Do you sincerely want your online venture to attract visitors, make bucket-loads of sales and keep you in the style in which you hope to become accustomed ?  Then you simply must devote yourself to learning as you much as you can about your website visitors. Especially those who made the all important transformation from browser to purchaser when they actually bought something.

What’s the first step in getting to know your visitors? Data. Don’t delay for even one day, open a Google Analytics account and integrate it with your store so you can see where your visitors are coming from – we offer this small but essential service free to all our cCommerce website clients. Elaborate

Equally importantly the Analytics data will tell you what visitors have been getting up to during the time they spent on your website. Did they…. elaborate.

Here’s an easy to follow video guide from Google themselves if you need assistance to set up Analytics. Once you’ve finished the install it will usually it only takes a day after before you can start seeing data and charts. What are the key statistics to look out for?

That’ll be the subject of a post we’ll publish soon.

Look around on the web for advice and you’ll usually find hard to understand technical tutorials containing phrases like:

For objects the size of a digital camera or smaller, you can use an EZcube light tent with two small 30-watt bulbs on either side. For larger items two 60-watt soft boxes on either side of the product should suffice.

Which might be fine for the serious amateur but it is likely to go straight over the heads of the genuine beginners.

Don’t worry. Help is at hand thanks to Handmadeology’s newest writer and resident product photography-pro Mariano, who has put together a low cost ( less than a tenner) product photography set up that will help you create studio quality product photography every time. Without the need to invest in expensive kit or spend the next 12 months in night school classes.

This easy to follow step by step guide will allow you to take shots of small products yourself for your ecommerce website and radically increase your chances of making online sales.

And it’s not just the mailing services, it’s their intelligence. If you’ve ever struggled to dedupe a mailing list you know it’s fiddly and time consuming work.  Those clever Mailchimpers have worked out a code in Excel which does all the hard work for you.

Now they’ve launched the new version of the guide and it’s jam-packed with more content and better examples.  Plus:

• More pictures to help you follow along with ease
• How to guides for optimizing websites for mobile devices
• Clearer wording for better readability
• More insider SEO tips.

Essential reading if you feel up to the challenge of optimizing your own website or blog.

You can download the new version here .

It is possible to create almost any type of web site with Drupal by calling on community contributed modules . There are users within the Drupal community who have recreated sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube from currently available modules.

Drupal was started by Dries Buyaert whilst at The University of Antwerp, he and a group of friend wanted an internal messaging system for dorm room discussions. The system Buyaert developed for this purpose morphed into Drupal. Why the name? Dries meant to purchase Dorp.org which is Dutch for ‘Village but thanks to a typing error he actually bought Drop.org.  When time came to release the software which made the community run he chose the name Drupal from the Dutch word ‘druppel’ meaning ‘Drop’. Drupal is now on it’s sixth release.

Here are three ways you can stimulate the urge to buy more stuff from your website:

1. Communicate regularly with existing customers to remind them you’re there and encourage repeat orders. Email newsletters, Facebook pages, regular Tweets all keep customers up-to-date on new products, discounts and other news of interest.
2. Make repeat ordering as simple as possible. Allow people to set up an account so they don’t need to enter payment and delivery details each time they order. Create an order process which reduces the number of necessary clicks to the bare minimum.
3. Run loyalty programs. Make sure that anyone who purchases gets showered with discount deals and advance notice of any promotions you’re running and preferential service.

It’s like the old joke sadistic scuba diving instructors tell the newbies just before they  jump into seas where sharks are likely to show up. “If anything over 15 feet appears please make a big circle around me facing outwards and wait for him to go away. If that doesn’t work and he starts to look interested in us as lunch then everybody swim like hell for the boat. And remember you won’t need to out-swim the shark, you just need to swim faster than your buddies.”

Safari guides tell their own lion-themed variation in the Serengeti.

What does it all mean in SEO terms? Don’t worry too much about the big boys, focus on out-performing the local competition and you’ll probably be alright.

Formula One Drivers know the most important thing they need do each season is beat their teammate. Ask yourself – what can  I do to make my business a local success? And if you haven’t already done so the first step is to get listed with Google Places.

One quick and dirty way to find out what’s happening in the real world is to research what’s selling on ebay. Here’s how.

• Sign in to ebay. If you don’t already have an account it’s dead simple to set one up.
• Enter a description of the item you plan to sell into the search box. The first thing to notice are the drop down prompts showing popular searches. For example if you enter bike the prompts might say road bike, racing bike, mountain bike. Search the niche you’re intending to target.
• Click on Advanced which is just to the right of the search box.  Enter your search term in the box. Scroll down and tick Completed Listings in the left menu. Scroll down again and set the minimum number of bids to 1.
• Click Search. The results will show you all the auctions which ended recently where there was at least one bid. You’re looking for all those where the price is in green which means the auction ended in a paid sale.

Make notes, think about margins, shipping costs. Is this an area where you might be able to turn a profit?

The fact is that nowadays you can sell almost anything online – take a long look through Amazon’s vast array of departments or browse through Google’s shopping section to see what I mean.

The whole process starts with a good business website, the plain fact is that no-body will take you seriously if your website’s not up to scratch. And be sure to choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system so buyers won’t give up in frustration when they’ve made the decision to part with their cash.

The next thing on your list of must dos is visibility – you can build the best site in the world but if no-one comes to visit all your efforts will have been for nothing. Remember, the Field of Dreams strategy was a proven bust back in the 90s. Sure you can always use pay-per-click – and you probably should – but a well optimised website will bring you ‘free’ clicks.
Here are 9 tips which should help your e-commerce website improve seo performance:

1. Optimize only the ‘content pages’ not the administrative pages like contact us and about us.
2. Always add  content to go with your images.
3. Focus. Concentrate on one keyword or phrase per content page.
4. Remember the seo basics – use unique page title and meta descriptions for each product page.
5. Create search engine friendly headings (H1s).
6. Keep an eye on keyword density in the body text. Keyword stuffing is never a good idea but make sure the keywords are well represented on the page.
7. Whenever possible use keywords in URLs
8. Use alt tags for all your product images
9. Create a good html sitemap not only useful for search engines but also for visitors

Bonus Tip

Update your product pages frequently in order to increase the crawl rate.

How do you get more first timers to buy? Third party recommendations or testimonials. Real ones – especially if you’ve ever sold to any big name brands. Be sure to add as much detail as possible:names, locations, verbatim quotes, pictures. Anything which brings the testimonial to life. Add in the awards you’ve won, stories in the press about you and you’re starting to makes some headway.

Watch the numbers change.