Thinking about possibly opening a local storefront and also thinking about creating another website for a 2nd store. Can some of you guys and gals give me some feedback based on your experiences with both? The 2nd website seems like a no brainer to me, is there things im over looking? If you have brick type storefront I would love to know whether you do well in that area. Thanks!

I posted a very similar message this weekend. I've got two websites plus a brick /retail store. I started the second website about 4 months ago and utilized MonsterCommerce marketing to promote the site. At this point, which is fairly early to really tell how the site will do, orders are only trickling in. While the two sites are about 30% different, Froogle would only accept one, and I haven't quite figured out how to get pay per clicks like google adwords and overture to accept both sites using my most needed keywords. Never the less, at this time, I think I'm still losing a little money on the second site but hopefully, it will pay off.

I've been considering using the second site as a local (Wichita, KS) ordering portal and offering a delivery service. My thoughts are to promote it locally with direct mail, email marketing, newspaper classifieds, etc - the same marketing I use for the brick store - and charge about $7.00 for local delivery to work or home. This will allow me to offer my internet prices (as opposed to the higher prices in the store) and hopefully capture some of the local market share in the pet bird business. I need to do some more research on the demographics of my local customers at this point before I really launch the marketing of the idea.

We have one site, soon two, and a retail store. We find that is it very difficult to balance the demands of both. We have not really found any "synergies." People do not shop in the store because of the website, and I really doubt if people shop at the site because we had a store.

If you do both you may need an employee devoted to just the website.

If we had it to do over again we would probably have just become an Internet business.

Birdman,

How long was your first site in business before you started the second? Also, with the large overhead of the storefront is it still more profitable than the website? I am assuming you started the storefront first then the web business.

Robert,

What is the process around bringing up the 2nd store? Meaning with , did you duplicate your existing site and then make changes? Also, my thinking is that if you have an already high pr on your existing site you can link that to your new site for an instance good pr, is my thinking correct? For instance if you have a PR5 or 6 on your original site then link to the new site, the new site would have 0 outbound links and 1 inbound link with a high pr, which should give the 2nd site a PR4, without having to invest a ton of time on link exchanges, initally anyway. I would think the actual startup work is much less with the 2nd store. What are thoughts? Captain can you comment on this as well?

I am happy to comment on this...

I believe it is extremely important to build multiple stores (and I hope you all know me well enough to know I am not saying this to coerce you to spend more money with MC).

Here is my reasoning:

1. Diversification - I like the idea of maintaining mutliple online stores for several reasons including broadening my reach and business security.

Here's why >>

Google is an excellent company and I think they do an excellent job with their task at hand- managing 3 billion web pages.

Due to the nature of their business, their algo is not fool proof and their algo is constantly changing. That being said, there is absolutely nothing an e-business owner can do to ensure online stability. You can continually add content to your site, build a good link structure, maintain high PR and excellent link popularity... and your site may still fall out of the serps for 30 days or more.

I always encourage our clients to build several avenues of traffic generation so that they are not 100% reliant on Google, however, Google currently powers the majority web, so regardless of what you do, a major portion of your business is going to be reliant on Google.

The good news is Google can be your best friend if you work hard, and follow solid and ethical SEO principles.

So back to my main point, Google favors themes. And I can use MC's properties as an example... we maintain an e-commerce site, monstercommerce.com, a web promotion site, monsterwebpromotion.com a design site monsterwebdesign.com and so on. We did this for two reasons.

1. If we placed all of these services on one site (and for some reason was dropped from Google's results) we would suffer a signifigant blow to our bottom line. By diversifying to multiple web sites (we could loose one of these sites for a month or even permanetly) and our company would not suffer as badly.

2. We also did this because Google favors theme specific sites. We compete against 27 million pages in Google for our most important keyword (shopping cart). We happen to be listed number 3, something we are very proud of. This would not have been possible if we included all of our services on one domain name... because, if you think about it, Google looks for the most relevent results, and if you talk about shopping carts, domain name registration, web design, promotion and merchant accounts all on one domain, you dilute the "theme" of a site... there is no way Google would deem us number 3 out of 27 million pages if we diluted the "theme" with multiple services.

So you ask, "what's your point"? My point is...

1. By maintaining multiple stores, you diversify risk. If one site drops from Google's serps for a few months, you don't have to hurl yourself off a bridge. You have redundancy- multiple streams of traffic and income.

