Tech Issues: Establishing an Online Presence

In a previous post I talked a little bit about the ins and outs of getting an e-commerce website off the ground with Shopify. That post focused solely on developing the content and functionality of the site. In this post I’ll talk about some of the more superficial elements involved in starting an online business.

Domain Names

I honestly don’t have much to say about domain names other than to state the obvious: you need to have one. As for what the domain name should be, I have only two criteria: it needs to be simple and it needs to have a ‘.com’ extension. Keep it simple so that people will remember it. Make it have a ‘.com’ extension because every reputable e-commerce site has a .com domain name. As for choosing a registrar, there are tons of choices. If you’re particularly price-sensitive I would encourage you to shop around a bit. I’ve used a few different registrars for various web projects over the past few years and in my experience they’re all pretty much the same. Quite frankly I hate dealing with them and view them as a necessary evil of doing business online.Once you’ve registered a domain name getting it pointed at your online store is generally a pretty trivial matter. If you’re using Shopify they have loads of great documentation on how to accomplish this.

E-mail

I don’t know about you, but when I see an online business that uses a free e-mail service (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) to allow its customers to contact them it’s a bit of a turn off. It’s a given that an online business (particularly a small online business with no appreciable budget) will rely heavily on e-mail to communicate with its customers. I think a lot of smaller online businesses end up leveraging free e-mail services because they’re free and very easy to setup. In reality, it’s not that difficult or expensive to setup ‘@yourdomainname.com’ e-mail addresses. Many domain name registrars offer this service for a pretty reasonable price. That’s not a bad way to go, but with just a bit of effort you can get professional looking e-mail addresses for your business without paying anything extra.

I’ve used Google’s free e-mail service, GMail, for my personal e-mail address for years. They offer tons of storage and have a best-in-class web interface for dealing with your mail. If you don’t already have a free ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address for your personal e-mail do yourself a favor and go get one now. It’s completely free and truly an awesome service. In addition to free ‘@gmail.com’ accounts, Google now offers the ability to have a full fledged GMail account for your own private domain with a service they call Google Apps. They really push the ‘Premier Edition’ of this service with is geared at large business and organizations. The premier edition costs money, but thankfully for bootstrappers like me they also offer a free Standard Edition. The Standard Edition is billed as being geared toward organizations and communities, but there’s nothing in the Terms Of Service stating that you can’t use it for a business. Getting Google Apps to work with your own domain name does take a bit of work, but Google offers pretty good documentation with step by step instructions for getting it setup with many of the popular domain name registrars.

Once you’ve got it all setup, you’ll be able to create as many e-mail addresses for your custom domain name as you want. Right now I have ‘support@pixeyewear.com’ and ‘jesse@pixeyewear.com’ in addition to a few other accounts for the folks that help me out with the business from time to time. All in all, I’m responsible for three ‘@pixeyewear.com’ e-mail addresses in addition to my personal ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address. This might sound like a hassle, but with a few tricks it’s actually pretty manageable. First of all, I setup all of my business e-mail accounts to automatically forward to my personal GMail. I’ve also setup a filter on my personal GMail to apply a label to any message that arrives addressed to one my business e-mail addresses. This lets me quickly and easily identity these messages in my inbox. Finally, I utilize Gmail's ability to let you send e-mail from multiple addresses within the same account to let me tag any outgoing message I send as having come from the appropriate business e-mail address. In this way, I only ever have to login to my personal GMail and can manage all of my business e-mail directly from that single account.

Telephone

Personally, I hate making and receiving telephone calls 99% of the time. I’m a firm believer that there’s a proper communication medium for every situation and in my opinion the telephone is not always the right one. Don’t get me wrong, I talk on the phone every day, but typically only because an indirect and/or non-verbal communication medium wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand. That said, the vast majority of communication that needs to take place between a small online business and its customers can take place via e-mail.

I do think, however, that having a publicly visible phone number on your e-commerce website lends your business some credibility instills a bit more confidence in your customers. I only have a single phone number (my cell phone) and certainly didn’t want to post that number on my website. Fortunately for me there is a free service from Google for accepting calls online called Google Voice.

You can setup a Google Voice account off any standard Google Account. Google recently started rolling out a number of new features, including Google Voice, for accounts that are associated with Google Apps, so if you took my advice above about using Google Apps for your store e-mail you can create a Google Voice account specifically for your business. When you create the account you get to choose a phone number. Google currently offers a huge number of phone numbers in a wide array of area codes. I opted to choose my local area code as I make it point to call out the fact that I run a “local business” whenever I advertise to people in my area.

After choosing a phone number you’ll be prompted to forward that number to another “real” phone number. I have my Google Voice number forwarded to my cell phone. This may sound like it defeats the purpose of having the Google Voice number, but Google Voice offers some great additional features. First of all, call screening is built in. That means that if someone calls your Google Voice number it will ring your phone. If you answer, Google Voice will announce who is calling and give you the option to send the caller to voice mail. If the caller opts to leave you a voice mail you’ll get an instant e-mail notification informing you. Also, if you’re not available to answer your “real” phone the Google Voice mail kicks in automatically. All in all I’d say that getting this all setup takes about an hour or so. That’s one hour of your time to have a real local phone number that you can publish on your business website for no cost. That’s not a bad deal at all.

