Of course, give yourself credit for recognizing one important facet of today’s selling world. You decided to sell your stuff at an online classified site. As anybody in the business knows, online classified ads get you more privacy, a broader selection of buyers, and a wealth of tools to help you keep tabs on your transactions. When compared to a newspaper, cyberspace is also a wee bit more spacious. There are billions of pages on the Web, and only a few dozen in your typical neighborhood rag. For you, that means a lot more space for your ad to say the least.

With that space, however, comes great responsibility—and great potential. The extra room gives you the freedom to include as much product description and sale copy as you want. You can’t just slap together a whole bunch of information, though. You need to use the three special ad writing techniques that will attract buyers and seal the deal: attention, interest, and action.

Attention. Make sure the buyer stops at your ad instead of the thousands upon thousands of others out there in cyberspace. Your ad’s title is the first lure to grab his or her attention, and the first component of a catchy title is the item’s best feature, whether it’s the price, the item’s rarity, or its popularity. Next, be sure the title includes keywords or other synonyms for your item that a buyer might use in a search. For instance, a buyer could search for “automobile” instead of “car,” “pullover” instead of “sweater.”

Interest. Once you have the buyer’s attention, hook them with details. There is a direct relationship between the amount of information you provide and the number of sales you’ll make. So describe the item as completely as possible—size, color, material, designer, model—and provide a clear, digital photo to finish the job where your words leave off. Even offer your prospective customer the item’s history if possible.

Also, try to list as many possible benefits that your sales item could offer the buyer. Come up with some that the buyer probably wouldn’t think of on his or her own. And zone in on specific benefits. Use what you already know about your target. For instance, if you were selling a car, you know that whoever is looking at your ad is in need of a vehicle. If your car is compact, perhaps the buyer is in search of great gas mileage. Or perhaps it’s power he or she wants if your car is a sports model.

Action. Finish your ad strongly. Don’t just suggest to the buyer that you offer a great deal. Tell them it’s a fantastic offer that they can’t pass up. Use phrases like “Call me now before someone else does” or “Buy now, this opportunity won’t last long.” Be cordial while you’re pressing the issue, of course. Thank them for reading your ad and make sure they know you appreciate their business.

Most importantly, your customers will also value your honesty throughout the whole ad. So whether it’s the attention, interest, or action you’re shooting for, never lie or exaggerate. Go so far to include any defects if your product is not in mint shape. Your honesty will build trust, and trust above all else makes an ad work. What’s more, it makes for repeat customers.

Remember, if you use all three of these elements—or four if you include honesty.  When you’re finished with it, it should read something like the two examples below.

Example 1:

Discover the beauty of a Forest Hill Home
2500 sq. ft. home, 4 bedroom, 3 baths, double garage, upgraded kitchen, 12 ft. ceilings
This open concept house is situated in a historical landmark district of Rhode Island. It’s a wonderful neighborhood to raise your family, with nearby schools and amenities.

(Insert your image or photo here.)

Call for an on-site appointment. Thanks for looking!

Example 2:

Looking for an inexpensive used car that drives well? only $4,950.
2003 Honda Civic, Limited Edition, 65,000 miles, manual transmission, CD, AM/FM radio, power steering, low maintenance. Great on gas – this car will save you $$$ on high gasoline prices.

(Insert your image or photo here.)

Send me a message now. Thanks for looking!

Internet shopping is bigger than ever. You can find anything and everything for sale online. Many times, you can find it cheaper online than anywhere else. Internet shopping offers so much more than a discounted price tag, though.

Imagine a shopping mall where there are no lines, where there are no jammed parking garages, and no pushy sales clerks. This is no land of make believe. It is the Internet, where you can discover unprecedented selection, convenience, and opportunities. Online shopping gives you the luxury of browsing hundreds of stores from your living room, while saving on time and frustration. It provides you the chance to compare prices to your heart’s delight on a near limitless selection of brands and models.

For even more benefits, try your hand at classifieds and auction Web sites. These sites are like yard sales and flea markets rolled into one. Unlike retail shopping sites, they offer:

Access to super secondary markets.  Take your pick of secondhand or brand-new wholesale goods at steeply discounted prices. The vendors at classifieds sites can get away with it because they aren’t paying high rent for a storefront or a warehouse. And in many cases, you’re not paying taxes.

Tools to locate unique and rare collectibles.  Imagine a classifieds site to be like a sunken pirate boat, laden with cultural artifacts, hard-to-find heirlooms, and priceless antiques. The Internet is your deep-sea vessel, sonar, and oxygen tank all in one.

Reach beyond your neighborhood. Search through the inventory of a vendor from your home town, or if you don’t find what you’re looking for there, try that fellow in California, Texas or Canada for that matter.

