Blog Profile – New Business Website/Blog Gets it’s Start With iBusinessLogic

I received a call the other day from the son of a nearly lifelong (at least it seems like a long time) friend of mine.

My friends son, Keith Bloemendaal is the sales manager of a local fence building contractor company in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina.

Carolina Custom Fences builds high quality custom fences and they are proud of the fact that they have some of the best installers in the area.

Keith Bloemendaal called iBusinessLogic to ask our opinion of the current Carolina Custom Fences website (follow the link above).

As you can see, the current website is a bit bland and really does not engage the public. This is web 1.0 at its best and is about 6-8 years out of date for website design. The owner of the company, Scott, did the best job he could with the tools his web builder gave him, but the results just do not compare with the state of the art today. Read more

Miami “Geek Dinner” Blogger & Podcaster Mashup Rohit Bhargava, Jay Berkowitz & Joseph Jaffe

A nifty video of a “Geek Dinner” I attended in Miami with the likes of Joseph Jaffe (camera wielding maniac), Rohit Bhargava, Jay Berkowitz, Lisa Sparks of Constant Contact, and many other notable and interesting people.

Read my article about the differ in the Trading Assistant Journal – The title of the article “Refresh Miami Blogger Dinner – Conversation Evolves” may be a bot off topic from the looks of this wild video, but believe me, the conversations were very inspired.

I am the Grey haired guy in the blue suit stirring his Mojito, a bit thrown off by the camera being thrust in his face by Jaffe, but it seems I made a better recovery than I had originally imagined.

eBay eCommerce Blogging or Affiliate Sales Why not All of the Above?

Do you have your own off eBay website?

As an eBay seller you know you should have your own website but for some unknown reason our research indicates that most eBay sellers do not. Why?

If it is because you do not have the time to set up another high maintenance difficult to control Internet presence… You may not be aware of all of the new and interesting ways to get online with your own name and brand while not having to maintain that online portal each and every day.

A website can be thought of as a more difficult animal to manage than an eBay store or auction listing business. In reality the maintenance is much lower while sometimes the cost to get started can be a bit higher. Continuing costs of a website versus an eBay business are completely different however and by an almost universal consensus the stand alone website will win the cost to maintain battle every time.

So, why eBay? Because with the massive traffic generation provided by the huge amount of inbound links and the pure enormity of eBay a seller can have a higher percentage chance of making a sale on eBay than on a stand alone website.

What if you want a website and the traffic of eBay but you do not have enough source of supply to populate your own eCommerce site to compete with the massive lists of products found on eBay or Amazon? We think you could be quite happy with the following solution.

One particularly interesting method of populating an off eBay website which will not simply promote your brand and your eBay items but also will pay you back and run on autopilot. Is to install phpBay Pro on an existing or new php based website or Wordpress CMS site.

phpBay Pro (See Link in the Sidebar) is an Ebay software script available as a plugin for Wordpress or as an API (application programming interface) for php driven web sites. It’s built for simplicity, meaning that you can have it up and running in just a matter of minutes. Both versions come with documentation.
Ebay Affiliate Software

phpBay Pro enables web publishers to quickly and easily add keyword rich eBay auction listings to your Wordpress or php driven site to generate serious affiliate revenue in a matter of minutes!

What this means to those who may not be aware of the terminology used in the phpBay Pro company literature is…

With phpBay Pro any website can import any eBay listing category, store, or keyword group directly into a stand alone website or Wordpress based self hosted blog. When the owner of such a website signs up as an eBay affiliate at Commission Junction, the resulting traffic directed to eBay from these listings inserted into any own website or blog will generate 24 hour a day revenue for that site. Those same listing imported into your off eBay website add constantly updating and new content to that site. For SEO this is a great advantage. Your site can be relatively static, yet always have new listings imported providing recent and relevant content for search engine spiders to chew upon.

These imported listings can be from your own store, your favorite category, or of the best items from eBay’s hot list. The best part is that the imported listings will look as though they are designed as part of your original website. It won’t look like some eBay generated widget or html builder import. Well, actually… the best thing is that as the website owner you can make money on any item sold via your listings imported from eBay and you will not have to ship or stock or inventory any of them.

Check Out phpBay Pro – Follow that link below…. Tell em the All Business Auctions sent you! Or give us a call, we use phpBay Pro ourselves and would be happy to help you set up a website which can take advantage of this technology. We will insert eBay live listings with phpBay to a new site which could also contain not only your eBay listings from an existing eBay store but also have a page of eBay listings from other sellers stores (a great way to test niche’s) and also have a web 2.0 style blog attached to build a sense of community with your buyers. The options are endless!

Blog for Business – Does your company need a blog?

As I was working on this blogs transition to our own hosting and a new wordpress theme… to: www.allbusinessauctions.com/blog ….

I started to think about all of the businesses in the world who could benefit by blogging. I came to the conclusion that there is not a single business I am familiar with which could not benefit by establishing a company blog…

Blogs are simply an amazing way to get your name and information recognized throughout the world. There are many reasons why blogs are beneficial…

• Fastest way to get your site indexed by the search engines
• Best way to increase your rankings in the search engines – fresh content is king
• Gives your audience (customers) a feel for what you do and how you do it. Write your blog as though you were talking directly to your customers.
• Quickest way to get your new information, idea, products known in the world.

If you have not really caught on to the “blogosphere” thing yet, don’t think your too late because blogging is still in it’s infancy and your company still has time to get in to the mix.

While our blog story here at All Business Auctions may not be typical… and I can not promise your company will have the same experience when establishing a blog… I would like to share a quick run down or the positive results we have experienced since starting this free wordpress.com blog less than 90 days ago.

1. Learned volumes about the blogosphere and how a single post in a wordpress blog can be indexed by google in less than 12 hours.
2. Gained recognition among like minded business owners in our field.
3. Became known as a source of information by major news organizations. (blog post: Quoted in the New York Times technology section).
4. Gained international business inquiries through blogging about relevant news in our field. (Inquiry about eBay Stores design work from Romania)
5. Won a small blogging award – first place SEOLogs blog contest
6. Broadened our company appeal by detailing just a few of the services we can provide and simply writing about the benefits of those services.
7. With the move to our own hosting and attaching the blog to our AllBusinessAuctions.com website we will increase the exposure for our company and increase the traffic on our Joomla based website. Fresh relevant content is indexed quickly in the search engines and is the most powerful for SEO tool in the toolbox.

I could increase the list above but after only 90 days online with a “free” wordpress.com blog, I think these are significant points.

Should you look into blogging for your business? While some people blog as a business your company or small business could benefit greatly by blogging for business.

It’s a whole lot less expensive than pay per click advertising, or the yellow pages and may not replace either for your business needs… But unlimited indexed content with your company name attached, could not hurt!