Day 1 – Discover the 4 Critical Steps for Your E-commerce Business.
Today I want to give you a quick heads up on e-commerce and how you can get it right from now. Whether you are a Start-Up or an Existing e-commerce online trader, I know for sure you will be leaving money on the table!
Did you know …
Give or take, 97% of e-commerce websites make $0 profits in their first 3 years online. Such is the steep learning curve and skill set required to build an e-commerce website that can dominate your product category, market or niche.
This shows you that e-commerce is tough. It can be an arduous journey working without a structured plan, process and strategy. Many people get physically and mentally trapped working in their business, when they should be working on their business, improving their website and marketing their website to greater profits.
The 3% that are making all of the money include the big boys like Amazon and eBay. But it’s not all about large companies with huge investors. Many small businesses are using a key ingredient for success. Experience!
Experience: Something you can’t buy, borrow or pretend to have.
Many online businesses fail and fail big. To many people, the online world is still new and a tough nut to crack, it takes a lot of testing to find out what works and what doesn’t. But this is a huge investment of time, energy and money. Many people don’t have this at their disposal.
But for less than $20, you can get access to bags of experience and see the inside of a profitable e-commerce business and ultimately what makes it tick …
E-commerce Get It Right! gives you a get-out-of-jail card. It details a structured time-tested formula in simple language. It works each time, every time, all of the time, without fail.
It’s powerful, but it looks as simple as this…
Step 1 – Get Started: Setting Up Your E-commerce Success Formula!
Step 2 – Get Sales: Build & Launch Your E-commerce Website
– Fast!
Step 3 – Get Hiring: How To Find A Kick-Ass-Web Designer!
Step 4 – Get More Sales: Marketing to Hordes of Hungry, Ready-to-Buy Ecommerce Customers!
This formula is simple, but it’s an in-depth multi-faceted plan, broken down for ease of use – with many key elements within each step – that you can use on your new or existing e-commerce website starting today.
It’s not only for Start-Ups. It’s for existing e-commerce websites too. If you are struggling you need this key information to give yourself a clear head, a new perspective and a new approach.
Day 2 – Start-Up Accelerated for Success in E-commerce!
Looking to start your first e-commerce website? If so, reading on is a must.
As you know E-commerce is a booming industry that is growing at a rapid rate and many e-commerce businesses are taking market share from traditional offline retail businesses.
Now is the time to take the opportunity of an accelerated start-up regardless of the economy, your age, background or experience. You’ll see how to quickly get accomplished in owning and running your e-commerce website with E-commerce Get It Right!
If you are looking forward to financial independence, moving towards your dream lifestyle, and achieving your career goals, then you have come to the right place.
E-commerce success comes down to a basic philosophy, a can-do attitude and a formula that when planned and executed equals sales, profit and wealth for you and your business.
E-commerce Foundation Principles:
Before you even start to build your new e-commerce website there are 4 simple, yet explosively powerful and essential foundational strategies for any e-commerce website that are critical to know – I call these the Foundational 4.
Here’s a quick snippet…
Principle #1) Traffic > Conversion > Relationships.
Traffic.
Your website needs traffic and lots of it. Without targeted traffic, your website will get lost in cyberspace gathering virtual cobwebs! Sure, over time, someone will stumble upon your website. Some visitors may even buy your product or service, or subscribe to your email newsletter list or blog; however, the numbers will be pitiful.
So, How Do We Get Traffic and Thousands of Visitors Per Month?
Key Strategy.
Because the majority of web searchers use the Google search engine (approx 80%), it has the market share majority with regards to web traffic. The sole purpose of the Google search engine is to send these web users to appropriate and matching sites.
This is where your site needs to be. Being in the top 10 is vital – anything under this and your traffic potential plummets. So build your website Google Friendly!
There are many other different ways to get hordes of ready-to-buy traffic to your new site such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and social media marketing. However, it makes sense to start
with strong foundations and a long-term free (organic) search engine traffic strategy in mind.
