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Either way you spell it, you either love that black candy or can’t get away fast enough. Amy dives into why. Image Credit: Pixaby -gate74 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode NCCIH Licorice HuffPost Licorice   Episode Transcript: Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Trace Kerr,…Read more →

Big word for a genetic mutation where an animal is split with one side being entirely female and the other male. This can happen in some species of birds, crustaceans, snakes, and insects.   Episode Transcript: Welcome to Brain Junk,…Read more →

In 1804 Dr. Troxler discovered he could make pastel dots disappear if he stared at them. Blink, and they would reappear. Trace puts Amy to the test…will she experience the Troxler Effect?   Episode Transcript: Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m…Read more →

In this episode, LCA World Lit teacher Danah Hashem explores classroom culture and ritual using tea parties. Episode Transcript: Welcome to Prose and Context, a podcast about lifegiving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy. (Intro Music) Hello! This is Danah Hashem, and thanks for joining me for today’s episode of Prose and Context. I am going to talk about tea parties in the classroom! Which sounds frivolous, but hear me out! I recently wrote a blog post, I maintain an educational blog called Pencils and Patience at pencilsandpatience.wordpress.com, and I recently published a post discussing this idea that I’ve been referring as my “Defense of the Classroom Tea Party.” Because, as much as this idea began accidentally and as much as it seems tangential to my classroom work with my students, I’ve actually come to find some very real, pedagogical value to these classroom tea parties in which my students and I actually drink hot tea together as we work on our classwork. As a tea lover myself, I have been accused of just trying to find excuses to buy more tea, and this accusation is not entirely wrong, but I’ve actually found real value to fostering this tradition or this, this ritual in my classroom. Now I understand 100% that we are really lucky here at LCA to have pretty small classes. My classes don’t usually go over 16-18 kids, and sometimes they’re really small, like 6 or 7 kids. So this is a pretty realistic possibility for me to maintain. But, even if you’re a teacher with larger classrooms, I think there’s a principle here that we can all consider. You know, this doesn’t have to be about tea. Ultimately this is more about the mindset and the kind of ethos that we create in our classrooms. I happened to accidentally create this ethos with tea parties, but I think there’s a lot of different ways as educators that we can think about creating spaces of sensitivity and confidence and places where our students feel really safe taking intellectual risks. I think we can always strive to be more intentional about fostering that kind of environment with our students. So this whole tea party thing actually started completely unintentionally because I personally drink a lot of tea, especially in the winter, especially, you know, the school week gets long and that little boost of caffeine is very helpful. I usually brew the tea in bulk, and, so I pour myself the cup of tea, and there’s extra. So whatever students are there, I’ve got this pile of mugs, and they’ll say, “Oh, can I have the leftover?” and I’ll pour them a cup too. And then, over time, this sort of developed into this ritual where students now walk into my room and say things like, “Oooo, what’s today’s tea?” or “ughhh I’m so exhausted, I need the tea today.” And so now I’ve created this expectation that there’s going to be hot tea in my classroom. Um, I don’t hate it because, quite frankly, there almost always is hot tea in my classroom, so this makes sense. But what this has meant is that pretty much every class, particularly classes where we are reading together or individually or where we’re having a discussion, uh when students come in, we get out the mugs and we drink tea! I again never intended this to be a piece in my classroom design; however, over time, I’ve really started to value and appreciate what this practice does for my time with my students. And I’d like to take just a little bit of time to talk more specifically about some of the really concrete reasons why I’ve found this to be super valuable. So, in the interest of getting us thinking about that, I would like to share with you my list of, um, why this has become this really important piece of my classroom pedagogy. And, again, this is much less about the tea than it is about being educators who spend our time thinking about different things that we can do in our classrooms, traditions, rituals, habits,

In our introductory episode, the teachers of the LCA English department introduce themselves, their pedagogies, and their goals for the podcast. Episode Transcript: Welcome to Prose and Context, a podcast about lifegiving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy. (Intro Music) Danah: Welcome, and thanks for joining us. This is our first episode. We wanted to take some time to introduce ourselves and talk through some of our goals for the podcast. So I am Danah Hashem, and I teach tenth grade World Literature. Karen: My name is Karen Elliott, and I currently teach 12th and 11th grade American and British literature and some cinema. Nancy: My name is Nancy Nies, and I teach 9th graders in an intensive English program, mostly international students from China, Japan, and Korea. Rebecca: Hello, my name is Rebecca LaFroy, and I’ve just moved from the UK where I taught English to 11-18 year olds, and here in the States, I’m going to be teaching it to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. Lori: My name is Lori Johnson, and I teach 6th and 8th grade language arts, and do some technology in the school. We wanted to introduce ourselves and give some of the background of how we came to teaching, how we came to LCA, and, um, sort of the journey that’s brought us here. Karen: ah, my name is Karen Elliott, and my journey is very odd. Uh, I went to very liberal, secular schools which I really loved, and I gained a lot from that. My background is writing, composition, and comparative literature, and, um, I wrote for a small newspaper now defunct in New York City, and, when I got married and we moved to Boston and I was writing my dissertation, and I got a letter in the mail from a little school I’d never heard of: Lexington Christian Academy. And I came in to sub for a woman who was on maternity leave, and I never left. I love it here. It’s just, I knew it was my calling. Danah: This is Danah, and I also have an odd background. My undergrad is in chemical engineering, so I worked in biotech for about 3 years before exploring going into teaching. I had always wanted to be a teacher; I come from a family of teachers. Um, but it just wasn’t something that my life would allow at the time, but 3 years in, I ended up going back and getting my master’s in teaching and my master’s in literature, and one of the first interviews I got after I graduated was here at LCA, and I’ve been here ever since, and I love it. Nancy: My name is Nancy, and my background is 10 years as a journalist, mostly in magazines. And then I went back to graduate school in Victorian novel and feminist theory, and I spent most of my career teaching at college level, ah, women’s studies, writing across the curriculum, and English. And then, as my career went along, I ended up working with more and more international students which led me into teaching, both graduate and undergraduate students from around the world, and I loved it. So, as my job became more management oriented, I knew I wanted to stick to teaching, so I switched to high school, and I began here 5 years ago, and I’ve been focusing on these students who are newbies, and I also teach courses that are for students who have high levels of English, but, fluency, but, uh, don’t have the cultural background on how to write in an American academic context. Rebecca: My mum was a history teacher, so growing up, being a teacher was the one thing I didn’t want to do. Uh, however, when I came to apply for college, I knew I wanted to study drama, and so I applied for lots of different courses including drama, and one of them was, ah, called “Education with English Drama.” And that was the one that I ended up doing. During my college course, I set up an organization called Little Hats which took drama into elementary schools and enthused them about the world of drama, and I just found that I loved it. So I trained to be a teacher, um, and, ah,

Every couple of years, somebody somewhere does something that brings the idea of an Internet-wide sales tax back into the news here in the US. This naturally causes people to freak out left and right. Why? Because most people are seriously misinformed about why this might happen, how it might happen, and what effect it may have on home-based ECommerce businesses. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.   EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the TRUTH about ECommerce is WHERE WE LIVE. Every couple of years, somebody somewhere does something that brings the idea of an Internet-wide sales tax back into the news here in the US. Whether it's a court case against a large retailer, a State government looking to raise even more tax revenue they can spend inefficiently, or any number of other triggering issues, the idea of a nationwide Internet Sales Tax in the United States rears it's ugly head over and over again. This naturally causes people to freak out left and right. Why? Because most people are seriously misinformed about why this might happen, how it might happen, and what effect it may have on home-based ECommerce businesses. So let's set the record straight and look at this with a common-sense perspective instead of the intentional fear-mongering created for a variety of specific agendas, none of which are to your benefit as a business owner. I do have to state for the record that I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, so I'm not giving you legal advice here. This is my personal opinion based on what I've seen in more than 40 years in business overall. As a long-time business owner in various large industries, I have an experienced personal perspective that most HOME-based business owners DON'T have. The first thing you need to understand is WHY this issue keeps coming up. It's simple, really. Let's use an example. Somebody in South Dakota buys a product online. The website that sold the product to that person is based in Florida. Since the seller is in Florida, they're not required (or allowed, under current law) to collect sales tax on that South Dakota sale. So the buyer in South Dakota gets to buy something without paying sales tax. The government officials in South Dakota don't like this. "What?!" they exclaim. "Somebody who lives in our State actually bought something without paying US for the privilege of buying it?? How dare they!" This is a common theme with many US States. They complain that they're losing tax revenue because their residents are buying things from across state lines without paying sales tax to their home State. They would much rather have all of their residents buy things ONLY from stores in their own States, so they don't miss out on a dime of that sales tax. Well, that simply isn't going to happen as much as it did decades ago. This is the 21st Century, and things are a changin'. To be fair, though, you CAN see their point. Sales tax revenue is one source (out of MANY sources of tax revenue) that provides states with hundreds of millions of dollars that they use to maintain infrastructure, provide services to their residents, spend wastefully on ill-conceived projects, you know...like States do with tax money. But to BE fair, you have to look at the OTHER side of the issue as well. Business that reside in other States LEGALLY CANNOT collect sales tax for states they don't RESIDE in. So the ECommerce website owner in Florida couldn't collect sales tax from that customer in South Dakota even if they WANTED to. That's because in any State in the US, a business can only collect sales tax in a State that they actually have a PHYSICAL PRESENCE in. That's called a "business nexus". If the website owner in Florida ALSO actually had a physical warehouse or other presence in South Dakota, then that Florida website owner would be REQUIRED to have a South Dakota State Sales Tax license, and collect sales tax on sales made to South Dakota residents. But with home-based ECommerce business owners, that's virtually NEVER the case. Home-based business owners are licensed to collect sales tax in their OWN State, where they DO actually reside and have a physical presence, but they CAN'T collect it from residents of OTHER States. And of course it's not just South Dakota. That's only an example. We're talking about 45 STATES in the US that actually do have sales tax. So in order to collect sales tax on every sale that a home-based business owner makes in the US, that business owner would have to have a physical presence in ALL 45 of those States, and be licensed to collect sales tax in all of those 45 States! That will NEVER happen. THIS is what you're told that the Internet Sales Tax proponents want to change. You hear that they want to come up with some kind of Federal law that requires online sellers to charge sales tax in every State, and makes it somehow LEGAL for online sellers to charge sales tax in States where they don't have a physical presence. HOWEVER, even if the Feds DID somehow make it legal for that to happen, there are over TEN THOUSAND sales tax jurisdictions in the US! Sales tax rates change by State, County and often even Cities and Municipalities. States have a basic sales tax rate, and then Counties and Cities can add more sales tax on top of the State rate. So of course, they DO. Can you imagine, as a small business owner, having to figure out exactly how much sales tax to charge your customers all over the country in more than ten thousand sales tax jurisdictions? It would be literally impossible to do that on your own. So let's look at where we are so far in all this mess as it relates to a home-based business owner. FIRST, the Feds keep talking about requiring all online businesses to charge sales tax to all their customers and pay that tax correctly to the State where EACH customer lives. But SECOND, you CANNOT LEGALLY COLLECT sales tax from customers outside your State. And THIRD, even if you could, you could NEVER figure out on your own how to properly charge customers in all those ten thousand-plus jurisdictions (that, by the way, are constantly changing). All right, we've got that established. Now let's talk about WHY the States keep bringing this up, and the Feds keep talking about it. It's not YOUR business they're concerned with. This is a result of companies like Amazon and eBay, as well as national big-box stores. Earlier, I talked about what a busines nexus is. When a company has a physical presence in a State, they're required and licensed to charge sales tax to customers in that State. But when they DON'T, they're NOT. There are lots of big-box stores that DON'T have physical locations in ALL States, but still SELL to all States nationally online. These are companies that do hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year. So you can see why the States are frustrated when they're losing all that potential tax revenue from the big-boxers who aren't physically in their States. eBay is mostly people selling to other people, but it's a LOT of people selling to other people. Strictly speaking, eBay sellers CANNOT collect sales tax outside of their own States, so there's that as well. Then there's Amazon. The online retail store that wants to swallow the world. Amazon DOES pay sales tax in all States for items that come from THEIR OWN PRODUCT INVENTORY. But they do NOT charge sales tax on products that come from the huge number of individual home-business owners that sell through Amazon's web site. That's a large amount of money. So this "Tax the Internet" push is always primarily about Amazon, and to a lesser extent, the big-box stores and eBay. It's NOT about YOU, the home-based business owner. As long as you don't sell on Amazon, which is a really bad idea to begin with for many other reasons. Still, you hear about it over and over again, and naturally it worries you. The talking bubbleheads on the news channels predict doom and gloom for small businesses, people who CLAIM to be internet gurus try to sell you useless solutions to paying taxes you still don't have to pay, and around and around we go. The LAST thing we need to talk about here is the fact that home-based business owners worry that people won't buy from them if they ever have to charge sales tax. That's ridiculous. Sales tax is a fact of life, and most online buyers don't even notice it. The very few who do are not the customers you want anyway, because they're bargain hunters and bargain hunters are a retail business's worst customer. So if you ever do end up having to charge sales tax, that means everybody else does too, and it won't matter to your sales. So here's the bottom line: 1. As a home-based business owner, as of this date you do not have to, and CANNOT pay sales tax to States other than where you are located. So you don't collect it for other States. 2. The Tax the Internet push is about the Amazon and the big-box stores, not about you. 3. If the Feds ever do find a way to tax all sales online, they will most likely exempt smaller home-based business that don't make millions of dollars a years. 4. If you DO somehow end up having to charge sales tax to all your customers, so will everybody else, so it won't affect your sales. In business, you'll learn over time that rules and regulations come and go. Things change. But the one thing that never changes is that business goes on no matter what happens, and yours will too if you don't let the changes freak you out. And if Tax the Internet ever DOES come to pass for home-based business, don't worry about figuring out the ten thousand different tax rates. Somebody will come up with a App that actually works and makes it simple. The State governments that want the tax money will make SURE of THAT. For much more highly experienced and incredibly insightful info about the ECommerce world, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.  

