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October 15, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 8, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 1, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
Earlier this week I wrote a post about features you might want in an ecommerce system. A few readers asked me to suggest systems that do all of this. First, you may not need a system that does ALL of those things, check out my list and see which features your business needs. Second, I can’t personally vouch for any ecomm systems out there because I use a custom built system. My background is in writing web applications, so for me it was easiest to just create a system that had the exact features I wanted. Writing my own system also means I can tweak it forever to make it do what I want as I get new ideas. This isn’t a practical solution for most people, so here are two resources to check out: Practical Ecommerce’s Directory of Shopping Carts and their shopping cart reviews.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 29, 2010
If you’re in the market for an ecommerce solution, it’s important to have a clear picture of what features you need your ecommerce system to offer. Below is a checklist of some of the features you might want to put on your must-haves list:
Marketing
SEO Optimized – Make sure any ecomm system you are considering creates Title Tags and URLs that are optimized for search engines.
Gift Cards – Do you want to sell gift cards? If so you need a system that sells and accepts them. Customer should be able to buy gift cards in varying amounts, spend the cards in varying amounts and check gift card balances.
Customer Rewards Program – Do you want to offer a customer rewards program? If so make sure your ecommerce system is set up to administer it. That means awarding points and allowing customers to redeem them for specific things.
Social Bookmark Plugins – Want customers to spread your content around the web? Then you’ll need an ecomm site that allows you to insert social bookmarking plugins like Add This
Wish List – If you want customers to be able to create wish lists, you’ll need a system that allows customers to create a wish list, share their wish list and allows others to look up the wish lists of friends and family.
Sale Pricing – If you want customers to see a mark down on an item, you’ll need a system that displays current price and previous price.
Product Feeds – If you want your products in a feed for programs like Google Products, Bing Shopping or Shopzilla you’ll want an ecomm system that can create these feeds for you.
Usability
Site Search – Do you want customers to be able to search your site for products? If so you’ll need a robust search tool. A great search tool allows you to do keyword tagging on your products, accounts for typos and gives you reporting data on what customers searched on your site.
Merchandising – Do you want to add products to multiple categories? Maybe you want to display holiday ornaments in home decor AND gifts under $10.00. You’ll need a system that allows you to create unlimited categories and add products to more than one.
Product Pages
Product Options – Do your items come in varying sizes or colors? If so you’ll need a cart that enables you to display that information to customers. You’ll want customers to have fields to select product color, product size, etc.
Product Photos – You’ll probably want to display several photos of each product, so make sure your system enables multiple product images.
Cross-Sells – Showing related or similar products on product pages and view cart pages can increase average order value, so this may be a feature you’ll want to look for.
Custom Layouts – Online marketers test the heck out of product page layouts to see what helps boost conversions. Don’t get stuck in a system that forces you into one template. You may want to move elements of your pages around and run tests to see which layouts are most effective.
Checkout
Coupons – Do you want to offer coupons? If so what kind? Free shipping? Free shipping within a certain country? 10% off? $10 off? Do you want the coupon to require a minimum spend? Do you want the coupon to only apply to certain items? If so you’ll need a sophisticated coupon tool that allows you to create an accept these types of coupons.
Guest Checkout – A lot of customers find it very annoying to have to create an account to buy things. You may want a system that accepts checkouts without creating an account.
Account Management – Alternately, you may want to allow frequent buyers to create accounts. You’ll want to make sure customers can access their account info to change things also such as email address or billing and shipping info.
Payment Integration – Make sure you pick a cart that integrates with the payment methods you accept.
Cart Persistence – You may want to save the contents of a customer’s cart for them. What if they add items to their cart and come back a few days later to complete their order? It’s best to save their selections for them, so you’ll want a system that does this.
Order Confirmation Emails – Customers expect to see an email confirming their order. Make sure the system you select generates one, and make sure it’s something you can customize.
Gift Options – Do you offer gift wrap or gift notes? If so you’ll want fields on your checkout forms that allow customers to indicate if an item is a gift and include a gift note.
Shipping and Taxes
Sales Tax – Do you charge sales tax? If so you’ll want an ecommerce system that automatically calculates the taxes and adds them to your order totals.
Shipping Options – Do you charge flat rate? Do you charge shipping based on weight or number of items? Do you have different shipping options? Do you charge different rates depending on destination? Shipping rules can be extremely complicated so make sure you select a system that can accommodate your shipping rules. You may also want to have a tool that does shipping calculations on your product pages. Customers like to know what shipping will be before they get to checkout.
