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PHP Shopping Cart Benefits Your Website

PHP Shopping Cart Benefits Your Website

You are an Internet entrepreneur hoping to make it big in the online world of business. You realize that your website has to be functional, accessible to viewers and attractive to keep the attention of the viewer; but do you realize the benefits of having a PHP shopping cart on your website? A PHP shopping cart can allow the visitor to your website to perform many functional tasks such as adding to the cart, updating the cart when changes are made to the items in the cart and deleting unwanted items from the cart. The shopping cart should be set up in a familiar way and should have a textual message on each page to inform the visitor of how many items are in the cart to remind the visitor when they are browsing the site of the existence of the cart in this “non-physical” world where a virtual cart is not as visible as a real shopping cart would be in the real world.

You can make a PHP shopping cart very accessible to the website visitor by a link, such as “add to cart”, or a visible button located by each item on the web page. You can also have both button and textual message for each product on the page.

The PHP shopping cart has many traits that lends success for your business such as having the requisite information being sent to the cart, the ability to locate and execute a high compliance cart, and the ability to call an external PHP file. It is also possible to have the PHP shopping cart to have the option of paying via the popular Paypal service.

Most PHP shopping cart software programs come with complete ready-to-run PHP shopping carts that do not require any programming knowledge. The software is usually cost-effective and can be complement major ecommerce features. PHP shopping carts are usually easy design integration with any HTML editor and are usually accompanied by ready-to-use skin templates. PHP shopping carts are search engine friends, and gives the website owner the ability to accept online credit card processing. Most PHP shopping cart software allows for real-time shipping quotes and easy order notifications by email or SMS. If you are looking for a software program consider PHP shopping carts.

PHP shopping carts are flexible, fully functional that can easily be integrated into any ecommerce website. Look for one with custom template systems that will make the cart easy to set up with multiple payment gateways. When purchasing a PHP shopping cart make sure the in company you purchase the software from has free technical support, multiple currency support and offers multiple shipping configurations. You want total control over your shopping cart and having separate links from each product to the shopping cart will allow the customer to easily add products to the cart.

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Why You Should Start a Membership Website

Why You Should Start a Membership Website

Membership websites have been around since the internet began and they’ve always been very popular forms of revenue for webmasters. There are many reasons why you would benefit from starting your own membership website and we’re going to look at some of those reasons today. Membership websites are now more popular then ever due to software programs coming out that makes setting up a membership website a breeze. There are also over a dozen payment processors to choose from to process your member’s payments which help make things easy.

Basically you’ll be required to set-up your website and then from there you’ll only need to promote it and add updates. There are many choices you need to make when you’re setting up the website in the early stages. You’ll need to decide what you want to offer in the member’s area, and you should be using more then one type of content in your member’s area. For instance if you have a webmaster membership website you should have articles, reports, eBook, software, templates and anything else you can think of. People like seeing lots of options in the member’s area, even though they won’t use most of it they like knowing that you offer enough value for the money. Once you’ve chosen what’s going to be in your member’s area you need to get it done and add it in. You also need to set-up your payment processor and decide whether it will be monthly, yearly or one-off payment. This is strictly preference and you can choose what you want, but generally you should choose monthly.

With monthly recurring payments you’ll be making a stable income from your membership website and this is the goal. There is no point marketing your membership website and then selling one-off payments because then once the crowd joins you won’t make anymore money and you’ll still need to update it. I would go with monthly recurring payments and make sure you offer enough weekly updates so that your clients want to stay a member.

Once you have a membership website with members and recurring payments rolling in you’ll only need to work on updates for the website. This could be outsourced at this point in time since you’ll be making good money and then it’s on complete auto-pilot. You won’t need to do anything except whatever promotions you want to do, and whatever communication you want to make with the members. You should play a role in the communication because people like to talk with the owner and many people will also have questions. You should just make a forum and that will make it very easy for everyone to communicate.