Google is a search engine. It's not a business owner, and it cannot teach you how to be a business owner. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where you'll always hear the Truth about EBiz, even if it isn't as pretty as everybody else's lies. I spend a great deal of time teaching the ECommerce business to all kinds of people. Through my EBiz Insider Workshop, Educational material I've created, videos, podcasts, articles, EBooks and more. I've been doing that for most of the 25 years that I've been successful in online business. When I tell people about my Workshops, I tell them they can call me if they have questions about Workshop. I tell them that I answer my own phone, and I'll answer their questions. Most people's response to that is surprise. How could I possibly spend that much time answering the phone? After all, when I market my Workshops, those emails go out to a HUGE number of people. You might be surprised to learn that while I do get great response to the Workshops I've been running for 9 years now, I really don't get that many phone calls in advance. Why? Because people don't believe I'll actually answer the phone! Yes, they tell me that when they email me or come into the Workshop. They think that offer of a phone call is some sinister trick to get them to call into a sales floor so that some fast-talking salesperson can sell them a whole bunch of gargage. I understand why people think that way. Pretty much every marketer in the ECommerce space does exactly that when they offer a phone number. I don't play that stupid game. I answer my phone myself, and I answer people's questions. Anyway, the reason I mention it is because when I do get calls, SOMETIMES it's really obvious that I'm talking to someone who thinks Google can teach them ECommerce. These are people who don't have questions about my Workshop specifically, like what do we discuss (we discuss EVERYTHING!), will they get to ask questions (of course they will), and so on. No, the people I'm talking about start asking me a laundry list of questions about Ecommerce. Basically what they're saying is "What do I do first?" I'll tell them the first thing they need to do is set up a legal business before anything else. Then it's "What do I do next?" And I'll tell them they need to learn proper Market Research in order to figure out what to sell. Then it's "What's next?" And "What's after that?" And "Then what?" And all through that series of "what's next" questions they're asking, I can hear them typing on their keyboards in the background. I know what they're doing. These are people who are trying to get me to give them a step by step laundry list of the things they need to do to build an online business the right way. Then they figure they can type those steps into Google, read some random articles and blog posts, and set up a business successfully on their own without any help. People who do that are fooling themselves, and it's harmful. They're going to waste unbelieveable amounts of time trying to slog their way through all the bad information, fake tools, scams and other bogus E-blabber they're going to find in the search engines. I can tell you from long experience that this is a rabbit hole that'll take them YEARS to climb back out of. They will NEVER get a business going that way; not successfully. How do I know that? Because I've taught THOUSANDS of people the RIGHT way to build this business in my Workshops over the years, and HUNDREDS of those people have told me that they took a deep dive into that same 'self teaching' rabbit hole and spent years trying to find their way out. Google cannot teach you how to start and run a successful business! There are several reasons people do this, so let's talk about those for a minute. 1. They just got laid off, don't have the money to pay for real help, and need to start a business quickly to make money. If that's the case, they need to go look for a job, and quickly. No matter what the bubble-headed New-Ru's out there want you to think, this business is NOT fast, and it's NOT easy. It WILL take time, hard work and a good deal of learning. 2. They've been scammed in the past by the HUGE number of dirt-bag EBiz marketing thieves online, and refuse to ever trust anybody ever again. I understand that. Probably more than 90% of the people I've taught this business to have been cheated somewhere along the way, before they found my Workshop and other materials. They don't want to get scammed again, and they're resigned to just trying to figure it out themselves. 3. There are people out there who don't understand the value of real information. They believe all information should be FREE; they feel entitled to it, and think that just because search engines exist, everything you find there is real. I've been in business overall for over 40 years; since I was a young teenager. I've busted my butt to get where I am. I've lived through the learning curves, the successes AND the failures, and that 40-plus years of experience is something I paid DEARLY for. I've learned things in that time that you'll never find in the search engines or in all the books you can possibly read on the subject. All that experience and knowledge is tremendously valuable, because it allows me to teach people to cut through all the crap and get straight to the core of what they need to know to do this right. Learning how to start a business from a successful, experienced business owner is worth a LOT. Let's look at this another way. If you wanted to become a plumber, would you call a local plumbing company, ask a whole bunch of questions about how plumbing works, look up details on Google and then run around taking plumbing jobs? Of course not. The very first time you flood somebody's kitchen (which will likely be your very first plumbing job!) will be the END of that particular fantasy. ON THE OTHER HAND, if you go to SCHOOL for plumbing, who are you going to be learning from? A PLUMBER, that's who. Somebody who already knows the trade and has spent years working in it. Let's look at other examples. Who teaches people to be Doctors? Doctors do! Who teaches people to be Lawyers? Yep. Lawyers do. No matter what you want to do in life or in business, you learn it from someone who already knows how to do it. Google is a search engine. It's not a business owner, and it cannot teach you how to be a business owner. So, while you have to be EXTREMELY careful about who you listen to, please understand that free info on the search engines will never teach you how to build and run a business. When you're ready to learn how to do this, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time!

There are a lot of mixed-up perceptions out there about what you should name your business and how you should register it. That can cause you a lot of problems down the road. If you do those five things, you'll be fine. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing that can hurt you is MISSING an episode! There are a lot of mixed-up perceptions out there about what you should name your business and how you should register it. There are, of COURSE, all the EBiz "Nurus" out there who tell you that you have to spend tons of money to let THEM register your business for you in some other state and spend thousands of dollars to do so. Please don't listen to the Nurus. In case you don't know what a Nuru is at this point, it's one of the thousands of so-called ebiz experts who pop up out of nowhere and claim to be an ebiz "guru". Then you check their domain names and find that they've been around for a grand total of 3 months, but they have tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of supposed ebiz education to sell you. Nurus are fake, and they lie. Don't listen. So, let's talk about the truth when it comes to setting up and naming your business. First, I have to state for the record that I am not a lawyer or an accountant, so what I'm telling you is not to be treated as legal advice. These are my experiences and opinions after over 40 years in business. If you want legal advice, talk to a lawyer or an accountant. My lawyer and my accountant told me I had to say that. (See? I get legal advice from lawyers and accountants too!) With that being said, here are the facts...as I've experienced them over and over again...when it comes to setting up your business within the United States. I'll get into what you should do from other countries in a few minutes. First, always set up your business in your own State. The State you RESIDE in. Nurus will tell you to set up in Nevada or Delaware or Wyoming to take advantage of amazing secret tax breaks, and other such drivel. While there are some differences in corporate law in those states, as a home-based business those differences aren't going to matter to you. Make no mistake; you're going to pay taxes, and you're not going to escape that fact no matter where you set up. When you grow to the size of Adidas or Disney, okay, you might want to consider some of those Nevada, Delaware or Wyoming, but until then keep it simple and keep it local. It's MUCH easier to deal with a business setup in your own state, and it's much less expensive to deal with your Accountant when your business is in your own state. Nurus only feed you that crap sandwich because they want you to think you need their VERY EXPENSIVE help. They'll charge you THOUSANDS of dollars to do something that doesn't COST thousands of dollars (they pocket most of that cash). Then they'll tell you that you need to pay for their ongoing "accounting services" to manage your magic, tax-free company. Again, it's a lie. In some states, Accountants can set up your business. In other states, an Attorney is needed. In NO state is it necessary to throw armfuls of cash at a Nuru. Second, DO NOT do this yourself. You're setting up a business entity that interacts with both state and federal governments. While you CAN simply download forms and file a business in any state in the US, you should NOT do that. If you do it yourself and you make a mistake, most of the time that mistake won't be found at first. By the time it catches up to you, possibly even years later, you could find yourself owing penalties and fines that could cost you all the rest of the money you're going to make for the REST of your life. Governments LOVE penalties and fines. Like I said, though, do NOT listen to a Nuru either. You need to locate a well-known and trusted Accountant or Attorney NEAR WHERE YOU LIVE. Not in some other city. Having the ability to easily meet in person with the Accountant or Attorney who manages your business filings is a huge advantage. Third, SHOP AROUND. The fees for setting up businesses are set by your state. The costs you pay for your Account or Attorney are set by the ACCOUNTANT or ATTORNEY. Some are WAY more expensive than others, for exactly the same work. Don't be afraid to come right out and ask what they charge, and then shop around till you find that balance between a reputable professional and the fees they charge. Remember, the initial business setup isn't the only fee you'll pay them over the life of your business. You need to make sure you get a good hourly rate on your accounting and legal advice, because you WILL need more of it in the future. Fourth, consider the type of business entity carefully. The legal professional you choose will give you advice on this. My PERSONAL advice would be to go with a Limited Liability Company, known as an "LLC". There are 3 main types of business entities that can work for a home-based business. A "DBA", also called a "sole proprietorship" is the one that most people choose. It's quick, it's cheap, and it's easy. HOWEVER, with that type of business, your personal assets are exposed. That means that if you ever do have any serious legal issues with your company, the men with the black ties and the calculators can show up and take your car, your house, and clean out your bank accounts. It's NOT worth the risk, no matter how small the risk may be. The next business type is called an LLC, as I said. You can think of an LLC as kind of a half-way step between a sole proprietorship and a full-blown corporation. It has those legal protections in place for your personal assets, but it's not as complex or costly as a full corporation. It was created in Wyoming in 1977 and has spread across all the US states since then. The LLC, as I said, protects you in many ways without costing as much or causing as many complications as a Corporation. It's my business entity of choice and is inexpensive to file and run. An LLC also allows you to write your own agreements and "by-laws", so to speak, as to how that business will be run within a loose framework, which makes it very flexible. The third general business type is called a Corporation. A full-on Corporation has many forms. They are all expensive, complicated, and cost much more to maintain. Personally, the ONLY time I would recommend a Corporation to someone is if you're going to have a business partner. A Corporation offers you more detailed remedies against a partner who does you dirty in some way in the future. I've been involved in several partnerships over the course of my decades in business. I hate to say it, but I have NEVER had a partner who didn't try to screw me out of money at some point. Some of them succeeded. It doesn't matter who the partner is. They can be the most trustworthy person you know, a lifelong friend, even a family member. PEOPLE GET WEIRD AROUND MONEY. Money changes people in ways you'd often never expect. If you're going to have a business partner, I would STRONGLY recommend that you talk to your legal pro about a full-on Corporation and a VERY detailed partnership agreement. Other than that, out of those three basic business types, my personal recommendation will always be an LLC. Fifth and finally, DON'T SCREW UP THE NAME. I see new ecommerce business owners doing that all the time. How can you screw up a business name? Well first, you could name it something that you personally think sounds really cool, like "The Purple Unicorn Company, LLC", for example. When you're in business, you must remember that something YOU think is really cool could look really silly to some other people. You don't want your business name to be something that could be a negative for any of your customers IN ANY WAY. Second, you could name it for the product niche that you THINK you're going to sell. So, if you call it "Milton's Baby Shoes, LLC", what happens if that product line doesn't work out in your research, or if you decide to sell in additional product niches down the road? People who might at some point buy a metal detector from you are going to scream "FRAUD!!" when they see the name "Milton's Baby Shoes" on their credit card receipt. Then they're going to complain to their bank, your merchant company is going to get a credit card chargeback, and you have a whole big nasty mess to straighten out. If that happens often enough, you could actually lose your merchant account. That's the thing you use to collect money from your customers. Kind of important. The best thing you can possibly do is to choose a generic business name. "Smith Enterprises, LLC" is JUST FINE. You're not going to have a domain name for the business name. You're not going to have a web site for the business name. The only place people will see it will be in your website's copyright notices, and credit card receipts. Your actual product sales web site will be called something different, and that site name will be OWNED by your business. So, ignore the Nurus, stay local, consult a legal pro in your area, strongly consider the LLC (unless you have a partner), and keep the name generic. If you do those five things, you'll be fine. I mentioned earlier that I'd talk about starting a US business from outside the US. This is a smart thing to do, because it makes it much easier to sell to the HUGE US market. In that case, you ARE going to want to use an online service but stick with either LegalZoom.com or MyCororation.com. They're reputable, and they'll walk you through the process. Although most people don't know about the things we've talked about here, this is still EBiz 101-type information. If you want to get to EBiz 10,005...check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series  at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time!

There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing separating you from the TRUTH about ECommerce, is everybody ELSE in this business! There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. To those who DO have experience in retail, however, buying and selling liquidations is about as exciting as putting on a $3,000 pair of Christian Louboutin sneakers and accidentally stepping in a mud puddle. First, you have to understand that there's a lot of risk involved, even if the "liquidation" price seems low. Liquidated products (also called “secondary market goods” to make the whole thing sound a little less horrifying) come from lots of sources. They COULD (rarely!) be factory overruns that never left the manufacturer or last year’s models that were never sold at the retail store. Much more likely, though, they're customer returns to big-box stores, used products such as old computers or other outdated electronics, incomplete or damaged scratch-n-dents, etc. It's hard to tell what you're actually getting, because the descriptions of the ORIGIN and CONDITION of the liquidated products are often vague, or even flat-out misleading. There are lots of web sites that advertise liquidations, acting as brokers. The web sites themselves, though, are simply paid advertising platforms. No matter how good their reputations, they do not control the actual liquidation sales themselves. Most don’t even check out the legitimacy of the liquidators advertising on them. That’s on your head; you’re the one who has to make sure you’re not getting burned when you buy. You could easily end up with a "waste factor" of 20 to 30% or more. "Waste" means products that are damaged, dented, non-functional, dirty, torn or generally useless for one reason or another. Of course the damaged boxes that contain the waste will almost always be hidden out of sight in the middle of the pallet you buy. On top of all that, always remember that liquidated products are liquidated in the first place because nobody ELSE could sell them at retail! Second, if you're buying liquidated product pallets, you're most likely trying to sell those products on eBay or Amazon. If you've been told that selling on EITHER of those platforms is a good idea for a home-based business owner, go get some of those $3,000 Louboutin sneakers and look for a mud puddle. At least that won't be as disappointing as finding out that there are no profit margins left for home-based business owners on eBay or Amazon. (For more info on that sorry state of affairs, check out my Podcasts and Blog Posts on eBay and Amazon). Third, no matter where you try to sell liquidated products, the fact that you're carrying physical inventory is going to hurt your business. Selling online SHOULD be a situation in which you NEVER actually touch a product. You should NOT be storing, cleaning, packing and shipping somebody else's leftovers one at a time for a miserable profit. That's NOT an effective business model. Fourth, the only people making any real money in liquidation are the brokers. The ones you buy the pallets from. The bigger brokers buy TRUCKLOADS of liquidation pallets all at once at REALLY low prices from big companies that couldn't sell the products for one reason or another, SIGHT UNSEEN. They do NOT inspect those individual pallets. Then they unload them on YOU at a profit without even looking at them, and YOU'RE the one who gets to deal with all the heartache of trying to sell that junk at something approaching an individual profit margin that MIGHT get you a beer and a bag of chips if you're lucky. Look, if you're going to be in business, BE IN BUSINESS. Forget about the gimmicks and all the other crap that sounds too good to be true. It IS too good to be true. Get away from eBay and Amazon. Learn how to plan, research and start your own website, where you actually are your own boss. Sell NEW products that people actually WANT from legitimate manufacturers and wholesalers. Use drop shipping so that you don't have to invest any money or handle the products physically. That's how the people who make money in this business actually make money in this business. Anybody who tells you different is lying to you. Simple as that. For much more no-holds-barred real life EBiz information, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time!

