Ecommerce Marketing & Optimization Workshop

About our marketing blueprints:

The approach we use with clients is quite different to most marketing and web agencies.

Our marketing blueprints breakdown the strategy and tactics we’re using with our clients to rank them higher in Google, get more traffic and turn more of those visitors into paying customers, ultimately what everyone wants right?

The video below is a workshop on ecommerce marketing and optimization recorded in 2016. The title of the session was Ecommerce Marketing & Optimization – From 5 and 6 Figures to 7 Figures And Beyond.

The workshop is a great starter for anyone looking to be more aggressive with marketing their online store and ecommerce business. The workshop contains some of the same material and action steps we work through with our one on one ecommerce consulting clients.

The workshop is broken into three sections:

Section 1 – Protecting the Downside

Especially in the online marketing world there’s so much focus on getting bigger, selling more and marketing harder but almost no mention of security and eliminating risks.

In “Protecting the Downside” we run through some simple steps that all businesses should take to protect their online assets. Often these action steps are free or almost free and in most cases will eliminate 99% or more of the risk a business is exposed to.

Section 2 – Quick Wins

If you’re like most online businesses you’re sitting on a ton of low hanging fruit or “quick wins”. Simple action steps and easy optimisation that can often increase your SEO rankings substantially and boost traffic often by 20-50% and in other cases, dramatically increase your conversion rate.

Section 3 – Models

Due to time constraints we had to keep this section short but we talk through a simple framework for understanding the various levers you can pull in your business to generate more revenue and profit.

Click here to download the slides of this workshop or flick through the slides below in the Slideshare window.

 

 

 

Transcript

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Brendan Tully: Alrighty, so I'm supposed to be talking about ecommerce marketing, and optimization, and I understand that not everyone in here owns an online store or in the ecommerce game. As much as possible, I've made this broad strokes, and there's a lot of stuff. We're going to talk a lot of tactics. There's a lot of stuff in here for basically any [00:00:30] business selling online. The title is "From 5 and 6 Figures to 7 Figures and Beyond."

A little bit about me. My main business is The Search Engine Shop. It's a local SEO and AdWords agency in Australia. In the mid-2000's I also grew an ecommerce. We acquired it for free. It was doing $100k turnover at the time, and within about just over two years we took it to doing $6.5 million a year turnover. It's a long story. Ultimately that business fell over, due to our own stupidity. [00:01:00] Out of that grew my current business, and in 2009, 2010, we won a government contract to do workshops and training for small business owners in Australia about web stuff.

 

That's how I grew my current business. Since then, we've worked with around 2,000 businesses through our services, through consulting, through one-on-one training workshops. Today, we manage the assets for several hundred businesses, and there's some common things we see all the time. Some common mistakes, and some tactics that we see that [00:01:30] work really, really well.

 

My goal for this session is two things. One, to give you one really, easy quick win that you can do yourself, really quick and easy, in the next seven days that's going to have some sort of impact. Then also, one bigger, something more chunky that might take some time to implement, but it's going to significantly move the needle. It might take some time to do, but it's really going to show results. Is that okay? Cool.

 

We'll start with this. I've got three sections for you. I've got a lot of stuff and not [00:02:00] a lot of time, so we'll have to jam it in. We'll have to move quickly. The first one, I want to talk about protecting the downside. There's so much stuff online, in the blogosphere, that you're exposed to all day long about growing businesses, getting more traffic, ranking higher, doing more on social media, all that sort of stuff. But there's almost no talk about protecting the downside. Success is a funny thing. It often happens by accident. Failure is the same. It often happens by accident as well.

 

To succeed [00:02:30] in business, we want to cover our ass. There's a lot of small, little things that you can do, often cost no money, or a few bucks a month, that will practically eliminate all the risk that you currently hold in your business. I'm going to show you a few of those, because a lot of people don't talk about these. There's this weird thing where people will happily spend a lot of money on stuff, but then balk at paying five or 10 bucks a month on something as simple as VaultPress that will completely back up their website, protect it [00:03:00] if it gets hacked or it falls over, they'll have a backup that actually works.

