Betcha you were just wondering which posts were the most popular ones, huh?

You weren’t?

That’s OK. I’m going to tell you anyway:

1. What Does Great Customer Service Mean To You?
2. Rethinking Customer Service
3. Essential Business Practices to Use in the New Year
4. Should I automate my site directory submission?
5. Don’t Start Business Without Consulting an Attorney
6. How Do I Sell My Online Business?
7. Does Your Personality Type Suit Your Business?
8. What Is a Business Plan and Why Do I Need One?
9. The Only Online Store Startup Checklist a Product Seller Needs
10. Top 3 Tips for Growing Your Business with a List

These posts are ranked in descending order by overall views. In other words, the top post has been viewed the most since this blog started.

Woohoo!

Popularity: 17% [?]

If you’re wanting to sell physical products online or already are, I’ve got some exciting news for you.

I’ll be hosting the first annual Product Sellers Seminar in September. This three-day online event will feature live speakers with experience and knowledge in selling physical products online, pre-recorded interviews, vendors with resources to help you start and grow your business and contests in which you can win prizes such as five hours of work from my very on virtual assistant.

Even better, this event will be free to attend! So clear your calendar for Sept. 17-19, 2008!

So far, we have Kelly McCausey of WAHM Talk Radio lined up to share with us how to focus our businesses, and Teresa Morrow of Key Business Partners will help us understand how online events (like this one!) can help sell more products. Both will be live one-hour sessions in our online conference room (Graciously donated by Kelly), so you’ll be able to ask questions at the end of the presentation.
I’ll also present a live session on how you can make sure your site can be indexed by the search engines.

I’m working with several other speakers for the event, including business owners who started at home and are now making millions of dollars in sales per year. I can’t announce them yet, because we haven’t finalized the schedule for their appearance.

So if you’d like to know more about who we have lined up, head over to the Product Sellers Seminar website and sign up for our notification list. We’ll keep you up to date on who we have scheduled and any other details you’ll love to know.

I can’t wait to see you there!

Popularity: 35% [?]

Gregory submitted a question to our survey:

What is the best way to get people to my site?

This is a pretty broad question. So I took a look at his website to see if I could tell what marketing methods he was already using. And that’s when I discovered several problems, that I actually just talked about a few weeks ago at Winning Sisters.

I would like to recommend SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is the most cost effective method of of driving people to your website who actually want what you are selling. Do-it-yourself SEO is free, and if done properly, will grow your business by leaps and bounds.

When done right, SEO enables your site to rank within the top 10 search engine results for the terms people type into the search engines when they are looking for your products.

Of course, the key is “done right.” For this reason, I believe it’s wise to invest in learning the proper methods of SEO. And I recommend SEO Power Up as the place to go to receive that training. It’s very affordable at $10 a month for 12 months.

What I noticed on Gregory’s site is the use of frames, session IDs and javascript navigation. Each of these website elements alone will prevent the search engines from properly indexing your site. This means that when the search engine visits your site, it can’t access your information, so it can’t store your web page content. This means that when people search for terms that are related to your products, your website will not appear in the listing.

My solution:  What Gregory needs to do is find a shopping cart, like the Shop Kit Plus, that does not use frames, session IDs or javascript navigation.

Once he has removed those elements from his website, he needs to invest in SEO training, such as SEO Power Up, and learn how to properly optimize his site. Once he has done that, he can look into other marketing methods, such as press releases, article marketing, email marketing, etc.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Artists, WAHMs and entrepreneurs who are new to ecommerce are often in a situation where they need to choose one website tool to spend their money on. So the question ends up being:

Should I sell my products on my own site with my own domain name, or just get an account at Etsy, or ebay or some other similar site?

Many people choose the Etsy or Ebay route first, and I can understand why.

Both sites have built in traffic (which can be hard to generate for brand new websites), and are very well known, either generally or in specific online communities.

The sites are easy to setup — you don’t have to worry about site design, ecommerce, a domain name, hosting, etc. You can have your site up and selling within about a day.

You don’t have to worry so much about customer fraud, since Etsy, Ebay and Paypal handle this for you (or at least will step in if you aren’t able to handle the situation satisfactorily yourself).

In my opinion, this is OK if you’re building a hobby.

However, if you’re building a business, you need to seriously consider the benefits of having your own website.

1. You will have your own domain name. I highly recommend you make absolutely certain is registered in your name with a company you trust. This way, if your hosting account goes belly up, you can move without losing all the backlinks you’ve earned.

