Do you have a search box on your website? If you don’t, and you sell multiple items, you’re frustrating about 50% of your visitors.

In a recent survey MarketingSherpa found a 50-50 split in the way people like to navigate around a site. Half like menus, half prefer search.

It depends somewhat on the type of product. Shoppers who want to compare what’s available will tend to use menus to find the category of product they’re looking for. Those who know what product they’re looking for like to just type it into a search box and go directly to it.

We asked our in-house programming guru what he would recommend as a tool to search the content of small-business websites and he suggested Google Custom Search, which creates “a customized search experience for your own website.”

You can find it at http://www.google.com/coop/cse. And of course, being Google, it’s free. So you can have all that sophisticated search functionality your potential customers are looking for… and they’ll stick around longer.

At the internet marketing Center, we work hard to provide you with everything you need to achieve your online business goals.

In order to make sure we’re giving you the information and resources you’re looking for, we need to hear from you. We want to know how we can help you overcome the challenges to starting and growing an online business.

Just leave us a comment answering one or all of the following questions:

What obstacles are preventing you from making money online?

What burning questions would you like us to answer about the nuts and bolts of building an online business?

What online marketing strategies would you like to understand better?

Tell us what you need to know — and we will answer your questions in our marketing tips Report and on this blog.

(And if you haven’t been receiving our regular marketing tips Report newsletters filled with the latest proven strategies for building your business, you can sign up for your FREE subscription in the blue box on the right.)

We look forward to reading your responses!

GREAT news from eBay!

It looks like they’re finally clearing the way for small-to-medium-sized sellers to make money again. FYI, here’s a quick rundown of the changes they’ve just announced.
Starting in September you’ll get better exposure in eBay’s search results AND get a 20% reduction in fees if:

eBay Logo by Flickr user liewcf

• you’re selling $3000.00 a year with 100+ sales
• you don’t get 1 and 2 ratings on the Detailed Seller Ratings
• you maintain a 4.6 or higher DSR average

You’ll also be rewarded if your listings have a high conversion rate — in other words your listings may not get a lot of views, but they consistently sell your items. Good news for sellers who take time to write a good title and item description; bad news for the giant Diamond sellers that don’t bother because they’ve got so much inventory!

Our eBay Mentoring Team are really excited about these changes. They say the just-introduced Top-Rated Seller designation is “realistic and achievable” for people who follow our system and use our strategies.

Coincidentally, we’ve just released the brand-new, online version of our insider secrets to Selling on eBay” href=”http://www.auctiontips.com/ebaycourse/” target=”_blank”>insider secrets to Selling on eBay course. It’ll cover all these changes (the big advantage of being online instead of in a book) and any new ones eBay comes up with.

So if you’ve been frustrated with eBay lately, NOW IT’S A WHOLE NEW BALLGAME!

After a couple of years of making it harder and harder to make money, it looks like eBay is rewarding the sellers who made it such a powerhouse in the first place.

What do you think? Is this what you’ve been waiting to see on eBay?

So, it’s more than halfway through the year… and all those good intentions of making money online have dimmed. You know you need to get going with this LIFE-CHANGING stuff, but somewhere along the line you just seemed to lose the excitement you had when you started.

Don’t despair! You’re not alone, and it happens to everyone! You’re in a slump and you just need a plan get back on track toward your goal of earning money online… so here are some things you can do to find (and keep) your motivation.

1. Grab a pen and paper and write in big letters why you wanted to start an online business in the first place. Was it to spend more time with your family? To add an extra stream of income? To prove to yourself that you could do it? To stop having to work for someone else? Whatever the reason, write it down and stick it up in front of your computer.

There… are you already connecting with the reason you started down this rewarding path in the first place? Good!

2. Go to www.marketingtips.com/tipsltr.html and scroll down to the “Proof” section. Take a few minutes to read how other people LIKE YOU have used the Internet to make money.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out the videos on www.internetmarketing.com/clinic. These are real people who started to make money online.

Are you beginning to feel more enthusiastic again… like this could happen to you too? Great!

3. Now look at the piece of paper you wrote on in step 1… your reason for wanting to change your life. Is it enough to make you get back to work on your home business? If it isn’t, then don’t sweat it. Right now may just not be the right time for you.

If it is, then you just need to get back on track!

So, think about what it was that leeched your motivation. Was it that life just got in the way? Was there a big change that shook you up and took all your attention? Did you find the keyword research too hard? Are you not so great at budgeting your time?

Sometimes all it takes is to break things down into more manageable chunks so you’re not overwhelmed by the scale of what needs to be done.

Let’s start by writing down what it was that interrupted your momentum. For example, “I kept procrastinating in finding a way to develop a product for my niche.” Use this statement as your goal. Don’t think about how you’re going to achieve everything else… just work at this one goal for now.

Do you believe again that your home business is totally attainable? Excellent!

4. Finally, Create a schedule to reach that one goal. Grab a calendar and realistically give yourself deadlines. For example:

July 27th — eBook outline and direction to be decided

August 3rd — Commission to be tendered for eBook author

August 17th — Deadline for eBook author to deliver end product

August 24th — My revisions to text to be completed and changes made

August 31st — eBook to be completed and ready for first sale

And that’s it! Now you have a plan in place, some deadlines to follow, and a fresh reminder of the rewards you could be reaping. Your motivation should be returning by the second!

Make a note of this process and run through it any time you feel your focus wandering to something else. And don’t beat yourself up over it if you do find you’re a bit lost. You aren’t the first person to find it hard to stay motivated, and you won’t be the last. Just don’t let it get in the way of your success

Anyone who uses email marketing knows how disastrous it can be to be blacklisted as a spammer. Your emails won’t be delivered, your reputation suffers… not to mention your bottom line.

Fortunately for you, we have tools that report how different email programs evaluate incoming messages. Here are our latest discoveries about how Microsoft Outlook decides what is spam and what isn’t:

1. What day your emails go out: Messages sent on a Saturday or Sunday are more closely correlated with spam than messages sent on a weekday.
2. UPPERCASE IN THE SUBJECT LINE: If words in uppercase make 25% (or more) of the total number of words, then the email is more correlated with spam. That’s 1 out of every 4 words.
3. Symbols (*#&@!!!) in the subject line: A “symbol” is any key on your keyboard that isn’t a letter or a number. Subject lines with 8% (or higher) symbols are more correlated with spam. Spammers used to overuse exclamation points and “@” symbols to get around spamtraps (ever had an email offering you “Vi@gr@”?)… so the traps have evolved.
4. Duplicate characters or spaces in the subject line: In many spam messages there is a meaningless (to the recipients) sequence of symbols separated by dozens and dozens of spaces. So emails that have a lot of duplicate characters in the subject line are flagged as potentially being spam.

Of course, this isn’t the complete list of how Outlook evaluates spam — Microsoft isn’t going to release all their anti-spam strategies — but it’s a handy “at-a-glance” list that should get you thinking about your approach and subject lines!

Oh, and have you ever wanted to know why “unwanted email” is called “spam”?

It’s because of this Monty Python sketch:

Probably the only time spam ever made us smile