Wrap Up

As I’ve said before, when you’re starting a business with little cash you have to fake it ‘til you make it sometimes. Of all the things that I’ve laid out above, the only one that costs any “real” money is the domain name. With a good domain name and a few hours to invest in setting up and learning a bit about Google Apps you can create a very professional online presence even if you’re a single person running a business out of your apartment.

Guest Post: Keyword Research – The Hard Way

This is a guest post by Tim Janssen. Tim runs a Shopify store selling Japanese chef’s knives. Time has taken a different approach to building an online business and I think offers a different perspective. Look for more guest posts from Tim in the future.

I want to talk a little bit about on-page and off-page optimization for an online store. When I sat down to write this post I began to realize just how big these topics are. So where do you start? How do you optimize something when you have no idea what to optimize for?

Before you can start optimizing your website you need to know what your potential customers are actually looking for. This is where keyword research comes into play. Keyword research is the art, yes the art, of finding out about your customers. To illustrate what I mean I will show you what keyword research means for my shop and how I do it.

When my two friends and I first started out we didn’t know a whole lot about Japanese kitchen knives. My friends are cooks and therefore were somewhat familiar with them, but none of us knew what made these knives special. I’m an Internet marketer and had even less of an idea. We came up with the idea at the gym one day. We wanted to “get rich quick” (spoiler: it hasn’t been quick so far ;-) ) and find a niche market that we could establish ourselves in. I said “why don’t we sell some special kitchen accessories” and so we eventually ended up researching all kinds of accessories.

At this point I should state that there are two ways to do keyword research: the hard way and the easy way. I opted for the hard way. Why? The hard way is free. You don’t have to spend any dime and since this blog is about bootstrapping I will of course show you that way since it’s a very good way to get started.

The best place to get started is the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. This is the best free keyword tool in my opinion as it is simple to use and comes from the big G itself, what more could you ask for? I started out by entering “knives” and got a pretty solid list back. I saw that Japanese knives was searched for quite often (9K searches/month as I write this) with MANY “longtail” keywords.

Let me take a minute to explain what “longtail” keywords are. Longtail keywords are related to very broad and general terms like “knives” or “insurance”. For example, “car insurance” could be considered a longtail keyword, though not a very specific one. Broad search terms get a lot of traffic per month (5 million searches). Your site would need a lot of “Google juice” to get ranked high in search results for those keywords. Furthermore, the competition is very tough for these broad keywords. Since we’re only starting out it is not advisable to compete with companies that have deep pockets for traffic. So instead of being a small fish in a big pond I prefer to be a big fish in a well defined pond. This is where longtail keywords help me. I can choose many longtail keywords, and obtain a high rank for those keywords without any serious optimization.

This is what keyword research is good for. It helps you find these keywords that you should try to go after. For my business these terms were all different kinds of Japanese knives. Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki, Yanagiba and so on are all types of Japanese knives that I did not know before. I’m optimizing my site for these keywords and reaping the benefits of these niche keywords with little competition and very good searches on a regular basis.

You can check out your competition by just entering your keyword(s) into Google. The number of approximate results returned is your competition. For me that’s around ~200K for my main keyword: that’s a small pond but very juicy.

Here’s a quick example of using longtail keywords to make your pond smaller:

Searching for “car insurance” yields ~174 million results. This can be narrowed by adding a few terms. Searching for “car insurance for young drivers” only returns ~520K results. This is still a lot, but definitely better than 174 million. This is why keyword research is so crucial in the beginning. Use these results to determine what will sell quickly in the short term to generate a profit. Less competition means more searches per month. You can make your pond smaller and smaller this way. Of course, you also need to take into account how much your products cost. If you sell your product for $1 you’d need a lot more hits per month than if you sell your product for $10,000. Simple.

I recommend exporting the results of your keyword research into Excel. You can also use spyfu.com to find the keywords of your competitor which can be quite interesting. You can find all of the keywords and their rank for if you pay for the service but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a good free tool but not worth paying for in my opinion.

Another useful tool is the Yahoo Site Explorer. There’s a text field at the top of this tool where you can enter something like: “site: somesite.com –link” which would give you any sites that link to “somesite.com”. Sometimes you can just go to these exact sites and get your own links. This is very helpful when you start building “backlinks” (a topic that I’ll cover in a future article). For now it’s important to know that the fewer links a competing site has the easier it will be for your to get your site ranked well for keyword terms that you share in common.

The process I’ve described above is good for finding a niche for your online business but it can be very time consuming. You enter a keyword, export the resulting related terms and search volumes, combine it all in Excel, filter out duplicates, check out which keywords must be juicy, check out the competition for those keywords, and repeat. This is why most people say that keyword research is the hardest part of starting an online business and I can tell you from personal experience that this is true. There are, however, tools out there to make this job easier. In my next post I’ll show one of these tools.

My last piece of advice for this article is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. You can submit your site, authorize yourself as the owner of that site (Another reason that Shopify is a great platform is that they make this a very easy process. See the Shopify Wiki for more information.) Once you’re setup you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords you rank for and how high in the rankings you are plus your monthly views for each keyword. These are great statistics that you’ll want to have when you start to optimize your website.

Tim runs a store on Shopify selling Japanese chef’s knives. Doing solid research he has found that his top search terms are words like Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki or Yanagiba. These keywords are paying off with highly targeted traffic and minimal effort.