The shopping cart is for a new website we’re establishing – from which we’ll market and sell our own high quality PLR article packs. We’ve chosen a hosted cart option and Magicdust is our chosen supplier. While making our decision, these are the things we had in mind:

1. We wanted a shopping cart with a simple admin panel. Our business isn’t complicated and we don’t want making changes to the site to be complicated either. We looked at the Magicdust admin demo several times and compared it to others. It looked like the simplest and most appropriate set up for us. Bells and whistles are fine if you need them but they’re just clutter if you don’t!

2. Naturally, we wanted a nice design. Now design is a very subjective thing but for us, something that is uncluttered and easy on the eye, yet attractive seems the way to go. We viewed the sites Magicdust had listed as samples of their work. Only one was appealing to us. We decided to dig further so we searched “powered by Magicdust” to find other sites they’d designed. Obviously, their designers are working to client instructions so we didn’t expect to like everything we saw – but we saw enough to be confident that they had some skilled designers on their team.

3. Looking at a lot of the shopping cart sites they’d created gave us a new concern. Most of them had no ranking at all – so we began to worry about SEO. Just a couple we found had good rankings. So we went back and looked over the shopping cart sites to see if we could see the problem. It was very obvious – the carts with no ranking had very little content. Some had plenty of products, but they were only supported by one or two sentence product descriptions and many had no other significant content on the sites. By contrast, the sites with ranking had lengthier product descriptions and plenty of other content.

4. Next, we scoured the forums looking for comments on Magicdust as the level of customer service, particularly post-construction is quite important to us – we’re going to be asking a lot of stupid questions! We found one very negative item but the writer wasn’t very clear about just what the problem had been and his comments suggested that he didn’t really understand that as it was a hosted shopping cart solution, he didn’t really own it. As the business seems to have created quite a few sites, we decided to disregard this item.

5. Finally, we asked some of the designers and SEO folk we know. None had heard any negative reports and we established that to have our own shopping cart website designed so we’d own it would be quite an expensive exercise. We decided that as the Magicdust design solution we needed was inexpensive at around AU$1000, the hosting would only amount to about $600 a year, and the site could be up and running quite quickly, it was worth starting out this way.

It did occur to us to contact some of the people operating Magicdust shopping carts and ask them directly about their experiences, but we decided this would be futile as the outcome would be predictable – those with good rankings and traffic would probably be happy, and those whose sites weren’t attracting traffic would be unhappy – and it would not have been the fault of Magicdust.

Completion time for our PLR article site is estimated at about 8 weeks, although with Christmas fast approaching, I suspect it might be a little longer. During that time, our writers will be busy writing the PLR articles, in between all the other unique articles and blog posts that they write.

If you have any topic suggestions for PLR article packs, or you’d like to be notified when the PLR articles will be available for purchase, feel free to send us an email.

This will be my first shopping cart experience so I’ve love to hear from anyone with any advice – particularly anyone who’s had a shopping cart experience that has exceeded their expectations! We love good news.

© Article Writers Australia 2009

Advertising Articles come in online and offline formats. Offline, they’re often called “advertorials” and are written to sound like informative news articles – but they’re designed to promote a business or product. You’ll see them often in local and state papers and you’ll usually see the word “advertorial” in small print at the top or bottom of the article.

Online, advertising articles are used to promote a business, service or product. They’re used as website content and sometimes submitted to article directories.

A website owner can use article content to add written content to their website that targets specific keywords relating to their product – keywords like those you typed into the search box to find this page. Using articles that way brings good targeted traffic to a website, giving you your best chance of online business success.

As it happens, whether you’re looking for online or offline advertising articles or general article content for your website or blog, our professional writers can assist you.

We don’t do “cheap” article content – that’s because our writers are university educated writers with professional writing skills and sadly, they won’t work for $5 an hour! They take the time to research where required and prepare quality material, so you can be sure your articles are tailored for your website and haven’t been copied from somewhere else.

If you’re a webmaster in need of high quality content, we’re sure you’ll appreciate the difference!

Our current specials include:

· Start-Up Content Pack $759 – 3 web pages (text only), 10 articles, 10 blog postings.

