1. technology and computing
2. internet technology
3. web search

m at t he wwo o dward.co .uk
http://www.matthewwo o dward.co .uk/tuto rials/e-co mmerce/
How To Build & Market A Successful E-Commerce Website
Step By Step
Charles Flo ate
Starting an E-commerce business can be pretty daunting. T here are a lot of things to consider including the
website, hosting, design, management & marketing!
T here are plenty of companies out there that will you charge you thousands of dollars to build an ECommerce website – but truth be told, you can do it yourself easily!
T his E-Commerce tutorial will teach you everything you need to know step by step!
What You Will Learn
How to build an E-Commerce site like this
E-commerce website design tips and tricks
E-commerce on site SEO & link building
E-commerce marketing & traf f ic generation
How to manage & maintain your E-commerce store
I’ll hand the reins over to Charles f or this epic 12,000 word tutorial!
Guess Who Is Back
Af ter the HUGE Success of my f irst guest post f or Matt’s blog, I thought I’d return once again.
T his time, I’ll be going through my personal E-Commerce sites over my shoulder.
You will learn how I build them, optimize and generate epic traf f ic and even more epic sales!
Who Is Charles Floate?
I’m Charles Floate, owner of Godlike Marketing & Blogger at God of SEO. I’ve been an SEO f or 5 years now,
even though I’m only 17 and have previously worked f or companies such as Wow Internet, Foster SEO and
Bootcamp Media.
So, what have I been up to since September when I wrote my f irst guest post here?
Well, I launched Godlike Marketing, did a ton of case studies, guides and various other Tutorials.
Along with quitting my job, getting my own of f ice to work f rom (mainly write f rom) f ulltime and have been
making tons of other “web properties” and trying to build them up, including a f ew of the E-Commerce sites
I’ll f eature below!
E-Commerce Guide Contents
I thought I’d include a super easy navigation guide just incase you want to read a chapter at a time or come
back later and want to quickly skip to a specif ic part of the guide!
Also, watch out f or the bonus tips at the end of some chapters!
Prologue – An Introduction to this Guide & E-Commerce
So, why do I have the audacity to tell you how to run an E-Commerce site, how to optimize it, maintain it,
generate traf f ic to it and all the cool things that you guys are waiting to get your teeth into in this guide?
I’ve been an SEO f or close to 5 years now, have been an internet marketer f or various E-Commerce
businesses all with various success and currently run a number of my own E-Commerce sites.
I started a site back in early August with Matthew Barby called Corner Sof a Company.
In this guide you are going to learn to build an E-Commerce site just like this one!
Sorry f or the gigantic screenshot, but it had to be done as I’ll be f urther dissecting parts of this site later
and exactly how we built it.
It also gives you an awesome look into what kind of sites you can build with this guide (and I know, it is a
BOSS design!).
Traf f ic So Far
Here are some of the traf f ic stats f rom the f ull month of September 2013 which we launched it properly.
Might not seem like a ton of traf f ic but with an absolutely killer bounce rate and f or our very f irst month of
putting it live, that’s pretty damn good!
Also bare in mind f rom June (Started) to October (Site completely Finished, everything looking awesome
and links built etc) we only dropped around $700 in expenditure.
Chapter 1 – Setting up Everything f or your Site
I’m aiming to put as many of this guides steps into video f orm so you guys can get a real perspective of
how to do things. Of course most of the guide will be written, and yes it is HUGE!
Installing & Configuring WooCommerce
In the below video tutorial, I’ll show you how to install WordPress onto a brand new domain, as well as
Install WooCommerce and Conf igure it to f it your industry, countries taxes and payment settings.
It’s literally that easy! Now all we have to do is move on to installing the theme to make our site look all
pretty and setup any necessary specif ics f or the store itself .
You can get e-commerce web hosting & a domain f rom any of the places below. Deals change all the time
so check out each one!
