Tips on Setting up A Shopping Cart Website
The first thing to consider before setting up a website to sell information or physical products is this:
- Is there a problem that I can solve?
- Will people pay me to fix that problem?
- Is there traffic that I can buy, safely?
- Can I buy targeted clicks at a reasonable price?
You may have heard of a “Lift Script” for pitching for money. The gist is that imagine you get into a lift with Richard Branson and you have a few minutes to convince him that you have a great idea and that he should invest in it.
Well, there’s another Pitch that you may not have heard of, it’s called a “Stadium Pitch”. Imagine that you have a football stadium filled with 60,000 people. You have an opportunity to walk out to the centre spot where there is a microphone on a stand and you have 3 minutes to sell your product.
How many people will stay behind and buy?
It could be 5% or even 10%.
But now imagine that the stadium is filled with 60,000 people who all have a problem that you have identified and you are about to offer the solution to their problem. Now how many will buy?
The great news about the internet is that you can find these people; or better still, they come to you.
You find them by identifying exactly what they are looking for. They come to you by responding to your online marketing message.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Take for example the problem of snoring.
It’s a big problem. But we need to know exactly how many people are looking for a cure to this problem.
To find out, use this website:
Click on “Tools and Analysis” and type “Cure for snoring” into the Keyword box.
That will generate a figure for Global and Local monthly searches. The figures are 33,100 Global and 5,400 Local.(as at May 2013)
Now look at the cost of a CPC search. You’ll see it set at £1.19 (as of May 2013). That’s quite high, but it’s a big problem and there is a lot of online competition.
The CPC figure is a Cost Per Click and how big it is depends on the price of the product you’re selling.
If your selling price is £29 you ideally need the CPC to be below £2.90
How much you pay for CPC will determine where your advert appears on Google.
If you pay £1.19 you may not even get to page one for “cure for snoring searches”. If you double it to £2.38 you may get a top 3 position – which is where you ideally want to be.
Other good examples include:
“Get rid of Fleas” 14,800 local searches at £0.56p
“lie detector” 18,100 local searches at £0.83p
“Spider catcher” 2,900 at £0.29p
“Vitamin supplements” 18,100 at £0.99p
“memory loss” 60,500 at £0.60p
Whatever topic you pick, the secret is to test it with an actual campaign (more on that later).
Build a Minimum Viable Business
If the number of local searches is more than 900, you have enough to do a decent online business. Here’s how the figures should add up;
Test the numbers for just one week. Divide the local monthly searches into 31 days.
So if the local search figure is 13,200 then the daily figure will be 440
The click-through-rate or CTR will be about 9%
40 hits/visitors per day will land on your site as a result of your keyword loaded advert
There will be a sales conversion of approx. 10% or 4 sales per day
So if your sale price is £35 you will make 4 x £35 = £140
Costs.
Adverts - 50p per click x 40 = £20 per day
Cost of product £5 landed =£20 per day
Total costs £40leaving £100 net profit per day from just one ad platform is a £36k pa business!
If you explore other platforms (eBay, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) you multiply sales. So if you have 6 platforms working you will effectively have a £219k pa business if you do it right!
Now add on the back-end sales which will be 2.2 times profit (£36k x 2.2 = £79.2k) And as you have already paid to acquire each customer, you don’t need to pay again so they (and the names on your list) are yours to re-sell to. You simply re-sell your list something similar that you know they will want.
Creating a Site and choosing a domain
Ideally you want an exact match domain such as spidercatcher.com or CureForSnoring.com
You can search and buy domain names for under $10 from or from or or any other such site as you decide.
Next you need Hosting. This is simply the place where your site will live.
You could choose hosting packages with the domain sellers or a good site in the UK would be
Creating a Website
The quickest and easiest way to create a website would be to use a template site such as
You could also buy a Wordpress theme. Simply search for “wordpress themes” and choose the style of a website you like. A “Theme” is simply a template of a website. There are excellent free themes, but you get much more flexibility if you pay a few $ and buy a decent theme. Circa $40 should be enough.
Another reason to avoid free themes is that they can have too many bugs.
You buy the template and fill in the gaps with a “what-you-see-is-what-you get” (or WYSIWYG) layout. You exchange their words for yours and before you know it, you have a decent looking website.
You will have to upload your theme onto the hosting site and if you’ve never done this before it can be a bit tricky. There is a great beginners guide online here:
You Need Basic Plug-ins
A plug-in is something that you can get for free or buy for your Wordpress website. Plug-ins do things. Such as:
-All in one SEO (Helps with titles and Metatags
-Google XML Sitemap – goes into Webmaster tools
-Share This – to allow you and visitors to share on facebook, LinkedIn, twitter etc
-Cbnet Ping Optimiser – for blog posts. Will ping directories every 60 mins or so
-WP Touch – to make your site mobile friendly
-Google analytics – to allow you to track your numbers
Remember that at the end of 2012, Google places, maps and Google + have now merged and in particular Google + is more valid than even before.
