Twitter has over 200 million active users creating over 400 million Tweets per day. That’s a lot of people and a lot of tweets.

For business owners, Twitter has become an important tool for distributing content, providing support to existing customers and proactively reaching out to potential customers.

To make its platform more attractive to businesses and brands, In 2012 Twitter began slowly rolling out its paid ads platform, however it was only made available to certain partners on an invite-only basis. This past April that all changed when Twitter announced that they would be making Twitter Ads available to all users in the U.S.

That means no matter how big or small your business is, and no matter how many followers you have, you can now start leveraging Twitter's paid service to amplify your Twitter presence, gain new followers, create more awareness about your business and drive more traffic to your website.

Get $50 in Free Twitter Ads from Shopify

We are pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Twitter to offer all U.S. based Shopify stores a free $50 Twitter Ads credit.

This is a great opportunity for merchants to get started testing some paid tweets and get familiar with the Twitter Ads platform. 

Claim Twitter Ads Credit Now

Getting Started With Twitter Ads

Even if you don't use Shopify, you can still get started using Twitter ads by heading over to the regular sign up page and completing the on-boarding process.

Once you've created your account and entered your billing information, you're ready to create your first campaign. When you click the 'Create Campaign' button, you will asked whether you want to promote your account or promote your tweets.

Note: At the moment, there are actually two Twitter advertising dashboards available on the self-service platform, Basic and Advanced. There is seemingly no difference in cost or how ads perform, but the basic dashboard limits you to a single target audience that will be applied to every promoted tweet or your promoted account. The advanced dashboard lets you target several audiences. All screenshots below are from the Advanced dashboard.

Promoted Tweets vs Promoted Account

Promoted Tweets: These will probably work best to extend your reach on Twitter and drive immediate traffic to your products, blog, or campaign landing page. That's because they (should) put a relevant message in front of users that don't currently follow you but are interested in the subject matter of your tweet.

When promoting a tweet you can choose to promote any of your existing tweets or create a new tweet to promote.

If you choose to create a new tweet, you also have the option to set it up as a Standard Tweet which is delivered immediately to all of your followers, or as a Promoted-only Tweet which is not delivered to your followers, suppressed from your profile and only delivered as part of a Promoted Tweet campaign.

To enable this option, make sure you select the Promoted-only 'eye' icon when composing a new tweet.

Once created, a tweet can be selected, bid on, and deployed at any point in the future.

The promoted tweet will appear at the top of related search results pages and on home timelines for users that might be interested in the promoted tweet's content.

The important thing to remember is that a promoted tweet should provide a relevant message that links to a landing page intended to get your prospect to take some form of action. That action could be buying a product or getting your prospect to enter their email so you can start a relationship and send future offers to them.

Promoted Accounts: These on the other hand are meant to start a relationship on Twitter itself rather than attempting to direct traffic elsewhere. This is more of a long term play that will help you build trust and a following over time that gets people seeing more of your tweets on a regular basis.

A promoted account will show up in the 'Who to Follow' widget positioned at the left side of the Twitter interface on the 'Home' and 'Connect' tabs. The promoted account will also show up in some search results and on a user's profile page in the 'Similar to You' widget.

It may be helpful to think of promoted tweets as being most similar to Google AdWords. Both are pay-per-click advertising intended to drive traffic. Promoted accounts might be thought of as the search engine optimization (SEO) done to improve results on Google or Bing. While you're still going to pay for each follow with a promoted account, the point is to increase the size of the audience that sees your posts naturally.

Targeting Strategies

The Twitter advertising self-service platform will allow you to target users by keywords, interest or through your profile.

In addition to these parameters, you can also target further by location, device and operating system, gender, interests or username.

When entering exact match key phrases that you want to target, it's important to keep in mind that in Google searches people tend to leave out small "connector words" like "a" and "the" but on Twitter people use conversational language so you may need to include these words in order to get an exact match.

In addition, Twitter will only deliver promoted accounts or tweets to users that it believes will be interested in your content. So selecting "fishing" as an interest does not necessarily mean that your promoted tweets or account will be shown to every Twitter user interested in fishing, but rather those interested in fishing that Twitter believes will also be interested in you.

An Auction Model

Twitter ads, like many other popular forms of online advertising, are based on an auction model, meaning that advertisers bid on their ads and the most profitable — not necessarily the highest bid — ads are likely to receive the greatest number of impressions.

Twitter has said that it will not increase ad frequency, which might make the platform pretty competitive. For many small online retailers, this competition may mean that it makes sense to get an early start on Twitter.

Almost all pay-for-performance advertising requires a bit of experimentation. And it is best to experiment when there is less competition driving up bids.

Have you experimented with Twitter Ads yet? Do you ever click on promoted tweets?

This is a guest post by Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com. 

Search engines and customers are smarter and savvier than ever before at sniffing out low-quality and spammy marketing techniques. Yet many companies still use antiquated marketing methods that are ineffective at best and downright dangerous at worst.  

Below are three of the worst marketing techniques for today's online environment – and what you should be doing instead.

1. Blog Commenting

This strategy involves leaving generic comments on blog posts that include a link to the site you're trying to market. It can be done manually but is more often generated by software that makes it possible to automatically spam the crap out sites and leave comments on thousands of blogs quickly.

Blog commenting is perhaps the most despicable, annoying and lowest form of online marketing in existence, as anyone with a WordPress site can attest. Worse, it's not even effective! Even IF a spammy comment is published, 99% of links posted in blog comments don't provide any kind of SEO benefit. Due to the special “no follow” tag added to links by most blogging platforms, Google and other search engines ignore them.

What to Do Instead:

Blog commeting isn't a good technique for building SEO authority but it can be a great way to generate highly targeted traffic to your website. Here's what to do:

1. Find an article on a subject you know very well.
2. Leave an in-depth, informative comment that adds to the conversation.
3. Include a very applicable link at the END of the comment. 

People reading your comment have absolutely no reason to want to visit your website, so you need to give them one. Writing a thoughtful, in-depth comment showcases your expertise and builds trust with someone scanning through the piece.

And if you include an on-topic link after your top-notch comment, a large number of people will click through to your site. The mistake most people make is putting their link at the top of their comment before they've established any credibility – and people skip right over it.

This technique works best on sites that are highly trafficked. The picture below illustrates a comment I left on a Hacker News thread that resulted in more than 500 people visiting my blog:

2. Article Marketing/Spinning

Traditional article marketing usually consists of creating dozens of slightly different versions of an article and then blasting them across the web using a paid distribution service. If most veteran online marketers are honest, they'll admit to having done it in some form in the past, myself included. 

But it's a really poor choice for marketing today. Search engines like Google are getting really good at filtering out and discounting duplicate content online, and that's exactly what a thinly spun mass distributed article is. It's also really spammy, and Google has been cracking down heavily on low-quality techniques and backlink profiles with algorithm updates like Penguin. Even if this technique works for a short time to improve your rankings, there's a good chance you'll be penalized in the future.

What to Do Instead:

Instead of using a paid service to shoot out hundreds of copies of a generic article, approach individual sites one at a time and offer to write a unique piece specifically for their visitors. You can then include a few tasteful and applicable backlinks to your site in the piece.

This approach takes much more time but is a much better long-term approach. You'll be able to get your articles posted on higher-quality websites, which will pass more authority (i.e., SEO power) back to your own site. Because you're specifically targeting the sites, you'll also be more likely to receive highly qualified direct traffic to your business. And, of course, you won't have to worry about Google penalties in the future.

For more information on how to use this technique, check out these resources:

• The Stalker's Guide to Guest Posting
• The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Guest Blogging
• KISSMetrics Guide to Guest Blogging

Blindly Outsourcing Your SEO and Marketing

Marketing an ecommerce store well takes a tremendous amount of work, so it's understandable that people often consider outsourcing the process. But unfortunately many people will simply hire the cheapest person on oDesk who claims to be a marketing or SEO “expert,” which is a recipe for disaster. 

Low-quality marketing techniques like the ones we've discussed can leave a messy backlink and marketing profile that can permanently hurt your rankings, be extremely difficult to clean up and damage any legitimate marketing efforts you've already done.  

What to Do Instead:

If you're new to online marketing and are bootstrapping your first ecommerce business, I highly recommend that you do as much of the marketing and SEO work yourself as possible. Why?