Chapter 2 – Design and Development
T he design side of things is actually pretty simple!
As we’re running WooCommerce, it’s the same as designing a WordPress site with a f ew extra options to
f ill out to make sure the theme is setup correctly in conjunction with WordPress.
WooT hemes (the awesome guys behind WooCommerce have a sweet collection of f ree WooCommerce
themes you can trawl through!)
I personally use T hemeForest, which of f ers a T ON of awesome premium E-Commerce website templates.
If you were wondering, Corner Sof a Company is in the Room 09 T heme (with a bit of extra hacking of the
theme to make it look even awesomer! – if that’s a word)
Theme Design
Picking your E-commerce template/theme can be brand building or smashing, luckily! T here’s a T ON of
WooCommerce themes available, and some really cool specif ic WooCommerce designers.
I can’t pick the theme you want as it’s more up to your taste in design etc… but here’s a f ew of my
f avourite, both f ree and premium -
Free Themes
Here’s a couple of my f avourite, f ree woocommerce themes f or you guys to potentially use in your site Wootique
Wootique is made by the guys who actually develop woocommerce, it’s a really clean and simple storef ront
with a ton of customization options f or you to make it your own with a f ew simple changes.
Virtue
Virtue is a f ree theme by Kadence, it’s more of a blogging style theme but of f ers an addon shop that
makes it look really f unctional f or anyone looking to make money of their blog.
Premium Themes
I actually think it’d be a lot better if you looked through all the awesome themes on T heme Forest bef ore
actually buying any, as you might see one that grabs your attention and is perf ect f or your brand.
I’ll still however give you some heads up with a f ew of my f avourite below -
Sellya
Sellya is an awesome theme that of f ers some f antastic f eatures including awesome mobile responsive
design that’s built into change with your changes.
T here’s a ton of dif f erent designs/patterns to use, Google f onts integration, dif f erent industry skins so
you can quickly optimize the theme and a ton more options you can check out on the sales page!
Room09
It’s the same theme we use f or Corner Sof a Company, and of f ers a T ON of cool options f or you to
develop a site around, though we’ve hacked it to pieces and added a ton of awesome graphical work to it.
Room09 still looks kick ass on it’s own and does come with a really helpf ul support team and a ton of
dif f erent options/f eatures.
Theme & Design Development
I’m really no specialist expert on WooCommerce theme development and have only done a bit of hacking of
themes.
So, I thought I’d link to this easy to understand guide!
Amber Weinberg has an awesome blog f or any wanna-be wordpress developer, so I suggest adding her to
your Bookmarks or your f eedly to keep up-to-date with her epic tutorials and news pieces.
T he guide of f ers some easy to learn things, that if you already know how to develop a WP theme, you can
just change over all the knowledge you already have and throw in this guides inf o.
If you don’t already know how to create a WordPress theme, then Derek Banas did a pretty cool video on
making one f rom scratch and you’ll learn everything you need to know in under 25 minutes!
Chapter 3 – Logos and Graphics
For most of the graphics I use on my E-Commerce sites there’s 2 routes that I take to get graphics made
up, quickly and prof essionally. I’ll go over both in detail below!
48 Hours Logo
I’ll start with my f avourite which is using 48HoursLogo to get a load of dif f erent designers to battle it out to
make your graphic f or you.
T his gives you the opportunity to have logos, packaging, website, banners designs and a ton of other
dif f erent kinds of graphics super easily!
Matt created a split test to see how much money his logo was costing him – the results were pretty
interesting!
Check out my video tutorial below -
oDesk
I’ve used Freelancer, eLance etc… All bef ore and though there is a lot of f luf f on oDesk (like most
f reelance sites).
But if you do your interviewing properly, you be able to get some awesome designers, writers and pretty
much any kind of f reelancer you’re looking f or through oDesk, always at a f airly cheap rate as well!
Louis f rom CloudIncome who did the 2nd ever guest post f or Matt’s blog earlier this year wrote an
awesome guide to using oDesk to f ind really cheap writers!