Anyway, here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you cannot simply use an e-commerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, guess what? There are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris malta's EBiz Insider podcast, where the information is so good that even the family pets will set up and listen! It’s true...our dogs sit here and stare at me all the time when I'm working. Or more they just need to go out. Anyway, here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you cannot simply use an e-commerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, guess what? There are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Because EASY. I say this over and over again in my podcasts, my articles, my books, my workshops, my blogs, my ECommerce courses...I repeat it so often, because it's so important. Whenever anybody tells you that anything in business is EASY, they're lying to you. They just want to get into your wallet, and telling everybody that everything is easy is like having the master key to every wallet on the planet! So because EASY...every day more and more people get suckered into the idea that they can take a pre-designed website template full of random pretty pictures, slap some products on it, and start selling like there's no tomorrow. No, no, NO. This business is retail marketing. When retail marketing is done online, some of it is based in technology, yes. Hence websites. But about 90% of retail marketing, both offline and online, is based in Psychology. That's what marketing is. Psychology. If you don't understand the psychology of retail marketing, you need to find someone legit who's willing to teach you. That's not easy, because there's only a very small handful of people in this business who are legit. Like me, for example. This is important, because this stuff really is make-or-break, seriously. Here’s just one of the many things you need to understand about retail Marketing in relation to psychology. We'll focus on this one because it relates to website templates. Demographics. I’ll bet you've never heard that word from online con artists like Richard Cranium and his amazing Circus of Online Easy, have you?. People like that don't even know this stuff. And if even if they did they wouldn't teach you, because when you know what you're doing, you don't need their silly little over-priced “apps, tools and amazing systems”. So anyway, demographics. It's not enough to just put products out there on a website with random pretty pictures, not by a long shot. What you really need to know is who is buying those products. Why? Two reasons. 1. You cannot sell the same product to all age and gender groups successfully at the same time. No professional marketer ever tries to do that. 2. Different age and gender groups respond to different styles marketing. So in order to be successful, you need to know the age and gender demographic of the people who buy the most of your product. Then you need to know what style of marketing that particular demographic responds to. And then, you need to modify the style, Graphics, typography, messaging, and social phraseology that you use to attract and communicate with your potential customers. Look, I know that sounds all fancy and stuff. It really isn't. Owning a business isn't EASY, but this stuff isn't rocket science either. It's just learning the details, like anything else in life. But it does illustrate the fact that you will never find a pre-designed e-commerce website template that is already built exactly right for the combination of the products you sell and the expectations of the demographic who buys them the most. Fancy, pretty website templates are created by graphic designers. Graphic designers are not Retail Marketers. They're GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. Don't get me wrong here. It's good to use a website template. There's so much coding in them that you don't want to build the site completely from scratch yourself. However, any website template you ever use for an e-commerce store will have to be modified visually and structurally to be an experience that your consumer demographic will respond to and buy from. This means people like the bubbleheads on all the TV and YouTube commercials who bounce up and down and say things like “I just built a professional website in ten minutes with Stix!” are not going to be helpful to you. Not EVER. So remember, templates in general are good, but putting them online straight out of the box is BAD. If you want to learn a lot more about how this business REALLY works, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com

From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. Unfortunately, Meg Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where you heard it here first, because you definitely won't hear it anyplace else! Let's talk about the question that more and more eBay Sellers are asking more and more every day: What happened to eBay? To do that we have to start with a little history lesson. From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. I was very involved with eBay back then. I was an eBay Developer Partner. I was a speaker at their national "eBay Live!" conventions. I spent years as a regular guest on eBay Radio. When eBay wanted info and content on Wholesaling, they called me. In about 2006, they asked me to write a book about how to find stuff to sell on eBay, and I did. It was published by McGraw-Hill and is still in bookstores today, although I would not recommend it now, because eBay has gone seriously downhill since about 2009. I firmly believe that the driving force behind all the things that were GOOD about eBay in those days was Meg Whitman, eBay's CEO back then. On her watch, the eBay Partner Program was created. eBay Educators were trained and certified to help potential sellers. Outreach programs for disadvantaged people who wanted to start a business were created. The eBay Radio Show began. The "eBay Live!" national convention was created. The 'eBay Bible" was written. I met Meg Whitman at the eBay convention in Las Vegas in 2006, when I was there as a speaker. Very smart person, and very interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, Ms. Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. eBay is a price-driven marketplace. It's like a flea market, actually. Everybody who shops there is looking for deal and bargains; they all look for the lowest price. That was okay when it was just people selling to other people back in the glory days. That marketplace tended to correct itself with respect to general pricing. After Meg Whitman left and the new management took over, it seems that the people running things got greedy. It started to look like everything was about earning more money for eBay in any way possible, even if it was at their Sellers' expense. The 'eBay Live!' conventions were shut down. The training and partner programs were shut down. eBay University was shut down. Regulations got more regulatory. Customer Service got less customer servicey. Fees went up, more and more each year. eBay stopped backing up their sellers as much as they used to during problem resolutions, and started siding with the buyers much more often. Sometime in about 2009 I was contacted by eBay and asked if I would work with one of their groups, to teach them how wholesale companies operated and how to properly communicate with them. I figured, "Great, eBay wants to learn more about how wholesale works!" That couldn't be a bad thing, right? So I did what they asked. Later on, I learned what they had really been interested in. They had started a project which, if I remember correctly (don't quote me on this) they internally called the 'Enterprise Project'. They basically opened a back-channel into eBay and began contacting wholesale and manufacturing companies, and invited them to come in and sell directly on eBay. Under assumed Seller names, so that nobody would know who they really were. In other words, eBay was no longer just people selling to people; it became more and more about wholesalers selling to people, but it seems that most people didn't know that. To the best of my knowledge, this practice still continues. The effect is that eBay has been flooded with wholesalers who can sell at much lower prices than individual eBay Sellers can. That's a terrible thing for eBay Sellers. In fact, more and more eBay Sellers are complaining that they can't find cheap enough wholesale sources of products to beat their competition on eBay and make a profit. Those Sellers blame their wholesalers for that. The reality is that eBay Sellers simply can't compete against other 'Sellers' that they don't realize ARE wholesale companies. As I said earlier, eBay has always been a price-driven marketplace. People looking for the lowest prices. Searching for what they want, then clicking the "Sort By Lowest Price" button. So of course eBay Sellers can't compete, because the wholesalers will always have the lowest price! It's important to understand that the worst place you can possibly put a home-based retail business is squarely in the path of the most bargain-hunting consumers. That's a given no matter where you're selling because home-based business owners need realprofit margins (at least 20%) to sustain a business, and 30 to 35% to grow that business. That doesn't happen often in ANY bargain-hunting, price driven marketplace. Add direct wholesalers into the mix, and you can forget it. At this point, in my experienced opinion, eBay is no longer a place where a home-based business owner can make any significant money. YET...there are HUNDREDS of "Make Money On eBay!" programs, books, tools and systems out there, many that sell for thousands of dollars, run by sniveling weasels who know they are lying to you. There are OTHER programs and systems that tell you that eBay should be a PART of your online business, along with Amazon and your own Website. Anybody who knows this business knows that's post-digestive dog food, because price-driven marketplaces like eBay and Amazon do NOT mesh with properly marketing-driven businesses like Websites. But the weasels lie to you and sell you that junk for college-tuition-level money anyway. Don't you believe them. For bargain hunters who SHOP on eBay, things have gotten BETTER. For the home-based business owner who tries to make a serious full time living SELLING on eBay, it's game over. For more home based business info you just won't learn anywhere else, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.  

Apparently China has somehow become a place that defies the general rules of Economics. Products are made at Amazing Low Prices, sold at Amazing Low Prices, and you can get them to your garage, your basement or a Convenient Storage Unit Near You at Amazing Low Prices. (Sigh). Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where business owners learn to be business owners, and scammers are scared, as they ....darn well better be. Okay, here we go on another Magical Mystery Tour. Apparently China has somehow become a place that defies the general rules of Economics. Products are made at Amazing Low Prices, sold at Amazing Low Prices, and you can get them to your garage, your basement or a Convenient Storage Unit Near You at Amazing Low Prices. (Sigh). A while back, I sent one of my business partners and several of my employees TO China for two weeks. Guangzhou Province, to be specific, which is a port area where a LOT of manufacturing goes on. Their mission was to determine whether it would be reasonable for us to begin large scale (not small-scale home-based business level) importing from China. We were looking at several product lines, but I'll just use one product line and one specific product as an example. You know those camping chairs with the aluminum legs and canvas seats that you can fold up and slide into a nylon bag and take with you wherever you go? Those were selling for $12 to $14 per unit retail in the US at the time. If we bought them in bulk in China, we could get them for $3.12. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? But wait...there's more. To get them at that price, we would have to buy at least a container load of them. A "container" is a railroad car. That's a lot of chairs. Before we even bought anything at all, we would have to hire an Agent in China that we could trust (good luck) to look after our sourcing interests there. Then the order would have to be placed, and we would have to wait 2 to 3 months for the order to be manufactured. Manufacturers in China do not make all kinds of stuff ahead of time, store it in warehouses and then sell it. They don't lay out that kind of effort and capital expense ahead of time. It's made to order, and that takes time. Then our trusty Agent in China (good luck) would have to inspect the product, and then get it to a shipping port to be transported to the US. That's ocean shipping, as in big ships that travel over the ocean. You can't FedEx a railroad car. Then we'd have to consult the US Harmonized Tariff Schedule to determine how much we're going to pay in Import Taxes to bring our chairs into the US. Then we'd pay Customs Fees at our Port of Entry into the US, then hire a trucking company to transport our chairs to whatever warehouse we would be paying for in order to store all those camping chairs. Once we added up all those costs, it turned out that it would actually cost us more than $9.00 per unit to buy those chairs in China, get them to the US and store them so that we could (hopefully) sell them all. Now, I'm no theoretical mathematician, but to me it sounds like $9.00 is a whole lot more than $3.12. On top of that, it turned out that we could actually buy those chairs already imported into the US by other really big existing importers for about $7.00. So what would be the point? We'd be better off buying them in the US. All the (expensive) steps I described above that come after "this costs $3.12 in China" are the steps that Slippery Dan and the band conveniently LEAVE OUT of the information they sell you for thousands of dollars. Their #1 chart-topping hit only has one verse..."This costs $3.12 in China!" It's just not the whole lyric, not by a long shot. What you need to know is that there are already lots and lots of very large import companies in the US that have the money and the infrastructure to import billions of dollars in Chinese-made products into the US at VERY low prices (because they buy HUGE quantity) and then sell them to you at wholesale for less than it would cost you to deal with China directly on a small-business scale. So please, for the sake of your kids' college fund, DO NOT buy in to the fantasy that you're going to get tons of dirt-cheap products if you buy direct from China. The chuckleheads who tell you that are just trying to make you think business is EASY to they can upsell you on their 'Amazing Systems' and 'Foolproof Tools' In some cases, they're actually trying to get you to pay them thousands of dollars to TAKE YOU ON A TRIP to China with so you feel like you've accomplished something. They're going to pocket most of that money while they slow-boat you there and leave you in a seedy hotel witha couple of trips to a trade show. On a home-based business scale, buying from China successfully is just a flat-out lie. Want the TRUTH about ECommerce? Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Amazon is a great place for LARGE companies to sell products. Not so much for home-based business. Can you make SOME money on Amazon as a small business? Sure. You can also make SOME money collecting old soda cans. It's just not going to be a full time living. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth prevails, and the scammers fail. Let's talk about the whale in the goldfish bowl for a little while. Amazon is a great place for LARGE companies to sell products. Not so much for home-based business. Can you make SOME money on Amazon as a small business? Sure. You can also make SOME money collecting old soda cans. It's just not going to be a full time living. Most people are familiar with Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). That's where you send wholesale products into an Amazon warehouse, and they basically take over the sale. They sell the product, handle the shipping, customer service, returns, etc. When something of yours sells, you get paid a (small) profit. Just like eBay, Amazon has it's fees (lots of them!), and as a small business owner who can't get those big bulk wholesale price breaks, those fees will hit you hard right where the sun don't shine. Like eBay, Amazon is price-driven marketplace. Most people who shop there are looking for bargains, and that's a bad place for a small business to be. The profit margins are too small. There are other issues too. Amazon can "gate" a product on you with no notice, and often does. What does that mean? Let's say you send 30 Sony DVD Players that you got in a liquidation lot (which is another bad idea, more on that in another podcast) to Amazon FBA so they can sell them for you. Then let's say that a little later on, Sony decides that they're tired of Amazon sellers selling their products at discount prices. Yes, that happens all the time. Big manufacturers have to maintain a certain price point for their products in the overall marketplace. Otherwise, the products become devalued (which means they're PERCIEVED to be worth less than they really are) and then the big-box physical stores refuse to sell them. Why? Because big-box stores have lots of overhead. Employees to pay, parking lots and buildings to maintain, mass media advertising to shovel out, etc. They have costs. If enough people see that Sony DVD Player selling online for $50 when a big-box store has to sell it for $75 to make a profit, the big-box store is going to stop selling it. That's bad for Sony, because the big-box stores are still their bread and butter. So the big-boxers go screaming to Sony that they can't compete anymore, and Sony goes screaming to Amazon (AND all of Sony's wholesalers as well) that the product can no longer be sold at a discount online. That's one reason (among many others) why Amazon "gates" a product. They tell you that you simply cannot sell it anymore. So then, you get to pay for Amazon to ship your unsold DVD Players back to you so that you can store them in your garage until the mice chew the wiring out of them and they become dumpster-food. The worst part is that gating can apply to entire brand names as well as entire categories of products. Gating is a fairly common complaint, and can cost you a lot of money if you have any kind of reasonable investment in the gated product, brand name or category. Another problem a lot of small Amazon sellers complain about is that Amazon will push them out of the "buy box" in favor of larger sellers. Amazon watches their sales metrics with an electron microscope. So let's say you send some product into Amazon that starts selling like crazy. When Amazon realizes this (about a nanosecond after it starts to happen) they go on the hunt for larger companies that can send lots more of those products into their warehouses at cheaper wholesale prices. If and when they find one (which they almost always will), you get spanked like a rented mule and sent into Time Out while the Biggie McBiggerson Wholesale Company gets Featured on Amazon for that product instead of you. Is it wrong of Amazon to do that? NO. It's their site, their platform, and they have every right to locate large suppliers of products that can fill their customers' needs better than your small business can. They also have every right to Feature whatever they darn well please. It's not much fun for you, but there's really nothing to be done about it. Then there are all the tools that people use to study their competition (you) on Amazon. Amazon sellers are constantly checking out and copying their competition, which makes it easy for people with a little more money to swoop in and out-compete you as soon as you hit on something that actually sells. Now, competition is a normal part of any marketplace, but it's just way too easy to get hammered like that on Amazon. Add to all of that the other problems and pitfalls (just too numerous to list here) that even people who push Amazon FBA and Amazon Stores admit to, and this is not a good idea for your home-base business. You'll spend most of your time trying to outfox your competition, dealing with tons of rules and regulations, and selling at profit margins that home-based businesses really can't survive on. When you try to work within a business framework like that, you're really not running your own business. You're being told what you can and can't do by a big company, you're getting shafted on your take-home pay, you're working far too hard for far too little money, and the ground shifts under you unpredictably every other day. Isn't that what you were trying to get away from when you started your own business?? Amazon is best left to the big wholesalers and manufacturers that it was designed to work with. And yet, there they are...the Evil Clowns who swear to you all day long that you're going to make a fortune selling on Amazon in just a few weeks if you'll only pay them $35,000 for their 'Amazing Amazon Coaching'. Puh-leeeze. If you REALLY want to learn this business from someone who's been successful in it for more than 25 YEARS and will NOT lie to you, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