1. Learning to market is – hands down – the most valuable skill you can develop in business.  
2. You'll need to know the ins and outs of marketing and SEO if you want to competently manage others doing it in the future.
3. It will save you money that you can pour back into your business.
4. You'll do a better job than 99% of low-end marketing freelancers.
5. You'll know exactly what's going on and can avoid any dangerous or penalty-causing techniques.

If you do decide to hire someone else to market your business, you'll want to vet and manage them closely. I learned this lesson firsthand when I failed to properly manage an SEO firm I'd hired.

Because I'd worked with the company before, I assumed things were being run well and I failed to oversee their work. Only after my site was heavily penalized by Google's Penguin update did I realize that the process hadn't been managed well, and that they'd used some unsavory techniques. Ultimately, it was my fault because I abdicated responsibility and didn't check in on their work.

When outsourcing your SEO or marketing, make sure you vet candidates well. Check references, look at their past work and talk with them about how they'd structure a campaign. And once work starts, make sure you're checking in on a regular basis and monitoring progress. Because in the end, it's your business – not theirs – on the line.

For more information, see this video by SEO guru Rand Fishkin on how to choose a good SEO company.  

You Pay Now … or Later.

Marketing your ecommerce business online can be a tremendous amount of work. You can either put in the investment to create a quality, value-adding marketing campaign now OR pay the price later when  shady techniques permanently penalize your site's reputation or rankings.

Focus on quality marketing tactics despite the additional work and you won't regret it in the long run.

By Andrew Youderian, an eCommerce entrepreneur who's passionate about marketing, SEO and traffic generation. His blog, eCommerceFuel.com, is dedicated to helping individuals and small organizations build thriving online stores. For more information, check out his well-reviewed free guide to running an ecommerce business.

Right now your ecommerce store could have 5 deadly sales-killers you didn't even know existed. Fortunately, there's a lot of literature in the UX and eye-tracking space, and today you're going to get these insightful studies served up in laymen's terms, allowing you to incorporate their findings into your site's design and interface.

You'll see how seemingly minor aspects of your website can be huge determinants of how well your business performs. Let's get into the research by diving in to problem #1 with your online store:

1. No Emphasis on Headlines

A lot of people are guilty of this. I think many of them feel headlines are too "salesy" and won't have the intended effect. According to the data in the Eyetrack III study, headlines are the most viewed thing on any page, even over flashy images. Here are some interesting stats on the power of headlines:

• Headlines draw people’s attention almost immediately, and outperformed pictures by a large margin.
• People only scan the first couple of words in a headline before they make their descision to leave or stay.
• Your headline has approximately ~1 second to capture a reader’s attention before being ignored.

Why this is important: You're killing your sales if the major pages on your site don't place emphasis on the headline telling customers exactly what the page is about. This goes across the board, starting first and foremost with your homepage:

You need to place clear and concise headlines on other critical pages as well - about page, FAQ, contact us, etc. should all include a powerful headline to get your message broadcast clearly. 

Check out this example from Help Scout's about page:

Potential customers should immediately be confronted with the point of the page. You have very little time before you lose their interest and their sale, so get to the point quick with a big headline.

2. A Slow Loading Site

You've likely heard this one before — a slow website isn't good for sales because people are impatient. But do you really know how far this effect goes? Much of the discussion out there on site speed is ancedotal, but today you're going to get some research that shows shocking truth about how important site speed really is. According to this analysis conducted by Microsoft's Bing team, page speed is a huge factor in a number of important statistics:

...a less than 2-second increase of delays in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by -3.8%, lost revenue per user of -4.3% and a reduced clicks by -4.3%.

Users really are impatient, and your punishment for a slow-loading website won't be complaints in your inbox, it will be lost sales from people who decided what you were selling wasn't worth the wait.

If you also take into consider that Google ranks pages based on their speed, what you are left with is a very clear warning that you need to have a seriously fast website if you wish for you business to grow into the big leagues. The good news for ecommerce stores using a hosted solution like Shopify is that speed is taken care of, and your online store will likely be very fast.

3. Illegible Typography & Spacing

This one might seem nit-picky but it's definitely not — great typography is a huge part of a fluid user experience, and if yours isn't set correctly, you're going to be losing customers. According to this study on readability, typography is one of the biggest influences in reading comprehension when it comes to text on the web. The study revealed how small margins managed to help people read faster, but that it greatly reduced their comprehension of the text on the page:

But the problems don't end there. Many other studies have shown that people have about as much patience for poor typography as they do a slow-loading site. If they don't like the way your content reads, they won't let you know about it, they're just going to leave. I'm no master of typography, but my buddy Rafal Tomal, lead designer of Copyblogger Media, certainly is, and he had the following three thoughts on improving typography:

A. Improve Margins 

Directly relating to the first study, Rafal recommends improving margins and line height on every page with text, adding white space both between lines as well as around.

B. Improve Contrast 

While grey-on-grey might look fancy, it's a big turnoff for your customers. So is any other color combination that's hard to read on page. The easiest colors to read? Good old fashion black text on a white background — it may not be original, but it gets results.

C. More Line Breaks 

Once again, Rafal's recommendation aligns with the research (on headlines), as he encourages webmasters and designers to include more line breaks and a better use of headings and sub-headings to make the content more approachable. 

All images from Rafal's blog.

4. Not Designing Based on Reading Patterns

The way we read dictates much of how we browse a website, because more often than not a majority of a website is going to consist of written content. You might have seen the eye-tracking study that revealed our tendency to browse in an F-pattern:

It's been found to be true across all sorts of content pages, from blog posts to search engine results, we tend to favor browsing in an F-pattern that leans heavily to the left side of the screen. This is largely due to our reading patterns, and the results don't end there. According to a separate study many web users spend a majority of their attention on the left side of a web page — as much as 69% of the time:

If your site has an interface that customers will regularly be interacting with, this is an important study to keep in the back of your mind when you're split-testing different elements of your site. Important note: the study found that the opposite was true for those users who read in a language where the text is consumed from right-to-left. This shows that we truly seem to browse pages based on reading patterns, but also brings up the point that you need to factor your audience into account when analyzing any of these studies.

5. Confusing Navigation

Navigation is one of those things you must get right, as it's likely the next place a user will look after they view your headline. Some companies, however, just can't seem to get navigation right, and they end up putting them in the wrong place, making them too generic to figure out, or include far too many options. Example:

According to this test involving site design, over 70% of users went for a link to click rather than using search. That coincides with another study that shows that users usually only use search when they can't find what they're looking for, meaning that you shouldn't rely on search as a crutch.

Make sure that the navigation on your site is in an area that people expect it to be, is obvious and clear in communicating where each links goes, and that contains enough links to navigate to the important parts of your site but that doesn't go overboard.

What did you think of these studies? Let us know in the comments below!

By: Gregory Ciotti, a marketing strategist at Help Scout, the invisible email support software for entreprenurs. 

Online shoppers love going on Facebook to contact merchants about orders, or even complain about a bad experience.

But having a complaint appear on a Facebook page for all of the world to see can be pretty scary for ecommere store owners. The good news is there's a huge upside - responding and resolving the issue properly and quickly can create loyal fans who trust that you will take care of any problems that arise.

Here are 4 examples of excellent customer service on Facebook. Adopt these smart strategies to your own social media customer service plan and you'll turn complainers into brand champions. 

1. Speed is of the Essence 

Shoppers communicate via Facebook because they want fast service. They took their problem, question, or concern to Facebook because it's easy, but also because they want to apply some public pressure to get the merchant to reply.

Consider the case of Golden Rivet, an online store selling military style pin-up art and t-shirts. Recently, the company received a question about an order on its Facebook page.

Check out the timing here - the customer sent the initial question at 12:50pm.

"Hey mate, ordered a T shirt a few weeks back when the 7 guys were being held. Do you have any estimation on when it might get here? I know you changed the design when it went to 5 and were pretty busy with things."

A Golden Rivet representative responded in eight minutes, logging a post at 12:58pm. An email and a couple more posts followed, and the customer's concern was completely resolved by 1:10pm. This is social media customer service at it's best. Respond quickly to customers on social media sites.

2. Pay Attention & Address Their Concern

Perhaps the most basic concept in good customer service is listening. Many customers simply want to know that they're being heard. So when a shopper posts something on your Facebook wall, take the time to understand what has been written.

