Choosing your domain name should be based on the goals you have for your business. Are you looking for local, national or international recognition? Do you want to dramatically increase your online sales or does your website just need to establish a brand presence?

Whether you are looking for local, national or international recognition, increased sales or a brand presence you need to think about what type of domain name will serve you best. There are two main types of domain name you can choose for your website; descriptive or branded.

A branded domain name uses the name of your company, for example www.netconnexions.co.uk

A descriptive domain name may not be the name of your company but a description of what you do. For example, Orchid Telecom uses www.smallbusinesstelephonesystems.co.uk

There are many arguments about which type of domain name is best, here we give you some info to help you determine which type of domain name is best for your business.

Branded domain names

Most people think that their company name should be their domain name, although this is generally good advice, using your company name only gets people to your website who already know who you are and what you do. The domain will help you attract your existing customers no problem, as they can likely already spell your company name and guess your domain name. But there’s a chance that a new customer, who doesn’t know you exist, won’t be able to guess your company name and type your long, hard to spell company domain name into their browser and find you! This is only one of the factors that make choosing a branded domain name require a little more leg work. To ensure that potential customers recognise your brand name and associate it with the product or services you are selling you need to work much harder with your marketing and branding to get your name out there and dominate your marketplace.

Therefore, when choosing to use a branded domain name, we would recommend securing multiple domain names for your website. The full company name, any commonly misspelled versions of the company name and a .co.uk or .com version to help limit missing out on valuable custom.

Descriptive domain names

The best thing you can do for your website is gain as much exposure as possible by getting well listed in search engines through ‘SEO’ or Search Engine Optimisation. Choosing a descriptive domain name is good for SEO. Think of SEO as being like a sat-nav guiding potential new customers towards your website – only the destination is defined by the words a potential customer types into a search engine. Each time a somebody searches for a product or service in a search engine, the search engine suggests websites where you can find that product or service. A descriptive domain name increases your chances of being listed as one of those destinations as the search engine will match up the descriptive words in your domain name with the descriptive words that person has typed into the search engine.

Therefore, when opting for a descriptive domain name, it’s wise to do a little research on good ‘keywords’ or search terms for your products or services and try to fit those keywords into your domain name. For example, Orchid Telecom have the domain name www.smallbusinesstelephonesystems.co.uk and they perform extremely well in search engine rankings, having appeared on page one on Google for quite some time now. Although the descriptive domain name is only a small factor in achieving successful search engine rankings, a little help goes a long way! Another benefit of using a descriptive domain name is that it gives potential customers an idea of what your business is about before they visit, eliminating the possibility of disappointment when they don’t find what they are looking for. As well as that, customers find it much easier to remember descriptive domain names, as they describe the product or service they are looking for.

To summarise

Branded or descriptive domains are both great but bare in mind the goals of your business; descriptive domains help with SEO allowing you to reach a wider audience and a branded domain name can help get your company name out there.

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won’t be able to pay you when they want to.

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!

Article from http://www.selfseo.com/story-19637.php

Although prices for shopping carts used to be high, this in no longer the case. You can find outstanding value and other significant e-commerce benefits you would not think possible. There are now low cost shopping cart options that will meet your e-commerce needs.

Administration:

A very useful feature of using Zen Cart, is the ability edit your content and terms pages. Pages like your privacy policy or terms of trade. What’s more is you can do it in HTML. Even if you don’t know any HTML. Zen Cart also boasts a comprehensive selection of shipping and payment modules as standard. Installation and management is as easy as 1 – 2 – 3. Even for an internet novice. The layout settings in Zen Cart’s admin section allow you to spotlight listings as ’special offers’ or ‘featured products’. Both of these options can seriously increase your profitability.

Creating and managing your product attributes is a breeze with Zen Cart. With the click of a button you have the power to add, delete, move, link or copy your products anywhere in your site. Unlike lessor e-commerce scripts, Zen Cart allows you pick which details to show and where you want to show them on your product details page.

Some of the Benefits:

The ability of this e-commerce programme to run multiple special offer campaigns along side new and upcoming products really can increase your profits significantly. Another outstanding reason to use this shopping cart software are it’s customer retention tools. Some of these worth noting are the ability to send newsletters in either text or html and it’s gift certificate or voucher modules. For international businesses, Zen Cart also supports multiple languages, currencies and tax structures.

