Internet Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce

Rabu, 25 Januari 2017

- [alison] hello everybody, and welcometo "marketing your new online store." if you're just launching your onlinestorefront, i'm sure you're chomping at the bit to start making sales, and we'regoing to talk about the various ways you can use digital marketing to do just that.in today's webinar, we'll start by meeting our digital marketing experts. then we'llquickly go over each marketing channel so you'll have a foundational understandingof what we mean when we refer to things like seo, ppc feeds, and then eachspecialist will share tips for using each channel effectively. and last but notleast, we'll answer your questions. so go ahead and start typing those questionsinto the q&a box in the webinar software.

we're going to have a lengthy q&a at theend of the webinar, but we might get a chance to answer some questionsduring the presentation as well. so let's start by meeting the webinarteam. hello again, my name is alison, and i'm going to moderate today's webinar.i'm a search marketing manager here at volusion, and i'm passionate aboutstrategy, content, and helping small to medium businesses outwit largercorporations. i'm originally from central california, but i've been in texasfor over eight years now and started spontaneously saying "ya'll" a few yearsago. so it's a done deal, i'm a texan. - [sean] it wasn't spontaneous at all.it's been a long time coming. howdy,

everybody. my name is sean, and i'mthe paid search specialist for today. i've been at volusion for four years. i'veworked specifically with shopping feeds and product listing ads for the last two.i'm certified in all things google, adwords, analytics, and shopping.and i'm a big fan about using data-driven marketing automationstrategies to help online businesses. when i'm not behind my twomonitors at work, i'll be out hiking around in the greenbeltshere in austin, texas. - [kavi] hey, i'm kavi. i'm one of theseo specialists here at volusion. my background is actually in publishing,but a few years ago, i took my writing

skills and turned those plus my love ofdata into a career in digital marketing. and yes, you are reading thatlast bullet point correctly. i've never seen "jaws,""the shining," or "groundhog day." - [samantha] and i'm samantha. i am an seospecialist and one of the resident social media gurus here at volusion. i recentlyjust moved to texas from long island, new york, and i have about fouryears working in social media, seo, and marketing. i've had experience dealingwith clients in a multitude industries from fashion to industrial fasteners.oh, and a fun fact, i hate cilantro. apparently, they say it's a genetic thing.

- [alison] interesting. all right. so nowthat we've met our team of experts, let's talk about the different marketingchannels. we can start with the text ads that often appear on the right-handside and on the top of search results. - [sean] alison, that's going to be me.so pay-per-click ads are going to be those hyperlinked text ads that appears at thetop or the side of search result pages, as you can see in the highlighted boxto the right here. these ads are the most ubiquitous of the web, and if you haven'tclicked on them, you've definitely seen them before. these are going to be reallyshort ads with only two lines of text and use targeted keywords to drive reallyqualified traffic to your store. keywords

are words and phrases that match yourads to the terms people are searching for. and from this example, you'll see thatwe're searching for telescopes, and the ad experience matches that. you're only goingto be paying for ads when someone clicks onto it and visits your website, ratherthan just having to pay a set rate. and lastly, ppc is a great marketingtechnique to oust your competition quickly because your ads can veryquickly appear on the front page. - [kavi] all right. and seo stands forsearch engine optimization. it's a set of strategies that can affect the organic orunpaid results that make up the majority of your average search results page. youcan see where those organic results begin

for our telescope example here inside thisgreen box. so unlike ppc or shopping feeds, seo is a slow and steadyprocess. results don't happen overnight. best practices are always changing. butwhen results do appear, they can provide a lasting value long after you've startedyour seo campaign. so by performing a few technical changes to your website andfeaturing fresh, compelling content on your landing pages, you can help thesearch engines recognize what each page is about and why it should be consideredworthy of appearing in the search results. one thing to keep in mind, this is acommon misconception that a lot of people have starting out with seo. seo is notabout tricking or gaming the search

engines into ranking your site higherthan a competitor's. it's about working along with the search engines'sophisticated algorithms to increase your site's traffic and revenue. - [sean] excellent. moving away fromorganic and back to paid search for just a moment, shopping feeds, or data feeds asi'll be calling them, are image-based ads that appear at the top or right-hand sideof the search result pages. because they have an image, they can really stand out,especially on mobile devices, and do a great job of showing off your products.these ads are pretty simple and only provide the product image, the producttitle, its price, and your domain name.

ppc, the text ads we just saw, canadvertise services or locations, like plumbers in your areas or restaurantsnearby. shopping feeds are a little bit different because they're going to be anecommerce-first type of advertising. that means they can only show products. lastly,these ads are not keyword based like ppc, so you don't have to research anykeywords or do much extra work. instead, your ads are going to beserved to clients based on google matching your products with search terms. - [samantha] the last marketing tool we'regoing to be discussing is social media. and social media doesn't have its ownplace in the search results, but it

definitely has a special place in theconsumer's heart. the whole idea of social media is to make your customers love youby showing them how valuable they are. this mutual respect fosters trust betweenthe customer and the brand, which is why about 81% of small businesses use socialmedia. when you're a small business, customer relations and business reputationon social media are very important. in fact, shoppers are more likely to makea purchase after reading something they saw on social media. so you wantto make sure that you're representing yourself well. when it comes down to it,social media is an avenue for promotion, but it's also an effective customerservice tool and a great way for brands

to get noticed. it does not discriminateby the size of your business. small and large brands both havea chance for success on social media. oh, and as a bonus, it allows youto direct people to your online store. - [alison] excellent. all right. so let'stalk about the strategies and tactics you can use today to start marketing youronline store. we've broken each channel into three parts: overview, tips, andtakeaways. we'll also be providing you with some resources. but beforewe do just that, i want to give you some homework for tonight. if you doone thing today, please install google analytics on your store. this way you canbegin gathering data immediately and track

