I have been an online entrepreneur for over 20 years now. Actually, some of you may remember a company that really helped me take my online businesses to the next level. They had the most successful internet launch in history back in the day, the company was StomperNet.
Before this time, I was getting my feet wet trying to get my real estate appraisal website ranked. I was also attempting to get my e-book to climb on Clickbank (Foreclosures & Flips). In order to rank better, I needed help and StomperNet was the answer.
The build up to their internet launch felt like it was yesterday. When they finally launched, their monthly recurring training was $797.00. When they launched, I was in downtown Chicago doing an appraisal.
I knew I needed to do join… So, I called a few friends that respected what I was trying to accomplish online and luckily, I was able to get 3 friends to pay me $200.00 per month.
It was an easier sell to my wife because at the time, my real estate appraisal business was tanking hard and fast. The refinance boom became a bubble and it was starting to burst. My thriving appraisal business that averaged 40-50 orders per week was at a measly 4. I was close to not being able to pay the mortgage on my house. An $800.00 hit per month wasn’t in the cards now.
Getting back to the story…
I remember the excitement and nervousness after joining StomperNet. I charged the first month of $797.00 on a credit card and recouped $600.00 from my new clients.
The Idea of Selling Treadmills Online
Being an idea guy, I always had a pad of sticky notes with a pen on my nightstand. Whenever I had a new idea, I would write it down. I faintly recall waking up one night (right before the StomperNet launch) and writing down the word TREADMILLS. Needless to say, the idea stuck and I decided to sell Treadmills online.
I was so green at creating a brand new website that StomperNet chose my site as an example of what NOT to do. They even created a “what not to do video” using my site! How embarrassing… Ugh.
You don’t have to worry about being embarrassed like I was. Today, there are many great e-commerce platforms and templates you can easily use to build your website.
It was definitely a rough start for me but eventually, things started to come together. I was so passionate about this new endeavor that I was able to come out of my shell and contact manufacturers directly over the phone. This was crucial for an e-commerce site since manufacturer deals are needed in order to drop ship products.
Being an affiliate where customers would click on links and be taken off my site wasn’t an option, I wanted to be paid directly.
I was in absolute awe when I got a deal with a major manufacturer to sell their treadmills!
I studied search engine marketing day and night. It helped me structure the website in order to rank on Google.
I creating separate pages for every treadmill. More importantly, I rewrote all of the treadmill product descriptions. Because the first website that has the content WINS since they are crawled by the search engines first.
All websites that copy and paste the content will LOSE due to duplicate content filters.
Again, rewriting ALL of the manufacturer product descriptions is Key. Google loves unique original content, they eat it up. Consequently, they hate duplicate content and they discount websites that have it.
After completing this work and taking the time to add keyword sensitive titles, the site began to rank. It took search engines about 5 months to start to trust and rank the site.
After some additional work, the site started to rank more and it was ranking #1 all over the web. The site even achieved #1 spot on Google for the biggest keyword there is “TREADMILLS”. This happened right around the one year marker.
The #1 ranking for treadmills stuck and ICON contacted me for a phone meeting. They were pulling information out of me. They wanted to know what I was doing to get the rankings and soon after the call, I discovered their title tags started looking very similar to mine.
When you build a new e-commerce website, carefully craft each page to be unique. It won’t be easy and it will take quite a bit of time but when done correctly, it will pay off.
- DO: Create Unique Content
- DO: Create Solid Titles Tags
- DO: Create A Description Tag
- DON’T: Keyword Stuff
- DON’T: Have Thin Content
Those are a few things you can do to stay on task when creating your website pages for an e-commerce store.
While there are tried and true things you can do to get quality online traffic, there are also many negative factors that can hurt your chances from getting ranked. You don’t want to have your new friend Google put you in the corner. Because if they do and since they are the leader, other search engines like Bing and Yahoo will likely follow suit.
Where Do You Even Begin to Start with an E-commerce Store?
You have to start by picking a niche. You want to find a niche that isn’t too competitive but that has potential. For example, a niche like “weight loss” is super competitive so that is something you want to stay away from.
Even though treadmills is a specific niche in the fitness equipment industry, you should consider staying out of that niche too. Why? It is relatively simple to know if a niche is overdone and too competitive. All you really have to do is Google search the keyword and see who comes up on page 1 of Google. If you see mom and pop type websites on page #1 and there is sufficient keyword search volume, you might just have something worth looking at.
However, if you search a keyword such as “treadmills” you will see the top competitors are Walmart, Amazon and Dicks Sporting Goods. There are also Google Ads with companies with deep pockets. Why would you want to compete with them? In my opinion, you shouldn’t!
Where Should I Build My Ecommerce Website
There are many solutions for building your online e-commerce website. But I will give you the top 3 most popular platforms. I have personally used these platforms and have succeeded with them. There are others, but these are the ones I prefer.
- Shopify
- Big Commerce
- WordPress with Woo Commerce Plugin
I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new! If you liked it, please Like & Share.