Your business is your voice! Get it out there!

Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Suzanne

There are a lot of “Internet Marketers” out there who will sell you the moon, “secret traffic builder” this and “sales blaster” that, and I’ve subscribed to dozens of them, and even bought some of the low cost products they offer, but the bottom line in just about all of them is to just to make yourself an absolute online social butterfly. Be real friendly, make lots of friends, become known as the friendly expert in your field, and try all kinds of ideas for getting your word out.

First in becoming recognized as the friendly expert is to set up a blog, and post to it frequently.

Second, you can offer a newsletter and you want to collect email  addresses of people who want to hear from you.  If you had an ebook to  sell, you might offer them a free chapter to entice them to subscribe to your e-newsletter.  You can send people chatty emails with free info, and once in a while send them a sales pitch, particularly if you are turning out new products too.   A lot of the big name marketers use expensive email services like aweber and ConstantContact, but there is an open source software called “poMMo” you can install on your own web site.  Although it has a  steep learning curve, it can save you a lot of money in the long run, as long as you don’t abuse your web hosting service, and use the throttle feature so you don’t overload their servers.

Thirdly, and these days it’s almost more important than an email mailing list, is to get on Twitter, and tweet a lot.  Draw many followers, and  increase who’s following you by following a lot of people yourself. (SteveWeber, a very down to earth internet marketer),  has a $5 product on how to supercharge your number of “followers” without getting your account suspended by Twitter.  I myself tend to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people on Twitter, but I hear “TweetDeck” really helps you sort out everybody cross-talking with you.  Tweet, be friendly,  chatty, social, and be conversational.  Answer other people’s tweets, besides just posting your own.   And every once in a while, post a link to your most recent blog post where people come to visit you, see your blog, and yes your sidebar link to your sales page for your product or affiliate product.

The trick is finding a niche that’s biting.  Travis Sligo of “Bum Marketing” (another down-to-earth low cost marketer I follow), says the lonely hearts market is a very hot market.  He’s got an ebook on how to win back your ex that is raking him in money hand over fist.  He’s marketing it himself through an alter-ego he’s created (he wrote the book under a pseudonym), but he’s also got it on Clickbank for affiliates to pick up, too.

So I’m tellin’ you, the bottom line of every marketing training package I’ve seen out there is just be an online social butterfly. Get out there — blog, email-newsletter, & Twitter.   If you wanna throw in Facebook &  Linked-In, Diggit, free classifieds, and others, ok.  But the first 3 are the first 3 and will get you the most bang for the effort.

Clickbank is good but they only do ebooks, and there are other affiliate programs out there too.  I sell a physical product in a certain niche, so I’ve been using  PayDotCom.com (which has no up front costs), but they do ebooks too, and Click2Sell.eu is a serious competitor for them too.

My nature is a little more on the introverted side, so I’m just getting the
hang of all this myself.  But technically, the above is how you do it.

Best wishes, God Bless, and good night :-)

http://www.SunWebStudio.com
http://twitter.com/SunWebStudio

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osCommerce joins the list of offerings at Sun Web Studio

Posted on November 13th, 2009 by Suzanne

 
I have a customer who is just not happy with her Wordpress web site. While the template customization turned out even more beautiful than I expected, and the wiz-bang plugins it’s running turn it all to magic, it is just not presenting her large inventory of products the way she envisioned. Not only that, but several of her competitors are obviously not using Wordpress, but some storefront type of software, (although it’s not always possible to tell exactly what). So she is expecting her customers will be more in tune with more catalog-type, less bloggy type, web sites. We had given Wordpress a valiant go on this site, but it just didn’t fit. osCommerce is now installed and running, and all she needs to do is upload her catalog of products and start managing her store.

So now, I am very excited to be adding osCommerce to the list of offerings through at Sun Web Studio. osCommerce is very nice storefront catalog & shopping cart software, with a great many features for just getting down to business, attractively presenting many categories of products, and automatically calculating shipping rates and sales tax. It also has the built in ability to keep accounts records, run specials, and especially nice is the ability to stay in touch with customers via email newsletters. This is so very important to your online business succeeding and thriving.

Yes, it enables us to change and customize templates, too. Your web site will be beautiful!

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Getting into Joomla and vTiger

Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Suzanne

Wow, I feel like my head is going to explode! I am working on a very big project, automating the connection between buyers and sellers in a large but well defined particular niche, and it’s not just a sole proprietor kind of operation. This needs extensive interaction with both customer bases, big advertisers, and extensive data tracking.

I had at first proposed Wordpress or Wordpressμ (μ=mu=multi-user) and that might actually become part of this project, but I quickly realized it was bigger than that. Don’t get me wrong. I really like Wordpress. It started out as a little blog software that grew into a very nice CMS – Content Management System. But I started thinking this project needed something different, something as big as a major news outlet would use, with many sections, each a web-site and a half in itself.

I’m a big fan of Open Source, so I started looking seriously at Joomla. I had dabbled in it a year ago, but didn’t have a project big enough to fully explore it. So wow, now I’m heavy into it. It is NOT like Wordpress at all. You have to define things before you can define things before you define things, and the documentation hasn’t really caught up with it. You have Components, Modules, Plugins, and Extensions, that are arranged in a flip-over hierarchy. Sometimes things outrank other things, and sometimes it’s reversed. And Categories & Sections are not the same. And God forbid you should write an article before a Category is defined for it. God forbid you define a Category before a Section is defined for it. God forbid you want to build a Menu before all your Sections and Categories are built. God double-forbid you want to enter content anywhere before your web site is finished!

Well, I am finally getting the hang of it, but Joomla has a pretty ultra basic Registration form, and a pretty basic Contact form, and God hang you for thinking a Registered user is a Contact! So of course, we need to go trolling for expanding Extensions to collect all this data.

Which brings me to what to do with this data??

Ha! Well, I’ve told you previously about SugarCRM. CRM=Customer Relationship Management. You need that for big projects. But I didn’t want to have Joomla collecting Registration/Contact data for me to manually import or type into another database every day! So I went looking for an automated method to collect all the data we needed, and stuff it in a CRM, and I found these people, OpenWebApps, who wax quite elequent about vTiger, an Open Source competitor for SugarCRM, and who very kindly provide another extension for collecting unlimited fields on your contact form, er um, registration form, in Joomla, and importing them into vTiger. Wow, that’s exactly what I need.

So I’ve gone through the process of installing Joomla (configuring it will be an ever ongoing process), and I’ve gone through the process of installing vTiger, both on my client’s preferred hosting service, and every hosting service has its quirks. But I got them both working fine now. And both have nearly empty databases.

NOW the job will be getting them to handshake, and it is at this point that I stop and fix some dinner, because my head is going to explode! But don’t worrry. :-) I’ll rest a bit and come back to it. I love a good challenge!

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