Louis’s oDesk hiring strategy is pretty much the same as mine when it comes to hiring Freelancers though
as most of you will know, the graphical world is a lot dif f erent f rom writing and we’ll have to do things a little
dif f erent than Louis, but check out his guide regardless here!
Step 1 – Writing the Job Description
T his is by f ar the most important part of the process, if you want to f ind writers that are suitable to your
needs and that can handle the quantity you’re af ter, then your job description has to describe, in detail what
you’re af ter.
Starting of f your job description, you want to conf irm that they’ve actually read it rather than just inputting
a template cover letter so you want to put a line within the article that they can put in their cover letter.
Example -
“At the Start of your Cover letter please put: RANDOM WORD. Anyone who fails to do so will be immediately
declined”
T his will conf irm you’ve got the correct people f or the job.
I needed a graphic f or this post, so here’s the description and title I gave f or the post -
It gives a clear look into what I’m af ter, as well as gives opportunity f or f urther work and includes the
random word f or my cover letter.
Step 2 – Selecting Requirements
oDesk of f ers a criteria you can set to get the best possible candidates f or the job. I have a set template
f or this, as I only want a f ew things.
English – I need the English level of any f reelancer to be a minimum of 4/5, if they’re below this I tend to
have real dif f iculty explaining this to them.
Feedback Score – A f reelancers Feedback score is their average f eedback f rom all their jobs. I go f or a
minimum of 4.5 Feedback score as anything under this, in my eyes means they haven’t done 100% and I
want the best possible quality I can get.
T here are a ton of other requirements you can set but those are the main 2 that I really care about, here’s
the f ull options f or you guys anyway -
Step 3 – Post your Job & Wait
It’s that simple, just hit the big green “Post a Job” button and you’ll have f reelancers gagging to join your
team!
Now you’ve got to interview all your candidates, this can be
tricky but it’s super easy to throttle people down to the best of
the best!
Step 4 – Interviews
First you’re going to want to f ilter out all the ones who didn’t put your random word at the beginning of
their application, this is easy just hit the “Sort by” drop down menu and click “Rate (High to Low)”.
T hen you simply look through their resumes by clicking their blue name button, read their cover letter as
well as check out their previous f eedback and prof ile underneath their cover letter.
Drop the f reelancers a message that you like the look of and go f rom there!
Step 5 – 3 Bonus Hiring T ips
Ask f or a watermarked mockup of the graphic to get an Idea of what each Freelancer can of f er
Use Google’s Reverse Image Search to make sure they aren’t just stealing other people’s work
Ask questions in a detailed manner, this means if they f ind English hard it’ll blatantly show in their
responses.
Chapter 4 – SEO Optimizing the Entire Site
Now OnPage SEO is pretty important and most E-Commerce stores really don’t push their onpage
optimization f or individual products, where as I’ve seen epic success with making sure every product has a
unique 200 words and a killer meta description and title.
If you see some of the more basic stuf f on here that you really aren’t interested in, then don’t be af raid to
skip past, this guide is f or everyone!
T here’s a f ew extra bonus tips I’ll also throw in at the end f or OnPage optimization to both increase your
conversion rate and your rankings.
Yoast ’s WooCommerce SEO Plugin
Most of you will know Yoast f rom their awesome f ree WordPress SEO plugin, but they also of f er a
premium WooCommerce plugin.
T hough you don’t necessarily need it, it can be an awesome extra bonus f or $29 to help f urther improve
your sites SEO.
It adds Twitter Product Cards, OpenGraph, Schema Data, even more advanced breadcrumbs and a whole
host of other neat f eatures to compliment your stores SEO even f urther!
Met a Dat a
For the meta data, we’ll be using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin which is the same as the WooCommerce
version just with less f eatures.
