Looking for a FREE way to advertise your products?

Do you want to have a greater reach to people looking for products like yours AT NO CHARGE?

Consider linking up with sites such as www.thefind.com. TheFind is one of several sites that retrieves a specified googlebase txt file from your site root directory  and then displays the information on their site. All you need to do is the FREE account set up, enter some company specific information (URL, shipping information, tax information, and other basic information) set up the googlebase feed on your site, let TheFind know where the googlebase feed is, and BAM you are ready to go.

 How TheFind works:

When someone is looking for a product they head over to TheFind on their computer, phone, or tablet. Once there they enter the keyword they are looking for and hit search. TheFind then searches their “crawled” files for the same keyword. Next TheFInd displays the files that contain the keyword, from all different stores. Across the top and side there are several different options for linking to stores or customizing your search. Once you click on a product it reroutes you directly to the sellers site.

Below I search for snowboards.

It returned with over 17 different sites on just the first page!

So, now to the answer the big question, what do I have to do to get it working? I will explain this for both AbleCommerce and Magento.

AbleCommerce

Log in to your admin and go to the marketing tab. On the drop down menu chose Feeds then Googlebase Feed. Create the feed and have it update automatically. Save it as a .txt file. Now head over to the TheFind merchant site. Create your account and fill in the needed information. Now go to the Product Feed Upload link (see Fig. 1) on the left. Set the feed format to googlebase, set the file type to .txt, select upload method to Scheduled Fetch,  set fetch my feed to daily, add the path to your file in the specify web address box and click save! (see Fig. 2)

Figure 1

Figure 2

Magento

First you will have to create a .txt file in Magento. This can be done by downloading an extension on www.magtentoconnect.com that will create the .txt file for you. Once the file is created head over to the TheFind merchant site. Create your account and fill in the needed information. Now go to the Product Feed Upload link (see Fig. 1) on the left. Set the feed format to googlebase, set the file type to .txt, select upload method to Scheduled Fetch,  set fetch my feed to daily, add the path to your file in the specify web address box and click save! (see Fig. 2)

Wondering how popular these type of sites are? TheFind has been featured in several major publications including the Wall Street Journal and won 12^th place on INC fastest growing private companies!!!

For more info on connecting to TheFind and all your AbleCommerce and Magento question contact Web 2 Market at 708.653.3100

-Dan

As 2012 winds down, I find myself surprised that some of our clients still dither about developing a mobile interface.  I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.  Just a year ago I created a video for the Mobile Commerce plugin for AbleCommerce. In it, I say that the importance of a mobile interface depends on your industry.

No more.  It's 2013 in a couple days, and the Web has changed dramatically. Now having a mobile friendly interface is imperative. Let me throw in a few tasty infographics to illustrate.

(Courtesy Marketing Land)

And the growth is only going to continue...

(Courtesy Lightning Buy)

But if your site isn't mobile friendly...

(Courtesy Google)

So as we approach 2013, I hope you're considering how to make your AbleCommerce or Magento mobile device friendly.

Email Marketing has been consistently rated one of the best marketing tools for return on investment. But many merchants find themselves stuck in the rut of sending the same type of email blast each month. Looking for something new to excite your customers? Looking for new and better ways to target your messages?

Here are 7 examples of messages our clients have sent. I hope these inspire you to rethink and improve your email marketing efforts.

1. Monthly featured product:

2. Overnight abandoned basket followup:

3. Special offer:

4. Monthly newsletter:

5. Monthly new product list:

6. Post-order follow-up:

7. Estranged customer follow-up:

Hope your like all these ideas! Good luck!

Have you ever had the feeling of being stalked around the web?  You keep seeing ads for a site you just visited?  It's not a coincidence, its remarketing. The goal of remarketing is to get visitors to you site back to your site to either finish a transaction or buy more.  If someone has visited your site, aren't they likely to be an excellent prospect?

After sticking a snippet of code into your site from one of the remarketing networks, a visitor get a cookie placed in his browsers.  Afterwords, when that he visits another site in their network, the cookie is detected and your ad is displayed.  No ads are displayed on your site.