your store's performance over time.volusion offers some easy do-it-yourself instructions linked here, and the volusiontech support team can certainly assist you with this. but trust me, it's literallycopy and pasting. so you can do it, and it's free. but if this is toointimidating, we also offer an implementation service. but again, it'scopy and pasting. it's free. i promise you, you can do it on your own, which isgreat, because the data google analytics provides is priceless. you'll learneverything from visitor demographics and behavior to which channels are drivingyour traffic and conversions. so you'll want to monitor your traffic data overtime so you can make informed marketing

decisions in the future. we recommend thatyou explore analytics in bite-size pieces just to avoid being overwhelmed. there area bunch of wonderful free tools out there to help you learn the ropes. i recommendstarting with this metrics webinar and google's free training resources. all ofthese links are not clickable now, but they will be when we send you out theslideshow after the webinar concludes. all right. so let's get to why you'rereally here. marketing your store and driving sales. we're going to startwith pay-per-click, also known as ppc. - [sean] excellent. thanks alison. asmentioned earlier, if you're a new store just getting started or even an older,established store, ppc is a cornerstone to

any marketing strategy. getting startedwith pay-per-click advertising can seem a bit daunting, but it's really not toomuch to it. you're going to begin the process by creating a campaignand then subdivide that campaign into something called ad groups.many of you may already be familiar with adwords and kind of know this, but adgroups are the subdivision where you actually create the ads, add in your twowitty lines of text as well as your call to action. this is also where you're goingto be setting your keywords. ppc is going to be great to bring highly qualifiedtraffic, and a reason for that is just how flexible that it is. these ad types canchange very quickly to accommodate store

changes, like a flash sale, as well as forseasons and holidays like black friday or the christmas shopping season. therereally is a ton of flexibility of what you can do. you can raise and lower dailybudgets with a few clicks, test new ad text, and add in new keywords.ppc is going to be great for marketing new stores. you can direct the customer to anypart of your store. and this means that the landing page, the first page that thecustomer sees after clicking your ad can be the homepage, an article, a category,or even a product page, anywhere on your site. there will, of course, be betterplaces to send them than not, so you can try out a lot of different things and testa lot. so focus on popular categories and

higher margin products, it's always agreat place to start. lastly, it's going to be great for gathering quality dataabout your store's traffic. because the data is tangible and quick, you can make alot of great decisions that contribute as you continue to build your store.so let's go ahead and consider some tips to get started. first, you're going towant to make sure that your store is presentable. take your customers to anattractive and functional website. of course, it doesn't have to be perfect,and you're never going to be truly finished building your store. but youstill want your new customers to have a really good experience when they getthere. second, you really want to organize

your categories and subcategories well.think about your online store like a real store. different aisles or differentcategories and different shelves are the different subcategories. so you're goingto want to separate your products in an appropriate way. if you sell apparel,you want to separate that from your sports equipment and gear. if you have men's andwomen's lines of clothes, make sure that they are not all jumbled together.for an example, let's look at considering gift baskets. if you sell gift baskets,this would be your aisle, and the different types -- baby gift baskets,movie gift baskets -- would be their own subcategories and their own shelves. forppc, if someone is searching for wedding

gift baskets, you want to show themproducts specific to that search. it's going to be more qualifiedand they're likely to enjoy the experience a little bit better.the third tip about ppc is try to keep your cpcs, your cost-per-click bids, aslow as you can while still getting the traffic that you want. if you're justgetting started, a rookie mistake that i see far too often is that you're going tobe overpaying for traffic because you want people to get in the door. instead, tryto slow it down and focus on building a sustainable and successful campaign.with this, experiment with ad position. it doesn't always really pay, nudge,nudge, to be in the first spot. you're

going to want to see a good roi, a returnon investment, at a lower spot without spending as much. so just don't overspendwhen you don't have to. and with that, try to be more specific than too broad. youdon't necessarily want anyone coming to your store. i know it may seem like that.but instead, you're trying to advertise to people who are looking to buy yourspecific products. ppc doesn't take a shotgun approach to getting people intothe door. a way to avoid the shotgun approach is to add negative keywords intoyour account. negative keywords are the complete opposite of keywords. they arewords and phrases that you don't want to show up for. common examples includethe words "cheap," "used," or places like

"craigslist" and "walmart. " thesepeople who are searching for "gift basket walmart" already have a destination inmind, and you don't want to pay for clicks along the way when someone may justbe searching and browsing around. as a final takeaway, i want to say thatppc is going to be a great way to meet a new audience through compelling text ads.it brings really quality traffic to your site very quickly. but before you startpaying for traffic, remember to have your site in its best form. structure yourcategories and subcategories as best they can be to align your products with yourcampaigns and your ad groups. and finally, try to offer some stuff that's goingto stand out from your competition.

well, i've added just a few littleresources for you as well when this slide deck and webinar are made available afterwe wrap up. these few little hyperlinks include the adwords keyword planner thatwill help you get an idea of how much you'll be paying for your keywords, aswell as some new ones you can add to your account. i've also included a list of afew blogs and webinars that we've done here at volusion and will give youideas of how to start as well as one of my favorite articles about ppc strategiesfor procrastinators. this article is about getting started in the holiday seasonin, like, november, but the basic steps provide you the ability to create abrief skeleton and the same type

of structure you'd be doingwhen you're just getting started. so i definitely recommend that third link. - [alison] awesome. thank you, sean. andjust as a happy reminder, as questions come up, you know, regarding ppc,seo feeds, please send those on in. no question is too basic.we'll tackle them all. all right. so now, let's take a minute totransition from the paid side of things to what we call the natural, or organic,search results. kavi will give us an overview of seo strategiesfor getting your store featured in google's naturalor organic search results.