If you don’t want to do anything technical, ask some website designers to do it for you: You can post a job on sites such as: or
Tell them what you want to do and they will ask web designers all over the work to quote to build your site. Give them your hosting account details and they will upload it for you and make it live. They will then give you a username and password so that you can make amendments to your site.
If you want to use scriptlance or elance or odesk, there is a checklist as an annexe to this tip sheet.
Whatever you do, you will need a minimum of 5 to 7 pages
The web pages you Must have
ABOUT – The most important page. Should include all your contact details, phone numbers email addresses, postal address, facebook comments and so on. Verify your address with Google+. Tell people where you’re near as well as your physical address, such as “we’re just next door to….” Or “just down the street from….”
PRIVACY POLICY – make visitors aware that you will not disclose or sell on their personal information. You also need this to comply with data protection and other legalities. Not having this can affect your rankings.
TERMS OF USE – Not terms of business. Not having this can also affect your rankings.
A GREAT SALES PAGE – compelling people to take action.
BLOG – for seo purposes
CONTACT US – Use captcha code to verify that the person contacting you IS actually genuine and not a bot otherwise you will get deluded with spam. If you can supply a landline phone number you should do so. You can get phones answered 24hrs a day using or other similar phone answering services.
COMPELLING LANDING PAGE – with lots of links at the bottom to the other pages
Examples of a good landing page are: or or
A good book to help you would be The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries His website is here:
Alternative Search Engines
Amazon
Traffic
Google adwords
Remarketing codes
Adblade
LinkedIn ads
Direct Media buying
Contextual ad Networks
TNT Supplements
Elance Ad Platforms such as Youtube where you can monetise.
Google “contract manufacturing” for products
Neutraceuticals. White label supplements.
Landing Pages
Truly white – teeth whitening
Farticle = a fake article
Squeeze page
Remarketing cookies
– very smart marketers
Best converting landing pages
Steel seal repairs blown head gaskets – 30% conversion – best in the business
for split testing.
Why Would You Want to SellYour website?
Businesses that sell £2k per month can sell for £72k or 3 x profit pa
You can Save Yourself Time and Trouble and Get it all Here.
You’ll enjoy a range of the following services for just one monthly fee:
- Website redesign
- Customer profiling
- Ad copywriting suggestions/implementation
- A/B multivariate testing
- Ad Quality review
- Ad group structure & setup
- Landing page review
- Landing page creation
- Ad scheduling and incremental bidding
- Dashboard setup
- Content and display networks management
- Banner advert design
- Ongoing optimisation
- Social Media management (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +)
- Social media fan page creation
- Re-marketing on the display network
- Google Extension ads
- Keyword list expansion and reduction
- Negative keyword list expansion and reduction
- Keyword match type assessments
- Multiple search engine account management (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.)
Get it all at – sign up for their free newsletter and digital monthly magazine
Finally, Some Rules for Selling Online
- Measure everything
- Not all searchers are created equal
- Boring Banners ads don’t sell
- Let the numbers make the decisions (but the client has the last word)
- Marketing has to be consistent across the search and sales cycle
- Pictures sell online but they must offer a benefit
- First get the click
- You won’t sell anything until you put your offer in front of the right audience
- Benefits sell, features tell
- Don’t try and be creative or funny, focus on selling instead
- Use the language of your prospects, go to forums and read reviews to get this
- Great information that is easy to understand will outsell great presentation (ugly sells)
- Be honest and truthful with your marketing, lies and bullshit always catches up to you
- Put news into the advert and you will make it contemporary and relevant and have a greater chance of catching the zeitgeist of the day
- Any demonstration of the product will always do well
- As will (believable) before and after pictures
Annexe 1 – Checklist for handling Scriptlance, eLance or Odesk
13 Point Checklist / Template For Posting Jobs On Elance Effectively
- Give the job a descriptive title including the key word to make it easy for Elancers to find it
- Add the sentence “This is an easy quick job for someone experienced with X and X”
- Write a short paragraph outlining your overall objective for the job
- Bullet point the job specs – what specific things do you want done or achieved
- Give a short paragraph of background, how this job fits into your business
- Bullet point the inputs you’ll be providing, for example, email content, photographs etc
- Bullet point the outputs required of the Elancer by you
- List any application requirements – such as they must use OptimizePress or WPWishlistetc
- Do not put any funds into Escrow in advance when dealing with a new Elancer to you
- Only choose an Elancer that has a good star rating and track record
- Try and divide the job up into Milestones where you will pay as you go, for example 33% done, 66% done etc
- Only pay if the job is delivered 100% to your satisfaction given that you wrote a clear brief with clear expectations of your outcome
- Consider posting job on Elance to get a feel for pricing even if you intend to use someone local / that you know – never overpay just because it’s easy or convenient!
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