Web Merchant Resource Center

A couple of months ago, in an article titled “Are social networks worth the effort?”, Chris Crawford raised the question: “Are you bombarded with requests to join Linkedin.com, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Twitter.com

…? If [not], are you at least curious as to what these things are …?”

Social networks, blogs, and all manner of “Web 2.0” options have rapidly transformed how people interact with each other online.

Chris focused on LinkedIn, a social network that focuses more on business networking. Meanwhile, Daria Topousis has contributed several articles about Twitter.  These and all the past Tech Beat articles are archived on the Redwood Technology Consortium website at www.redwoodtech.org. I’d like to now move on to discuss Facebook and MySpace.

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Do you accept payment under either the Visa & MasterCard logos? If so, are you certified as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant?

If you don’t know what PCI DSS is, join the crowd. While we believe Visa & MasterCard really haven’t raised enough attention with this yet, this is changing swiftly. If you are accepting credit or debit cards, then you are required to be PCI DSS compliant once you accept the first transaction; however, you may not have been required to certify that you were compliant.

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The Internet has exploded as a medium for organizations and small businesses to find audiences for their services and products in the past several years. Searching the Internet is as likely a way for audience to find you as any other means – IF you have an online presence.
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If you are using Parallel’s ( was Webhost Automation’s ) HELM control panel, you might be scratching your head on how to get HELM to set up a 301 permanent redirect to a URL.

We scratched our heads on it for a while too, and frankly, we stumbled up one the answer quite by accident.
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If you are one of our Web Merchant Services clients processing credit cards on the Elavon (was NOVA) network, you have just received a letter from Elavon informing you that you have until December 15, 2008 to document PCI DSS compliancy or Elavon will automatically enroll you with TrustKeeper at the rate of $135.00/yr.

We expect a lot of questions about this, so we are trying to answer them here, and will continually update this blog post over the next two weeks with current information that will help you understand what this is about and what to do about it.

IF YOU ARE NOT A WEB MERCHANT SERVICES CLIENT, Please take your issue up with your own provider. You will find usefull resources here, but this post is for our clients only. If you are not one of our clients, we cannot help you further than what we have posted here.

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(This is the first in a series on the core fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization)

I recently got an email, from a client that had been hosting with us for several years, requesting a quote to rebuild their website because they weren’t being found in the search engines for phrases like “personal injury.” It immediately struck me as an excellent example of the mysteriousness with which merchants and business owners approach what search engines do. . . . and honestly why they wouldn’t necessarily have to rebuild their site at all.

What they really needed to do was to at least provide content on “personal injury” on their website.
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Though rare, every now and again it is necessary to change the domain name of a site – say someone finally just got that domain name they’ve been after for years, for example.

However, how to change it without losing all of the search engine indexing that existed on the old site . . . especially if the URLs already indexed in search engines contained query strings?  If we just do a typical permanent / 301 domainn redirect, all of those pages that used query strings to provide content will simply redirect to the home page of the new domain, which would be dismal for Search Engine Optimization, affiliate links, back links, and other sources of traffic.
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Relatively recently we have had to go through another round of re-evaluating what “top shelf” shopping cart solution to recommend to our clients. This is never a fun task, as it takes a lot of very careful evaluation and research.

After doing all of that carefull evaluation and research, and after our experience with many other shopping carts, we got excited about the new AbleCommerce 7, ASP.NET shopping cart.

There are many “propeller head”/geek programmer reasons for our decission here, which we have started to detail here:
http://www.wmsmerchantservices.com/shopping-carts/AbleCommerce.asp

More importantly, though, for the topic of this post, we wanted to point out the what a fabulous community AbleCommerce has at http://forums.ablecommerce.com. AbleCommerce 7 is not only a very feature rich, robust shopping cart application, but it has a very vibrant community behind it.

NOTE: If you are interested in our contributions to this forum, search it for “author” Sean@WMS.

Pete Caputa of HubSpot discusses 13 ways to use your blog to improve sales for your business:

1. Subscribers Sell Themselves.
2. Answering Questions with Blog Posts.
3. Invite Prospects to Write Guest Blog Posts.
4. Highlight Your Client’s Success. They’ll Send It To Their Mom (and Everyone Else).
5. Ask Your Prospects for Feedback in the Comments.
6. Link to Your Prospect’s Blog. Send Them Some Readers.
7. Build a Community of Clients, Prospects and Partners On Your Blog.
8. Track What Prospects Read, What Comments They Leave, How Often They Visit.
9. Be a Resource. Link to Other Relevant Articles.
10. Promote Your Blog Via Email.
11. Promote Your Blog Via Social Media and Social Networking Sites.
12. Blogging Supports Search Engine Optimization.
13. Blogging Creates a Discussion and You’re the Host

Read the full article here:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4061/13-Ways-to-Use-Your-Blog-to-Improve-Your-Sales-Process/?source=email0908

Starting August 12 there’s a fairly new beta directory, AffSphere, that is going to be sharing their affiliate income with Contributing Authors.  This is the first syndication directory actually offering to share revenue their Contributing Authors!

This is an excellent Search Engine Marketing opportunity for all merchants motivated to write unique content to attract new customers. Simply write up a short article with your own unique content, submit it to AffSphere.com, and generate exposure for your business, traffic, AND eight possible ways to automattically produce residual income.

To learn more, start at AffSphere.com