1. Attacking and Defending Your Ecommerce Niche

• • Stephan Miller

• Introduction

• Forget Keywords and Market Research

• Build Your Presence As Fast As You Can

• Start Sacrificing Pawns and Emphasizing Winners

• Using Your Customers to Work For You

• The Bottlenecks

• Boosting Profits Without Adding Overhead

• Staying Ahead

2. Introduction

Being successful at e-commerce is more than building a site and getting traffic.

Strategies are like belief systems. Use them while they work. Modify or throw them out when they don't.

Don't fall asleep at the wheel.

Part of your job is keeping up to date.

3. Forget Marketing First

Be knowledgeable or have a passion.

Upload everything possible as fast as possible.

Huge sites have the advantage of being a link-juice factory.

Build links to your site.

Be active in communities where your customers are.

Help people use the products and don't sell.

4. Sacrifice Pawns

Set up analytics.

Track your most profitable sku's.

Restructure your site to emphasize them.

Move high traffic keywords higher up in the SERP's.

Use known profitable keywords in Pay per Click campaigns.

Write content based on these keywords (on site blog).

5. Using Your Customers

A large percentage of your customers need help. A small percentage of them will ask for help.

1,000,000 ways to contact you. Use a few.

A knowledge base for answers.

Your best evangelists. Give them every opportunity to be vocal, good or bad.

Find their questions. Answer their questions. Customize your site for them.

6. Bottlenecks

These can slow down growth if not planned correctly.

Shipping

Inventory Control

Customer Service

Create a efficient work-flow so you can work on new sites and projects to expand your presence.

7. Higher Profits and Lower Expenses

Sign up for related affiliate programs. List their products on your site.

Sell ads to companies that are related to yours but aren't direct competitors.

Set up an affiliate program so that if you don't rank high, chances are that an affiliate linking to your site will. Many affiliates make more than e-commerce webmasters.

8. Staying On Top

The first site online will not stay first.

The internet is tranparent. There is no way to stop copy cats.

You are a target when you become #1.

Guerrilla marketing via long tail

A niche is a sliding scale.

Break up sites into multiple niches if necessary.

Early adopter is a hat you must wear.