- [kavi] okay. thank you, alison. seo isa great search marketing tactic for ecommerce stores in almost any industry.search engine visibility is an absolute must for getting brands discovered, andthat's true whether you sell sundresses or networking cables or anything in between.no matter what your site is about, you're going to need some unique and relevantcontent to signal to your customers and also to the search engines whatyou're selling and why it's great. before beginning an seo overhaul, though, you dowant to do some thinking about customer behavior. make sure your site looks andfeels like a place where people want to shop and actually make purchases, as seansaid before, because the search engines

can tell how much time visitors spend onyour site and how often they just leave the store without buying anything.so think about things like: does your site use a responsive template? will customershave a good shopping experience if they're on a desktop or a mobile platform?those are important considerations for the search engines, so they should beimportant to you as well. the way the search engines treat your site and, as aresult, your traffic and your revenue will improve the more customers interactmeaningfully with your online store. in my opinion, the best thing about seois that it costs nothing but your time and your brain power. when it's done right,it's a totally free way to improve your

presence in the search results and toattract new customers. seo can definitely be time-consuming, but the time and energyyou spend is definitely worth the return. i saw a recent digital marketing studythat shows 88% of all shoppers do some research online before making a purchase,even if that purchase ends up happening in a brick-and-mortar store insteadof online. so in order for potential customers to discover your brand duringthat online research period, they have to be able to find you using channels likegoogle search. think about the actual phrases that your ideal customer is typinginto google. think about what makes your brand or your products unique, and thenmake a list of keyword phrases that are

specifically relevant to your business.incorporate those phrases into the content that appears on your product pages andyour category descriptions. when they're compiling their search results, searchengines consider a landing page's relevance and authority within theindustry, as well as the user behavior that surrounds it. so like i said,make sure your website's navigation is user-friendly and that your contentreally reflects your industry expertise. so here are some tips that you can usegoing into your seo campaign. there are two basic pieces involved in seo. there'son-page and off-page optimization. on-page optimization includes things like titletags, meta descriptions, and h1 tags, and

all of those are things that can be easilyedited in the admin area of your volusion store. for your on-page optimization to becomplete, though, you also want to include about 150 words of unique, relevantcontent on each landing page. this content should describe what can be found on thepage and should contain compelling marketing messaging as well to push peopleto buy. but you should not just stuff in a bunch of keywords so that it soundsunnatural. that's a big no-no for the search engines. on tooff-page optimization. this focuses more on how other influencers, like otherwebsites and online thought leaders, interact with your site. when you earn alink from another website, assuming that

site isn't spammy or totally unrelatedto what you're selling, it's kind of like they're giving you a vote for your websiteto signal that you're also relevant and authoritative. so the best way to earnmeaningful links to your site is, you guessed it, by creating content thatpeople will want to link to. helpful original content that demonstratesyour expertise tends to earn the most attention. write stuff that people want toread and share. this can take the form of a blog or some well-researchedinfographics or even a how-to video series, if you have the resources to putsomething like that together. one thing to keep in mind is that earning links can bea bit tricky because the search engines

have several rules that you have to adhereto in order to avoid harmful penalties that can kill your search rankings and,therefore, your traffic as well. so for example, paying for links is a majorno-no. links have to come in organically and actually be earned in orderto be considered legitimate. so to wrap up our tips, it's pretty clearthat having a good content strategy in place is absolutely critical for seo. andi know this can seem intimidating, but it really doesn't have to be complicated. themost important thing to keep in mind is what your customers are searching forthroughout the sales cycle. so to give you an example, i had an seo client who soldorganic skincare. so to draw in customers

who were in that research phase of thesales cycle, we created a resource library that included explanations of some of themore exotic ingredients that she was using in her products. but we also put a lotof focus on their individual product descriptions so that customers who werepretty much ready to buy would know exactly how to use that particularface wash or a moisturizer or whatever they were looking at.so as i said before, you want to think about the terms and phrases that yourcustomers are using and incorporate those as naturally as possible into your on-sitecontent, whether that's in your product descriptions or a short paragraph thatappears on a category page or a useful

blog post that's connected to your site.the right content not only helps you make sales and attract customers through thesearch engines, it can also help you earn those valuable links thati mentioned earlier. and one more thing to note, sam will talkabout this a bit more as well a little bit later on, but you also want to considerhow your social media strategy can support your seo. make sure your social mediaprofiles are optimized with the correct business information and some goodkeywords for discovery on those platforms as well. plus, if you've written somereally great content, avenues like facebook and twitter and your other socialmedia profiles are the most natural way

to share all of that. so ourmain takeaway for seo is seo is a long-term process that can earnexponential results. it requires patience and thoughtfulness, but it's the singlemost important way to signal your relevance and authority to the searchengines and, therefore, to your potential customers. the earlier you start thinkingabout your seo strategy, the more quickly you should start seeing increasesin traffic and revenue, which is what we all want. so here area few seo resources for you to get started. when you're doing yourkeyword research, google trends, which is linked here, and even just carrying outyour own searches can help you discover

what terms your customers are searchingfor. there might be customers in a certain area of the country using a term for oneof your products that might not come to mind immediately for you, and that's agreat way to discover things like that. volusion and some of our other favoriteonline experts have written lots of great blog posts and created tons of videos andwebinars on seo best practices. so there are some links to those here as well,including our upcoming webinar next month called "tailoring product pages for seoand feeds success." that's going to be on august 11, and we will have a sign-upfor that coming soon. and for some more information and instructions on adjustingthings like meta tags in the admin area

of your store, i'm including a linkto our knowledge base overview of volusion's specific seo features. - [alison] this is alison again. mybackground is also in seo, and i can attest that it's a powerful long-termstrategy. i also noticed that many times when i started out with merchants, aquestion i often received was, "okay, i like that i'm showing up in the naturalsearch results, but how do i get the pictures up top or on the side?i want to see my products there." so i'm going to loop sean backin right now to talk about how you can do just that.take it away sean.

