Businesses Growing Together

Businesses Growing Together is a network of businesses who are dedicated to helping make each others businesses grow. We do this by cross advertising for each other through a monthly flyer that is inserted in our outgoing packages and a magnetic car sign exchange program. Businesses Growing Together is all about EXPOSING YOURSELF! Because we adhear to a high standard of quality in the sellers we promote, we try to connect our buyers with other quality online web site stores.

Our standards of quality include:

* Sellers who ship within four (4) days of payment, unless they are providing a customized order or if item has been back-ordered. If item has been back-ordered, the seller must make the customer aware of this fact within two (2) days of payment and given the opportunity to cancel not only the back-ordered portion of their order, but also the entire order without any service charges being applied;
* Sellers who send out shipping notices to buyers letting them know their items have been shipped;
* Our sellers are serious about their online businesses and have been in business for over a year. Many started out on ebay and have moved on.

By creating a high level of standards for our selling network, we aim to only refer those businesses that we would buy from ourselves!

Our mall offers everything from antiques, recipes, lingerie, turquoise jewelry, gourmet foods, gift baskets, unique costumes, designer apparel, to gowns and much more. All in a mall of individually owned online stores.

The perfect online stores are at your fingertips!

HELP!!!!

We need your help to get this lens a good rating

We need your help we are trying to get our lens in the top 100 in the Shopping category. The only way we can do this is if we get visitors and they vote for us, At the top of the page below the orange title bar you will see Your rating followed by 5 stars, click the star to rate this lens with 5 being the highest

While your at it join our Fan Club to using the button on the top left. You'll be glad you did.

Inspire Your Customers to Buy

Write better descriptions and sell more goods

When writing product descriptions for your auction listings or web store, go beyond pure information. You must inspire action. If all you want to do is tell prospects about your products, your descriptions are not working for you.

Writing effective copy is about conducting business, not just stating facts. You must do more than just tell. You must sell. Your writing must persuade, motivate and build desire to purchase the item.

The difference between just describing a product and selling it is

* Focusing on Product Benefits - The things your product does of value. Describe how your product benefits your prospects. What does it do for your customers? Why would they want to own it?

* Making Offers - Selling is deal making. Present your deal. What do they get for how much?

* Committing to your Customers' Point of View - Embrace their needs and wants. Consider their best interests and what is important to them.

Think of every product description you write as an agent of action. Make sure the goal is not just to give information, but to stimulate interest and make sales. You should present all the information your customer needs to make a decision and persuade her to buy your item.

You don't need to be a great writer to write product descriptions that sell. But, there are proven principles you need to apply to write persuasive, customer-motivating copy that turns your web store visitors into active customers.

Headlines set the bait. Body Copy hooks them. Calls to Action reels them in

* Promise Benefits - Use a headline to make a promise that appeals to customers' self-interests.

* Make Offers - An offer is the promise of an exchange. A discount or special sale price can be a particularly strong offer.

* Deliver Relevant Information - Provide interesting information about your product, then relate that information to something your customers value. Explain how your product makes them more attractive, healthier, safer, sexier, etc.

* Inspire Action - Ask them flat out to press the 'Add to Cart' button. Create a sense of urgency by emphasizing limited quantities, or deadlines for special prices.

Allen
Parts and Things Vintage Auto Parts
Parts and Things General Store

Why should I edit my images?

The two main reasons to edit your images are (1) to improve the clarity and presentation of your items for sale, and (2) to make your images "web-friendly". Image Preparation software helps you improve the clarity of images captured with a digital camera or scanner using "photo enhancement" technology, which can sharpen and brighten images as well as more advanced and subtle improvements.

"Web-friendly" images are small enough (height and width, as well as file size) to display quickly and attractively to those with dial-up Internet connections or low-resolution monitors. Image Preparation software allows you to crop, resize and recompress images to achieve this.

Meta Tag Analyzer Tool

Ever wonder how your meta tags look to the search spiders? With this niffty free tool you can check your title, description and keywords.
Here is some sample output from one of my sites

Meta tags analysis.
Title: Title meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 30 characters.
Title relevancy to page content is excellent.
The Title relevancy to page content is 100%.

Description: Description meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 191 characters.
Description relevancy to page content is very good.
The Description relevancy to page content is 90%.

Keywords: Keywords meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 18 keywords and 144 characters.
Keyword relevancy to page content is good.
The keywords relevancy to page content is 72%.

Robots: The Robots meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 12 characters.

Author: Found no author meta tag.
This tag is not really required but can help you for your (company) name recognizing.

Online Meta Tag Analyzer
provide by SEOCentro.

Three Secrets to Web Traffic

Three U's and the Haystack
After you build a page on Squidoo (or a blog, or anywhere else on the web, for that matter) there's an almost irrestible urge to panic. Panic, because you've put in all this work and then you feel sort of powerless. "No one is looking at my page!"

It's human nature. We want to be noticed, we want our effort to pay off and we hate to fail. So, the question: How do I get more traffic? It's not just you. EVERYONE wants to know the answer to this question. They want to know how to get more traffic to their blog, their corporate website, their Squidoo lens. More. There are plenty of tactics about how to get more traffic to your pages online. Dozens of blog posts and great advice, easy to find. WARNING: None of these tactics work without the three U's that are covered in this articel.

The three U's? Yes, it's simple:
Useful
Updated
Unique
The reason you don't have enough traffic is pretty obvious but still hard for most people to embrace. The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack. And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.

And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.

Three Secrets to Web Traffic cont...

Of course you don't show up first in Google. I'd be stunned if you did. With a million matches on a typical term, the odds of showing up first are, ready for this... a million to one.
That means that the search engines can be really picky. Sure, there are ways to trick them (for a while) but pretty soon,the average stuff just ends up somewhere in the middle. If you can settle for this, you should, because the alternative requires some effort. This is a really short article about three requirements to avoid the middle, three ways to stand out,three ways to make all those other tactics actually work for you.

Stay tuned more to come.....
You can skip these three and spend all your time and your money trying to beat the system. Or, you can embrace the
system and put it to work for you. It's worked for me so far, and I've managed to rank highly for dozens of terms for my
blog and my Squidoo lenses.
If you spend any time at Google, what you'll discover is that the people there are universally committed to making the
web better. I can't remember ever talking to anyone at Google (or Yahoo for that matter) who said, "hey, that's a pretty
lousy page, but we make a lot of money on it."
Superstition
What people do:
When we see a system we don't understand, we make up stories. Humans used to think that space was filled with ether,
that supernatural beings rode chariots through the sky to make the sun rise and that stomach ulcers were caused by
pastrami sandwiches. We saw phenomena that we didn't understand and made up stories around them.
There's a lot of stories about search. Certain kinds of content, we hear, gets you banned. Other kinds of link structures
always work. There are gnomes at Yahoo with a blacklist. Certain political parties are favored... the list goes on and on.
We find a few data points to support a theory and suddenly it becomes a religion. We follow habits slavishly, all hoping to please the search gods.
It turns out that it's a lot simpler than that. The search engines have been really up front about what they seek and what
they link to. I thought I'd give my best shot at explaining it.

Businesses Growing Together