Your EBiz Name…is it Right?
People starting an Ebiz often get confused when it comes to naming their businesses. If you plan to build a web site, there are actually two names you need to figure out: The name of your business, and your Domain Name (the name of your store/web site). They should rarely, if ever, both be the same.
Your Overall Business Name
If you’re going to do business, you need to be in business. That means you need to form a legal business in your State. Sorry, but that’s a fact, Jack. If you don’t do the legal stuff, you cause yourself all kinds of problems with taxes, you can’t collect money from people’s credit cards, and lots of other bad stuff. So grit your teeth and form a Sole Proprietorship, an LLC, or a Corporation. It’s not as bad as everybody thinks it is, and it turns your online stuff from a hobby into a real, moneymaking business.
When you name that overall business, it should be something very generic. Like Smith Enterprises LLC, for example. The business name is not going to be a name you publicize. It will not be the name of your web site.
However, it will appear at the bottom of your web pages, as in “Copyright Smith Enterprises LLC. All rights reserved”.
It will also appear on your customers’ credit card statements when they order from you. That’s one of the most important reasons why your business name needs to be generic.
Say, for example, that you plan to open an internet store that sells Bowling Shoes. Let’s say you make the mistake of naming your overall business “Bob’s Bowling Shoes, LLC”, and you make your web site (domain) name “BobsBowlingShoes.com”.
Seems logical, right? People come to BobsBowlingShoes.com and buy their bowling shoes from you. They get their email receipt from Bob’s Bowling Shoes, LLC, and when they get their credit card statement later in the month, it shows a charge from Bob’s Bowling Shoes, LLC. So far, so good.
But what happens when you open your NEXT web site, and you sell Pool Toys on that site? You choose the domain name ReallyCoolPoolToys.com, but you still have to put “Copyright Bob’s Bowling Shoes” on the bottom of the site pages because that’s your legal business name. What happens when your customers buy something from ReallyCoolPoolToys.com and get a credit card statement showing a purchase from Bob’s Bowling Shoes, LLC? (They dispute the charge, that’s what happens).
So, if you use a generic business name like Smith Enterprises LLC, you can build as many web sites under as many domain names as you like, and that generic business name makes sense on all your different web site Copyright notices and all your customers’ credit card statements no matter which one of your web sites they buy from.
Don’t get too hung up on what your overall business name shoud be, either. I’ve seen people agonize over this needlessly. Keep it simple.
Your Domain Name
Just like the web site domain names I talked about above, your web site domain name (your “dot-com” name) needs to be specific to the products you sell. Don’t name your bowling shoes site “SlideAndStrike.com” Don’t name your pool toys site “SplashAndPlay.com”. Cute and clever names and terms have their place in your marketing, but this isn’t one of them.
Your domain name for your web site needs to contain words that describe exactly what you sell.
How They Work Together
It’s important to understand that you do NOT have to set up a separate legal business for each different web site name. Set up your overall legal business (like Smith Enterprises LLC), set up your business bank account with that business name, and then you can buy all the different web site domain names you want with that bank account, and they ALL belong to Smith Enterprises LLC.
What The Search Engines REALLY Want
In the dim recesses of internet history (about 5 years ago) the way to get the all-important internet search engines to find your web site used to be all about on-page optimization. That meant that the more times your site pages repeated certain words that people searched on to find your products, the higher you rose in the search engines.
However, like everything else on God’s green earth, all the mental midgets out there who would rather cheat than work spoiled all that for us. They started stuffing unrelated, but popular ‘keywords’ into their web pages in order to bring people to their web sites. Someone would search on ‘DVD player’ (a very popular ‘keyword’) and end up on a web site that sold bowling balls. Because the owner of the bowling ball site had stuffed the keyword ‘DVD player’ into their bowling ball site so many times, trying to being in visitors that really didn’t belong there in hopes of making a sale.
