This is a great video by SEOMoz about making eCommerce Pages SEO friendly and linkable.

Rand talks about how to make product pages unique, linkable, and search engine friendly. Even if you sell the same products that hundreds of other people sell online, you can be unique enough to dominate SERPs.

Key Takeaways from the ECommerce SEO Video

1. Use keyword rich phrases as the title of products
2. Show multiple images of products that YOU take
3. Write creative descriptions of the products (not duplicate content from the manufacturer)
4. Display cool statistics that people can source or write about on their own sites
5. Run side by side comparisons of other products – the pro’s and con’s, benefits, etc.
6. Allow user generated feedback: comments, rankings, thumbs up/down, reviews

How do you optimize individual product pages for search engines?

Do you make money online?

Why?

Or maybe a better question is, Why not?

Last year alone, Amazon.com made $24.5 BILLION dollars in online sales.

Why didn’t you get a piece of that pie?

I’ve been running online businesses and teaching others how to start an online business for over six years now and have learned one main point that I can’t teach clearly enough…

Online Marketing is about SALES!

If you want to actually make money online, you have to provide a product or service that has enough demand and that you won’t have to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart and Costco to sell.

Online marketing is NOT just about selling products ONLINE!

To me, this is one of the most common misconceptions about an internet business – that most, if not all, of the sales are made online.

First off, yes, your eCommerce website can be the PORTAL to sell your products online. But you’re not necessarily LIMITED to only selling them there.

Some of the biggest sales I’ve made online have been because of connections made OFFLINE that then got the ball rolling to finalize the sales online.

Do you have an affiliate program for your website?

I was talking with a client today about his website that sells cool pencil cases. He’s using a website builder that has a custom affiliate program BUILT IN! I was pretty excited for him when I heard that he’d made about 70 sales within the last week.

I asked him how many of those sales he’d made were now affiliates that were promoting his products to their friends and family in exchange for a little commission on sales they helped create.

He told me 1 person was and they’d helped generate FOUR sales already.

I then did the math. 1 person for 4 sales….?

That means, if he got all 75 people who bought from him already to do a bit of affiliate promoting…. He be “in the money” for (at least) 300 sales!

From 4 sales to 300 sales is actually  A LOT MORE than TRIPLING YOUR ONLINE SALES!

Are you seeing where I’m going here…?

How to Build a Successful Affiliate Program for Your Ecommerce Store

As we talked more, ideas started coming about what he could be doing. Here are some I want to collect on “paper”.

1. Have an affiliate program built for your eCommerce store or find one.
2. When a sale is made and a new client is added to your database, email them right away to thank them for their business.
3. In that same email, or in follow up emails, ask them questions and build the business relationship:
   1. How did they find your website?
   2. Do they have any recommendations or suggestions for your website?
   3. What did they like about the product(s) or service?
   4. What can you add to the site that would make it even better for the end user?
   5. What other products would they like to see in the future?
   6. Would they buy from your website again in the future? Why or why not?
   7. If they could refer the product(s) to their friends and family for a commission, would they?
   8. Do they know what affiliate marketing is?
4. Make some of these questions direct links to a page on your website that explains more about what they can do to make money or help a cause or whatever…(a landing page with an invitation to do something)
5. On the landing page, teach them how they can set up their own affiliate program on your site and get PAID as they refer your products to friends and family who then BUY your products.
6. Teach them about http://bit.ly – a website address shortening service that basically “hides” all the affiliate tracking information and keeps the website address short and easy to remember.
7. If they want to do “Offline Sales”, teach them about how they could collect the money from buyers of your products offline and then go through their own affiliate link to make sure they get credit for the sale.
8. Encourage them to think about their email list, their friends on Facebook, and offline connections too.
9. Start helping them make a list of people they think would be ideal for the product or service you offer.

These were just a few of the ideas that came to mind as we talked about the success he was having so far with his new online business.

What are other suggestions you have to double, triple, even QUADRUPLE your sales online?

(by the way, the title is an example of a Flashy Headline and nothing else; yes, I do think a process like this has potential to triple sales overnight, but I DON’T believe in “get rich quick” schemes at all…)

A lot has been going on.

• Selling discount clogging shoes.
• Doing search & social media marketing for clients.
• Signing dance recital video contracts with dance studios in Utah County.
• And, of course, tweeting and facebooking in my spare time.

I was recently motivated by this quote:

“If you don’t take action to accomplish YOUR goals, you will get used to accomplishing someone else’s…”

So, does that quote hit home to you?

What are you going to do about it?

This new-age entrepreneur video is a great tribute to all my friends and clients who wonder if they can really be entrepreneurs.

