Secrets to Successful E-Commerce

If you are interested in making more money on the Internet, you should read this.

I just posted my list of the most important secrets I know about making money on the Internet.  It's a fairly comprehensive list of things that I've learned in my 11 year career programming the web and building Internet businesses.

http://travis.giggy.com/ecommerce-secrets.htm

I speak briefly about the most important thing you can do to make more money on the Internet.  Also, I tried to cover all the bases from pre-sale to checkout to marketing your site.  If you have an Internet site that sells anything (hard goods or information or service) you can profit by reading this list and implementing one or more of the suggestions.

Good luck, and let me know what you think of the list.

Travis

Good Copywriting Makes You Rich

Bad copywriting just makes you a bad business person... you don't get any inquiries, customers, or feedback. Much less any money. The most important thing you can do is have good copy. If you can't do it yourself, or don't want to put in the extreme effort required, then hire someone to do it for you.

You can have the hottest market, with the best product, for the best price, and not make diddly squat... if you can't get that message across. You can sell ice-cold umbrella drinks in the desert and make nothing if you don't know how to reach your customer.

I've broken down a beautiful Gary Halbert newsletter into 14 steps to write an ad that sells. The article is titled "Hands On Experience For A Basic Education In Advertising Principles!"

This list only covers the second half of this particular newsletter. The first half goes into great detail on how to train yourself to become a good copywriter. It's not for the faint of heart - but I'm sure the advice is golden. That part is also interesting, and I'm going through the steps that he lays out in great detail (I've already hand written 5 direct mail ads - tough for a life-long typist...) The second half is where he describes how to actually write the ad. I've ripped much of his stuff directly, and added my own flavor. To see the original newsletter, go here.


Steps to write a decent ad:

1. Collect all online pitches for the product or service you're writing about.
   
2. Find any possible offline ads, direct mail packages for related, or similar services.
   
3. Carefully examine the product or service and learn everything you can about it. Become a student of the product. Ask questions.
   
4. Read, re-read and take notes on everything on 3x5 index cards. By the time you're done with this, you should be an expert.
   
5. Determine customer pain spots - what evokes their emotion that's connected to the product? (Sell the holes, not the drill) - write it down on 3x5 index cards
   
6. Take a couple of days break
   
7. Re-read notes.
   
8. Write down the CSI - central selling idea that pops into your brain
   
9. Write, write, write - get it all out on paper. Tell everything, every detail, every nuance. Every benefit, every product feature, every advantage. Don't stop. Rave! rave! rave! crow! describe! enthuse! Give details. Don't worry about getting it perfect. Don't worry about formulas. Just write.
   
10. Take a break for a day
    
11. Organize the copy into the following sequence (AIDA principle - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action):
    
    
    
    1. Say something that gets attention
       
    2. Tell them why they should be interested (expand on the CSI)
       
    3. Tell them why they should believe what you are saying is true
       
    4. Prove it is true
       
    5. Itemize and describe all benefits
       
    6. Tell them how to order
       
    7. Tell them to order now
       
    
    
12. Check spelling, grammar, edit, tighten copy
    
13. Read the copy aloud to discover all the little snags where the copy isn't smooth. Reading aloud helps you find where the copy isn't seamless from one sentence to another, one paragraph to another.
    
14. Edit again. Make it tight. Use short sentences. Short paragraphs. Everyday English. Use some one word sentence paragraphs. Use some sub-heads that make your copy look interesting and easy to read.
    

I highly recommend getting this info from the horse's mouth. Gary's web site is fantastic. Informative. To the point. He's actually a pretty funny dude...

Thanks for the education Gary!
http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com

Cool Internet Business Model: OneShare.com

The Internet is all about finding opportunities to make money by doing things that nobody else thought about. You find a niche that’s proven to spend money, and then exploit it. OneShare.com is a great example of creative thinking in Internet models.

OneShare.com buys large quantities of stocks, and then allows people to purchase shares (usually a single share), with a certificate, framed, for anyone they want. It’s a great gift to give a newborn or graduate. It’s been done a long time by direct marketing companies, but you’ve never been able to pick out which share you want, the frame you want, and how it’s all going to look together.

I'll call it the break-apart business. Buy large chunks of a product, and break it apart, wrap it individually, and sell it. This particular product has the advantage of appreciating (during good times) after you've bought it...

Where's the beef?

As of this writing, OneShare has an Alexa ranking of 42,165. According to my non-science, this means around 5,000 daily visitors. At 2.5% average e-commerce conversion rate, they're closing 125 people per day. If those 125 people are all buying a frame ($44) and the transfer fee ($39), they're making an average of $10,375 per day. This site is well put together, with a tight niche, highly customized, so I'd guess that they're closing more like 5% of their daily traffic. That pushes the daily revenue number to $20,750 per day. I can only imagine that a company like oneshare gets a big chunk of their yearly revenue around Christmas time, repeat customers, and stock appreciation (buying chunks of good stocks low and selling them high), but we'll just keep it simple.

If you take $20,750 per day, times 365 days a year (internet businesses run all the time), you come up with $7,573,750 of annual revenue. Seven million isn't chump change. It's not Fortune 500 money, but after expenses, it's enough to buy someone a nice mansion, and a Ferrari to go in the garage! In fact, someone at Oneshare is not doing too badly... They've offered $100,000 for Barry Bond's 715th homerun.


