Trust Certificates, Email Marketing and Customer Reviews

Found a great resource for those of us on a budget who are looking to add a trust seal, email marketing and a customer review system to our online store. There's a company called RatePoint, that offers each of these elements for a monthly rate of $17.95. They offer a 30-day free trial.

Trust Seal

RatePoint provides a trust seal badge. You can select from four different designs with 3 color options. Only the design to the left has a date field. Initially, you will be displayed as a "member" - but get three good reviews and you go to "Consumer Approved."


Connect with customers, increase sales and improve your
business with RatePoint. Sign-up for a FREE 30 day trial today.

Email

The email widget to collect customer emails was easy to set up. Color options are customizable. Call to action text is too. Not much else beyond that. Add your text and color and RatePoint creates the html to plug into your site. Creating the auto-response emails was simple. The system is intuitive and I found it far easier to comprehend than Aweber, another email campaign tool. I plugged the html code into my "tagline" variable in my Yahoo Store to have it display as part of the header.

RatePoint offers a "simple review" email option with a pre-made template. I wanted to customize mine, so I created a new email campaign. Pretty easy and flexible. Took me about 20 minutes to load my email list, create the review request and send it. Of the 40 emails I sent, 20 were opened. 8 clicked on the link to submit a review. 5 actually submitted reviews. All were five star reviews. Nice.



Get Email Marketing, Customer Surveys and Customer
Feedback in one easy-to-use service. Sign-up for a FREE 30-day trial today.

Review System

RatePoint offers a variety of widgets to solicit and display feedback. When a customer submits a review, you have the option to show or hide any positive feedback. Four different widgets are available. Color options are light and dark blue, light and dark gray. You can display 1-3 reviews at a time within the widget. When a customer clicks "more" - they're taken to a pages that shows all the reviews received.

Negative reviews are handled through a dispute resolution system that gives the merchant the opportunity to resolve the dispute before negative feedback is displayed and also shows the merchant response to negative in the review display.

While this might concern some merchants, this tool is a legitimate trust seal system and lends real credibility when the system holds the merchant accountable for customer issues while allowing both sides of the story to be told. RatePoint estimates that 90% of all disputes are addressed before any negative reviews occur.

RatePoint provides the best feedback, email marketing and surveys in one easy to use package. Learn more and get a free 30-day trial.

What It's Not

This isn't a secure shopping site badge like McAfee or GeoTrust. It doesn't indicate any level of SSL encryption of site security and shouldn't be intended to function in this manner. However, RatePoint does offer an assurance to the customer that a RatePoint merchant adheres to a system of dispute resolution and a standard of customer service that puts the responsibility on the merchant to resolve issues to the customer's satisfaction.

Get the best email marketing and customer feedback. Create great newsletters and more. Sign-up for a FREE 30-day trial today.

Wrapping it up

Given the low cost point of $17.95/month for managing up to 1,000 email contacts (unlimited emails), review sytem and trust seal - this could be a great option for those starting out to add these pieces to their business. I've been really happy with my experience so far and have already converted my free trial to a monthly memebership. No long-term contract and they gave me a discounted rate for signing up within the trial period.

Definitely worth checking out.

Another 30 Day Challenge Update

Still deep in the bowels of the Thirty Day Challenge. Day 8 brought the introduction of a marvelous new product called Traffic Bug. Traffic Bugs is an automated social bookmarking submission application. Take a few moments to create a few unique "titles" and "descriptions" for a blog post or web page and the application starts bookmarking your site on social bookmarking sites like deli.co.us, Stumble Upon, Propeller and many others. You can set the aggression level (low, medium and high) and then sit back and watch it do its work.

In addition, the application automates submission of pages to search engines and directories. All for the low, low price of $24.95. Found that price tag pretty shocking.

Days 9-11 brought the introduction of Web 2.0 authority sites (EzineArticles.com, ScribD.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com). All great stuff and must know for those who want to get to the top of Google rankings. If you haven't yet - check it out.

Article Submission - Is there an easier way?

Once you get your Yahoo Store open for business, the question quickly becomes "where are all the customers?" So many people fall into the "if you build it they will come" mentality. Keep in mind, your store is not a Field of Dreams and they're not coming unless you make them.

One of the ways that you can begin to build traffic and improve your search engine rankings is by writing and distributing articles. The concept is fairly simple. Your write a relevant article related to your product or niche. You sprinkle a few anchored links with your keywords into the body of the article. Then you submit these articles to sites like ezinearticles.com, articlebase.com, buzzle.com and many more. Keep in mind that not every site has the same policies and some may be very specific about how and how many links you can include in your articles. When your articles are published, the search engine spiders find them and see links back to your products. Voila! Back links! And remember, you want links to your deeply nested pages (product pages). Don't just link to your home page. This makes your site less attractive to search engines.

