Do you know how to go about building trust with other people? First of all, you take the time to get to know them and find out what they are all about. It is easier to do this if you meet them in person, but it’s perfectly possible to achieve the same thing online, so long as you work at it. But, why go to all of that trouble to do any of that anyway?

Yes, it is, as you have to build solid relationships with your readers, for online business development purposes. Your first priority is to make lots of money and you will need to ensure that lots of people visit your site on a regular basis. However, generating visitors by itself is not enough.

Look at it this way. Imagine that you had launched a great new product. In the beginning, you advertise in a variety of places. In the first months of your launch, your unique visitors go up 100% (it’s possible!) AND the sales go through the roof as well.

In your new found bliss, don’t forget that the journey towards one-time sales is a very short trip. If you made six figures in each of those months, it still wouldn’t compensate for the next eight months of basement stats because none of those customers ever came back. That’s no way to run and grow a successful online business enterprise.

Instead, strive for repeat visitors each and every month of the year. How is it possible to do this? You build a relationship with each one of them. And no, you don’t have to know them all by name, but you will want to pay a great deal of attention and give them what they want to keep them coming back – again and again.

Readers are more than just people who come to hear what you have to say, they are looking for something, often times something very specific. It could very well be your product, but they won’t stay where they are not appreciated.

Here are a few reasons why reader relationships are so important to your site:

1. These people have friends. You never know who is visiting and reading your site content. One thing that you do know is that they have a sphere of influence with someone. That sphere can be yours if they are truly satisfied with their relationship with you.

2. They have money. What started out as simply a visitor can be converted to a customer who uses your products or services — if they trust you. Now you have the potential for repeat business.

3. They represent a segment of the population. Whatever their connections, they can be useful to you in building a better business. Most online business owners can provide organic backlinks for you; bloggers can ask you to guest post for them; avid social bookmarkers can help lift you to expert status by linking to your content.

Readers are not just numbers; they are people who are important in their own right and to your business. Connect with them.

Does it bother you when you’re looking for a product to buy and you get routed through several web pages before you even see a picture of the product? Nobody else likes it either. Make it easy for visitors to become customers and set up your e-commerce website development so that it is a breeze to navigate through.

Think of the navigation that’s on an airplane or on a ship. The system you will find there helps to tell you whether you are going in the right direction. It also signals you when you are off-course.

Site maps are very important navigational tools for your web presence. This useful feature gives a breakdown allowing the visitor to understand where information can be located. There will be a variety of headings and hyperlinks pointing to those locations. Visiting a site map can take the customer to the general area or the specific place that they want to go.

With online business marketing, there is a rule that many of the “clued-in” website owners follow: Take fewer than three clicks to reach any destination. It is said that the customer who is made to work too much in this way, will quickly look for a site that is more user-friendly. It is essential that you employ good navigation, as you could lose more business than you think, before anybody even sees your product.

From the homepage to the product page needs to be a very short trip. Customising your site with pull down menus, easy to read and click buttons and other design features will assist you in creating a visitor friendly website. When any cursor runs over a clickable link it will turn into a hand or even change colour. Always make sure that you test all your pages and links before you go live, to ensure that links are not broken.

If you have ever advertised on another website, you know that you can link back to your own site. If you are showcasing your products, you will want to link not to the homepage but to a landing page. The landing page is used so that the potential client goes directly to where the product is. If you draw an analogy with a supermarket, the landing page could take the client to the general location in your virtual storefront if you have a category of different products available. This gives the customer the opportunity of clicking through to read more information, or simply going ahead and buying the product.

A landing page can be some way to find out information. It can contain content that talks about that particular type of product, with a button at the bottom to click and view it in the virtual store. For eCommerce businesses that want to use customer interest to create email lists, the landing page can include a form for capturing that information before proceeding to the actual product.

Always keep in mind that products that are easy to find have a much better chance of generating sales. Take time when you are putting your website together, so that the overall design makes it easy to link the pages for best effect and remember that if you are looking for help with any of your online business marketing or design issues, a professional virtual assistant can be located rather easily by engaging a Google search!

Anyone can find out what they need to know about any subject under the sun within the Internet. If you want any one or two of these billions of people to find you there, giving them what they desire is the key. You must use keywords within your Web content to achieve this.

Tell us about Keywords?

This word has been tossed around a lot on the Web. Keywords are the words that people use to search for information in cyberspace. Now, every word is not a keyword. Some words like “the,” “of,” and others are too common and are usually excluded from search results. Only the main words are used in the search parameters.