Reasons for Success

The only form of advertising OneShare does that I can discuss intelligently is adwords. I know they buy a few keywords that are directly associated with their product, like "buy one share of stock", "one share", "buy disney stock", "stock certificates", "buy apple com". They are the top advertiser on google for each of those keywords. They also buy several other more general keywords like "buy shares online", "buy and sell stock", "perfect gift", "stock to buy", but they don't rank near the top for those keywords.

By the way, if you ever want to find out what keywords a company is paying for, this is a really cool tool. Check out Googspy.com.

Another trick I use to find out where a company advertises is to look on their checkout page for a "How did you find out about us" drop down box... companies don't even know all the information they give away for free...

Using this trick for OneShare gives us the following options:

• Return Buyer - as we discussed earlier, they probably get a lot of repeat business
  
• Email from OneShare - Direct email campaign? Renting a list?
  
• Disney Magazine - An obvious good market for them - adults that would be interested in purchasing a framed share of Disney
  
• From a Friend - Word of mouth
  
• From a Broker - Kickback?
  
• Google - PPC, as discussed above
  
• Yahoo!
  
• Other Search Engine
  
• Banner Ad - Banners are making a comeback!!
  
• Newsgroup/Web Board - More word of mouth - perhaps a guerilla marketing tactic?
  
• Local Newspaper - If they're advertising in the local paper, they're onto a big secret...
  
• Radio - A lot of internet companies are moving onto the radio, with 60 second spots, and sponsored blurbs.
  
• Television - TV is big timing it, but I doubt they're using this widely, or it would be closer to the top of the list
  
• USA Today - More newspaper advertising. The fact that they mention USA Today in particular means that they were running a test campaign in this particular newspaper...
  
• Other
  

How to Steal This Idea

Any item that can be bought in bulk and split into smaller pieces and sold as a gift or novelty can be used. My favorite is EducationalCoin.com. Gary Halbert, the best direct marketing copywriter in the world, buys one yen coins from them and attaches them to letters that go out to Joe America (in order to get their attention when opening the letter).

EducationalCoin.com obtains large quantities of coins from around the world, and sells them in massive quantities. For $19.50 you can buy 100 Japanese yen coins. These coins can be used for educational purposes, gifts, or more likely, direct marketing campaigns.


Standard Disclaimer

The data and analysis in this blog are complete guesses, not remotely researched, and should not be taken seriously. This is meant only to show the basic business model of the site, and why I think its special (to be loved and admired). If I've royally screwed the pooch, feel free to let me know, and I'll acknowledge my stupidity in a future post.

Keep Learning. Always keep learning.

First off, I have to apologize.  I haven't been posting very much to my blog lately.  In the past I just posted about stuff that I knew about.  Only the facts.  I've been keeping very busy learning new things lately, so I haven't had much to write about.  I'm on a crash course of marketing and copywriting.  Of these things I know very little.  But they're intriguing subjects, and the basis for making the kind of money that would allow me to paint a custom color on my Ferrari.  So, I thought I'd switch it up a little bit and write about something that I think I know, instead of something that I definitely know...

The secret to life.  That one thing to live by, and be happy with forever.  KEEP LEARNING.  Never stop learning.  Don't think you know it all, because it makes you bored.  Boredom is the mortal enemy of creativity.

Just the other day, for the first time in my life, I discovered an honest-to-god bug in Internet Explorer.  When you're serving web pages from an IIS server farm using a load balancer (like many large web sites do), IE 6 will drop cookies when you jump from one server in the farm to another.  It doesn't matter if the cookies are server side or client side cookies, and the expiration date doesn't matter either.  Then, after I found the bug, I discovered the solution to it.  You must bypass the default behavior of cookies and manualy set the exact domain you'll be accessing them from.  I spent 6 hours on the phone with Microsoft, and they verified it.

People were very proud of me, I solved a major company problem, and accomplished something that not very many people ever will.  You know what joy I gained from discovering that bug?  Not much.  It's just what I'm expected to do.  I've gotten a big head, think I know it all, and gotten bored with programming.

When I'm learning new stuff, I'm excited.  I'm engaged.  When I'm doing the same thing for the 1,000th time, it's just the opposite.  I guarantee you're the same.  So, the moral of the story is still this: KEEP LEARNING.  Stay interested, or even the big things aren't much fun.

Hollywood Boulevard sign at night

Hollywood Blvd. Street Closure

The Mission Impossible 3 movie premiere is shaping up to be a big event...  They've been building up to this for a while, sending out notices, street closures, bringing in equipment, etc...  Here's the notice I got today:

Please be informed that Paramount Pictures will be holding the premiere of "Mission Impossible III" at the Grauman's Chinese Theater, located at 6925 Hollywood Blvd., at 7:00 PM on Thursday, May 4, 2006. 

Below are the street/curb/lane closures:

Temporary closure of all westbound traffic lanes of Hollywood Boulevard, from Highland Avenue to Orange Avenue, closed to vehicular traffic from 4:00 AM on May 4th to 6:00AM on May 5th.

Temporary closure of all traffic lanes of Hollywood Boulevard, from Highland Avenue to La Brea Avenue, closed to vehicular traffic from 1:00 PM on May 4th to 6:00AM on May 5th.

Temporary closure of the north sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard, from 6925 Hollywood Boulevard west to the northeast corner of Orange Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, from 12:00 PM to 6:00 AM.

Temporary closure of the mid-block crosswalk from 5:00 PM to 11:30 PM on May 4th.

If I get a chance, I'll try to post some pictures of the festivities tomorrow...