Farm and ranch retailer, D&B Supply had a customer on its Facebook page concerned about a recall. 

The D&B Supply representative looked into the issue immediately and provided an answer that directly responded to Mary's inquiry all within 20 minutes. D&B didn't put a spin on their response - they found a thorough answer and quickly responded in a direct fashion.

Show customers that you care by paying attention, and addressing their concern directly.

3. Accept Responsibility

Facebook customer service, like all good customer service, is about taking care of needs. If there has been a problem, it's important for the merchant to take responsibility. Simply saying "sorry" is often all that is needed.

Recently, a customer complained on the Pottery Barn's Facebook page about the store's automated email system. 

Apparently, this shopper had first sent an email to Pottery Barn, then became further upset when the response wasn't personal. On Facebook, Pottery Barn quickly accepted responsibility, said sorry, and began working to resolve the issue.

4. Be Generous

One goal of Facebook customer service is to demonstrate that your store is easy to work with and will do what it can to help answer questions, address concerns, or resolve problems. To achieve this goal you need to resolve the problem generously.

This can mean upgrading shipping when a package is behind schedule, offering a coupon or gift card to compensate a shoppers, or even offer alternatives to out of stock or back ordered items. The key is that you need to do something to improve the shoppers experience.

Check out this example from Zappos.

Zappos, which is known for its customer service, often offers $50 off coupons as a way to generously fix their mistakes. 

If you screw up, take ownership of your mistake and be generous while making things better. 

Conclusion

If one of your customers makes a complaint on your Facebook page, act quick, make sure you fully understand their complaint, accept responsibility when it's your fault, and be generous when you solve their problem. 

Also check out some tips on using Twitter as a customer service platform. 

By Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com.

Marketing is undoubtedly one of the most crucial success factors for new online businesses and should be a primary emphasis early on. But if you only focus on traditional traffic generation strategies like link building you're missing out on lots of potential customers.

The following strategies can easily help you increase your website's traffic - even double it - without having to do an ounce of marketing.  Here's how:

1. Add Long-Tail Variations to Your Pages

It's easy to focus on short, high-volume terms because they are easier to identify and research.  But in reality, 80% to 90% of the traffic you're likely to receive will be from "long-tail" queries with three, four or five-plus words.

Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and usually convert at a much higher rate than shorter, more generic terms.  Here's how you can maximize your exposure to long-tail variations and increase your traffic: 

Identify Long-Tail Modifiers

Let's pretend we sell the Logitech C310 webcam and wanted to optimize our page to rank for as many searches as possible.  We'd visit our old friend the Google Keyword Tool and make note of all the long-tail variations. We'd also want to look at the bottom of the search results where Google lists related searches. The related searches for "Logitech C310" look like this:

Work these Modifiers into Your Page Copy

Because our Logitech C310 page is (hopefully) somewhat optimized for the term "Logitech C310", we don't need to insert each long-tail search phrase verbatim into the page. Instead, we want to work the unique variations at the end of "Logitech C310" into our copy to allow the possibility that we can rank for it.

Revisiting the related searches from above, we'd want to make sure the words boxed in red below appeared on our page:

We'd want to ensure our page included the words "Skype" and "Mac", as well as discussed the differences between the C525 model using the "vs c525" phrase.  With all of these newly included modifiers incorporated into the copy, our page has the potential to rank for a wider range of queries. 

Not all of the modifiers we uncovered will be applicable. Branded keywords - like "best buy" above - won't be useful, and we would likely have a number of modifiers already incorporated. However, more often than not, we'll uncover a handful of long-tail gems to help increase potential ranking opportunities and ultimately boost our traffic.

2. Stand Out with Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are search listings that include information regarding a product's price, availability and review count.  They're useful for learning more about the particular product and/or site at a glance from the search results page without having to visit it.

Rich snippets are incredibly powerful because they can increase the number of people that click on your page by up to 30%.  That's a huge boost for something that can usually be implemented relatively painlessly! Compare that to increasing your marketing or ad-spending budget by 30% and you'll see why it's so powerful.

The process for setting up or enabling rich snippets will vary based on your platform, so you may need to do some research to get it implemented. Once you think everything is setup properly, you can use Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool to make sure there won't be any display problems. Rich snippets can take some time to appear in the search listings, so don't worry if you don't see them right away. 

Authorship and Video Thumbnails 

Product-based rich snippets will likely be the most applicable for many merchants, but there's also two other types of enhanced listings to know about: Google Authorship and video thumbnails.

With authorship markup you can tell Google which content you've written and your picture will appear alongside the listing for that piece. Just like the name implies, video thumbnails are a thumbnails of a page's embedded video that appears alongside a page listing. Just like product-based rich snippets, both of these have also proven to dramatically increase the click through rate of the associated pages. 

When should you use each type of enhanced markup? That will vary based on your content, products and goals.  Google Authorship markup could be a great choice for enhancing a store's blog posts in the search results, while video thumbnails could potentially help video-rich educational pages stand out.

We're now even seeing multiple mark-up mediums combined in one listing, as seen below:

Setting up Google Authorship is fairly simple assuming you have a Google Plus profile. For more information, see these guides by KISSMetrics and 312 Digital.

To get video thumbnails to appear, you'll need to create a video sitemap for Google. You can do this manually via your Webmaster Tools account, and some video hosting services like Wistia (I love these guys!) will do it automatically for you. For more details on video SEO and thumbnails, see this video from Wistia.

3. Write Titles and Descriptions People Can't Resist 

The meta title and meta description are attributes that determine how your page appears in the search results - and they're immensely important. Write a compelling title and interesting description and you'll stand out to searches.   Alternatively, if your copy is boring and doesn't offer any compelling reason to click, you'll get much less traffic.

In the search results below, I've tried to make the homepage for my trolling motor store stand out by highlighting:

• That we focus exclusively on high-end trolling motors
• We offer free shipping
• We don't charge sales tax

Despite competing against some big competitors, I'd bet our listings receives a higher click-through rate than the other pages, especially given many of them aren't very appealing from a sales and copywriting perspective. 

When writing meta titles and descriptions, you need to approach think like you're writing an advertisement - because you are! Highlight your expertise, unique selling proposition, and why the customer will benefit shopping with you.

You also want to keep SEO and keyword optimization in mind, but don't go overboard. Include your primary keyword(s) at least once in the title and description, ensuring they flow naturally with your copy. But when in doubt, prioritize readability over SEO.

Revamping underwhelming titles and descriptions with compelling copy can have a massive and almost overnight impact on the traffic you receive.

4. Leverage Your Internal Links

Getting links from other sites is obviously an important and well-known technique. Far fewer people understand how much influence your own site's structure and internal links have over your rankings. Need to give a particular page a rankings boost? Linking to it from existing high authority pages on your domain can pass authority and help the target page to rank better.

Here's what you can do:

• Make a list of high-value target pages you'd like to rank better.
• Identify the pages on your website that currently have the most authority and "SEO juice."
• Add a link from your authority page(s) to your target page(s).
• Incorporate the link naturally on the authority page using anchor text related to the keyword you'd like the target page to rank for.

A site's homepage will usually be the most authoritative page on a domain, so it's an obvious choice for an authority page to link from. To find other internal authority pages, use Open Site Explorer to search for internal links, and then sort in descending order by Page Authority so the most authoritative internal pages rise to the top.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can do with internal linking.  For more information on internal linking see these articles from HubSpot and SEOMoz.

The Power Of Optimization

It could take years to double your traffic if you relied solely on increasing the number of backlinks your site had. Using the techniques discussed above, it's possible to drastically increase your traffic by making smart adjustments to your existing site - and in significantly less time.

What would you do with twice the number of customers?

Andrew Youderian is an eCommerce entrepreneur who blogs about his experiences running online stores at eCommerceFuel.com. If you enjoyed this piece, you'll love this rare behind-the-scenes look at his store's redesign  that increased sales by nearly 50%.

Life can be pretty intimidating for small ecommerce stores. There's a lot of tough competition out there. Sites like Amazon generate crazy money every day and have better brand recognition than you could ever dream of – how exactly can you compete with that?

Well the beauty of the Internet is that you can compete. You just need to know how to stand out from the crowd. 