Af ter installing the Yoast plugin, you’ll get an added extension to the editing page like this -
Met a Tit les
Meta titles are really important as you want to appeal to the visitor, as most visitors will just look at the title
and click through, but at the same time have it optimized f or the search engines themselves.
Now, I tend to f ormat my meta titles like this:
Product Name + Keywords + Company Name
So in essence you get something like this Cooper Jumbo Cord, Modular Corner Sof a – Corner Sof a Company
Which breaks down into this Product Name: Cooper Jumbo Cord
Keyword: Modular Corner Sof a
Company Name: Corner Sof a Company
T his in my opinion is the best of all 3 worlds, you get the super-niche keyword f rom people searching f or
the very specif ic product name.
As well as the power f rom a strong keyword and f inally the brand awareness f rom your company / brand
name being within the SERP.
Met a Descript ions
Your descriptions can be a lot more targeted towards the searches engines indexing them, than the viewer
reading it as most people won’t bother to read the descriptions you put.
I don’t really have a set f ormat f or descriptions, but I tend to just describe the product whilst using as many
of my targeted keywords f or that specif ic product as possible.
Product Descript ions
I’ve always said the more detailed the descriptions, the better. For Corner Sof a Company you’ll see we did a
f ew hundred words per product.
Now of course I’m not expecting you to sit down f or hours on end writing generic descriptions about your
products. I wouldn’t even expect myself to, f or the CSC ones we used Natasha Nixon which of f ers some
killer content on the cheap!
Even though they say their SEO Articles aren’t meant f or web use, we’ve f ound them to be perf ectly
suitable as long as you give as much detail as possible.
90% of the content on CSC is written by Natasha Nixon, so you can easily get a taster f or the quality by
checking out some of the main product descriptions on our site.
Most WooCommerce themes have 2 dif f erent types of description, you have your small description which
on your product page tends to go next to your price.
T hen, underneath your main product details you have your main description which you can put a pretty
much unlimited amount of words into.
If you’re running a
store that only has
a f ew dozen (or
even less products)
I highly suggest to
spend a lot of time
optimizing every
page individually
and putting as
much unique
content onto each
page as possible.
T his means your
products will rank
f or a ton of other
long tail keywords,
and as we added all
these new longer
descriptions, we
managed to pull in
a ton more visits
every day and a lot
more to every
individual page!
Permalinks
Your Permalinks
can be f ound in
your “Settings” tab
of your WP-Admin.
O ur Kic kAs s Uniq ue Pro d uc t De s c rip tio ns !
It basically decides
how your URLs are
displayed, by def ault they will be displayed as “?p=xxx” and that’s a really poorly optimized URL.
So, you’re going to select “Custom Structure” and input the f ollowing /%category%/%postname%/
Which will look something like this -
T his’ll put the product category then your product’s name af terwards. T his kind of a structure means you
can f ill out all of the keywords.
Opt imizing your Product Cat egories
You have a f ew dif f erent options within your product categories section and optimizing all your categories
properly will make a wealth of dif f erence.
Especially if you have a site with a lot more products than you can optimize individually, you can optimize
the categories instead.
T he f irst f ew options you’ll be f aced with when adding a new product category look like this.
Add your Title which in this case we’ll be using “Corner Sof a Beds” as our test category to use and optimize
it.
T he f irst thing you’re going to want to do is put in the title, this is easy and it’s just the name of your
category.
T hen you’ll need to add your URL Slug which is the extension in which your category is displayed.
Here’s how it looks once we’ve f illed that out.
Next, you’ll have to f ill out your description; this is where you can start optimizing everything f or the search
engines.
I use the same description here that I’ll use f or my meta description later on.
T hen, all you have to do is f ill out the Yoast details which will be in the “Edit Category” page.
Just scroll down to the Yoast settings and f ill them out, here’s how I did it f or the corner sof a beds
category.
Sit emaps
I personally really dislike the Yoast sitemaps as they don’t really give as much f unctionality as I’d like when
putting a Sitemap together.