 

I'm going to run through some of these. Some of these you're probably already doing. Probably some people in the room that are going to look at these and go, "Shit. I'm not doing that. I need to do it." We've got a simple checklist. Let's talk about your hosting. There's four parts of your hosting. Domain name, DNS hosting, email hosting, web hosting. Ideally, all four parts of your hosting should be with separate providers. Most people when they're starting out, they get a Bluehost account for five bucks [00:03:30] a month, four bucks a month, whatever it is. Stick all this stuff there. That's a problem, because if Bluehost falls over or if it's down for the day or has a prolonged outage, then all your stuff's going to be down.

 

If you have it with four separate providers, if one of those goes down, then you're going to be okay. If email goes down, it's not going to knock out the website. The website goes down, it's not going to knock out email. Simple step that most people don't do. Does that make sense? Let's talk about domain names. Domain names cost 20 bucks a year, [00:04:00] something like that. Almost nothing. But, they are the foundational component of your online business. Everything sits on top of the domain name. Your email, your brand, your SEO rankings, your customers know your domain name. Every single thing in your business, your online business, is tied back to the domain name.

 

The problem is, it costs 20 bucks a year or whatever it is, 30 bucks a year. No one really gives it any attention. There's a disproportionate amount of risk associated with a domain name. It's doing [00:04:30] a disproportionate amount of things in your business, and you're not giving it much attention. Some simple steps to protect your domain name are going to go a long way. Whois protection for your domain, yeah, it's going to cost you 10 bucks a year or something like that, but it's going to give you a base level of protection.

 

Having the domain name in the right corporate entity's name is really important. We deal with a lot of businesses, seven and eight figure businesses, and there have been problems selling businesses because one partner who doesn't want to sell [00:05:00] owns the domain name, it's technically in their name. The other partner wants to sell. It's not actually in the business name. It's critical that your domain name is owned by the right entity. It's a simple step, but when you're registering a domain name at 3:00 A.M. in the morning, it's something you aren't really thinking about.

 

Then the last one is two factor authentication on your domain name. This is especially important for people in this scene who work on public wifi, unencrypted wifi, coffee shops, places where people can be looking over your shoulder. It's crazy that some people are still not using [00:05:30] two factor authentication. For domain registration, domain registrar, we use Namecheap. It is cheap, it's good quality, and they support two factor authentication. If your current registrar doesn't support two factor authentication, it's probably worth looking at moving. Does that make sense?

 

Let's talk about DNS hosting. Most people don't think about this either because it's one of those underlying tech things that just happens. It's part of web hosting of something. That stuff. Just like your domain name, DNS hosting is a foundational component of making everything work. [00:06:00] It makes your online assets work. Basically converts internet addresses into IP addresses. Often, when you see people talk about ... You guys have seen it. There's a lot of talk about website speed and 0.1% of a second is so much conversion, all this sort of nonsense. People talk about moving web hosting provider, and the website goes much faster. A lot of the time, that's because they've moved DNS hosting. The DNS hosting actually plays a really important role in website speed and reliability, and again, [00:06:30] if you're using Bluehost or HostGator or some other shitty host for a few bucks a month, their DNS hosting sucks. It's slow, it's unreliable, so ultimately that means that your website's going to be slow and unreliable.

 

The provider we use for DNS hosting, we use Cloudflare. It's actually free. It's one of the top 10 fastest providers, DNS providers in the world. It does a whole bunch of other stuff, website acceleration, security, and some other things that just make your website faster and better and more secure. Check it out. If you can't use Cloudflare then it's worth checking [00:07:00] out Amazon DNS, that would be my second choice. Pretty simple stuff. You do those few things, they're going to remove a lot of risk around the business. Cloudflare will protect your website from a lot of hack attempts and a lot of rubbish traffic that's hitting it, and it's free.

 

Few more things. Downtime costs money. Almost all of us are in the online business game. Every second the website's down effectively costs money. The downtime actually literally can cost you money. It makes sense to pay a few bucks a month [00:07:30] for uptime monitoring, but most people aren't doing it. We use Pingdom.com. We use Uptime Robot as well, so we have two different ... We do a lot of hosting, so we have hosting environments that need to be monitored. If those environments go down, I get an SMS, our team gets an SMS, and we can do something about it. Again, the last thing you want to do is get up in the morning, check your web stats, and see that you haven't made any money over night because the website's been down for 12 hours. Again, something that costs you five or 10 bucks a month [00:08:00] removes a lot of risk around losing income, things not working. Does that make sense?

