Category: Online Business

Inc.com: Small retailers who want to take their companies online can now build a store on the Web for free with a new service from FastCommerce.com. Business owners follow a simple step-by-step process to create a store template, and can have their online businesses up and running in a short amount of time.
FastCommerce.com provides business owners with a fully integrated package on the Web that allows them to run their entire operations — from order processing to sales to inventory control — without purchasing additional computer software. Online businesses can also customize their storefront with other applications available on FastCommerce.com, including order management and customer management, shipping rate calculator for UPS and FedEx shipments, and automatic e-mails for order confirmations.
The service is free for the first 250 products posted.
A One-Stop Shop for Setting Up Your Own Online Shop [Inc.com]

CashBulge: 1. Comment on other blogs in your niche.
Probably one of the most powerful ways to get noticed early on and to establish ties & contacts with people that have similar interests. Make sure you post relevant comments.
2. Join forums & communities.
Same as before, join forums and communities that are in your niche. Some useful forums I always reference (for SEO and Marketing) are DigitalPoint and EarnersForum.
3. List your blog in directories and top sites.
BlogFlux is a great blog directory and free to submit to. Start out with this and then expand.
4. Promotion & SEO Blog Plugins.
Depending on which blogging platform you are using you should have an array of tools at your disposal. Get the plug-ins that you need and scrap the ones you don’t.
5. RSS Feed conversion.
Use FeedBurner, its the best in the RSS industry right now and used by all the top bloggers such as ProBlogger and others.
6. Use Technorati.
Technorati is a powerful resource for bloggers. You can see who has linked your story and how powerful your blog is compared to others.
7. Social Bookmarking – your powerhouse.
Getting to that front-page of Digg or Reddit is a gold-mine and will create a tsunami of visitors. A great social bookmarking plug-in is AddThis.
8. Traffic Exchange websites.
Sites like BlogExplosion are a powerful way to drive some new traffic. Basically you browse other bloggers blogs and earn ‘credits’ which you can then redeem for traffic or review posts. It’s good stuff.
9. Linkrolling.
BlogRolling is a link manager service that helps you organize and evolve your list of links. It also makes it easier for people browsing your site to add you with a quick button :).
10. Using Flickr to host your images. Save space.
Well that tag-line basically did it. By using Flickr to host your photos, you can save web space and bandwidth each month and even get a few incoming links depending on how good your photo is.
And many more…
33 Useful Ways to Promote & Improve Your Blog [CashBulge]

StartupJournal: Start by figuring out what phrases people are typing into search engines when looking for your type of products online. Once you know that, you can buy paid search ads, such as pay-per-click ads, using those phrases and pepper your site with them to boost its search-engine rankings.
Showing up high in search-engine rankings is very important since most people use search engines to shop for products online.
There are some key-word suggestion tools that help identify popular search phrases, usually available free. For instance, Google Inc.’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.com let you type in words and see which related phrases get searched most often. Type “Made in America” into the AdWords Keyword Tool, for instance, and you see phrases like “clothing made in America” and “toys made in the USA” have been searched fairly often recently. But “toys made in America” was searched hardly at all.
You also can experiment with various search phrases by signing up for an advertising program, like Google AdWords. The programs let you bid on various phrases. The price you bid is what you pay the search-engine provider each time someone clicks on your ad. The more you bid, the higher an ad for your site appears on the right-hand side of a search-results page. These programs have monitoring programs that let you see what phrases are most effective in generating traffic and customers on your site.
Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site [StartupJournal]

EcommerceGuide: Widgets are generating a lot of buzz in the industry these days as more e-tailers begin to capitalize on how these snippets of code can expand the exposure of online businesses — and make them more money.
These mini-applications generally come packaged in a little window, can be dragged and dropped onto a Web page, and offer a scaled-down version of features you would ordinarily get at a full-fledged site.
For e-tailers, this means you can, for instance, showcase your eBay listings on your social networking page, bringing your merchandise to interested shoppers who might not have found your storefront. Those who like what you’re selling can even pass your widget on to their friends. Another way e-biz owners can earn extra revenue is by using affiliate marketing widgets at their Web store sites or blogs.
In the latter case is an impressive new widget — officially launching July 23, called PopShops — that promises to make managing affiliate partnerships a snap. Simply put, you can build affiliate storefronts in three clicks: Pick from more than 15 million products from across the top four affiliate networks, click to customize the showcase of products for your site and “pop” the storefront application into your site or blog.
New Affiliate Tool Promises Pick, Click and Pop [EcommerceGuide]

Reveries: Google may be the world’s dominant search engine, but in South Korea it claims just 1.7 percent of all searches, reports Choe Sang-Hun. The search-engine leader in South Korea, with 77 percent of searches, is a home-grown site called Naver.com. Founded in 1999 by NHN, an online gaming company, Naver capitalizes on both the lack of Korean-language content online as well as the interest amongst Koreans to try to help each other out. In a nutshell, Naver is building its own database of information by letting its users answer each other’s questions.
So far, Naver has “accumulated a user-generated database of 70 million entries.” Cho In Joon, a dedicated user, explains the appeal: “When people I have never met thank me, I feel good … No one pays me for this. But helping other people on the internet is addictive.”
Neighbour + Navigate = Naver.com is what makes the online business tickes!
Naver.com [Reveries]