The secret to having a great web presence is just as much a matter of knowing what other people are doing as tweaking your own system. And quite often, the technical system is less important than the marketing system you have in place to drive the right traffic to the site. That means keeping up with the people who are regularly writing about e-commerce topics and who can give you insights into what opportunities are out there.

These ten blogs (which include a couple of sites with multiple writers) provide in-depth information on topics related to selling services and products online. Many are updated daily, giving you plenty of information. You don’t have to read every site on this list every day, but checking in with at least a few regularly will help you take your business to the next level.

1. My Wife Quit Her Job: This site chronicles a family’s successful approach to replacing a full-time, six-figure income with an online business. While there are personal elements that make the blog fun to read, the information shared by this blogger is top-notch
2. Exciting Commerce: With the help of this blog, you can keep up with the companies executing the best e-commerce efforts and campaigns. It’s a great resource when you’re in search of ideas.
3. Practical eCommerce: You’ll find posts from a wide variety of online sellers and other e-commerce professionals on this blog, along with the industry updates you need to keep in touch.
4. Get Elastic: Focusing on the mechanics of e-commerce, this site is full of tips and helpful advice.
5. DavidRisley.com: The professional blog of a man who consistently makes six figures online, this blog will provide you with a focused look at internet marketing, blogging and related topics.
6. E-commerce Junkie: If you need a round up of news on ecommerce topics, this blog will help you keep up to date.
7. Entrepreneurs Journey: What was originally a chronicle of a successful serial entrepreneur’s efforts, this blog has expanded to include the writing of multiple business owners.
8. Income Diary: This site is focused specifically on how to earn money online, offering up actionable tips for getting the most out of your efforts.
9. ViperChill: You’ll find that this blog is definitely not like most blogs that cover marketing and business — and that’s a good thing. It’s full of amazing advice and even purpose-built tools.
10. Copyblogger: When you need help with your online content, especially the copy that goes along with selling products and services online, this is the site to visit.

Do you have any favorite blogs that really help you with e-commerce? Share them in a comment!

Image by Flickr user vaxzine

There are three key questions that you need to ask in order to make sure that you’re presenting the best experience to anyone visiting your site from a mobile device.

1. Do you have a mobile version of your site? If you’re not sure, the answer is likely no — while most websites can be displayed on mobile devices just as they were originally designed for a computer browser, very few have an actual mobile version. That can be a problem, because what shows up well on a regular computer can appear very differently on a cell phone or a tablet.
2. What technology is your site built on? You can do some very cool things on website with the right technology. Flash, for instance, can help you turn out a truly beautiful site. But Flash is particularly hard on a mobile browser. If you’ve got a visitor using an iPhone or an iPad, they simply won’t see your site at all. Other approaches to websites can have their own problems, making it truly necessary to consider where you’ll need a mobile version of your site separate from the main version.
3. What do mobile visitors need to do on your site? If someone is accessing your website through his phone, odds are good that he’s not trying to read every page on your site. So creating a mobile version that emphasizes those tasks that a visitor actually needs to complete makes sense. Maybe they need to place an order quickly or confirm a price. Making it particularly easy to perform such tasks will win over clients who rely on their mobile devices.

With a growing percentage of all online traffic coming from mobile devices, you don’t have any option but to make sure that visitors to your site can read what you have to offer, even on the tiny screens offered by smart phones. They have to be able to interact with your site whether they’re on an iPad, on the phone or anywhere else.

When you consider that it’s even more likely that a business owner or manager is likely to be out and about when they need information online, it’s especially important for B2B companies to make sure that their websites are ready for mobile users. There’s a price that goes along with creating a mobile version of any site — in some cases, you almost need two separate sites — but that price can be worth it. Depending on your business, just a handful of customers can make a world of difference and mobile traffic typically represents more than a handful of visitors.

Image by Flickr user Mr T in DC

There are ways that you can minimize the costs that go along with building and maintaining a website, while still getting the results you want — more clients, more sales, and more awareness of your business.