Within E-commerce Get It Right! we fully break down and analyze the four critical steps required to get explosive E-commerce Sales & Profits – within 30 Days of launch and beyond.
Day 3 – Transform Your Struggling E-commerce Website – Starting Today!
Today let’s look at the Pros and Cons of E-commerce…
We already know this insane Statistic.
Sad but true… 97% of e-commerce websites make $0 profits in their first 3 years online. Such is the steep learning curve and skill set required to build an e-commerce website that can ultimately dominate your product category, market or niche.
Have you heard the phrase ‘work on your business and not in your business’? Well, the 97% referred to above are doing the latter. Spending time with customers, and suppliers and handling the daily tasks, essentially fighting fires all day. They are stuck running the business.
How about implementing this philosophy instead?
‘Spend 20% of Your Time On Operations and 80% On Marketing’
Here’s why… Once trapped running your e-commerce website, it’s very hard to escape and spend time where you should be, marketing your business to greater profits. So aim to be part of the profitable 3% as quickly as possible, and your e-commerce sales and profits will skyrocket…
Having been part of the 97% from 2000-03 and subsequently part of the elite 3% from 2004 on doing sales in the multi-millions and growing in very competitive markets, I can give you the benefit of impartial views and experiences, and I have the ‘e-commerce stripes’ to help you.
So it’s not all doom and gloom. E-commerce can be exciting, fulfilling and very profitable if you plan from the ground up, grow consistently and get it right from now.
E-commerce Success Story.
Amazon.com is the most successful e-commerce website online. It’s also my all-time favorite e-commerce website! In 1995 Amazon exploded onto the e-commerce scene pioneering the way
in online retailing to date. By February 2010 Amazon had 124 million customers worldwide.
Many companies have tried to imitate but very few can replicate such massive success. Amazon’s web team fully understands its web customers, and why they buy from its website.
Using Personalization to Maximize Sales.
Amazon takes marketing to the next level whereas most websites simply do not. The people at Amazon analyze user data and utilize this to build, design, personalize and structure their website accordingly, to answer their customers’ questions, fears and frustrations and match the wants and desires of their customers exactly. They introduced and pioneered the product ‘Recommendation Engines and Systems’.
This essentially means once you have user data you can target and match your products to your ideal and typical customers’ buying interests, behaviors and personality. This results in them SPENDing like crazy with you.
With E-commerce Get It Right! you’ll get an inside look at personalization and how you can target your products, website and emails to your ideal customers’ specific wants and needs.
You’ll get the ammunition to get your website live, learn as you grow, market aggressively, keep testing and refining conversions using actual user data and sell on the back end!
Day 4 – The Power of E-commerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization)!
SEO is art. SEO is science. SEO is essential.
If you learn the key to Search Engine Optimisation commonly known as (SEO) you will unlock floods of hungry ready-to-buy traffic (visitors) to your website!
So what is SEO and why exactly is it considered an art?
Over 80% of user searches online are via the Google search engine. If your website is NOT in the top 5-10 results you may as well quit right now – shut your website down because nobody can find you. Essentially your site sucks!
The reality is that most websites are impossible to find and all because the website owner (that’s you) or your website designer who built it, does not understand what makes Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google tick.
The internet today is as competitive as ever with literally thousands of websites coming online every single day of the year – these websites are your competitors, they are taking your sales!
To be found online and get customers landing on your site in their masses, you need to be on the first page of the Google search results listings for your given keywords and key phrases. Good, solid white hat (in line with Google recommended practices) SEO is the best way to achieve this effectively, rapidly and for long-term dominance of your product, market or niche!
Traffic. Traffic. Traffic.
No Traffic = No sales. So what exactly is web traffic?
Simplified, web traffic is visitors to your website. Without this, you will not sell your product, your service or your brand. The key is about generating multiple ways or methods of traffic that are efficient and effective but not just one, they all must work synergistically. This is an accumulative effect.
The more traffic from the sources, the better. It’s vital to get your message to as many people as possible.
Traffic must be generated via search engines and blogs, communities, directories, forums, PR sites, affiliate sites, review sites, plus many more sources.