If you've decided to get in on this by starting your own home-based ECommerce business, the first thing you need to know is that you're going to be walking through a minefield in the dark. With a blindfold on. Hands tied behind your back, forced to hop on one foot. Be prepared! Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth will open your eyes wider than a Lasik surgeon can. There's a 21st century gold rush going on, and it isn't on the Discovery Channel. If you've decided to get in on this by starting your own home-based ECommerce business, the first thing you need to know is that you're going to be walking through a minefield in the dark. With a blindfold on. Hands tied behind your back, forced to hop on one foot. And dizzy. Does that sound like an exaggeration? IT ISN'T. When I first started in this business way back in 1993, things were whole lot simpler. Even though the 'consumer internet' was brand new and we were feeling our way along learning (and inventing) new things every day, at least nobody was trying to sabotage us on purpose. Today it's a whole different ball game. It seems like everybody with access to a keyboard, a bag of Cheetos, a YouTube account and a complete disregard for basic human decency claims to be an "EBiz Guru" of some kind. There are thousands of them. Yes, I said thousands, and I'm not exaggerating. 99% of these people couldn't muster enough brain cells in one place long enough to tie their own shoes, but oh, they're EXPERTS in ECommerce! Yeah. Ok. Apparently all it takes these days to be an 'expert' in ECommerce is a keyboard, a bag of Cheetos, a YouTube account and a complete disregard for...well, we've covered that ground. They claim to be experts, then they sell you absolute garbage 'apps', 'tools', 'systems', 'information', and 'coaching' for tens of thousands of dollars. It's not just the Grinning Ninnies who've blanketed YouTube with crapstorms of stupid, either. Many of these putzes are doing hotel seminars and national conventions. Speaking to crowds of hundreds of people who hang on every slippery word and scribble reams of notes as if they're going to magically pick up on that one hidden amazing secret that'll allow them to get out of there without spending any money [cue the hilarious laughter] and go home, start a business with no money, no learning and no experience, and get rich by next Tuesday. By 3:30 PM, so they have time to get ready for dinner. After all, we wouldn't want starting an online business to be inconvenient in any way. I hate to say this, but it's not just them. It's you as well! They're heartless, disgusting con artists, yes. But a con artist needs a willing "Mark". (The "Mark" is the target of the con, in case you're not up on con artist lingo). If the Mark isn't willing, the con doesn't work. So if YOU are the Mark, (which you absolutely are, the moment you sign up for that first 'free lesson' or 'free trial') YOU have to be willing to believe that it's possible to get rich by Tuesday (no later than 3:30 PM) with no money, no learning and no experience. And if you DO allow yourself to believe that even for just one minute, you might as well fry an egg, grab a slice of cheese and pop yourself in the toaster, because YOU are the Breakfast Bagel that these jack-wagons are going to chow down on every morning before they even get dressed. No matter how many of these swamp lizards paddle up to your door, the only way they can hurt you is if you believe that starting a real, live business that makes actual full-time money is EASY...or...can be bought from somebody else on easy credit terms. Starting, building and running a real money-making business online is NOT easy, and you CAN'T buy 'tools, systems and apps' that will do it FOR you. Not EVER. Let's face it, in life we want things to be easy. Easy is better than hard. However, life being life, that ain't gonna happen. But the knuckle-draggers who have been trained to think that cheating people is actually a smart business method KNOW that we want easy. So they serve it up to us like a three-scoop bowl of ice cream and give us a giant spoon. The only problem is that they charge thousands of dollars a scoop, and when the bowl is empty all you end up with is an empty bowl. Which you could have gotten for a dollar at the Dollar Store, if all you actually wanted really was a bowl. If you've read any history or maybe watched the History Channel once in a while you might remember learning about the great California Gold Rush of 1849 (which actually started in 1848, but hey, facts get fuzzy when people get greedy). During the years of that gold rush, the people who actually made much more money much more consistently were the people who were smart enough to go into the retail business, not the "Gimme a shovel, I'm gonna get rich by Tuesday" business. Hoteliers, store owners, butchers, restaurateurs, etc. were the real gold rush winners in 1849(8). There were actually very few miners who made "fortunes", and the vast majority of them were the few who actually knew how to mine gold. But those facts (which were known at the time) didn't stop the shipping and transportation companies 'back east' (and even in other countries) from screaming at the top of their lungs that you could pick gold up in the streets in California, and all you needed was a really expensive ticket on their ships and wagon trains. Huh...guess they made a lot of money too, right? This is no different. The thousands of needle-heads who know that you don't know how to mine gold charge you tens of thousands of dollars for a ticket on the Secret Train To The Gold Fields. They'll put you in a first-class seat so you can relax comfortably while you eat your ice cream. They'll give you all kinds of fancy-looking gimmicks to play with that flash and spin and have buttons that bleep when you click them. They'll tell you about all the magical ways you can summon your own personal Unicorns (which don't actually exist; sorry!) that will fly around scooping up people to buy from you. They'll promise you a Secret Code to the hidden Trans-Pacific Matter Transporters (that don't actually exist) that will make huge loads of incredible products from China appear in your garage for mere pennies on the dollar (which isn't actually true). They'll show you amazing-looking web sites that they claim make quadrillions of dollars per second (but actually don't). They'll show you heart-felt testimonials (that they wrote themselves, but don't ask that question!) from others (themselves) who are all giddy and tingly about their Amazing Systems (that don't actually work). They'll show you "Actual Bank Statements" (that they actually spent entire minutes of their lives creating by pecking away at Photoshop with their stubby little fingers) that PROVE that their "Amazing Systems" have made millions of dollars for themselves and other giddy and tingly people (only they actually didn't). THE ONLY THING THEY DON'T DO is actually teach you how to mine gold. The thing they never tell you (but should be easy enough to figure out) is that the Secret Train To The Gold Fields is powered by your money. That train doesn't run on a wood-burning boiler or diesel fuel. It runs on your CASH. Picture somebody at the front of the train tossing shovel-fulls of your hundred dollar bills into the flaming maw of an old-fashioned steam boiler fire-box, laughing maniacally. Not a pretty picture, is it. The minute your money is gone and there's nothing more to shovel into the fire-box, that train's emergency brakes automatically kick in. The Conductor stomps over to your seat, unceremoniously tosses you out the window into the desert, and the train screeches off down the line shoveling other people's money into the fire. So now you're sitting in the desert, broke, nowhere near the actual gold fields, and you have no idea what to do next. And you still don't know how to mine gold. So get off the train, come to Chris Malta.com and check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. I've been a REAL successful gold miner for over 25 years online. I'll show you where the gold REALLY is. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

The idea of a Free Trial Website is purposely misleading, and here's why. When you start a REAL online business using a Website, the Website is actually the LAST thing you do, NOT the first. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where you CAN buy EBiz Scammer Pinatas in the gift shop if you like! The idea of a Free Trial Website is purposely misleading, and here's why. When you start a REAL online business using a Website, the Website is actually the LAST thing you do, NOT the first. There is a certain amount of learning that needs to be done before you jump into this business. Then there's a certain amount of Market Research, Keyword Research, Graphic Development, Site Pre-Design, Marketing Material Development, Demographic Research, Social Media Setup and SEO Development to be done FIRST. THEN you get the Website and start to put it together. If that sounds like it's just too much for you, you should not be considering an online business. If you're not willing to learn and work, you're never going to make any money in any business of any kind. If you are willing to learn and work, read on. Very 'reputable' companies will offer you Free Trial Websites. All the big ones you see on TV and online do this in one form or another. The problem with that is that they know there's a lot of other work to do first, but they don't care and won't tell you. As long as they can get you hooked with a Free Trial and then start marketing useless "apps, systems and tools" that make it all sound EASY to you, they're doing their happy-dance because they've successfully connected your wallet to their bank account on a monthly recurring basis, and they'll keep stringing you along for as long as they possibly can. That's disgusting. I once had a man attend my EBiz Insider Workshop who told me that he had started four Websites in a row that had each failed. I felt bad for him until we started talking about the details. Then I felt even worse for him. He told me he had let Shopify talk him into a 2 Week Free Trail Website. He started the Free Trial, slapped some random products from Oberlo on it (oh, boy), didn't make any money in 2 weeks, so he shut it down. Then he started another Shopify 2 Week Free Trial, slapped some random products from Oberlo on it, didn't make any money in 2 weeks, so he shut it down. Then he started another Shopify 2 Week Free Trial, slapped some random products from Oberlo on it, didn't make any money in 2 weeks...well, I'm sure you know where this story is going at this point. He said he did that four times in 2 months. I think I was probably speechless for almost a full minute, which, as you can tell, is rare for me. But you know what? This WASN'T HIS FAULT. This is the level of absolute insanity that these sick, greedy con artists tell people to in order to cheat them out of money. He was TOLD to do that by some skeechy online marketing hack who charged him thousands of dollars for THAT kind of advice!! You're never going to make any real money online in 2 weeks. Or in 2 months, for that matter. Not money that counts. This take patience, effort and time. The people who most often become the worst victims of all these misleading cons are people who are in a hurry to make money. An online business, or any other kind of business, is not a quick solution to a short-term financial shortage. It's going to take time, patience, effort and SOME money. Please remember that. There are a FEW (not MANY, but a FEW) highly experienced business owners out here who actually care more about being honest than we do about making money. If you want to see that strange concept in action, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.