1. Learn the content management system. When your web designer is putting together your site in the first place, make sure that they use a content management system. For fairly simple sites, WordPress is a great option (this site is built on WordPress). For more complex sites, we typically use Drupal. As long as you can spend a little time learning how to use that system, you can make updates to the content of your site (like adding new products) without asking your web designer to handle it.
2. Shop around for your domain name and SSL certificates. There can be some dramatic differences in the prices of registering a domain name between different companies, making it crucial that you look at more than one domain registrar. There can be similar differences with SSL certificates. Similar products from companies like Verisign, Entrust and GoDaddy vary dramatically in cost. It’s important to look at exactly what you get for your money before making up your mind on hosting. Some cut-rate hosting providers don’t give you what you need, despite their low prices and big promises.
3. Create a consistent style. It’s easier to maintain a website where every page looks similar than one with lots of differences. It also makes it easier to roll out social media accounts, mini-sites, HTML newsletters and every other aspect of your online presence — and the consistency will help your customers recognize your website and other efforts immediately.
4. “Future proof” your website. While there seem to be constant changes to what technologies and strategies are used for websites, taking as many steps to make sure that your website can be easily updated is important. That can include, but isn’t limited to, avoiding website builders and templates that you can’t be sure have kept up with the times, making sure that your web designer is using the most up-to-date techniques and choosing content management systems that can be easily updated.
5. Make arrangements to back up your website. Our hosting plans include daily off-site backups, but if your host doesn’t, make sure you have a backup copy of your site. Recovering a website after a problem can be an expensive (not to mention unexpected) process, sometimes requiring you to go back and have the site rebuilt from scratch.

You don’t need to become a web expert to make sure you get the most out of your website and there are some options that make the ongoing costs of maintaining a website much lower than in the past.

Image by Flickr user photosteve101

• Redundant web servers with real time failover – Our primary web servers have replicated standby servers that fail over in the event the primary server goes down. This provides unsurpassed uptime for your website.
• Replicated databases, both onsite and offsite – We replicate our databases both to a separate server on site and one in another datacenter. This provides up to the minute data in case the primary database server goes down.
• Firewalls in front of all servers – All servers have a strict firewall policy that only allows traffic for the services available on the server. The database servers are behind the web servers and only database access is allowed from the web servers to the database servers. Terminal (ssh) access is only allowed from inside our network and is closed off from the outside.
• 24×7 monitoring and paging in event of emergency – We monitor every server and service on the servers to ensure we catch any issues early. A text is sent out to the system administrator on call in the event of an emergency.
• Daily off site encrypted backups to the cloud – We back up everything to the cloud on a daily basis, we keep incremental backups in case we need to go back in time.
• Backend VPN for all internal traffic – We run a VPN for all internal traffic, this ensures any traffic between servers or between our datacenter and our offices cannot be sniffed as it is encrypted by the VPN.
• Regular server software updates – As security and software updates come out we are quick to apply those updates and patches.
• Most sites are in version control – Most of the frequently updated sites are in version control, providing a history of changes and another backup of the site. This allows large site changes to occur in branches while the main site can still have small updates. Version control allows this to happen without conflicts.
• Capacity planning and load balancing – Our monitoring and graphing allows us to do capacity planning and ensure everything is running as well as possible. In the event we know a site will be getting a lot of traffic we can load balance that site ahead of time to ensure it can handle the traffic.

A lot of planning and engineering go into making WalkerTek one of the best possible places to host your website. Before you decide on where to host your company’s website, make sure that their infrastructure is appropriate for your needs.

Photo By Arthur Caranta

The truth of the matter is that if you’re dealing with someone face to face, especially if they’ve already decided that they want to do business with you, it’s much easier to convince them to join your mailing list. Customers, even before they hand over money, already have a personal connection with you that will make them more interested in hearing from you in the future. You’re likely to see email recipients who you’ve signed up for your list in person be more responsive to any offers you send out.

Why Build Your Own List?

We have seen some drastic differences between purchased lists and in-house lists that our clients cultivate themselves over time. While it is possible to purchase email lists, their quality is usually terrible and their open rates are worse. When we have a good in-house list, we typically see open rates between 12% and 17%, sometimes as high as 22%, depending on the audience. With purchased lists, the open rates are typically less than 5% to a much less targeted list.