Admin Tools
Order Status – Do you give customers a delivery confirmation number? Do you want them to be able to check order status? If so you’ll want a back end tool that allows you to enter order status info and a front end tool that allows customer to look up order status.
Reporting – Do you want to know your gross sales? Your net sales? Your best sellers? Your busiest day of the week? Your busiest period in the month? An ecommerce tool with reporting information can help you pull this information, so you can more effectively make decisions about your business.
Order Management – Do you need a system that helps you keep track of orders internally? Do you need to use your ecommerce system to keep track of what has shipped, what is being returned, etc. If so a tool that manages order status for you or your staff is essential.
Customer Management/CRM – Do you need a tool to keep track of customer emails, phone calls, feedback, etc? A CRM that’s built into your ecommerce system can help you store and organize this information.
Open Source – Sometimes you just need to get into the guts of your system. Maybe you need a feature that doesn’t exist in any ecommerce system out of the box. For those situations, you’ll want to look for a system that allows you to access and modify the source code.
Inventory Management
Inventory Management – Do you need a system that keeps track of what’s in stock, what’s out and what’s running low? Maybe you want to be alerted when your stock level drops to a certain number. Some ecommerce systems have built in inventory management and can deduct inventory as items are sold or even add inventory as returns are accepted.
Inventory Notices for Customers – A really good system will allow customers to indicate that they want to be notified when an out of stock product comes back to the store. The system will then email them when your inventory is replenished. You may also want to look for an option that alerts cart abandoners when you are about to run out of a product, in case they want to complete their order before the item is no longer available.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 24, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
Turbo Charge Your Holiday Sales!
I am in the final stages of putting together my Holiday Advertising Co-op. The main co-op site will be IShopIndie.com but all members will be able to feature their items on loungeluxe.com and cutique.com as an added bonus. Both sites have been around for a few years and get lots of organic traffic every day from search engines and links. In addition, membership comes with 12 months of newsletter advertising (monthly newsletters reach 1000s of fans of indie shopping and handmade goods) and 12 months of promotion through Twitter and Facebook. And as always, real time stats on your click-throughs and access to update your listings in real time too!
If you are hoping to get in on this you’ll be in some amazing company, some of our members will be: Shanalogic, Cry Wolf Clothing, WishJewel, Xmittens, Piggy’s Little Shop, and Ex-Boyfriend. We have space for just a few more designers, so if you want in let me know today!
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 22, 2010
I saw an artisan ask the other day “how can I market my stuff without feeling like a sleazy sales person?” The anxiety of coming off as sleazy or pestering to customers can keep you from marketing your products and services effectively, so below are some surefire ways that keep you from coming off this way.
1. Be There When They Need You
Sometimes people actually want to buy stuff, your best bet at getting money from those people is getting in front of them when they are looking for stuff to buy. Thankfully search engines have made this task easier than ever before. You just have to know how to leverage them. This is why search engine optimization and search engine marketing is extremely important.
Imagine I want to buy organic infant apparel, imagine that’s what you sell. If you’ve done your search marketing job properly I find your brand through organic search results when I search for “organic infant clothes”. I find your Adwords ads when I search for “organic infant shirts”. I find your products when I look for “organic infant sleepwear” on Google Products. You sell what I want and you’ve positioned yourself to let me know about your products. This is one of the top ways online retailers get sales. (Hint: I have written and linked tons of articles on SEO, here’s where you can find them. SEO and SEM can be very tedious and technical but it’s probably one of the most important things you’ll for for your online business.)
2. Get Permission
The great thing about online marketing is that customers can give you permission to market to them. They can opt into your newsletter, they can follow you on Twitter, they can read your blog, they can subscribe to your Youtube channel, they can like you on Facebook. These are all actions they take to indicate that they want to hear from you so take advantage of this.
Of course you can abuse this privilege, so it’s important to follow some guidelines like making sure you sure content you provide is of interest to your customers and making sure you don’t bug them non-stop. This means you don’t email them 10 times a day or post 10 promotions to Facebook about your current clearance sale. That is sleazy and annoying. But the weekly, monthly or bi-monthly email they signed up for is fine. The daily blog post is great. The handful of Tweets about a new creative project, a funny news story or a request for feedback is well within reason. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to imagine how you’d react if you saw the same content coming from another company’s newsletter, blog or social media accounts.
