OK, now you've designed the killer website and tweaked your online store. You're bringing in sales. You're making money. But, you don't want to just succeed; you want to win. You want that corner office or that shiny new sports car. How do you get there and take your online business to the next level?

This isn't the Field of Dreams where “if you build it, they will come.” This is reality, not Hollywood. In reality, after you build it, you need to promote it. The best way to promote your online store is to try to position yourself where your potential customers will look for you. Ask yourself, if I were a customer looking to buy a hat, where would I go? Someone looking to purchase a hat online would usually start with the search engines.

Try doing that with a few keywords that describe your products or services and examine the results. If your name comes up on top of the list, then congratulations to you. Read no further – this article isn't for you. If you are like most online businesses, you're probably not at the top of the list, but you'd like to be. Statistics have shown that if you are listed in the first few search results, then you will have significantly higher traffic than someone ranked even just a few notches below. Think about this for a second: if you go to Yahoo.com and search for “hats,” you are going to see 3 sponsor matches, 20 search results and then 2 more sponsor matches. If you want to reach your target audience, you’ll want to be on that short list. Are your customers really going to click to see results 21-40? Not likely. Did you know that anyone can be at the top of the list for any given search word? It’s actually fairly easy.

You can make it to the top of the first page of a given search in only a few short days. One option is with Overture and the other is with Google’s AdWords Select. Both Overture and Google are pay per click marketing services that allow you to bid on search terms or keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, if you sell hats, then you’d probably want to be first on the list when a potential customer searches for “hats.” Google accounts for approximately 1/3 of all searches conducted on the Internet, not to mention providing the search results for online powerhouses like AOL, while Overture search results power almost every other search engine or directory, like Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, HotBot, InfoSpace and more. Getting high listings with these two will do wonders for your traffic, which will do wonders for your business.

These are great resources because they allow you to quickly drive targeted customers to your site. You only pay for people who actually click through on the words that you select. When using Overture, there are a few tools that you might find useful. The first is the Overture search term suggestion tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

With this tool, you can type in a keyword and see the frequency with which it and other related keywords are searched on. It is a great tool to help you decide which terms you might want to bid on.

Another tool you may find useful for efficiently managing bids is Keyword Bid Optimizer, produced by paidsearchenginetools.com. With this tool, you can quickly manage your bids. Its interface shows you where you rank for each term and highlights gaps so that you can quickly raise or lower your bid for optimum placement and the lowest click rate.

Using the pay per click model is smart. It not only helps you to drive more traffic to your site, you can be assured that it is targeted traffic. Soon, you’ll be smiling and looking down on your competition from your corner office!

Now that you are taking advantage of the cost per click system, you might start asking yourself, “how much can I really bid on a specific word and still turn a profit?” Surprisingly, most advertisers using these tools do not track their ROI (Return on Investment) and hence, have no idea how much they should bid on a specific key word or phrase. Tracking your investment is easy. Tracking your return can also be easy if you have the right tools. A practical method of tracking your return is through use of an affiliate tracking program. For this article, we will focus on the affiliate tracking program inherent in Nexternal’s e-commerce software.

To get started, log into your Nexternal order management system and click on the “affiliates” tab. Next, create a new affiliate. If you are bidding on the phrase, “baseball hats” at Overture, you might name your affiliate, “Overture – Baseball Hats.” Because you are not paying Overture as a true affiliate, set the commission percentage to zero. Approve the affiliate and the system will generate the links that you need to track this affiliate. Take one of these links and plug it into Overture for that keyword. That is it - now you can start tracking your return.

As time goes on, you will be able to click on that affiliate's name and see sales that result from the “Overture – Baseball Hats” effort. If a month goes by and you see that “baseball hats” on Overture generated $2000 in sales, you now have a return. If you run a report in Overture and see that you spent $400 on the phrase “baseball hats” during the same month, you probably made a good investment, but we do need to throw one more variable into the mix just to be sure, profit margin. If your average profit margin is 30%, then your profit from this effort is 30%*$2000 = $600. Because you spent $400 on marketing to yield $600 in profit, your return on investment is $600/$400=150%.

Using this data, one can then calculate what can be spent for the term “baseball hats” and still yield a positive ROI. If your average cost per click (CPC) for “baseball hats” in that month was 20 cents, then it took $400/$.20=2000 clicks to generate $2000 in sales, $600 in profit. To figure out how much you could have spent to receive a positive ROI, multiply your sales for that month times your average profit margin and divide by the number of clicks generated. In this example, $2,000*.3/2000=$.30. In other words, if you were to have bid 30 cents for “baseball hats,” you would have broken even, aside from the benefit of having one more customer in the database to market to in the future. Now you're marketing intelligently.

A new UPS OnLine Tool is now available in your Nexternal order management system called UPS Shipping. With UPS Shipping, merchants can create UPS Shipping Labels and receive tracking numbers directly from their own web based order management systems. Merchants no longer must enter the data from their order management systems into UPS OnLine WorldShip® Software. The merchant can simply click a button and have the label appear in their web browser for printing. This tool saves merchants a significant amount time and reduces data entry errors. To read more about how Nexternal Solutions integrated this tool, click here.

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