- [sean] all right, alison. so the imagesat the top of the page are often going to be a part of google shopping when they'renot part of the image slideshow. data feeds or shopping feeds are a spreadsheetthat has all of your products' pertinent information, and it can be as simple as acsv that you've exported from your store and updated the column headers, orsomething a bit more advanced like xml. you can take your store's data and submitthat to google for their approval so that they're going to show your ads.we had a question that came in from john that says, "what if your product is aservice? how do i take advantage of shopping with such a product?" well,this is the trick. because google is so

specific in what it requires, they canonly be products. and a lot of this is because they've got so many requiredfields and services. they're really trying to create a window shopping experience,which is part of the benefit and also part of the detriment of google shopping. sojohn, what you'll want to do is focus on ppc. and we'll follow-up in the q&aa little bit after to tell you what to do with that. back toshopping feeds for a little bit. there's going to be so many requiredfields. they include obvious ones, such as the product title, the productdescription, the weight, the required fields in the volusion dashboard. there'salso going to be ones that they are

looking for as well, such asproduct manufacturer and upc code and google category.if a product doesn't meet these requirements, it's going to be disapprovedand won't be pulled into the data feed. or if it is taken up,it will be rejected after the fact. i mentioned a little bit about the windowshopping aspect of google shopping, and a handy thing about using data feeds as partof your marketing strategy is that they appear in search results and in shoppingaggregators. this means that your ads get to double dip where they appear. and likea ppc, google shopping campaigns are going to be created through adwords.let's go ahead and just jump into some

tips really quickly. because shoppingfeeds are so data-driven, as is said by the name itself data feeds, what you'llreally want to do is start by optimizing the product page first. because thelanding page, that first page that you see after a client clicks onto to an ad, isthe product page, your customers won't have the same context as they would fromfinding the product from searching through your website, your on-page search.instead, they're taken directly to it instead. so your customers don't havethe context of knowing if the item is in a necklace category or a bracelet categoryif they're searching for something like a 36-inch chain. instead, your product titleshould include 36-inch chain, necklace

made out of silver and gold, somethingmore descriptive that provides them all of the information that they need to belooking for. because it's just the product page, just make sure that it's descriptiveand thorough. don't have any thin content. just the more robust it's going to be, themore likely google will show your ads as well as the seo benefitsthat kavi talked about. next, and this tip may seem prettyobvious, but you really need to monitor your campaigns. feeds aren't aset-it-and-forget-it. and in fact, if you don't submit a new data feed every 30days, google is going to automatically expire your product listings. you wantto make sure that any changes you

make in the store should be reflectedin the data feed itself. if your items fluctuate in stock or if you're changingthe price point and taking things on sales, reflect that in data feed so yourpotential customers are getting the best experience possible. if you put somethingon sale, you're going to want to show the sale price to incentivize people to cometo your store, not your competitors. so keep your data really, really fresh.talking about monitoring your campaign, use the data you get from adwords andidentify those products which are best performing, call back to what alison saidabout setting up google analytics. but if you can know the products which areperforming better, you can increase their

bids a wee bit, or you can even optimizeyour product title to ensure that you're getting a larger impressionshowing your ads are serving a more qualified group of people.the cost-per-click of shopping feed ads are generally lower than ppc ads.so try to find a really good price point. of course, there's going to be nosize-fits-all, but just start lower and slowly increase your bids until you findthe return on ad spend that you're really, really looking for. the biggest, importantthing here is just consider your roi, your return on investment,and where your window is. lastly, and probably most importantly,about shopping feeds is have a really good

product image. if you're a dropshipperand all of your images match that of your competition, it's going to be really hardto stand out. so when you can, use different angles. take your own photos.use really high-quality images and make sure that the image just isn't pixilatedand just depicts your product very well. if you have multiple product images,please, please include those to the product page itself. the more interactiveyour customer will be on the page, the longer they spend and the more timethey glean information about the product, the likelier they are to check out.so lastly is the big takeaways. you're working really hard, if you're stillbuilding your store, to build out your

store's inventory, so show it off withdata feeds. using comparison shopping engines allows you to show off your entireinventory through image ads to online shoppers. with so many potential ads,you can reach customers far and wide. so structure your product informationcorrectly and use these type of campaigns to show off your best brands, and thecustomers will find you after that. some resources i've included as well isall those rules and requirements from google. the product recommendations andrequirements can be very, very helpful if you ever wonder, "why isn't this productshowing up?" you may discover that it's apparel. it doesn't have the color andsize attributes. or you may find that the

tax and shipping information isn't there.so google has great, great support documentation. i've also included somevideos and blogs from webinars that i've created as well as some other people onthe team that help really define how to set up shopping feeds as well as howto get started in terms of moving very quickly and what you can dowhen your price point isn't super competitive. so that's a prettyhandy one of some kind of side techniques you can really do.so thank you. - [alison] thank you, sean. okay. and lastbut not least, we cannot forget social media marketing, which is a verycost-effective way for a new store to