The first step is to understand your weaknesses. We’ll use Amazon as our example, but this applies to any giant retailer who happens to be dominating a market you would like a share of. So what does Amazon have that you don’t? 

Authority

Basically, this is off-page SEO: links, brand mentions, social mentions... you name it, Amazon has it covered. They have been mentioned by massive sites that don’t even know you exist and they have millions upon millions of links, some are good some are bad. Basically, you’re not going to out rank Amazon just by brute force.

Reach

The other thing about sites like Amazon is that they sell everything. So some people will just go to Amazon.com without even searching for alternatives. As a result, Amazon can sell items without ever having to market them.

Price

If you don’t have a huge amount of buying power, it is going to be hard to compete on price. You probably wouldn’t want to anyway. Massive sites like these can cut their costs and keep margins slim, so if you want to compete solely on price, you probably won’t make a lot of money.

Short-Head Traffic

As a result of all that authority and brand awareness, Amazon has the juice to be able to rank for big, high-volume terms. Their category pages will often rank without them having to do a lot of SEO. For this reason, niche ecommerce sites often focus on long-tail traffic, where there is less traffic, but less competition.

Ok, so what can you do to compete with all of that? Plenty and it's not that difficult. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is batted around a lot at the moment, and it is certainly a powerful tool. And it doesn’t just apply to bloggers you know. Ecommerce sites can harness content marketing in some really powerful ways. But let’s start with the basics:

1. Blog Well & Blog Often

Basically, every ecommerce site, if nothing else, should have a blog. Blogging isn’t necessarily a way to generate traffic directly (although it certainly can do that) but it is a great way to build authority and credibility.

You shouldn’t just blog with the intention of churning out endless streams of low quality SEO content, you should blog with your readers in mind. This is the first step to adding value and setting yourself apart from Amazon – show your customers that you own your niche and you will gain their trust.

2. Link Out

There is a big myth in the world of SEO (perhaps more of an assumption) that linking to other sites is bad for SEO. The truth is that linking out to relevant sites isn’t going to cause you to lose rankings and it may actually help to improve them.

Don’t be afraid to link to other helpful sites. Remember the tip above – you are blogging for your readers. If it is helpful to do so, give them a link to a good resource. This alone will set you apart from most ecommerce sites and will show your customers that you care about helping them.

3. Make an Infographic

Your blog doesn’t have to be all words – images and visual items are helpful too - they make reading easier and more fun. So while you're blogging include some infographics and break up your content with visuals.

The best strategy depends on what you are selling but as an example you could include images or diagrams of your products being used. Show how they work and what they do. Don’t fill your blog with cheesy PR photos, fill it with inspiring and interesting imagery that your readers will enjoy viewing.

4. Interview Someone

Another great idea is publishing interviews. You probably already know some people in your industry but make the effort to network more and reach out to thought leaders. You don’t necessarily want to start at the top but try reaching out to people you like and ask whether they would mind answering some questions.

Most medium to high level bloggers/personalities will be flattered by the offer and getting your first interview may not be as hard as you expect. The interviewee may even link to your site once you post the interview!

Category Pages

Most ecommerce sites basically have category pages and product pages, both of which follow a fairly tired format, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

5. Create Awesome Category Pages

Why not make your category pages more interactive and fill them with content rather than just thumbnails and ‘more info’ buttons?

Example 1: Say we run a small store selling tools. One category might contain wrenches. Here is Amazon’s category page for such items, pretty dull right?

But instead, we could build a bespoke category page and make it fun for a user to browse. Maybe we could make the page look like a workshop setting, different tools would be in their relevant locations and by browsing around you might highlight a certain tool set & get a hover over message saying something like “Impact Wrenches: Ideal for car maintenance and machinery repair.” Shopify store DODOcase does an amazing job at this - everything looks and works great.

With a bit of imagination you could make your category pages more enjoyable to use and perhaps more helpful for anyone who is not really sure what tools they need.

6. Offer Free Help

To take our category page a bit further, we could also add some additional help. Not everything on your page has to be focused on selling you know. Why not also link to some relevant blog posts about how to select the right wrench for the job, how to maintain your wrenches or how to undo ceased bolts with minimal damage?

Adding information in place of upsell will build trust, add some vital content to your pages and add value for the customer. You can just use snippets from the posts themselves, but ideally you should use a customised, relevant explanation of each post so that you are also adding unique content to the page.

Products Pages

There is a lot you can do with a product page to make it a little more interesting. This is one of your biggest advantages as a smaller retailer, you can put in the time that Amazon can’t.

For this example let’s pick on this really expensive torque wrench: 

This is a valuable item so it’s certainly going to be worth some extra effort to sell it. How could we do a better job than Amazon?

7. Use High Quality & Unique Descriptions

The first thing I noticed about Amazon’s product page is that the description at the top of the page consists of three bullet points. But there is so much more that you could say about this tool – what it does, what it’s useful for, why it's a better option than a $20 wrench?

This post by Neil Patel explains how long content tends to rank better than shorter content. The biggest mistake you can make is using generic manufacturer descriptions rather than taking the time to craft thorough and informative descriptions. If the product warrants it, don’t be afraid to write 1,000 words or more about a product.

8. Use Rich Snippets

Another key aspect of product pages is including all of the relevant product data. This is particularly helpful if you want to target long-tail phrases, since people will often search for specific products, and when they do they are very likely to be ready to buy.

Including rich snippets (checkout schema.org for an introduction) allows you to include this data in a structured way that search engines can understand. In particular you can include things like price, model number, main photo, brand, description etc...

The best thing about structured data is that when used correctly your data may be shown in search results (even images can be shown). Needless to say, this can have a big impact on click through rates which boosts your traffic and leads to better rankings.

9. Allow User Generated Content

User generated content is something Amazon does very well. Many of their products have hundreds of reviews – this particular wrench has some great reviews and they're all pretty long. So it’s going to be hard to compete with them just by using user content, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add some UGC to your content mix.

As a smaller retailer one of your biggest assets is your customer base, so why not try sending out an email to new customers asking them to make a review? If you offer an incentive (such as a discount on their next order) you should get a pretty good response rate and lots of new reviews. This strategy can improve your repeat custom rate too, so it’s win-win! Yotpo is a popular Shopify app that allows merchants to easily offer product reviews on their ecommerce store. 

10. Make Product Videos

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you already know that product videos are a big deal. People like videos, they are easier than reading and you can use them to really show how a product looks and feels.

With our wrench example above, you could include a video showing how it adjusts, what settings it has, how to use it and maybe show it actually being used to tighten a bolt. With a bit of imagination, most products can be shown-off in a well shot video.

11. Connect Products To Blog Posts

Remember that your blog isn’t there to sell, it is there to add value. But there is a great way to do both at once. You could write a blog post showing how to complete a DIY task of some sort, maybe include a video too.

In that video you would use the tools that you sell and when mentioning each tool you could link back to the relevant product page. If you tag up your blog posts accordingly, you could also include a section on your product pages labelled “job tutorials using this tool.” This is a great way to add even more content to your product pages and really draw in the reader.

Link Building

For any new ecommerce website you need links. Links get you traffic and help with your SEO. Fortunately if you implement some of the strategies outlined above you will be creating content that actually deserves to rank.

There is no reason why an ecommerce shop can’t attract links naturally, but they won’t do so unless you work hard at creating link-worthy content. That said, there are also things you can do to get the ball rolling by building links manually.

12. Link To Products

In the wild, product pages don’t get linked to a whole lot, because let’s face it, why would anyone link to a product page? People like to link to resources and interesting things, and Google knows this.

Fortunately, your product pages are going to be awesome, which will make life a lot easier when trying to build links. But don’t overdo it, build links to your blog posts too, this will give your site more authority, and also make your life easier and give you a more believable link profile.

13. Get Product Reviews

The model is simple, send your products to a thought leader in your industry, they get a free thing in return for a review. If your products are actually up to the job, this can be a great way to build your brand and get traffic.

Just to warn you though – Google does see this practice as link buying. Unless you want to risk penalties, ask reviewers to no-follow your links. Don’t worry, the real value is in the traffic you generate anyway.

14. Write Guest Posts

Guest posting is a very popular way to build links and if you do it right it can be very effective. This is a big topic and one that I have covered in the past on the ThinkTraffic blog, so click here to find out how to manage your guest posting.