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What Are The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Shopping Carts

What Are The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Shopping Carts? There are questions about shopping carts that are asked by customers and there are questions that Website owners have about shopping carts when they are looking to add a shopping cart to their Website. Some of the questions are the same, but most of the questions are different. What are the questions that customers and Website owners ask about shopping carts? Customers often ask questions about a shopping cart’s navigation such as how do I add products to the cart, and how do I delete items if I chance my mind? Customers want to know if they will be able to use their preferred payment method. They also want options when it comes to shipping so they can choose the quickest way, or the cheapest way or the preferred carrier. Customers are very concerned about security when it comes to using credit cards online. They also want to know which credit cards are acceptable to use? Customers also want to know how to make choices such as color or size when ordering. While browsing for multiple items customers also want to know if they can see what is in their cart and also if they can see a tally of the total dollar amount of the items in the cart? Customers want to know if there is any sales tax charged and if the store ships to where they live? Customers want to know not only what the shipping options are but they want to be able to compare the costs of shipping. There may be some customers who need to know if you ship to APO or FPO addresses or internationally? Website owners often ask a lot of questions when they are looking for a shopping cart solution for their business. They want to know how well the shopping cart will blend in with their Website. They have questions about how much HTML knowledge they will need to know in order to install or configure the shopping cart? They are naturally going to want to know about technical support if they encounter problems while installing or configuring the shopping cart. They are also going to want to know how responsive customer support is and how helpful they are. They are going to want to know if there is a user’s manual or a help topic or FAQs section that they can find answers when customer service is closed. When in the buying phase they will have lots of questions about features, administration, installation, maintenance, and upgrades. They will also want to know about pricing and payment plans so that they can know if the shopping cart is within their budget or not. It is up to the shopping cart software company to answer the questions of the Website Owner and it is up to the Website owner to answer the questions asked by the customer about the shopping cart. The shopping cart is a very important part of the success of any Website that sells products or services so answering questions about the shopping cart are vital too.

 

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Never Buy or Trade Traffic for Your Blog

Never Buy or Trade Traffic for Your Blog

No matter what niche of blog you have there always seems to be a traffic exchange system where you can either trade or buy traffic. Now for the most part you never want to trade or buy traffic for your blog simply because it’s a waste of money. You only want to change trade traffic if the other traffic is coming from another website or blog that is similar to yours and offers good traffic. If it doesn’t offer good targeted traffic then there is no reason why you would want to trade traffic with the website and you should stay away from it because it won’t help you out.

If you trade all your hard earned traffic then your blog visitors will be leaving your blog and you’ll be receiving visitors from the website you’re trading traffic with. Now if the website you trade with is a toplist or something then the traffic isn’t going to be worth exchanging traffic to get. You need to determine which trades will offer you equal or more traffic for your traffic, and the traffic needs to be targeted. There is no reason sending away your targeted traffic to get junk traffic in return that won’t amount to anything.

Now for those of you who have been thinking about spending money on buying traffic I would advise against doing so. You don’t want to buy traffic for your blog because the only reason traffic is for sale is because it isn’t good targeted traffic. If it was targeted traffic then you would never see people selling traffic by the thousands for dollars. The reason they sell their traffic though is because there traffic is garbage and they make more money by selling it then trying to convert it into sales. Now you could try and hope to convert the bought traffic into sales, but for the most part you won’t even see one sale from any traffic you buy. Unless you find someone who is selling some private traffic that is targeted and converts then you shouldn’t buy traffic.

Some people buy traffic to try and boost there website stats before selling it, but the problem with this is that it won’t help you. People will want to see the referrer stats and once they see that the traffic has been bought then they won’t want to buy your blog or if they do they won’t pay much. Buying traffic seems dodgy because the only reason people really do it is to boost their stats and other webmasters don’t like buying blogs with bought traffic.

Buying traffic from bad areas can also cause your blog problems in the future with the search engines. The more unnatural stuff you do the more likely the search engines are to find something wrong with what you’re doing and penalize you. The last thing you want to do is get penalized by the search engines so make sure you follow the rules. Stick to building links and getting organic traffic and the revenue will begin to build up. Buying traffic is just a waste of your money and you shouldn’t spend time even considering spending your hard earned money on useless junk traffic.

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Totally Wicked With Widgets

Totally Wicked With Widgets!

Feeling bored with your old theme? Want more customization in your blog? You can do that now with the WordPress Widgets! WordPress developer, Andy Skelton has announced the next generation of funky new WordPress plugin, WordPress Widgets, which drove the blogging community to both ends of the enthusiasm spectrum. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.

