• Do you want to and/or have the budget to advertise online ( the direct approach )
  
• Do you want to focus on marketing your website the free way ( the conservative but certainly not easy way )
• ... Or both advertise and market ( the less conservative and/or more direct approach )
• And how will you spread your budget over marketing and/or advertising online

Advertising Online

• You set the maximum monthly spend ( monthly budget )
  
• You set the maximum you are willing to pay per click to your website URL (cost per click / CPC)
  
• You create your own advertisements according to the search engine guidelines ( campaigns / ads)
  
• You create the keywords / search phrases you want to come up for ( on the search engine )
• Expect to compete for top placement on your keywords with costs varying by market
• Cost per click (CPC) can range from $0.50 per click or lower to $2.00 per click or upwards of $15 per click by market and competition for the keywords you are bidding on
  

Marketing Online

Now is always the best time to start your business. That’s right. Right now. We
truly believe that it’s possible for your business to succeed no matter what the
economy is doing, no matter what stock market sectors are up or down, or what
niches venture capitalists think are hot or not. Many of our country’s most
successful companies were born during the toughest of times.

We believe
that many of the reasons businesses fail have far more to do with factors you
can control than the ones you cannot control. You can’t control
world affairs. You can’t control the economy. You certainly can’t control the
stock market, and you’re never going to control venture capitalists. But in
general, events and issues outside your control do not have to ruin your chance
for success as an entrepreneur. You can control how much research you do on your
big idea. You can control which strategies you choose to include in your
business plan and how you spend your money. You can control whom you hire, and
you certainly have control over charting your business’s course for the
future.

5 Reasons to Start a Business Now:

1. Technology levels the playing field between you and big business.
   
2. Today, the phrase, "corporate job security" is an oxymoron.
   
3. The Internet provides an unprecedented opportunity to start an online
   business at minimal cost.
   
4. Like never before, business can be done from home.
   
5. Corporate outsourcing to smaller businesses creates an abundance of
   opportunities.

Bonus Reason: The only person who can boss you
around is you!

Now, we know it’s all too easy to push back, to stick
with whatever you’ve believed up until this moment—whatever has kept you from
starting up. We deal with those roadblocks from quagmired callers all the time
on our radio show. What we’ve found is that people hesitate for one of two
reasons—either their immobilized by fear of what they don’t know, or they’re
just scared away by what they think they do know. Myths about starting up a
business are rampant, leading people to use those myths as the crutch that keeps
them from moving forward.

<from iContact monthly newsletter - Author: Jeff and Rich Sloan>

<edited by Earth Skater>

Anyone with a Google account can publish content on Google Base. Users can include attributes with the data, similar to the meta keywords in conventional Web page files, for search engine optimization SEO. Once you have added content you can edit it at any time.

The Google Base interface is easy to use and works with most Web browsers. Content is screened by Google according to a standard editorial policy and their Terms of Service (ToS) agreement.

Merchant Processing 101

By Erin Kroll, PR/VAR Marketing Coordinator - e-onlinedata 

There are countless reasons why a business should add credit card and
electronic payment processing capabilities — transactional speed, convenience,
increased customer satisfaction, improved cash flow, views into sales data and
more. But perhaps the most important consideration is the sheer volume of
consumers who use non-cash methods as their primary form of payment.

 In 2005, credit card and electronic transactions accounted for an
overwhelming $3.4 trillion of total U.S. payments, according to The Nilson
Report. That’s 50 percent of all transactions nationwide for that year. More
recently, Visa USA estimated that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers aged 18 to
25 use cards as their primary payment method.

 So while the reasons for adding payment processing are clear, understanding
all your options and which are right for your business is far more complex. This
article will give you the information you need to get started in setting up
payment capabilities for your business, and it will provide some of the
essential details you need to consider when selecting a provider.  

 How Payment Processing Works

Some form of the modern credit card has been in use since the late 19th
century, mostly as department store charge cards representing lines of credit.
Things have changed and today, the step a merchant needs to take in order to
accept credit card payments is to establish a merchant account with a bank or
third-party payment provider. Once your account is live, the transaction process
generally works as follows: 

 1.      A customer presents a credit card for
payment.

 2.      By swiping the credit card through an
electronic point-of-sale (POS) transaction terminal, typically provided by the
bank or payment provider, an electronic request is submitted to the processing
network for authorization.