 

Some other simple ones. Particularly because we're all working in coffee shops and public wifi and someone else's network, VPN, which I'm sure you all probably already know about but a lot of you won't be using. There's a plug-in for Chrome that I use, HTTPS Everywhere, which'll force the traffic over a secure connection if the website supports it. It's a very easy way to add an extra layer of security to what you're doing. OpenDNS, [00:08:30] so using OpenDNS serves for the DNS service settings on your computer is a really easy way to prevent against low-level attacks. It'll filter out a lot of websites that have been hacked or trying to do dodgy things.

 

Then the Littlesnitch Network Monitor, it's a great little tool. I think it's paid, but it's not much. It'll tell you exactly what's happening on the network connection on your computer, but the other benefit is when you're on a Skype call, when you need to make an important call and the internet's unreliable, it'll tell you what's using the bandwidth, what's using the internet connection so you can turn it off. It's a really handy [00:09:00] little tool as well.

 

I don't have to tell you guys, but I do see it all the time, when clients send us passwords, using the same password on everything. A password manager makes it easy not to do that. If you're not using a password manager, it's worth checking out. 1Password or Lastpass. Then giving staff their own accounts for stuff. It's all pretty straightforward stuff, but I guarantee you, there's some people in this room who are not doing some of it. Does that all make sense? It's all good? All right. I feel like I'm ranting a bit, but you'd be surprised. We get clients [00:09:30] coming to us every month with problems related to not doing these things.

 

Backups is a huge one. There's kind of, well, in a digital business, in an online business, a disproportionate amount of the business value is tied up in digital assets. Digital assets are effectively the business value. Then there's also this kind of psychology around, "It doesn't matter. It's not front of mind. I'll be fine." This is the expectation that [00:10:00] nothing's going to go wrong, but the reality's very different.

 

Laptops break, you drop a laptop, you drop a phone, it gets wet, cloud services go offline, things break, Amazon goes down. Data loss is going to happen. It's inevitable. It's better to have the attitude that it is going to happen and prepare for it and have your ass covered, as opposed to sticking your head in the sand, shit hits the fan, drop the laptop, you lose important data, something goes down, things are broken, and you lose money, ultimately.

 

Some [00:10:30] simple rules to live by. Expect that it's going to happen and prepare for it. Pretty straightforward. That simple change in mindset will make a big difference. It'll uncover a lot of risk that you're carrying around now around data and where the value is in your business. Second one, don't trust anyone with your backups. It's basically the data is, those digital assets are the value of the business. You wouldn't go handing out your internet banking details, so I wouldn't go handing out backups, access to backups, just [00:11:00] to anybody. Don't trust anyone with your backups. It really is, that data really is the value of your business.

 

Two independent backups where possible. There's a saying that two is one and one is none when it comes to backups. One backup is probably not going to be enough, because Murphy's law, when you go to use the backup, it's likely it's going to be missing data, something's going to be wrong, doesn't work properly, there'll be some issue. If you have two backups, there's going to be overlap. If there's a gap in one, it's more than likely, the other one's covering [00:11:30] that gap. Important that really, aim for a minimum of two.

 

Backups must be automated with monitoring. Manual backups don't count, because that needs you to do it. Again, don't trust the monitoring, check them regularly. I check our backups, depending where the backup is, weekly or monthly when I do our finances. It's that important to me.

 

This is basically the backup strategy we have in our business. I do a lot of WordPress stuff, like probably most of you. We have recently moved from VaultPress, VaultPress is a great backup [00:12:00] solution, but we actually discovered it has huge gaps. We actually moved to Blogvault, which is a cheaper solution, and it actually tells us what it's not backing up, which is great. Then we use WPEngine. We actually spend five figures a year on WPEngine, and they do backups as well. We have the Blogvault on every instance, because I don't trust WPEngine.

 

On a cloud service, you're probably not going to have that option to back stuff up. We found a tool called mover.io, which is fantastic. It will back stuff up to Dropbox. [00:12:30] It's a cheap tool, but it will back things up like Shopify websites, anything you have FTP access to or web access to, you can back up. It's a great tool. Email's an important one. There's a lot of value stored in email. I don't know how many times a day I get a Gmail and search for stuff, so we use Backupify. It'll back up personal Gmail accounts and Google apps accounts, and it also backs up Google Docs.

 

What else we got? PC Backup, Crashplan and Dropbox, and we have the extended Dropbox History, I think it's 40 bucks a year. The bottom one we [00:13:00] started doing recently. We have UPS Power protection with solar panels for our staff in the Philippines, because they're getting a lot of power outages, and that was causing problems with the staff were offline for the day. Also, they were losing data because things were, the power quality was so bad.

 

It's pretty cheap. It's a few hundred bucks a year. Sorry, a few hundred bucks to get them a UPS and a solar panel. Let's talk about money. All businesses effectively run on money in some way, shape, or form. Right? Makes sense? [00:13:30] It kind of follows that if you don't understand money, then you don't really understand business. My question is, there's a lot of business owners in the room. Who here can click a button, within a few clicks, produce a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet accurate to within one to two weeks? It's not many people.

 

Then, if you can't produce these reports, these financial statements, how do you really manage your business? How do you know how well it's doing? This is a very common problem, particularly for startup business owners. [00:14:00] Things like running personal and business accounts together. Big mistake long term. We've got simple finance rules. I actually talked about these at the first [DC 00:14:14] Dynamite Circle Bangkok Conference in 2012, and I still have friends today coming to me and saying, "Hey, that thing you talked about, I actually went and did it." Three years later, four years later.

 

Simple stuff, common sense, but I guarantee [00:14:30] a lot of people are making these mistakes. Running your personal business finances through the same accounts, even if you're not incorporated it's a crazy thing to do, because it's very hard to manage the business, see how well it's doing if you're treating it like your personal piggy bank, which some people do. We just talked about the profit and loss and the balance sheet. Being 100% legal and tax compliant, this is a funny one, because we're in Asia. We're traveling. We're not at home. A number of people I talk to are like, "Not there. They're not going to get me, so that's fine. [00:15:00] I'll just leave those debts. I'll just leave my tax returns for five years."

 

The thing is, the IRS, the [HEO 00:15:06] in Australia, those tax agencies, they're all government-funded debt collectors. Their job is to get their money from you no matter what. What you'll find if that's your attitude, head in the sand, that you'll go back home, five years of tax returns, you lodge them, they come looking for five years' worth of money and interest. It's better to be legal and tax compliant today and take a little bit of pain right now than sit on [00:15:30] your hands and ignore it and then it comes and bites you on the ass in years to come. I've made this mistake. I've had $80,000 bills come from the ATO when I was in my early 20's. It's not fun, so don't make the mistakes I've made. Do something about it today, and really, once you've got a little bit of momentum, and once you're making a little bit of money, you really should incorporate. Running business as yourself, as you as the entity, opens you up to a lot of risk that you don't see, and a lot of potential problems.

 

The sooner you incorporate, the better. Then the bookkeeping, you shouldn't [00:16:00] really be doing bookkeeping. It's basic data entry. You should have a bookkeeper. Someone should be doing it for you. In terms of reading financial reports, if you can't check all these boxes, if you don't know what some of these terms mean, then you probably need to do some work and do some learning. It's funny. The only person I've ever seen in the blogosphere or in the online space talk about this is Andrew Youderian on his eCommerceFuel blog. He has two articles that are fantastic. If you don't know what a profit and loss statement is or a balance sheet is, that's probably a good place to start.

 

[00:16:30] He's the only person I've seen dig into these, which is crazy because there's millions of articles on SEO and AdWords and everything else, but again, if we come back to the point that the business runs on money, it's important that we understand money and how it works, right? Some important ones here. The difference between a cash and accrual business, which will become increasingly important if you're dealing with staff, dealing with payment terms, dealing with inventory. That's a very important thing to understand, the difference between the two.

 

Knowing that the trends are more important than the individual numbers [00:17:00] and whether or not you're tracking the trend, is it trending up or down? That's really important. Normal growth is good. Controlled growth is great. Uncontrolled, explosive growth can kill a business. That's ultimately what happened to our ecommerce business. We grew like crazy. It was completely uncontrolled. We grew from four to 25 staff in a very short period of time. we were just kids. All the sudden, we had all this money in the bank account, and it was just crazy. It was out of control.

 

Ultimately, the business ran out of cash, [00:17:30] because we didn't know some of these things. We had uncontrolled, explosive growth. That can be very dangerous. Keeping a personal net worth spreadsheet can be very powerful. Ultimately, we're all in this to grow our own personal net worth. Tracking your own net worth can be a really good way to see how you're doing overall in the big picture. Then the last one, not all accountants are created equal, so be careful who you take business advice from, because a tax accountant is more like a tax lawyer and doesn't necessarily, [00:18:00] is not really necessarily in a position to give you good business advice.

 

Some resources for you. I've talked about Andrew's [inaudible 00:18:08] articles there, so that would be a good place to start if you're not familiar with some of these things. Then their book Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs is probably the next step. It's well worth the read. Those are some of the tools we use. We use Zapier to connect all sorts of stuff to our accounting system, so we have multiple things taking the money off customers online, and we use Zapier to push [00:18:30] it into Xero. Xero's our cloud accounting system. That's section one.

 

Section two, quick wins. I'll go through these quickly. These are more ecommerce focused, but there is some that apply to all businesses. The first one is understanding funnels. We do a lot of work with clients around particular tools. The question we get a lot of the time in our workshops is, "I heard this tool is great. Should I be using Facebook ads? Should I be using this or that?" The underlying problem there, really, is that they don't understand how a marketing funnel works.

 

[00:19:00] This is a marketing funnel with a terrible slide. It's almost like clip art, but hopefully it gives you the idea. You might have heard the terms top of funnel, bottom of funnel, and it refers to this. At the top of the funnel, customers are not aware of us. They're not aware of your business, the products and services or the solutions you offer. They might not be aware that the have a problem. In the middle, they have little or no active demand. They have some sort of awareness. They had a tiny bit of demand, maybe, but they really have no pressure [00:19:30] to change or there's no ... There's too much friction to change. Then at the bottom of the funnel, they have active demand. They're actively seeking to buy it, to solve the problem, to do something about it.

 

Then, for us, as business owners, this is really where our focus should be. At the top of the funnel, we need to be creating awareness of their problems and the solutions we offer. In the middle, we've got to create, reignite, and increase the demand, remove the friction, or increase the pressure to buy. You've probably seen a lot of stuff around [00:20:00] discounts, time-based discounts, and pressure and things like that. That's what that's all about.

 

Then at the bottom of the funnel, we've got to capture that demand somehow, filter it, and qualify. Just understanding this alone enables you to pick the right tools. Then it comes back to, if you're an ecommerce business, there's really three places where the active demand is. Google, eBay, and Amazon. Then there's other places where there might be active demand, YouTube, Facebook, second tier shopping channels, Pinterest, Etsy, all those sort of places. [00:20:30] The point I want to make is, if you understand how the marketing funnel works, then you're much better places to choose the right tool and choose the right channel that works for you.

 

That should eliminate all the questions you have around, "What, do I use Facebook ads, do I not use Facebook ads?" If you can understand where your customers are at, or where the bulk of your customers or prospects are at, that'll solve that problem.

 

This is really an ecommerce-specific one. I spoke at Anton's DSL, his first Drop Ship Lifestyle Conference. I shared this [00:21:00] quick win, and a few months after that, I had one of the attendees who runs a seven-figure ecommerce business tell me he did it, and he saw a 10% increase in revenue. This is a tiny little change, and if you think 10% on seven-figure business, that's a lot of money. Probably, maybe an hour's worth of work. The action step is to add two words to the title tags on product pages. Buy [00:21:30] and online.

Why we do it? It comes back to the funnel. When people are ready to buy, when they have that active demand, they go to Google and they type in "But something online," or some variation of that. Adding those words to the title tag, the SEO title tag, can make a huge difference. It makes us rank higher for those terms, and it gets us better quality visitors. What I mean is, ti look something like this.

 

We have a before, this is Dan and Ian's business from the [inaudible 00:21:54] NBA before they sold it. We have a before example for litter box hiders, and [00:22:00] then we have some after examples. Ideally, we want to be the middle one, so buy litter box hiders online. That'll make a huge difference. Some ecommerce platforms has a limitation where you can't do that. In that case, you'd add the buy online after it. This simple change for that one guy, more than $100,000 in revenue per annum.

Here's another example, massage tables. It's pretty simple, again, add the bio line to the end of it. Most of the time, you can do this manually. If you only have a handful of products or you can export to [inaudible 00:22:30] do some [00:22:30] find, replace there on Excel, or there might be an SEO plugin that will allow you to template it. That's a quick and easy one for ecommerce. Also, Google Shopping optimization, so you might have seen this. I'll go through it quickly, because I know a lot of you guys aren't in the ecommerce space.