2. By building multiple stores, you can build "themes" for each store to target niche groups and keyword phrases. Multiple stores also provides the opportunity to speak to your target audience more directly through design, layout and the product offering.

Now, having said all of this, there are some important things to consider. Before you run out and open a second store, you want to make sure you have covered your bases 100% on your first store. I would recommend pouring 110% effort into store 1 before opening a second store. Once you have mastered SEO techniques, earned solid listings in Google and maintain a stable business with store 1, it is time to begin investigating niche areas to target for your second store.

When the time is right to build a second store and you have done your homework regarding niche environments, do the following.

1. Develop a new design concept that speaks to your audience in a fresh way. Stray away from store 1 design tactics... studies have shown that you have literally 15 seconds to appeal to a consumer... and since consumer preferences and tastes vary from party to party, a new concept will help capture sales from customers that may not have purchased from site 1.

2. Stretch the limits on product layout and navigations. Create a balance between look and feel, usability and Google friendliness. Create store 2 to function differently from store 1.

3. Change some product names and eliminate products that do not fill the specific niche you are trying to fill. Example... if I sell a full line of sun protective clothing for men, women, youths and babies in store 1, and the baby market is my best seller, then I may want to create a store dedicated to selling ONLY sun protective clothing for babies. Or you may want to keep the same product line entirely. As long as you change the site 30 - 40% (especially the homepage) Google will not mind.

4. Remember... success for store 2 will not happen overnight. Just like store 1, getting listed in Google will take a few months and it takes work (not as much as store 1, but it still takes work). Understand that you will not get an ROI immediatly... If you are working on a strict budget, wait until you have a few hundred dollars to invest before engaing in your second store.

Summary... sorry for the long winded response. We have clients that maintain 10-20 stores and have expanded their reach exponetially. I recommend starting small and finishing big. Once you have mastered e-business in store one... build a second site. Once that is performing optimally, build another.

Questions? Need clarification? Let me know.

Ultra, can you make spell check work again? My spelling is horrible. haha

What about my question regarding the google links?

Nutrition-

I agree with what you are saying... if you have store 1 with a PR 5 or 6 and then link store 1 to store 2, this will help store 2 out tremendously. I am not sure what PR score Google would give for one link of PR 5 or 6, but it is certainly easier than starting from scratch (especially since the inbound link to store 2 would be from a store with a related "theme".

Don't link store 2 back to store 1... it will score less for both sites, plus a link to store 1 from NEW store 2 is useless.

Any feedback on this? Do you agree or disagree with this thought process?

Yes I agree, thats exactly what I was thinking, but now I am confused with the theme concept. Here are my questions:

1) If you don't link store 2 back to store 1 how did develop the theme sites like design for instance without linking? MC has www.monstercommerce.com on the monsterdesign.com site. Am I confused on this one?

2) What would be a good way to develop theme sites for products? MC has mostly services so Im trying to get an idea on how it worked with products.

Nutrition,

MonsterCommerce sites are not the best example to follow for two reasons.

1. The link structure that is currently being used for our sites are not 100% correct, we created that structure before Google changed their point system for cross linking. It is not a good example.

2. Looks can also be deieving... there is a code you can place on links so the links work, the links are viewable to users, but the links are hidden from Search engine Bots. This is not a deceptive practice... and it is a good method for linking sites together without getting point deductions from Google. We used to use a specific Java Script, but I just learned Google can now "see" this script... I will look into learning new tricks to keep links hidden.

FYI >> When I say hide, I am not speaking of spammy tactics nor am I talking about actually hiding links from view or hidden text. This is a major no-no. Hidden text and redirects are a quick way to get your site a 30 day ban.

Nutrition-

Our second site will market one product line (beads). For SEO purposes and focus it makes more sense to have a separate site. The added cost is nothing compared to what you can gain by being high on search engine results with that focus. Also you don't want to confuse customers.

A second site is about $50/month with . If you just had an ordinary site with no cart you would be paying perhaps $10/month, so it really does not cost much to open a second online store. With SEO and focus you can sidestep many marketing expenses, as well. We don't plan to spend that much on marketing for our second site because we should be very high in search engine results by the time we go live. (We are already there for two of three targeted keywords -- something we could never have done if we sold beads through our current site.)

My guess is that a couple of years out we could have 4-5 sites, all very focused.

That said, our store is still much more profitable than our Internet shops. I believe that will change in time, but for the present we make more money off the store on one good day than we have made in three months on the web.