Close relationships with vendors. You deal with real people—not big, impersonal corporations—when you buy on classifieds sites. They can provide more details about the product, which you can then use to bargain for a reasonable price.

Despite this bounty of benefits, you might still be hesitant to dive into Internet shopping. Don’t be embarrassed. You have good reason to take your time and weigh your choices.  According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Internet fraud tops the list of the thousands of fraud cases that happen every year. In some ways, WWW could stand for the Wild West Web, in that anything goes. Vendors can be villains in disguise, and there aren’t any online Wyatt Earps to protect you from these bad guys.  You’re on your own.

But give yourself some credit. You have the common sense it takes to survive the WWW.  It is the same commonsense that helps you make the most of your money on your standard shopping trips. Become familiar and comfortable with an online vendor before jumping into a purchase. Ask questions and do a bit of research.

After doing your research, you’ll feel more confident in searching for your online booty. To refine your findings and whittle your list to only the exceptional sites, look for these additional qualities:

•    A focus on local shopping, so you can feel more confident buying from neighbors.
•    Free education and advice on safe purchasing.
•    No-cost and easy browsing through available merchandise.
•    Search tools that let you prioritize items by category, location, and distance.
•    A straightforward pricing system that avoids the haggling and risk of auction bidding.
•    Quick price comparisons among different vendors.

Unbelievably, a few trustworthy, practical, and exciting Web sites exist that have all of these features. To find these websites, simply browse through Yahoo’s directory under the classifieds category.  The best of the online classified sites offer these services free to buyers such as you. Some of these sites can link you at no charge to your neighbor selling the antique lamp that you’ve been hunting for or that retiree looking to unload an incredible piece of real estate—or the cowboy looking to sell his big-screen television.

So, what do you do? Simple. Use a physical mailing address as a contact option in your ‘Contact Us’ page and/or website order form. However, if you’re a website owner that operates from your home, don’t go and attach your home address to your website just yet, you might want to think about your mailing options.

Deciding where to have your business mail sent is not as straightforward as you might think. There are a few factors that you have to take into consideration – quantity of mail received, length of time at location, convenience, and of course, cost. The good news is that you have several options that are available to you:

1. Your Home Address
2. Mailing Services (Mailboxes Etc., The UPS Store, etc.)
3. Mail Forwarding
4. Post Office Box (P.O. Box)

Using your home address:

Using your home address is definitely the cheapest option. To the small to medium size website owners, it is probably the best option. However, if you tend to grow rapidly, or if your website already has a large user-base, then your home address may not be the best option for you.

If you are selling products from your website and allowing customers the option to mail in their order (which is good practice – and many do), then you could potentially get a lot of mail, depending on the user-base of your website, of course. If this is the case, then your home mailman will not be happy with you at this stage! And you may also find yourself spending a half hour out of each day prying your mail out of your tiny home mailbox that is not big enough to accommodate all that mail. Furthermore, if you ever move you will need to forward your mail to your new location, which never seems to be as smooth as you’d like it to be.

Then there’s the fact the all of your customers can easily find out where you live. Not that you’re hiding from anyone! But you could find yourself in the situation where you have a few inquisitive customers that don’t mind “stopping by” to ask a few questions!

Using a Mailing Services (Mailboxes Etc., The UPS Store, etc.):

The use of a mailing service can be quite expensive ($25-$45 per month). However, there are some benefits. You can assign a suite number or have a real street name assigned to your business address, instead of a P.O. box. This can give the potential customer the impression that your business has an office or building that resides at the location. However, I have found that the cost of this service usually outweighs the benefits associated with it. Nevertheless, the money you pay to use a mailing service is tax deductible as a business expense.

Using Mail Forwarding:

Now, if you REALLY want to get fancy you can opt for the mail forwarding option. Here you can pay a company in a “big time” city like New York or Chicago to accept your mail and forward your mail to you. This is EXPENSIVE! And there is another major drawback – you are always getting your mail about 2-5 days late due to the forwarding time.

Using a Post Office Box (P.O. Box):

The use of a P.O. Box is, in my opinion, the best choice for those that run high traffic websites out of their home. Not only does your mail get to the P.O. Box more quickly, but also the cost is relatively cheap (about $50-$125 per year). Again, this cost is a business expense, so save your receipt and write it off!

In my opinion and experience, most people are accustom to the P.O. Box and do not mind sending orders to it. In fact, many big companies use P.O. boxes as a matter of conveniently keeping the mail separate.

There you have it, four good ways to make your customers feel more secure by adding a physical address to your website. Pick the one that suites you and your company’s needs best – everyone is different. The important thing is to give your customers a place to send physical mail.