Bringing Your Staff In

Depending on the size of your staff, it may seem like asking them to do even one more thing can be tough. But any employee that regularly interacts with customers — current or prospective — needs to be aware that you want to get people signed up to your newsletter. It may be enough to just establish asking for the sign up as one more step in what your team does, but you may find you need to take it a step beyond.

If getting newsletter subscriptions are a priority, offering your staff an incentive can make sense. Even something as simple as a dollar for every completed subscription can get your team interested in getting names and email addresses down. However, it is important to be clear about the types of people you want on your email list, especially if you’re offering your employees some sort of incentive. Getting plenty of email addresses from their friends and family won’t help you out if you don’t have a hope of selling anything to those individuals.

The Mechanics of Collecting Email Addresses

You can keep the process of signing up new members of your email list to a sheet of paper and a pen but, depending on the newsletter management software you use, you may need to consider how you’ll get those email addresses entered. Many such tools use double opt-in (requiring not just the submission of an email address but a confirmation, usually by clicking a link in an email, from the recipient) to avoid issues related to spam. But such systems can confuse new recipients who simply gave you their email address in passing. At the bare minimum, you’ll want to warn folks that a confirmation email is coming, if not edit the confirmation email entirely to make it clear that they signed up in person.

Taking the time to collect and enter email addresses, however, can be very worthwhile. It gives you a way to build up repeat business — and selling to someone who has already bought from you, or at least agreed to receive your email newsletter, is always easier than going in cold.

Image by Flickr user Joey Rozier

Creating a Facebook page, even for organizations targeting businesses, can make a lot of sense.

Facebook pages are a great option, even for B2B marketers. Here’s our logic in setting up a Facebook page for New Jersey’s largest business-to-business marketing association.

I recently joined the board of the Business Marketing Association of New Jersey (BMA-NJ) as the MarCom (Marketing/Communications) chair. Part of this position includes responsibility for our online marketing and social media. In evaluating BMA-NJ’s current social media presence, we found a few things occurring:

1. We have a nice LinkedIn group, with several members

2. We had a Facebook Group page for the members

3. We had a Facebook Group page for students

4. We have a Twitter account setup.

5. The website has a events, but no Blog for current or timely events.

It is important to understand this, because your organizations setup may be different and that may affect your decisions. Based on the above setup, a Facebook Page makes a lot of sense. Here’s why:

1. It’s easy to update
We can setup multiple admins and they all can update it easily. This will help to keep it up to date and more interactive.

2. Members can participate easier
The LinkedIn group is nice, but unless someone is logging into LinkedIn and looking specifically at our group, they may not get involved in the conversations. Since most people log into Facebook more regularly, our hope is that people will engage more often and help to drive conversations.

3. Multimedia
When is the last time you saw a picture of an event in a LinkedIn Group? A video? Facebook provides an easy-to-use outlet to post images and videos from our events. Actually showing what the group does helps people connect with what is going on and reduces the unknowns for potential new visitors. Knowing what to expect makes it easier for them to attend events.

4. Using Facebook as a Page
You can see my recent post on Using Facebook as a Page. This capability allows us to interact with other organizations and companies as BMA-NJ not only in an effort to increase the exposure of the organization, but to help provide value to those companies and organizations. The Business Marketing Association of New Jersey provides several valuable workshops and presentations every year and the information from those events can be very helpful to the executives and mangers within those companies.

5. The Wall
Facebook does it better. Sure LinkedIn has status updates, but when is the last time you clicked on “Show More” at the bottom of your LinkedIn page? When is the last time you did it on Facebook? Actually, most of the time, Facebook will do it for you automatically, if you just scroll down. People want to see their walls on Facebook, they will scroll down to see if there is something interesting that they may have missed. Our goal with the Facebook BMA-NJ page is to provide them with something valuable, without becoming annoying.

6. Metrics
Facebook pages provide a lot of metrics that we can use for the organization. We can see things like Active Monthly Users, demographics like Gender and Age, Locations (down to the city level, which we could use to help choose locations for meetings). It also shows Impressions per post and various other interactions. This information is useful for an organization like ours because we can use it to help tailor the content and get feedback.

I think these are all important reasons to be on Facebook, even as an organization or company targeting businesses. Now, we realize that there are some negatives as well.

