How to choose a domain name
Don’t worry about choosing some snazzy brand name. Choose the country extension for your primary market (e.g. .co.uk) (don’t be tempted to create duplicate sites at different country extensions).
Choose a URL that contains your target keywords, and if necessary break it up with dashes. (See this post from Matt Cutts - Google does not penalise URLs with dashes).
Browsers are searching for their target product, not your brand name - give them what they want!
The joy of payment (gateway providers)
If you’re making money online, you could be raising revenue through Amazon Marketplace, eBay or affiliate traffic. It’s a doddle, you’ve got no exposure to credit-card fraud, no chargebacks, no settlement periods to worry about, you just collect a cheque or watch an electronic transfer go kerching in your online account.
But sooner or later you will make the jump into a full ecommerce store (get the book!), and when you do you’ll need to get a payment gateway provider (PGP). Well actually, you’ll need a few pieces in the jigsaw.
Last month, we launched Healthspark. Healthspark is an OScommerce site we built for £200, and it broke even on day 2. When we launched the site, I tried to bypass the PGP route, and went instead for just PayPal and Google Checkout (see earlier post on Google Adwords Checkout).
Both PayPal and Google Checkout are not PGPs - they’re complete payment solution providers. You don’t need an SSL certificate (the thing that gives you a padlock on your site). You don’t process credit cards, you don’t keep the data (in fact with Google Checkout you might not even get the email address of your customer).
The Paypal/Google checkout thing has worked well for HealthSpark in its infancy, until Google Checkout decided that the natural remedies for male problems might infringe its stringent policies. I don’t mind Google having anti-gun, anti-natural remedy policies, anti-everything but their response was strange. When Google complained, we pulled checkout. When we removed the offending items, Google wouldn’t re-instate Google Checkout until we’d put the buttons back (even though they didn’t work) on a LIVE SITE! Long story short, Google Checkout is back, but now we push on with a PGP.
If you want real control (and better credit card commission rates) you’ll need to process credit cards using a payment gateway provider (PGP). Your bank (Merchant provider) will give you a Merchant account. You then need to look at a PGP.
Your website can interface with the PGP in two ways. First (and best) it can transmit credit card details from a secure page (SSL - padlocked), the customer never leaves the site, and the PGP handles everything in the background. Second, you can pass your customer from our site to a branded page (hosted on the PGP’s servers), the payment is handled, and the customer returned to a thank you page on your site. This latter route is a good alternative, there are no SSL costs, no security risks, and the brand of your PGP can help secure the deal (e.g. NatWest).
Your bank will be keen to push their own PGP - most high street banks are now running their own PGPs, but look at the small print carefully, you need to consider commission rates and payment terms.
The joy of payment is a joy often deferred, whichever route you choose.
Questions you should ask if you want to make money online
1. Are you selling a physical or a digital product?
My forthcoming book will be focussed on selling easy-to-shift physical product that people are actually searching for. It’s possible to make good money out of shifting digital product (many of you will be reading this as a free blog though!), but in general the digital market faces certain problems for the budding e-entrepreneur. The main problem is that the content that people really want can already be obtained by suppliers with massive leverage (e.g. Apple - iTunes) or illegally (e.g. LimeWire). You can pitch original content, software widgets, ebooks etc., but you’ve got a lot of work to do in establishing a market that doesn’t already exist.
At least with physical product, you will be shifting stuff that people want, and they know they want it.
2. What barriers to entry are there?
Ideally, you need a market which is difficult to enter or understand. Establishing supplier relationships for exercise bikes, for example, is fairly protracted.
3. Can you get good supply? Agree terms with your suppliers.
Will you be drop-shipping? (The manufacturer holds inventory, and ships when you get an order). Will you be buying stock? If so, can you buy small quantities, and achieve Amazon like JIT shipping.
4. What’s your price advantage? Put together a spreadsheet of prices
Get comparison prices using searches on Google Adwords, eBay, Amazon Marketplace and a price comparison engine, e.g. Froogle, Kelkoo or PriceGrabber. Calculate your likely margin.
5. How much will it cost to get a customer? Estimate the cost of conversion.
This is an approximate estimation, but you can do the following. Create a test page using a free blog tool (e.g. Type Pad, Word Press, or Blogger.com). Create an Adwords campaign, and look for the amount you’re paying for each keyword for each click-through (CPC). Ideally, you should expect around 6-10% click-through rate (CTR) if you’re Ad is well written, and compelling against the other Adwords being served. Of the 10% that clickthrough, you should be aiming for a 10% conversion rate.
Now, these are rough numbers, but I’ve seen them work across a range of industies. So 100 people see your Ad (100 impressions, cost of an impression = zero). 10 people click through (the exact amount you pay for each click-through is determined by a real-time auction with your competitors, but let’s assume £0.20 per clickthrough). 1 person buys, so the cost of the customer acquisition is £2 (10 x £0.20).
If your margin on a tub of vitamins is £6, you’ve just made £4 profit, and you’ve got a business.
Chitika eMiniMall better than Adsense?