If you've been approached by somebody who wants to charge you a butt-ton of money to put you through ECommerce Training or Coaching, close your eyes immediately. Looking too closely at that 99% of those particular Gorgons will turn you to stone, just like in Greek mythology. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth isn't optional; it's a daily requirement. If you've been approached by somebody who wants to charge you a butt-ton of money to put you through ECommerce Training or Coaching, close your eyes immediately. Looking too closely at that 99% of those particular Gorgons will turn you to stone, just like in Greek mythology. Then run the other way, preferably with your eyes still closed. You can't be too careful; you might catch a reflection in a mirror on your way out of the room. You can tell who the bad guys are by the words they use, the questions they ask and the promises they make. Here's a list of the seven worst red flags in ecommerce marketing. 1. If buzzwords like Easy, Wealthy, Amazing, Secret, etc., etc. are part of their name or presentation, run away. Those marketing buzzwords are purposely used to fool you, and anybody who's willing to fool you isn't your friend. 2. If they attempt to ask you anything (and I mean ANYTHING) about how much money you earn or savings you have available, or ANYTHING about your credit rating and credit cards, run away. That's called "Pre-qualification". They're trying to figure out how much money they can squeeze from you. The very small handful of reputable people in this business do NOT pre-qualify. 3. If they tell you it's okay to spend lots of money on their stuff because you'll earn it back quickly, run away. That is a LIE. 4. If they show you images of bank statements of people who have supposedly made money with them, run away. That's a sure sign of hack marketing tactics. Photoshop can simulate the appearance money, but it can't actually print money. 5. If they show you Testimonials from people who talk about having made specific amounts of money or claim to have made money quickly, run away. That's a Marketing Gimmick and a LIE. 6. If they show you Websites that are supposedly owned by people who have made lots of money with them, run away. They're fake. People who actually make money with their Websites NEVER want potential competitors to see them, because they can be copied. 7. If they tell you they're going to connect you with their "Manager" to talk further, run away. That's sales code for "Now we know you have money, we're going to bring in the Closer and take it from you". It's very important to understand that whenever you have these phone conversations with these people, you're talking to a sales floor. That same salesperson you're talking to will be selling ECommerce junk in the morning, Make Money In Real Estate junk in the afternoon, and Make Money In Forex Trading in the evening. They don't care. They'll sell whatever they're told to for as much as they can get. They'll even sell the exact same thing to one person for $2,500 dollars and to another for $25,000 dollars, depending on how much money they determined those people have during pre-qualification. SERIOUSLY. It doesn't matter to the salesperson or the "Coaching or Training" company; it's all junk that costs them nothing anyway. You really should write those 7 points down and stick them to your fridge or something. Real EBiz mentors and trainers are extremely rare, and every time you talk to somebody who claims to be, there's a 98% chance that they are NOT. If you want the TRUTH about EBiz, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. I've been making money in this business for over 25 years. Only a VERY small number of people can say that. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

Here's another favorite of the "let's screw the sheeple" crowd. This is usually presented as a component of the Amazing Amazon Business they're going to cheat you how to build. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing you have to worry about is anybody ELSE you might listen to. Here's another favorite of the "let's screw the sheeple" crowd. This is usually presented as a component of the Amazing Amazon Business they're going to cheat you how to build. They tell you that you need to get "unique" products into the marketplace and create your own brand with a "Private Label" because it will be impressive and cool and people will buy lots of it and love you. NO. First, let's think about the concept of "unique". On the Internet, people search for things they know about. They know about those things because of something called Consumer Awareness. Consumer Awareness is created by the manufacturing companies that make products. They do it by spending tens of millions of dollars in real-world mass media advertising. They have to do that. If they don't, the big-box stores won't carry their products because consumers won't know about them and they'll be harder to sell. Yes, it's a thing, and has been forever both in the physical world and online. Make sense so far? So, "unique" products are by definition..."unique". That means there is NO general Consumer Awareness. Most people don't know about them. They're new and unique. Here's a news flash for the Scam Boys. The internet is based on Search. So is Amazon. So is eBay. The only way a consumer can find a product is if they search for it. That means they have to know what it is. If it's "unique", they don't know what it is, and will never search for it. That means you can't make any money with it. DUH. Now let's talk about the "Private Label" thing. Labeling is about branding in the Real Business World. Brands are created to instill confidence in consumers, so they will keep coming back to the brand and buy it over and over again because if the brand is built right, consumers TRUST it. It takes years and tens of millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars to create a brand strong enough that large numbers of consumers will trust it enough to make it worthwhile to manufacture and sell. Slapping a sticky label that says "Joe's Coffemakers" on a cheap product from China is NOT creating a brand! Which would you rather buy? A Joe's Coffeemaker, or a Cuisinart Coffeemaker? See what I mean? This whole Private Label thing was created by some skeezy marketer somewhere as a way to make you feel cool because you "own a brand". It has ZERO value in the retail marketing world. They'll charge you tens of thousands of dollars to "teach you" how to create that brand. For all that money, you get told to slap sticky labels on cheap stuff from China, and you end up NOT owning a brand. You own some sticky labels, a bunch of junk from China and a miserable future trying to get rid of that cheap crap that you "Private Labeled". Don't do it, please. To learn to start a REAL online business that actually makes a full time living, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

Outsourcing is the favorite buzzword of all the online scammers under all the slimiest rocks on earth. Why? Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth about ECommerce WILL set you free. Outsourcing is the favorite buzzword of all the online scammers under all the slimiest rocks on earth. Why? Because everybody thinks everything should be EASY in ECommerce. After all, that's what all those "ECommerce Experts" say, right? They WANT you to think this is easy. It gives them the perfect excuse to get you all excited about making a million dollars by next week, and then they can sell you pure garbage info instead of going to all the trouble of teaching you what you REALLY need to know. Writing your own articles, blog posts and social media material? You don't have to do that...outsource it to India or the Philippines for a buck an Article! Building your own Graphics for your site and marketing? You don't have to do that...just get it done on Fiver or 99 Designs for a few bucks a pop! WRONG. This business is RETAIL MARKETING. A critical part of Retail Marketing is building a BRAND for your Website. That means that everything your marketing says has to be said with a CONSISTENT VOICE. It means that every graphic on your site and in all of your marketing has to be shown in a CONSISTENT STYLE. When you own a Website, which is by far the best method and most profitable method of online sales, your customers are going to find you in a variety of different ways. They're not just going to do a search in Google every time. They might hit your Facebook Business page first, then go from there to your Blog, then from there to your site, for example. There are lots of different points where a customer might contact your brand. If those points of contact don't all look, sound and feel the same, your site's brand WILL NOT work. If your brand doesn't work, your site doesn't make sales. So 'outsourcing' is out of the question, because every time you outsource something, you're going to be dealing with a different writer or graphic artist. Unless you want to pay them to be exclusive, but that costs a fortune. Here's what happens when you deal with different individuals on these outsourcing sites all the time: When you outsource to different graphic artists over time, you'll be dealing with abstract artists, impressionists, classical artists, cartoonists and so on. The graphics across your site and marketing with be a horrifying kaleidoscope of mis-matched imagery. If you close ONE sale, you'll be lucky. When you outsource to cheap writers, they simply search your Subject in Google, take someone else's article, and run it through Article Spinner software. That software spits out several different versions of the original article simply by shifting words around, and then they'll send you the one that reads the least horribly. The conversation is fractured, there's NO SEO value and it simply won't make sense to your readers. That's not marketing. In fact it's the complete OPPOSITE Of marketing. If you're going to own a business, you need to OWN your business. That means you need to learn it, understand it, and know how to run it. If you don't, you won't make money at it. Don't fall into the "outsourcing makes it easy" trap. It's just part of a cheap con, nothing more. Turn around and RUN away from any online marketer who tells you to outsource; it's a sure sign that they couldn't care less about what happens to you or your business. They just want to get into your wallet by making you think everything's EASY, nothing more. Writing your marketing content and working with graphics is NOT hard to learn, and you NEED to learn it. So learn something. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

AliExpress is something that highly questionable marketing gurus like Richard Cranium And His Amazing Wealth Machine (and many others) will tell you is a great way to get products drop shipped to your customers directly from China (sigh) at low, low prices (sigh). Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth is NOT negotiable. If you haven't heard of AliExpress yet, good. Do your best not to hear of it. If you have heard of AliExpress, run far, far away from anybody who tells you it's a good idea. If you're actually using AliExpress, you have my most sincere sympathies. Really. Okay, okay...I brought it up, I know. So now even if you haven't heard of it I have to talk about it because someday you would hear of it and you need to be protected. AliExpress is something that highly questionable marketing gurus like Richard Cranium And His Amazing Wealth Machine (and many others) will tell you is a great way to get products drop shipped to your customers directly from China (sigh) at low, low prices (sigh). Let's look at this point by point. 1. There is no way you can know whether the supposed 'drop ship supplier' in China is real. Chinese companies are not subject to the kind of regulation we have in the US and other countries. You run a huge risk not having your orders delivered at all. 2. You're dealing with companies who will very often foist cheap imitation junk products that often don't even look like their product pictures off on your customers, which results in returns and a bad rep for you. 3. You can't return products to most of these companies, because (a) they often won't accept them, and (b) if they do, it will often take weeks to get it done. 4. If you get cheated, you lose your money, period. There is NO legal recourse between the US and other countries, and China. 5. Having something drop shipped from China takes WEEKS. 3 to 6 weeks on average. Do you really think your customers are going to wait that long for you to deliver their product orders? Look, you can't make this stuff up. It's real. I can't even count how many people I've taught and mentored who have already been nailed to a wall dealing with these people, for the exact reasons I mention above. As a home-based business owner, China is not your answer to product supply. Not EVER. Yet again, the idiots who claim to teach you all this "amazing" eBay, Amazon and Website stuff will tell you to use AliExpress. Why would they do that when they know it doesn't work? Because it sounds EASY, and everybody wants EASY. We talked about that earlier. Another part of this lunacy is called Oberlo. Oberlo is the creation of the geniuses (please not the sarcasm) in the Marketing Department at Shopify. Oblero is simply a way to connect your Shopify Website to AliExpress and populate that site automatically with products drop shipped from China, in a way that hides the fact that you're actually working with AliExpress. I checked a Thesaurus to see how many different ways there are to say "stupid". Here are the results most pertinent to what Shopify is trying to foist on you with Oberlo: Dull, dumb, foolish, futile, ill-advised, laughable, ludicrous, naive, senseless, shortsighted, simple, rash, thick, unintelligent, brainless, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, imbecilic, insensate, mindless, moronic, nonsensical, out to lunch, pointless, simpleminded, slow, stupefied, thick-headed, unthinking, and witless. Keep in mind I'm not referring to YOU if you're already using that monstrosity. I'm referring to Shopify's utterly un-caring marketing people. Oberlo is just one of the tons of unnecssary and ridiculous "apps" that Shopify tries to sell you along with their ECommerce Website packages. The sad thing is that the Shopify Website Platform itself is actually really GOOD. It's just all the other junk (like Oberlo) they try to sell you that is so well described by all those words above. Shopify's marketing team, like all the other EBiz hacks out there, want you to think everything is easy so that you keep paying for their Website platform for years while you try to figure out why nothing is working, when in fact it's not working because instead of actually learning this business properly, you bought into their ridiculous "easy apps". Using AliExpress or Oberlo is all of those words I mentioned earlier. I'm not going o repeat them because it makes me a little dizzy. Just don't fall for it, please. For lots more honest info about ECommerce, based on my over 25 YEARS of experience in this business, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.  

If you think it's a good idea to waste all your time, gas, and energy running around to retail stores all week long looking for individual bargain products that you then have to package and ship to Amazon to hopefully get resold on FBA for an artificially jacked-up price (cheating your own customers) before Amazon figures you out and suspends your account, please raise your hand. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!  Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing that gets in the way of the truth is a bad set of speakers. Let's talk about this little gem that the bad guys like to call "Retail Arbitrage". If you think it's a good idea to waste all your time, gas, and energy running around to retail stores all week long looking for individual bargain products that you then have to package and ship to Amazon to hopefully get resold on FBA for an artificially jacked-up price (cheating your own customers) before Amazon figures you out and suspends your account, please raise your hand. If you raised your hand, please start this podcast over again and listen more carefully. I'm betting that you didn't raise your hand, though. When you hear it in plain english like that, the ridiculousness is unavoidable. I KNOW there are a lot of people who TELL you that this is a good idea. The absolute morons who tell you that either don't know the first thing about the retail business, or are lying to you with a big, fake grin on their faces. Personally, I believe it's the second choice, but it is true that there is no lack of morons in the internet "guru" space. So it could be either one. No matter which one it is, don't let them suck you in. "Retail Arbitrage" is a phrase that was simply invented by an unscrupulous online marketer several years ago to make it sound like it's a thing. It isn't a thing. It's a lie. Look, the word "Arbitrage" is a term that's used in the financial world, and generally refers to people who buy and sell on the world securities, currency and commodity markets. Here's the actual dictionary definition of Arbitrage: The simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset. Notice there's nothing there about "retail". Yes, the word "commodities" could be loosely interpreted to mean physical retail products, but only by someone who doesn't understand commodities. Gold is a commodity. Grain, precious metals, electricity, oil, beef, and natural gas are all commodities. An Easy Bake Oven that you have to chase all over town to find on sale and then overcharge for on Amazon is NOT a commodity. By definition, "Retail Arbitrage" doesn't exist. It's a fake con-artist buzzword, it's a waste of your time, money and energy, and it has a "glass ceiling". That means that you only have so much time in a given year to schlep around retail stores pointing your iPhone app at stuff on sale, and when you use up that time, that's all the money you're ever going to make at this. Glass ceiling. Any by the way, don't let any of this blithering ninnies tell you that it works better if you buy liquidation lots either. Here's another definition for you...most products that are "liquidated, and "liquidated" because nobody else could sell them! Just don't do it. You'll be way better off. For much more amazingly truthful and insightful information about ECommerce, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.  