Generating masses of high-quality traffic is no secret – but it is an art – it’s hard work, a formula and ultimately requires experience. Search Engine Optimisation is not for the faint-hearted, part-timer or inexperienced.
So how do you go from inexperienced newbie to experienced E-commerce SEO pro?
You learn from the experience in a simple-to-use method with a proven formula…
E-commerce Get It Right! will give you a fast track from SEO novice to E-commerce SEO Expert within about 30 minutes. The secret code is detailed in simple-to-follow steps.
Day 5 – Learn How to Dominate Your Product Category, Market or Niche. FAST!
Today we’re going to discuss taking control of your e-commerce marketplace and how you can become the leader and dominate. Ultimately generating bigger profits!
You must learn to shout the loudest and be heard above your competitors in your specific product category. I don’t mean aggressively but in an assertive way that will fill your customers with ‘buying’ confidence.
However, there is one important point: Shout loud only if your marketing message is ethical and professional.
If you plan to start an e-commerce website shortly or if you already sell online with an existing e-commerce store, the question you need to ask is: are you number one in your market, are you the top dog that everyone looks to for their product needs?
Thought not! So with that said let’s look at what you need to do, to become number one in your product category, market or niche.
Let me ask you 3 Simple Questions:
1) When you think of a Search Engine, who do you think of? Probably Google!
2) When you think of buying online? I bet it’s Amazon and eBay!
3) When you think of social media sites? Facebook & Twitter no doubt!
So what does this tell us? Essentially you need to be the dominant force so that anyone looking for the product you sell, thinks of you and your website.
Controlling Your Marketplace:
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, his idea was to create a space without rules and regulations that would be equal for everyone including e-commerce entrepreneurs. However, the opposite is happening and those with the biggest resources or category dominance are shouting the loudest and consequently making the most money.
‘Your Customers Want What You Are Offering, So Do Everything You Can to Give It to Them… Before Your Competitors Do!’
So the ball is in your court, go-pro and learn all you need to know about this key strategy or lose sales. This key strategy is one of my Foundational 4!
These four must-know, must-use principles are detailed in the section ‘Foundation Principles – The 4 Foundational Principles for e-commerce success!’ in my new book, released and hot off the press – E-commerce Get It Right!
And you can get E-commerce Get It Right! in paperback on Amazon or a copy for your Kindle in the Kindle store or for your iPad in the iBookstore. Also available from B&N, Google Play or Kobo.
Day 6 – E-commerce Multi-Channel Retailing for Double, Triple or Quadruple Sales!
Today let’s talk about offline versus online retailing.
Do you currently have an offline store and are eager to sell your products online? Are you planning to sell both online and offline? This is multi-channel retailing.
E-commerce (selling online) accounts for approximately 30%-40% of all retail sales worldwide and is growing month on month. This demonstrates that mixing the two sales channels can be explosive when working in synergy; especially when you run marketing strategies such as ‘Buy Online, Collect-in-Store’.
The advantage of an online business is that you can sell a complete selection of products, with no limits on space. A bookstore can only hold so many books, but online you can display and sell the entire range of book titles the world over, should you wish.
An online business typically has highly automated and more efficient software and systems. Online marketing is highly targeted and ultimately e-commerce overhead costs are lower. On the flip side, if not managed well e-commerce design, operational and marketing costs can sky-rocket and sink your business.
E-commerce websites do not have the advantage of a typical store-front with passing trade (footfall), so you cannot be passive and wait for customers to come to you, as many offline retailers do.
However, just like an offline business, a website needs traffic (customers), and conversions (sales) and you must build a relationship by communicating with your customers to offer them valuable information and products on the back end (after the sale is made.
If you already have an offline business, bolting on an e-commerce business could be the way to double, triple or even quadruple your profits and reach customers in parts of the world you never knew existed.
However, an analysis of the pros and cons must be completed. If approached without planning or checking the numbers it may just add unnecessary costs, which ultimately reduce your net profits.
When trading through multi-channels there are several elements to consider in preparation for hiring a web designer, hiring employees and building your website.
