South West eCommerce Newsletter
Hi %%First Name%% and welcome to this edition of the South West eCommerce newsletter.
In this issue...
- How Important Are Keywords In Your Domain Name?
- Problems With Credit Card Fraud
- IM Eye: For Serious Affiliate Marketers
How Important Are Keywords In Your Domain Name?
You may have heard people saying that if you want to rank high for your keyword phrase, you should try and get a domain name with your keyword in it. For example, if you want to rank high for "ladies shoes", then you should try and get the domain "ladiesshoes.com.au". How important is getting a domain with your keywords in it?
Having your keywords in your domain name is one factor out of dozens that affect search engine ranking. All other things being equal, a domain made up of the right keywords will outrank a domain without them. But there's another reason why this is important, and that is: it's not repeatable by your competitors.
What we mean is that every other ranking factor can be repeated by other sites. Let's say you want to rank number one for the keyword "ladies shoes". You do some research and find out that the number one ranking site has a certain number of keywords placed in it's text in certain areas. You can do the same. It also has 1000 backlinks pointint to it. You can build 2000. It's listed in Yahoo. You can list in Yahoo too. And so on, and so on. You can repeat all of the things they have done, and improve on them, so that you eventually outrank them.
That is, except for one thing - keywords in the domain name. Once somebody buys "ladiesshoes.com.au" that's it, it's gone. You can't take it off them, you can't get the same name, that business has one advantage over you which you can't match.
Now as we said earlier, keywords in a domain name are only ONE factor in dozens of factors relating to search engine ranking. So if you don't have a domain name with your main keywords in it, all is not lost.
But if you're starting out with a new website, and considering what domain name to get, make sure you do some research on the best keywords to target, and see if a domain name is still available that matches those keywords. For the most thorough keyword research available, we recommend Market Samurai.
To check if a domain name is available or not, use our free search tool at http://domains.southwestecommerce.net.au.
Problems With Credit Card Fraud
If you've been following our journey into affiliate marketing and dropshipping, you'll know that we've been building a number of new websites and working hard on their rankings, in order to start making money from selling other people's products.
One such site we built had a promising start. We did the research and found a keyword phrase that was searched regularly, didn't have a lot of competitors, and we found a supplier who could dropship for us. After building the site it began to rank high fairly quickly, and within a couple of weeks the first order came in. Then another order came in, and another, and after about 6 weeks we had received 5 orders, which was promising for a brand new site. Things seemed to be going well, especially since we still had a while to go with our search engine ranking efforts.
But one day as we were fulfilling the most recent order, something didn't quite look right about the delivery address, and we became suspicious. Upon further investigation, the records showed that the IP address of the computer where the order was made was in Ghana (even though the delivery address was in Australia). Immediately concerned, we checked the other previous orders, and found that 4 of the 5 orders had been made from the same IP address. In other words, it appeared that 4 of our 5 orders had been fraudulent.
Those of you who are online merchants will know that in most cases where credit card fraud is uncovered, it's the merchant who ends up losing out, because they have already sent the item, and the funds get returned to the card owner by your bank. Our initial excitement about this site turned to frustration and anger when we realised that 4 of our 5 orders would most likely get refunded, and we had already sent the items. We may be out of pocket several hundred dollars. This has been a difficult lesson for us to learn, and in future we will be checking all orders very closely to ensure the IP address details match everything else in the order. We have also blocked the offending IP address from making any further orders.
What's been your experience selling online and taking credit card payments? Has fraud been an issue for you? How do you protect yourself from it? Do you manually confirm orders before sending? As always, we'd love your comments. Visit our blog post at www.southwestecommerce.com/blogs/things-we-hate-%E2%80%93-and-you-should-be-careful-of.html and post a comment on your experiences and ideas.
IM Eye: For Serious Affiliate Marketers
If you're serious about Affiliate Marketing, and find it hard to initially uncover the markets or "niches" that are worth targeting, then you are going to absolutely love a new product that is being launched in early April, which will change the way you find market opportunities.
In short, normally when you try and find niche markets, you start of with a "seed" keyword, and then use tools to search for more specific keywords with high traffic and low competition.
The new IM Eye product is a database already prepared, where you don't even need a seed keyword to begin with. The benefits are too numerous to mention here, but one small example is that you could use the database to show you keyword phrases where:
- Monthly search volume is greater than 15,000
- Competing pages < 50,000
- Intitle competing pages < 10,000
- No exact domains exist in the top 10 SERPS
- No youtube videos in the top 10 SERPS
- No Squidoo lenses in the top 10 SERPS
- No Hubpages in the top 10 SERPS
- No Blogspot sites in the top 10 SERPS
- Adwords high bid estimate > $5.00
- Physical goods ARE being sold for this keyword
- and much much more
This is an amazing tool which will be of most benefit to people who are regularly looking to build affiliate and/or dropship websites.
As mentioned, the list of features is too long to be shown here, so if you want to find out more, just hit reply and ask us for the IM Eye details. We'll send you an email with the full details, and also ensure that you're one of the first people to find out exactly when it's released (early to mid-April).
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Don't forget to check out our website for great articles on Internet Marketing and growing your online business.
Until next time!
South West eCommerce
www.southwestecommerce.com
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