Ecommerce is a tough business. There are alot of fly-by-night web design and seo companies out there who take money and run. They show little or no results and usually offer no customer service so that the customer is the one that suffers in the end.

The good companies who have lasting power must fight against each other, as well as the scammers in order to make a decent profit and put food on the table.

In the end, the fact that you show excellent work and have word of mouth marketing is what decides your fate. But if you do not want to make that your only way of making a living then you have to learn how to expand your business to a larger market.

Your realistic goal should be of partnering with various advertisers, and powerful companies with like-interests to come up with a major marketing campaign. A joint campaign should benefit both companies by fattening the pocketbook in the end, and making a household name for themselves with consumers.

Keep in mind when marketing that you have to think major and you have to have a gimick. An example of a gimick is the new Subway campaign that has a sandwich for every day of the week. I actually decided to write this post last oven roasted chicken breast, but I had some design work to finish. But back to my point… Every major company that is a household name has a gimick. I called Geico only because I thought the way the Gecko batted his eyes was funny. I stopped subscribing to Verizon Wireless and switched to T-Mobile because the "can you hear me now?" ad annoyed me. As you can see, some gimicks are simply annoying even though they hold a household name. My advice is to stick to funny.

Web Design Taxi is inviting solicitation by major companies to create a cooperative marketing campaign as we speak. Remember our post in May about having a company theme? Think Donald Trump. He lives for the brand that his name carries. He bases his reputation on it and we respect that. We believe in that way of branding and we mention Web Design Taxi every chance we get.

When in doubt, put your thinking cap on and sit at the drawing board. The business that thinks together makes expansion easier.

If your company has a website, it most likely needs traffic. Unless of course you are the ceo of a major corporation with lots of brand recognition. If you are then you are most likely not going to care about this post unless you are optimizing your traffic.

Free services and tools are a great way of generating traffic. Let's say for example that you have an interior design company. Offering your visitors a free flash tool online that allows them to decorate their room virtually before they buy or sign up for your service will help you make the sale.

The extra money spent on free tools that require zero or little management from you can help you generate twice as many sales or more!

Traffic generation is more than social networking and blogging. By offering a free tool you are bound to get a flood of inbound links from grateful webmasters who stumbled upon your website. And if you are wise, you will have a graphic and a statement requesting that visitors link to your tool on your website using a code that you provide.

Joomla is a well known cms (content management system) and it is GPL licensed. If you are not familiar with GPL then you can read more at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

The GPL license means basically that the software is free to use and distribute as-is. It is used by many developers because the cms is already coded. It just needs to be customized to look like the client's company brand.

The Joomla system uses what you call modules. These modules add to the functionality of the website. In Joomla, the modules allow you to add content on the website where you want it to display. Sometimes you come across an issue with a module where you would need to change the way it looks, or functions. For example, there is a module called ds-syndicate that provides advanced rss feed functionality to the Joomla system. Unfortunately it displays the dynamic url of the Joomla feed. We recently has a customer who needed that feed link to point to the rss from the integrated wordpress blog design that we created for them. In order to change that feed url we had to change the hard-coding of that module because the url is hard-coded as the standard Joomla rss url. The module admin would not allow us to change that dynamically. To do that we would have had to provide additional programming to customize that module.

To add new static content to the sidebar of Joomla we had to install an additional module which allows you to post any html code and place it where we wanted it. It is still called dynamically but it was not a standard module in the release of Joomla.

Joomla offers many modules that you can download and use. You just have to look for them sometimes. If you are a web developer then this will save you costs without sacrificing quality and allow you to pass the savings to the customer.

Google Analytics is a detailed stats tracking system that shows webmasters where their traffic comes from and how long visitors stay, among other things. Most webmasters use the system to find out how their marketing efforts are doing. However, the analytics usage goes deeper than that.

When you are in the business of ecommerce you most likely hope to one day be bought out by a large billion dollar corporation. Think broadcast.com which was bought from Mark Cuban by Yahoo, Inc. Mark Cuban now owns the Dallas Mavericks. I wish I could afford to buy the Chicago Bulls, and maybe this season we might win a championship again.