The main take-away though is that you should target sites that you think you will get traffic from. More to the point, you want to post on sites which are read by your potential customers. So consider location and niche and get your message infront of the right people.

15. Never Forget Social Media

Social media is one of your biggest assets. Everything so far in this post has been focused on building content that deserves to get links and deserves to rank. Basically, you want to grab the attention of your users and get them engaged.

Social media is all about building a community and if you put in the time you will soon have a group of customers who will champion your brand, will give you repeat custom and will tell their friends about you.

Your Products

There are other ways to compete with Amazon and the big guys. If you use the ideas above, you'll certainly have an ecommerce store that deserves to rank and will attract attention. But things like product selection matter too.

16. Be More Niche

Amazon clearly aren’t niche at all so a good way to compete is to be niche. This is partly achieved through product selection and partly by publishing lots of authoritative content. Keep in mind, with everything you do, that you are the website for buying tools (or whatever you sell) and put yourself across as the experts.

17. Add Unique Products

Why not offer something that Amazon could never compete with? Ok, so you may sell the same products as them, but why not write an ebook (or better still, an actual book). Your book could be about how to use tools more effectively, maintenance tips, how to set-up a workshop etc...

Offer your book for free with each purchase, the cost to you will be negligible, but it will add a huge amount of value for certain customers.

18. Be Up To Date

Another way to enhance that ‘expert’ image is to make sure that your shop is always cutting edge. In our example that might mean having the latest tools available and also reporting the latest news in the world of tools.

Basically, you can react faster than sites like Amazon, you can make decisions in a few minutes without having to have a committee meeting. Use that to your advantage!

19. Value Service Over Price

One complaint people often have with these sorts of ideas is that Amazon will always win because they are cheaper. This is a big myth!

Ok, some customers will always buy on price alone, and if you operate in a particularly price sensitive niche then this could be an issue. But people don’t buy on price alone and it is important to differentiate yourself as such.

Conversion Rate Optimization

20. Test Your Assumptions

The one thing that every ecommerce business owner should be doing relentlessly is testing their assumptions. You never know what will work and what won’t and there is no scientific formula to figure it out.

You should start by split testing different layouts for product pages and tracking key performance indicators to see which layouts work best.

You can also test different positions for things like product descriptions and images. Also, test call to action buttons for position and wording. If you’re not familiar with conversion rate optimization, here is a quick outline of what it entails.

A site the size of Amazon has to undergo major work if they want to change their layout, but you can test and constantly tweak your site to produce better conversion rates.

By: Mark Johnson, owner of ThinkTraffic.co.uk and expert in SEO and optimization.

When it comes to online sales and customer conversion, connecting with your potential customers and describing your products persuasively is one of the most important parts of selling online.

That’s because after your product photo, your product description is the information people turn to when trying to make a buying decision. And with Amazon a click away, the story you tell about your products (and your business) is your best chance at convincing people to buy from you.

In fact it's a mission critical piece of the online sales puzzle.

Here are five techniques to make sure your product descriptions (and business story) get people clicking the 'add to cart' button.

1. Discover What Makes Your Product Remarkable

In his book, My Life in Advertising, advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins tells the story of how in the 1920’s he used a new advertising campaign to propel Schlitz beer from fifth place in the beer market to being tied for first.

After being hired for the job, Hopkins toured the brewery to get to know the product. He discovered an elaborate filtration process in which the beer was sterilized and cooled in a special way over frigid pipes - all in a plate glass room in which only filtered air could enter. When he asked why they weren’t telling people about this he was told that ‘every brewery filtered beer this way’.

His response? “But others have never told this story.”

Schlitz rolled out their new ‘filtration story’ and marched forward to beer brand dominance.

It’s Toasted

Another example of discovering what makes your product and business remarkable can be found in this scene from Mad Men:

To discover the remarkable benefits of your products and business, try asking yourself questions like:

• What materials is your product is made from?
• Where did those materials came from?
• How are your products manufactured and assembled?
• Who are they manufactured and assembled by?
• What are the unique benefits your product offers?
• What’s your personal story and how does it add value to your products?

For example, Dodocase doesn’t just make iPad cases. They make handcrafted iPad cases while preserving traditional artisan bookbinding techniques in the city of San Francisco.

And if that’s something you want, you can only buy from them.

2. Persuade With Video

These days product descriptions don’t just have to come in text form. Video can be an incredibly persuasive medium that takes you from simply claiming your product is remarkable to actually demonstrating that it is.

Video lets you tell a visually engaging story that adds emotion and transparency to the online shopping experience. It creates trust by showing that the product is real and so are the people that make it.

Another good example of a company using video to tell a story and sell is LIFX - a new smartphone enabled LED lightbulb company who have just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Let’s take a look at some of the copywriting and persuasion techniques at play in the LIFX video so that you can adapt them to your own product descriptions and videos.

3. Resonating and Empathizing with Potential Customers

After a brief introduction, the first thing the makers of LIFX do is make some statements about traditional light bulbs in an attempt to resonate and empathize with you as well as get you nodding your head in agreement and starting to say yes.

“I was thinking one day that the light bulb is amazing and is probably one of the greatest inventions of all time.” Yes.

“But it hasn’t really changed much in the last 100 years.” Yes.

“Not to mention how annoying it is when they blow out.” YES!

In other words, you’re trying to get your customer in harmony with what you’re saying in order to create the right buying environment.

The other factor at play here is empathy. Empathy establishes rapport with your visitors and lets them know that you understand their problems and their pain. It also positions your product as the solution to that pain.

4. Sell with Emotion, Justify with Logic

When it comes to making a purchase, people buy on emotion and justify with logic. As copywriter Joe Sugarman points out in his book Advertising Secrets of the Written Word, people may tell their friends that they bought a Mercedes because of an impressive list of technical features, but really they just wanted a prestigious car that would allow them to belong to the crowd that drives luxury vehicles.

Creating emotion comes from explaining the benefits that your product offers. In the case of LIFX, that’s:

• Having a cool light bulb that you can show off to your friends at parties.
• Being environmentally conscious.
• Making your kids feel safe (nightlight).
• Being a tech savvy early adopter.
• Saving electricity and money.

The actual features of your product are the logical points people use to justify an emotional purchase. 

• Dim and change colors via your smartphone.
• Turn on one bulb or a group of bulbs.
• A 25 year lifespan, notifications, night light functionality etc.

In other words, appeal to emotion (benefits) and back it up with logic (features).

5. Risk Removal

Once you've got your potential customer in the right buying environment and emotionally connected to your product, the last step is to remove any risk with a solid guarantee. Every potential purchase comes with some risk for the buyer and adding a money back guarantee backs up the promise that your product is making.

The goal here is to remove any lingering doubts in your customers mind.

When it comes to describing your products and business to potential customers, there is no one size fits all approach but employing all or some of these strategies should help to make what you're selling more compelling.

By Leo Widrich, Co-Founder, Buffer

The last year has been absolutely crazy year for us here at Buffer. We’ve turned a lot of things upside down and learnt a huge amount about scaling and building out our business.

When it comes to our social media presence, we’ve made a lot of drastic changes too, a lot of which have had a surprisingly huge impact on our business. Here are the top 5 things we’ve changed that helped us reach and interact with more awesome people:

1. Let Everybody Blog, Facebook & Tweet

The first key change we made was to allow everyone on the team to post Tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates. It made a massive difference to really describe our transparency and offer different flavors to posting.

A great quote that one of my favorite Social Media experts Jay Baer once mentioned to me, describes this the best:

"Social Media isn’t a department. It is more like the telephone or the typewriter. Because it's so early, we have specialists using it. Eventually, this will simply be another communication channel that everyone uses, without wondering who and how." 

With everyone blogging, you tell a much better story. Alyssa on our team started to write about how we go about customer service. Tom started posting awesome pictures to Facebook he found that got more exposure than anything else we’ve ever posted before. For everyone observing, it becomes a lot more fun and interesting. It’s not just one guy any more.

If you're thinking of trying this, this was a crucial finding for us: Not everyone is confident to immediately go in and share to your company’s Facebook wall and Twitter feed. Encouraging everyone and briefly brainstorming on what they might like to share is very powerful.