Results are returned to the searcher based on the words entered into the box. Usually the results are in the millions but no one is going to look at all of those entries. Unless you are featured prominently on the first page, you may as well be entry number 1,000,001.

Using Content.

The world is being educated now about bots and spiders. It’s difficult to comprehend what they are all about, but they perform an essential service for your website development enterprise. They crawl your articles, headlines, picture tags and unique pages for the words that searchers enter. When they find them, you will be ranked for the appropriate words.

Is this all? Of course it’s not. Something called keyword density, which is the number of times that your word appears is very relevant. These robots want to know how many times a certain word is used and use the findings to work out how your content compares to other sites featuring the same words.

The hang-up is going to be finding those words. For each particular niche or subject, a huge number of words can be featured, either alone or within the context of the phrase.

But, what you have to remember is that without the keywords, it will be next to impossible to reach your target market. Don’t make the mistake of casting a net and trying to use really generic wording, hoping to reach your audience. Not only are you going to get a large amount of uninterested people but you are also going to waste money doing it.

Keywords narrow down the field to only the people who are likely to use your product or service. Just like with ads, you will want to test out these keywords to see the rate of return you get from your efforts. You will be starting off in the right direction, at least.

Once you have your keyword phrases, though, you could also create a unique page within your website development for each keyword phrase. On the home page, include links to each page using that keyword phrase. Remember that you will get credit from the robots for the phrase appearing on your home page, as well. You can also pepper your content with the keyword phrases where appropriate and use it as anchor text for a link to the corresponding page on your website development.

Keyword phrases are just as important as single keywords. You can use them throughout your website and improve your search engine placement.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting-edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Now!

Do you currently have an active bank account? Most people do these days. After all, who wants to try and hide their money underneath the mattress! Specific accounts are often set up for business owners, to look after the money that they accumulate from credit card transactions.

Unfortunately, we live in an era where many people are looking for the easy way out and trying to defraud other people as often as possible. This is very prevalent in the credit card business unfortunately and the industry itself makes sure that merchant accounts are established for businesses that accepts these cards. The account can be either on, or off-line. In a bricks and mortar operation, credit cards are processed through a machine, manually. For the purposes of this article, we will be dealing with merchant accounts for eCommerce businesses.

In every eCommerce website development situation, a business owner that takes a credit card has to use a payment gateway to enable the situation. It is part of an automatic process, where each transaction is handled and recorded, comprehensively.

A merchant account is not at all like your typical savings or checking account. The account is just used for credit card payments, and nothing else. There are quite a variety of options for choosing a merchant account. For example, do you require a number of add-on solutions, or will you make your decision according to the level of fees applicable?

An Internet businesses has an additional account known as an “Internet merchant account.” This is an account that is set up to temporarily hold funds from credit card transactions. On a schedule that you agree upon, the money is then transferred from this account to your merchant bank account.

As you might expect, a number of fees are applicable for every stage of the process. As an example, you would expect to pay fees for maintaining a merchant bank account, as you would with any other. You will have one time fees and monthly maintenance fees. For each transaction that they process, there is a per transaction fee. In eCommerce situations, with the Internet merchant account in place, more fees are expected.

Any decent seo consulting services and website development firm will tell you that the payment gateway service account is also subject to fees. To subscribe you will have one time fees and monthly maintenance fees. Transaction fees can be expected at the gateway, as well.

When choosing any of these services for your eCommerce business, take all the time you need to investigate them carefully, and be as prudent as possible in your final selection. Always look into this comprehensively and ask the relevant questions. Fee schedules need to be clearly listed and broken down by the banks and service providers so that you know exactly what you are paying and if it is worth it. Any financial institution that withholds this information could be hiding something, and if that’s the case, you may want to pass them by. If you think you could use some advice, consider professional website and seo consulting services, to help with website security, and ranking advancement.

However you do business, off-line or on, expect costs. Therefore, make absolutely sure you know exactly where your money is going and verify that you’re able to track all of your transactions through reliable merchant accounts and payment gateway services.

The most common solution that people think about when selling products through website development enterprises online, is that the actual product gets delivered to the front door of the buyer by the Post Office or courier. Physical products are not the only ones sold by online businesses. eCommerce is the domain of many digital products, as well.

You have to do a lot to get your website ready if you plan on selling physical items, and apply real online business management skills. You want to make the products visible via photos, create landing pages, market them elsewhere and create a reliable shopping cart process to meet the customer’s needs. This process is quite a bit different when it comes to selling digital products.

