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Starting a business online is no longer as difficult as it used to be! Now, there are plenty of interesting business ideas
that anybody can pick up from various Internet resources. Startup related cost, which used to deter many in taking action,
has become negligible. Many people already started to notice this! According to a recent report GoDaddy has gained 294,368 new sites in just the first
5 months of 2005 while the top four domain registrars combined, including GoDaddy, have gained more than half a million. Mind
it! This is not the quantity of domains registered, this is the quantity of websites hosting with them! This recent
explosive growth means one thing. Online business is on the rise!
So, if you have one or several products to sell to a large geographical area and you would like to start an online
business fairly quick but you don’t have much money to spend on it, there are still ways to do so.
Using the integrated features of many portals you can start your dream e–commerce
site on a shoe-string budget within several hours. I am going to show you how
to do this on Rusbiz.com.
Sign up
Preparation needed:
Write an informative, precise but easy–to–read profile of your company in less than 600 words. If your
company’s name is less than 12–letter long you are fine. If not, choose a nice name, preferably, by shortening
the company name. This you will require for login name. Create a logo for your company. You can do it later if you
don’t have a logo as yet.
Steps: Register your company by filling
up the membership form.
Choose a membership other than basic. You need an option with the ability to
build a web store. Copy and paste your prepared profile. Once you submit the
form you will be taken to a page called My Business.
Time required: Maximum one hour including preparation.
Add products to the e-catalog
This step will help you create electronic catalog of your products that you will use on your website as well.
Preparation: Take digital pictures of your products. Each picture should not be more than 100 KB. Make thumbnail
versions of your pictures. Thumbnails should be less than 10 KB. Both pictures and thumbnails should be of JPG or GIF
formats.
If your product requires special instructions, schemas, etc., make an electronic copy of them as well. This should be of
doc, txt, or PDF format and less than 50 KB in size.
Steps: Now from your My Business page click on the "Add Product" button. You will be prompted to
"Add Product" page. Next step is to select the correct subcategory, where your product should be listed. First,
choose the main category and than keep on selecting the right subcategory until you end up on the final subcategory. This
E–catalog is based on USPSC, electronic classification standard, which offers a ten–digit, five–level
logical hierarchy for organizing products and services. Once you successfully selected the fifth level subcategory you will
be prompted to a detail form. Add all the necessary information about your product. Insert the pictures in the designated
places. Once you finished, submit the form. Continue doing the same for all the products. You have just created your first
electronic catalog!
If you face difficulties, as a premium member you don’t have to go through the steps outlined above, you can just
send all the required information to Rusbiz customer service and they will take care of your e–catalog.
Time required: half an hour including preparation.
Build your web store
You will be surprised to know that part of your web store is already created from the information that you have inserted
so far! From My Business page click on Manage web store in order to check and edit what you already have so far and what
else do you have to do. Your web store has 9 more pages apart from the product pages. The pages are Home, Contact, Company
events, Services, Employee information, Company News, Surveys, and FAQ.
Preparation: You can gather information for some of the vital pages to give your site a professional look and
feel. As the pages are template based, you can edit and insert needed information, whenever you like.
Steps: From Manage Web Store the first thing you should do is configure your web store. This means, you have to
select currency of your choice, payment and delivery methods. Next you should choose which of the products you would like to
display on your home page. I’ll also suggest you to fill up some of the above mentioned pages, i.e. employee bios,
etc. This gives your web store a human touch.
Voila! Your e–commerce website is ready to go!
Time required: Maximum two hours including preparation.
Here are the advantages of having a web store like this one:
You don’t need to know HTML
Navigation and editing of your website is easy and simple
You receive instant access to Rusbiz community of thousands of prospective customers
Shopping cart is an integrated part of the package
Membership allows you to sell products through Rusbiz e–marketplace
As a member you are also allowed to use Rusbiz business process management system
You will get access to other useful features of Rusbiz system
Your website will be indexed by major search engines within a matter of days
The best thing about this method is you can start with 3 months Simple Membership for just US$ 65! If you need to use a
domain name, you can readdress it to your Rusbiz web store. After a while, if you feel that you require a
full–fledged e–business website,
professional developers from Rusbiz can take care of this as well. As more and more people are getting involved in online
business, if you don’t start now, you might miss the boat! So, take action!
How to install?
In order to add this feature go to the "My Search History" link
on your Google home page and search results pages, by clicking the My Search
History link on Google Labs, or by going directly
to http://www.google.com/searchhistory.
If you ever registered with any of Google’s services, i.e. Gmail, Newsgroups,
Froogle, etc. you may use same user name and password to install this feature.
If you don’t have account with Google as yet, don’t worry unlike
Gmail account you can go to the following page https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
and create a new account. Once you created an account, you can turn on "My
Search History", which will add the link to your Google home page and
search results pages.
Is this feature something new?
This is actually not a new feature on the Internet. This service of Google
has striking similarity to the one already existed on Meta Search tool www.a9.com.
Other search engines like www.askjeeves.com
and little know www.findory.com also have some
thing similar incorporated to their systems. A9 also has a feature called
"Discover", which along with your search results recommends sites
relevant to the query. The My Yahoo Search test released in October also enables
users to save, share and post notes on their own search results.
Privacy issues
There is always a reason to be concerned when your Internet activities are
tracked and kept by any company. However, Google has taken several steps so
that a user can have total control on how he exploits this service.
First, you have to log on in order to use this feature. Your log in status
is visible all the time on the Google home page. If you can see your account
name on top right side of the page, this means you are signed in.
If you don’t want certain searches to be tracked by Google, you have
two choices. Either you can suspend the service for a while by clicking on
the "pause" button or just log off from the service.
You can also erase search results from history page by clicking on "Remove"
link. Combination of all these mechanisms will allow you to keep your searches
private and protected. However, if you are overly concerned about privacy,
you better refrain from using this feature.
Benefits
Most of Google’s features carry great values for users. The personalization
of search processes using "My Search History" allows you to get
a better search experience. It’s a significant leap towards creating
an ideal search system.
The benefits of this feature for Google are also enormous! Almost all of
Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Naturally, Google’s ability
to provide more refined search results to users will allow vendors better
targeting their market niche. They would spend substantially more if they
could show ads to users based on their past search history. But, Google claims
that at this moment it is not planning to post any ads on your history pages.
No doubt, this is an interface that many of us have been waiting for quite
a while. However, its impact on the future of search engines remains to be
seen!
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Business
Weblog covering online business, Internet Marketing, Internet Technology,
International Trade, Business Consulting, ecommerce, Â2Â marketplace,
etc.
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