To the people around the world, gadgets or gizmos are typically used to refer to helpful little high technology devices or tools. But to the tech savvy people of the computer or technology world, a widget is used generically for a plugin that can be placed in your blog’s sidebar. The best thing about widget is that even if you do not have any knowledge of html or how to edit a web page, you can still easily drag and drop for convenient customization or to increase your blog’s functionality. Through the use of widget, a self-contained piece of code that allows you to move into, out of or anywhere inside the sidebar area of your blog without touching a line of code, you can easily personalize your blog and deliver information just the way you wanted it with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Apart from the standard widgets in WordPress, there is also a vast variety of external widgets to choose from. Webpage such as http://www.widgetbox.com provides thousands of widgets for your blog, profile, or webpage with numerous categories ranging from humor, news, movies, music, sports and a lot more. Besides having widgets, it also contains several guides on how to make your own widget to give your blog a ‘truly yours’ experience or if you’re a developer, writing a WordPress Widget is as easy as a plugin and they’ve even documented all the APIs (application programming interface) for you, as well as including guides for theme authors and current plugin authors. In addition to the 130,000+ blogs on WordPress.com, the talented developers also have the ability to keep tab on to the thousands of people who are still downloading the WordPress program every day and the many hundreds thousands of the already existing WordPress blogs out in the World Wide Web.

By using Javascripts and Ajax, widgets are very much similar to boxes representing content elements within your theme’s sidebar. The only disadvantage is that you can’t change how they look or work. The standard elements include;

Archives – displays archive links for each month that has posts.

Blog stats – displays statcounter and traffic count to your blog.

Calendar – displays a calendar of the current month with dates appearing as links if there are posts for that day.

Categories – displays a list of post categories as links to those posts.

Links – displays list of links (blogroll) separated by category.

Pages – displays a link to each Page.

Most Recent Posts/Comments – displays list of the blog’s most recent posts or approved comments.
Meta/admin – displays links to meta functions such as Site Admin, Login/Out, Entries RSS, Comments RSS, and WordPress.org.

Search – displays a Search box to enter text to search your blog. A submit button is also provided.

Text – used to enter HTML, Javascript, or just plain text. Using this opens a number of possible uses for text widgets.

Also a very cool thing you can do is to add RSS feeds from other websites with these new widgets in your sidebar. And as such, widgets can be used for an infinite variety of purposes limited only by your imagination. The only downfall is that too many widgets can slow down your blog. Hence, try to control yourself from over-widgetizing your blog and avoid badly designed widgets. After all, too much of anything is too much.

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Make Money like the Top Bloggers

Make Money like the Top Bloggers

Very few people expected that blogging could give them profits which
could encourage them to dump their regular jobs for it. However, it is
also a fact that most of the top bloggers had a humble beginning as
they did not start the blogs with the profits in mind. Nevertheless, the
blogs created by them were able to attract huge traffics which in turn
resulted in great profits for these bloggers. So what did these bloggers
do differently to make these mounds of money?

This article aims at discussing some strategies which were used by
some of the top bloggers for making money:

Create a blog on a niche of interest

All the top bloggers were able to make money through their blogs
because they were passionate about it. It is very crucial to determine
on a niche which is of great interest to you and many others. This will
ensure that you have a thorough understanding of the niche of the
blog, which in result will encourage you to add quality content to your
blog which will inevitably attract people with similar interests.

Create blogs with WordPress or Blogger accounts

Most of the successful blogs can be found with WordPress or Blogger
accounts. One of the reasons for the huge popularity of these blogs is
that they are more SEO friendly and hence receive more hits and
traffic.

Always add Content and value to your visitors

Even if your intention is to commercialize the blog, make sure that the
blog has content and ads which are of value to the visitors of your
blog. A blog which is able to draw the interest of a loyal audience will
result in increased traffic, which can play a vital role in heightening
your profits.

Pay regular visits to popular blogs on the same niche

Be interested in blogs on the same niche. This will result in increased
knowledge on the niche. Leaving comments on those blogs with back
links to your blog will result in increased audience for your blog. One
must understand that almost always, higher traffic leads to more and
higher paying ads which implies more profits for you.

Try selling advice

If you have considerable experience as a successful marketer, then
you can try selling advices in the form of full consulting packages. On
the contrary, you can also sell brief advices for a relatively lower fee.
This will almost inevitably result in increased cash flow, more content
and boosted traffic.

Spread your wings by creating blogs on different niches

If you are already the proud owner of a relatively established blog,
then it is high time that you start another blog on a different niche.
Placing the ads of these blogs on the established blog can result in
traffic for those blogs as well, which in turn will earn profits for you in
the long run.

It is very important to mention here that if you are interested in
making money like the top bloggers, then it is quintessential to
cultivate an attitude like them. Almost every blogger who has made it
big in this industry has dedicated a lot of time and effort to make their
blogs a hit. Like in any other job or industry, hard work is a must for
making it big in the world of blogging.