Here are a few elements to consider to get you started…
– What overall budget are you allocating to the initial set-up of your website? Have you compared this with existing and similar live websites, ensuring it is a realistic figure to compete with them? Will you get a good Return On Investment?
– Are you planning to offer the same, selected or additional products on your e-commerce site compared to your offline store?
– Will you be synchronizing your online and offline prices between your website and offline systems at all times, including sale periods?
– Will you be offering a Buy Online, Collect-in-Store service?
– Have you budgeted for all online and offline running costs and how will you measure the profitability of the site against that of your offline channel?
This is just a small sample taken from over 10 years ecommerce and multi-channel retailing experience all detailed in a simplified way in E-commerce Get It Right!
Day 7 – Are You Back-Ending Your E-commerce Customers?
No, the subject is not a joke! I mean, are you hitting your customers on the back end?
I’ll explain…
The majority of e-commerce website owners – do not know how, or just cannot be bothered to contact their customers, once they have bought a product from them. Big Mistake!
Back-end strategies are marketing methods for generating sales of additional products to an existing customer database or email list. Back-end marketing is critically important for long-term business growth and the overall success of an e-commerce sales and marketing strategy online.
Back-end marketing is very inexpensive when compared to front-end (acquisition) marketing as the people you are marketing to are already your customers and so you already have their contact details. The largest investment of money was made in acquiring that customer on the front end (the initial sale).
A key advantage to back-end marketing is that your response rates and conversions (sales) will be much higher because your customers already know, respect and trust you.
Despite the benefits of back-end marketing – low cost, higher conversions and higher profits – it’s the most underused and even ignored form of marketing strategy.
Learn how to Back-End your customers within the next 5 minutes with my new book: E-commerce Get It Right!
Download the ebook now, loaded with 10 years ecommerce experience time test strategies and practical tips.
Day 8 – Explosive E-commerce Conversion Techniques!
Let’s get straight into the lowest investment, yet most effective way of increasing sales.
Simplified, Conversions = Sales!
Once you get traffic (visitors) to your website, you have to do something with them. Are they taking action? Are you converting them, monetizing them, getting them to subscribe to your email list or selling them your products?
What is your Call to Action or Most Wanted Response? Let’s be clear – with an e-commerce website, you want the sale! As a minimum, you need to capture your visitor’s email addresses, get them to subscribe to your Blog RSS feed or have them click your Google Adsense advert when they leave your site – this is a ‘monetized’ exit click.
Hot Tip: Google Adsense is advertising that you can put on your site to make you money when visitors click it.
Average conversion rates in e-commerce suck. Approximately 0.7 out of every 100 visitors will buy your product.
Your website must have clear text, images, navigation, a clean design and a simple call to action (“add to cart/add to shopping basket”). Visitors must easily understand what you want them to do. If not, forget it – just one ‘CLICK’ and they are gone to your competitors!
So what strategy should you implement on your e-commerce website to turbo-charge conversions?
A clean, simple yet professional site design, based on a fast, functional and familiar layout. Build your navigation and structure with clear instructions and content. These are the things that will help increase your conversion rate – anywhere from 1% to 4% overnight!
Do the math – if you’ve been selling one product per day at $100, then overnight after making some subtle design, navigational and conversion changes on your website you could increase this to $400, without spending a cent more on off-site marketing. This equals – Easy Money.
With your conversion strategy, you need to take your site visitors by hand from site entry to exit (after a sale) in as few steps as possible and as fast as possible, with the least resistance possible.
Resistance can come from many areas such as poor design, poor content and poor navigation, in addition to poor product descriptions and common issues of poor trust and negative security.
Many other areas of resistance can severely hurt your sales, including your checkout process and sales funnel. I detail these in-depth and the ways to fix them in E-commerce Get It Right!
Day 9 – E-commerce Success or E-commerce Failure? It All Starts With Design!
Today let’s talk ecommerce design.
Before you even think about getting your new e-commerce website designed, or your existing website re-designed, consider this …
Web Designers Are Not Created Equal. Here is what I mean.