Good luck! And be sure to come back to visit VictoryKey often for more online business tips and discussions!

Where you should start greatly depends on what you plan on attempting to do, and how deep you’re going to dive in. For a moderately professional, clean looking web site without a lot of automation or intensive animated graphics you can probably get by with some basic knowledge of html, ability with a good WYSIWYG editor, and an image editting program. On the other hand, if you’re someone that’s looking to build something that will really wow your audience then you might consider spending some major time and developing some animation skills with a program like Macromedia Flash. I personally always spring for what I believe will bring me the greatest amount of profit with a minimal amount of effort, and because of this I usually end up spending all of my time diving in deeper with ONLY my WYSIWYG HTML editor, and my image editor.

## What is a “WYSIWYG” editor? ##
A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is what allows you to get by with minimal knowledge of HTML. Yes, that means you don’t have to know EVERYTHING about HTML to have a decent looking website. When you use a WYSIWYG editor it interprets what you’re doing (inserting an image for example) as being a certain series of HTML tags with attributes, and does it for you… Thus, what you see on your screen is what you get. Instead of seeing a bunch of HTML code in text format, you’ll mostly see what will actually show up in your browser once your web site is up WHILE you’re making it. I highly recommend using the latest version of dreamweaver — it is well-known as one of the best HTML editors by general consensus. Dreamweaver’s interface is very friendly, has a built in FTP client, and is specifically built to be flexible enough to suit both the coder and the everyday amatuer webmaster.

## Image editing? What do I need that for? ##
Okay, let’s be realistic here: If you’re going to make a professional *appearing* web site it’s important that you can make some basic, decent looking graphics. There’s a lot of graphics problems that can truly get the job done, but as far as power and flexibility goes I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop definitely takes some time getting used to, but in the end it’s VERY rewarding. I’ve ended up using my knowledge of Photoshop to make not only graphics for multiple web sites, but also touched up portraits, made business cards, flyers, and other online advertisments such as banners. Infact, I’ve used it for everything except animation… But it also comes with Adobe Imageready which is very good with animation. This software is amazing, and if you’re going to learn ANY image editing software I recommend you start with Photoshop because of it’s widerange of overall… usefulness!

## Let’s get me some sales! ##
Kick off your new web site you’ve gotten up from your knowledge of webmastering and image editing with a few new sales… Sounds like a plan? Well a great way to do that quickly is with pay-per-click advertising. BUT WAIT! Doesn’t that cost money? Well… Yes. But with the tools brought to us by some of the biggest pay-per-click advertisers out there we should be able to make a good evaluation of how much profit we’re going to make without much investment upfront.

The big question behind pay-per-click advertising is whether or not it’s worth the cash when you can simply get traffic from regular search engine ranking (otherwise known as organic traffic). Afterall, there are plenty of companies out there that promise to help get you all the traffic you need through optimizing your web site for organic ranking. The answer to this question is quite simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools such as those offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords anyone can calculate exactly what their profit is after cost of PPC advertising is taken out. In my opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among the PPC advertisers. Google Adword’s interface makes it very easy to see which keywords are pulling you in the most sales, and which ones aren’t even worth your advertising money.

Let us not forget, however, that in order to make those conversions we’re going to be needing a shopping cart! There’s a lot of diverse software packages out there you can use, but I’ve been using Mal’s E-Commerce Free shopping cart for a number of years with great success. The cart’s server is hosted on their machines so that means you not only get away with not having to pay for the software itself, but you get out of having to buy an SSL security ticket too! Nothing’s a better bargain than free, eh?

## Getting those sales leads you’ve been building up to BUY! ##
Once you’ve scored a few sales it would probably be a good idea to start using some kind of lead management services. I highly recommend the use of autoresponders for this purpose. Autoresponders are, essentially, a newsletter sign-up that allows you to strategically determine what you want to send each lead after a certain alotted amount of time. For example, let’s say someone visits your web site and you offer them a free newsletter. If you were selling an ebook on some very complicated topic, you might consider sending them only information on the most basic concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn those visitors that might have left your web site and never have returned into some serious revenue!

As far as autoresponders go, I highly recommend the use of Aweber. Their customer service is superb (seriously, these guys really know their stuff!) and can be contacted at any point during the business day via online chat or phone. They also offer tons of free information, and guides on making the most of their services. Check out their month long free trial at http://www.getaweber.com/ .

You advertise your business in local newspapers, local television and even local radio. That is good. You are getting enough business to keep you afloat. You may receive inquiries from the surrounding cities, or even the bordering states, and that is great.

What if you could attract business from another country?

When you finally decide to take advantage of technology, the Internet is an incredible universe of its own.