I’m grateful for the following things:

• my family, who supports me even though they don’t always understand why I would take a pay cut to focus more on my first website
• my Arizona SEO mentor who got me started in online marketing and ecommerce and continues to share insights
• the opportunity I have to work with great entrepreneurs every day at Prosper
• my “devil school” friend who lets me do what I’m best at and pursue new options with our video and photography company
• new partnerships and ventures that are in the works
• WORDPRESS & Bluehost for newbies
• my programmer friends who allow me to pick their brains at all hours of the day and night
• Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Aaron Wall, SEOMoz – they stuff I read most online
• Entrepreneurship!

What are you grateful for?

Here are a few books I recommend reading about Entrepreneurship:

1. Entrepreneurship by Robert D. Hisrich
2. Innovation and Entrepreneurship
3. Harvard Business Review on Entrepreneurship (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)
4. Entrepreneurship by William D. Bygrave
5. Entrepreneurship: Successfully Launching New Ventures (3rd Edition)

What are your favorite books on Entrepreneurship?

I have been talking a lot lately with clients about how a social network profile can help your online business.

A few points I focus on include:

• Backlinks on other credible sites
• Direct interaction with your target audience
• Online networking with big players in your field
• Ability to monitor competitor involvement and strategy
• Online reputation management & brand awareness
• Natural SEO & link building if profile pages are allowed to be set up correctly

The last point was one I’ve always known, but it didn’t come to me so clearly until tonight when I was talking to one of the managers of a new political social network. Over the past few days, I’ve been working to help him understand the importance of social media in organic search engine optimization.

One of the goals his company has is to be the “LinkedIn of Politics” or the “Politically Focused Facebook”. Granted, it’s hard to compete with the likes of Facebook, but the point he made to me was that these big websites don’t really do SEO. That statement really made me think, “Is he right?” “Is organic SEO really that important or…?”

I thought about that for the rest of that day and through out the day today. My gut kept saying “Yeah right! SEO is a MUST!”,  but he had made some valid points.

Then the light clicked on as I was driving home this evening.

One of the MAIN WAYS big companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter do organic SEO is by letting USERS do the SEO for them.

How Social Networks Use SEO

Think about it:

• Social networks let people, some of which are very, very good at SEO, online PR, etc. build unique, SEO friendly profile pages: (http://facebook.com/mollermarketing)
• These profile pages have lots of dynamic and static content
• The profile pages have tons of quality external links with relevant topics
• These same creators of individual profile pages in-directly, and some times directly, promote their social media profiles (follow me on twitter)
• Some users build profile pages just to say they have lots of followers.
• Others promote their profile pages for online reputation management.

But the bottom line is, the USERS are doing a lot of the hard core SEO grunt work – the off-site SEO link building, the viral marketing, etc.

By allowing visitors to set up static profile pages with friendly URLs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are saying, “Sure, we’ll let you have a “free account” but we’ll grow our investment capital over and over again because you’re building yet another indexable page for us and adding your name and info to our “subscriber list…Thanks for stoping by…”

I'll just wait for the SEO Train to stop by...

I agree that at some point, Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn my not care (as much) about organic SEO, but maybe they do afterall.

Facebook has been making changes that hint to the fact that SEO is important to them:

• Indexable pages
• Friendly URLs
• Etc.

Organic SEO is here to stay.

Yes, word of mouth marketing plays a crucial role in the heavy growth of websites, especially social networks.

But every online business, big or small, needs to make the time to work on organic SEO strategy: if they don’t, their competitors will.

What are your thoughts on social networks and SEO?

Things you should know about blogging when you’re just getting started:

1. Used numbered lists: Why? Organization, organization, organization. Reader friendliness! Scanability!
2. Use bold text from time to time: scanability, can be good for SEO, reader friendliness
3. Quote other blogs in your industry:

The New York Yankees are the best team in baseball and should be blogged about every day!  Nate Moller’s Blog Tutorials

More Blogging Tips

• Use bulleted lists
• Use header tags
• Use pictures in every blog post

How to add a pictures on a blog post

• Use Video! Youtube.com is a great place to start!
• Ask for comments – end your blog posts with a question?
• Be confrontational or opinionated or controversial…encourage people to like or dislike your article and pass it on
• Let your friends and family know about your blog ASAP – ask them to comment to get started
• Share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks (it’s better if you can get someone else to share them but you have to start somewhere…)

Conclusion

Blogging is not rocket science.

A blog can be a journal of your day to day activities with starting an online business. It can be a daily rant on why you hate your boss (be careful, he might be reading this).  It can be a simple collection of family pictures.

For eCommerce purposes, a blog will do 5 main things:

1. Build your credibility as a legitimate professional in your industry
2. Get you connected to the real clients in your industry
3. Allow you to do product reviews
4. Help you create links for search engine purposes
5. Give you a reason to interview big names in the industry and guest post on other blogs

Why are YOU blogging?