The search engines figured this out and decided that on-page optimization was only going to be a small part of the way they ranked web sites. Instead, they turned to inbound links to give sites authority in their search rankings. While on-page optimization is still important, inbound links are now more important.
What’s an inbound link? It’s another web page somewhere online that talks about a subject, and links to your web site as an authority on that subject.
I’ve been a musician for nearly 40 years, since I was a kid. If I’m at a party playing my guitar, and somebody walks in the door and asks if anyone knows how to tune a guitar, everybody in the room is going to point to me, right? I’m right there playing the guitar and I obviously know how to tune one. Those people pointing to me are my ‘inbound links’. They’re giving me the ‘authority’ in the room for being the one who can answer that person’s question or solve their problem.
So, the search engines turned to counting inbound links to a web site in order to decide how much authority it had for its subject. Once again, though, the mental midgets outnumbered the real businesspeople, and created ‘link farms’. These are places where you can pay by the month to have them point thousands of links to your web site. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those links were (once again) completely unrelated to what your web site was about.
The search engines figured this out too, and decided that link farms were a no-no.
What to do now? Well, the mental midgets are still trying to come up with flavor-of-the-week tricks to beat the search engines, and they’re still out there trying to sell those secret tips and tricks (that will only work for a couple of months or so) for outrageous amounts of money.
On the other hand, people who understand that you actually have to do the work when you’re in business, and that shortcuts and tricks are not the basis of a real business, are simply doing things the right way.
What’s the right way? Create real inbound links to your web site. It’s that simple. The search engines are like newspapers. They need a constant fresh supply of new information in order to keep people coming back to them. They need to keep people coming back to them so they can sell advertising, which is how they make their money, just like newspapers do.
The best way to get the search engines to ‘feature your story’ in their ‘newspaper’ is to simply give them what they want, instead of constantly trying to fool them.
The best way to create inbound links for your web site is to write a blog, write articles for EZines, and use social marketing tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on. Whenever you use these social marketing tools, you’re creating content-rich pages online that link back to your web site, and you’re raising yourself higher in the Search Engines because you’re building real, authoritative inbound links back to your site, just like the Search Engines want you to do.
If you really want to be successful in business, there’s no substitute for doing things the right way. Trying to trick your way into high search engine rankings is only going to work for a short period of time if it works at all, then the search engines are going to figure you out and banish you to never-never land, where your site will never be seen again.
So do it right with social marketing, and let the mental midgets fall by the wayside as you climb the rankings to real Ebiz success.
It’s News Years…They’re Coming for Your Wallet
Welcome to 2010! Another New Year, and thank goodness. Like most of you, I’m certainly glad to get rid of 2009.
Let’s face it, it was a crappy financial year, due to circumstances beyond our control. Unless you happen to control the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the banks and the politicians that put us in that stinking mess.
The good thing about a brand new year is that even though it’s just the tick of a clock into another day timewise, it’s a new calendar year. People look at a new year as a chance to start over and do better. This helps to give consumer confidence a shot in the arm, which is something we seriously need in order to get the economic recovery moving faster.
HOWEVER, a New Year means something else as well.
Watch out…the online marketers are coming, and they’re coming at ramming speed, heading straight for your wallet.
This past year was a tough one for most of the big-name internet marketers who sell fluff information online. All those guys who have the secret clubs and the foolproof plans and the just-pay-for-shipping-and-we’ll-make-you-rich DVDs and the incredible new systems that fool the search engines and all of that other crapola had a really tough time last year. They’ll never admit it, but the word at several of the larger marketing conferences was that most of them were dropping unfortunately maloderous bricks in their pants all year. Why? Nobody was wiling to part with the cash or credit to cover the multi-thousand dollar price tags these guys throw on their ‘amazing systems and secret clubs’.
They know, though, that the promise of a New Year brings renewed hope to most, and they know that YOU ARE VULNERABLE RIGHT NOW. They know this is their best shot to get you to part with thousands of dollars on your credit cards if they promise you easy ways to make lots of money in the New Year.