A fulfillment center is a shared warehouse used by small businesses. Why is that important to you? Because if you're selling products online, your ideal situation is to be buying bulk products at wholesale for better profit margins, but having them stored and delivered by someone else. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast; quite possibly the only place left in the UNIVERSE that tells you the TRUTH about ECommerce! Let's talk about fulfillment centers and why we need them. The first thing people tend to think about when you mention fulfillment in relation to ECommerce, is Fulfillment by Amazon. We are NOT talking about fulfillment by Amazon here. In fact, we're not talking about Amazon at all; there is NO profit margin on Amazon for small business owners, no matter how many gibbering ninnies out there want you to think there IS so they can line their pockets selling you junk information. If you're going to sell online, you need to be selling through a Web Site, NOT Amazon. Not eBay either; there hasn't been a decent profit margin available on eBay for a LONG time. If you want to actually make MONEY in product sales online, you need your own web site. And you need a tightly focused NICHE web site that sells a very closely related set of product, not one of those ridiculous automated monstrosities that automatically load a gazillion unrelated products into your page. FOCUSING on a NICHE is the ONLY way to make money with a web site. That's a topic for another day, but I thought it was worth mentioning here. So let's get back to business and talk about fulfillment centers. What's a fulfillment center when it's NOT Amazon? A fulfillment center is a shared warehouse used by small businesses. Why is that important to you? Because if you're selling products online, your ideal situation is to be buying bulk products at wholesale for better profit margins, but having them stored and delivered by someone else. Wait a minute, tho. Buying bulk is expensive. You have to lay out a lot of money to get serious bulk discounts from a wholesaler. So let's back up, start at the start, and go through this point by point. First, when you sell products online for profit through your WEB SITE you always START with drop shipping. Wholesalers who drop ship for you will let you place single item orders, and they'll send them straight to your customers from the warehouse. Of course there's more to drop shipping, but that's another story for another day. Suffice it to say that you should NOT store and ship what you sell in your basement, your living room, in a paid storage unit, in your neighbor Ed's garage...because that's a ridiculous waste of time and energy, and a serious added cost to you. Time is money, after all. That's something home-based business owners don't always think about, but should. Second, once your web site's sales reach the point where you can accurately predict how much product you'll sell 30 days, 60 days or 90 days in the future, you're definitely making enough PROFIT to start buying your products in bulk. When you buy in bulk, your wholesale cost drops and your profit margins rise. Third, when you buy in bulk, you need to buy ALL the products you sell on your site in bulk. We've already talked about the fact that your site needs to be a targeted niche site, so there won't be all that many differnet products you need to buy. If you DON'T buy ALL your products in bulk, then you have some products that are still drop shipped, and others that go through another shipping method. What if somebody buys two or three products from your site, and 1 or 2 of them are sent by different shipping methods? That's multiple shipping charges, and NO customer is going to pay multiple shipping charges! Not even on Amazon or eBay. So all your products always need to be shipped from the same place using the same method. THAT is where fulfillment centers come in. When you buy your products in bulk, you send them to a fulfillment center. Your fulfillment center puts your stuff in warehouse space reserved for you. Then they connect their system to your web site. When your site gets an order, THEY get the order too. They pick, pack and ship your product, and your done! What does it cost? Fulfillment centers are HUGE. They ship tens of thousands of products EVERY DAY. This means they pay pennies on the dollar for shipping through UPS, FeEx and USPS, and they pass the savings to you. Generally, the UNIT cost to store, pick, pack and ship your products FOR you comes out to about the same as you would charge your customer for shipping and handling. I hate to get off track again, but it's also important to mention that your web site should NOT offer free shipping. Free shipping is nothing but a gimmick, it's something that your home-based business can't afford to do, and if you know how to market a product you don't NEED free shipping. So you ARE going to sharge your customers shipping and handling. That's ANOTHER story for another day, though. So back to the topic...your unit cost per product to have the fulfillment center do everything for you comes out to an amount that you can charge back to your customer as shipping and handling (because thats actually what it IS), and you end up with a basically FREE warehouse full of people doing all the work FOR you. So remember: start with drop shipping. When your site makes enough money to use your PROFITS to buy in bulk, buy EVERYTHING you sell in bulk. Send them to a fulfillment center, and let them do all the work. In this business, you should NEVER physcially handle a product. It's time consuming, it takes up a lot of space, and it wastes money. Once you';re in position to start using a fulfilment center, you're helping to streamline your time and your costs, and that's always good business. Where do you look for a fulfillment center? Just Google it. But be SURE to locate a fulfillment center that's as close as possible, like same-city close, to your wholesale supplier. You DO have to pay for the one-time shipping of your bulk product order from the wholesaler TO the fulfillment center. Wholesalers are always located near cities, because they need the highway and railway infrastructure that cities provide. For the same reason, fulfillment centers are always located near cities. So it won't be hard to find one that's close to your wholesale supplier. I've toured fulfillment centers, and they are AMAZING. In fact, several years ago I got a chance to spend some one-one-one time with Roy Speer, the billionaire founder of the Home Shopping Network. VERY interesting guy who took a genuine interest in what we were talking about at the time. I really appreciated that meeting. Anyway, he got me a tour of the Home Shopping Network's fulfillment center in central florida. The place was gigantic. Warehouse space, conveyors, shipping stations, forklifts running around, loading docks full of trucks...if you ever get a chance to check out a fulfillment center first hand, you should. Quite the experience. So that's what you need to know about fulfillment centers. For much more critical and amazingly insightful EBiz information,  get my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time!  

When you’re selling online, whether you use Drop Shipping or you physically stock and ship your products, wholesale backorders from your supplier are always a real possibility. As a business owner, it’s really important for you to understand why this happens and what you can do to avoid damage to your online reputation. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where we don't have to PRACTICE telling the truth, because we don't know how to do anything else! When you’re selling online, whether you use Drop Shipping or you physically stock and ship your products, wholesale backorders from your supplier are always a real possibility. Wholesale backorders often seemingly come out of nowhere, and leave you holding the bag, trying to explain to your customer why you suddenly can’t deliver what they bought. To some degree or other, this is almost always the result of the Butterfly Effect, where one small problem in the Supply Chain ripples out across the entire product market. As a business owner, it’s really important for you to understand why this happens and what you can do to avoid damage to your online reputation. So please bear with me as we go through a how a hypothetical "Butterfly Effect" wholesale backorder situation might occur. Sometimes the reasons for these problems are simple, and sometimes they're more complex. I'm going to use a more complex example that touches every aspect of the Supply Chain, because a Supply Chain is something you should understand as a business owner. Then we'll talk about what to do about the problem. Let’s say you’re selling Coffee Makers. The US-based Manufacturer of the coffee makers orders different parts for those coffee makers from different specialized suppliers around the world, and assembles those parts into the finished product in the US. One day, somewhere in China, the machine that punches out the metal bands for the coffee pot handles breaks down. As with many companies in the largely unregulated manufacturing space in China, it’s a very small manufacturing company using a very old machine to punch out those metal bands. The breakdown is a crack in the pressure cylinder that drives the press, and the fix is very difficult. Parts for that machine are impossible to come by, because this small Chinese company bought the 50 year old machine at a cheap price from a Russian surplus equipment dealer and there aren’t any replacement parts to be had. The Chinese company can’t manufacture the metal bands until they repair or replace the machine. They can’t replace it because there aren't any cheap surplus presses to be had, and a newer machine is too expensive for this small manufacturing operation to buy. The small Chinese company is down for 3 weeks while they remove the old cylinder and have a replacement specially made for it by an equipment fabricator in Thailand. This one breakdown and repair delay sends a ripple effect across the entire Supply Chain for your coffee makers. The small Chinese company is operating on a (very common) 3 month lead time. That means that the metal bands they make today, for example, don’t arrive on a ship and get offloaded to a US Customs Port for about 3 months. Because they have that lead time, the Chinese company decides not to notify the US-based manufacturer that they have a problem. They’re afraid of losing their contract, so they keep the delay a secret for as long as they can while they scramble to fix the problem and hope to catch up to their quota in time. The US-based manufacturer happily goes along assembling coffee makers with the parts they have from the delivery of thousands of metal bands that just came in on the last shipment, unaware that one critical part is about to be delayed. Because the Chinese company didn’t tell the US company that there would be a delay, the US company doesn’t go out and look for a replacement supplier for the metal band. The Chinese company gets their machine back up and running 3 weeks later and works overtime trying to make up for the time they were down, but it’s impossible to catch up. The next order they send to the US company is going to be significantly short. Months later, the next shipment of metal bands arrives at the US company’s facility, and it’s far fewer metal bands than it should be. The US company finds out what happened, and is forced to reduce the number of coffee makers they assemble and ship to their wholesale suppliers around the country until they can get their next full shipment of metal bands for the coffeepots. The US company doesn’t want their wholesalers to go looking for other brands of coffee makers to sell, so they decide to delay telling their wholesalers about the upcoming shortage as long as possible until they can come up with a retention strategy that won’t cost them any ill will with their wholesalers. It takes them about a month to burn through their on-hand factory inventory, and then they start to casually notify their wholesalers that future shipments will be short for about 3 months or so. Your wholesaler of the coffee makers you sell only has a fairly small quantity of the coffee makers in stock because they’re trying to manage their cash flow as carefully as possible. They don’t bother to make a general announcement that the coffee makers will be in short supply for a while, because they don’t want to lose retailers. They decide to deal with their retailers on a case-by-case basis, offering discounts on other products in order to retain their retailers while they wait for their supply of that coffee maker to be fully available again. Seven months after the initial equipment breakdown at the Chinese manufacturer of metal bands, you sell a coffee maker to one of your customers on your web site. You place the order with your wholesaler, only then to find out that the coffee maker is out of stock. This is an example of poor Supply Chain management, specifically with regard to the transmission of information throughout the Supply Chain. However, it happens. Now you have a customer that you can’t fill an order for, so you get mad at the wholesaler for not telling you their stock was running out. You’d be right; the wholesaler could have notified its retailers of the problem. However, the delay itself isn’t the wholesaler’s fault; the fault lies with that cracked pressure cylinder in China, and a couple of poor management decisions by other companies in the Supply Chain as well. The Chinese manufacturer could have told the US company that there would be a delay, and the US company might have found a substitution for the metal bands. But, the Chinese company was afraid of losing that large contract if the temporary replacement supplier did a better job than they could. The US company could have warned their wholesalers that the delay was coming, but they didn’t want their wholesalers shopping for other coffee maker brands from other companies in the short term or causing a drop in sales by making any announcements. The wholesaler could have warned their retailers that stock would be low to non-existent for a while, but they didn't want to look bad to their retailers, and decided to ride it out on a case-by-case basis. They also could have looked for other brands of coffee makers to carry, but for a wholesaler that can be a months-long process that gets very costly. These are the kinds of things you need to understand and be prepared for. When you’re in business, one of your primary jobs is to put out fires. They’ll spring up in the strangest places for reasons that are often a complete mystery, but the business owner who reacts well to situations like this is a business owner who succeeds in business. Simply remember that every problem is an opportunity. That’s an old saying, but it’s an old saying for a reason; it’s true, and has stood the test of time. In the situation describe above, for example; what do you do to turn that problem into an opportunity? Let’s take it step by step: 1. As soon as you find out that product is out of stock, mark it "out of stock" on your website. Don't remove the page, because you don't want to lose whatever search engine ranking authority the page has already built up. 2. See if you can buy that same product from another web site; perhaps a big-box store that still has some in their inventory. If you can, buy it and have it shipped to your customer. Make sure you let your customer know what you did for them. The trust and goodwill that comes from that simple act far outweighs the few dollars you have to spend to buy the product elsewhere and send it to your customer. 3. If you can’t get the product anywhere else, contact your customer immediately. Let them know the product is out of stock. Offer them a choice; a similar replacement product at a discount, or an immediate refund. Your immediate and effective response to your customer turns a negative into a positive every time. People will trust and respect a business that takes care of them as a customer. It’s very important to understand that Supply Chains are complex and can be volatile, but the better you understand how they work and how to deal with the problems that arise, the more efficient and successful your business will be. Put my 25 years of ECommerce experience to work for YOU. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time!

EBiz Competition - Myth or Reality? Far too many people worry about the levels of competition in online business, when the truth is that there's actually very little, and here's why. Subscribe to the Show! EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the TRUTH about EBiz is the ONLY thing you'll ever hear. Here are some thing I hear from people all the time. “How can my online business compete with eBay and Amazon?” "How can I compete with all those big stores?” “Aren’t there too many online stores already?” “There’s no room left to compete!” Well, “competition” is a big and scary word. Not big meaning ‘long-big’. A ‘long-big’ word would be something like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicavolcanoconiosis. Now that's a long-big word! No, the word “competition” is different. It’s “big” meaning all-encompassing; a generalization. Most people don’t really understand what “competition” actually IS. Google, bless it’s googly little algorithmic heart, defines the word as “the person or people with whom one is competing, especially in a commercial or sporting arena; the opposition.” Here’s the important part: “The person or people with whom one is competing”. And only those people. Because online business and the internet itself seem to be so big and all-encompassing, people often forget that internet users do not see the entire internet all at the same time when they search for something online. Yet that’s what they base this fear of competition on; that somebody searching for a set of dog socks on Google can somehow magically see every single store, every single page and every single price for every single pair of dog socks on the internet all at the same time! The reality is very different. When you search for a product on Google (and we always talk about Google because it’s by far the biggest and most influential search engine) what do you see? You see some “display ads” up in the top right corner. Those are the paid advertisements with pictures. Then the first 4 search results you see are paid ads as well (you can tell because they all say “AD” next to them). Then you see the natural listings; the pages that for whatever reason, deserved or not (but usually not deserved), have worked their way up to the top natural rankings in Google. Here’s a little-known factoid for ya. The human eye can “subitize” (meaning “perceive a number of separate items in a group without actually counting”) only about 4 to 5 separate objects at a time. A single paid ad link on a SERP (a search engine results page) is perceived as a single OBJECT. A single NATURAL page link on a SERP is perceived as a single OBJECT. So people CANNOT effectively see THE ENTIRE INTERNET AND EVERY SET OF DOG SOCKS ON IT ALL AT ONCE. They can only EFFECTIVELY see 4 or 5 objects at a time. That just begs the question…does 4 or 5 search results sound like a LOT of online business competition to you? I’m guessing that you’re thinking, “no”. Now, here’s the kicker. Add to that the fact that the search results that people see first are psychologically interpreted as the most important and relevant results, and that vast macro-cosmos of millions of perceived competitors that so many people are afraid of has just shrunk to a number of competitors that you can count on one hand. Now, if that's scary, you shouldn't even think about starting an online business (because it’s NOT scary, and if you think it is, well…you get the point). Let’s throw yet another fact into the mix. People will always favor natural search engine results over paid ads. In fact, the search engine listings that gather the most clicks by far, are the first 3 natural listings (the ones that are highest on the page, but are not ads). Most people are TIRED of ads! So... Natural result #1 for any given search online gets about 40% of all clicks. Natural result #2 gets about 18 to 20% of all clicks. Natural result #3 gets about 8 to 10% of all clicks. So there you have it. Nearly 70% of all clicks on a search engine results page are done on the top 3 natural results. Your competition just shrunk some more. Feeling better about it? You should be feeling a LOT better about it. SO WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE FEAR “HUGE” COMPETITION LEVELS? Well, to answer that question we have to discuss that bane of our existence; the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the hair in our soup…the online business "marketers". These fake gurus spend a lot of time whipping up a false frenzy about massive online competition that ONLY their Super-Secret Systems And Tools Made From Unicorn Dust And Sunshine can ever break through. They tell you over and over and over and over and over again that the only way you will ever be found among the millions of other sets of competing dog socks online that people somehow magically see all at once is to use their Amazing Systems. They tell you (eventually, over time, so as not to sticker-shock you) that you’ll need to pay them tens of thousands of dollars to create your site, run your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) handle your blog, your social media, etc, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. When you pay them for all that, what they’re REALLY doing is spending about seven and a half minutes copying a basic template and calling it a site, and then installing some useless ‘automated marketing tool’ (which never works) to do the rest. For tens of thousands of dollars. TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. Utterly, completely and unequivocally (defined as “In a way that leaves no doubt”) disgusting people, these fake gurus. So we've established that your only real competition are basically the top three listings on a search engine page that are natural, and not paid ads. The false fear that there's too much competition online should now be long-gone in your rear-view mirror. Want to learn how to put YOUR business into those top three pages? Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Catch ya next time, and thanks for listening.