3. Be the News/Buzz
There’s a difference between the huge Revlon ad in the middle of Self Magazine and the detailed editorial written in Self about the editor-approved best mascaras, right? You want to be the latter. The former is just advertising, but the latter is a product that’s become news and part of the content. Get your products and services in front of the media. Look for opportunities to generate word of mouth from friends and fans. Institute a customer referral program or sponsor a charitable cause that gives people and press outlets a reason to talk about what you’re up to and generate interest in your company.
SOCIAL MEDIA BLOGGING MEME: Be sure to check out Blacksburg Belle’s post today on how to create useful content in social media.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 20, 2010
Small businesses are operated by small staffs, maybe even a staff of one. That’s why it’s important to be insanely efficient with your time. A few months ago I wrote about 5 common time sinks for small business owners, and today I have 5 more tips on tweaks you can make to your current routine to get even more efficient.
1. Your PR Strategy:
Remove media outlets that aren’t a match for your work from your media list. If you’ve got a media contact you’ve pitched repeatedly over time and they ignore your pitches or constantly reject your work, get them off your list. Instead use that time to seek out and build relationships with media contacts who will give you press.
2. Your Social Media Strategy:
While networking with peers is fun and can sometimes lead to useful opportunities, don’t make fellow business owners the focus of your social media efforts, unless your target market is your peers. Instead use your Facebook profile, YouTube account, Twitter profile, etc. to generate interest from your target market. Connect with the kind of people who would buy your products or services. Connect with media contacts who would give you press. If you’re going to connect with peers, do it in a way that has an end goal in mind like cross-promotion or collaboration. Amassing thousands of other business owners as friends/fans/followers is probably not the best route to increasing sales unless you’re selling a B2B product or service.
3. Your Content Creation Strategy:
Don’t create blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates that are all about you. Customers don’t want to read a constant stream of “Just listed this new item on Etsy.” Instead create content that fits in with your SEO strategy AND piques the interest of your target market.
4.Your Ecommerce System:
Don’t spend all your time wrestling with a slow or inefficient method of getting your products posted to your website or online shop. If your goal is to sell a lot of product, get an ecommerce system that’s easy to manage and doesn’t take a lot of time. In my case, we have over 1000 unique products on our website. If I tried to list all of that on Etsy I’d never have time to do anything else! That’s why I use an ecommerce system that offers great efficiency when it comes to product management. I can post new products to my website with 1 click and easily get reporting information on sales data. I don’t spend time pouring over excel spreadsheets or trying to keep track of order status in a manual way, my ecommerce system does it all for me. (Hint: Looking for a new ecommerce system? One of my favorite blogs has reviewed hundreds of them! You can see those reviews here.)
5. Your Time Management System:
Lose the post it notes and myriad of to do lists you may be storing on your computer or desktop. These types of lists are difficult to keep track of and don’t allow you to truly organize. Instead find a task management system that can store all of your to-dos and allow you to easily sort, update, delegate, prioritize and expound upon all of your tasks.
http://smallerbox.net/blog/branding/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-cross-promotion-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 8, 2010
All of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, SEO has become a buzz word in the craft community. For all this hype, there’s a very weak understanding of what SEO entails and how you can SEO your Etsy shop. Etsy has tried to get into the SEO game by using properly optimized URLs and title tags, but the truth is, there’s more to SEO than that, and if you want to rocket to the top of the search engine rankings, what they have to offer probably isn’t going to get you there.
If you want search traffic, truckloads of visitors that come to your online shop every day, just because what they searched for is what you sell, you probably need your own website and you probably need to be prepared to do some work. Here’s why:
1. Content Matters
Sites like Etsy simply are not set up for content creation. You can’t create carefully crafted landing pages with just the right bolding, anchor text and H1 tags. You don’t control the HTML, and you’re essentially paying 20 cents for every “page” you create on Etsy.
Let’s contrast John Brana‘s website with random Etsy shop selling handmade silver jewelry. First of all, how’d I find this guy? I did a search for “handmade silver jewelry”. He’s the number 4 listing on Google. Why him and not an Etsy shop?
His site has a ton of pages, and they’re nicely optimized pages that make use of proper keyword placement and SEO’d title tags and URLs. He’s got bolding, he’s got links. His site is full of content for search bots to crawl through and all those pages give him more tickets to the search engine lottery. He’s got a blog, he’s got a press page, he’s got his products merchandised in a variety of ways.
