E-Commerce Specialist - Digital Marketing & Web Design & Development. If you need my expertise let me know.

If you'd like a Forbes-listed, Marketer of the Year as your mentor... feel free to set up a 10 minute call with me. If you look at my reviews and do some research on me, you'll quickly see why, if you want an empire, you should get my advice. My average client grows by approximately 1,400%. That's insanity.

It's very important. (first, read this article by Josh Breinlinger - http://acrowdedspace.com/post/47647912203/a-critical-but-ignored-metric-for-marketplaces) The way you achieve success in a marketplace is by driving liquidity for both your supply & demand. Demand-side Liquidity = When users come to your marketplace, they can achieve their goals. Supply-side Liquidity = When supply comes to your marketplace they can achieve their goals... which are almost always to make money. If you're making a large amount of your supply-side users a full-time income, then you're helping them achieve liquidity. Now it's not so black and white and it doesn't always have to be a "full-time income." It depends what their goals are. E.g., 1) At Airbnb, renters aren't looking to quit their day jobs and become landlords full-time... they're just look to earn a substantial amount of income to offset their rent, mortgage, etc. So in this case, I would probably goal on # of renters that earn >$500 / month... and (in the first 1-5 years) try to grow this number by 10-20% MoM... and maybe by just 5% once you're in the mid-high tens of millions in yearly revenue. 2) At Kickstarter, the goal of the supply-side is to get their project successfully funded. They don't care if the project creator is "full-time"... they just want to make sure they meet their funding goal. This is why they talk about their 44% project success rate all the time - http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats 3) At Udemy, our instructors want a substantial amount of their income to be driven from their Udemy course earnings... so we look at how many instructors are earning >$2k / month.

Hi, I specialise in eCommerce strategy and marketing, helping eCommerce people make better decisions, and run more efficiently and effectively. The short answer is 'no'. Your target market isn't "subscription buyers" it's "cigar lovers". So unless there's a lot of subscription programs targeting the cigar lover, you're fine. However, if your market strategy is to go after people who like subscriptions - then I think you're not going to do so well! A cigar is a tough first sell! If you're coming at this from the "I love cigars" point of view first consider if Subscription is the best way to serve that customer base. If you're coming at this from the "I want a subscription business" point of view - then make sure you've researched cigars thoroughly before going down that road. Not least the legal restrictions on advertising - these differ from country to country, but it can be pretty hard to market tobacco online. Hope that helps. Chloe

I agree with some of the recommendations above; 1) Focus on making sure your XML sitemap is accurate, and make sure your weightings (server priority weights) are set correctly from parent to child (category > sub-category > product detail). 2) Submit through Google webmaster tools 3) Submit partials in increments (again, good suggestion at 50k/time) and pay close attention to your index rate to see how fast these are picked up 4) you can brute force a lot of these crawls by submitting and re-submitting your sitemap(s) - as often as every day 5) For very important URL's that are not getting picked up a handy trick is to tweet them out from an account that has a positive share of voice (more followers than following)

The quickest path to cash is almost always consulting. Be very specific about what it is you can offer. Don't just offer "business consulting". Find a niche and serve it. Reach out to your network, including friends and family and ask if they need or know of anyone who might want to hear about what your consulting has to offer. That will be way faster than trying to go at it from scratch or cold calling. If you call 100 people in your network this week, you will have a consulting gig within 3 weeks. Good luck, and let me know if you'd like advice on entering a digital marketing/lead generation consulting niche. I've grown from zero to $8,000 of monthly recurring payments in the last 40 days! Dave