With Etsy or Ebay, if your site is shut down or you just decide to move, you’ve lost all your marketing. You can’t take mywebsite.etsy.com with you when you go.

2. You will have control over your own fraud prevention. Now, at first it may like a good idea to have Etsy or Ebay helping you with this. But that doesn’t work out so well when one of these companies decides you’re the bad guy. Even if you aren’t.

If you are using a payment method such as authorize.net, you have access to the information you need to verify your customers yourself. And if one sets of your spidey-sense, you can always opt not to do business with them. (I mean really — when someone places an order from “Houstn, New York” and the IP address is out of Nigeria, it’s a pretty good bet that the order is bogus.

3. You can tailor your site to your target market. Etsy and Ebay both serve very specific target markets. Etsy buyers are after handcrafted items. Ebay buyers are after a great deal on everything. In Etsy’s case, you might not be able to branch out of the Etsy community without your own website. And in Ebay’s case, you are destined to sell your products at bargain basement prices — which is not conducive to profiting from your business — or even making enough to pay the bills.

4. With your own website, you can have the best of both worlds. Setup your own website (which can be easy and inexpensive with a $10 a month hosting account and Wordpress) and use the site to promote your Etsy shop and Ebay auctions. Once you have established a clientèle, you can guide them (within the rules of the other sites) to your main site, where you can sell without the fees and where you can be in charge.

Some of my baby sling clients sell the bulk of their products on their website — and then auction off their seconds and returns at Ebay.

Some crafters sell products on their main websites, but use Etsy and Ebay to expand their reach.

What has your experience been?

Popularity: 44% [?]

One of the most common questions new product sellers have is how to optimize their newly minted ecommerce website. Lynn Terry, in her ClickNewz! blog, talks about seven methods to properly optimize your ecommerce site.

A Page For Each Product
Lynn’s first recommendation is to create a page for each individual product in your store. This is very easy to do in my ecommerce software, the Shop Kit Plus. You simply add your products and the script creates the optimized pages for you.

High Quality Backlinks
Obtaining high-quality inbound links is the second method to optimizing your ecommerce site that Lynn recommends. Basically, you need to get other people to link to each page of your site.

Unique Product Descriptions
Start by making sure your product descriptions are unique. If you’re a product manufacturer, uniqueness won’t be such as issue. However, writing a description that will increase your link worthiness may be a bit tricky. So I recommend my friend Melissa Ingold’s Product Descriptions Pack to help you learn how to write those descriptions. Basically, include as much information as possible.

And if you’re a wholesaler or affiliate and you’re using the manufacturer’s descriptions, rewrite them so that they won’t be identical to the original.

Related Items
Lynn also suggests posting related items on your product pages. This is very easy to do in the Shop Kit Plus during the process of adding your products.

Customer Reviews
Have you considered asking for reviews? Lynn notes several sites that you can go to in order to request user experiences and feedback. Reprint these on your site. With the SKP, you can reprint them in your product page’s description area, and on your home page.

Social Networks
If you haven’t created a profile on sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, now’s the time! Some of my clients who have done this include Earth Friendly Goods, who can be found at StumbleUpon and The Cloth Diaper Shop, who has embraced Facebook.

Useful Content
Finally, Lynn recommends adding content to your store that will enrich your visitor’s experience. I see some clients using video tutorials, how-to articles, checklists and more.

As I’ve suggested before, adding a blog to your site can help you leverage an RSS feed and open your business up to the comments of your customers. This can be an invaluable tool for letting your customers get to know, like and trust you — but also so you can learn what your customers want, so you can provide it to them.

Has this given you some ideas? Are you already using these techniques? Tell me what you think…

Popularity: 32% [?]

Happy Earth Day everyone!

In celebration of this day, I’d like to share with you a great resource put together by my friend Carrie Lauth.

Carrie is the host of Natural Moms Talk Radio and writer of the Natural Mom Business Guide. She is a homeschooling mom of four and a breastfeeding counselor.

And even better, she has put together a Private Label Rights article pack for this day.

What is a private label rights article?

It’s called PRL. What that means is that you can reprint the article without putting someone else’s name on it. You can use it on your website, your blog or in a special report. (You just can’t say you wrote it, or resell the rights to the content.)

I’ve know Carrie for years and I know that she produced high-quality content that will bring added value to your website for your customers.

Click here to get the Earth Day Article Pack!

Popularity: 49% [?]

Have you ever received an email from a WAHM’s mailing list that you don’t remember signing up for? You thought maybe you had signed up for it, since, after all, what WAHM in her right mind would shoot herself in the foot by spamming, right?