One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!).   Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chis Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing we DON'T know is how to do it WRONG! One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!). 1. YOU CAN’T TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS There’s a process to traditional physical sales that’s worked very well since the first caveman sold a hunting rock to his buddy in exchange for a chunk of meat. A really good salesperson in the physical world understands that process and does it very well. That means that salesperson makes good money in sales. The process they use to make more sales basically goes like this: – You show someone a product. – You ask them questions about what they desire from the product and then speak to those desires and how the product fulfills them. – You talk price and close the sale. That conversation is critical in good physical-world sales. If I go to Sam Ash Music in Orlando and ask a salesperson to see a specific guitar, any good salesperson is going to try to find out what I want from the product. He or she might ask me if I’m going to use the guitar for practice, for fun, to play on stage, to record with, etc. What kind of pickups do I like? What kind of tone am I looking for? What gauge strings do I like to use? My answers to these questions allow the salesperson to either point out that the features I want already exist on that guitar or can be added to that guitar, or point out that I might want to check out a different guitar. During that process, the salesperson is GUIDING ME THROUGH THE SALE. If he or she does a good really job of controlling that process and guiding me through the sale, I’m most likely going to buy the product. That salesperson is always going to make more sales than one who doesn't know how to do that. Online, though, there’s something very important that’s missing from this time-tested process. You can’t talk to your customer about what they desire from the product. You can’t physically guide them through the sale with questions and answers. So what do you do to make more sales? 2. VISUAL MARKETING WORKS ONE-WAY When you think about it, the entire marketing process online is VISUAL. From your product pictures to your written site content, your articles, blogs, public forum participation, social marketing, video content…everything you do is ONE-WAY, from you to your customer, and it’s all VISUAL. Just like it’s easy to mistake someone’s tone in an email when you can’t see their expressions and body language in person, it’s easy to visually confuse people on your site and in your marketing. In the many years I’ve spent teaching Ecommerce business owners how to fix sites that don’t work, I can’t even attempt to count the number of times I’ve seen web sites that are so visually confusing that I feel like I’m looking at them through a psychotic kaleidoscope. Most web site owners (and yes, eBay sellers too) try to make more sales by cramming so much STUFF onto a single page that it simply descends into visual chaos right from the top of the page. It’s not the site owners’ fault, because that’s what EBiz owners see everybody ELSE doing. However, when you understand that literally more than 97% of the Ebiz sites online never provide a full time income for their owners, it’s easy to see that this is one of the reasons. ‘Busy’ pages don’t work well visually. They’re too confusing. Online shoppers move very quickly as a rule, and a busy, confusing page turns off an online shopper faster than their cat peeing on their keyboard. We’ve already established that this is one-way visual marketing. You can’t stand over your customers’ shoulders and direct their attention through that confusion for them. Your pages need to do the visual directing all by themselves! They can only do that if they are clean, clear, intuitive, AND focused on one thing at a time. That's the only way those pages are going to make more sales. Visual marketing is a PROCESS. In that process, EACH PAGE of your site needs to accomplish the following things for your customer: – Professionalism – Legitimacy – Engagement – Action – Closure You have 3 to 7 seconds to move someone’s eyes to a single focal point on any given page. That’s because people are at their peak level of interest and attention for anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds after they first hit a new piece of media (your web page). After that first 3 to 7 seconds, their interest and attention begin to drop off, and you’ve lost that Magic Moment when you had your one BEST chance to capture their interest. That’s one reason that confusing web pages lead to miserable sales; it takes way too much time to wade through the confusion. Other reasons are that confusing pages are hard to follow, don’t speak well of your Brand, and are just too much work for the typical fast-moving online shopper. 3. UNDERSTANDING THE VISUAL MARKETING PROCESS If you want to make more sales in your online business, you need an understanding of the Visual Sales Process. So how do you establish a visual process that leads your customer to a sale instead of chasing them away? Let’s explore that process again, with some added notes. – Professionalism: Your customers MUST feel that they are dealing with a professional company. Professionalism is immediately established (or not!) by the top left corner of any given page in your site. That’s where they Site Name, Tagline and Logo belong, as we talked about )in a previous post). That’s your “Identity Package”. That’s what your customer will notice first, and first impressions are everything. Make sure you learn how to put together a truly great Identity Package. – Legitimacy: Your customers must immediately feel that you’re a legitimate company. This is a function of how easy it is for them to contact you directly. It’s best established by a toll-free Customer Service phone number at the top right of every page on your site. It’s actually very inexpensive (about $20 a month) and it’s will definitely help you make more sales. – Engagement: You have to create a SINGLE focal point on each page of your web site that contains the ONE THING that your customer needs to do on that page in order to further the sale. This is why you can’t jumble up a nasty mess of multiple product buy buttons, “free shipping” tags, coupons, ads, flashy graphics splattered all over the page, and all the rest of that garbage. When you do that, you create MULTIPLE focal points for your customers’ eyes, and they get lost, confused, and then they leave. You can't make more sales when your customers leave your site. Engaging a customer’s eyes means catching their attention with something that moves their eyes toward your focal point. You can do this really well by placing an image of a person USING your product near the upper middle portion of your page, above and usually slightly to the left of the focal point. That person in the image should be LOOKING TOWARD your focal point; your customers will follow the eyes of the person in the image. – Action: This is what happens when you successfully establish Professionalism, Legitimacy and Engagement. At this point, your customer has landed on the focal point of your page, and takes an ACTION. On a Home Page, the focal point is usually images that clearly represent your categories. On a Category Page, the focal point is a group of clean, clear product images (NOT prices and buy buttons!) that represent the products in that Category. On a Product Page, the focal point is the product image itself, the description, and the Buy button. If your page’s visual sales process quickly and effectively moves your customer to your focal point, your customer will click on it. Get a customer to click on a Category image on your home page, and it’s much more likely they’ll click on a Product image in the Category, and then MUCH more likely they’ll buy the product once they hit the Product page. That is, if you effectively move their eyes through the visual sales process on each of those pages. – Closure: This is what happens when your customer buys the product and completes the sale. Always keep in mind that most of your customers will land somewhere in the MIDDLE of your site, not on your Home Page. That’s just one more reason that EVERY page must be clean, clear and be built with an effective visual sales process! I've been doing this for 25 years, and I'll teach YOU how to do it. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com!

When I consult for ECommerce businesses or teach EBiz owners who already have sites, one of the things that stands out the most to me is the total lack of an Identity Package for that ECommerce business. An Identity Package helps to set the tone for site design, marketing style, and the entire Brand of the business...which always leads to more sales.   Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only time you WON'T hear the truth, is AFTER YOU LEAVE! When I consult for ECommerce businesses or teach EBiz owners who already have sites, one of the things that stands out the most to me is the total lack of an Identity Package for that ECommerce business. An Identity Package helps to set the tone for site design, marketing style, and the entire Brand Identity of the business. A well-constructed Branding Identity is an absolute MUST for ANY business to be truly successful, online or offline. For an EBiz, an Identity Package for branding consists of three things: 1. A GOOD SITE NAME I’m often surprised by the number of people who have taken bad advice or learned the wrong things and given their web sites names that will do nothing for their business at best, and hurt it at worst. I don’t blame the site owners; there’s a tremendous amount of bad info floating around out there. However, when it comes to branding, they do need to learn how to do it right. How many times have you seen a site named something like “MyGreatBargains.com”, or “GreatBuys4U.com”, or “BigPlaceFullOfExcellentThingsAtLowPrices.com”? Okay, that last one is a stretch, but you know what I mean, right? Actually, that was a trick question. You probably only rarely come across sites with a names like that. Why? Because they don’t rank well in the search engines, and hardly ever get found by shoppers. The reason they don’t rank well is another topic altogether; perhaps a discussion for another day, but I’ll mention it here in passing. They don’t rank because they’re trying to sell a whole bunch of different products on the same web site. Those products all have widely different Keywords in their product names and marketing content. Google and the other search engines rank best on RELEVANT Keyword content; Keywords that they know are related to one another in some way. So, when the search engines see a site that has page after page of words describing products that the search engine knows are NOT related to one another, that site doesn’t rank well n omatter how good it's branding might be. Period. Yep, I know, big-box stores that carry widely varied stuff seem to rank pretty well, don’t they. However, that’s for different reasons altogether, and they can be beaten with highly targeted web sites. For that reason and many others, small home-based EBiz sites need to sell ONLY one specific product line per site in order to do well in the search engines. As I said, though, that’s a topic for another time. There are LOTS of details involved in making an ECommerce business successful, and right now we're talking about ONE of those things: Branding. So let’s get back to our conversation about an Identity Package, with site names being the first thing to learn. A site name needs to reflect what it sells. On a properly built, web site with thoughtful branding, that will be something very specific. However, it can’t just be “Toasters.com”. For one thing, that name is already taken, which most of the best product-descriptive names are. For another, though, a site name needs to connect with its consumer demographic. To connect with its consumer demographic, the business owner needs to know who that consumer demographic IS. I'll talk about that in another post in this blog. Back to names, now. Let’s say that an EBiz owner sells a very specific line of toasters that is best suited for a female audience (a demographic) made up of older women who have a serious passion for baking and cooking. What site name do you think would appeal more to that consumer audience? – BestToasters4U.com – CheapToasters.com – CozyKitchenToasters.com If you picked the last one, you’re right. A site name, like everything else in marketing, needs to tell part of a story and also make an emotional connection with its consumers. That's part of branding. CozyKitchenToasters.com evokes a warm, comfortable, familiar place where family gathers and great food is carefully made with lots of love. The other two choices, well…don’t. So, you can see the difference between thoughtless, sales-gimmicky names and a carefully selected audience-driven name, right? Good. That leads us to some of the other things a good site name does. It helps to drive site design. A name like that inspires a site with a warm, rich color palette, a cozy, comfortable graphic treatment and a very personally friendly space. What else does it do? Among other things, it helps to inspire the creation of the second part of an Identity Package for branding. The Tagline. 2. A GOOD TAGLINE These used to be called “slogans”. Now we call them Taglines, or ‘Tags’ for short. A business without a Tagline in it's branding is a business that needs to get one, or close up shop. I cannot stress strongly enough that this is a critical part of your Identity Package, and your Identity Package is a critical part of your branding. Your branding is a critical part of your marketing, and…well, I’m sure you get the idea! In ECommerce, Tag Lines are generally best inspired by site names. The Tag needs to support the name, while at the same time telling another part of the branding story. Professional copywriters who create Taglines often go through dozens, if not more than a hundred different ideas before settling on a good Tag. This is not something to be taken lightly. Remember, it has to support the name, and tell more of the story of the brand. “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best!” isn’t gonna cut it. At one time, that Tag was clever. That’s when it was new, back before humans discovered fire. A good Tagline needs to be short, memorable, part of a story, and supportive of the brand. It needs to CONNECT with people emotionally as well, just like the site name should. Another rule of thumb is that a Tagline shouldn’t ever be more than 3 to 5 words. That makes them much easier for consumers to remember, and that’s what you want. Think of some of the most memorable Tags you know. – Don’t leave home with it (5 words) – You deserve a break today (5 words) – Just Do It (3 words) – The quicker picker-upper (4 words) – The King of beers (4 words) See what I mean? Short, memorable, and telling part of a story. Let’s look at the first one; the American Express Tagline “Don’t Leave Home Without It”. This Tag is using negative reinforcement to create a scary imagined impact if you DON’T have the product. Warning a fellow human being not to leave a safe, comfortable place and go out into the big, bad world without a taking specific thing along makes a very visceral connection with us psychologically. It subconsciously makes us feel like bad, BAD things are going to happen if we leave our home without this thing. Again, it’s psychology. As humans, we look to other humans to warn us of danger, and a need to pay attention to those warnings is deeply ingrained in our psyche. So, a negatively reinforcing Tagline like that works very well in branding. What Tagline would we give our CozyKitchenToasters.com web site? There are lots of possibilities, and there’s a serious amount of research to do before choosing one, but I’ll just throw one out there off the top of my head. (Excuse me while I remove my hat…) Okay, how about: "Real kitchens bake with love". That’s 5 words. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little sappy when you look at it sitting there all by itself. Hey, I spent all of 30 seconds coming up with that; cut me a little slack! BUT, put that Tag together with the site name ‘CozyKitchenToasters.com’ and the right graphic design, and I promise you it will look perfectly natural in that site's branding, make an emotional connection, and tell another part of the story of the site’s Brand. There’s still one thing missing, though. The site name and Tagline will play a part in helping us to design the third and final part of an Identity Package for branding: The Logo. 3. A GOOD LOGO How many times have you seen a web site that just has text in the top left corner of each page that says something like ‘BobsWebSite.com’? Probably too often. That's NOT branding. The top left corner of any page on your web site is the first impression your customers have of your Brand. We all know how important first impressions are. Because we’re raised to read left to right, top to bottom (in most Western cultures, anyway) the first thing we see when our eyes hit a new piece of media, like a web page, is the top left corner of the page. That’s where our brains expect us to start reading, so that’s the first place our eyes go. Sometimes we don’t even realize that, but it happens every time. No matter where we THINK we looked first, our brains instantly register whatever is in that top left corner. The brainiacs at MIT tell us that the human brain can register and recall an image that it sees for as little as 13 MILLISECONDS. That’s 13 one-thousands of a second!! So don’t think for a millisecond that your customers’ brains don’t take whatever is in the top left corner of your web site pages as their first impression of your business and branding; they absolutely do. If that top left corner is a flat, dry, no-personality lump of text that says ‘BobsWebSite.com’, you’ve already lost that customer in their first couple of seconds on your site. At that point even the customer doesn’t consciously realize it yet, but SUBconsciously they already know they’re not going to buy anything from you, because you've killed your branding before it got a chance to get started. A good Logo completes your Identity Package and is a cornerstone of your site’s branding. In a quick, visually symbolic way, a good Logo captures attention, tells yet another part of the Brand story, sets a mood for your customers and much more. Professional designers charge thousands of dollars for a really good Logo, because they do a lot of research into your customer demographic and your product market and play with dozens of ideas before finalizing the design. Don’t think you can get a good Logo from one of those five-dollar graphics sites. The graphic artists who do those dirt-cheap Logo designs literally time themselves and only devote about 10 to 15 minutes of their time to each Logo they create. How else can we realistically expect them to make any money otherwise? They’re not doing it for fun! 10 to 15 minutes isn’t going to get you a good Logo, though, and a bad Logo will sink your branding faster than a boat anchor chained to a dog biscuit. So where do you get a good Logo? Here are three suggestions, from best to worst case scenario. It’s probably the last thing you want to hear, but any business owner who’s serious about building a successful business from the ground up needs to develop multiple skills. As an Ebiz owner, you need to have some familiarity with graphics software like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. If you spend some time with it, you can come up with a Logo on your own. Just make sure to study other successful Logos in your market and take your time. Or, you could find a friend or family member who’s good at sketching or drawing and work with them. Finally, if you must, you can try to find a designer who will spend more than 15 minutes on your Logo. You WILL have to pay them a pretty chunky amount of money for their time, though, if you expect a reasonable Logo in return. Remember that your Logo will be greatly influenced by the other parts of your Identity Package; your Site Name and your Tagline, so they must be developed first. Logos come in several forms: Word Mark – this Logo form is simply the name of the company written out in a stylized font with no graphics. Think Disney. Icon – this Logo form is simply a graphic that stands on its own. Think Apple. Lettermark – this form of Logo is the initials of a company name in a stylized text font with no graphics. Think CNN. Combination Mark – this form of Logo uses both a Word Mark and an Icon. Think Adobe. Emblem – this form of Logo consist of words or letters inside a graphic design. Think Harley-Davidson. Our CozyKitchenToasters.com site name could use any of these forms of Logo, as can most site name and Tagline combinations.   4. WHAT'S NEXT? As the business owner, it’s up to you to learn to provide the creativity to build a good Identity Package for branding your web site. Your real-world business success depends on it. Want to learn a whole lot more extremely important things you need to do for your business? Of course you do! Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. I'll teach you 'til you drop. :o) Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time!