Having the core ability to design for maximum conversions (sales), is pretty rare. Design is innate, it’s something you have or something you don’t, it’s that simple. I’ll prove this point.
How many websites do you classify as exceptional with nice design and good usability, the website just works and so you return to the site time and time again, to buy your products.
1 website, maybe 2, 3 max?
Why is it that most e-commerce sites struggle from day one?
Well, it all starts with the design. Design is a subconscious process for your visitor and prospect (your potential customer).
Design is the first visual element that new and existing customers notice on your website when they enter. As these processes are subconscious – and adding to the challenge, you only have approx 5-7 seconds to capture your visitor’s attention – your design has to be right or your visitor will leave, also known as bounce.
Bounce Rate is an online measurement that expresses the percentage of visitors who only see a single page on your website before leaving.
Good design means visitors will ‘stick’ and stay on your website and this is the difference between long-term success and imminent failure.
This all starts with hiring the right web designer for your project needs. Most designers simply do not have the innate ability to design great websites, which is why so many websites die a slow death in cyberspace.
It’s critical to ask some key questions before hiring anyone to work on your website or e-commerce business.
With my new book E-commerce Get It Right! you’ll save years of frustration and hassle. Inside you’ll quickly learn how to hire a professional, reliable and affordable web designer or web developer. It’s all covered in Step 3.
I speak from experience. Over 5 years I hired over 150 outsourcers (including designers and developers) and I can categorically tell you that very few have the real-world skills that cut it, in high-level e-commerce web design.
Hiring a kick-ass web designer is essential to your e-commerce success. Get it wrong and your site will bomb!
Everything from great communication, good interpretation of your ideas, and the ability to work with you and for your benefit as opposed to your designer working simply to bolster their portfolio with scant regard for your online success. All these are critical traits to find in a web designer.
I guarantee the information within E-commerce Get It Right! will save you months if not years of time, energy and money.
Learn how to hire a great designer, the first time, every time. Grab your copy of E-commerce Get It Right! at www.ecommercegetitright.com
Day 10 – Accelerate Your E-commerce Traffic for Bigger Sales & Profits!
Today let’s talk traffic.
If you are just starting on your first e-commerce website project, take my advice – it’s best to hit the ground running by using long-term mass-traffic-generating techniques.
If you have an existing e-commerce site you will want more traffic to get more sales, to ultimately make more profits.
Traffic simply means visitors to your website. Low traffic or traffic that is not targeted to your products, will result in zero or poor sales. This is one of the main reasons that so many e-commerce websites fail.
Your website needs visitors. Without targeted traffic, your site will get lost in cyberspace gathering virtual cobwebs!
Don’t leave it to chance like the majority of website owners. Get assertive and on the front foot and invest in your traffic generation from today.
As the majority of web searchers use the Google search engine (approx 80%), it has the majority market share in web traffic. This is where you need to focus your traffic strategy as well engineered e-commerce sites are SEO machines.
The sole purpose of the Google search engine is to send targeted web users to appropriate and matching websites, your website. This is where your site needs to be. Top 10 is critical – anything under this and your traffic potential plummets.
So build your website Google Friendly – Give it some Google Love!
All this starts by focusing your content on the terms that your potential customers type into the search engines. The sad fact is, that many websites fail to match their site content with the search terms that their prospects search for in Google. This is a crucial component to driving lots of free organic – also known as natural – search engine traffic to your website. It all starts with detailed keyword research.
When writing content for your website, especially on your home page, category and product pages, you need to target these specific keywords and key phrases – which your prospect will type in the Google search box – to get this traffic onto your website.
There are of course many other different ways to get hordes of ready-to-buy traffic to your new site such as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, social media marketing, blogs, videos, etc. However, it makes sense to start with solid foundations and a long-term free and organic search engine traffic strategy in mind.
In E-commerce Get It Right! I take you by the hand and detail how to maximize your web traffic generation, covering all of the key marketing strategies required to get hungry ready-to-buy traffic onto your e-commerce website.
