Starting An E-Commerce Business: Baby Steps Starting your own e-commerce business can be quite the adventure. There is nothing wrong with falling head over heels in love with your ideas and plans and becoming overly excited. But always remember, feet first. Creating a business from scratch is like a child learning to walk. You need to grab on to something solid, feel around, get a sense of balance, and take baby steps. Risky Business Before running full speed ahead with your brilliant business brainchild, proper planning is required. Being an entrepreneur is risky business, however you can improve your chances of success with preparation and development.
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Advertisement should start immediately after the company is created and you have decided on a unique name. The more people see your company's advertising, the more they will recognize its name. You want people to remember your company in a positive way. It is similar to making a first impression when meeting a person. So the first thing you have to work on is your name and your face. In the business world your company's logo is the name and face of the company. Its effectiveness is based primarily on your logo design.

The first and the most inexpensive way of advertisement, is face to face advertising. You say your company name to people who you meet so they remember you. Now if you want them to remember you for a longer time, an effective way could be to hand them your business card with your name phone number and address. This is the most common way of advertisement.

You can customize anything; letterhead, envelopes, even on a pens and mouse pads with your logo design on it! Promotional materials are endless, from a t-shirt to custom pins. All this is done for only one purpose, so that as many people as possible can see your logo and remember your company. There are many different ways to advertise your business. The most important thing is to be consistent. When people start recognizing your logo and associating this image to what your company is all about, this is called brand recognition.

Why is it important?

The idea is to create strong brand recognition. You want people to think of your service or product before they start opening the yellow pages and looking for someone else. If you walk by McDonalds you don't expect to find a hammer and nails. Even if your logo does not say "hamburger", people still know what the company sells. Advertising is meant to attract more customers, to win their trust and build stronger brand recognition.

You don't have to be a computer genius to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website. Effective search engine optimization can be done by anyone who has the time and determination. There exists a horde of information, suggestions, ideas, methods and techniques about successfully optimizing your website for search engines. SEO companies do not use any 'special' tactics that we don't already know or that we can't easily research on the internet.

Safe SEO techniques:

• Content: Add valuable and relevant content to your site. The more content the better. Keep your paragraphs brief and to the point.

• Continuously update your website: Add new information and new pages to your site. Create a section on your home page containing up-to-date news items relevant to your business (ex.: "logo design" at www.logobee.com).

There are so many unethical SEO companies that claim to be able to boost your website to #1 in search engine rankings, however they use overwhelmingly aggressive marketing techniques and attempt to manipulate search engine results. This gives the industry a bad name.

The main problem with SEO companies is that they base their methods and techniques on research trial and error and speculation. As a result of the secretive indexing criteria of search engines, webmasters and SEO companies can only make an educated guess about the ranking systems and possible algorithm revisions.

Copyright infringement. How to cope with the rise of internet plagiarism

When it comes to corporate identity and logo design, copyright infringement has become an increasingly prevalent issue. As more and more small businesses find they need a logo to stay competitive, the demand has created a plethora of logo design firms that offer a variety of services from stock clipart images to custom design services.

However, because of the competitive nature of graphics design and the ease in which people have access to information, it has become difficult to ensure that a design remains the property of the respectful owner, and does not become duplicated by someone else. The ease in which an image or logo can be taken from the web and retraced is surprising, and there are even some that fail to realize that online content isn't simply 'public' domain. Therefore you should always be careful to properly document and trademark your logo design, Read the rest of this entry »

Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For businesses that receive the majority of their clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break their business.

Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that enhances a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems as they continuously update and revise their algorithms (mathematical formulas used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming.