What to do next.....

[Murray]

Sure, I mean I don't want to go into the absolute specifics because competition becomes more and more fierce each week. But I'm happy to discuss ecommerce in general and the logistics behind it all, which are not easy! We have some big plans for the short to medium term, too, with a new website going live at the end of February.

How did you establish it into doing so well? just SEO and rankings or did you do anything special promotional wise? work with bloggers, social media campaigns etc

Thanks

 

[donton]

How did you establish it into doing so well? just SEO and rankings or did you do anything special promotional wise? work with bloggers, social media campaigns etc

Thanks

I'm a sucker for scaling stuff. SEO is great but it's pretty hard to scale, really you can only put a timeframe on SEO if you're doing dodgy stuff - and that'll wind up with Google penalising you at some point. If you play everything by the book, it's a case of 'how long is a piece of string?' until you can hope to attribute scalable growth to favourable search rankings.

I invested a lot of time and money into PPC - I spent a long time learning everything I possibly could about AdWords and Bing Ads (mainly search ads and shopping ads.) I spent two years building out huge campaigns, with only one or two keywords per ad group. I laser targeted everything, I spent hundreds/thousands of hours on it, but it gave me ultimate control. And with the flip of a switch, I could scale in a big way by increasing budget etc.

I used to spend hours looking over search terms that had triggered our ads so I could add negative keywords to chop down our spend. I optimised everything on a continuous basis. Lots of people say AdWords is expensive etc, but if you really put the hours in, it does pay. I like PPC because it's scalable, and ultimately because I took time to understand how it works. About 18 months ago I hired Wordstream (PPC agency) to help me with things, and that does save me a lot of time nowadays - but I still spend 3-4 full days per month poking around in the account.

We also run PPC ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter - and spend a lot on retargeting via AdRoll.

Paid traffic gives me a lot of control - and the fact I'm paying for it means I'm constantly reviewing and tweaking our setup because I know there's always some more savings to be made, and CPAs to be reduced.

Email marketing also plays a big role - we send regular offers and deals to past customers, and we also have a popup that harvests email addresses on our website. Nothing too groundbreaking there really! I watched a few email marketing workshops and people always said you had to build a bond with your customers by offering them content with value. My experience has been the opposite - give your customers a lot of [good] deals and they go crazy for them. Give them interesting content and open rates plummet - they're just not interested. 99% of our emails now are sales emails, and that approach works for us.

I view any traffic and conversions that we get from SEO/social media as a bonus. We've done some PR campaigns in the past and we do a lot of outreach to bloggers and influencers, but the biggest source of traffic is PPC and email marketing. We have worked with celebs too, and will continue to do so, but it's hard to attribute a value to the results, and it's often very expensive to setup in the first place.

Everyone has a different opinion/experience, but for me, PPC is where it's at without a doubt!

 

[martin-s]

I invested a lot of time and money into PPC

Have you tried Gmail Ads? Sound like they might be a good fit for your PPC knowledge and existing email approach.

 

[donton]

Have you tried Gmail Ads? Sound like they might be a good fit for your PPC knowledge and existing email approach.

Wordstream have run some for me, but it's not something I've ever followed up on. Thank you for the suggestion, I will pop my head in now and have a look and see how far they got with them

 

[ian]

Shopify Plus is an enterprise solution for companies who don't want their own in house CMS developers.

Oh of course, I just meant I've always seen it as a small business platform, but you are right, there are some big companies using it (or supporting it I guess). When an operation reaches a certain size, usually you have employees or agencies to take away the burden and stress of operating your own in-house ecommerce solution, but that may only kick in at £20million turnover or more (figure plucked from the air).

When I launched my ecommerce business in 2007 it was on my own platform, and have stuck with it ever since, but I have to admit that with everything else operating a business requires, keeping up to date was impossible and now it operates as a 'make do' solution. I had considered switching platform, but not for this operation.

PPC can work very well for a business, but for anyone with basic level of understanding, again it is hard to keep up, as they change it so often, and have included so many options! No one said running a business is easy though

 

[Edwin]

I guess the good thing about PPC is you're not beholden to the Google algorithm. So long as you can afford to buy traffic, traffic will flow.

Has anyone experimented with Facebook ads for ecommerce? A friend buys tons of them, but that's for driving traffic to a content site...

 

[donton]

I guess the good thing about PPC is you're not beholden to the Google algorithm. So long as you can afford to buy traffic, traffic will flow.

Has anyone experimented with Facebook ads for ecommerce? A friend buys tons of them, but that's for driving traffic to a content site...

We use Facebook extensively - we hook it up to dynamic email lists in Klaviyo (email platform). We can retarget people on Facebook based on how recently they ordered with us, how much they spent, how many times they've ordered, etc. It's good because we know who needs to be re-engaged and who doesn't. We work with dynamic Facebook ads displaying items from our central product feed. We see very low CPAs this way.

We can also use lookalike audiences, derived from the profiles of the people who have purchased from us. We can also do things like plain old cart abandon retargeting - and general retargeting of anyone who may have browsed our site at some point.

We also use Facebook to drive email signups on our list, and for brand awareness. For these two activities it's not particularly cheap or cost effective.

There are so many different ways in which Facebook ads can be used for an ecommerce site, it's pretty mind boggling. Just like AdWords though, you have to test test test for results before scaling gradually.

 

[Edwin]

Wow, the retargeting sounds like a really clever way of getting back in front of your audience to push the message of your email marketing campaigns through a different channel. Thanks for being so forthcoming about your tactics!

 

[martin-s]

Thank you for the suggestion, I will pop my head in now and have a look and see how far they got with them

We're getting click through (open) rates of 40% on some of the stuff we're running. At about 10 pence a time.

I should add for people who don't already know, that you pay on the click when people open your ad (read the 'email'). Not for the actual clicks out to your website.

Edit: they're also a great way of testing email subject lines. We just hit a 65% open rate on one test.

 

[Edwin]

BTW if you don't feel you have to worrry about the reputational risk, it seems more and more "mainstream" firms are buying ad space on adult sites because the inventory is so massive and so cheap.

 

[martin-s]

BTW if you don't feel you have to worrry about the reputational risk, it seems more and more "mainstream" firms are buying ad space on adult sites because the inventory is so massive and so cheap.

And you know that how?

 

[Edwin]

And you know that how?

Through a friend. Yes, really! He always likes to stay ahead of the curve on web promotion stuff because he buys so much ad space.

 

[findtim]

i threw my job away 17 years ago, but i spent the last year creating an online income first, it only made @ 20% of my job when i quit but went far above very quickly with fulltime effort.
some really good advice in this thread, yes you end up working more then 40 hours but if your out of town mate is coming to visit then golf is on the cards without feeling guilty

i'd definately do consulting if i was you, then get a good domain that is about something you know BACK THE FRONT and produce content, then move into online courses for your knowledge. you'll make more money and sustainable then domaining, knowledge IS money now and once your target market was 50klms around you, now its all 7.4 billion people in the world.

$100 isn't a lot of money to pay for a course, x 10,000 people is a million bucks, sounds to easy, divide that by england, france, germany, den/bel/neth/swed/fin/nor/ , spain/port, italy, usa, canada, australia/nz, japan/asia, ( pick your own 10) then its only 1000 per area !

 

[Edwin]

$100 isn't a lot of money to pay for a course, x 10,000 people is a million bucks, sounds to easy, divide that by england, france, germany, den/bel/neth/swed/fin/nor/ , spain/port, italy, usa, canada, australia/nz, japan/asia, ( pick your own 10) then its only 1000 per area !

And of course if $100,000 sounds like a decent enough amount, it's 10x easier still!

No, but seriously, that's some good advice there. A lot of people are making money from courses and associated materials, from paid-for PDFs to video tutorials, "enhanced tutoring", private forums, etc.

 

[findtim]

search ed dale and troy dean, just some aussies doing well

also wordpress have some great online course plugins to use, all with guidelines and one off or recurring payment systems for your students.

the secret seems to be, give give give , make an offer......

disclosure: i don't do it, my business is creating directories.

tim

 

[Edwin]

This blog has a lot of interesting ideas (my advice: skip over everything that looks like an SEO "short cut" or a puff piece for a particular tool or service - but the ideas stuff has some real gems in it)
http://www.viperchill.com/

Old but may still be of some interest if you're going down the SEO route. You just have to apply common sense to ignore the stuff that's clearly outdated now.
https://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_promotion/3810495.htm

 

[martin-s]

http://www.viperchill.com/

Agreed - highly rated by me too. Or find some inspiration on his new site, gaps.com

 

[dog]

Facebook Fraud

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Facebook streaming numbers plummet 94% after Nielsen recalibration
https://mumbrella.com.au/facebook-streaming-numbers-plummet-recalibration-423919
https://mumbrella.com.au/facebook-streaming-numbers-plummet-recalibration-423919

 

[Edwin]

It's a bit clickbaity to call it fraud. They were wrong because they calculated them from an incorrect stance. But fraud implies deliberate intent. Looks much more like good old-fashioned human stupidity...

 

[dog]

It's not clickbait. Vertasium does high quality science videos.

Calculate incorrectly?