So I decided on Wholesale Electronics, you know such things as cell phones, Digital cameras along with gadgets, yep that’s what I would will sell online, because I like electronics. So I search around for a supplier and find one, then set up my account. Once done I proceed to purchase a Domain to start to set up my new venture.
Once template was set up I went to my supplier and picked the products I liked and wanted to sell, I placed them all in my website along with some descriptions and pictures, set up my emails and payment option. Awesome my store is ready to bring online.
With all that done it is time to Bring my store online & wait for the magic to happen (people coming to my site), yet no one there so what do I do now? Research yep I think I will do some research. Well first thing I find is I need to build up points with the major search engines, <> so now it’s more research, as I do this research all I keep saying is what the hell is anchor text (It's the text displayed in the menu bar of a websit), meta tags,(Key words the search engines use to find your site) key phrase, meta description(a brief description of words that people may use to locate what it is you have) oh and the dreaded SEO(Search Engine Optimization). How does one know what to use and where to place it? Let me be the first to say that had I know about the key phrase and words I may have picked a different domain name and possibly a different product due to http://www.wholesale-mega-store.com and wholesale electronics, cell phones gadgets are not the easiest to try and set up with anchor text and the market is full of electronics people are trying to sell. Anyway I spend the time and finally find some anchor text that I think will work, along with some Meta tags, set that all up and still nothing? So back to the books, I find out that in order to gain traffic you need to advertise, well how the hell do you advertise on the web? Links links links, ok so I need links and back links, so I continue my education down html lane and spend most of my days setting up accounts with link sharing sites, I go online and start finding places I can place my site name and link for free.
Now it’s time to check out my 10000 gazillion competitors, and find that a huge majority of them are selling the same products as me only at around 20% less than what I can buy it for, WTH? So back to square one find out how and where they are getting their product so I can at least be competitive. After endless hours of searching I found a new supplier who has great products at a much lesser cost to me, which will ripple into less cost for my customers, this now allows me to be competitive in the market. I set up the account with them and proceed to head straight back to the start, I now have to take out the old supplies and put in the new stuff, along with pictures, descriptions and yep you guessed it SEO Meta tags. After all that still nothing, no one visiting my site or even leaving me any emails to tell me what they thought. It is at this point I start thinking about paying someone to set all this up for me, but I’m stubborn and will have to learn it eventually so I will do the research and do this myself. I found a great little web site that explains Meta tags and anchored text very well. http://www.30minutebacklinks.com . Even though it says back links it walks you through how to set up anchor text and key word fraises.
The learning Curve
So now I am on week number two of my crash course in online business, so what have I learned so far this week? ha ha well let me tell you.
First I have learned all about links where to go to advertize yours and how to set up a reciprocal links page on my website, not easy for those of us who don't have the first clue about html, but I did it. (HOW, well I added a separate category on my site and called it Links to Friends, then in the description area I add their link they supply) however that left me with the problem of no spaces between the different links not to mention that when you would click on a link it would open in the same window taking people away from my site, soooo with a little research I found out how to add to their supplied link to allow for opening in a new window AND having spaces between the different links. The code looks something like this.
Wholesale Mega Store
We are a site devoted to providing electronics at wholesale prices, we supply cell phones car accessories and affordable blood pressure monitors and much much more.
Ok so if you are like me a week ago you are looking at this going WTH, ok a little break down. Target="_blank" this is what opens the link in a new window when someone clicks on it.
this is a page break it is what makes the line space between the links on my page...it looks nicer. Feel free to cut and paste on your own site and play around with it, that's how I did it.
so now it's time to do some real marketing so I head to a few sites and exchange my link but still nothing going on at my site so I keep plugging away at it until I found this great site, sonicxpressmail.com it has two options one FREE and one for a small fee, I went with the free and still had some hits and visitors to my site within 3 hours, yep I said it VISITORS, no sales but there was someone there and this site even notified me via email when someone went to my site via the Link I provided.
Ok so now I have some marketing so onto the next learning curve and that is SEO, well where do I start with that? Same place I did with the rest of this venture, research. I know I need to get my site optimized as best I can in order to compete with the Wholesale electronics companies that are already established. I started by trying SEO with no help and found that it just didn't seem to be working, so after a day of online searching I found this site submitexpress.com it will score your websites SEO for you. After a Full day of testing and changing and testing and changing I managed to fine tune my wholesale electronics websiteto the 90% + range, now the plan is to continue to do what I have been doing and hope that it all helps in getting more than a few people to my site.
Next was an issue with payments, for some reason ALL credit card transactions would be declined. So after calling my host and PayPal for a few days we finally get to the bottom of the issue and I should be able to receive master card and visa. While this was going on I managed to make a few sales...ish...
one from a gentleman who stated he wanted to get a cell phone for his nephew in Nigeria but because my site would not accept credit cards at the time he asked if I could send him a PayPal invoice and he would pay that way. COOL a SALE...that's what I thought, so I go ahead and do the invoice and send it off, I recieve a paypal receipt stating that the funds are on hold from paypal untill I provide a tracking number to verify the shipment has left. I proceed to order the phone but my suppliers won't ship direct to Nigeria without payment being a bank transfer. WTH? So I order the phone to come to me, then I will package and re-ship to the original destination. I mean I have the PayPal receipt so the money is there. while I wait for the phone to arrive I do a little research as to why no one ships to Nigeria and happened to find out that there is a lot of scams going on there, so many in fact that PayPal won't even set up shop there. so I keep looking and reading and turns out the scam is someone contacts you states he/she wants to send a gift to their family member in Nigeria, you send them a PayPal invoice THEY hack the invoice to get pertinent information, then THEY send you a PAYPAL payment received email/letter stating that the funds are there and will be released as soon as a tracking number is provided...the only problem there is there is NO FUNDS and once you send off the package you have no seller protection, the goods are long gone the people on the other end get free stuff they can sell for whatever as it cost them nothing and you everything...WATCH OUT FOR THIS!!!!!!As they change names and emails on a regular basis. So I went online to PayPal and checked out what countries they are set up in and those are the only countries I can and will ship to...it's unfortunate that a few bad apples wreck it for everyone else but that's the way it goes.
I have been exchanging links with other websites in the hopes to increase my rankings with the engines. This is a long and tedious task but must be done. However I did manage to find a few good free link exchange sites. http://www.linkmarket.net/ is a pretty good one I seem to get 10 to 20 link requests per day, although I can only send out 5 requests per day but that is ok as you don't want to build up your links to fast or the engines may penalize you for link grabbing...
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