When you create a Website, and starting an e-commerce trade, you are opening your business to a whole new world.

Businesses that would not know that you exist are now able to view your website, research your services and contact you with any questions.

By taking advantage of the Internet, you are allowing your business to grow in ways that it could not if you were to advertise with conventional methods.

In recent years, the E-commerce trades as raised a steady twenty-five every year, and experts feel that this trend will continue. When you finally decide to take the plunge and get your business started on the Internet, there are a few steps that you should take before starting. This will be a nerve wrecking, nail biting point in the growth of your business.

There are steps to take before jumping in. As with any new venture, do a lot of research. Find out what the statistics and trends are for your type of business.

Make sure that your products or services are available as soon as your Website goes live. You want to have everything ready to ship as soon as you get an order. If a client feels that they have received exceptional treatment, your business will experience repeat business.

After your website is created and goes live, there is more to do. Advertising your business in the right manner is crucial. Joining E-commerce organizations and associations, can give your business the boost it needs. These are groups of business owners just like you who want to advertise their businesses.

When you join these organizations and associations you are agreeing to their rules and terms. Most have very strict rules of conduct, and once established, Potential clients will find you through them. Remember, if you are debating whether or not to go forward and start an E-commerce Trade, your competitors are taking advantage of the Internet.

For everyday that you procrastinate, your competitors will take full advantage of all that the Internet has to offer. If you are not familiar with the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the Internet, have no fear. A simple search of the Internet will yield Thousands perhaps millions of companies who will explain to you the benefits of an online business. They will assist you in creating and maintaining an online business that will raise your standard of living.

AN AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION MUST BE DRAWN UP AS THE FIRST STAGE BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE IS DONE – ANY OTHER APPROACH WILL ONLY LEAD TO CONFUSION AND WORSE.

Once an AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION has been agreed then solutions need to be evaluated and costed against that specification are:

- Project management
- Hardware
- Web design and software
- Site marketing
- Project management:

All aspects of the project need to be managed. Decide who is going to do it and properly plan the requirements, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.

Hardware:

Your choices here are a managed service or your own server. The security and disaster recovery aspect that is achieved by hosting with a major provider is very important. Only go with your own server if you have the experience and facilities.

Design and Software:

Site design

Develop site templates and test them with real people. They have to be easy to use and navigate. Don’t let “design” drive the site; let ease of use and sales drive the “design”. Think how the customer thinks.

Software

At least 5 solutions need to be considered.

- Updating
- Shopping cart
- Forum
- Email
- Statistics

Updating

There are 2 realistic routes here. Either an online or an offline, PC based content management system (CMS). The online CMS can be either an Open Source CMS (Open Source means any application that has been made available, generally free, to developers to view and modify freely. Examples of Open Source applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.

There are pros and cons to both routes. An online system is available to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based system is, obviously, limited to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC based system is Macromedia Contribute which integrates with Dreamweaver. There are a whole range of online Commercial and Open Source options such as SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. However, even this is complicated by the fact that some of the shopping cart solutions also contain CMS that may be sufficient for many companies’ requirements.

Shopping cart and CRM

There are also 2 realistic routes for the shopping cart – Open Source or commercial.

There are excellent Open Source shopping carts such as OSCommerce and Zen, but also excellent commercial solutions such as Actinic and Customer Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with a complete CMS).

There are other factors to consider with the shopping cart:

- Does it have its own or does it easily integrate with your exiting stock control systems?

- Does it integrate easily with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?

- Does it have or integrate easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be proposed in future?

Forum

Many CMS have good integrated forums but if they do not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source package such as PunBB or phpBB. They are free, robust and easy to integrate and customise into any site.

Email

Most CMS, shopping carts and forums have email solutions. However, some solutions are very basic. If the chosen shopping cart solution that best meets the ecommerce and other requirements does not have an effective integrated email solution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications such as PHPlist are one alternative solution and the other is an online solution such as Constant Contact or many others.

Statistics

This is arguably the most important part of the package. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site profitability. Commercial applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.

SITE MARKETING

There are 4 major areas to consider here.

- Offline marketing – e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-web activities.

- Site optimisation – how to make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of other factors are initially and remain optimised so that as many high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.

- Pay per click and other online marketing – how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on other sites.

- Email – how to grow the email list and use it to grow profitable sales.

In summary:

- Manage the project
- Think how the customer thinks
- Get excellent software to make finding product and price easy
- Make terms clear and payment simple
- Ensure you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
- Make sure you have a good CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
- Market the site appropriately
- Know what’s going on – use your stats to test, track and try

Cost ………… well how long is a pice of string, but you could be up and running for far less than the cost of new premises!!!

Domain Tax Guide.