I started my first business silk tie retailing using a ready made website template and shopping cart. This was because I did not want to spend a lot of money having a site built and did not know anything about web retailing so wouldn't be able to specify what I needed anyway. It seems to me that this was a good decision. It meant that I could concentrate my work on getting the product, merchandising, sales text and internet marketing right and not worry too much about the other stuff. As I have progressed I have wanted to change some things in the site design but it has been fairly easy and cheap to do so and I have changed only the things that really needed to change. I got my website from www.DPBUk.co.uk who have been good but there are many other companies out there selling ready made retailing websites.

The first step in getting the business up and running was to add my sales text. I decided to aim initially at the UK market only as that is the one I know and is less competitive than the us. My sales text for the front page aims to do a few things; show that I am UK based, show that people can trust and rely on the site (site looks professional, address is prominent, email and phone numbers are listed, money back guarantee and testimonials from customers) and encourage people to browse the ties knowing that prices are reasonable and shipping is free.

Next priority was to make finding the right tie easier. I did this by creating all sorts of categories; by colour, by style etc. Then was the grinding effort as going into every tie in the catalogue and adding it to various categories. This effort was well worth while however, if people can't quickly find what they are looking for then they will go elsewhere. It is so easy on the internet to pop into the next shop that you must make it very easy for people. Not only did I categorise every tie in to multiple categories, but I also tagged each tie with a basic description so that the Search box on my site would pull up relevant searches. Finally I selected what I thought were the nicest ties for the featured products on the front.

Final priority was pricing. I wanted the pricing to be competitive and to be easily changed, so that I could experiment and find the best pricing. I also wanted to make it clear to people that prices were much lower for the quality than you would get on the high street. I therefore decided to put high-street retail pricing in and then use a Sale to reduce the price to a competitive internet level. This has worked fairly well, although I think I under-priced initially. Now I am slowly increasing prices and it does not seem to be hurting sales. In pricing I wanted to have progressive quantity discounts to encourage people to buy more silk ties, however the cart system couldn't handle it. In the website administration it did have bands for price by quantity which I filled in for every product, only to find that it only worked if you bought multiples of the same silk tie. I haven't yet found a way of doing what I want with the cart, but am glad that I left the volume discounts bulk buying of the same tie in. I get lots of orders for multiples of the same tie from clubs, companies and weddings and having the discounts has definately paid off.

After a week or so working every evening and weekend the site was looking good enough to go. I placed a few trial orders for silk ties to make sure everything worked. It didn't. Test, test and test again until it works great. Finally the moment of truth, I was ready to go live and start getting customers.

Google AdWords has been the biggest expense in getting the business going. To have a successful internet business you have to get people to come to your site. When you start a high-street shop you have passers by to sell to but when you start a new website you have no passers by. Google does not rank new websites highly (in fact almost no website achieves a top ranking on Google for a simple search term in less than six to nine months) so no one will find you by accident. The only way to get visitors quickly is to advertise. I figured that offline advertising wouldn't be very good, much better to sell to people when they are at their computers already. I also figured that banner ads and listing sites are poor value for money. I therefore focused all my advertising on AdWords first and then Overture.

AdWords is a very clever system. Completely automated, it allows you to advertise to people whoare searching for particular keywords in particular countries. For example for www.tiespecialist.com I want people in the UK who are searching for tie, ties, silk ties, woven silk ties, wedding ties, bow ties, polyester ties etc. The adverts appear on the right hand side of Google and you only pay when someone clicks through. In this way it is better than traditional advertising in that you know you get visitors to your site for your adspend.

How far your ad is from the top depends on how much you are willing to pay and your click through rate (CTR). In essence Google maximises the money making potential of each search by showing the ads people are most likely to click on and that pay the most. When I started my website I put in lots of keywords, wrote an ad and aimed it at the UK. I quickly found that I needed to pay 20p to 35p per click to be in the top 3 for the ads. In the first week of advertising I generated 150 clicks or so per day at 25p each on average and got no sales. After the 1st week sales started to come in at the rate of 1 or 2 per day. When I worked out the cost per conversion I was paying