The built in Search Engine Optimization tools, which have an automatic Meta Tags builder. Mean that you can control how individual products get listed. You really can expect great search engine listings. Customizing Zen Cart to meet your individual needs is easier than you would expect. Visitors to your website will love how simple Zen Cart makes finding and getting to what they want to buy.

When you want to really create an opportunity, Zen Cart makes it easy to put in place global price reductions. Imagine the impact that will have. Special offers are always a good thing to get your customers spending.
Setting up quantity discounts to increase turnover is as painless as it gets. Click Click. Say you have more stock than you need, simply set-up individual items with special prices. By default your customers will see at a glance how much they are saving, making them more likely to buy.

One feature really makes Zen Cart stand out as the champion in its arena. Prices can be set, simply and quickly by your products attributes. If red is more expensive than green and small is cheaper than large, Zen Cart can deal with it. In fact, it is so good, it can deal with multiple attributes at the same time. That will make you life easier. Why not consider using the built in Customer Group Discounts facility to market your products to clubs or associations. Why waste your time contacting 20 individuals when you can contact one club secretary who has 30 members?

That’s how easy it is to improve or create profits with the Zen Cart shopping cart script. iwebshop are specialists in setting up ecommerce shopping sites, and offer extra services such as search engine optimisation to help you increase your traffic and potential sales.

Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?E-Commerce-101—Shopping-Carts-Made-Easy&id=295074

Now let’s look at this very underused method for finding topics and hot products using Paypal Shops to determine what people are spending money on. This is so easy it blows my mind it hasn’t been talked about before and that could be because people don’t know about it. I’m probably eroding someone’s secret advantage by publishing this one!

Paypal Shops

You probably know Paypal shops already. It’s the page you are taken to after you log out of Paypal that contains a list of online retailers that use Paypal to sell goods.

If you haven’t been there before, go visit Paypal Shops now.

Once there you will see this page which you can either search or browse categories to find stores. For the sake of this tutorial, I clicked the Sports category link in the left side navigation.

After clicking a category you are taken to a list of shops ranked by volume.

In the listings you will notice a number in brackets next to the name of the store. That number refers to the number of Paypal members who have paid that merchant. The higher that number, the more sales made.

The idea here is that you can browse categories and find the stores that make a lot of sales. This is free live information about what is selling well online. If you don’t understand how powerful that is, then you haven’t been reading my blog enough .

What’s even better is you can go and visit the stores making a lot of sales and see the exact products they sell and the website design and content they use to sell it.

How To Use This Information

The simple way to use this information is to find products that sell. What you do after that is entirely dependent on your strategy.

Here are some ideas for you -

• If you are a blogger you can use this information to find hot products to sell as an affiliate. You can write content to attract the buyers of these hot products or test these products on your existing blog readers.Some of the students in Blog Mastermind complain of not knowing what products to promote on their blog, so Paypal Shops is definitely a great research point and conveniently breaks everything into categories. Some of the shops will have affiliate programs you can join, but if they don’t, simply find another retailer who sells the same product that does have an affiliate program or consider drop-shipping the product yourself.
• If you are a niche marketer you can develop content sites targeting a topic category to attract search engine traffic and use AdSense, brokering services like Chitika and affiliate products to monetize the content. This is a tactic for those thinking about making 50 sites that make $100 a month, rather than one site that makes $5,000 a month. Hot products are generally reflective of hot markets where search research is being done. If you want the traffic, find the hot topics and create the content.
• If you are keen to go deep in a subject and become an authority, but you need topic ideas and are concerned about profitability, Paypal shops can help. Use the data to come up with topic ideas and find the product categories that sell in large quantity.
• If you are looking to build an e-commerce store, you can use Paypal shops to find who makes money and then enter their market and do a better job. Most of the shops listed, despite their high sales figures, will under utilize the marketing methods available to them. Use your search engine optimization and direct marketing skills to become a dominant retailer.
• If going up against the existing competition is not your thing, consider creating a product or service to compliment and appeal to existing customers. The data in Paypal Shops can give you ideas and point you in the direction of customer categories with ample buyer numbers. Remember iPod customers buy a ton of iPod accessories each year too.

I’m sure you can come up with a bunch of your own ideas that go beyond what I came up with. Feel free to post your ideas as comment replies.

Knowing what sells online is powerful information. Most Internet marketers are very good at one or two techniques and go from market-to-market applying these techniques. If you have skills in SEO or PPC or blogging or social marketing, Paypal Shops can show you what people spend money on and thus what traffic to seek using your skills.

Article written by Yaro from: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com