· Article Content 10 Pack $350 – 10 x 500 articles

We are a professional writing service specialising in website content and online material. The majority of our writers are tertiary educated and highly experienced. The majority of our clients are:

• Online business owners who want to have their web pages or other content professionally written. Often, they’re increasing the level of content on their site with blog postings or articles, to improve rankings and increase the number of visitors to their site.

• Internet marketing firms and SEO experts who specialise in helping online businesses order blog postings and articles on behalf of their clients, or refer their clients to us.

• Other individuals with particular requirements. We undertake off-line writing work too, such as newspaper advertorials, press releases and brochure content.

Our professional writers all work from home and enjoy researching and writing on a variety of topics. They come from varied backgrounds and their areas of particular expertise extend from the performing arts to real estate, medical and legal topics. So whether you want us to write about the products on your ecommerce shopping website, or the services you offer, you can be confident we have a writer with the expertise to do it well.

Please visit our main pages for more information, or drop us a line and put our professional writers to work for you. We’re a friendly lot!

If you are an internet marketer you might like to expand your market by duplicating your website content in English and adding English articles to your site. Reach more of the world and sell more of your product!

We do not offer translation services however, if you provide the article topics and details of any specific requirements in English, we’ll be happy to prepare your English articles for you.

Internet marketing is now vital to business survival and growth because so many people search online for products and services before looking anywhere else. Why would you open the Yellow Pages when you can just type the words into the search box?

One of the great things about this trend is that if your business is well listed in the search results, you’ll have free advertising 24/7. To take advantage of this, it’s important that your website comes up well in the search results when people search for your products or services. If you don’t understand how to make this occur, you need to find someone who does. That’s where a good online writing service comes in.

There are several aspects to online marketing that can significantly increase the number of potential customers visiting your website. Here are three ways of bringing potential customers to your website that you really should understand a little about:

• Optimised website content
• Articles
• Blog postings

Optimised Website Content

If your website content is professionally prepared by writers who understand SEO (search engine optimisation) the number of people visiting your website who are actually looking for the product or service you sell, will be far greater. If your website was designed by a graphic designer without SEO expertise, you are likely to benefit tremendously by paying an SEO expert to optimise your site.

Articles

Article marketing is not only an advertising method but a strategy to increase your website page ranking with the search engines. A writer can prepare numerous articles about your industry and the type of products or services you deliver. Those articles can either be placed on your website as information for your website visitors, or they can be distributed across the Internet via article directory services. All of these articles will contain keywords relevant to your products or services – hence significantly increasing the traffic to your website. If the articles are placed on article directories they generally have a link to your website. This not only brings more visitors your way but provides what is called a “backlink” – something that is beneficial for your website ranking.

Blogs

If you don’t know what a Blog is by now, you must have been living in a cave on the Nullarbor. If you are one of the many people who think Blogs are merely modern soap boxes you are way off the mark – there is much more to blogging than meets the eye.

Having a Blog on your website allows you to post new website content on a regular basis. Naturally, this content should aim to bring additional traffic to your website – and if it is written by an experienced online writer, it will bring traffic by the drove. A Blog is your opportunity to announce new products and services, write postings around targeted keywords, offer special deals and provide news about your industry.

The down side of a Blog is that it is only truly useful when it is updated on a regular basis and written by someone with online writing expertise. If you don’t have the time to learn these skills or write regular postings, it may be well worth paying a blog writer to make weekly postings for you. Properly written, Blogs can generate a tremendous amount of traffic – which is of course, more free advertising for your business!

To a large extent, these “traffic generation” methods rely upon the selection and positioning of keywords and phrases. Keywords are the words or phrases that potential customers are most likely to type into the search box when looking for your products or services. To be effective, keywords need to be selected based on popularity and advertiser competition. They also need to be positioned strategically so that the search engine crawlers will identify them as the important words of the content. This applies whether it is a web page about your business, a blog posting about a particular service, or an article about a new product.

As you can see, online writing is not as simple as it might seem. If you need a legal contract drawn up you would hire a lawyer because they have the required skills and experience. If you need good website content, hire a writing service that specialises in online content!