So the f irst thing you’re going to want to do is head over to the SEO > XML Sitemaps and make sure you
have the f irst check box Disabled –
T hen, we are going to want to install this plugin – Google XML Sitemaps .
T his gives us a ton more f unctionality when it comes to building your sitemap and automatically includes
pinging services to make sure the likes of Ask, Bing and Google get your sitemap submitted to them as
quickly as possible.
So, you’ve got the Google XML Sitemaps plugin all installed and ready to go.
T he Basic options part, you really don’t have any reason to touch so we can just leave that f or now, unless
you’re looking to do some really strange customization kind of stuf f .
Additional Pages – T his bit is all about adding in of f -CMS stuf f , which f or those who don’t know what
that means, let’s say your main site was in WooCommerce on WordPress but you decided you wanted to
add a Forum that was in vBulletin, you’d add the /f orum of the vBulletin and any f urther category pages to
the Additional pages part of the sitemaps plugin.
Post Priority – Leave this on the standard Comment count bit, as it really doesn’t matter though you can
turn of f automatic priority and setup all your own priorities.
Sitemap Location – T his bit is where you want your sitemap to go, on def ault it’ll be /sitemap.xml which
f or me is perf ectly f ine, but if you want to specif y somewhere dif f erent you can just choose to do so.
Sitemap Content – Leave all the standard boxes ticked but add the Category pages and f ollowing pages
so you get everything indexed.
T he rest of the plugin is pretty much up to your own will of what you want the bots to look at and how
of ten.
If you’re running a pretty big E-Commerce site, I always suggest having the Homepage f requency on “Daily”
so the inf amous GoogleBot will come back and check your site (hopef ully) every day f or any changes.
Bonus T ips Add a Product Video and the use the Yoast Video SEO Plugin to add an awesome rich snippet and
increase your conversion rate!
Add some super simple Schema data to your site to add a Review Rich Snippet
Chapter 5 – Product, Content & Sales Management
Managing your site can be ridiculously dif f icult, managing any site f or that matter can be hard but when
you’re a 1 man band with orders, calls, emails, products, marketing, design, content and all that stuf f to
manage it can seem like an absolute nightmare!
I’ll be giving you here some good advice on how to actually manage everything on your site whilst still
leaving time to actually Sell your products.
Managing Orders
If you have hundreds of people buying of your site every day, it can be really tricky to manage everything.
Luckily f or us every action that happens on the site, WooCommerce uses as a “Comment” using the
WordPress f unctionality already in place, clever guys at that WooCommerce place aye!
So, if you ever get stuck on remembering orders you can quickly manage everything within the WordPress
comment f acility or the WooCommerce orders back end.
T hey also give you reports, which means if you’re doing your job as an IM’er and want to quickly show your
boss how much money and sales (and if you’re running a coupon campaign, you can have a look at
individual or all coupon/discount usages) he’s made this month!
Shipping
Now when it comes to shipping, I don’t really have much in the ways of advice as it really depends on what
kind of product you’re selling.
Some of you might be using the likes of a drop shipping or af f iliate service to sell your items, so I really
can’t give advice when it comes to that kind of thing.
I personally use a 3rd party when it comes to shipping my products, I buy of f them and they ship f or me at
the wholesale rate, making me some money on the sof a itself .
I do however run another site called Mystic Magic, which I sell trading cards of f .
As you can imagine though, trading cards are relatively light weight, especially when I am shipping them
generally in “Singles” (which means to ship them a card or a couple cards at a time, yes people actually do
buy individual cards!).
I have a wholesaler who sells “Jif f y” envelopes (aka padded envelopes) f or a mere £0.11 each per
envelope, they look like this Yup, f or £11 I can ship 100 dif f erent cards all orders
ranging f rom £3 upto £50 per card (Mental, I know!).
