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DanceCrazy [2/5] Let’s do it the Right Way, the Wrong Way

Ok, so after years of making money, doing things the purported “wrong way”, I decided I would do things the right way (or so I thought). After purchasing the very expensive domain name (covered in Part 1 of this amazing Case Study), I was ready to drop some big bucks on creating a great site, a great marketing program, and a whole new line of products.

Not only that, for some strange reason, I wanted to spend money. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but when you are used to always doing things inexpensively (on the cheap), you sometimes feel like you’re missing out on something if you but had more money to purchase it. 

So, rolling in dough, I thought, let’s spend some cash. Note to Readers: If you ever find yourself in a similar situation. I’ll get you back on track! After all, my skewed and completely warped inner voice said, “why get a website for $200, when you can spend 10k”? “Why market for a thousand dollars, when you can market for 20” (um, thousand dollars). So, I let loose the dogs of vanity, and unlocked the padlocked bank account, so I could “play with the big boys”.  I decided I would not run or hide from the idea of spending some  "serious" money.

All with good intentions mind you, I went to a mid tier developer, or so I (mistakenly) thought, Network Solutions.  They are a huge player in the internet space, known mostly for registrar services. Since I won the auction through Snapnames (and at that time, they worked closely together), the domain was registered there, and they had a fancy new shopping division called Monster Commerce. Since my previous Yahoo Store fiasco (coming soon to this blog), I decided this was to be my next platform.

“Why I needed a platform”, that simple question, seems to have eluded me. I already had a shopping cart (http://www.shoppingcartcrazy.com, the best on the web), and I had very basic HTML skills, and access to some good designers, yet…onward I went, right to the spendy “other side”, and I got a lesson in how the other half lives (the rest of the world), that aren’t so lucky as I, and now you, to have the knowledge which I so carelessly discarded in this instance.

You see, to make a long story, a tad shorter, ignoring my previous success, and reaching for the illusion of something greater, I made my single greatest mistake in a long time (only trumped by being a TrafficPower.com customer – some people will get that, others will have to Google it).  The problem was not in the “reaching”, but in the implementation, and disregard for my past success. In attaining the next level, and moving into multi-millions of dollars, I had the false belief that I needed to do something different than what I was already doing. Rather than focusing on what was working, and do more of that, I decided to  go in a different direction.

I chose very poorly in adding this shopping cart, and a dynamic one at that, to a brand new site. Even with 7 years of site “aging”, this killed my once powerful domain name, as I failed to recreate the existing page structure of the past site (an easy thing to do, and something I’ve done before to keep page rank and incoming links). 

Lack of FTP access was a killer! Never, and I repeat, never, use a closed system to host your site and run your shopping cart unless you are entirely trusting of their SEO techniques, their internal website structuring and layout for your site, and their suite of tools available. I have never found this kind of shopping application on the internet, and likely you will not either. If you do, let me know!

Making a web store is not rocket science. There are tried and true benefits to conversion techniques, page layout, SEO optimization, and sales letters, which this new web store simply didn’t do (and made it very hard to implement). I had already used all these techniques, on multiple sites, and was making money on these tried and true principles. My stores may not look professional (or at least what I would consider professional), but boy…was I making a lot of money.  This was my attempt to go the “corporate” route, and copy what the big boys were doing, in hopes that I would see a new channel of sales (perhaps customers who were turned off to my sales-letters and marketing tactics on my other sites).  Even with this stated intention, it would have been better to use my existing shopping cart, and hire a designer, rather than rely on the MonsterCommerce back-end.

The overly cumbersome, absurdly complicated structure of MonsterCommerce (at least for me, and my staff), along with an amazing tangled, and SEO unfriendly structure (we never ranked in google – of all places, and had middling rankings on the other engines),, killed the site long before we even launched it.  The lack of direct FTP, or ROOT access, and inability to actually change, modify, or take complete control (easily) of the website, and SEO unfriendly pages (from unbelievable bad page titles that could not be easily changed, to meta tags that were dead), was the final nail in our coffin. I put countless man hours on building the store, adding the products, video, descriptions … but sales were not coming, and rankings were nonexistent. But rather than wake up, and smell the coffee, I went the other direction, and even with a lousy, but fairly good looking storefront, I decided to throw money at marketing to try and turn it around, and throw it I did, which is the focus of the next report on the DanceCrazy.com debacle…

Lessons Learned:

Stick with what works!  Just like internet marketing courses, you only need one thing that works, duplicate it, build upon it, and cherish it. Don’t keep going after new things, but focus on those things that work. 

Avoid closed systems. You need control.  If you are going to use a closed shopping cart system (store), then you’ll be in trouble unless you do your research first. See other stellar implementations, and talk to other store owners before deciding.  More money, rarely, if ever, means great service or greater products.  You need FTP access!  Unless you will NEVER be meddling with your sites, in which case, I would still go with Yahoo, or even Sitebuilder (for very beginners), before MonsterCommerce.  It was a stellar sales job on their part – what can I say?!

Be Clear about What I wanted: Why I didn’t just build the store with my existing shopping cart, I have no idea. While http://www.shoppingcartcrazy.com is not perfect for huge businesses (as mine is becoming), it’s great for people starting out. It’s an absolute necessity. There are simply too many things to keep track of, and the design of your site should not be dictated (and controlled) by your shopping cart. At first, I saw this as a bonus (due to integration), but later learned, it was a huge boulder around my neck, dragging me down.

Page Layout and Control: what I like about hand coding a site is it give you individual page control, so you can not only design nice looking pages, that actually convert customers using tried and true techniques, but you also have control over individual, page by page SEO. It’s not hard to do the 5 Step MarketingCrazy.com SEO page techniques, but if you are using a closed system, you may not have easy access to your pages HTML.  You need to have complete control.

Make sure, when and if you need to, You’ll be able to move: This is covered in the next sections a bit more, but it bears a quick note here.  If you can’t change services, you are in big trouble.

I have never, ever, ranked so badly as I did when using this service.  But it gets much, much, worse. In part 4, we’ll talk about how hard it was to get OFF the host/service, and actually rebuild the entire site, but before we get to that, in Part 3, we’ll investigate paying big bucks for SEO page optimization efforts.

Wait until you see part 3…