“All I need to do is add some good meta tags to my website, buy some links, and then I’ll have lots of traffic to my site, and people will then buy my products.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this, or something very similar. Many new e-commerce website owners are so eager to get on the search engines, and often naively think that once they have their meta tags inserted, buyers will flood their gates.

In reality, just like a brick and mortar business, it takes time to build the business and grow your customer base. It takes patience. It takes multiple forms of online marketing – search engine optimization, link submissions, e-mail marketing, and maybe also blogging and frequenting social media sites. It takes traditional forms of marketing – direct mail, print marketing, personal networking, and advertising.

Keep in mind – if it were just a matter of optimizing your site and adding meta tags, everyone would be doing it. And these days as more and more people are doing it, then the playing field has become leveled. Why should consumers buy from you rather than buying from a similar site? Likely they have never heard of you. Why should they trust you?

It sounds like it’s easy, but an online business is no different than any other business, so treat it as such and you’ll be on the right track.

Just an observation about what seems like the saturation of “get rich” and entrepreneurial books, CDs and TV shows lately: A good example is Donny Deutsch’s Big Idea, a nightly show on CNBC that shows entrepreneurs who have made it big, or would like to. Is it me, or is this show like always on? I know that these “get rich quick” or “become a millionaire”-type books aren’t new. In fact, they have been popular for as long as I can remember, but they seem to have had a resurgence lately. I wonder if it has to do with the faltering economy we’re in.

I’m all for people having big goals, going for their dreams and trying to make it – but it seems to me that our culture creates many “serial entrepreneurs” who risk everything they have to be the next overnight millionaire, often not realizing how long it can take. If it doesn’t happen quickly, they’re onto their next venture.

Many people fail to understand that many of the so called “overnight millionaires” worked their butts off for years, overcame countless rejections, and persevered for a long time before finally “making it.” Their seemingly “overnight” success took years! If anyone exists who really did make it “overnight,” then I’d say that he or she did all the right things, but was also at the right place at the right time, in the right industry, etc. These are the exceptions, though, not the rule.

Most entrepreneurs make it by steadily working at it, year after year, gradually reaching their goals, slowly but surely. That’s how you make it! Just as most financial planners will advise you to investing in the long term, the same concept applies to building a business. It’s a long, continual journey. But we don’t hear too much about the gradual way to build a business – that idea doesn’t sell and isn’t nearly as appealing as launching the next big product in the immediate gratification culture we live in.

Keep in mind – for every person that made it, there are hundreds who are flat out broke and in debt, their lives ruined from the reckless manner in which they “went for it,” and not having the persistence or patience to really build a business. But we don’t ever hear their stories on Donny Deutsch’s Big Idea. They don’t sell books about the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who went into debt trying to launch a product, and are still in debt and haven’t made it.

If your product or service takes off quickly and makes you an overnight success, then that is awesome and more power to you. But if that doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean that you should throw in the towel and look for your next overnight venture. Rather, work at your business, build it slowly. To use an old cliché, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and most successful businesses aren’t either.

Want to improve your customer service? Looking to offer a new service but not sure what the response will be? Are you curious to know what your customers are thinking? Conducting an e-mail survey may prove to be very effective for you.

E-mail marketing is very affordable and a short survey can be a real-eye opener. I recently e-mailed all of my company’s clients a 4-question survey about a possible new service offering, and got some very different results than I had anticipated, which saved us money and helped us decide on a different course of action than we had originally planned on taking.

Here are some tips for your next e-mail survey:

Keep it short. No one wants to fill out a long, time-consuming survey. If you want your customers or prospects to participate, keep it at 5 or 6 questions.

Ask follow-up questions. Often, asking “Why?” as a follow up to a question can give you some insight as to why someone feels a certain way.

Consider offering an incentive. It may be worthwhile to offer a free gift for anyone who participates in your survey. You’ll get many more participants, and the information gained could save you money and be very valuable in many other ways.

Ensure your customers’ anonymity. Make your survey recipients feel comfortable with answering honestly by stating that their answers will remain 100% anonymous. Otherwise, you may not get the whole truth.

Lead them to your website. When the survey is complete, take the participant to a “thank you” page on your website, where she may browse your site and find offers and services that she may have been unaware of.

Don’t overdo it. Don’t send surveys to the same people too often – they may not participate if you overdo it. Once or twice a year is plenty.

Track your results. What are the results of your survey? What do they mean? What is your plan of action? What will you do – or not do – as a result of the answers you received?