 3.      The processing network receives your
electronic request and determines if the cardholder’s account is valid and if
the funds are available. If so, a response called an "authorization code" is
transmitted, guaranteeing your access to the funds.

4.      A receipt is then printed for the
customer using the POS terminal or your computer. The customer then signs the
receipt and, for their part, the transaction is complete.

5.      At the end of the business day, a
merchant will electronically submit a final request to the processing network to
"capture the funds" for all authorized transactions in a given day. This process
is referred to as settlement. Once approved, a response is generated to your
electronic terminal or computer.

6.      From there, the funds associated with
the batch you settled are deposited electronically into your business bank
account, usually within 48 to 72 hours. Typically, the rate and any fees paid to
your merchant account provider are deducted from your account at the end of the
month.

7.      At the end of the month, your merchant account provider will send a
statement to you, detailing the credit card activity for the month and the
associated fees you’ve been charged.

This process describes what happens in a traditional retail, or “bricks and
mortar” sales environment. For Internet and e-commerce merchants, the set-up
process requires a few additional steps.

Retail Terminals vs. e-Commerce Processing

Because they do not have access to the purchaser’s physical card, Internet
and e-commerce merchants rely on specialized software that allows them to
capture and process credit card information on their Web sites instead of
through a POS terminal. There are two basic software programs needed to enable
online commerce:

·        Shopping Cart: A secure series of scripts (or coding) that keep
track of items a visitor chooses to buy from a site until they proceed to
checkout. On the checkout screen, the shopping cart collects the credit card
number, billing address, authorization number and expiration date.

·        Payment Gateway: When the online shopper is ready to finalize the
transaction, the information collected in the shopping cart is transferred to a
payment gateway for authorization. It is the equivalent of a physical POS
terminal used in a retail setting.

Another situation where a purchaser’s card is not physically present happens
with MOTO or Mail Order and Telephone Order. Here, touch-tone processing or an
automated response unit (ARU) allows for credit card authorization and
processing over the telephone. This type of processing does not require a
shopping cart or payment gateway.

Pricing Basics

Now that you know how processing works and what the available options are,
you’re probably wondering how much all this will cost. While service fees and
rates vary from provider to provider, “bundled” pricing is the most common type
of agreement used in determining which per-transaction rate applies to which
type of merchant. In the simplest terms, pricing is based on risk:
the higher the risk involved in the transaction, the higher the rate the
merchant will have to pay:

·       
Qualified Rate applies primarily to card-present or
traditional card-swipe (not key-entered) transactions. This is the lowest
possible rate a merchant will incur when accepting a credit card. Telephone and
e-commerce transactions cannot receive the qualified rate because they are
unable to swipe a customer’s card.  

·       
Mid-Qualified, or partially qualified rate, is the
percentage a merchant will be charged if they accept a credit card that does not
qualify for the lowest rate. This may happen if a consumer credit card is keyed
into a credit card terminal, virtual terminal (online) or via a shopping cart.
 This is the best rate that a telephone or e-commerce business can receive.

·        
Non-Qualified is the highest percentage rate a merchant can be
charged and applies to those transactions posing the greatest amount of risk.
This rate would apply if a special kind of credit card is used like a rewards
card or business card or if address verification is not performed, or a merchant
does not settle its daily batch within the allotted time.

Again, these rates are used
to determine the cost to the merchant on a per-transaction basis. There are
additional costs associated with payment processing, including start- up fees,
equipment costs, chargeback fees and more. Stay tuned for the next e-newsletter
installment for additional processing tips and useful information for merchants
and business owners.

e-onlinedata (EOD) is the
nation’s fastest-growing, most trusted provider of online payment solutions.
Thousands of Internet, mail order, auction sellers and retail businesses — from
start-ups to billion-dollar companies — are choosing EOD every month for
affordable, reliable, and easy-to-use credit card processing and Authorize.Net
payment gateway solutions.

Merchant Processing 101 is a
production of e-onlinedata, reprinted with permission from e-onlinedata. Content
is intended to provide merchants and small business owners with practical
information and insight into the world of payment processing.

1. Market your business - even if you don't want to buy advertising you can market your domain name
2. If you have time to invest and like surfing the web you can market your business on your own for free
3. Always add new content to your website - create new products / update products, create / edit categories, edit your home page and create articles
4. Create a Blog your website - a blog is simply a journal or log you keep in relation to your website content
   
5. Speak to your customers as often as possible - client input is priceless