The Ultimate Pinterest Guide for Your Online Store

 

You've probably heard of Pinterest by now. It's a new social networking site that literally everybody is talking about. Pinterest's growth is staggering - the site already has over 1 million members, and it receives almost 12 million unique visitors a month. The whirlwind of excitement that surrounds Pinterest provides online store owners a great opportunity to leverage it's popularity (and overall awesomeness) to bring attention to their online store. 

Whether you're already setup on Pinterest or you're a complete newbie, this is a guide that will teach you the basics, and also help the more experienced pinners get the most from this popular social media platform. 

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How to Design an Online Store Logo

Warren Dunlop

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At Shopify, we find that online stores that have gone the extra mile on branding and awesome online store logos bring in a significant amount more in revenue compared to those that haven’t. 

The fundamentals to creating and running a successful online business are taken care of by Shopify, offering up a fast and reliable service worldwide, with quality themes to make the shopping experience really enjoyable. What Shopify can’t do, is give your shop a personality, deliver a message, or make your brand really stick out from the competition. That's where branding and a great online store logo come into play.


There’s no better way to give your site an immediate personality than with an awesome logo. For the average shopper a brand is just a product identifier — it isn’t just another iPad case, it’s a DODOcase. The logo is a pivotal piece to this branding, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Fret over the details with it, make sure it appeals to your target market and conveys your primary message. Logos are best kept simple; great typography or a pictogram is often more than enough.

Here are 3 easy ways to design an online store logo: 

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8 Tips for Highly Productive Entrepreneurs

Being productive isn't about working harder, it's about working smarter. Tons of entrepreneurs waste time procrastinating, checking emails, liking a whole bunch of stuff on Facebook, and working on low-priority projects. The key to supercharging your productivity isn't about working longer hours, it's about recognizing the habits that slow you down and removing them. Here are 8 tips that will boost your productivity:

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How to Use Digg to Bring Customers to Your Online Store


Digg can be a great way for you to boost exposure for your online store. I recently examined reddit and showed how to best leverage their community to drive traffic to your ecommerce store. Digg is quite similar to reddit - they're both full of obscure humor, inside jokes, and landmines everywhere waiting to detonate upon the first hint of self-promotion. Although traffic on Digg is declining, it still gets an estimated 4.6 million unique US visitors a month, so it's still relevant as an online marketing tool. Here are some things to consider: 
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5 Tips to Help Entrepreneurs Set Up a Home Office

 
A lot of entrepreneurs work from home these days - but is your home office built for optimal comfort and productivity? A couple weeks ago I wrote an article on ways to boost productivity while working from home, but that was assuming you already had a fully functional home work space. If you're still working from the kitchen table and thinking about building a serious home office, here are 5 tips that will help you get started: 
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How to Write a Press Release for your Ecommerce Store

If you think your products will sell themselves, you're dreaming. In addition to paid search, SEO, and social media, you might want to consider more traditional forms of marketing and PR as well. 


There's a lot of debate whether or not press releases are worthwhile anymore. I've heard good arguments come from both sides, and to be perfectly honest, for most online stores it's hard to say whether the juice will be worth the squeeze. 

Companies like Apple can send a release and 2 seconds after it hits the wire there are headlines in every paper and on every TV station in the world. On the other hand, you can spend $500 and send a press release to +35,000 media outlets and be ignored by every single one of them. 

At any rate, sending a news release does have its undeniable benefits. Even if it doesn't generate any coverage, it will at least pop up in Google Search when someone is looking for more information on your store or product. If you're ready to give it a shot, here's a beginners guide to writing and sending your first press release:

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