We’ve started to discuss this a lot internally beforehand and quickly everyone started dipping their feet into the cold water with a tweet, Facebook post and eventually an article. Especially the idea of “co-producing” the first tweets, Facebook posts and blog posts has worked extremely well for us to get more people on the team started.

2. Respond Fast & Use Your Name

Another key change we made is to radically personalize our company’s Twitter account and focusing on decreasing response times.What we’ve realized was that the more personal we would interact, the more likely people were to respond, share their love about Buffer and eventually even upgrade to a paid account.

Here are a few key things we’ve changed:

We’ve listed everyone on the team in our Twitter bio to make it clear that there are real people Tweeting and responding:

We have started to end every Tweet with the person’s first name. There seems to be the suggestion to use initials like “LW” to end Tweets, but I’ve always found this to be quite unpersonal. Using first names, makes a huge difference:

Another key improvement we’ve made was to decrease our response time to incoming Tweets dramatically. 

All this led to hundreds of more Twitter mentions, with people using personal names such as “Alyssa from Buffer” instead of just “Buffer.” It triggered way more interactions and most importantly, made chatting on Social Media a lot more fun and casual.

3. Email: Change from “no reply” to, “please, reply”

Another big change we’ve made, that strictly speaking wasn’t a social media focused improvement, but had a massive impact on social media, was how we went about sending out our emails.

This is actually something we’ve done from the very beginning, yet recently started to double down on. Every email we send out has a short note or PS at the end, urging you to respond to us, as we’ll do the same.

The results? Dozens of friendly replies, tweets and even press, simply emphasizing our friendly approach when working with users:

If you haven’t tried this yet, be sure to give it a go. The impact you can have with a simple friendly note that you are around to answer any questions can go a long way. It makes a point about transparency and approachability that is hard to make in any other way.  

4. Blog About More Topics

Another change, which was admittedly also extremely painful, was the direction of our blog.

We’ve moved from being a “Social Media” blog, to a resource about “Lifehacks, writing, customer happiness and business.” What I found was that we had reached somewhat of a local maximum for the content we have been writing in the social media space. Moving out of my comfort zone and starting to write more about broader topics was definitely very challenging at first, yet also extremely rewarding eventually.

The best way to describe this change is with a recent presentation from content marketing king Rand Fishkin, titled “The content marketing manifesto.” In short, we stopped writing for our customers and started to produce content for anyone who interacts with a potential customer of ours.

Marketers at Oreo have been generating a lot of buzz about their cookies these days, and they're using social media to do it. The techniques they're using are extremely innovative, and they're not that difficult to replicate. 

Although this popular brand of cookie is known for its black-and-white striped appearance and its customers tendency to twist it apart or dunk it in milk, the brand is a social media powerhouse:

• 32M+ on Facebook
• 82K+ on Twitter
• 87K+ on Instagram
• 14M+ on YouTube

Over the past few months, Oreo has hit more than a couple social media home runs. Their tweet during the Super Bowl, the 100-day “Daily Twist” Facebook campaign, the "Cookie Vs. Cream" videos on YouTube, and their spur-the-moment Twitter banter with their arch enemy, Kit Kat, demonstrated true mastery of social media. Let’s consider the promotions, then consider the lessons to be learned.

Oreo's Super Bowl Tweet

When the lights went out at the New Orleans Superdome during the Super Bowl, much of North America came to a halt. Football players shuffled about the sidelines in the barely lit arena, while tens of millions of television viewers looked for something else to do during the 34 minute blackout. Here's what Oreo did:

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29… — Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Oreo’s marketing executives and agency, 360i, were already gathered watching the game from a social media war room of sorts. In five minutes, the team had composed, created, approved, and tweeted a simple, blackout-related ad, showing a picture of a single Oreo cookie against a dark background with the tag line, “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark.” Brilliant.

The ad generated more than 16,000 retweets and was seen by tens of thousands on Twitter. The media lauded it for being one of the best Super Bowl ads bar none. The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other publications wrote articles about it. 

Oreo's Daily Twist Campaign

Each day from June 25 to October 2, 2012, Oreo released a whimsical image of the cookie redesigned to commemorate something that had happened on that date.

On September 27, an Oreo was shown with referee stripes noting that the National Football League’s referee strike had ended. On August 5, half a cookie with red cream and tire tracks symbolized the Mars rover landing. You can see them all here. 

The campaign was housed primarily on Oreo’s Facebook page and managed to increase customer engagement 110%, according to the company. Oreo also added nearly 5 million likes during the campaign’s run.

Oreo's Cookie Vs. Cream Video Campaign

Oreo's 'Cookie vs. Cream' videos are a clever campaign housed on their YouTube account. They feature wildly elaborate machines that are designed to split Oreo cookies into two pieces and remove the cream filling. The first video from this ad campaign shows a seperator created by physicist David Neevel, and in three weeks it received over 4 million views. 

Oreo went on to produce three more videos featuring creative seperator machines. The four videos have been seen over 5 million times and have generated thousands of positive comments. 

Twitter Tic-Tac-Toe

A couple weeks ago a playful banter between Oreo and Kit Kat occured. Oreo is owned by Nabisco, and Kit Kat is owned by Nestle - so they are direct competitors. It all started when someone Tweeted this:

Can tell I like chocolate abit too much when I'm following @kitkat and @oreo hahahahahah

— LauraEllen (@Laura_ellenxx) March 11, 2013

 Two days later, Kit Kat's social media marketers responded with a clever challenge to Oreo:

The fight for @laura_ellenxx's affections is on. @oreo your move #haveabreak twitpic.com/cb1g84

— Kit Kat (@KITKAT) March 13, 2013

Several hours later, Oreo responded with a checkmate: 

Sorry, @kitkat we couldn't resist ... #GiveOreoABreak twitter.com/Oreo/status/31…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) March 13, 2013

Apply Oreo’s Strategies to Your Business

The social media campaigns outlined above are some of the highest quality found anywhere to date. They can generally teach us five important lessons how to run a successful social media strategy:

1. Be Timely and Topical

Terms like “newsjacking” and “culture-jacking” have been applied to both the Oreo Super Bowl tweet and the Daily Twist campaign.

Newsjacking is the idea of interjecting a business’ marketing message or ideas into a current news story in order to garner additional attention from both customers and the media. Culture-jacking has a similar definition, but centers around events like the Super Bowl.

The Daily Twist with its 100 topical designs and the Super Bowl tweet were, in part, a success because they were timely and topical. They spoke to current events. 

To apply this lesson, make a calendar of holidays and upcoming events, and plan posts around them. For example, April 5 is National Walk to Work Day in the U.S., a perfect opportunity for retailers selling shoes or health and fitness products. April 10 is Golfer’s Day and another opportunity for some retailers to post timely and topical updates.

2. Promote Consistently and Frequently

Consistency and frequency played a big role in the success of both the Super Bowl tweet and the Daily Twist campaign.

Consider that Oreo’s “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” message could not have been a viral success if no one had seen it in the first place. If Oreo had 82 Twitter followers instead of 82,000 the ad, however clever, would not have made headlines. Rather Oreo had laid the foundation for Super Bowl success with about 5,000 simple tweets, posted at a rate of about three or four a day, incrementally engaging its customers and building an ongoing dialogue.

Similarly, the Oreo Daily Twist boosted customer engagement because as regular as the sunrise, Oreo fans knew that each day Oreo would post a new graphic and new twist on its image. To apply this lesson, plan to regularly engage on social media. Try to post at least a couple of times each day, and build up your social community. 

3. Use Graphics, Simple Concepts

All of Oreo's social media campaigns have relatively high production quality. Instead of simply tweeting about the Super Bowl blackout, they knew it was worth waiting a few extra minutes (risking the lights going back on) to produce a well designed image that they could share. The image was nicely designed and had a clear tagline making it easy to understand. 

Same goes with the game of tic-tac-toe with Kit Kat. They had a graphic designer edit the Kit Kat bar and add the Oreo logo to the image.

With the Daily Twist campaign, Oreo designed 100 different cookies to release a new one each day. The campaign was so simple, just show people a new picture of a cookie every single day for 100 days. The simplicity paired with the exciting visual element in these social media campaigns made them easy for viewers to understand and share. 

Apply this lesson to your company by using more high quality visuals, and simplifying your message. 