Managing Product s
Managing products in WooCommerce is f airly easy, unless
you’re posting in bulk… T hen it can be a HUGE pain.
Luckily f or us, WooCommerce have thought of pretty
much everything and have built a premium plugin called the
“Product CSV Import Suite” which looks like this -
You can buy it here, at a pretty expensive $200 or so though!
Otherwise, WooCommerce has a built in product poster that is pretty detailed, but can take a while if you’re
adding hundreds (if not thousands) of products.
I thought I’d give you a quick explanation of how to use the product adder step by step anyway!
Product Name – T his is where (you guessed it) the name of the product you’re posting, goes.
Category – T his is where your product categories go, just make sure you’re selecting the right one and
have all your categories setup properly bef ore posting your products.
Main Description – T his is where your main post goes, it’s the exact same as a standard wordpress post
area and looks like this -
Just input all that text I was talking about earlier here to optimize your product descriptions!
Product Page Settings – Luckily f or us, we have a built in Meta Title/Description tool to input to. Use the
Optimize guide in Chapter 4 f or this bit!
Product Short Description – T his is the bit that gets added on the category pages and is the “Excerpt” if
you like of a product page, I suggest putting in what you’d normally put into the meta data in here as it’s
around the perf ect length f or this part and cuts down on content creation cost and time.
Featured Image – T his is the main product image, it’ll be displayed on the product page and everywhere
else as the main image f or your specif ic product.
Product Dat a
T his tab is FULL of important stuf f , so I’ll explain it bit by bit
SKU - T his is the barcode name normally on the back of a product, it’s the Unique Identif ier of a
product and is generally suited f or the likes of a Bookstore or people searching f or a VERY specif ic
product’s barcode.
Regular / Sales price – T his is just the determining price, if you input a Sales price you HAVE to input a
regular price and it’ll look like this -
Tax Info – T his is just adding or not adding in your tax, easy stuf f !
OnSale Info – T his is just selling if your product is on sale to add a banner and what not.
Invent ory
T his is where you can manage your inventory of a specif ic product, just click the “Enable stock
management at product level” button and you’ll be able to easily manage your stock like this -
Shipping – T his is easily manageable, if you have a product that can weigh a lot and you’re calculating all
the delivery f ees using a 3rd party API (such as FedEx) to calculate the distance and weight to then charge
the buyer this part is a must!
Just f ill out the shipping inf o and the API / cart will do the rest f or you.
Link Products – T he cheeky beauty of an upsell! You can add products that are “similar” so they get an
upsell at the cart page, hopef ully making you a bit of extra bob f or some easy work.
Managing Cont ent
You can always use the same process that I put in the graphics guide and use oDesk to f ind some pretty
good content writers, again, just make sure to test them bef ore throwing a bunch of money at them to
write content f or you.
For products however, I use Natasha Nixon, which was a service originally by one person (yup, her name
was natasha) on Fiverr.
Now however, they have a dedicated team of writers and a f ully f lexed site to deal with all your orders.
SEO Art icles
Even though they say they don’t suggest using the SEO Articles as web content, it’s still really good f or the
likes of a big product description f or $6.25/500 word article who could argue?
Especially when you get a 10% discount on Orders over $500, so if you want to order a ton of content
straight away f or your products, this is your best bet!
Aut horit y Cont ent
T his is the juicy stuf f , it’s written by published authors and journalists.
It’s rather expensive at around $40 per 500 word article but is perf ect if you’re looking f or a really well
written blog post or press release later on in your site’s development.
I use the authority content to get content written f or my press releases, just describe exactly what you’re
looking f or and you’ll get an epic piece back, normally well over the word count of what you ordered.
Chapter 6 – E-Commerce Link Building
Link building f or an E-Commerce site can be insanely dif f icult!
So, I’ve put together a f ew dif f erent ways you can go about your link building. T hough some of them take a
lot longer than others, they all have some good return.