build their following. and samcan tell us a little bit about that. - [samantha] thanks, alison. i love socialmedia. i think it's sometimes overlooked, but it's actually one of the bestmarketing tools out there, and as kavi said earlier, it works hand-in-hand withseo. it can boost traffic to your website, improve your brand authority, and enhancecustomer loyalty. not to mention, it works well with a multitude of industries fromfashion to food and everything in between. there's a wide array of social medianetworks out there, and many of them are industry-specific. the vastness of thesocial media landscape makes it easier for people to find networks where their brandscan thrive. so while i bet your first

inclination is to choose facebook, it'simportant not to discount others such as twitter, pinterest, polyvore, reddit, oreven instagram. so for instance, if you're in the fashion industry, pinterest orpolyvore might work better than, say, i don't know, twitter. you don't have to beactive on every channel all at once, so choose one or two networks to devote yourtime to. it's better to be active on one or two platforms thaninconsistent on all of them. not only is social media extremelyversatile, but it's also a cost-effective marketing strategy, because guess what,creating a social media page is free. so to get started, the only thing required isyour time. there are tons of social media

networks out there. as i mentioned before,i've listed some of the most popular networks. so you can use those to promoteyour brand and interact with customers. you may be familiar with some of them, orperhaps even all of them, but i thought it would be helpful to see a wide variety ofyour options. we've got the big guns that are very well-known like facebook andtwitter, and then we have some more visual, lesser known ones like pinterestand instagram. however, if you are in a very specific industry, it might be worthtaking some time to look at networks that are created specifically for your niche.for example, houzz, it's a social network for interior designers and brands in thereal estate or housing market. so you can

use anything that relates specifically toyour audience, and that's pretty much the main point. you want to be on the networkwhere your audience interacts most. it's also important to note that, likeseo, social media success takes time. but social media can also help enhance yoursearch visibility. to give your brand the best chance at being discovered, you wantto begin by optimizing each social network you decide to use. so what this meansis filling out all of the fields in the "about" sections of your social profilesby using relevant keywords and search terms. however, please do not publishduplicate content. don't just copy and paste content from the "about us" sectionon your website. instead, try to write

similar, new keyword rich content thatshows what your store is all about. if you have a store with abrick-and-mortar location, make sure to add your address and otherlocally specific information as well. social media is also the best way toengage with customers and potential audiences. you can see what people aretalking about by using relevant hashtags and join those conversations on facebookand twitter. this will showcase your authority and your relevance within yourindustry. and please, don't neglect your followers. they love receiving replies. somake sure that you're always replying to those messages or comments to keep theconversation going, because social media

can actually be your bestcustomer service tool. and last but not least, if you have alittle bit of wiggle room with your budget, social advertising opportunitieslike facebook ads and boosted posts can really help your strategy, plus they'rereasonably priced. with facebook, it's a pay-to-play environment, so we recommendusing social advertising to reach new customers and grow your presence online.facebook ads can be used to garner page likes or to drive traffic to your website.however, if this seems a little bit overwhelming to you, you can chooseto boost individual posts right on your timeline to reach more people. these arereally easy to use and can serve your ads

to large numbers of people for a minimalcost. the best part about the boosted posts is that they can also allow you totarget your audience using a variety of filters. so this means you can serve adsto people who already like your page and their friends, or create a custom audienceby targeting specific locations, genders, interests, or keywords. now, youmay be asking, "how do i go about doing all of this?" i know it can be alittle bit overwhelming, but don't panic. i'm going to share a few tips and somesocial media best practices to make that a little easier. so first,posting regularly is extremely important, because it lets your customersand your followers know that you are

active. i would suggest spending about 15minutes per day posting and engaging. creating a weekly or a monthly contentcalendar can be a huge help. this will keep you organized so you won't have tospend too much time thinking about what to post every day. we recommend postingaround three to five times per week to keep that content fresh. and you don'twant to clog the timeline with too many of your posts. speaking of posts,you have to get to know your customers. learn about your audienceto find out what type of posts they like. once you have an idea of what type ofcontent they like, make sure you aren't overloading them with too manyself-promotional product posts. instead,

try creating your own unique and engagingcontent, you know, the stuff that people will want to share. don't just post linksto your products. we tend to use the 80/20 rule. about 80% of your posts shouldrelate to your brand's industry and your target audience, and the other 20% shouldbe self-promotional and used to introduce sales or giveaways or contests or anythinglike that. try to use your own images if you can, or create them on your own usingcanva.com or other free design tools, which i will list later. and remember,here, unique content is key. unique images can also be used for promotions.promotions, such as sales, giveaways, or other contests that i mentioned before,can enhance customer engagement and help

you gain new customers. we recommend usingthose boosted posts to promote all of your exclusive deals, content,or even new product launches. another tip is to always track yoursuccess. to get a good idea if your posts are working, dig into the facebookinsights or another network's analytics to see how well your posts perform. this willhelp you figure out what type of posts your audience likes and what promptsthem to take action. you can use this information to identify your strongestperforming posts and re-create similar posts to garner higher levelsof engagement. and finally, as i mentioned before, if youdecide to delegate some of your marketing

budget to social advertising, don't forgetto monitor those campaigns. ads must be monitored periodically to ensure that theyare performing and you're getting the most bang for your buck. i recommend checkingthem bi-weekly. you can edit the copy, you can edit the target filters or images onpoor performing ads to see if they begin to work. and this also goes for theboosted posts. make sure that you look at your results after the paid campaign endsto see how your audience responded to that post. this can help you decide how youwant to refine your targeting the next time you want to boost something.so what's the main takeaway regarding social? well, when it comes down to it,social media management is the best way to

