eCommerce

How The Heck Do You Make A Profitable Ecommerce Site
With All The Competition Out There?

Powerful Ecommerce Secrets Discovered By 13-Year Ecommerce Veteran

Before I get started, I want to introduce myself… My name is Sylvan Newby, and I got started in eCommerce about 13years ago. I only do ecommerce, and SEO is my primary strategy for marketing. I started with $700 in credit card debt, and have since built many profitable ecommerce sites and developed many products for sale on the web. My annual sales are over $2,000,000 and climbing….. I have made all the mistakes there are to make, the only reason I am still here is sheer determination. Out of all the possible tools out there, your determination is the most important, and you will need it to survive. I am writing this article in the hopes that I can save you from some of the heartaches and troubles that I have experienced in my career. Remember to keep the tools that work for you and to throw away the ones that don’t.

There are about as many types of ecommerce as there are people in the world. For the purposes of this article I will be talking about ecommerce as it relates to selling physical products online and how it relates to SEO.

The first thing about ecommerce, as opposed to offline commerce, is that it has creates a much more efficient marketplace. The internet has been a disruptive technology in many ways, but probably as much so with commerce as anything else. Ecommerce enables buyers and sellers to meet with more efficacy than any other method known to man since the dawn of time.

So what does this mean for someone who is trying to make a living out of selling physical products online? And how can sellers use this to their advantage? The nature of the internet will cause serious downward pricing pressure on some products, while also giving a unique advantage to selling other products. Ecommerce, for the average entrepreneur building a website, will be more successful when focusing on a narrow range of products (niche) for each website. Finding the right products and keywords is paramount before you ever begin to create your Ecommerce website. That is because your website will be developed around your keyword research, and a competitive analysis of products, markets, and competitors.

It has never been easier to sell something online; If you don’t want to build a website, EBay, and Amazon make it simple to sign up an account and start selling to millions of people in a matter of minutes. With a little bit of earnest effort most people can also build an ecommerce website and promote it with Google Ad words or other PPC marketplaces. This has made it very convenient for sellers looking for buyers, but at the same time it has created a huge comparison shopping environment for the buyer. The buyer, with the click of a mouse, can find the product he is looking for with the best price in the world. This is great for buyers, but what does it mean for sellers? The answer is simple, any product that is readily available for any dealer with a business license will quickly become a commodity with little to no profit for the sellers. There is always somebody, retired, extremely poor, extremely stupid, or brand new and going to go out of business quickly, or whatever reason, willing to make a penny or even zero profit out there, this is who you will be competing against.

It is important to know this, because before you waste your time and money on SEO, you should first have a product or family of products ready that you have created a competitive advantage with, the products must be hot within the niche, and you must have some type of pricing control over the products. I can assure you that this is no task for feeble minded. Finding or developing the right product is arguably the most difficult, and definitely the most crucial aspect of building a successful ecommerce website.

The biggest mistake that most people make is that they choose a niche or product based on what they like, or what they think might sell well. DON’T DO THIS! You must choose your niche based on keyword research (see what people are searching for), and that is not enough. Then you need to look closely at the market, see how difficult these products are to find (how much competition), how much profit can you make selling the products at market price? Printer ink sells like wildfire, but how much competition is there and how much profit margin is there for you? How much control do you have over the products? Is it a market that is being controlled by trademarks and/or other intellectual property? Can you easily develop your own product to make a 5 to 10 times markup? If not, and it is a cheap item, then move on and keep looking….. More expensive items you can afford to work on lower profit margins.

If you think you can just start buying cameras from Sony and selling them online for a profit, then you are in for a very unpleasant experience. The problem with selling name brand electronics are threefold; Firstly famous manufacturers, like Sony, will not sell direct to you unless you are already a very large and established company, they will just send you to their distributor who sells it to you for about the same market price you can buy for on eBay. Second, companies like Wal-Mart, and Best Buy are able to buy at a lower price, and they are able to have a very nice sized profit with only a 1% profit margin. For the independent ecommerce businessperson you need to be making more like 20-30% net profit margins to flourish. Third, if you try to open a store that has a very broad assortment of products, like Amazon or eBay, then you will very hard pressed to get ranking for any of these products, because your broad ecommerce website will be read by search engines that you are not specifically about anything so then you won’t rank for anything.

You are probably wondering how Amazon and Wal-Mart seem to do very well with SEO for hundreds of categories and product niches. The answer to that is not simple, it has to do with what I call “intrinsic ranking integers” that are given to certain authority websites so that they have a huge advantage as far as ranking for category pages (despite bad on-page and off-page SEO). This is different than pagerank, and this topic is too involved to get into here, but just remember that normal every day internet businesses get zero intrinsic ranking integers, so the only way to be competitive in the SERP’s is to show the search engines that you are very relevant to a very specific topic (niche ecommerce site).

Above I asked you how can sellers use this super efficient marketplace to their advantage? Because you have instant access to millions of people online that can find the product they are looking for, this makes it possible to do VERY well with obscure and arcane physical products that are very expensive, and very low competition – Products that you will not see in Wal-Mart or other discount retailers. These types of products are where I like to find my bread and butter. Some of these products are very inexpensive in terms of materials but very expensive in terms of price. Some might not even have any intellectual property (patents) so that if you knew how, you could just inspire your own product from that product and start making those fat margins without much engineering, marketing, or tooling costs.

This, with a powerful SEO team behind you, can be very effective for your specific niche, and yes you can build as many niche ecommerce sites as you wish. The task of finding/developing a product that you have good profit margins, hot, and you have pricing control in the market is the most important, getting your product in front of the right buyers (SEO) is second most important. This article is not about finding the right niches and developing products, but I may be writing some content about that in the future.

Another strategy is to just build a large niche website for selling other peoples products. You would still need to find a specific niche, but you would probably want many categories and many products to offer something to of all the possible buyers out there in that niche. Then launch an SEO campaign that is going for many long tail keywords like “product name review”, or “product name buy”, or another popular modifier while the whole time you are setting yourself up for the bull’s-eye keyword. A website like this you would try to rank tons of pages, and get tons of traffic. You would need to have good SEO traffic to be profitable as with other people’s products you will be making less margins. The bright side of this is that you can have these other vendors drop ship for you and also take care of the customer service. For a website like this, I would suggest building a specialty niche website for something like boating products, log splitters, body armor, or motorcycle gear, etc… These types of niches can have a good compromise between popularity, profit margins, and competition.

For both of these strategies, your SEO marketing plan should look something like this:

1) Niche chosen based on keyword research and other marketplace data (terapeak, amazon, ebay) Choose something that people are already looking for. High selling price is not enough, you must also track the long term sellthrough rates.

1) Keyword rich domain (small family of niche keywords about your product)

2) aged authority domain 301-redirect

3) Website architecture built on your keyword research – See siloh architecture

4) On-page factors- meta tags, h1 tags, internal linking, alt tags, page copy and keyword density

5) Comprehensive and continuous off-page campaign with press releases, blog linking, article submissions, blog commenting, video submissions, directory submissions (just to name a few)

There is too much to talk about with ecommerce to sum it all up into one article, but I hope this was helpful to you. Remember there are two types of ecommerce sites – one centered around your own product in a profitable niche, and the second type is a broader site selling other peoples products in a larger profitable niche. Stay tuned for more information about how to find and develop very high profitable physical products that you will have complete control over (nobody else can sell).

Written By SEO/SEM expert Sylvan Newby

For more information call Jeff Persons at 617-512-3443