Big Commerce is courting me

just update. Received call from marketing branch of Big C and they cover SEO (backlinking), adwords, Social Media and Custom design your site. The also build back-end blog that has populated keywords designed for crawlers from google, bing & yahoo (not blog designed for general public to read) and hopefully ranks your product images in google product searches. Price packages start at $500 and go up to $25,000 monthly.

Thanks for the recommendation, Tim. I visited his site and didn't see a platform, though. I did read a couple articles, though, and didn't see a whole lot that I didn't already know, although I'm sure there's much more information in the product that he has for sale.

I'm not in a position right now to drop $3,000.00 up front on pay per click to find out what's converting, as he recommends. Unfortunately, like so many others, I lost my Adwords account and that leaves Bing, which I do use sometimes, but I've never used Facebook advertising.

I can still spy on my competition, though, and see where they're spending their money. I can also talk to account reps where I buy my products to find out what they're selling a lot of right now.

In addition, I also have a good relationship with a competitor and we keep each other in the loop about what's selling well right now, what's good or bad quality, what's getting rave reviews, what's being returned a lot, etc. Most people don't think so, but your competition can be a great resource. Just treat each other with respect.

I'm doing 100% telemarketing and have been for years successfully, but I figured it was about time I got an online presence since most of my competitors have.

Ron, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. As I said, I didn't see an option for an ecommerce platform on your site, only a how-to ebook. Care to share? :-)

Joe

Understood. :-)

I appreciate your honesty. I'll definitely check out "Zero Cost Traffic" once I'm up and running. I signed up to be on your list as a reminder. I can definitely use some zero cost traffic. Even if I were still using Adwords, it would be unlikely that I could compete with the "big boys" right out of the gate. The cost per click in my niche is very high because of the lifetime customer value. However, I've seen that some of them aren't very experienced with basic SEO and I think I can exploit that without too much effort.

I lost my Adwords account back when Google did their first sweep of affiliates. I believe it was July, 2008? They closed 15,000 accounts then and then did even more the following November. I lost about 75% of my income overnight. That hurt. It hurt a lot of people. I learned a hard lesson. Never put all of your eggs in one product or traffic source.

I was doing well with CPA offers at that time, promoting for a few different companies and trying to do things the right way, unlike many others. Well, I screwed up ONE time and made the mistake of promoting a business opportunity offer that others were making a lot of money with. I set it up one evening to test it with a $100.00 cap, ran it until the following morning and found that I'd broke even. Still, I wasn't comfortable with it, so I shut the campaign down.

Three weeks later I got the the unhappy news from Google stating that they were not only closing my account, but my wife's account as well! We'd been using the same credit card and she was apparently "guilty by association". Sucked.

I contacted Google about three months ago and explained what had happened, admitted my mistake, asked them to look at all of the 100% clean business I'd done for around 4 years prior to that and asked them to reconsider, but they wouldn't. Actually, the person said it wasn't because of the single incident, it was because of my affiliation with that one CPA company. Apparently they'd been really hammering some people. I wasn't aware, honestly.

Anyway, live and learn. The good news is that there's still a lot more traffic out there besides Google.

Thanks for replying.

Joe