There is little doubt that the best quality referrals come from your existing clients who are happy with your product or service. But will that be enough to keep your business growing at the pace you’d like? The answer would depend on the industry you’re in. A friend of mine does computer networking and his business is 100% by referral, and that keeps him busy. For my telephone on-hold and web design business, while we get many referrals from our clients, if I relied on those alone, it would hardly be enough.

So the next question is – how do you generate other leads? Try to establish relationships with close spheres of influence. As a web design company, we have several “partners” such as SEO firms and IT firms, which do not provide the same service as we do, and often refer their clients to us. After a period of time, we have built mutual trust with these partners, and they have become excellent sources of referrals.

E-mail marketing may work well also. You can send monthly e-newsletters to your clients and lead lists. We always try to give some useful information in our e-newsletters, and not be purely salesy, if at all. This keeps people reading and retains their interest.

We also do a few tradeshows throughout the year, which is another avenue for generating leads. And…don’t neglect the dreaded cold calls! Most of us hate doing them, and put it off, but they are so very effective. Do them yourself – allot some specific time each day – or hire someone else to do them.

Overall, use a variety of marketing methods, and you’ll have good leads coming from every angle.

Getting visitors to your website is one thing – converting visits to sales, what is known as the “Conversion Rate,” is something else entirely.

Most experts say that you should expect a conversion rate of 1-3%. This low figure may surprise you, but if you think of how many searches are done daily on any given term, how many competing websites are out there, and consumers growing distrust of many website scams, then it may shed some light on this percentage.

So what can you do to increase your conversion rates?

Have your contact information displayed so it is easily found. If people need to search endlessly to find a phone number or e-mail address to reach you, they will either give up trying, or lose trust in you as a legitimate business. Have your phone number and e-mail prominently displayed in the top area of each web page.

Make sure your site is secure. Nothing takes the trust away like a site that takes credit cards, but is not encrypted and secure.

Make sure your site looks professional. If your site looks like it was created over the weekend by your teenage nephew, don’t expect people to buy.

Get some good buzz out there. Referrals and word of mouth are very effective, so generate some good buzz on social networking sites, forums, etc. Have testimonials of satisfied customers on your site as well.

Don’t neglect traditional forms of marketing. So many new net entrepreneurs rely solely on internet marketing, and that is a mistake. Print business cards and brochures or postcards, do some personal networking, and you’ll get people to visit your site.

Repeat business is always easier to get than new business. Send monthly e-mail newsletters to customers who have already purchased from you. Promote new products and specials.

These are just a few ideas, and the basic idea is to build trust and confidence in those who browse your site. Good luck!

Everyone wants to be highly ranked in search engines, and so many people and companies are looking for a quick and easy way to attain results. Just as there is no magic weight loss pill, or easy get rich quick scheme, there really is no quick fix that will have meaningful or long term effects for search engine rankings.

I have come to learn that just as in so many areas of life and business, anything done for the wrong reason won’t work too well. If you’re optimizing your site, buying links for the sake of it, starting a blog purely for SEO purposes or paying someone not knowledgeable in your industry to write articles for you, I would bet that you won’t likely have good long term results.

On the other hand, if you are writing good, quality, relevant content in order to improve your website, writing a blog to provide more value to your customers or to start a web community, getting links naturally from articles you wrote or were written about your business, or generating links from other companies, associations you belong to, or other such sites that want to link to yours, then you’ll probably attain much better results.

Much like building a successful small business, getting good rankings happens gradually over time. I speak to people daily who want to be #1 in Google overnight. Keep in mind, it’s one thing to get traffic, it’s another thing entirely to convert that traffic to sales. Most website owners are astounded at how low the percentage is for visitors that make a purchase. But in this new world where everyone’s optimizing their sites and getting lots of visitors, consumers are fickle, will leave a site quickly if it offers little or no value, and must trust you before they buy from you. Remember, if it’s so easy to get traffic and make sales quickly, then you’re not the only one doing it.

Another common mistake often made is expecting that internet marketing can be the sole form of marketing. Traditional marketing techniques should not be neglected, as start-up sites often need word of mouth and personal networking to generate sales at first. Like any business, marketing should be a multi-pronged approach, including traditional and online marketing techniques.

A start-up company recently hired us to help them with their website. They had their entire site designed using Photoshop, and needed our help making it functional and giving it a professional look. They had a product line of about 10 products, so this project also involved implementation of a custom shopping cart, which is one of our specialties.

One of their requests was that we review the home page to ensure that it was effective and made the right first impression, so that visitors would hopefully purchase something while they were there. I was reminded of a valuable lesson while reviewing their home page.