Chitika is an online PPC advertising company geared up for Web 2.0. Amazingly, they seem to be competing very effectively with Adsense (20,000+ site, and 2 billion monthly impressions, reaching 60 million unique visitors a month).
Adsense is Google Adwords for content sites. In an earlier blog, I’ve recommended opting out of the content network when you’re running Adwords campaigns as you can’t be sure where your site will be published. (but if you’re canny, you can do some very effective site specific advertising - we’ve just run a very effective campaign for www.healthspark.co.uk).
Although content Adsense now allows imagery, most of the advertising remains in the Adwords text link format.
Chitika’s USP is that they’ve created some really innovative widgets for bloggers and web 2.0 sites, like the eMiniMall. In the eMiniMall, this mini-shop concept works really well, particularly in product-specific blogs. Users have reported a 50% increase in CTR.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be trialling the eMiniMall over at naturalhealthlibrary.org, and I’ll post the results when I’ve got them.
Google Adwords Checkout
The number of Adwords carrying the checkout symbol is on the increase. For those of you who don’t know, Google Checkout is Google’s answer to Paypal. The incentives for using the checkout go way beyond a secure transaction, as the presence of the Google Checkout badge has been know to increase the clickthrough rate by 23%. Also, the brand identification increases the probabilities of customer conversion, and retention. Google’s sales spiel looks like this:
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Increase sales. Google Checkout users click on AdWords ads 10% more when the ad displays the Checkout badge, and convert 40% more than shoppers that have not used Checkout before. |
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Process sales for free. For every £1 spent on AdWords each month, merchants can process £10 in sales the following month through Google Checkout for free. For all other sales, the charge is a low 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction. |
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Protect yourself from fraud for free. Our fraud prevention tools stop invalid orders from reaching you. And our Payment Guarantee policy helps protect you from chargebacks. |
So the economic benefits of clear, but it’s surprising how few people know how to integrate Google Checkout into their store, and into their Adwords campaigns. Here’s how:
1. Get a Google checkout account here : http://checkout.google.com
2. Now the tough bit; integrate with your store. Most mainstream providers already offer checkout integration, and Google also provides code for most of the open source platforms. (OS Commerce integration is very easy). If you’re interested in getting the Adwords bit rolling for a few products, you could simply produce a buy it now button and slap it on the page.
3. When you set your account up, in the merchant profile, place the root of your domain (e.g. webreality.co.uk, not www.webreality.co.uk).
4. In Google Checkout : settings : Adwords, add your Adwords Customer ID (when you’re logged in to Adwords this is displayed top right).
4. Run your Adwords campaigns as normal.
5. Initially, nothing will change, after the first Google Checkout transaction, there is a delay, and then your Checkout Badge will be active on your campaigns.
You can set your Adwords Checkout badges to Inactive but it will affect all campaigns. It’s worth running tests to ensure that the Checkout badge does actually yield a higher conversion rate.
Outsourcing authenticity?
The blogosphere is very good at filtering signals from noise (see Seth Godin’s blog on the signal to noise ratio). To the uninitiated the signal to noise ratio in 50 million + blogs is pretty poor. But the granular searches provided by Google, Technorati, Digg etc allow you to reach really targeted traffic when you need it.
Established offline business are often keen to register in the brave new world of blogs, and make noise in social networking land. But these businesses have no real sense of engagement with this world, in fact their business models don’t really fit in this world. But instead of reinventing their businesses, they force their way in by retaining agencies who blog on their behalf (pr spam - aagh!). They outsource the building of MySpace pages, and defend their brands on Facebook and Twittr. But with half-hearted, out-sourced engagement with new-marketing, you end up with a Meatball Sundae
You can’t outsource the heart of your business. If new marketing is so painful and counter-intuitive for your business, my advice would be to leave it alone. The online community is surprisingly good at sniffing insincerity, so outsource all the dull repetitive bits of your business, or the technology that runs websites, or the process of adding content, but the actual content must be authentic.
Part of the problem is that established offline businesses are overwhelmed by the scale of the task. As one client put it (not unreasonably), “I just don’t have the time to spend hours a day just playing catch-up with all the new technologies”. The answer is to concentrate on providing deep product knowledge using one online channel. That might be an artisan blog giving valuable insight into an arcane industry (Thomas Mahon’s inside view of Saville Row), or it might be a coffee blog communicating the passion and insight of a professional roaster (David Warr).
Landing Page revisited
Time and time again I click on Adwords to find myself on a generalised page with little or no relevance to the keyword I searched for on Google. Not only will these advertisers find themselves spending more on Cost per Click (CPC, because Google rewards relevancy), they’re chances of conversion are greatly reduced. You’ve got less than 10 seconds to ensure the user can complete the desired action (e.g. sign-up, or add to basket) immediately.The key elements you need to consider on your landing page are:
My friend and colleague Mark Evans, gives us a perfect example in his Exercise Equipment site.
To achieve this level of precision, Google recommends multi-variate testing. Adwords gives such granular detail, that you can measure yield on small changes to your landing page layout and copy. At Webreality we’ve seen multi-variate testing yield an increase from 6% to 10% conversion rates for our customers, so it’s definitely worth the effort.