get to know your target audience, drivetraffic, and engage with potential customers. it requires patience,creativity, and the willingness to learn. and while growing a social media presencecan be a long-term process, it allows businesses of all sizes to increaseawareness, boost engagement, drive traffic to online stores, and promptfollowers to take action. that being said, we've complied a list ofresources that can help you save some time and further educate you on social mediabest practices. these include free tools that can help you create amazing, sharableimages along with a few apps that can help you schedule posts during your busiestdays. i've even included some guides that

provide information on how to best driveengagement and get the most out of your social campaigns. the last resource thereis a helpful tutorial on how to create your own facebook ads if you decide thatthat's something that you want to explore more. also, keep an eye out for ourupcoming webinar on september 1 about how to craft a social media strategy for theholidays. it's going to be full of great information, so be sure to keepchecking for sign-up dates. - [alison] all right. thank you, sam. sothat rounds out the four digital marketing channels we wanted to cover today, and thequestions have literally been pouring in. so without further ado, let's getto those questions. we might start with

paid search since that wasthe first section we went over. - [sean] sure. yeah, i'll talk a littlebit more about ppc if i can. so marin you asked, "can you explain a little bit moreabout negative keywords. why would i want to attract someone who wants free,cheap items when i sell quality goods?" i'm sorry i wasn't clear. negativekeywords will do the exact opposite of that. when you create a new campaign, youwill set your keywords for your goods and the products that you offer, and thenegative keywords, which go in a slightly separate location, are going to be theones to dis-include your ad from. if someone searches for a cheap car andyou're selling cars, that means that your

ad would not serve if the negative keywordappears in the query itself. so whenever there's a term or a phrase you don't wantto show up for, you can throw that right in there, and then yourad wouldn't appear. thomas, a little bit more about ppc. youasked, "can you track ppc through a sale?" the answer is yes, absolutely. this is whyinstalling google analytics today is so vitally, vitally important. within yourgoogle adwords account, at the very top of the page under "tools," you'll see theoption and ability to create conversions. that conversion is what you'll put on theorder finish page, one of design site contents page. you'll put on the orderfinish page to ensure that when someone

gets to that page after the one-pagecheckout, it will be registered. this is vitally, vitally important for monitoringyour roi. you really want to make sure that you're seeing return on ad spend andthat you're just not bringing in a lot of traffic without seeingwhere it's coming from. to follow up with john about ppc and theservices and shopping feeds, i'll talk about shopping feeds a little after seo togive some other people a chance to talk. but john, to follow up with you aboutppc as a service, is that i looked at specifically the services denied forgoogle shopping, and they include product bundles, online services, such asfinancial or downloading, and this is

maybe likely the case for you is businessservices, including locksmiths, plumbing, or with ecommerce consulting. if you offerit setups or any type of consulting, instead you'll want to be using ppc, thetwo lines of text. this allows you to target keywords about business consulting,it, or whatever the service you may be offering, rather than google shopping.google shopping as a product aggregator is kind of very similar to amazon. you'relikely not going to find a plumber onto that resource, so that's why youhave to use a slightly different type of advertising model.both are amazingly effective for what they're doing, and your vertical willprobably recognize that as well. there can

be things that you can offer and othersthat you don't. so just try to focus on what the best fit for you when startingwith paid advertising is going to be. so john, if not, shoot us an e-mail too,as well. we'll follow-up with you if you want a further explanationof what you can be doing as well. - [alison] it looks like we've gotquite a few seo questions as well. one of you want to focus in on this? - [kavi] sure. i can start off with aquestion from cindy. she said, "i heard that google does not use the keywordstag any more but still uses the meta description. is this true?"so a little more info on that. cindy,

google actually doesn't read the metakeywords or meta description tags. the keywords tag really doesn't serve much ofa purpose at all any more since it doesn't show anywhere. but still, having a goodlist of keywords around is great for your own reference, just don't worry aboutactually inputting them because, like i said, they don't show up anywhereand google doesn't read them. so the description tag does still show up in thesearch results though. that means that customers are seeing it even if googleisn't paying attention to it. so that description tag is a great field toinclude some marketing messaging to encourage people to click your linkinstead of someone else's. phrases like

"free shipping" and really enticingmarketing tactics like that can attract a lot of clicks. i also wantedto answer a question from joe. he asked, "how do you know your searchranking when talking about seo?" so search rankings are something thatecommerce sellers obviously care about a lot, and google's webmaster tools,if you have that set up, can show you your average ranking for certain keywords. butkeep in mind that your search rankings are going to change all the time. the seoexperts generally agree also that it's much more beneficial to focus on yoursite's improvements, like how much traffic you're getting and how much money you'remaking rather than focusing on your search

rankings, just because they changeconstantly. there are tons of competitors, and you really want to make sure thatyou're attracting more customers and making more sales, and that should be yourtop concern rather than that ranking. - [alison] i've also noticed that a lot ofranking is personalized. i've had a few merchants call in and they're like,"i'm number one now for this." i'm like, "you need to log outof your google account." - [kavi] yeah. that's[inaudible 00:40:29]. - [alison] because your results are beingtailored to your search history. - [sean] very much so. and that comes intoppc all the time. some people will say,

