One Stop Web Support Newsletter #66

July 27, 2008

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One Stop Web Support Newsletter #66

Jeff Baas - One Stop Web Support

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/

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Are You Hurting Your Business by Going After the Wrong Metrics?

One problem with doing business online is that it's easy to treat it as something other than a business. Many business owners treat it as if the ordinary rules of business don't apply.

In reality, though, business online is the same as business offline: if it isn't making money, it isn't working.

You'd think the business world would have learned from the dot-com to dot-bomb crash that attracted investors simply on the basis of, "Hey, we're a WEBSITE, and websites are bound to make a fortune."

Yet, here, eight years later, many business owners still find themselves seduced by the aura of the Web, focusing on metrics that are nothing more than a means to an end.

Metrics like backlinks, search engine rankings, and even traffic are valid metrics. But they must be viewed in the context of what effect they are having on generating revenue.

What role do they each of them play?

Backlinks is a term that refers to links from other sites that point to your site. Their value is twofold. First, they are a potential source of visitors. Second, they represent a vote for the page to which it points.

This vote is important when it comes to search engine rankings. With thousands of websites that seem equally relevant as far as what is on their page, the search engines use incoming links, especially ones from high-regarded authority sites, to determine which sites other sites consider most valuable.

Backlinks can affect your revenues indirectly by bringing you visitors and by helping to increase your search engine rankings. In no way, though, do they measure your revenues.

Search engine rankings, similarly, affect your revenues indirectly. High rankings for highly searched terms bring you more visitors, but they do not directly increase or decrease your revenues.

Website traffic comes closest to affecting your revenue. It represents the living, breathing people who visit your site. Yet it still is not the key metric you ultimately want to track.

In the end, the metric that matters is revenue. You can track any of these other metrics to assess general elements of your website's potential for generating revenue. But never let them distract your attention from revenues.

Even when you plan expenditures that affect these other metrics primarily, your ultimate concern should not be, "What will this do for my backlinks, or rankings, or traffic?" but "What will this do for my bottom line?"

Always make sure that any discussion of website work focuses squarely on what really matters to your business.

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Q and A with Jeff

In this section, Jeff answers your questions about starting a business online. Here's this week's question, from Troy.

How do you get wholesale prices so you can sell products?

One way is to do a lot of legwork. Do searches for the type of products you want to sell and add the word "dropship" or "drop ship" to the product name. This likely will put you in contact with manufacturers and distributors who will sell to you at wholesale prices under a dropship arrangement.

With a dropship arrangement, you offer their products on your website as your own products. You process the order and receive the payment for the product on your website. Then you contact the dropshipper and they ship your product direct to your customer without you needing to store or ship any products.

They charge you a wholesale price, a processing fee, and the cost of shipping. The difference between what they charge you and what you charge your customer is your profit.

Be aware, though, if you search for dropshipper on your own, you likely will run into middlemen who are neither manufacturers nor distributors. The wholesale price they charge you actually is not the wholesale price. They buy at wholesale, jack up the price on you and take a cut of what should be your profits.

Once again, the "Starting Your Internet Business Right" ebook (www.OneStopWebSupport.com/wwb-ebook) that I mentioned last week has a lot of information to help you find legitimate manufacturers and distributors and avoid the unnecessary markups of middlemen.

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HOTTEST OFFERS

Each issue, I feature what I consider the best offers available each week on worthwhile business-building tools. Check here to see what's hot this week.

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/hot-offers.htm

Or check to see my growing selection of ebooks and training tools that you can use for free to build your Internet business.

Free Ebooks:

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/dir-ebooks.htm

Free Training tools:

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/ongoing-bargains.htm

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Success quote

'The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created - created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.'

Deborah James

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This newsletter is published by One Stop Web Support, where our business is helping your business succeed.

http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/

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Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.

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