How to survive in the jungles of e-commerce
Author Dr. M. Mataev, CEC
Are you familiar with the feeling of desperation because nobody is visiting
your site, on which you have spent a load of time while making? A small
comfort might be the fact that there are many sites on the Internet with
the same theme. But you were counting on something better. You have laboriously
read and reread lots of articles about marketing, bought banners, paid
“promotion specialists”. And nothing helped. How do others reach astounding
results and attract thousands of visitors?
The creation of a popular website takes both knowledge and skill.
A Webmaster needs to have a lot of knowledge and a considerable amount
of skill. There are several popular ways of solving the problem of making
a commerce website.
First, do this by yourself. You could search the web for
materials and courses. There are loads of them. Some are useful and others
totally pointless. How can you tell a good one from a bad one? Sadly, only
by trying out all the advice. It might take years of work with varying
success.
Second, you can hire a trained specialist, who created
and promoted at least one popular website. To hire such a specialist takes
lots and lots of money. If you have an unlimited budget and big plans,
try to attract such a celebrity.
Third, you can post a ‘wanted’ add for a specialist in website
promotion. You’ll be shocked to find how many ‘specialists’ will respond
to your call. You can use money to hire some student… and waste even more
precious time. Experienced corporations turn to the services of e-commerce
consultants. Milliards of dollars are spent on this each year. A consultant
will help you write up a budget of your e-business, develop a strategic
concept for your site, help select a team of specialists and check their
qualifications, put together a business plan for constructing a site, filling
it with content and correct promotion procedures for your project. As a
result you will save a lot of time, money and get a working project with
a business plan, detailed for several years.
To find a specialist of this kind and check his qualification is
not easy. That is why a board of standard e-commerce was created in USA.
The CEC™ board of standard, which is an independent regulating professional
organization, which has the license to promote people to be a Certified
E-commerce Consultant™ and the certified sign CEC™, belongs to the International
Institute of Professional Analytics, founded in 1996, San-Francisco, California
and New Orleans, Louisiana. The CEC Board regulates e-Commerce Professionals
through trademark law by certifying individuals who meet its requirements
to use the marks. CEC was started by University and College Professors
and Internet Chief Officers to innovate education for e-Professionals and
form a worldwide professional society to assist executives, managers, and
professionals. This joint merger between corporate America and Prominent
Universities has brought the CEC to the forefront of manager and executive
certification.
If there is no chance to hire a certified specialist, you will need
to be sure in the practical competition of a consultant, with who you’ll
working. Ask him what kind of practical successes he had. Phone the clients
he has worked with and ask about their opinion about work with this person.
If the consultant is saying that he is a specialist but hasn’t promoted
a single e-commerce project, you should question in his proficiency.
How do you test the efficiency of promotion?
From the many ways to show the efficiency of work, we decided to stop
on the site rating in the largest search systems in the world. This is
the easiest way to see the most efficient promotion of a website, being
displayed on the first page of the search results significantly increases
the popularity of the website. It is known that search systems and catalogs
are the largest visitor suppliers for many successful sites. Not less important
is the fact that these statistics are available to anybody who wants them.
Here are some examples of site promotion of several of our clients, who
used our consultations, technical help or went through training and certification
in the company.
Olga’s Gallery – an online art museum
The largest exhibition of Russian artists on the Internet. The site
is about three years old and its popularity is hundreds of thousands people
a month. Earnings from advertisement and sales are more than $100 000 a
year. This site is our largest achievement.
Search for ‘online art gallery’.
Google: No. 1-3 (out of 2.300.000 pages)
Dmoz: No. 13 (on 1st page)
Overture.com: No. 38 (on 1st page)
Askjeeves.com: No. 7
MSN: No. 29
GOOGLE - PR- 7/10.
Except that, when searching for the names of dozens of famous artists you’ll
find this gallery in the first five of the largest search systems.
1001meloch.com – a free classified ads board in Russian (owner Anna
Levinson)
Search for "Free ads board" (In Russian)
Yandex: No. 1-3 (out of 61.342 pages)
MSN: No. 22 (out of 5146)
Search for "ads" (In Russian)
Yandex: No. 5-7 (out of 10,014,995 pages)
The site pravo.co.il – a site about the Israeli legislation system in
Russian (owner Boris Bricker)
Search for legislation (Russian)
Google: No. 1 (out of 303 000 pages)
Yandex: No. 1 (out of 1 728 964 pages)
MSN: No. 3
The site 1001art.net – an online modern art gallery (owner Lilia Pavlova)
Google: For dozens of keywords it takes 1st-10th place out of tens
of thousands of pages.
If you search for “e-commerce consultant” in Yandex, you’ll find that the
2nd and 3rd positions belong to www.abcmlm.com/about.html (owner Victor
Tetov) and AnnaLevinson.com – sites created by certified consultants of
e-commerce, trained in our company.
Our company, Join2day.com Inc. Training Institute, New York is the first
company in the world that trains and certifies specialists in Russian and
is one of the chosen few companies in the world which has the right to
award its graduates with the CEC™ (Certified E-Commerce Consultant) title,
a corresponding diploma and the right to use the CEC™ logo. It is on the
list of recommended educational institutions of e-commerce: http://icecc.com/mba.html.
Such a major success with small expenses is not an accident. We have researched
a unique technology for promotion, which permits the user to achieve great
results in a short period of time. But for a commerce project, high visitor
rate is not the only problem, which needs to be solved.
If you have a traditional business, then before you begin making
a website you have to answer these questions:
-
what is the point of the company and how will the website help it
-
what results are you planning to achieve with the website
-
will the website attract new visitors, clients and buyers to your business
or raise the sell rate for old visitors
-
will the site raise customer service
-
will the site bring popularity to your business
-
when is the best time to create a website for your business
-
will the website have any negative effects on your business
And another very important factor determines the success of a web project.
Which part of the visitors will become buyers and which part of that part
returns to buy again. We use the newest methods to evaluate the content
and structure of a web site, which permits to attract new visitors with
interesting contents and urge them to buy. E-commerce is suffering a boom.
This is mostly because of the quick growth of users. In these favorable
conditions e-commerce is the most attractive kind of business.
Today Internet is the most comfortable and cheap way to take your products
into other countries. Sadly, most businesses are not well informed of the
opportunities, possible in the World Wide Web and infrastructure, which
serves e-commerce on Earth. In developed countries more that 50% of the
population uses Internet and buys products and services for milliards of
dollars. Today more than ¾ commerce projects bring their owners
income.
Runet – is one of the most dynamic secrets of the World Wide Web.
If the number of users in rich countries is nearing great concentration,
then in Russia an avalanche-like growth is taking place. That’s why commerce
projects in Russian have very good prospects. In the nearest two years
more successful projects will appear in Runet. Luckily today competition
is small and it’s pretty easy to find an empty shelter. The right choice
of web strategy is the key to success. Recommendations of specialists are
especially important here. Informational technologies are being developed
so fast that even the most experienced specialists will not be able to
tell you what new discoveries await your business in the future.
So as not to stay in this race, you have to own your own working
project and attentively watch for everything new. Luckily Internet is in
the best way adapted to working with information. |