In this introductory episode, Christina sets the stage for the upcoming series designed to assist families with navigating a healthy separation and divorce process. Christina Vinters is a nationally designated Chartered Mediator on a mission to inspire and facilitate healthy family transitions. She is an “ex” Divorce Lawyer (Non-Practicing Member of the Bar), Author of Pathways to Amicable Divorce, and the DIY Divorce Manual, and Peacemaking Business Consultant. Links Free download of Pathways to Amicable Divorce (no email required): https://www.modernseparations.com/separation Website: https://www.modernseparations.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/modernseparations Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/divorcewell Twitter: https://twitter.com/cvinters LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvinters Christina's Other Podcast Interviews Referred to in this episode: The Happy Lawyer Project Podcast, with Okeoma Moronu - Episode HLP029: On Launching a Solo Practice in Six Weeks with Christina Vinters, Modern Separations. Released April 11, 2017 Women Taking the Lead, with Jodi Flynn - Episode 232: Christina Vinters on What’s Possible When You Shed Self-Limiting Beliefs. Released September 11, 2017 Episode Transcript Welcome to the Divorce Well Podcast. This is the first episode and I'm so happy that you're joining me. In this podcast series,  I'll be diving into information that will help you deal with the various types of issues that arise upon the separation including emotional,  legal, financial, and parenting. There will be a few episodes where I'm sharing information directly with you on specific topics, and the rest of the episodes will be me interviewing renowned experts from across North America about various aspects of the divorce process. I'll start by briefly introducing myself. I'm Christina Vinters, I'm now a family mediator. I founded my mediation firm Modern Separations just over a year ago, after having practiced law as a divorce lawyer for several years. I've talked about my career transition in detail on the Happy Lawyer Project podcast, as well as on Women Taking the Lead. If you're interested in hearing my full story, check out those podcasts. In the last year and a half, I've also written and published two books, related to helping people go through the separation and divorce process more smoothly. Today I'm gonna be talking about the culture of divorce – the assumptions that a lot of us bring to the divorce process, and the impact that our mindset has on the outcome of our process. If we look at some statistics, we'll see that separation among intimate couples is very, very common in North America. It is estimated that about 40% of marriages in Canada end in divorce, which is about 70,000 divorces per year. And this does not include the breakdown of common law relationships. So the actual percentage and number of families experiencing separation is even higher. In the United States, about 50% of first time cohabiting relationships end within 5 years; 20% of first marriages end within 5 years; and 33% end within 10 years. This is approximately 1 million divorces per year, plus separations of common law couples. I'm not going to get into why this is happening but clearly this is a common phenomenon that families are dealing with. It is a mere certainty that you have relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who've had experienced separation, and indeed you may have as well. Divorce is often referred to as the second most traumatic event in a person's life, only after the death of a close family member. In my experience and from the research that I've done, the reason for this trauma is not the separation itself, but the extreme animosity that develops through the use of the adversarial legal system. Both Canada and the United States have adversarial legal systems, and this is a system in which one side is pitted against the other side as opposing parties. And they each advocate fiercely for their own position, trying to win the favor of the judge. It's specifically setup as a win-lose scenario. The theory is this is the best possible system to allow the judge to get at the truth of the situation and the fact is that it is well-suited  to bringing transparency and justice to many types of cases. For example, when an injured person sues another driver after a car accident, or a patient who sues a doctor for malpractice. In these cases, those two parties don't ever have to deal with each other again, or maybe not even see each other again. Family law is quite different. Couples without children may share a circle of friends and may have to continue seeing each other, on and off in the future. Of course couples who share children will have to be in each other's lives for the rest of their lives as their children grow and have their own children there will be weddings and grandchildren's birthday parties to attend. In the short term, they'll have to continue cooperating over financial and parenting matters. So the system in which one person tries to win by destroying the other person's case, is extremely destructive for families. In addition, litigation feels profoundly stressful and intensely personal, as much of the evidence goes to the core of who are they as people?. What kind of parent are you? What have you done with your life? How have you contributed to the marriage? Is your love for wine an indication some kind of a concerning problem? Do your life choices raise questions about whether you have your child's best interests at heart? These types of questions are sampling of the types of questions that can occur, with respective various different issues in family law. This is where those horror stories come from that you heard of. Each person attempts to portray a picture of himself or herself as being a model citizen, model spouse, model parent. Well at the same time, throwing the other party completely under the bus. This process is reflected in our culture, and in various movies, various comics, various jokes. For example, the War of the Roses starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito is a “comedy” about a separating couple who viciously come after each other, to the point of attempted murder as they each try to win the house in their divorce. The great Robin Williams had a bit about divorce, which was repeated and circulated for years. He said, “Ah, divorce! From the Latin word meaning to rip a man's wallet out through his genitals.” And probably the most cited divorce joke is “Why are divorces so expensive? Because they're worth it!”. And this of course implies a long drawn out court battle and it implies a dreadful ex. We've carried over that adversarial approach of destroying the other party into our culture and really gotten into the habit of assuming the worst villifying and dehumanizing the former partner. All of these incredibly negative associations and feelings embedded in our culture can't help but influence your perceptions, unless you're mindful to frame your understanding of your separation differently. It is possible to have a healthy divorce. It is possible to reach a fair financial settlement with going the court. It is possible to have a reasonable and functional relationship with your co-parent. Does it take work? Yes. Does it take cooperation from both of you? Yes it does. Do you have to be friends or like each other? No, definitely not. But what you do need is  to recognize that it's the conflict around the separation which is harmful for both you and your children, not the separation itself. Studies have shown that high conflict between parents during and after separation can be traumatic for children and can actually result in poor development and behavioral outcomes for them. Some of the concerning effects on children of a high conflict separation may include experiencing impaired relationships with peers, depression, anxiety, and developing negative attention seeking behaviors, just to name a few. And what do I mean when I say high conflict? High conflict may involve yelling, it may also involve just refusing to speak to each other. It could involve name calling, or bad mouthing the other parents to the child or in front of the child, failing to cooperate about the parenting schedule – it can encompass all sorts of small and large transgressions. Children feel very deeply and they perceive more than parents realize. My belief is that the statistically-predictable restructuring of families through separation shouldn't be routinely managed in ways that routinely traumatize both parents and children. Separating couples need information about and access to non-adversarial dispute resolution mechanisms. In this podcast series, I'll be providing information about a number of different types of supports that parents can access, to help them shift their mindset rather than fear-based mindset. Non-adversarial options including mediation, which is what I do. Mediation is where a neutral mediator meets with both parties to help facilitate the discussion, provide family law information, and help them come up with solutions to that will meet both of their needs and the needs of the children, if there are any. For people who need a greater level of support, there's collaborative law, which is also a non-adversarial process. In this process, each party retains a collaboratively trained lawyer, but the lawyers and the clients all work together as a team to come up with solutions that are appropriate for the whole family. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you're notified when each of these new interviews is released. I'll be interviewing experts on all of these different areas, and we'll be diving into lots of detail on each individual topic. One of the challenges people have is that the stories they hear from friends and family about their separation and divorce often involves court. The court process, which in North America is the adversarial system, is the default process. It's the process that people have been using for decades for family law, and so this is what's brings to mind of people first. If you have not yet started down that process, I strongly recommend that you talk to either a mediator or a collaborative lawyer to get information about your next steps. People find it very difficult to start down that court process in which they're putting each other down, to then shift into a cooperative process, listening to each other and coming to a solution that meets both of their needs. Once that trust is broken, it's very difficult to go back. So for those of you at the beginning of your process, please know that separation does not have to be nasty and ridiculously expensive. Shift how you think about divorce, if you do have those negative assumptions that are rampant in our culture rather than thinking of divorce as a combat – as a battle at the cost of the family. Try to think about divorce as a respectful restructuring for the benefit of the family. You're moving from a one-home family  to a two-home family. De-escalating conflict must be the priority in order to try to do no harm to yourself, your partner, or your children. I believe that having an amicable divorce involves both of you agreeing to participate in a non-adversarial process. It involves disagreeing, it certainly might. But it involves disagreeing without being disagreeable. And I think that it must involve a fair outcome. I think that if one person is just completely bending to the demands of the other, so as to avoid a conflict, it would be hard to call that amicable. An agreement should take into account your history, your circumstances, both past and present. Families are so different – the context of your particular family is going to determine what is fair in your particular circumstance. So you really can't compare to what happened to your sister, what happened to your neighbor – it needs to be an individualized approach. We're hearing more and more positive stories though these days. Example of co-parents purchasing houses next door to each other so that their children could go freely go back and forth. Or co-parents having a family dinner night once per month, to help the children feel a sense of continuity of the family, even though it's been restructured. Some of these types of stories may strike you as strange or comfortable. But I encourage you to look at your assumptions. The assumptions you're bringing to these opinions and why it is that these images of positive co-parenting relationship are causing cognitive dissonance. If you're still listening, I'm going to assume that it's important for you to be able to achieve a smooth and respectful separation. And that you believe that that will be to your benefit and if you have children that that will be to their benefit as well. So I'm going to encourage you to stay focused on your values of achieving an amicable divorce. This is a commitment that you're going to need to make and you're going to need to make it over and over again. What I mean by that is that there are countless situations in day to day life where you can either choose to take the high road or not. I see people frequently making decisions with respect to their separation that slowly chips away at the trust between them and their partner. They let their anger, impatience, jealously, grief take over their better judgment and take actions which slowly corrode their ability to communicate effectively with each other. Snarky comments are made, emails go unanswered, personal properties are taken without consent, maybe children are dropped off a little later than agreed. Each of these is perhaps small and meaningless on its own. But when these types of transgressions continue to happen, they chip away at any remaining trust and goodwill in the relationship. They breed fear, suspicion, and anxiety, making an amicable divorce less and less likely over time. With each poor decision, you move further away from your target of having a respectful and efficient divorce. We all have bad days. The good news is, that you can make a concerted effort though to get back on track. You can be polite, you can be proactive. You can be respectful, honest, cooperative, going forward. No matter what you've chosen to do in the past, and no matter how the other person is treating you, you are always in control of how you respond. So I want to provide you the hope that you can make a decision about how you want to treat your spouse. The tone in which you wish to have communications together, and the level of respect that you bring to the relationship. Good behavior by one person will often create a feeling of goodwill, and the wish to reciprocate by the other person. I suggest that you share this podcast with your spouse. There will be lots of great information in the upcoming episodes about different types of processes and different types of experts who can help you through your separation, and help you achieve the smooth, efficient, respectful separation that you wish to see. Essentially, to help you Divorce Well.