If you’re selling your own products or services, a good shopping cart experience is very important. You want to avoid shopping cart abandonment whenever possible.

Today I’m looking at E-junkie Shopping Cart and Digital Delivery. This system allows you to integrate your cart within your site, rather than having to redirect to another website. Your customers don’t leave the site and can continue shopping until the process requires the sale be finished on your payment processor.

This shopping cart is very flexible as to the payment options you can take. It works with the popular options: PayPal, Clickbank, 2Checkout and Google Checkout.

This is a Javascript solution, but has a non-Javascript mode so you don’t have to worry about losing those customers who have Javascript turned off.

I took a look at their trial. It looks quite nice. I don’t sell anything myself right now, but I can see where this is an easy solution.

For those with software phobias, you don’t have to install anything - just generate the buttons on the site and place the code on yours. For digital products you can also store your products on their server, and the software takes care of delivery. Good and bad to that, of course, since that’s yet another server you rely upon to be up or your sales vanish, but nice for those who aren’t sure how to protect their digital downloads.

Hopefully you have already done a lot of work to get your business off to a good start for the new year. But have you done the basic maintenance yet?

There are some things you should do regularly to keep your website running smoothly. It can be a bit of a pain at times but it is also very necessary.

Start off with any copyright notice you may have on your website. Is it current? If not, update it with either the current year or find way to have it update automatically. If your site can run PHP, for example, you can put the following code within the PHP code to just show the current year:

echo date(”Y”);

Now is also a good time to test your links. Not just the internal ones that really should work at all times… check the ones pointing to outside sites. Businesses disappear, they redo their sites or drop a product… if you can avoid linking to dead pages you will look much more professional. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re probably familiar with the basics of search, but you’ve probably also mostly focused on your search results from search engines. Have you given any thought at all to how people search your site?

Vertical Search can be thought of as a visitor’s search through your site. They’ve come to your site through a search engine, an ad, bookmark or some similar way. But the page they landed on isn’t quite what they wanted. If your site has a search function, they may use it to see if your site does indeed offer what they are looking for.

If you have a good vertical search program installed on your website you can help your visitors find what they are most likely looking for. Taking a look at the tools offered by VortalOptics, a search company that offers products to help your site be searched vertically, you can see some options that have the potential to really help your customers get what they want. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing a blog is a great way to attract traffic to your home business. Blogs can alert various services that there’s a new post available, which can bring in traffic right away or over time. This is an advantage over the traditional website which must wait for the search engines to discover a page for a new page to attract traffic on its own.

But one of the hardest parts is getting inspired. It is tough writing for a blog day in and day out. Some days you just don’t know so much as how to begin. And yet many of the best bloggers post more than once a day!

How do they do that?

The trick is having reliable resources to keep yourself inspired. Reading other blogs is a great start. If one gives you ideas you can post a reply on your own blog explaining what you think. Link back to the original post for reference. For example, I started thinking about this after reading a post over on ProBlogger. Read the rest of this entry »

As you get more serious about your online home business you may come to realize that a shared hosting service really isn’t good enough all the time.

Shared hosting is, of course, much cheaper than dedicated. This is very helpful when you’re small and really need to watch what you spend. But if you get on the wrong shared machine your site can be slowed tremendously when some other site on that same machine starts getting slammed or hogs resources.

As many people get serious about running a lot of sites, especially as their sites become more demanding of resources. This is a natural progression, even if it is not necessary for every website owner. Just a good option for those that do outgrow shared hosting.

While you don’t particularly have to worry about where your server is located, many do prefer to get a server in their same area. That is, people in the United States will often prefer dedicated servers in the United States, and people in Europe may prefer, as with the particular company I will be discussing here, Dedicated Servers in Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as you go into a home business or even express interest in one you are likely to start getting the question….

The question itself varies. It may be expressed as doubt that there is anything legitimate you can do to earn money from home. It may be someone asking if you can do them a favor because you’re just at home all day. But what it really is is a question of whether or not you are really working.

It doesn’t matter how normal what you do would seem if you did it outside the home. You could be a computer programmer working at home and people would have trouble believing that you actually work.

Explaining that you are in a real business can take time. From my experience, I can tell you that it can take years, literally. At least, it took my inlaws about 2-3 years just to believe that I really was earning good money working at home and for them to finally stop nagging me to get a job. Still can’t get them to quit giving me their annual copy of home business tax tips they find every year in one magazine or another. It seems to be reprinted every year. Read the rest of this entry »

Becoming a published writer is a dream for many people. I don’t mean self-published; I mean writing a book and getting it published.

Writers Club is a newsletter associated with WritersBeat.com. It offers contests and opportunities for writers to contribute to it. You may also enjoy the tips offered.

It’s easy to register as a part of the community. Once you’ve joined you can post and answer questions on the discussion boards.

One of the best ways to improve your skills as a writer is to write. Another is to get feedback from your fellow writers. Writers Club is an opportunity for that.

These days, so much as getting people to click open an email can be pretty tough. After all, a significant portion of emails go straight to the spam folder, whether or not permission was given. Spam is just so much of a problem that the filters have to be pretty tough and not every subscriber checks that folder regularly or even at all.

But there are things you can do to improve your chances of getting that email opened, read and hopefully acted upon.

The first thing to do is take a look at your list. If it’s not opt-in, or better yet, double opt-in, your response rate is likely to be dismal. Frankly, if your “subscribers” didn’t opt in to your particular list you are likely to be accused of spamming. So start out with a clean, opted in list.

Every time you send out a newsletter you need to pay attention to your subject line. Is it going to get that newsletter opened or ignored? Read the rest of this entry »