Digital products can be delivered in two different ways, via the mail or as an instant download to the buyer’s desktop. Most online businesses opt to offer downloads since they are easy to receive and require no inventory other than the initial files containing the products.

But, how do you get the products to the customers securely without being scammed yourself?

Here are some considerations on this issue:

Methods of Payment

Electronic payments need to be considered when marketing digitally. Customers pay at the time of purchase just like for any other product. In order to accept and process payments via credit card, you have to have:

• Internet Merchant Account
• A Merchant Bank Account
• A Payment Gateway Account

The first thing you need to think about is that a receipt of payment must be produced, so that both you and the customer have this information, just in case something goes wrong during download. Don’t forget that charge backs can be initiated by credit card companies, when digital products are purchased using their cards.

A “person-to-person” payment solution, also known as third party P2P is common for digital situations. Look at PayPal as an example. To create an account, a customer or business owner just needs an email address to associate with the account and a bank account for verification. To initiate and authenticate the transaction, an e-mail address is specified on your website. The customer is directed to their PayPal account where they securely sign-in. Once there, they verify that they want to make the transaction. When this is complete, they are sent back to the product website for confirmation.

Your digital products can be stored in a password-protected directory on your website. This is to keep unauthorised individuals from accessing it. A very simple way for you to set it up is that when the customer pays, they will receive a login and password, and the link to that particular digital product. Make sure that you tell your customers not to give the link to anybody else! However, if you’re willing to invest a bit more time, and perhaps hire a professional online business management firm to handle this process on your behalf, you can have a timer set up on the download link as well, for added security.

If you don’t want to bother yourself with all this organisational headache, get a complete digital download solution, where for a monthly fee you have everything you need to do business, digitally. Examples of this include PayLoadz (www.payloadz.com) and ClickBank (www.clickbank.com).

Digital products are hot right now. Setting up a digital product eCommerce business means low overhead and more profit. Use a system that allows you to “quickly and easily” get your products to customers and their payments to you.

When customers see your virtual website development storefront, you want them to be truly inspired to buy. As soon as they are ready to purchase, they need to be able to consummate this efficiently. This is where payment gateways come into play.

A gateway represents a conduit to get from one place to another. In terms of eCommerce, the gateway enables the verification and handling of credit card related business. A payment gateway is necessary if your online business plans to accept payments.

Any internet business consulting firm will tell you that a merchant account is necessary whenever you deal with credit cards. A merchant account can be opened at the bank of your choice. This is where money will be transferred once a credit transaction has been verified through the gateway.

You will find an amazing number of online companies willing and able to act as a payment gateway for merchants who want to accept credit cards. You can choose a payment gateway independently. Another option is selecting one of the many companies that offer more than just one service. For example, a number of shopping cart related packages will offer you merchant account and gateway elements in addition.

You need a merchant bank account and a payment gateway account to get you started. When choosing a bank for the merchant account, it is crucial to make sure that they accept payments from the gateway account you will be using. A payment gateway account is a vehicle to enable you to funnel payments between your site and your merchant account. If this seems at all complicated, consider the services of an elite internet business consulting firm, to help you get started.

Business owners selling online and accepting credit cards also have an Internet merchant account. Initially, the funds are sent here from the payment gateway. Every day these funds are sent to a separate account that you have established for this business purpose, as a merchant.

The Basics of How it all Works

We will walk you through how it works, here. This may seem complicated, but it happens in just a few seconds in the real world.

1. The customer will go to your website and choose a product(s) to buy. When they are ready to checkout, they are taken to the payment page to verify their order and the type of payment they’ll be using.

2. You will have set up a system so that when a payment is made the production goes through to the payment gateway you have nominated. Through the payment gateway, the transaction is forwarded to your bank’s processor.

3. From there, the data goes to the credit card network. The network serves as a forwarder and the transaction now goes to the bank that gave the credit card to the customer in the first place.

4. The all-important conclusion is made to determine whether the customer has enough money to make the purchase. Then, it moves back through the system, the same way it came.

5. The payment gateway receives the approval notice and forwards it to you, as the merchant and also to the waiting customer on your website.

Payment gateways are great for saving you time and effort in the otherwise complex process of handling credit cards. In short, you are free to focus on other pressing areas associated with your eCommerce organisation. As you can see, it’s very important to select the best payment gateway for your needs, so that you can go as far as you can with your business aspirations and not be held back.

Do you have an active interest in eCommerce and website development? It’s the wave of the now and the future. Technology allows businesses to conduct their transactions online, as another way of doing business.