 

Probably the biggest thing, the biggest way to optimize your Google shopping campaigns is to add negative keywords. I actually have, if you go to my website, [inaudible 00:22:52] ecommerce.com, sign up for the auto responder, one of the modules in there has a video in there that shows you exactly how to do it. Often, that can double the profitability [00:23:00] of those campaigns very quickly and easily.

 

Rules to live by. Don't ask, don't get. My old business partner used to say this all the time. He was a strange man. He was a little Napoleon type character, but he used to say, "Don't ask, don't get," all the time. It used to drive me nuts. It ended up sticking, and now it's one of the rules I live by. Many providers will give you a discount, will give you something, just by asking. Don't ask, don't get. Places like Shopify, you give them a call, they'll give [00:23:30] you a discount. We had one of our [proto 00:23:33] ecommerce blueprint members call Shopify, and he got a $2,000 a year discount, a 0.01% reduction in your credit card processing rate on $1 million a year is $10 grand. Just but making a few quick calls, you can get these sort of discounts.

 

There's probably places in your business where you're overpaying right now. You might have a monthly service you can change to yearly and save 20%, simple things like that. This rule, Don't ask, don't get, if you live by it, make [00:24:00] it a habit, put it in your calendar every three months to review stuff and ask for discounts, can be really, really easy way to save a lot of money very simple.

 

Money meta descriptions. Meta descriptions matter. If you don't know what a meta description is, it's the little blurb that appears in the Google search results when the search results come up. It's funny because in the AdWords space, we do a lot of AdWords, and if you go to an AdWords blog or any AdWords website, there's all this talk about CTR or click through rate. Small, tiny tweaks you can make to an AdWords ad [00:24:30] that will double the click through rate. That means twice the traffic.

 

Something as simple as swapping the top and bottom lines in an AdWords ad can double the click through rate. That's twice the traffic from that ad. In the SEO space, nobody talks about this, which is really strange because there's so much talk about rankings, but to actually get the traffic some Google, from organic search, you actually have to rank and get the click. Actually, ranking's only half the job. I want to talk about meta descriptions. Small, [00:25:00] little tweaks and changes can make a massive difference. A lot of you guys, no matter what website you're running, there are probably problems with your meta descriptions or things you can change that are going to make a big difference.

 

Your homepage is a really good one. It's probably worth writing a note to go and check your homepage and see what the meta description says. That's probably the thing that's going to get the most mileage in the Google search results, so it's going to give you a lot of leverage. Some quick ones. When the meta description is not set, Google just pulls a random blurb from [00:25:30] the webpage, which often doesn't really make sense or doesn't entice the click.

 

We have some super rules. If you follow these rules, it will make quite a bit of difference over time to your traffic hitting your website. Every page on your website needs a unique meta description because every page should be unique. If it's not unique, then why does it exist? Why is it live? Use capitals at the start of important words, it's an easy one. Use capital letters strategically. You can't really use capital letters in an AdWords ad, but you can use them in your meta descriptions. Really [00:26:00] simple way to stand out amongst competitors.

 

Sell the sizzle. It's like a mini-sales letter. What you're selling is the click, not necessarily the product. You need to give people a reason to click you over the competitors. Remember, simple things like adding your phone number into the meta description can make a huge difference. It's not just in the search results that meta descriptions show up. They show up on social a swell. Often you'll see stuff shared on Facebook that doesn't have a meta description set. It doesn't really have any information to entice you to click through.

 

Here's an example of what I [00:26:30] mean. This is natural stacks. This has actually been fixed and now they're following our template. The top is the before example, when we took this screenshot for a vitamin D product. You can see the meta description basically tells us what vitamin D basically is. Again, coming back to our sales funnel, marketing funnel, if I'm searching for vitamin D, I already know what it is. I want vitamin D. I don't need to be told what it does or what it is. Rewriting the meta description for the second example, that it's high potency, [00:27:00] vitamin D3 capsules with certified organic oil, coconut oil to boost absorption. Buy online with fast, insured nationwide shipping.

 

Making that small change will make a huge difference to organic traffic. If you think about, it you're competing with 10 other people, 15 other people in their search results. You need to give them a reason to click. If you do this on your home page, small little tweak. It'll make a big difference. You see there, that a lot of the important words have capitals at the start? That's a really easy way to make these work better and make them stand out.