But back on track…. The purpose of tracking your stats is so you can use that free information to leverage it into a buyout or at least a very profitable revenue stream from selling ad space. Think MySpace which uses the huge traffic statistics to get millions is ad revenue. Their adsense alone has to be making them some phat cash!

When you setup your website it is very important to track your visitors. You need to know how they found you, what pages they visited, what keywords they searched, and how long they stayed before they went to another website. This information is the basis on how much your company is truly worth!

I have worked to keep a low profile when it comes to who I am in the music business. I still plan on keeping that practice for now. I have recorded with platinum hit producers and musicians.

A few years back I stopped making music and focused on business and ecommerce. It was a hobby that I was able to turn into a successful business with many wonderful clients.

Lately I have been hearing some great inspiring music that has me thinking. I used to write and record songs that touched you deep inside. My songs caried a melody and demanded it touch your soul in one way or another. It feed off of your emotions and made you follow every backround noise and every word in the lyrics. I stopped making that music because I guess it had control of my emotions also.

Music was my release, and by losing my release I seemed to have lost my soul. I have all of this digidesign gear and pro tools just sitting in a storage room collecting dust.

I recently decided to start writing and producing again. Somehow I create the best music when I am surrounded by what others will call a huge distraction. I write emotion grabbing hits when there is loud construction outside. I can somehow pick out the melodies by that noise. I don't really see it as noise at all. It is my focus.

Unfortunately we have recently been the victim of a fraudulent transaction with a client. The client came to us with a godaddy site tonight website in need of a makeover and internet marketing. Well, we offered her the marketing and as a concession and to make the marketing effective through seo we installed a drupal backbone with search engine friendly aliases.

Now first off, we normally never start work on a project that pays with an e-check until that e-check has cleared. But this woman really seemed like an upstanding individual with her demeaner and everything. We started work immediately.

The first sign of trouble is when the e-check went from 5 days to clear, on the 5th day it suddenly said it will take 2 weeks. We were suspicious because we know how e-checks work, so something was wrong. We did not stop marketing at this point. However, a few days later the e-check did not go through at all and we had to call the merchant. They told us that something happened on the clients end and the payment failed.

We contacted the client and told her, and she said she did not know why it went through as an e-check in the first place. We told her that work was frozen on her account and that the payment needed to be made immediately. She said that as soon as she got back to her office she would take care of it.

It has now been around two weeks and not only has she ceased accepting our phone calls, returning voice mails, and emails but she has done nothing in regards to sending the payment. It is clear that she not only fraudulently purchased our services with a bad e-check, but she knew she never intended to pay us. She milked us for as much as she could before the payment went bad.

I am actually sorry that we have marketed this persons service as much as we did because her own "clients" will most likely be the next victims. While I cannot tell you the name of the client or her business name because we NEVER share this information with anyone unless we get a court order, I can tell you she is in the credit repair business.

The reason I am telling you the business type is because it is a warning. So far, I have corresponded with a good amount of "credit repair professionals" and unfortunately they have all turned out to be iffy. On top of that is the loophole available for credit repair. As long as they do not call themselves a credit repair consultation then they are not regulated to the high standards of such and need no special licenses.

Literally anyone can call themselves a credit repair professional and offer you a service. The problem with this is that you will be at risk of losing your personal information to fraud. These "professionals" need your social security number in order to dispute negative items on your credit report. Your identity can be stolen and used for more shady business on their behalf.

I am not saying that all credit repair people are frauds. I am just saying that my experience with them has been. If you need to repair your credit you can do it yourself and without the risk. It is legal to dispute items on your credit report. Additionally it is easy to add new positive items to your report legally such as getting a secured credit card and making payments for 6 months. Or you can get a savings account at your local bank and obtain a loan for that deposited amount through that bank secured by your savings account.

If you are trying to buy a home you can get an FHA loan even if you have bad credit. With a 500 middle score you can still get a loan. Self employment is not an excuse. They use your tax returns to verify income. So there is not really a need for an unlicensed credit repair person to work on your behalf. You can make the change yourself and avoid bad transactions like we wish we should have by following our policy on clearing e-checks.