"why aren't my ads appearing? do we havethe right keywords?" well it's often that you're searching for your own ads toooften, and, therefore, google thinks they're less relevant to you andtherefore stops serving them as much. i think i talked a little bit more aboutpaid search. we've got two very similar questions about, "what percentage of mymonthly income do you recommend to a start-up, to invest in ppc and feeds, anda reasonable monthly budget to show results?" two very similar questions. whenyou're first getting started, i hate this, because i always want to say it depends,but start small. if you want to start with $10 a day daily budgets, i think thatis a fine medium if you're just getting

started. ten dollars a day is small enoughthat it's going to be $300 for the month, assuming you're hitting your daily budget,and allows you enough money to have some flexibility. as i said earlier, you don'twant to be overspending, and you really need to be tracking this information. sorather than starting to potentially waste or spend ill-advisedly $20 a day, startwith $10. the best thing about both of these paid advertising models is that youcan go in and change your bids and daily budgets whenever you want. it's just asmall click. you don't pay upfront. so if you're finding a lot of success or you'renot, you can very quickly lower those bids. i can keep talking about... oh there's another one

about shopping feeds, if i may.we'll wrap it up. john and jeff, you asked about, "what are shopping feeds?"once again, i apologize for not being very clear. two great resources to find them.support.volusion.com, you'll be able to find out a further explanation what i'veblabbered through very quickly. but a data feed is just a spreadsheet of all yourstore's information. from the dashboard, if you go to inventory import/export andexport your product table, that's a data feed that google shopping will take.you just have to change the product title headers just a little bit. we call it"product title." google just calls it "title." we've got "product code." theycall it "id." so what you'll do is you'll

export your product informationand then start to tweak the column headers a little bit to what googlespecifies. but we've got a lot of great support documentation on that stuff. - [samantha] we've also got a bunch ofsocial questions rolling in here. one of them from brianna, "what is the best wayto get followers quickly if i just started a facebook business page?" this is a greatquestion. my answer would be facebook ads. facebook organic reach has slowly beendeclining, so the best way to kind of get people to start liking your page is to setup an ad campaign. you can set your budget and your targets. you can target basedon a variety of different things, such as

what interests you know your audiencemight have or your potential customers might have, and set your daily budget.from there, people will start seeing your ads based on your targets,and you'll start gaining "likes" that way. marisema also asked about linkedin, whichis a great question. we don't really get too many b2b questions, so this is good."the 80/20 rule, how does it work on linkedin?" so basically, when you're onlinkedin, you can have your published posts or whatever, and then you can alsojoin groups. when you post in groups, you want to make sure that you're postingrelevant stuff to that industry. so take some newsworthy content and post it in thegroup so it would help your fellow group

members. the 20%, use your own posts, yourown blog posts or anything like that to post personally from your own page.that's the best way that i can kind of break down that 80/20 rule that way. - [kavi] i've got a couple more seoquestions here. one should be a pretty quick answer. from pete, he says,"we've activated the seo-friendly urls in volusion, but this still creates pathslike the slash category s/107.htm, for example." and he's asking, "is there abetter way to do this in volusion so that we have tidier urls?"yes, there definitely is. first of all, great job activating those seo-friendlyurls. that's a really important thing to

have checked off. that url structure isthe standard that volusion uses, and it's very easy to change that category to aphrase that more accurately describes what's on your page. so you can change itto, for example, "/redmittens-s" instead of just "/category." that's a really easything to change that you can do in the admin area of your volusion store, thesame way that you would change your title tags, your meta descriptions, things likethat, that i mentioned earlier. in the seo section of the webinar slides, when that'ssent to you later, you'll see a link to the volusion support article abouthow to change all of those fields. one more thing, this is a really importantquestion for seo. somebody asked, "what do

you mean by a penalty, and are paid linksnot effective?" so earlier, i mentioned that not following the search engines'rules when it comes to earning links to your site can be really harmful and cancause the search engines to put manual penalties on your site as well. so apenalty is basically when google or another search engine recognizes thatyou've done something that they don't like, like paying for a link,and they decide what they put on their search results. so theycan decide that they will not list you when someone searches for a productthat you sell or something that's relevant to your site. obviously, you don't wantthat. you want to be listed as much as

possible. so in order to avoid upsettingthe search engines, you just have to follow their rules, and they do have avery strict rule against paying for links. paid links used to be a very commonpractice in seo. they are not any more because they're so frowned upon. they maybe effective in terms of earning traffic to your site in the very short term, butgoogle will very quickly catch on to the fact that you're using that tacticand will penalize your site and cause you to not show up in thesearch results. so don't do it. don't even think about doing it.it's a terrible idea. - [alison] i remember, like a year ago,there was period of time where there were

a tremendous amount of penalties beingleveled through webmaster tools, and we got so many requests for people, like justdo some disavows and clean this up. it was a very difficult task.so it is just not worth the risk. - [kavi] we've also got some othermarketing questions. another one from brianna, "how can we add a blog to oursite? is there a specific article we should use?" volusion actually has thisawesome tool. it's called the knowledge base. if you go in there, it's right onour website. you can type in "how to set up a blog for your volusion store."it'll give you a complete how-to guide. the first thing you want to do, obviously,is create a blog on a third-party site,

whether it's wordpress or blogger orsomething else. then you want to make it a subdomain of your volusion store. i'm notgoing to get too technical with this because the guide is going to have prettymuch word-for-word directions on what you should do. so i totally encourage you togo on the website and look through that. - [alison] another alternative to a blogthat, i mean, it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish, would becreating your own, like, resource library. kavi referenced this earlier with herorganic skincare client. so sometimes there are times when it might make senseto have some of that content living on your website. but i think our team oftenuses blogs, because blogs are really great

for producing content quickly and pushingit out there and having an audience. there's one more question i would like toaddress. alexander asked, "how can we convert the visitors on our site intosales, and how long to start having sales?" i just wanted to, alexander, pointout that i think it was last tuesday we had a conversion webinar. we should begetting out the recording fairly quickly on thursday. so that's going to be a goodhour devoted to that topic. as far as going to how long is it going to be tohave sales, that's going to depend. there's too many variables for us to saydefinitively. but you can start driving qualified traffic now, which meansa sale could happen at any point.