This coming Monday, January 4th 2010, you are going to see an onslaught of marketing email that’s going to make your email inbox beg for mercy.
Every one of these ‘instant success’ jokers has taken all of their same old stuff, dressed it up in shiny new suits, renamed it, come up with new and different amazing claims about it, and will be launching it straight at your wallet on Monday the 4th.
If I thought you’d actually do it, I’d tell you to simply delete every single email you get on Monday without even looking at it, but I know you won’t do that. So what I am telling you is this:
-Do not make rash decisions.
-Do not order ANYTHING without typing it’s name, plus the word ’scam’ into Google first.
-Do not accept any ‘free’ offers. Nothing is free, and most of that stuff leads to huge price tags.
-Do not let yourself get caught up in all the enthusiastic hype.
-Put your credit cards away for the day, and sleep on anything you are tempted by.
-Carefully research anything you’re thinking about, before you buy.
If you can stick to those rules during the next few days, you’re going to save yourself from wasting thousands of dollars.
Don’t let these people make the beginning of the New Year, the end of your financial security.
Choosing an Online Store For Your EBiz
I get a lot of questions from people asking how and where they should build their online stores. With so much conflicting information out there today, it’s almost impossible to figure this out on your own if you’re new to the business.
Many people are under the impression that different types of stores will automatically bring you different amounts of “traffic” (visitors who might buy from you). While that might have been true to some extent years ago, it really doesn’t work that way anymore. You can’t depend on a store platform to bring in your traffic. You have to go out and get it. So don’t believe it when you hear that building this kind of store or that kind of store will automatically bring people in to buy from you. There’s no such thing as “automatic traffic”. At least not enough of it to make any kind of a difference to your business.
What platform you use to build your store is a business decision. If you’re going to be in business, you have to learn to make objective business decisions, no matter what hype and promises you hear. Choosing a store platform has to do with cost, time, features, and compatibility.
Cost
There companies out there who want to charge you thousands of dollars for a web site, or a set of web sites, claiming they give you all kinds of “support” and make things “easy”. Don’t believe them. Those people have all the moral fiber of the underside of an outhouse.
First, you only need ONE web site/store to get started online. One web site all by itself will keep you busier than a set of jumper cables in a junkyard for a long, long time. Second, the best web site/store out there only costs $49 a month, and that’s it.
A good online businessperson should be building a business mostly from profit, not from their wallet, and the best way to do that is to ignore the get rich quick promises and use the right tools for the job. The right tools actually cost very little, but they get lost very quickly in all the noise from the ‘get rich quick’ leeches that dominate the search engines.
Control costs from the very beginning, and you’ll find that you can run an online business for less than $100 a month.
Time
I hear from a pretty large number of people who say they want to “build their own” web site/store. Even if you have the kind of programming expertise to do that (and it takes a LOT of programming expertise, no matter what anybody tells you!) it still takes too much time.
Building a good web site and store from scratch is a complicated process. There are hosting companies out there (lots of them) that tell you that their amazingly cheap and simple do-it-yourself shopping carts and store solutions are the next greatest thing on the internet. Well, if cheaply built, partially functional, inflexible and programming-intensive web sites are the next greatest thing, we’d all better go build lemonade stands on the corner, because we won’t get anywhere otherwise.
Your time is critical to you in your business. Chances are you still have to work a day job to keep money coming in, which means you don’t have a lot of time available for your biz. Or, maybe you’ve been laid off and need to get something working pretty quickly. Either way, as a businessperson you can’t make the mistake of spending too much time on any one thing, no matter how much web programming you know.
So, even if you do have the programming knowledge you need, you can’t allow yourself to waste the extra time it takes to re-invent the wheel and try to make something like that work right.
Your best choice is a really good pre-built we site/store platform that doesn’t require a lot of “poke and hope” mouse clicking and time-wasting to get running.
