom” scenario with the integrity of the retail pricing of the vendor’s product being degraded. Vendors need to be reassured that you WILL NOT violate the MSRP strategy they have in place. They also need to be reassured that you can provide them with new market share.
My chief recommendation—that has become something of a personal dictum—is that in order to excite interest on the part of a vendor you need to be interesting to them, both in terms of the economics or the peripheral benefits by way of brand exposure and eyeballs.
What this means is that rankings and search engine placements for critical key terms in the vendor’s industry are essential. If you rank in the top 5 for a key terms like “shower rings” then most manufacturers or dealers of shower rings could benefit by having their items up on your site.
Link To Full Story: www.domainstryker.com
Well, they had a great run for a couple of years and then they started seeing more competition from smaller players who turned into big players, because that’s what always happens with time. People flock to where there is good or easy money. Then soon it didn’t make sense anymore to mess around with eBay, one of their best sales outlets so they said bye bye to it.
Now earlier this year, Amazon, the place where they sell close to two third’s of their stuff and do the most of their biz online started directly competing with them… Looks like Amazon saw an opportunity (analyzed all the sales data from last few years, looked into margins and added the inventory by going direct to manufacturer since there is some nice $$$ to be made) and that’s that.
Link To Full Story: lifehacker.com
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite site for setting up shop online. Now we're back with the results and an overview of the five best places to establish a web-based shop and build your online presence.
Big Cartel (Web-Based, Basic: Free/Premium: From $9.99 per month)
Big Cartel is an easy-to-use store building and shopping cart service marketed towards artists. They've designed their setup and control panel system with the attitude that you'd rather be creating stuff and working on your business instead of tinkering with your web site. The pricing structure at Big Cartel makes it easy to test the waters without an up front cost. You can set up a storefront and list up to 5 products with basic customization for free. From there they have the Platinum plan for $9.99/month and the Diamond plan for $19.99/month offering an increase in volume of products and level of customization. Big Cartel doesn't take a percentage of your sales with any sort of fees. Check out their example page to see the variety of designs their users are using—the shot above is from the storefront of Backseat Vintage.
Link To Full Story: internet marketing: Frequently tagged products at Amazon.com
Twitter (A Little Birdie Told Me): Building your business one tweet at a time (Paperback)
By Henry J. Button
Buy new: $9.99
8 used and new from $9.14
Customer Rating: 
Customer tags: social media(101), twitter(100), internet marketing(87), online advertising(67), ecommerce(54), internet(50), internet business(48), new media(46), online(42), online business(42), online marketing(23), blogging(7)
Link To Full Story: www.elliotsblog.com
The best tip I can give to any web developer to make money is to be proactive in seeking out advertisers. Unless you have a really popular website, it’s most likely that you will have to seek out advertisers rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Visit competing websites and see who is advertising there and contact those companies directly. Install Google Adsense on your website and see what companies are advertising on your site via Google. If they’re small (not a lot of red tape in the marketing department), try to contact those companies and work out direct deals with them.
Link To Full Story: fragerfactor.blogspot.com
It's a well-known fact that the more steps a shopper must take in order to make a purchase, the less likely that purchase is. The same is true for shoppers on Facebook, of course, which is why San Francisco-based Payvmenthas developed a tool that lets them buy from vendors without ever leaving the site.
Now in beta, Payvment turns companies' Facebook fan pages from marketing platforms into sales platforms. Specifically, its Facebook app gives vendors everything they need to create a storefront on the social networking site, including a built-in, full-featured admin area. Installation takes 15 minutes, the company says; once it's done, Facebook users can shop and make purchases from that store without needing to leave Facebook.
Link To Full Story: domainnamewire.com
Also on the call, Google explained that it’s getting more involved with cost-per-action. Some e-commerce stores will provide Google with their product list and pricing, and then turn over advertising to Google. Google chooses when and where to display ads, and then gets a cut of sales — much like an affiliate program. It’s kind of like affiliate arbitrage for Google, except they get to bid on trademarks whereas most affiliates can’t.
Link To Full Story: gigaom.com
In the most basic implementation, advertisers will be able to bid on keywords to have their tweets featured in search results. But Twitter says also may eventually include the paid tweets in users’ regular tweet streams too, something that will surely be more controversial. Costolo said the company expects to decide whether to take that step before the end of the year.
Link To Full Story: adage.com
Shared by JohnH
This getting a lot of traction over the last few days.
Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged -- and here's what we found: 10 rules that hold up across category and time.
1. The 1% Rule
In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who's subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage -- and better recognize and reward -- these super-influentials.