I’d start of f with your E-Commerce site’s link building campaign by starting with Matthews tutorial f rom
earlier this year on “Stealing your Competitors Rankings” this’ll help you start of f with some good solid
f oundation links, then you can move onto the more complicated stuf f below!
6.1 – Link Building f or Traf f ic Generat ion
Don Roades did an excellent post on Downtown E-Commerce on what I’m about to explain, but I have a f ew
tweaks!
Forum Traf f ic
According to Don, you can add some awesome sales to your website just by adding a link into your f orum
prof iles signature back to your site.
As you can see, they generated a total of over $14,000 in sales in just a month of posting on 3 f orums!
A strategy Matt has used to generate over $95,000 with this very blog!
Finding Relat ed Forums
T his isn’t really very hard, you can use your good old f riend Google by inputting a Google f ootprint like:
inurl:forum “keyword here”
You’ll generally be able to f ind a ton of dif f erent f orums, I suggest putting a f ew into an excel document
and check the states of the f orums, most f orums you’ll be able to see said stats by visiting the site and
scrolling to the bottom of the f orum in the f ooter area -
You can also check out Matt’s post on how to f ind & engage your audience with some f orum f inding tips!
T he Rules of Forum Posting!
Forums and communities, like their community… Most of them don’t like some brash new kid on the block
coming in a posting a ton of links to their own site.
Bef ore you post ANY links to your site, introduce yourself and get some members to recognize you as a
pretty nice chap!
T hen you can unleash your new shiny signature with some links or graphics to gain your site some cool
traf f ic.
6.2 – Whit e Hat E-Commerce Link Building
T hough, technically using the f orum tactic would be “real white hat” I’ll just be going over some tips on how
you can do some really good white hat link building below.
Cont ent t o Earn Links
T his topic has been overly covered, I’ll admit that one but I thought I’d add it in anyway.
Still, and by the looks of the f uture of search, “natural links” will always be the best as you’re heavily
unlikely to get any kind of penalty.
Natural links are those links that you get f or f ree, they’re the links random people (or some targeted) have
placed around the web as they’ve seen your content, liked it and give you a kick ass link in return.
Building a Cont ent Team
T his was covered by Matthew Barby (who also lef t a cool tip f or you in the Bonus Tips section in Chapter
10) on f ind my blog way.
He built a content team and managed to get some awesome, natural links in doing so, check out his post
here.
Out reach & Guest Post ing
For those SEOs in the crowd, I’m sure you’re horrif ied by this category as it’s been covered SOOO much.
So I’ll just give you some quick links to f ollow up on and you can go get started in the guest post game.
T he Outreach Bit
Matthew Barby (Yup, he’s at it again!) armed with ScrapeBox and BuzzStream managed to outreach to
literally, hundreds of targets in under an hour, getting some really good quality results back f rom the
outreach campaign.
He did a post here on “Link Prospecting on Steroids.
T he Guest Posting Bit
Kristi Heines wrote “T he Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting” (I know, an old and tired title and I’m a victim if
anything of using those kind of titles, but it really is “the ultimate guide”) f or KissMetrics, which literally
covers everything.
Saying that though, I would skip the f inding bit as you’ve got the tutorial Matthew wrote!
Check out the post Kristi wrote here.
Whit e Hat Tiered Link Building
Rohit Palit (who also works f or me at Godlike) did an epic piece on using the normally black hat technique
of Tiered Link Building in a completely white hat way using some really quality content, put on some really
good places then using them as “Link Properties”.
Check Rohit’s guide out here.
6.3 – Grey Hat E-Commerce Link Building
T he true def inition of a grey hat has been argued over f or donkeys years.
I class myself as a grey hat, and by my def inition it means you use both white and black hat SEO tactics to
push your site up the rankings and bring in some epic search engine traf f ic.
So in this part of the guide I’ll be giving you exactly that!