We know that some people may want to keep their personal profiles separate from their work profiles. In that case, they don’t need to follow us on Facebook. We’re not going to abandon LinkedIn or Twitter. However, more and more, personal lives and business lives are overlapping and for the people open to connecting with BMA-NJ on Facebook, hopefully it will make interactions a little bit easier.

Any sales person will tell you relationships are key. Part of building and allowing those relationships to happen – and the idea behind social media as a whole – is interacting with people, organizations and companies that add value to your life both personally and professionally.

Visit the Business Marketing Association of New Jersey on Facebook and let us know what you think.

The construction industry alone has put together an impressive presence on Twitter and other social media sites. Builder (an industry trade publication) maintains a Twitter directory listing more than fifty construction companies alone. These accounts share tweets ranging from surveys about new buyers to updates on businesses near new developments.

Listening to Stories on Social Media

The key to understanding social media opportunities — and finding ways to use it to reach out to clients and customers — is that social media is about listening, more than anything else. The secret recipe, if you will, is four parts listening to every message you send out.

You have to know where your target clientele is on social media and what their purposes for being on social media sites are. After all, if the only reason a member of your potential audience has joined Facebook is to be able to look at pictures of her grandchildren (a driving motivation for one of the fastest growing segments of Facebook users), you’re going to have a hard time refocusing her attention on buying your product. But if that same person is on Twitter to connect with her peers and grow her business, it’s a very different story. You need to know those background stories before you start to communicate through social media — assuming you want to stand out.

Solving Problems and Telling Stories

The most unexpected use you can put social media to is solving other people’s problems. There are many tools that offer you the opportunity to look for keywords and questions on social media. Typically, these tools are used to find mentions of brands or find people ready to buy. But there are plenty of people out there that only know that they have a problem. They may not know that you have a product or service that solves that problem and, if you show them how to get that problem taken care of, they’ll be surprised as well as pleased.

Take a look at Twitter. A surprising number of messages posted to the site are complaints that something is not working or vague questions about how to resolve an issue that someone is facing. That’s just as true of people using the site for business purposes as for personal communications. It takes plenty of work to sort through all of those problems and find the questions relevant to your business, but that’s a workload worth the time it takes when you consider the value of just a few new clients — especially ones that will tell their network that you are their white knight, someone who arrived via social media to solve their problems.

Having a clear idea of what your competition is up to is important to any small business owner, if only to compare your own marketing and customer service.

Depending on your industry, your competition may not have a big online presence — there are many small businesses that still don’t even have websites — but it’s still important to check what information is available online on a regular basis. After all, customers can post information about a business online just as easily as that business’ owner.

1. Subscribe to their blogs and newsletters: If one of your competitors is offering free information to his clients, it’s just good sense to make sure you get a copy of it. At the very least, you can get a clear idea of how your competitor is handling online promotions.

1. Check out their social media accounts: The growing number of businesses with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts makes it necessary to check out what your competition is doing on such sites. Not all companies are making use of social media yet, but a surprising number are moving in that direction. It may not feel comfortable friending or following your competition on these sites, but even just bookmarking these pages and coming back later is a good idea.
2. Set up Google Alerts for their names: Just as you might set up alerts with a tool like Google Alerts for your company’s name, it makes sense to see what other people are saying about your competitors. You may just find an opportunity — a dissatisfied customer that you can talk into switching over to your services or products.
3. Track their reviews: There are thousands of sites dedicated to reviews, from Yelp with its reviews of local businesses and service providers to CNET with its product reviews. Make sure you know what customers are saying about you competition’s products and services. At the very least, you’ll probably find some things you shouldn’t be doing.
4. Check out your competition’s team: Depending on the size of your competition’s company, there may be just an owner, a few employees or a whole bunch of people working for the company. You can find quite a bit of information about these people online, through their own social networking profiles, any sites they might have and just a couple of searches in Google. A LinkedIn profile, in particular, can provide you quite a bit of information about a competitor’s employee — perhaps even giving you an idea of future strategies when a competitor hires someone new with a specific skill set.

It’s worthwhile to make a list of those companies that you consider competitors and work down this list every so often. Don’t forget that whether or not a company is online can change overnight — and keeping tabs on what your competition is up to makes good sense.

