Advancing eCommerce

Many folks feel that by participating in social networking they are enhancing the page rank of their own web site and getting some major SEO accomplished.

To a vanishingly small degree, they are, but much more often such activity can actually harm your site’s page rank and page authority if not done properly.

Everyone has seen those posts wishing you blessings and prosperity and promising a little more added success for you if you just click on this link.

Yet the entire idea of social networking is to contribute your ideas and make them available to the reader right here, right now (where they are reading your article now) instead of inducing them to follow a link to get to the meat your really great idea.

If you find yourself composing a nice article – especially a promotional article that tries to get folks to click to visit your site, you are making a couple of serious mistakes in the social networking world.

The first mistake is that you are not sharing the meat of your idea or thought right now where the reader is reading right now. That earns you ‘negative credits’ in ’search space’ and the collective ‘mind space’.

The second mistake this activity represents is that Google and many other search engines are becoming more and more successful at detecting ‘wall spam’ and discounting it for search results (page rank and page authority) accordingly.

If you are interested in SEO, then you must undertake SEO activities: develop content almost daily for your own web site; make sure you have a site map available in your site root; don’t put false tags in your pages; make tags relevant and different for every page.

Social Networking can successfully promote your business, but it isn’t SEO as many people have been discussing in these spaces.

Ron Robinson is a senior executive at <a href=http://www.800cart.com>800Cart Secure eCommerce Shopping Cart/SEO</a>

In spite of the financial crisis, many merchants and first-time businesspeople are seizing control of their destiny and prospering in spite of the hard times.

You can be one of these people, too if you care to take control of your destiny instead oif joining the victim class.

All you have to do is start your own small business online, then operate it shrewdly taking advantage of automated tools that can serve your business and leverage your efforts.

Leverage is not just for financiers taking over other companies. Leverage can operate to turn 5 minutes of time into an hour, and turn 10 minutes of effort into results equal to 3 hours of work!

Needless to say, we feel that by choosing our <a href=http://www.800cart.com>800Cart Secure eCommerce Shopping Cart platform</a> you will be able to use our SEO capabilities to leverage 3 months of internet presence as if you had been in business actively promoting your web business for over 3 years! Other merchant have proven that it’s not only possible, it’s very likely.

We've blogged <a href=http://sta.rtup.biz/profiles/blogs/add-true-value-and-go-viral>elsewhere</a> about gadget marketing and adding true value to your blog and knowledge-sharing operations.

Another way to share the genuinely valuable knowledge you possess is to create RSS feeds among the different places where you blog in order that your knowledge will be shared more widely and automatically. When you place a blog post in one resource, make sure it's RSS feed is being shared on other resources where you have a presence!

It’s simple, but many people have not thought of it yet. The SEO world is constantly changing.

If you see an article on SEO that you feel is helpful, check one more item. Look at the date that the article was published. If the date is older than 6 months, ignore the hint – the SEO world has changed greatly since then!

Trying, Trying…
Many are still trying to figure out how to get viral activity working on their behalf. They suspect that post and wall spamming and 100 posts a day are not really going to do the trick, and they are correct.

Besides, it’s time consuming and you should be able to direct your activities toward more satisfying rewards (golf?) and let your online marketing activities work for you while you are engaged elsewhere… while genuinely adding value to the networks where you participate!

One good solution to the above dilemna is what I call ‘Gadget Marketing’ (see My Page over at sta.rtup.biz for an example). (If you follow the link to that ‘My Page’, you should note the custom RSS reader gadget I have near the top – this is what I am discussing.)

Why Gadget Marketing Works:
First of all, it adds true value to my page at sta.rtup.biz! This is the most important part! Readers are directed to resources, facts and reading that they may not know about otherwise. They get another perspective on the social networking world we are all exploring together. I choose up to 5 feeds that will be presented on my page and let the reader choose what they want to read.

Incidentally, one of the feeds that is presented in the reader is the headlines from my own company’s blog. (If you do not have a stand-alone blog, you should start one!)

Finally, unobtrusively, there is a small ‘ad’ for my company at the bottom of the reader – and this is the viral part – the gadget gives copies of itelf away!

So when a page owner likes the gadget and copies it into their own page, my ad goes with it! My ad is now appearing in a new space with a new audience and I did nothing but publish the gadget in my own spaces! That that is getting very close to going viral! All you need to mix in now is popularity.

Now let’s take a minute out and take inventory the benefits that have accrued to the all the different parties because I published this gadget.

1. Readers & surfers: exposure to new content, resources, news and ideas that they may not have seen otherwise. They may even return to your page to read your feeds because they like your choices (which you selected and configured for them).

2. Page owners: their content is enhanced when they add an RSS feed they can configure to the feeds they like to present to their readers. It saves page owners time and effort in trying to keep fresh content on their pages. The page owner only spent 10 minutes installing and configuring the gadget! But the benefits last forever, and are always fresh and timely.

3. Myself (YOU if you use similar gadget marketing!)
a. Since my own blog’s feed is published in the feed reader, google notices and raises the page rank for my blog because yet another authoritative site (sta.rtup.biz) is linking to my blog.
b. When my gadget is copied to another person’s page (a) above happens again on yet another new site (assuming they keep my feed intact as requested).
c. My ad is appearing at the bottom of the gadget at sta.rtup.biz
d. when a new page owner copies the gadget for his/her own page, the ad goes with it.
e. google notices both c and d above – more page authority, more rank for my biz site.
f. I’m off doing something else fun, not ruining my reputation and wasting my time copy/pasting spam posts!

Now the more clever among you are going to say “I want a gadget bearing my ad!” (Although this is not a requirement to get some benefit from this strategy) The current answer is easy: pick the gadget you want modified (you don’t need to use an RSS feeder as I do) and go to odesk.com where there are plenty of programmers from India and Mexico eagerly waiting to do a fixed-cost gadget mod for you for only $25 or so, paid by credit card and the work is delivered to you by email.

Or (shortly) there will be an easier way for you to get that ad-customized gadget for you to publish and to distribute instantly for even less than that…

More in Part II of this article!

(cross-posted in the viral group)