Apparently, there is at least one WAHM out there who has been accused of spamming. You can read more from the spamming victims at Working WAHM.

In short, a word to the wise: Just because you have access to an email does not mean you can put it on your mailing list.

Spam is the use of a mailing list to blanket newsgroups or private email boxes with messages the recipients didn’t ask for.

The only appropriate way to receive an email for your mailing list is to have the potential member sign up for your list via the internet (or give you permission in writing at a trade show, for example) AND verify their admission via email.

In other words, just having someone tell you they want to be on your mailing list is not enough. Make sure you have your list setup to send them a verification, also known as confirmation, email, in which they must click a link to be included in the list.

This is the only way to ensure that no one gets on the list that doesn’t want to be there.

One last note: Make sure you always include a way for people to unsubscribe in each email.

Popularity: 49% [?]

As I’ve mentioned before, submitting the right press release to the right source can lead to sudden success. For example, one of my Shop Kit Plus clients submitted a press release to a local TV station. The next thing she knew, a reporter was on her doorstep wanting to do a story.

Since then, her products have appeared on CBS’ The Early Show and HGTV, both national TV networks. Wow! Talk about getting your name out there.

Some people might say she was lucky — but we know better. She did her homework, which included sending out press releases. I know my client’s case, she had someone else write a press release. Which is fine — except for new business owners or those who are still paying off the cost of the initial inventory investment, paying $75 or more for a writer to write one good press release just isn’t realistic.

And writing a press release yourself isn’t such a hot idea either, even if you’re a writer, because press releases require a certain style. As a busy mom and jack-of-all-trades in your business, you don’t have time learn how to write press releases.

My friends, Alice Seba, Mila Sidman and Shannon Cherry understand this. So they put together several very inexpensive press release packs that you can download, customize and send out to your media list. Not only have they made it very easy to edit the press releases, they’ve included written instructions — and recommendations on where to submit the releases.

I just downloaded six packs tonight and they are awesome! Trust me — I used to be a reporter and editor. I had control over which releases went into the trash can. These press releases are attention getters.

So, if you want to save money while still taking advantage of your very own publicity campaign, head over to All Press Content.

Update: Alice just contacted me to let me know that she is offering a 40% discount for you! Just enter this coupon code when you order: A40CE

Thank you, Alice!

Popularity: 50% [?]

Imagine having a way to get thousands of qualified prospects on your email list in a short amount of time - and actually get reporters writing all about it. Seem impossible?

Well, my friend and publicity pro, Shannon Cherry from Be Heard Solutions, has actually created a way to do it, without being sleazy or inauthentic.

Recently, she developed a promotional system which gave her more than 2,500 targeted people in just two weeks, as well as 200 media outlets covering the promotion. But best of all, because these people were truly interested, she made a ton of sales right away!

Now, she’s sharing her system to ONLY a few dozen people. And I don’t want you to miss out.

So I called her up and we chatted for a few minutes about her ideas. Even better — I recorded the conversation and will air it next week on Product Sellers Talk Radio.

She shared her top three tips for list building - including a real gem that is BRILLIANT!

She also talked about the teleseminar she’ll be holding in just a couple of weeks. It’s The List Building Promotion Secrets Telebootcamp. You can check it out at List Building Promotions.

Even better: If you sign up for List Building Secrets through my link, she’ll throw in a press release written by her personally, for your target market AND a targeted media list. Her press release alone is worth $1,500. and I’m not just saying that. She really sells her services for that much money, because her techniques get results.

You know the money is in the list. Isn’t it time to get your share?

Go to List Building Promotion and sign up today.

And make sure you subscribe to Product Seller’s Talk Radio in your feed reader or your email, so you can listen to Shannon’s top three tips:

Popularity: 45% [?]

After scrapping my jaw off the floor upon reading the aforementioned myth, I knew this bad advice needed to be addressed.

Text content is search engine food. If you are wanting to promote your site through search engines (and if you are online, you should, as search engine promotion is the cheapest and most effective marketing method online) you need to feed them. And the only way to do this is to provide lots of quality content.

Now, please note that word I slipped in there: quality.

Using software to spin 300 versions of one article and pasting the unreadable copies into your website will do more harm than good.

Writing about your baby’s daily diaper changes won’t help much either — unless you’re using your wonderful cloth diapers that you sell on your site.

Writing high quality content that the search engines will index and that other people on the internet will link to is a necessary part of marketing your business online.

Popularity: 43% [?]