4. Have Fun

Social media is supposed to be social, so it should be no surprise that people enjoy entertaining and fun-loving engagement. Every one of Oreo's social media campaigns outlined above were mean't to make people smile.

Their Super Bowl tweet amazed people with its speed of execution. Their Daily Twist images delighted their customers with a fun little surprise each day. The separator machine videos are just plain hilarious. And their Twitter battle with arch enemy Kit Kat was playful and took a lot of guts. 

When you're interacting with your social community it's vitally important to have fun, so long as your business type allows it. If you can make someone smile, do it, and you'll notice your following will immediately begin to grow.

This article is written by author Jacqueline Biggs.

The 10% strategy is all about growing your ecommerce business by making small incremental changes. As you know, marketing is part big ideas and part process. As an entrepreneur you have the ideas, so I'm going to help you with the process part. In this article I'm going to show you how a small increase in key business metrics has the potential to create a huge impact in net profits. 

Case Study

Theresa has an ecommerce designer shirt company and last year her marketing generated 10,000 new business leads. She converted 10% of these (1,000) into paying customers. Theresa sells shirts through subscriptions and on average, each customer spent a total of $1,000 on ten shirts over the course of the year. Last year her business turned over $100,000 and with a profit margin of 30%, her net profit was $30,000..

This year, Theresa is following the ’10% strategy.’ She's going to increase each of the following all by just 10%:

• Volume of leads 
• Conversion of leads to sales
• Average order value  
• Profit margin

The cumulative effect of this strategy on her net profit is where it gets really exciting. A 10% increase on the volume of leads means she will generate 11,000 new business leads this year, a 10% increase on her conversion rate means she needs to convert 11% of these into paying customers, which results in 1,210 customers. She then needs to increase their average spend by 10%, so each customer needs to spend around $110 a year. A 10% increase on the number of purchases customers make each year, means they need to buy 11 times.

1,210 customers x $110 (average spend) x 11 (no of purchases / yr) = $1,464,100

If she successfully increases her profit margin by 10%, raising it to 33%, her net profit will be $483,153, which is a 61% increase on last year. Wow. The cumulative effect of each 10% increment is dramatic. This is a very powerful and effective strategy for any business. Note that I have deliberately kept this example simple and focused on new customers only to demonstrate a point. Theresa’s business will also make money from repeat purchase from existing customers over the course of this year, but what I want you to focus on are the strategies that you can put in place to move the dial on each of these critical metrics.

To illustrate how the 10% strategy can work for you, I'm going to show you 12 different strategies to implement with your online business. We're going to start with increasing your volume of leads. Let’s dive in.

3 Strategies to Increase Volume of Leads

1) Write Guest Blogs

Guest blogs on high traffic sites in your niche are one of the most effective ways to drive qualified traffic to your ecommerce store. Not only are they great traffic drivers, but they simultaneously position you as an authority in your niche and raise brand awareness with your target audience. Theyr'e also great for SEO since they link back to your site in a byline at the end of your article. Be sure to link to some of the best content on your website within your post and position an opt-in form at the bottom of it. Engaged readers will click on your references and sign-up if they enjoy what they read. 

There are a number of tools available to help you to identify relevant blogs.

• www.invesp.com/blog-rank - A blog ranking directory; search by category using keywords.
• www.alltop.com - Guy Kawasaki’s news aggregator site that covers a diverse range of niches and highlights the top sites and blogs in each.
• Technorati.com - Reviews the top 100 blogs in the world as well as within different niches.
• Alexa.com - Look for top sites by country and by category, though oddly not combined. You can also research a site’s traffic and audience profile by entering the web address.
• MyBlogGuest.com - A forum community where bloggers give info about their blogs and then ask for guest posts from other users. Use this in conjunction with Alexa to ensure sites are high traffic.
• Blog rolls - Review the blogrolls on popular blogs in your niche. This is often overlooked, but can be a great way to find blogs to guest post on as authority bloggers normally list other authority bloggers in their blogroll.

Once you have your shortlist don’t just launch straight in and ask to write a guest post, remember you want to create a relationship first. Read their blog and understand their tone of voice and the type of content that works for their readers. Start commenting and share their content. Dedicate time to this, so that they notice you. After a few weeks, be proactive and suggest an irresistible blog post that their readers will love. It has to be original and ideally spark a debate. If you do this well, a guest post can be a great source of new business leads.

2) Create Juicy Hooks

Most ecommerce stores have a sign-up form, but how many have effective forms? One of the biggest reasons for poorly converting sign-up forms is that the hook isn’t juicy enough. Are you offering something genuinely unique and valuable in exchange for a prospect’s details? A recent study by the Digital Marketing Association confirmed that the main reason people sign-up to company emails is to get offers (61%) and discounts (59%), yet few companies make this really clear on their sign-up forms. Why not spell out that they will be the first to hear about discounts and deals as it is an effective hook. If you run a business to business company, then digital content such as free reports, white papers or video series can be enticing, so long as they solve a genuine problem for your prospects.  

The location of your sign-up forms is also really important and it is well worth experimenting with multiple locations across your site - at the top of content, at the bottom, in a side box. It’s a sad realisation, but it’s rare for prospects to just land on your site and sign-up immediately, so make sure your sign-up form isn’t confined to the home page. To increase the volume of sign-ups, make it easy; don’t request too much information. Email and first name, so that you can personalise emails are enough. You can get additional information for better segmentation later, at this stage, you just want to get them into the top of your marketing funnel. If you already have a large number subscribers, then add the number to your form as social proof is an effective convertor.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for creating the most effective sign-up forms. So test and evaluate through continual split testing. Change copy, the incentive, call to action, colours of buttons and track the volume of sign-ups as a result. Make sure that you only change one element at a time so that you know exactly what drives an increase or decrease. 

3) Consider Retargeting

Whilst site retargeting campaigns are very effective at bringing lost prospects or customers back to your site, search re-targeting is an effective prospecting tool. It identifies people that have searched on keywords that matter to you and haven’t yet been to your site and shows them display ads. It’s a much more effective and efficient way to buy media than buying based on consumer demographics and hoping to get noticed, as you are reaching active buyers.

3 Strategies to Increase Conversions

Getting prospects to your ecommerce store is only half the battle and arguably the easy bit. The bigger challenge is turning browsers into buyers. Following are a few tried and tested ways to increase site conversions.

1) Show Social Proof

Social proof helps us to make decisions more easily. Whilst we are all more than capable of making our own decisions, knowing what other people have done acts like a mental shortcut. You might have heard of the experiment conducted by Milgram, Bickman and Berkowitz in New York that proved that four or more people standing on the pavement looking up at the sky will make 80% of people walking past look up too.

However, if only one or two people are looking up, it’s insignificant and others do not follow suit. Does this mean than deep down are we all sheep? I don’t think that is necessarily the case, as it doesn’t work in all situations. If ten people randomly jumped off a cliff without a parachute, would you? Unlikely. But, if it’s a low risk option like staring up at the sky, or if you are sitting on the fence about a purchase, other people’s behavior can persuade you to take action. Just take a look at this video:

The “crazy, weird, lone dancer” becomes the starter of a movement that everyone wants to be a part of. Same guy, same dancing, nothing changed, aside from other people’s behavior. When making any decision, most people want to mitigate the chances of making a bad one and if lots of other people are doing x, y or z then it must be ok. That said, all social proof is not created equal; taking the same action is contingent on two key factors:

1. The number of people who have already done the same thing.
2. The similarity between you and those people.

If you want to convert prospects to buyers then making them feel that people just like them have already bought what they are looking at can tip the decision. Start by identifying the critical decision making moments in a customer’s conversion journey, as at these points social proof is the most persuasive. Consider adding to your site online ratings, testimonials and stats showing the number of people who have already bought or signed up. Travel companies take this to another, more pressured level, showing people “currently viewing” and the number of “available vacancies”, that ticks down as you deliberate. Then, suddenly you see a pop up that tells you the number of people who “just bought,” yikes, fear of missing out kicks in for many and tips the conversion. Think about your product pages, what could you add to help consumers to make that buying decision?

2) Use Video to Convert Customers

One of the great challenges of ecommerce is that you can’t touch and feel a product before you make a purchase. This makes it difficult to convey the full potential of a product or service with a two dimensional photo and some copy. Using videos to showcase your products is a good substitute and one that improves conversions and reduces returns.