- [samantha] one last social question wehad from jennifer. "what are the best keywords to have in your socialdescriptions?" so basically, what i was talking about before is you kind of wantto go into your "about" section and think about keywords and your products andeverything that you sell, what kind of words really embody your store and yourproducts, and just kind of fill those into your "about" fields. there should be ashort description on facebook, a long description, stuff like that. if youreally want to get involved in the keyword stuff, you can go into the google adwords,if you have google analytics already, and take a look at some of the keywords thatpeople are searching for products similar

to yours and kind of fill them into anatural description on your social page. - [kavi] there's a question about tags inseo. marcia asked, "what tags is google paying attention to for seo?" i mentionedthat keyword tags and meta descriptions aren't things that google particularlylooks at any more. but they do pay attention to a number of other things. forexample, your title tag and then the h1, which is kind of the biggest header thatappears on any particular landing page. again, that's a tag that you can justmanipulate within your html, super easy to do, and we have information about that inour knowledge base as well that i linked to in our seo slides. so the title tag andthe h1 tag, i would say, are the most

important ones that you need to payattention to for google. we'll actually have a product optimization webinar thati mentioned a little bit earlier. again, it's on august 11. in that webinar, we'regoing to be running through all of the different tags that you can change in yourvolusion store in order of importance to the search engines so that you knowexactly how to change each one and exactly how much time you should bespending writing each of those. - [sean] a question from joe, "how muchdoes it cost per click for ppc, and does that change often?" so the cost-per-clickfor ppc is a bid that you will set within your own campaign. that bid is how muchyou are willing to pay whenever a certain

customer visits your site based on theirad. that bid will change, and you can set it at a different time, and then googlewill charge you up to that amount. if you bid $0.50 for a customer to visit yoursite, google can only charge you up to that much. they may charge you $0.25, theymay charge you $0.30, but they know that you are willing to spend up to $0.50for that qualified traffic and, therefore, that's what it is. there is something alittle bit more complex called the adwords auction of how often you will truly bechanging. but it's really about the bid that you choose to set. in the resource,right at the end, about the keyword planner will give you the best idea aboutthe keywords in your specific vertical and

how much you'll be paying for them. soit's going to vary, of course. but you get to set it yourself. you've got alot of control in that situation. there's also one from glen that i wantedto take too. glen, you asked, "how often should you redo your sitemap?" the bestthing about that is you don't have to. under "marketing and seo," volusionautomatically updates your sitemap daily. it's going to regenerate it for you. soevery change that you make are going to be reflected in your sitemap later that day.unlike maybe former platforms and things like that, you've had to manually createit, but volusion takes that step away from you. so as you continue to addnew products and new categories

your sitemap will be regenerated daily. - [alison] and i mentioned webmastertools, just briefly, earlier. that's another thing that's good to have set upalong with your google analytics account. when you submit your sitemap to webmastertools, that's another great way to get google to recognize each of the pagesthat's on your site and sort of your general site structure and navigation.that's super easy to do as well. it's literally just a click of a button. - [kavi] alejandra, "is there anywherewhere i can learn more about how to use google analytics effectively?" yes.there's a ton of resources on the volusion

website. if you want to go to ourecommerce blog, there's a "welcome to metrics." it's an analytics webinar. itwill kind of show you what metrics are important for you to pay attention to,how to set things up. there's a lot of resources on the volusion knowledgebase. and then also, google puts out its own kind of instructions on how toinstall it and what metrics need what. - [female] okay. maureen had one aboutkeywords and sort of keyword hierarchy. she asks, "for seo, do the keywords haveto be on each page, or can you have keywords that are relevant to the entiresite?" that's a great question for when you're thinking about the way to structureyour overall site content. so there will

be some keywords, obviously, that arerelevant to your entire website, but it's important to differentiate yourlower-level pages from each other so that you don't end up competing with yourself.so if you sell gardening supplies, for example, make sure that your homepageincludes keywords and content about gardening supplies in general. then makesure that your rakes and your gloves categories each contain content that'smore specific to rakes and gloves rather than focusing on, again, just gardeningsupplies in general. just when you're writing out your list of keywords, makesure that each one is particularly relevant to that page so that people willget to that page, specifically, when they

type in those keywords ratherthan just finding your site as a whole. - [alison] all right. it looks like we'regetting close to the hour here, so we're going to be wrapping it up. as ahappy reminder, you're going to be receiving these slides and a videorecording in a couple of days. so you'll have all the resources that we coveredhere at your fingertips. we also offer regular webinars, as we keep referencingthese, but it's something we do all the time. they're on all these sort ofmarketing topics, and we go a bit more in depth than what we did today. someupcoming webinar topics include the product page optimization that kavireferenced and crafting a social media

strategy for the holidays, and that onewill be on september 1. all of our marketing webinars are absolutely free,and we encourage you to sign up for as many as you can. our teamalso offers marketing services. so, if at any time you want to outsourceyour marketing efforts to our experts, simply reach out to the number you seeon the slide or the e-mail on this slide. and again, we want to thank you for takingthe time out of your busy schedule to join us today. we wish and your storetremendous success. happy selling.