Hi! This is part II of E-commerce: How to Start? (go to E-commerce: How to Start? part I)

Asking for quotations to get a company to make your website will take a huge amount of your precious time. It is time-consuming because you will need to explain exactly what features you will need in your website.

Creating your webpages all by yourself is quick and easy with Autoweb Creator free online tools. No need to learn any html language, it’s just user friendly and fun.

So let’s do it by ourselves! Let’s take this opportunity to make more out of life,  just like our grand grand fathers built their house, their shop, their farm in their own time and with their own hands.

What is the risk? What do we have to loose? Not much, really: A domain name costs less than usd 20. It only takes a few minutes to build your website from scratch with free templates at autoweb-creator.com

The difficult part, the one that you cannot buy (because nobody can guarantee such a thing) is the positioning of your website in the search engines results.

However they are ways to put Good Luck on your side:

- Choose a domain name that is keyword rich,

- Key in a quick description of your business.

- Make sure that your homepage is full of text with little code.

- Put a link from your website to an other (quality outbound link)

- Offer internet users to sign up for an alert, so that you can contact them as soon as your shopping website is fully functional.

- Submit your website to the 10 major search engines for indexation.

- Set up a Google Cost Per Click campaign with a very small daily budget.

Each single task above is simple. Just take it step by step. The good news is that you get online assistance from Autoweb Creator if you are stuck.

Smart Tip: Do the above early to gain a bit of profile history.
After that, just let your website’s homepage alone for a few months.

Now, you have time to:
- Become an expert in analyzing other websites titles, body text, bold text, Meta descriptions, H1 headings, links texts.

- Study your competitors’ websites and their link popularity in directories and search engines (Alexa, Google, and Yahoo) as well as in the social marketing websites (facebook, digg, delicious, YouTube).

If you want your shopping website to be amongst the most popular, then you need you website to be of the same caliber than these websites.

Do what they do and you will have what they have. Remember this: “It is possible if you work hard at it.”

Build your mailing list. Time is on your side: While your website is automatically collecting email addresses from your prospects as they sign up for an alert, you are setting up your shopping website in a secret sub page of your website.

Make it easy for yourself, choose a freeware such as OScommerce online shopping platform which is user friendly, easy to install and offers the right options for payments, products pictures etc…

When your website is completely ready, send an email to your email list to let them know the shopping season is opened.
That’s what I call a good launch for your line of products.

About the Author: L Lemaire is a internet business writer and partner of Ellen Clothing Manufacturer. ECM is a French clothing company with a factory in Vietnam. Related article: Start a clothing line from scratch.

Online business basics by L Lemaire

What is the best way to do business online? Surely an other one million dollar question! And the one who can answer this question will ultimately get any money problems out of sight.

It’s easy to do business online if you know what you are doing and if you’ve got the right partners. It’s also very easy to get distracted when doing business on internet because there is so much at hand.

Since the end of the industrial age, we are in the era of information. The unfortunate downside to this is that we are sometimes overflowed with information.

My personal way to stay on track is to apply old school thinking to new technologies. For example, I like to think of a website in the same way than a brick and mortar shop.

To me, the best way to do business online means first mastering the two main aspects of running a shop:
- Getting the crowd in the shop.
- Getting them to purchase your products.

Getting people in the shop should immediately remind of Hilton famous saying: There are three important things when opening a new site: Location, Location and Location.

That means of course that a beautiful shop in the middle of the desert will not generate any revenue. What is called Location in the real world is simply callled Position in the world wide web.

The position of your website is important, it determines the traffic in your shop. What your landing page is made of plays a huge part in the position of your website.

Play it safe: Use Autoweb Creator as a starting point when creating your webpages. Write naturally about your business and your customer needs and use the tools at hand (often free) to check that your text doesn’t over-use one keyword or expression.

In the next article, we will examine how important it is that your shop is easily accessible by a simple click from as many quality websites as possible.

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About the Author: L Lemaire is a internet business writer and partner of Ellen Clothing Manufacturer. ECM is a French clothing company with a factory in Vietnam. Read recent articles by this author on ECM blog