Features
Every idiot who ever wrote a sales letter makes promises to you about “Features”. Most of the web site/store platforms out there frankly suck eggs, but that doesn’t stop their salespeople and affiliates from praising them to the Heavens, in the hope of wrenching a few ill-gotten dollars from your wallet before you find out you bought a peice of junk, whether it was for a few bucks, or a few thousand.
A web site/store platform should be:
1. Completely under your control. You should never be forced to ask someone else to make changes to your site, or ever be charged for changes. There are too many changes you’re going to have to make to your site over time to give up control and have to depend on or pay somebody else to make them for you.
2. Feature Rich at a Low Cost.
A good site/store platform has features like easy merchant account connectivity, the ability to create your own HTML pages (no “locked” templates that you can’t change), the ability to cross-promote and offer coupons, autoresponders to contact your customers automatically, real-time connection to shipping companies so your customers’ orders can be calculated exactly, the ability to let you choose how you tax your sales, the ability to let you choose where you accept orders from and where you ship to, and a whole lot more.
Each basic business feature that your web site DOESN’T have is going to make your site that much less likely to succeed in business.
These features should not be add-ons that you have to find or create yourself. They should be included, at a LOW cost.
Compatibility
Most of the over-hyped and underpowered site/store “solutions” out there are incompatible with other things you need to run your business. One of the most important is your Merchant Account. That’s how you collect payment from your customers’ credit cards. If you buy a junk site/store platform, you’re going to find that you either can’t collect your customers’ money without huge amounts of programming hassles, or you have to go with the merchant account “solution” offered (at a high cost) by the same leeches who sold you the junk site/store platform. That’s one example; there are many more.
What’s the real solution?
The store platform I have found to be the best, the most feature-rich, time-saving, inexpensive, flexible and reliable is Yahoo Store, without a doubt.
This is a store platform and web site combo that’s been around for more than a decade, and has everything you need and more for under $50 a month, with no contract length. That means if you want to close it, you close it, and you’re done paying for it.
Their tech support is phenominal, and the store itself can host thousands of products at no additional cost.
Before you buy any site/store platform, look at Yahoo Store.
If you’re already in a site/store platform that isn’t working, dump it and go get a Yahoo Store. Seriously, this is the best recommendation out there.
Stores Online Settlement: A New Low
Okay, here’s a new low in online marketing that blows even me away.
A while back, Stores Online was sued in a Class Action lawsuit (one lawsuit by many people) and agreed to settle out of court for $7.6 million dollars. That money will be split amoung those people who feel they didn’t get what they paid for. Because that’s a LOT of people, each person gets far less than they paid in. That’s not surprising, although it’s disgusting. In my personal opinion Stores Online felt they would end up paying a lot less by agreeing to settle than by actually dragging their business through a court of law, which is something I would actually have liked to see very much.
However, from this Class Action settlement, a new low in Internet Marketing has emerged. This is purely disgusting.
Someone is calling Stores Online customers and offering to SELL them a “kit” to help them file these Class Action settlement papers. The “kit” costs $497!!! This is just unbelieveable! Who wants to bet me that if you dug deep enough, you’d find that somehwhere, somehow, Stores Online themselves were behind the sales of this “kit”? After all, who else would have the phone numbers of the Stores Online customers to call in the first place? Hey, just my personal opinion, but if I were betting, I’d bet I’m right.
What an idea, right? Get sued, settle so you don’t have to go to court, then chisel yet another five hundred bucks out of the people you have to pay back by selling them some bogus kit that “helps them file the papers” to get their money.
This is a deep, dark, ugly new low in the stinking cesspool that most of internet marketing has become, and I’m personally disgusted by it. You should be too. If you qualify for a Stores Online settlement from that lawsuit, DON’T buy any “kits” that help you do it. It’s a load of garbage, and I personally would just love five minutes in a room alone with the scumsucker who came up with this idea.
Partners in Your EBiz….Good Idea or Bad?
Starting an online business can be tough to do alone, especially in this lousy economy.
