productivity tools

If you are planning to open an eCommerce store, please consider to think small.

Why?

First, let me tell my story. I am embarrassed to say that I have started an eCommerce store before, and I failed.

Why I failed? Because I took ‘think big’ principle a bit too far.

I open an online natural remedy store on my own - I use Joomla! CMS, I buy a professional template, I buy a premium shopping cart script, I partner with a dropshipping company, and I purchase SSL to secure transaction. I do SEO, marketing, promotional campaigns myself.

All is text-book, what-should-be-done, and best practices. I think big - I envision my eCommerce store to run, grow and make me some money online.

I turned out wrong - my hosting company performance is lackluster, and the SSL I bought is collecting dust. In fact the whole website and business concepts I have are collecting dust!

I have invested thousands of dollars, and I can never be able to recover my investment. I learned the hard way that start small, simple and ‘light’ are the best way to ace in eCommerce.

Think small, act big with hosted eCommerce

One of the small, simple and ‘light’ steps that I should have taken that day is having my eCommerce store hosted by a professional eCommerce hosting service provider.

A hosted eCommerce service provider is a company offering you the ability to host your online retail store, as well as the tools to manage your back-end operation.

I found that Shopify is one of the better hosted eCommerce services on the Net.

For a small sum of money per month, even for free, you can host your eCommerce store at Shopify, and stop worrying about SEO, web hosting, bandwidth and security issues. you can start focusing on your business - something that I failed to do before.

You might think, “monthly fee? I don’t like it. I’ll start on my own, on a tight budget, immediately!” - I recommend you to rethink your online business strategy and highly consider the overheads, in term of money and time, to run on your own. Especially if you are not an experienced eTailer or programmer/designer.

Shopify offer you a simple and fast process, from sign-up to up-and-running eCommerce store. Ready made templates, loaded shop features and store management help you to start your business immediately.

Even if you don’t like the ready made design, you can always hire a designer that Shopify can recommend, or go DIY. In my opinion, the stock designs that Shopify include to each store is better than most eCommerce store design on the Net.

If you are interested in offering the hosted eCommerce service to your clients or collegues, Shopify Affiliate Program allows you to do just that. Shopify offers you 20% revenue share for all eCommerce systems created.

And no, I’m not their affiliate - so you can trust me on this :)

How to make more money online with hosted ecommerce

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I spend hours during my day to seek for business opportunities online, about triple the time I actually work on my business.

The time I have invested allows me to learn about new business opportunities and take a couple of great business opportunities.

I usually seek business opportunities online in:

• Web forums: SitePoint, DigitalPoint and the likes - many hidden opportunities here, but beware of scams!
• Online marketplace: SitePoint Marketplace and the likes - I somewhat prefer marketplace with paid listing that naturally screen-out ‘unwanted’ listings.
• Search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the likes - The most common, but powerful source of information.
• Business online publications: Entrepreneur.com and the likes - This includes blogs, I mainly look for benefits, recommendations and reviews of the business opportunities offered.

The new search tool I found

I recently came across a different search engine that help me in searching for opportunities, namely RankNoodle.com.

It looks just like the other search engines I have used to search for business opportunities, but this one has caught my eyes - it is the human involvement in search results.

To explain better, let us use the term I searched yesterday - ‘business opportunity‘ and ‘franchising‘.

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I have written about monitoring your business website performance monitoring and search engine ranking a while ago.

Please allow me to highlight the importance of your online business website monitoring again.

Online business owners often forget what’s best for your online business, especially in the back end - your business website performance. You often focus too much on your marketing effort and designing the look and usability of your front-end, but forget to secure your back end operations.

Database backup, transaction management, bug fixes, spam elimination, security hole fixes, etc - all is important and crucial to support your online business front-end. You need to monitor your website performance to spot such potential problems, fast.

Why you need to centralise your online business monitoring

Either hiring a techie or DIY, consider to centralise your online business website monitoring.

Why centralise?

Logically, you will want to control your website performance - availability, load, responsiveness, functionality, search engine ranking, traffic and user experience - on a single place. This is to cut the cost and complexity of website management.

I use website monitoring services before - I have mentioned above, about my articles in web performance and search engine ranking monitoring.

The services I use are great. However, I desperately need to monitor many, if not all, my web properties, and having multiple tools to do so is quite resource consuming and difficult to manage.

Tool to centralise website monitoring

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I own many web properties - I’m currently investing my time and resources to web properties due to the ever-growing market capitalisation of Internet business and investment.

Not only monitoring my web properties’ value and revenue, I also monitor my websites’ performance in the eye of search engines.

Why search engines? You promote to people, not to search engines!

Well, yes - that’s why search engine is paramount for your Internet business and web properties. Simple, search engines are your marketplaces - You advertise, promote and optimise your websites in order to achieve better placement in the them.

If you often heard about the over-emphasized Google PageRank, it’s because PageRank is one of the important indicator of how Google, as a search engine, view your site - eventually, it affect your placement in the search engine result pages.