What can you do on an eCommerce website development you ask? It’s not just for dealing with sales. Depending on the base of operations for your business, the website can be used for a variety of purposes which you will find out about in just a few minutes.

Virtual Storefronts – These are the websites you see when you’re looking to do some shopping online. This kind of site is set up to enable you to do all your transactions with the organisation at your convenience. This is certainly one-stop shopping. In much the same way as you would shop at a physical location, you can do so here.

In the online example, menus are available, allowing you to search and locate what you require within the various categories of products. Once items have been selected, they can be placed in a virtual basket or shopping cart. When you are done, you can pay for your item using the website’s eCommerce interface and get a receipt for your transaction.

Many types of products are sold on virtual storefronts. There are virtually no restrictions, as you are only limited to what you can realistically deliver to your customers and still make money.

If you come across a website that is set up as one of the information sites, the primary goal is to convince you to make a purchase elsewhere. Companies with physical stores can use this type of website to advertise for their products. The biggest organisations can use this type of online presence to develop general interest in their business. And don’t forget, an expert online business consulting firm can “shed some light” on what you need to do to really succeed!

One of the main reasons that people surf the Internet is to find good information. If, for example, you are interested in buying a car, you would not want to spend all day driving around and wasting gas as you visit the various car showrooms. You can shortcut the process considerably by surfing through the best car websites, getting the quality information you need and beginning to formulate your decisions this way.

These sites provide content on the products, like cars, that they sell. Visitors can see pictures and/or videos of the products as well as descriptions, pricing and location information.

Marketplaces – Have you heard of eBay? Very few people have not heard of the power of eBay. In a marketplace eCommerce setting, a smart middleman brings sellers and buyers together to transact business. In such instances, items for sale can be purchased directly or through a bidding process, just as with eBay.

In this arena, there are several businesses working in one area at the same time. In the virtual world you have no space restrictions and you can expand into larger spaces as you become more successful. The beauty here is that much of what you will need to do to get prepared for eCommerce, is already clearly laid out for you.

Food for thought: Figure out exactly what type of website you want to begin with. As any decent online business consulting firm will tell you, online businesses can use one or more of these types of websites to flesh out their business, and achieve a high level of visibility to the maximum amount of potential consumers.

Different mediums for recording information are becoming available within the online business arena, essentially because it is a whole lot easier to record the information through audio and video for access later. A large number of these businesses will then need the services of an expert virtual assistant to turn all the recorded media into print.

A significant percentage of medical professionals have been using Dictaphone and dictating services for a long time. Doctors often transcribe notes later for patient access and hospital records. The same goes for legal proceedings as well. It is a whole lot more convenient using a recording device and then taking time later to construct a written copy.

Online businesses have found extremely effective ways to market their products with audio and video. This can include how-to guides, interviews and tutorials, which are uploaded to websites to be accessed. It is sometimes the case that, for whatever reason, it’s difficult to understand what is being said. In these cases, the transcribed records of the recording could be very valuable for those interested.

Just like movies, audio and video can be translated into other languages to increase the results from overall marketing efforts. Many business owners would like to do just that, but they don’t know how, or don’t have the time, to transcribe or translate. These individuals need the help of a professional, someone like a virtual assistant who is well versed in the art of transcription and translation.

It is not as easy as you might think to transcribe recordings. As a virtual assistant transcriptionist, your clients will not have to struggle with this time consuming work. You will have prescription software available to you, enabling you to deal with all kinds of recordings that your clients come up with and you can select from a variety of formats for the final copy.

Some of these services can include:

• Medical Transcription
• Legal Transcription
• Transcription for video
• Transcription for podcasts
• Transcription Translation
• Audio transcription of business meetings

Once you notify them what file extensions you accept, clients can e-mail you their work in either audio or video format. In certain cases, they may wish to mail you tapes or CDs for less than urgent jobs. Depending on their particular needs, you can provide verbatim transcription or cleaned-up transcription that is grammatically correct.

If, as a virtual assistant transcriptionist, you speak another language well, or several languages, you can provide this kind of translation service for your clients as well. The clients themselves will have additional opportunities to expand their own customer base by producing material for non-English speaking customers. Each area of transcription can become a sub-niche if you want to specialise further. Medical or legal transcription alone can turn into a lucrative business if you really apply yourself to this area of expertise.

Transcription services can definitely prove lucrative for a virtual assistant, although on average this may take a long time to set up and consequently it may take time to set up your client base. As more and more online businesses pursue website development and use other media as marketing tools, they will need the skill of a transcriptionist and even a translator for their work.