 

[00:27:30] Some tolls you can use to see what your meta descriptions currently look like, ScreaMING Frog SEO Spider, which is a crazy name but it's free for up to 500 URLs. On most small websites, that's fine. Xenu Link Sleuth is another good one. Just doing this search in Google, this is a really powerful one. If I'm talking with someone on the phone and they want to buy stuff from us, I'll do this search while they're on the phone and it'll tell me a lot about their website.

 

The site, domain.com search, there's an example. We'll do the moderncatdesigns.com again, [inaudible 00:27:59]'s website. [00:28:00] These are the search results. I don't know how easy that is to read. Some things we want to pay attention to, this will show us all the pages Google sees on the website for that particular domain. You can see there it gives us the number of pages indexed. It should roughly match what's on the website or very closely.

 

You can see there, it shows us the title tags and the meta description. You see immediately there's a problem there, because modern cab design is repeated in that title tag. There's a simple little mistake that will make a big difference to that business over [00:28:30] time. It will hurt it quite a lot. Again, we have the meta description, meta description's not set.

 

Here's basically our checklist, what we're looking for when we do that search. Again, if you did that search on your website, you might find that there are some problems or some easy wins there. All righty, got a few more slides. Email, I won't get into this too much, but email's a special case because it can both boost traffic and conversion. Most people aren't really doing it, so my recommend is just to do it consistently. I even struggle with [00:29:00] this. Most people struggle with this. It's just easy to forget, but it's hugely powerful.

 

8020 conversion optimization, traffic is one part of doing stuff online. Actually converting the visitor is another one. These are kind of the tools and hacks we use to boost conversions. We're not talking about changing button colors. We're talking about big improvements, like 50%, 100% improvements. So a large chat with proactive chat. That's my best tool out any tool you can use for conversion optimization, that's the best one. You all know [00:29:30] what live chat is. Most live chat tools have a proactive chat where they can start a conversation with the visitor.

 

[Zocom 00:29:36] is a good place to start. [Zeropim 00:29:40]. It's cheap and I think it's free for 30 days, and it hooks up to your smartphone. Particularly if you're starting out, you don't really want to be sitting in front of the computer all day, but some people do. If you have [Zeropim 00:29:49] on your phone, you can have the live chat conversations on there as well. It's a really good way to get insights, to find problems in the website, or low-hanging fruit that you can fix that will help boost that conversion.

 

[00:30:00] Some other good ones. Crazy [egg 00:30:02] and lucky orange are fantastic tools in terms of seeing what's going on with the website. Lucky orange will actually show you videos of visitors on the website. It's really powerful. The bottom one, ditch the PayPal express buttons. Anything that forces the customer through PayPal before your checkout can be a problem, because it's going to break. People don't like PayPal. People forget their PayPal logins, there's some sort of problems. The PayPal website runs slow as hell sometimes.

 

I would use Stripe instead of PayPal. [00:30:30] Generally where the customers are given an option between Stripe and PayPal, we see a 60/40 or 70/30 split in favor of Stripe, so that's definitely an easy win there if you only have PayPal.

I did have a whole bunch of mental models and frameworks, but I'm just going to give you one because we're limited on time. A lot of newbies and [inaudible 00:30:50], which I'm sure there's many of you in this room, don't really understand the fundamentals of making money in a business. There's a simple model that I learnt early [00:31:00] on that can make or break a business. It's this.

 

This is from my friend Lisa's book. It's basically the five ways to make money in a business. Get more leads, prove the conversion rate, increase the average transaction size, get more transactions, or reduce the cost. Now, in a brand new business, you really need to move left to right on that, so you need to get some leads and start doing stuff. For an established business, when someone's looking at growing it, there's [00:31:30] still a tendency to go left to right on that diagram, but what you'll find if you've been running for a few years and you have momentum and traction, if you go right to left on that diagram, you'll find some really easy, low-hanging fruit.

 

We actually built, the model we used to work with clients is based on this. You see there, leads equals traffic. We've got conversion rate. Trust in relationship, and technology and systems. When we work with small business clients, bricks and mortar clients, this is typically the model we give them to learn and understand. [00:32:00] We start at the bottom. Business fundamentals, and then move up from there.

All right, that's it. I'm done.

Speaker 2: All right, ladies and gentlemen, come on! Excellent.

 

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