Search engine ranking

Search engine ranking indicates where your websites are in the search engine result pages. The aim, of course, is for your website to be listed in the first page, usually the top 10 website for a certain keyword.

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Running online business does resembles its off line counterpart.

You need to monitor the performance of your back office operations.

In off line business, that includes monitoring financial management and reporting, monitoring your team performance, and even monitoring whether your coffee machine is in good shape and well-stocked :)

In online business, that includes monitoring your website performance, server performance, and tracking your website visitors and popularity.

Why you need to track your website performance

First of all, it is a good habit - you need to know your website’s current state in order to spot a potential problem or two in the future and receive a report on it.

Secondly, it is important to test campaigns to find your best practices. In term of website traffic monitoring, for example, you implement a new online certification, such as BizRate, for your online retail store. You may want to know the effectiveness of BizRate’s badge placement on your website. You can test the campain by monitoring the visitors traffic - is it increasing?

Tools to track your online business performance

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As a small business owner, you are often required to travel, either to attend seminars, meetings, or leisure traveling.

I personally like to work at home. I like to be ‘bothered’ by my wife and son :) To me, working at home is heaven.

However, there are times that I need to travel to attend meeting with my staffs and to attend seminars. There are also times that I need to simply go outside the house to seek for inspiration and to brainstorm ideas - My favourite place to do this is the coffee shop.

To stay productive whether I am ‘in office’ a.k.a at home or on the road, I need some basic equipments for my survival. Laptops are the most common must-have for small business owners. However, there are plenty of other productivity tools to keep you, well, productive.

My choices of productivity tools

These are common must-have productivity tools for small business owners to stay productive when the need to travel arises:

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Guest post by BroadbandSuppliers.co.uk.

In the present situation there will be no business without a broadband. It provides a huge support in the business to achieve success. If you are working from home or having your own business firm, the business broadband package will help you in the growth of your company. The arrival of recent technologies in broadband enhances the business functions. The broadband providers are offering exclusive business packages for their customers. Generally the business packages are expensive, but they offer very good features for the customers, like unlimited email addresses, domain name and free web space.

With the help of the free web space you can easily create your own website for the promotion of your business deals with the customers and other business associates. The business broadband packages offer a very good upload speed when compared with the home broadband packages. The users can identify a great difference while using the business broadband. You can easily find number of broadband suppliers offering the best broadband packages. The business packages generally comes with a good uploading speed through which you can transfer the easily.

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If you involved in online investment, including website flipping - that is, buying-low-selling-high type of business - you always want to know the estimated value of your web properties.

Unfortunately, the free online tools today is not really lift up the standard - unless you want to spend top dollar for experts’ valuation.

I’ve used many tools to estimate roughly about my websites’ value. To mention some, I’ve used tools from DNScoop.com and Estibot.com

In my humble opinion, both are decent, but considerably inaccurate. To sum:

• Estibot.com
  Value based on predicted traffic from Alexa, Google PageRank, inbound links and the Domain Name Value based on domaining marketplace price comparison
• DNScoop.com
  The better option - value based on domain age, Google PageRank, Alexa, and inbound links

Although both tools can be used complementary to give you an estimate, both lacks important variables to taken into account.

And forget about Technorati.com’s your-blog-worth-5-million-dollar valuation - unless you are Yaro Starak or Darren Rowse, your blogs will likely valued way, way much lesser than those of the pro-bloggers :D

Luckily, there IS a website valuation tool that, in my opinion, overshadow others by far.
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Guest post written by Mobility Scooters Products Co, ltd

Whether through age, disease or accident, many people end up requiring a mobility device at some stage in their lives. For some it’s just a temporary stopgap, for others a permanent fixture in their lives. In either case, the choice of device is crucial to well being and the quality of life. Here’s an overview of mobility options for the disabled to help you make the best choice.

The traditional solution is the wheelchair. Wheelchairs come as manual items which the user powers via wheel rims or a lever. These devices are suitable for those with the good upper body strength needed to propel the device, thus best suited to people whose mobility problem involves only their lower body. Another type of manually-propelled wheelchair is a lever-drive one. The user propels the chair forwards by using a lever that is pumped back and forth. Some chairs allow the user to move using one or both feet instead of using the rims. Other manual wheelchairs are pushed along by an attendant.

Electric (powered) wheelchairs, which are powered by rechargeable batteries (by connecting them to standard electric outlets), are ideal for those who lack upper body strength as they’re steered by a joystick. The basic types are rear, centre, front-wheel driven and four-wheel driven. However a power wheelchair is not suitable for someone suffering from poor visual perception or coordination.

The second kind of mobility device is the mobility scooter. Mobility scooters blend the functionality of the wheelchair with the form of a scooter. They’re steered with a handlebar. Like power chairs, they’re suitable for people lacking the stamina or arm/shoulder flexibility needed to use a manual wheelchair. Compared to wheelchairs, they offer fewer medical support options. So they’re not suitable for those who have problems supporting their heads or bodies. They are helpful for users suffering from disabling conditions such as arthritis. Users just need to be able to sit erect without torso support.
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