There are a number of remarketing networks, Google and AdRoll being a couple of the bigger ones.  As of now, AdRoll has further reach.  But for many merchants, it'll be a bit easier to set up in their Google Adwords account.

Costs are pretty minimal.  You'll need to add the snippet of code to your site, which should take half an hour or less.  You'll need to create eight or ten small images to fit different ad formats on different sites.  And you'll need to pay-per-click.  You can set your own bid, typically a dollar or two.

Give it a try!  It'll just take a couple hours to get going.  Here are a couple sites to start at:

Google Adwords

AdRoll

Most merchants haven't thought seriously about video yet. However, video is both a powerful selling tool and great for search engine optimization. First let's review why video is great for selling, then we'll move on to the basics of implementing video.

Imagine you're a customer visiting a site selling software. You're looking for a new accounting package. Of course you'll look over the features and the price. But how does it actually work? Prospective customers want to experience the product as much as possible before purchasing it. Pictures are an obvious way to experience a product, but video is even better. With video, the customer can see the product in use, and gain a greater understanding of how it works. As an example, take a look at the attached video I created for our SEO Manager. After adding vidoes to our plugins, sales have multipled - our customers gain a much deeper knowledge of the product than they ever could with just pictures and text.

As you can see, the video doesn't have to be a Hollywood production. Of course better production values are better, but the reality is that few merchants are using video. So having ANY video is better than no video...

Let's move on to how to actually create and add video. The simplest way to create a video is to get a decent video camera and start shooting! It'll create video files that can be uploaded to YouTube or directly to your site.

An important point to keep in mind is that Google doesn't give your site higher ranking on SERP (Search Engines Results Pages) if the video is on YouTube. So if you want better SEO, you'll need to host it yourself or consider one of the 3rd party video hosting sites out there.

Once you've add videos to your site, let Google know about them. You'll want to create a video sitemap file. You can find details here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

If that gets a bit to detailed, you might want to see how the Web 2 Market video sitemap looks. Download, edit and save it to your site!

Obviously there's a lot more to know about video and web shopping carts. What would you like to know?

For the last 15 years, I've worked with hundreds of clients, building great websites.  I've been asked hundreds of times "how do I get ranked higher in search engines?", or something similar.  Really, every merchant wants more people to find them and their great site.

Back in the olden days, circa 2000 AD, the focus was on getting the right keywords on a page, or using an <H3> around important keywords.  But Google moved past that many years ago.

These days the emphasis is on having good content, supplying search engines the data they need and building relationships with online partners.  Every couple weeks I'll publish another post with some good ideas for building your business.  And, I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas.  Sharing our ideas, there are infinite ways to make your site better and to build more traffic.

1. Videos – Adding videos helps customers understand the product better. With enough of them, and regular updates, customers make your site a starting point. AND, Google indexes videos as well as considering that in ranking general web searches. There are lots of manufacturers videos on YouTube. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=138G9ES-YCg&feature=plcp. You could link to that from within that products page.
2. Email Marketing – Probably the best way to generate repeat business. You’re already do it, so I won’t belabor it.
3. Social Networking – Builds relationships with customers, counts toward rank by Google. Don’t forget Google +.
4. Physical World – Are you promoting your site and social networking on invoices, catalogs and so forth?
5. Product Feeds – Google Shopping, Bing!, Shopping.com, Oogle, TheFind, etc. Low cost, but millions of people use these tools and buy, A LOT!
6. Blogging – Find/make someone and expert and have them blog on your site. Again, Google is looking for this kind of content. It will generate both content and higher ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Tie this in with Google Author too…
7. Forums – Create a place your customers can share questions, knowledge, experience and product info.
8. Product Reviews – For experiential products, having other customers’ feedback (good and bad) can be huge in making a decision. See WilliamsBrewing.com for a great example. It does take consistent effort to get reviews built up.
9. Mobile Commerce – Again, Google ranks sites with mobile device support higher. And, Google pushes people using mobile devices to sites supporting them. We’ve seen some clients get great sales increases because of this. Mobile is a must-do now.
10. Pay-per-clicks – I’m not a huge fan of these. But the right price, for the right keywords can be profitable.
11. Google Remarketing