Image by Flickr user Leo Reynolds

But how can you tell if your website has reached the point where an update is necessary? Web design trends don’t change as fast as fashion seems to, and it’s not exactly practical to update your site’s look every quarter.

These five signs are indicators that you need to consider changing things up.

• Your site is difficult to update: If it’s hard for you to add new information or even update the copyright date for your site, it’s time to consider some new technology. While it used to be common to build websites with straight HTML, there are now a variety of content management systems that allow you to update your site without worrying about messing up the code.
• You have new tools you would like to integrate into your site: Technology is continuing to evolve, making it easier for a business to promote itself online. If you’ve got something new that you’d really like to add, whether it’s a new lead generation tool or a better way to manage your online store, it may be time to update your site.
• Your site’s visitors don’t stick around: If your analytics package shows a high bounce rate, or you’re just not converting a lot of visitors into buyers, start by looking at your site’s design. There may be small fixes that can help the problem.
• Your business has changed since you set up the website: Businesses grow over time and what worked perfectly for your business in the past may not remain a perfect solution for the future. If your business has gone through a growth spurt or two since your website was designed, you need something new.
• It’s simply been a while since your last update: The underlying technology that displays websites does change over time. If it’s been several years since your website originally went up, it may not display properly in newer web browser or on mobile browsers. Even if you just have your site tuned up, you can see a world of difference.

You don’t have to redesign your website on a regular basis, but it is a good idea to look it over regularly and bring in a web designer if it seems like it’s time for an update. Just generally checking your website over (and possibly comparing it to the competition’s) is a good task to have on your calendar every few months. Even then, you don’t need to do a complete overhaul — in many cases, just a tune up will be enough to make your website look fresh and ready for business.

Image by Flickr user Rain Rannu

You have to get the edge if you want to move past your competition. Right now, there are lots of opportunities to do so online, if you just identify them.

1. Get There First

Right now, many small businesses don’t actually have websites. According the Small Business Success Index, just 50 percent of small businesses have websites. All you may have to do to be ahead of the game is to get a good website up.

Of course, the numbers differ based on industry and other factors, but all that tells us is what we already knew — your business needs the best website you can get, with the tweaks necessary to improve its standings in the search engines. When you’re designing your site, think about your customer and how they will be interacting with the site. If you’re talkint to engineers or other technical people, lot’s of Flash probably doesn’t make sense.

Also, keep in mind mobile devices. As the number of people accessing websites on thier phones increases, it is important to make sure your website works for them as well.

2. Differentiate on Customer Service

Online tools have created, first and foremost, a communications revolution. Make use of that strength to hear as much as you can about where your customers are and what they need. With social media tools, for instance, you can get clear insights to potential problems — and hopefully resolve them — setting yourself apart from the competition in the area of customer service.

3. Be the Expert

When you make a purchase, choosing the company that knows more about your business and your needs seems like the obvious choice, right? But what helps you decide that someone is an expert? Maybe they have written a lot about your industry and what you need, contributed quotes to publications you read and even offer white papers on the topic.

You can be that company. You can build expertise online; setting up a professional blog can be a matter of minutes and a few dollars. If you’re in the business already, all you have to do is start writing about your experiences and showcasing the fact that you are an expert in your field.

We like using WordPress, but there are several different platforms out there.

4. Connect with Prospective Clients

If you have a clear idea of who is likely to buy your products or services in the end, you can start looking for those individuals earlier in the sales cycle. If, for instance, you connect with a bunch of Twitter users who happen to be in your target market and take some time to interact with them regularly, you can establish yourself as a friend and a connection in those individuals’ minds.

Then, when they’re ready to buy, you’re already a known entity — why would they even consider going to someone else?

5. Keep Watch for New Opportunities

You have a better chance of spotting trends if you can get out ahead of the crowd a little bit. There are online tools revolutionizing every industry. There are new opportunities in how we make reservations for restaurants, how we get educational materials and even how we find coupons. Catching just one of these trends in your own industry can move you far ahead of the competition.

People are more likely to vent online than post compliments and praise. If you can keep an eye on what people are having problems with, you can often propose a solution which will make you stand apart from your competition and help you generate a more loyal following.

Image by Flickr user Thomas Brandt