Sortprice: An E-Commerce Service Using Social Media and Facebook

Around the beginning of March, I had an interview at a company called Sortprice.  They were looking for sales reps to market their service to businesses that have on-line stores.  I was intrigued by their service and would have been thrilled to sell it- except for the fact that it involved heavy phone sales and cold calling.

The gist of their service:
They have created an application ("app"- which basically means it's a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment such as java... ) that they offer to their clients.  This application works with facebook fanpages.  Once a company has a fanpage on facebook and some other online store site they can easily apply the function to their fanpage - that when someone goes to their fanpage you see their products right there as if it was a duplicate store without ever leaving facebook! 

There have been statistics shows that facebook gets just about as many hits as google does so this is an excellent marketing ticket for e-commerce companies.  Plus, facebook is known for their targeted marketing- because the age, gender and location of the member is all recorded and the ads are manipulated to be appropriated for those stats.

Let's take Nike for example.  They have an online store selling their products, plus a fanpage on facebook.  When you "like" them on facebook and become a fan and then visit their fanpage- there you will see all of their products - exactly as you would see them on their site - and when making a purchase the checkout button is there and only redirected to the main check-out once you click on it.

If a store does not have a facebook page you can easily follow the steps on how to create one.  It's very easy.  The only requirement is that the business has a site with products and a checkout.

The benefits of Sortprice are:
1) Targeted marketing- getting the customers who are already fans of your company and products.
2) Never leaving facebook- and having the products right on the site.
3) Once you make a purchase all your friends can see and that increases the exposure as well.

There is a monthly fee- it is quite pricey- but companies can assess whether the fees are worth their ROI (return on investment) is worth it.  They have a lot of very satisfied customers, ie Petco, Adidas...

You can check them out as Sortprice.com.  Their actual website is a price comparison site.  The facebook feature is an added service they have developed more recently with the rise of facebook stores.

Google AdSense- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - Monetizing Online

The purpose of this blog was not to monetiz.  I started it purely to learn about how online media works and how people actually DO make money online, while blogging my findings along the way.   Since I do seem to be getting a decent amount of traffic onto this site, I figured why not just put up some Google Ad.
Placing ads on my blog is both a learning experience and an experiment to see how it all works. 

Here were my findings:
1) Placing the Ad onto the site: I can go into a whole song and dance as to how to embed the ads into the blog- but it is a whole lot of HTML jargon.  I just googled "How to place adsense onto a blog" or something like that and came up with very detailed instructions.   I do not remember them at this point- but it took me all about a half an hour in total.  Yes, for easier reference I could have copied and pasted the steps into this blog, but why should I if you can just google it and follow the clear instructions. For now I am ok with that.  I There was a lot of HTML reading and cutting and pasting- which I am so clueless about and really disinterested in as well.  However, as you can see it worked.  And the whole time I was saying to myself that I would just blindly follow the instructions and then hope for the best.

2) People actually DO click on the ads.  I have to check my adsense account, but last I checked I had make a couple of cents!  But for doing nothing (a half an hour of investment) why not make some cents- just for the kick of it.  Plus, in the future who knows if more people will suddenly start to visit this site. Also, it's just a great skill to have whenever you are building sites- and you don't have to do anything.

Believe it or not there are people who make a living off people clicking on their google ads!!!
If you have a couple of websites with traffic and ads- it all "adds up!"

3) It's free. Period.

Maybe one day I will post the steps to placing the ads, but for now this is all.
I can only tell you it's easier than it seems.