Making Internet Money Part Two

Steps to Starting an e-Business

1)      Domain name selection

2)      Choosing a website hosting company

3)      Website design and construction

4)      Copywriting

5)      Optimizing

6)      Marketing

7)      Operations

 

Domain Name Rules:

 

1)      Match your business name as closely as possible

2)      Make it short, easy to remember and easy to remember

3)      Avoid hyphens and underscores in the name if possible

4)      If you have to, use .net or .org and if you can, go ahead and register these as well.  Example, your URL is bigblimp.com, go ahead and register bigblimp.net and bigblimp.org.

 

GoDaddy.com

This is the place to go for domain name searches, registration, domain name administration tools, domain forwarding, e-mail accounts and locking.  Domain name registration costs about $10 a pop nowadays

Hosting

Basic website hosting costs about $3.95 a month or less.  The host is the spot that “hosts” your web page files and serves them up.  

 

e-Commerce Shopping Carts

 

Shopping Carts

 

“A website “shopping cart” is a piece of software that mimics the use of a shopping cart in the real world.  In other words, it is software that allows the online shopper to choose and hold items for purchase until she is ready to check out and complete the purchase process by making payment.”  - Fox,  Internet Riches

The best e-commerce shopping carts:

1)      Are easy for the shopper to use

2)      Are easy for you to install on your website

3)      Offer easy visibility of the cart’s contents

4)      Make it easy for the customer to add/subtract goods

5)      Display the current total cost of the items in the cart (ideally including sales tax and shipping costs, if any)

 

Payment Processors

 

This is the middle man between the customer’s credit card company and your merchant account.  It checks to see if a customer’s credit card is legit before allowing a purchase to continue.

 

Merchant Accounts

 

This is the middle man between your payment processor and you collecting payment from the customer’s credit card company.  In a lot of cases the payment processor and merchant account are one and the same and indistinguishable.  But, process-wise, the merchant account receives the okay from the payment processor and then reaches out to collect payment from the customer’s credit card company.  This is your merchant account.

 

Paypal

 

This is a payment processor and probably the biggest.   These guys allow the ability to accept credit card transactions without a traditional merchant account.  Initially they started as a way for customers to send and receive money to one another directly from their bank accounts, eliminating the need for credit card transaction-processing capabilities.  They have grown to include credit card processing as well.  Of course, there is a small fee but by using this service, you can accept online payments by directly debiting the consumer’s PayPal account, checking account or credit card. 

 

Your Shopping Cart:

 

Paypal offers a simple shopping cart that works very well with its own payment system.  It is easily installed to your website with some HTML. 

 

Yahoo also offers a shopping cart product.

 

Why Ship When You Can e-Mail

 

Do you have a book or a song that you want to sell?  Don’t ship it, send it as a digital download.  This will save you all of the hassle and the overhead that comes along with traditional snail mail shipping. 

There is a company …

That specializes in digital downloads from Word files to PDFs to MP3s  - Payloadz.  You can upload your files, and install the basic shopping cart buttons to your website and away you go.  You can offer your digital goods for sale securely without having to manually send each customer file purchased and manually process the transaction.  Payloadz integrates all of these functions into one helpful service that offers free trials and then starts at $15 a month. 

 

eBay

 

You know the story … they offer auctions, fixed price auctions, multiple item auctions and stores.  ‘Nuff said.

 

Craig’s List

Need some extra income?  Go to the gigs section on Craig’s List to find tons of  online gigs such as Writing Gigs, Creative Gigs and Labor Gigs.