I had formed an opinion of their home page rather quickly, and to ensure that it was sound, I had 2 of my designers and a non-designer employee take a look at the site. We all agreed that the home page had a major flaw – it was nearly impossible to tell what products the company provided! Only after clicking around the site did it become obvious what they did – but we felt very strongly that the home page would leave the visitor feeling baffled, and that as a result visitors wouldn’t hang around the site long enough to find out what it was all about.

This was HUGE flaw!! The basic problem was, the business owners were so engrossed in their website, so involved in everything, that they were unable to step back and take an objective look to realize that it needed to be simplified and made more obvious.

After we made them aware of this problem, they had us redesign the home page, and since opening their online store, they have thanked us for the thousands of dollars we saved them in potentially lost revenue.

So the lesson is – keep it simple, and always get a 3rd party’s objective opinion.

In a past article, I wrote about the benefits of using a domain e-mail, such as bob@company.com instead of using a hotmail or aol-type e-mail address. I’d like to explain the options available when using a domain e-mail, since this is a commonly asked-about topic by our clients.

First, keep in mind that when you own a domain, you can create any e-mail address you want at that domain. For example, you can have bob@company.com, mary@company.com, info@company.com, sales@company.com, or anything, else. In these examples, “company.com” is used as an example of whatever your domain actually is.

There are basically two ways to set up domain e-mails:

Option 1: The e-mail address can forward to another existing non-domain e-mail address. For example, bob@company.com forwards to your personal bob@hotmail.com e-mail. That would mean that any e-mail sent to bob@company.net would automatically forward to bob@hotmail.com. The benefits of setting up the e-mail this way is that you still get the professionalism of having a domain e-mail, and also that you don’t have to check two separate e-mail accounts, since all e-mails are going to your personal hotmail, yahoo or aol account.

The negative thing about having your domain e-mail forward is that when you reply to e-mails sent to your domain e-mail, the recipient will see your hotmail e-mail address, not your domain e-mail address. For example – Joe sends you an e-mail to bob@company.com. That e-mail forwards to your bob@hotmail.com e-mail address. When you reply to Joe, it will show that the e-mail you sent came from bob@hotmail.com.

Option 2: Set up your domain e-mail address as a separate account in Outlook or your e-mail program. This is by far the more professional option, since any e-mails you send out will show your domain e-mail address. The only down-side is that you need to set up this separate account in Outlook, and check it separately from your personal e-mail account.

A friend asked me to write a short article on this topic, so here it goes:
Ever think of the impression your e-mail address makes? This may seem like a rather trivial matter, but I assure you that in the eyes of many, having an aol, yahoo, or hotmail-type e-mail address makes you seem small time. Think I’m crazy?

What particularly seems funny to me is when I am handed a business card which shows the company website, such as www.xyz.com, and then the person’s e-mail address is bob@hotmail.com. While many people won’t think that anything is amiss there, those who are more savvy will wonder why Bob doesn’t realize that he can have a bob@xyz.com e-mail address (where “xyz” would be his actual domain).

So if you own your own domain, and have a website, use a domain e-mail! You can have anything@your domain.com and it is more consistent, looks way more professional, and makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

Link building is definitely the hot thing right now. So, what exactly is link building? Simply put, link building means increasing the number of links on other websites which point to your website. Why do this? The idea is that in the eyes of the search engines, the more links a site has pointing to it, the more relevant and important it must be, therefore it gets ranked higher.

There are several ways to build external links, some more effective than others:

1. Submit your site to directories. This used to be very effective, but now since it seems like everyone is doing it, the search engines have caught on a bit, and it has also leveled the playing field to some extent. Submitting your site to directories in your industry is the best way to go.

2. Join online forums. Most forums allow you to have a signature which includes your url. Every time you post a comment, your url appears, thus another external link is born. Contribute to these forums, post new topics, get involved. The bonus is you can learn something while you’re there.

3. Write and submit articles. If you like to write, this is a great tool for you. You can submit your articles to sites such as http://www.ezinearticles.com, where others may use your articles on their sites. Every time your article appears, so does your signature which includes your link.

4. Join social networking sites. Sites such as http://www.linkedin.com/ (Which I use) or Myspace or Facebook are great places to interact with others, post comments, and a great place to build links.

5. Blogs. Start your own blog – its free and easy at http://www.blogger.com/ or http://www.wordpress.com/. It’s a great source for links, and creates lots of relevant content. Also, post comments on other’s blogs. This will create more links to you, plus if you post a comment on someone’s blog, they are more likely to check yours out and do the same.

Keep in mind, though, link building is just one effective tool in the SEO arsenal. Do it well, but don’t neglect the other methods.