Developing Your E-Commerce Business

There are a number of places you can read about how to put your business on "auto-pilot."  Well, you can't!  Okay, maybe you can once you become wealthy enough to hire an entire management team, but what's the fun in that?

A growing business needs requires constant nurturing.  Granted, there are lots of valuable tools that can help you work productively, but there is no tool that can replace all the work.

I view that reality as a positive.  I truly enjoy the time that I spend tweaking my business so that it can serve my client's needs more fully.  My sense of accomplishment comes far more from that than from depositing a check into my account.

Here are some of the issues of an e-commerce operation that benefit from continuing attention--and issues that we shall address in this section of 99Sites.US.

Traffic: I've never heard anyone complain that their web sites get too much traffic.  Of course it is possible to get too much of the wrong kind of traffic.

There are always ways in which you can improve your traffic metrics in terms of both quantity and quality.

Maximizing Multiple Streams of Income: There are three major ways of making money online.  They are 1) selling something of your own (a service, a physical product or a digital product), or at least gathering leads in order to make and offline sale; 2) selling someone else's product (affiliate marketing); or 3) advertising (selling access to your traffic).  While I do not recommend trying to capitalize on all three streams on the same piece of virtual real estate (e.g., web page or, perhaps even, web site), you can expand into multiple sites in your marketing niche.

Conversion: The important challenge is to convert your visitors into valuable customers or valuable targets of advertiser's products.  You don't sell something, including advertising space, unless someone buys.

Here at 99Sites.US, we shall look at various ways of increasing your traffic, your rate of conversions and ways in which you can maximize your income from any or all of the multiple streams. 

Here are some of the more pertinent methods of achieving those goals:

List Building: Capturing leads can be important to any business.  Even if you web site does no more than provide content and sell ad space, you want to find a way to bring those people back again and again.

E-Mail Marketing: One of the least expensive methods of marketing is through email, set up in an auto-responder so that it comes close to being on "auto-pilot."

Article Marketing: Article marketing has two major purposes.  One is to increase your ranking in the search engines (where your site is listed in the results of searches done for phrases that are relevant to your niche).  The other is to bring people (traffic) who read those articles directly to your site, so that they don't even have to use a search engine to find you. 

Adding Sub-Niches or Related Niches to Your Business Plan: If you are in the wedding planning niche, for example, you may find that wedding party favors (a sub-niche) is a good fit for you.  Or you might decide to expand into honeymoon planning (a related niche).

I'm sure you get the idea.  You can keep as busy as you want, for as long as you like.  If you work intelligently and efficiently, your business can continue to grow.  It just won't happen on auto-pilot!