What are your biggest challenges in embracing Internet Marketing & Ecommerce?

[Warren Cottis]

Hi Lucki

The reason I listed so many things is that the internet and internet marketing is evolving constantly and what worked yesterday may not work today.

The days of throwing a website up and waiting for the money to roll in are long gone and as the competition increases you have to improve your skills or find suppliers who can also act as mentors. No different to offline marketing really. Everything has to be considered holistically.

Peppie made a very valid comment with: If you don't know, how are you going to know what to ask for??? So it can be tricky coming up with a strategy when you don’t know what you don’t know.

.... and I also liked Guruju’s comment about finding a provider who actually tries to help its clients do more re marketing via online and offline. Again, it’s not about just having a website.

Take a look at www.alexa.com which is a site that gives world rankings for sites based on traffic and content. Just type in your site and you will see that you currently rank 9,031,691. Now if you start researching your competitors and look at their ranking you will start to see a basic pattern of what your site needs to improve your traffic. Conversions are another subject.

To give you some perspective, Flying Solo is currently ranked about 106,933 which is great and my site is 385,267.

Now I know that what I have just said probably doesn’t give you the specifics that you need and I have looked at your site.... so if you want to go to the contact us page on the 360 Digital Performance website and leave your details with "coconoir" in the subject box, I’ll send you a past ezine of mine that has specific comments that are very relevant to what you can do to improve your site .... as well, my weekly ezine went out today and it’s going to cover a lot of topics also relevant to your position over the next three months so you might want to keep receiving it.

Regardless, I encourage you to check out other sites in your niche for ideas plus keywords and to check their Alexa ranking as a point of reference against your ranking.

[Lucki]

Hi Warren,

Thanks so much for the information. Greatly appreciated. I've sent you an email requesting the ezine on how to improve my website.

I get what previously worked in the past may not be relevant today and so it's about getting creative and building quality relationships with your customers. Coconoir only went live mid last year and so I wasn't expecting a flurry of instant hits. I've been told it takes time and it's the quality of hits that's important. That being said, it's still a learning curve for me and one I'm particularly enjoying.

Sharing ideas and knowledge with fellow soloists is certainly a great and enjoyable way to learn.

[mexham]

Hey, great topic.

Leela really liked your comments on the blog side of things, thanks. We've been working on our blog as a SEO tool as you mentioned, but you made some great points about keywords and grammer, I'll recheck my posting to see they are well optimised, thanks.

In regards to Alexa, from what I read Alexa ranking is quite flawed as it only ranks you for visitors that visit your sites who have the Alexa tool bar installed. http://pietpetoors.com/blog/how-does...-ranking-work/

[Abby Eagle]

For me the biggest challenges in internet commerce is the admin work. I build and maintain my own websites to promote my meditation school... and i find that an inordinate amount of time goes into repairing the website... for example:

- webhost shifted the site to a new server.. which destroyed the mail program and shopping cart.
- websites got hacked. the result was a serious loss of business and once again server side programs destroyed... including my blog... i hope i can access the data from the database.
- dealing with spam.
- hard drive failure... lost three hard drives last year and one mother board.
- need i go on?

What i need is someone in the office who can look after these issues.

Getting page one rankings... that is the easy bit... you just have to be methodical. I keep a record of my google search positions, then make a change to the page and check a few days later.

[ARcashflow]

Just getting through the volume of marketing activities.

[Aidan]

You might want to try the Google keyword tool - the Overture one is long gone the way of the dodo

https://adwords.google.com.au/select...rdToolExternal

[LeelaCosgrove]

... which really says a lot about me and how much keyword researching I do, doesn't it? LOLZ ... Note to FS: Leela is NOT an SEO person!!