Instructional videos bring your products and services to life; they can create wow factor and educate your consumers about multiple features and benefits that are difficult to convey in copy. Online fashion retailers are dramatically increasing sales through videos of models simply turning around to show how the outfit looks from all angles, or putting a hand bag on their shoulders, so the more spatially challenged (myself included) can see it in context and more accurately judge its size.

Zappo’s have a different approach and use their own staff to demonstrate their products believing it delivers a more relatable video than a model on a catwalk and feels more like a recommendation from a friend than a sales video. When creating a video for your site make sure that it answers all the questions that a buyer might have and allows them to see the product in action.

3) Ramp Up Email Marketing 

There is a lot more to email marketing than weekly emails. The more targeted and strategic you become, the greater your conversions. We all hate an abandoned shopping cart, but what are you doing to reverse this trend? As an ecommerce business, you have a lot of data about your customers and you can leverage this to your advantage.

It’s well worth creating triggered remarketing emails that list the products they left behind. Research has shown that the speed of delivery of these emails is critical; triggering an email sequence as soon as a cart is abandoned delivers greater conversions.

A series of three emails is proven to be the most effective, one sent immediately, another 24 hours later and another one week later. Test and trial the timing and messaging for your niche. Whilst price is often an issue for cart abandonment don’t offer a discount at the outset, as you risk associating an abandoned cart with a discount and you can usually win back customers without this. If by the third email they have not converted then consider an offer. Keep this series of emails focused and practical, make sure they are clearly branded, list the products left behind and contain a link back to the shopping cart to complete the purchase.

3 Strategies to Increase Average Order Value

1) Practice Psychological Pricing

An insight into consumer psychology can lead to customers increasing their average spend. Introducing a much higher price point can lead to people spending more money with you, even if they don’t buy the most expensive option. This sounds counterintuitive, but it works. Try putting an expensive premium product next to a less expensive item. The pricier item will make the other product look like a better deal and will increase your chances of making a sale.

2) Show Related Products

Suggesting relevant, related products to a customer is a great way to drive up order value. It’s the online equivalent of the classic McDonald’s up-sell: “Would you like fries with that?” and Amazon excels at this style of promotion. When buying anything, from a CD to a cuddly toy, Amazon lets you know that ‘people who bought this, also bought this’ and suggests two or three additional products. It’s incredibly successful and at times you’re even grateful to Amazon for reminding you to buy that extra lead with your camera, as you didn’t realise that it came without it.

This strategy manipulates people to spend more and leave even more satisfied with their service. Genius. What can you offer as a cross-sell at the point of purchase? Ensure it is relevant and adds genuine value. Suggesting batteries after selling electronics, or a memory card after a customer adds a digital camera to their cart are great examples. It is also advisable to offer discounts based on bundled purchases to further encourage take up. As always, ensure you track and monitor the impact of your cross-sells, week in, week out. If take up is low, then reconsider the products on offer.

3) Offer Multi-buy Promotions

Offering discounts for multiple purchases made at once can be an effective way to increase the amount people spend, but you need to find the sweet spot for your industry. Volume discounts, such as ‘buy one get one free’ and ‘three for two’ deals are typical retail promotions. Test and compare this style of promotion with percentage discounts for multiple purchases, these are often the exact same deals, just expressed differently and generate a different success rate as a result. You need to analyse the numbers and then start experimenting and tracking all the results. 

3 Strategies to Increase Purchase Frequency 

First you need to be able to identify the average frequency of purchase of your customer base. To do this, total all your transactions over a twelve month period (or shorter if you do not have a year’s worth of data) and divide them by the number of unique customers you had in the same period. This is a basic way to calculate your average purchase frequency.

1) Frequent Communication

One of the best ways to increase a customer’s frequency of purchase is actually one of the easiest. Frequent communication. Just because someone has bought from you once or twice is no guarantee that that they will buy from you again. You need to build a relationship and show that you care through regular communication that helps you to stay top of mind. Use email to tell your customers about other products and services they might not know about, send targeted emails offering related purchase ideas based on their previous buys. Create a regular calendar for your email marketing and stick to it.

2) Create Special Offers

The most successful special offers tend to be those that create scarcity through limited availability. This can mean a limited time frame, such as ‘today only’, or limited volume, ‘just one hundred available’. It’s vital you stick to your claims though, or you lose credibility. There are so many ways to create a special offer, they can be for everyone; seasonal sales, introductory offers for new products, or targeted; birthday offers, 100^th, 1,000^th customer etc. You could also offer a promotion immediately after the point of purchase that discounts their next buy, available for a limited time only. As with all of these special offers, send reminder emails before they expire and track and evaluate uptake so that you identify and re-run only the most successful offers.

3) Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to drive up frequency, as customers are rewarded for every purchase that they make. As points accrue, they get closer to the rewards and they become more likely to choose your brand over the competition. A study into the psychology of loyalty programs was conducted by Rajesh Bagchi and Xingbo Li in a paper for the February, 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. They identified that if consumers were given a high number of points for each purchase (10 points / $1 versus 1 point / $1)  they were more excited by the offering and more likely to tell other people about it, even when the amount they needed to spend to get a prize was exactly the same. That said, the quality and desirability of the rewards on offer determine the success of a loyalty scheme, but it is still worth bearing this in mind.

Punch Tab offers an online loyalty program around social sharing that rewards people for sharing content on a daily basis. It’s a great way to build loyalty and awareness of your website or blog. When readers land on your site, a small pop up window alerts them that they can earn points for visiting and sharing your content if they sign up. Points mean prizes and you can set up a reward scheme to let people win anything, from your products and services to Amazon vouchers, in exchange for liking and tweeting your content. In addition to the on-going loyalty programmes, you can also set up one-off giveaways to drive a fast response. You can also check out Incentify.

3 Strategies to Increase Profits

1) Reverse Defection

Most business owners know exactly how many new customers they win month in, month out, but fail to track how many they lose. To do this you need to agree on the definition of a lapsed customer and this depends on the nature of your business. Start by identifying the average buying cycles for each of your customer segments and decide on the time period that indicates that they are now a lapsed customer; this could be three, six or twelve months depending on the nature of your business.

Once you have identified a group of lapsed customers create an irresistible offer to bring them back to the fold. If the average customer spend is $40, offer a voucher for $30, chances are they will spend more than $40 thanks to the free money, but what’s more important is that you are recreating the habit that they spend with you.

A nutritionist I advise offered a free consultation to her lapsed clients, the majority of them took it up and over 50% turned into paying clients again. A landscape gardener client offered a free lawn mowing service to his largest lapsed clients, it got him back on their radar and gave him the perfect opportunity to suggest additional jobs. Other clients have sent gifts that surprised and delighted their former customers and importantly reminded them that they existed. Consider the same for your lapsed customers, as chances are they have forgotten about you as time has gone by.

2) Leverage Technology

Can you increase the profitability of your team by leveraging technology to reduce admin tasks? Analyse how much time is spent on non strategic admin tasks over the course of a week. What tools could you use to make better use of time?

I often find that small business owners spend a lot of time looking for the right logos, images, videos, or latest marketing copy that is often found on desktops and USB sticks!

If your team are guilty of this, then consider a digital asset management solution that houses all of your brand assets in one place and saves heaps of wasted hours spent searching. It will significantly improve your efficiencies and importantly ensures consistent delivery across multiple digital channels. There are numerous solutions on the market for all budgets, just google “digital asset management solutions” and select the one that works for your budget.

3) Know Your Numbers

If you are not monitoring the numbers of your business, you are not managing them. Too many small business owners leave their accountant to look after the financial side of their business. This is a dangerous game and one that can create a big headache at the end of the year if you encounter a problem that should have been addressed much earlier.

It's really important to get a handle on all of the financials of your business and to monitor these on a monthly basis, this avoids any end of year "surprises". The most effective way to increase your profits is to understand every single cost in your business. Pay particular attention to your marketing spend, is it delivering results or are you paying for services you are not using to their full potential? Do you really need that subscription? Be brutal, if it is not generating an return on investment cut it out.

Marketing To Win

Jacqueline Biggs

This article was written by author and marketing expert, Jacqueline Biggs. Her latest book "Marketing to Win - How Small Businesses Can Do More With Less" helps people with no marketing experience succeed in the world of business.