Contrast this with how few pages an online shop gets you on a site like Etsy. You don’t get a blog, you don’t get a press page, you don’t get an upcoming events page. All you get are product pages, and you’re paying for each of them.
When you have your own website you pay a flat fee for the domain and hosting. Beyond that, you can make a million pages if you like. Every one of them is content on YOUR website as far as the search engines are concerned, and all those pages score you points and help you drive traffic. When you’re on Etsy your pages are essentially very low profile buried links on a very gigantic site. Not the kind of thing that attracts the search traffic so easily.
2. Keywords are Tricky
The keyword game is like a Transformer. It’s more than meets the eye. Yes you want to use words that describe your product, but there are many words that do that. You need to research the words that:
- Describe your product
- Have search volume
- Don’t have the most competition under the sun
Once you find these phrases, you need to work them into your title tags, your URLs, your copy, your anchors, your bolded/h1 copy and so forth. You can find these words using programs like Google’s keyword tool, but this process takes work and research. It’s not about just coming up with flowery language that appeals to humans. It’s about getting robots to behave the way you want. To do this most effectively, you need more control than your Etsy shop allows.
3. Links Matter A Lot
Link building is a big part of SEO. Search engines like websites and web pages that other sites have vouched for. If you’re on Etsy this sucks for a few reasons.
1. You don’t have permanent links. Once your product is sold/expired, your URL is pretty much gone. Even if you re-list, the URL won’t be identical. So even if you did go to the trouble of scaring up some links to your pages, they wouldn’t be all that useful.
2. Those links are votes for etsy.com, not yourdomain.com. Sure you could get a zillion pages to link to yourstore.etsy.com and this would make your shop URL more interesting to search engines, but you’re still doing an awful lot of work to build links for a domain you don’t own. A domain that hosts your competitors.
Links are very valuable, they’re essentially a vote for your site among search engines, and they’re hard work to come by. At least, links worth their salt. They’ll have a lot to do with whether search engines promote you or ignore you, so if you’re going to work to get them, it’s in your best interest to have control of the site they’re going to. This way if you ever leave Etsy, you haven’t lost all your SEO work.
Does this mean I can’t succeed at SEO as long as I just sell on Etsy?
Not necessarily. It will be harder, but it could be done. You could get your own website, still sell on Etsy, but keep all the SEO work focused on your own site. Then you could direct people to Etsy to make a purchase. If you really don’t want to get into handling your own ecommerce, this compromise might be a solution.
You might even want to create product pages and link them to Etsy product pages, that way you can have SEO’d product pages. Depending on how much you sell, this could be a hassle to maintain, but if you’re in the early stages of your business, it might work for you.
Note: Although I reference Etsy specifically in this article, other sites like Etsy have the same problems. This includes Ebay, 1000 markets, Art Fire, etc. I don’t think these sites are bad selling venues, but it’s important to be objective about what they can and can’t do for you.
They’re great ways for an established business to reach an audience that might not otherwise find them. They’re fine for someone starting out who’s still testing the waters of selling online. They’re even okay for someone who wants to sell online but does not want to go to the trouble of managing their own ecommerce website (though such a decision definitely limits your marketing opportunities). What they aren’t great for is a be-all-end-all destination for someone trying to grow a serious online retail business.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 3, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 2, 2010
In the marketing world a cross-sell is an attempt to sell a customer an additional product, related to a product they’ve already expressed an interest in. You see this all the time on major online retail sites. If you click a book on Amazon you’ll see a section on the page that says ‘customers who bought this also bought…” If you click a jacket on the Express website you’ll see a column titled “may we suggest” with a list of products similar to the one you’re viewing.
Huge online retail sites like Amazon may use complicated formulas to decide what to display to customers. These sites may have millions of products and millions of sales records to comb through and rely on to make product recommendations.
For a smaller business like mine (or yours), it’s a less daunting task. For my own site, I set it up so that any time I add or edit a product, I have the option to select related products. Those selections are what produce the cross-sells for my website. So now my product pages look like this:
Monday I talked about how I added tabs to my product pages. One of the tabs was a listing of current coupon codes. Since my coupon codes require a certain dollar amount spent, having cross-sells right under those coupon codes is a great way to encourage customers to select a second item.
I also added a cross-sell section to my view cart page so customers can get product suggestions based on items they’re likely to purchase.
If your shopping cart has a built in cross-sell feature, why not try it out. If it does not, but you have access to your cart’s source code, you (or a programmer) may be able to build in a feature like this quite easily.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
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