If you know a virtual assistant currently, then they know how important it is to be present online. If you make yourself visible in as many places as you can, your business will certainly benefit. If you have the skills, you can be an Internet marketer and help others to achieve this same success.

Certainly, nobody can have failed to access the Internet yet, can they? The cyber world is filled with businesses with virtual storefronts, advertising and people talking on forums and in real-time. Businesses want to know what those people are talking about so they can tailor their advertising to bring in sales. This is where a virtual assistant can come in as much needed help for an Internet marketer.

Every online business needs a top notch marketing plan. The plan is specifically designed to get the products or services in front of the millions of people who are surfing the Web each and every day. Unless people know about the product and its advantages, they will buy from someone else. It takes time to set up an online marketing plan and this is an effort that many business owners just don’t want to get involved with, as they have so much else to do.

There are no easy shortcuts to Internet marketing success. Most business owners tend to use the trial and error method to see what works. With the help of an expert Internet marketer, that process gets a whole lot easier. A virtual assistant Internet marketer can make the difference between creating a powerful, highly successful new brand through website development, and complete obscurity.

Virtual assistants who can function as Internet marketing experts are in very high demand. They can take the pressure off of companies both small and large that want to concentrate on their product or service. It’s their job to draw the traffic to the site to see the products.

Just some of the tasks you would expect an Internet marketing VA to perform are:

• Article marketing
• Pay per click advertising (PPC)
• Search engine optimisation, also known as SEO
• E-mail marketing campaigns
• Direct mailing campaign
• Keyword research
• Social networking
• Link building

Sometimes a client will have an idea of what they want to do, marketing wise, but sometimes they won’t. It takes a combination of marketing tools to increase the visibility of a business online and off. For the business owner who doesn’t have time to explore and learn each one, the virtual assistant Internet marketer already possesses this expertise and can hit the ground running with a plan to get their business going online, fast.

Each of these areas is a part of Internet marketing, but most VA’s - even specialists, don’t offer every service. As an example, some VA’s could focus on search engine optimisation or e-mail marketing. These areas can be further subdivided into specific domains enabling a VA to build really strong campaigns that will attract the attention of business owners.

You can build your business by bringing additional business to other owners by taking on a virtual assistant Internet marketer. As the industry grows, you will profit from being on the forefront of technology while being an expert in your field.

One niche that virtual assistants are pursuing a great deal these days is that of web design or website development. We have seen that more and more bricks and mortar operations are turning to the Internet to market their products. Very often these individuals don’t know how to create an online presence creatively and they need help to make it all work.

What is a web designer? The web designer works with other businesses to set up websites for them. You may be knowledgeable in this area and have quite a lot of talent as well and can set up your virtual assistant business in this field.

The Internet is the next great frontier. On a daily basis, many millions of people visit the Internet to seek out information, buy products or services and conduct business. You need to build up an online presence to be able to access this world. This is how people will learn about your business and your existence.

Web designing has a tremendous learning curve. If you talk to somebody about CSS for HTML, they really won’t know what you are talking about. As such, if you want to build a website for your business, either an existing one or an Internet operation, it can be difficult to do so without making mistakes.

Mistakes can easily cost you business. Pages that won’t load or graphics that are too loud can turn visitors away before they even get a chance to see what the business has to offer. Many businesses would avoid this part if they could.

The field of web design is rapidly expanding and booming and is a perfect choice for a virtual assistant with the relevant experience. Website designers who can take the ideas of the business owner and turn them into reality are - and will continue to be, in great demand.

Virtual assistant website designers get involved with:

• Setting up a website
• Setting up a blog
• Monitoring discussions on a forum
• Setting up a page
• Conducting search engine optimisation
• Uploading files, videos, audio and podcasts
• Troubleshooting coding
• Website maintenance

Visitors are looking for different things when they visit a website. Placing ads at the top of the page is more eye-catching. Each webpage should be dedicated to a different product, so that information about each can be displayed and made available productively. Armed with good information, visitors are more likely to buy the product or service.

These examples are just a few off the tasks that you could be called on to provide. You would be amazed how business owners just do not want to deal with the problems of website maintenance and would be delighted for you to take on the management of complex graphics and blog postings for them.

The great news is that all of these areas can be broken up further into sub niches. Within web design you can concentrate on website maintenance or simply the initial setup process. Each element is in high demand and is much sought after. Any virtual assistant, who likes the technical side of the Internet, will see their passion fulfilled as a website designer.