One of the reasons for this site is to help our own clients boost their online business effectiveness. From our experience, more than 70% of the new ecommerce sites are failing to deliver, or at least failing to deliver to their full potential. The overiding reasons why they fail include lack of internet traffic and lack of business planning. Another factor is that some sites can be very difficult to edit and maintain. The last thing that is missing from sites that don't do so well is an owner with passion.

If the first reason that you decide to try ecommerce is that you can make money, my advice is to check your motivations before you embark on a time-wasting venture and you get exactly the opposite of what you want. As I get more into why I built this site, the bottom line, the profit motive (yes there is one) is that the money you make is a RESULT of your efforts. Your efforts are your primary concern. And in that regard, once a website is up, many people simply don't know what to do. So the site justs sits there.

An ecommerce site owner's primary concern, primary efforts if you will, should be getting people to the site and making known the existence of this wonderful thing that was built just waiting for people to discover it. It has been two weeks since this site was started...that's all. But here's what we've done so far.

• Installed Google analytics and other tracking software (easy to do)
• Created Twitter account specifically for Build a web shop. We have 20 followers currently.
• Created a Business Account on Facebook
• Submitted three ads so far in various cities in Craigslist
• Submitted three articles so far promoting specific keywords (searches within the site). we are already on the first page for two of those words.
• Today we built a profile and became a member of small business computing ecommerce forums. We've asked for advice and I'm sure we'll also have advice to share. And every time I leave a post, I get a link back to my site. YOU ARE REWARDED FOR BEING A CONTRIBUTING MEMBER OF COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE COMMON INTERESTS - and I guess that's the message for today.

Greg Newell