The price that you pick for your site’s offerings will be intimately tied to your sites conversion rate. If the price you pick is too high, then even with excellent presentation, your conversion rate will begin to drop. On the other hand, if you price your offering too low people will assume your product is not of much value, and your conversion rate will also suffer.

The exception to the two guidelines mentioned above is websites that run as discount operations. These kinds of sites can be successful, however this is very difficult model for those just starting their first business. One reason for this is because these kinds of sites usually require the business owner to maintain his own inventory.

If you are drop shipping, and acting as a middle man, then chances are that it will be just about impossible for you to undercut your competitors and still make a profit. The problem with keeping an inventory when starting out is that it requires storage space, and that it comes with the risk of taking a loss if you are not able to move your inventory.

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So as we touched on in our last post, all things that relate to monetization in the online business world start with Traffic. It is the river flowing towards your online business. Feel free to let me know if I am getting too metaphysical sounding.

Anywho, once we have this traffic flowing towards us, it is our job to funnel it through some sort of conversion piece. The purpose of this conversion piece is to catch a certain percentage of the traffic flowing towards us and to convert them into some actionable event, such as a sale.

If you are sending traffic from an email list to a specific landing page on one of your e-commerce sites that sells a single product, or a single product with multiple variations, then in theory your conversion rate could get as high as 5%

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Well do you? If so we want to know! Here at Feedback Secrets we are gearing up for a new series on the subject of e-commerce sites. To kick off this series, we are asking you to share a link to your e-commerce site.

All you need to do is email us at feedbacksecrets@gmail.com with your site’s name, URL, and up to seven words describing the nature of your business.

We’ll post your link and site description in this post and we will continue to update this list throughout the week. BTW, no sites of an “adult nature” please. Thanks for your participation.

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So earlier today I was eating at a local location of a restaurant chain that has become a recent lunch time favorite of mine. The chain is a small but up and coming organization, I think at the moment they only have four locations.

I don’t know how long the company has been in business. I first heard about the place about a month ago, and since then every day I walk past it during lunch, the place is packed. The food is really good and the price is not totally unreasonable. In their menu, they have managed to come up with a new twist on an old theme.

So here is what happened… I was stuffing my face, enjoying a break from work when I happened to look towards the restaurant’s front door. At that moment a cute little girl, who to me looked to be about seven years of age, walked in with a high power Minolta digital camera complete with a giant manual focus lens attached to the front.

What happened next was even more bizarre. This little girl systematically walked up to just about every menu hanging on the wall, focused her camera and then snapped a picture. After she was done with the menus, she repeated the process with the marketing posters on the wall. I don’t know if she got a shot of every single marketing piece they had, but she came close.

I noticed at least one other person in the restaurant who had noticed the strange behavior of this adorable little girl. He had a look of utter confusion on his face that seemed to say “what in the world is going on”? Most of the other patrons seemed not to notice this tiny photography enthusiast.

So what in the world does this have to do with online business? Well the business world, in all its forms, can be highly competitive. This level of competition drives people to do all sorts of things in an attempt to gain an edge. I am not suggesting that you engage in any business activities which make you feel uncomfortable.

What I am advising is for you to be aware of some of the techniques that others may use in attempt to gain information on you or your business. There will be some information that will be almost impossible to protect, like a menu on a wall. There will be other details that you will want to protect to the best of your abilities.

In our last post on Batch Processing we wrote about the incredible value that can comes from knowing the “priority stack” for your business and making sure that those weekly business functions that you deem as most important, are completed without fail, every week.

So what is the other secret to batch processing? As we mentioned in our last post in this series, hopefully one day your business will grow to the point where you have to hire people to work in order to farm out some of your business’ functions. Until you reach that point you will have to decide which functions you will take on, and which you will leave alone until you can retain some help.

Once again there should be two lists. A first list of those functions that you must complete each week without fail, and a second list of all the tasks you hope to hammer out in an ideal week. The second secret ingredient in batch processing is to make sure to leave some business function off of both of these lists.

Each of us is different, and some entrepreneurs seem to be “superhuman” in there ability to accomplish an unnatural number of tasks each and every week. The point is that you know your own optimal stress load. To little stress and human beings tend to get lax, on the other hand, if you stack too much responsibility on yourself you may feel swamped if you are unable to complete your tasks.