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Initial Steps to SEO

Initial Steps to SEO’ing Your Blog

When you first start out blogging you’ll most likely have no clue what you should do in order to make your blog more search engine optimized, and if you don’t then you need to learn quickly. Without properly making sure that your blog is ready for the search engines in the early stages, you could easily miss something important and then not notice it for awhile. This is why I find it so important to make sure that you follow certain steps each time you start a fresh blog. If you follow the simple steps I’m about to outline for you then you should be able to have search engine traffic coming into your blog within a week from starting it. There is more you can do then just the things listed here to make your blog even more SEO optimized, but if you follow these steps it’s a good start for now if you don’t know what else to do.

The first thing that you should do is make sure that you change the permalink structure in the wordpress admin section, and also make sure that you allow search engines to crawl the site. There is an option near the permalink structure option that will show you whether or not you’re allowing or blocking search engines, so make sure that this is switched to allowing the search engines. I once made the mistake of not checking this for a couple months and wondered why my blog had no indexed pages, and sure enough it’s because I was blocking them from crawling my site, so make sure you choose the right option.

After you do those two simple things you can then install the all-in-one SEO plug-in for wordpress which will allow you too choose the title, keyword and description for each page of your blog. These titles, keywords and descriptions are what the search engines will be reading when displaying their results so make sure that you optimize this section as best you can. The more searched phrases that you can get rankings for on the search engines the more traffic you’ll end up getting, so make sure that you take the time to set the proper titles, keywords and descriptions for each page and post.

There are now two more plug-ins that you should download to finish off this quick process and that’s the Google Sitemap Generator and KB Robot Txt plug-in. This will help your blog get more search engine traffic and will help your blog get its pages indexed faster in the search engines. It takes only a mere five minutes to set-up the two plug-ins so that there functional.

Now you just about have a nicely SEO’d wordpress blog that you can begin filling up with blog posts for the search engines. From here you spend a bit of time each day submitting to some blog directories, social bookmarking sites and comments on other blogs. All of these techniques will help keep your SEO on good track and after a month or two of doing this you should begin seeing that you have some nice rankings in the search engines. Of course the more searched the phrases you rank for the more traffic you’ll get so try your best to rank for the most searched keywords in your niche. Sometimes these keywords can take months to get rankings for, so don’t become discouraged if it doesn’t happen overnight. Some keywords will lots of competition will be really hard to get, but if you ever do get it then you could strike rich with the amount of traffic you’d get. You’d be surprised at how many different keywords you could rank for with a blog, and it doesn’t take long to start getting those rankings if you put in a bit of work.

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The Indispensable Shopping Cart

The Indispensable Shopping Cart

Shopping carts are a necessity for those Website owners who wish to sell physical or digital goods and also those who sell services. Customers have come to expect that a serious ecommerce site will have a shopping cart and will exit a site it if doesn’t. A shopping cart has become an indispensable part of doing business online.

A customer can place items into a virtual shopping cart and continue browsing the site to locate other items of interest. The customer can usually look at the top of the screen and see a running total of how many items they have placed in the cart and can usually also tell a running total of dollars spent so far. While navigating the online shopping cart a customer is able to add to the cart, delete items from the cart, change quantities of the items that are in the cart and make option choices such as color and size from the cart. Shopping carts will even do the math for the customer regarding totaling the retail amount of the order, adding any necessary tax and also adding the shipping fee to the order. Most shopping carts will even email the customer after they have made a purchase and thank them for shopping at the particular Website and will confirm the order that they just placed. The fact that a shopping carts software can be programmed to do this means that the customer will feel secure in the purchase.

Because most ecommerce sites have shopping carts, if your site lacks one you will look unprofessional to a customer visiting your site. The last thing you want to do is drive away potential customers because you did not think to provide a shopping cart.

A shopping cart can provide many benefits to the online store owner including providing data collection and market research based on customer usage, such as how many carts have been abandoned before the purchase was completed, and how much traffic went through the shopping cart. A secure, easy to use shopping cart can even foster repeat business when customers enjoy their shopping cart experience.

The benefits of a secure and multiple featured shopping cart can give your customers a shopping experience that will put them at ease dealing with you. When a customer feels comfortable dealing with you they will purchase more items, and also come back to purchase again from you. They will also spread the word about the good shopping experience they encountered with you and you will pick up more customers by word-of-mouth advertising.

A shopping cart is an indispensable tool to the Website owner who sells goods or services because of the professional look of the site, the shopping experience a customer will enjoy using the shopping cart and because of the invaluable data a shopping cart can provide the Website owner about the shopping habits of the customers who visit the site.

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