When it comes to submitting articles, it can be very time-consuming. You have to log in to every site, do some format tweaking, change around the links based on site policy - ugh! I've had a lot of success with a product called Brad Callen's Free Article Submitter. The basic version is free and while it doesn't offer one-click submission, it does semi-automate the process. This company also offers a platinum version of the software that does fully automate the process of submission to 210 sites.

I stick with 20 or so submission sites with high page rank. I figure that if I can create an article per week and submit to 20 sites...52 X 20 = 1040 links. Not bad.

The 30 Day Challenge

It's Day 4 of the Thirty Day Challenge. I didn't quite know what to expect when I signed up, but it was free - so what the hell right?

For the uninitiated, the Thirty Day Challenge is run by Aussie Ed Dale and advertised with the tagline "there is no charge for awesomeness." The program takes you through a 30 day process to earn your first dollar on learn. Ed has a real "volunteerism" spirit and has created a movement of sorts. Many confess to drinking the Kool-Aid when it comes to the Thirty Day Challenge.

The early work is on finding your niche and using the tool Market Samurai to help determine the level of competition, commercial intent and ability to monetize your selected niche.

Market Samurai is an amazing tool I've been using for a few months now. It has several components that mostly tie existing "free tools" like Google Keyword Tool, Microsoft Labs commercial intent tool and others into a single interface that helps you slice and dice keyword data to really get a handle on your keyword choices and whether you've got a chance to compete in your desired niche.

Definitely worth checking out.

Finding Your Niche in a Big, Bad World

I'm a member of World Wide Brands, the only company I know of that provides access to legitimate, fully reviewed dropship and wholesale companies. If that sounds like a plug for them, that's fine. They deserve it.

They've taught me a lot about niche research and marketing through their product sourcing tool, video tutorials and e-Books. What astounds me is that there are so many other people who are members of WWB who seem to completely ignore every piece of valuable information inside the site. I call these guys "Mega-Mallers." The Mega-Maller thinks bigger is better. He's going to sell crystal figurines and pool tables. Scuba equipment and coffee makers. Heart monitors and skateboard ramps. All in one super collosal, totally awesome internet superstore.

Bad idea. Eventually the Mega-Maller will realize that his store is impossible to market. He has too many products. SEO is an absolute nightmare. His bounce rate is 95% because his products and navigation are an unfocused mess. Mega-Maller did not do his homework.

If you want to operate a successful eBiz, find your niche. I confess - my first shot at online retail was an eBay store that sold "sporting goods." Sporting goods is not a niche. "Antique golf clubs" is a niche. "Unicycles" is a niche. Get specific. Life's too short to take on Wal-Mart.

Some camps say it doesn't matter what you sell. Do your research. Test the keywords. Determine your profit potential. The market is the market. Emotion is meaningless. You don't have to like what you sell, you just have to like money.

I disagree with that approach. Successful niche retailers generally become experts on the products they sell. They need to write compelling content about their products. Reviews and articles to direct traffic to their site. Blogs. They twitter. "Cloth Adult Diapers" might be a great, profitable niche, but...I'm going to take a pass on that one.

I've always been captivated by ancient cultures and dinosaurs. As a kid I imagined I'd someday grab Indiana Jones trusty Fedora, jacket and whip and travel to exotic countries on important archaeological expeditions. Instead, I opened Your Museum Store.

I'd say don't let emotion rule the day, but if possible turn one of your passions or interests into your niche. This is the basis of your business. Why not be in love with it?

Introduction to the Yahoo Store Insider

Welcome to Yahoo Store Insider, the blog. If you've come here in search of sage wisdom from a man who's been building Yahoo Store's for decades and wrote the book on SEO...better turn around and run in the other direction. That's not me.

I'm new to the e-commerce game and Yahoo Stores. My wife and I opened the doors of our first Yahoo Store three months ago. We're doing well building our business and have no allusions about what it takes to launch and operate a successful business. In the last few days, we've started to hit our stride. We're starting to show up on page one of Google for some of the 2nd tier keywords we've been targeting. Traffic has multiplied by 10 in the past week.

If I'd been more forward thinking, I would have starting chronicling this adventure from the very beginning. It didn't occur to me that I would learn so much of value. I didn't understand how undocumented the Yahoo Store "language" RTML is and hard it is to find free information because so many people want to sell their services to you. I didn't understand the SEO game either. Five months ago, I was pretty naive.

I've learned and it's time to share that education. So keep an eye out and I'll be filling you in on some of the ins-and-outs of Yahoo Store ownership.

If you want to see the fruits of my labor, check out Your Museum Store. Today I'd like to refer you to an excellent starter video from 1Choice4YourStore that offers an introduction to the Yahoo Store Editor.