Sometimes, economic issues force people to bring partners into a business in order to provide credit and/or extra startup money. There are some things you need to be very careful of if you think about doing this.
Partnerships with Friends
The most natural thing in the world seems to be to partner with someone you know already. It’s easier to work with that person, and you’re already friends, so its easier to get them to sign on to your business plan.
The problem with this is that you never really know someone until you have to split money with them. I can attest to that from my long history in business. I’ve had friends as partners who have worked out alright, but never really well. When you’re in partnership with a friend, you run the risk that the friend does things on their own that you would not want them to do. They tend to think it’s okay because they think they “know what you would want”. So, they make decisions without asking you, and that can get on your nerves pretty quickly.
Then, because they’re a friend, you tend to avoid conflict over those issues. If the partner were not a friend, you feel much more comfortable in approaching them and saying “Hey, what did you think you were doing, ordering four hundred pairs of Doggie Shoes? We only sold three of those stupid things last month!” However, because they’re a friend, you end up not wanting to jeopardize a long friendship, and you don’t bring those things up. Or, if you do, you minimize how you feel about it.
That’s a very bad way to run a business.
Partnerships with Family
Take everything I said about Partnerships with Friends, multiply it by a factor of ten, and then throw in guilt and other family members interfering. That’s partnering with Family members. Some familes can do this. I know of a couple of good examples, and I partnered in a couple of businesses with my own parents many years ago, which worked out fine.
However, a family member can guilt-trip you like no other person can (besides a spouse, that it). That kind of thing gets in the way of business decisions just like working with friends. Add to that the fact that if a family member disagrees with you and doesn’t want to confront you, they’ll go crying to other family members, and you’ll be the bad guy from several directions in your extended family without ever even knowing there was disagreement.
As I said, some family member partnerships can handle this. Most can’t, and you can’t choose your family members. So, choose your business partners wisely instead.
Partnering with People You Don’t Know
This seems riskier in some ways, but is generally a better way to go. Sure, you’re going to have a harder time convincing someone you don’t know to go into business with you. If that’s the case, make it a casual acquaintance, not a friend or family member.
When you partner with someone you don’t know that well, you are both much more likely to have open, honest discussions about issues that come up in your business. That makes for a healthier business overall.
What to watch out for when partnering
Oh, let’s see, I don’t think I have enough room here to tell you about everything you need to watch out for when you partner with other people! Guess I’ll just keep it down to the main points.
1. When you partner with someone in your business, never, NEVER give up control. Always keep at least 51% of the business. My father warned me about that once, and I didn’t listen to him. I regretted it for a long time. If YOU have an idea for a business, and YOU approach someone with that business idea, it’s YOUR idea. You need to make sure you legally own a majority of that business. No exceptions, no matter how hard the other person tries. Someone who won’t partner with you on a minority (less than 50% ownership) basis WILL cause you trouble down the road.
2. Always create a Partnership Agreement. This is something else in my long business career that I have ignored at times, and I have always regretted it. A Partnership Agreement can be simple, but should cover basics like:
3. Be very careful when partners ask you to agree to hiring their family and friends, especially when they want to shortcut standard hiring procedures and bring in their buddies and relatives without offering the job to the general job market first. Never allow a partner to bring in an employee who doesn’t have qualifications for that job. If you’re not careful as your business grows, you could very quickly find yourself outnumbered by a whole army your partner’s inexperienced relatives. That can be a very bad situation.
4. Make sure you and your partner both agree on employee salaries when hiring people into your growing business. You may find that your partner will want to bring in people they know or are related to at high salaries. It’s extremely important to remember that when you’re hiring people, you need to leave room in their salaries for them to grow (get raises) at a rate of 3% to 5% a year. If you hire people at or near the top of the standard range for their postion, within a couple of years you’ll find yourself either overpaying them or losing them. Both are bad to say the least.