Several weeks in a row of feeling swamped can have an extremely discouraging effect on a small business owner. This is why we recommend a small list, faithfully completed every week. Too much of load and you run the risk of either stressing yourself to the max or of spreading yourself so thin that you cannot maintain the standards of quality that you have set for your organization. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”

Whatever form of online business you engage in, you can probably benefit from batch processing. This could mean blogging, writing sales copy, combing thorough analytics, cold calling…whatever. For those not familiar with batch processing, it is the practice of lumping together related business activities in an attempt to be as efficient as possible.

So what is this first secret ingredient suggested in the title? Well before we get to it, let’s consider some background. Engaging in any sort of weekly routine with diligence for month after month obviously requires self discipline.

And there seems to be a direct correlation between discipline and financial success in online business, especially in the early stages when there is usually only one person working on the business. There are however limit to self discipline as even the most disciplined entrepreneurs run into snags, emergencies, other miscellaneous delays. So what should happen to our batch processing schedule when we run into these inevitable distractions?

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My favorite movie so far this summer has been Kung Fu Panda, and my favorite character from the movie is Master Oogue. I’m an Oogue fan for two reasons, first he is super wise and second, despite the fact that he is obviously a high-mileage turtle, he is fast when he needs to be.

So how does this relate to online business? One thing in particular which Oogue says to Shifu, “let go of the illusion of control”, I think resonates especially well in the world of online business.

Human beings, as creatures of habit, naturally want to feel in control. The problem is that in the crazy world of growing your own business, rarely are things ever under control.

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If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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A story made its way around the Twitter-verse starting about two day’s ago regarding a seemingly ground breaking event had occurred. An eBay auction for the right to sponsor the Twitter feed of Ian Schafer for one month had ended with a closing bid of $1,082.01. For more complete details on the auction you can view this auction’s auction page on eBay.

At first this would seem to be a momentous event. Certainly being able to raise over a thousand dollars for the right to sponsor a Twitter feed with less than 600 followers, for one month is noteworthy, even if the purpose of the auction was not for profit. According to Mr. Schafer’s Twitter feed all proceeds from the auction are to go to the David Wright Foundation.

The winning bid for the auction came from a bid from eBay user “teammetacafe” who prior to winning this auction had zero eBay Feedback. I am assuming that the eBay user “teammetacafe” refers to the metacafe.com website, though I am not sure. It is important to note that this winning bid may well have been totally legitimate and un-engineered in any way, shape, or form.

What is particularly interesting however, about this auction is its bid history. If you look at the bid history you will see that there were 22 bids from what appears to be 5 eBay accounts. If you examine this bid history closely you will see that with the exception of the first bidder who seems to have an eBay feedback rating of 50, none of the other accounts had a feedback rating higher than 1 prior to the end of this auction.

Hmm… a bunch of eBay accounts with little or no feedback history bidding what some would consider a surprisingly high amount for the rights to sponsor a Twitter feed for a month. What could it mean?

Regardless of how the end result of this auction came about, I think that there is an important lesson in this story. The lesson here is that marketing, to a large degree, is about creating a spectacle and it is clear that Mr. Schafer here has succeeded in doing so with the sponsorship he has obtained for his Twitter feed.

Assuming that you have a WordPress based blog, and your own hosting, then there are several ways that you can add social bookmarking buttons to your posts. This post will briefly go over two options for adding this functionality to your site.

The first option that I would suggest is the option that we use here at Feedback Secrets. We use Feedburner.com to syndicate our RSS feed and FeedBurner allows you the option to add social bookmarking buttons to your posts from inside the control panels of your FeedBurner account.

If you are currently using FeedBurner, then log in to your account and click on the “Optimize” tab. Then click on the “FeedFlare” link in the left hand sidebar. Here you will have the option to select various social bookmarking links to be added to the posts on your site. Please note that next to the option for each link is a check box for adding the link to your site and another for adding the link to your feed.

The next option that I would like to suggest is the plug-in available from ShareThis.com. The ShareThis plug-in is probably the most used method for adding social bookmarking buttons to a blog that I have seen. The advantage of this plug-in is it’s clean and unobtrusive look.

The plug-in appears on the bottom of your posts as a single button in the shape of the ShareThis logo. Once you click on this icon you are given the option to bookmark the post with a host of other social bookmarking and social networking sites.

We hope that this brief overview provided you with some idea for adding social bookmarking buttons to your site. If you have used another method to add the functionality of social bookmarking to your site please leave a comment and let us know about your experience and whether you would recommend that method.