5. Check into your partner’s history a bit. You never really know someone until they disagree with you. It’s possible to think the world of a business partner for years, and then find out some really ugly truths much later on. You’ll want to know if your potential partner has a history of dealing with people well over long periods of time, or if that partner has a history of dancing a happy tune with people for a while, then trying to take over the business in the long run. There are more people out there like that than you’d think.
Overall, if you can avoid bringing a partner into your online business, by all means avoid it. Following your own dream should never be subject to the twists and turns of other peoples’ fear, greed, poor judgement and/or psychoses. :o)
Stores Online Settles in Class-Action Lawsuit!
Finally, a breakthrough that the Scambuster Road Trip is thrilled to see!
Stores Online, a company that runs these hotel seminars and gets you to pay thousands of dollars for template-driven web sites (which in my personal opinion are a business model that’s way overpriced and underpowered) has decided to settle a class-action lawsuit against them in Tennessee. The settlement figure is about $7.6 MILLION dollars.
In law, a class action or a representative action is a form of lawsuit where a large group of people collectively bring a claim to court. (Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-action_lawsuit).
Generally, when a company decides to settle a lawsuit rather than face trial, that means that the company either considers it less expensive and time consuming to simply settle, or they’re afraid that they will lose the lawsuit and face a much larger judgement by the court. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what the story was here. :o)
Because this case was “settled” by Stores Online, there will be no actual trial and no determination made as to whether Stores Online was actually guilty of the allegations made against them. Again, up to you to decide why they would decide to avoid a trial.
Basically this means that if you were a customer of Stores Online during the time that the lawsuit covers (several years) you can make a claim to collect your part of that $7.6 million dollars.
You can read about the lawsuit and the procedures you should go through to recover money at the Stores Online web site, on a page where it appears the court forced them to place a copy of the suit and procedures. Click the link to see the lawsuit and claim procedures.
My personal opinion? Score one for the good guys!
Re-purposing “The Rock”
So, I have an idea. My EBiz Scambuster Road Trip is in San Francisco right now. We were checking out Fisherman’s Wharf, and noticed the old Alcatraz Prison out in San Francisco Bay.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could talk the State of California into re-purposing Alcatraz into a high-security prison for the EBiz Scammers we catch along the way on our Road Trip? We thought it would be, so we went out to Alcatraz and started making plans. Check out the video:
Coached To Ruins
When you’re starting or running an online busness, your email inbox is going to be overflowing with “easy money” ebiz offers. If you ever reply to any of these offers, your phone is going to start to ring, and people are going to try to sell you all kinds of “Coaching” programs that cost as much as $15,000 or more!
I’ve been in business for over 35 years. I’ve made millions online since the advent of the Internet. I know what I’m doing. Here’s the most important thing I can tell you about these programs, based on all my years of successful biz experience:
Don’t do it, ever. These people, without exception, are only looking to take your money. The programs are cheap and cheesy, but they cost a fortune. The “Coaching” they offer SOUNDS great, but is actually nothing more than college students making $8 bucks an hour reading scripts to you over the phone. One-size fits-all scripts are NOT going to teach you how to start and run a real business that actually makes money.
Check out this video I shot on my Scambuster Road Trip in Portland, Oregon, to see what happens to real people when they get trapped by these overpriced, underpowered loads of information garbage:
There’s only one program online that’s for real, and it’s not “Coaching”. It’s real-world business evaluation and mentoring, and I run it myself. It does NOT cost thousands of dollars. No online business coaching or mentoring should ever cost that much. It’s not staffed by college students reading scripts. I work with you myself.
If you ever have any questions about online business that you want REAL answers to, just give me a call at 1-888-8ChrisM. No sales, no pressure. I answer my own phone, and I’ll be glad to help you understand what the difference is between the online Fantasy World of easy money and quick riches, and Real-World business that actually makes money.
Don’t “Set” Your Online Business To Fail!
Recently ran into some of the Internet “Bad Guy” types I talk about all the time. Check out the video!