My approach to a grey hat link building campaign is using white hat SEO (such as guest blogging etc..) and
manually building the likes of Web 2.0s f or your tier 1 then using black hat tactics (such as private blog
networks etc…) f or your tier 2.
We won’t be f ully automating anything, and f or this to work it can be rather costly, but the beauty of it is
you get quality across the board and it can really increase your rankings.
Tier 1
As I was saying earlier, I highly suggest using white hat things f or your Tier 1 services, though understand
that it can be highly expensive in terms of time and money to just get 1 guest post published, let alone an
army of powerf ul tier 1 links.
I have a f ew f avourite services to speed up this process though, so no worries there!
Fat Joe Guest Blogging – I’ve used these guys f or a f ew dif f erent clients in the past and though when you
start talking about the higher DA stuf f , they can be rather expensive.
If you’re just looking to build some good quality guest posts with great content, these guys can be
awesome!
T hey have some really good inhouse writers and have been published across the web, including Moz, SEJ
and a f ew other huge IM blogs.
Niche Blog Posts on Traf f ic Planet – I’ve been using this service a f ew times over the last month, and
Morgan (the guy behind the service) is a really nice guy.
He’s in constant contact with you about your order and is a great help when looking to order more specif ic
things.
Otherwise f or a mere $30 you can get 5 good, quality posts (My Average domain authority f rom this
network is around 35!) which is a killer price f or these kind of posts.
Also, to actually get a post live on Traf f ic Planet can be really dif f icult, the vendors are severely vetted
bef orehand.
Tier 2
T here’s a f ew dif f erent things you can use f or your tier 2 links but the best in my opinion is still to use
private blog networks, so I’ll be giving you a f ew options when it comes to the dif f erent blog networks
available.
Private Blog Network Links
I personally normally use 1 of 3 services to build these kind of links. T he beauty of using private blog
networks is they of f er contextual links on highly authoritative sites at a f airly cheap price.
T he f irst service would be Link Emperor which you can check out my Matt’s tutorial on here.
When using LE to create these kind of links, f irstly create your campaign, add your manually spun content
and keywords then use the custom order f orm to order your private network links.
I highly suggest using either Ultimate Buzz, as they of f er links at about $1/post and are f airly good at
delivering them quickly and on google quality sites (I’ve seen a f ew of the sites MozRank go upto 6 bef ore,
that doesn’t mean DA by the way).
T hen, I generally use 2 services that are available on black hat world (yup, however much that f orum is
turning into a piece of s%$t it’s still got a pretty solid marketplace, if you ignore the mods approving every
thread available on there without proper vetting) and wicked f ire.
Galaxy Blog Network – T hese guys are a pretty cheap but good quality site network that of f er some ok
content, good support and quick turnaround times (Normally you’ll get your report within a f ew days, and if
there’s any issues later on their Skype support will f ix them almost immediately!
Juggernaut Blog Network – I’ve only used these guys a f ew times, but they have some seriously powerf ul
links though are on the more expensive side of galaxy they of f er a lot better quality of content, f antastic
support and the links are on pretty strong domains.
6.4 – Black Hat E-Commerce Link Building
Now, being a black hat SEO is hard nowadays, if you’re mentally challenged that is.
For some very odd reason people think black hat is just spamming links 24/7 and likewise, with spinning you
can only even automatically spin content which will be unreadable.
Doing that then, is if you’re trying to rank on Bing and Yahoo (Which f or E-Commerce is perf ectly viable and
around 30% of our traf f ic f or CSC comes f rom those 2 search engines).
If you’re going to go into black hat f or E-Commerce however, there’s 2 dif f erent routes you’ll be wanting to
take -
Micro-Spammed Sit e
T hese are minisites which you use to generate sales or traf f ic to your main site. Whilst these are great,
you have to have a f ew in a f older somewhere, ready f or the next update which will wipe out your site
completely.
Follow my ranking f or rand post, which was actually my f irst guest post on this blog earlier this year.
It f ollows exactly how I ranked a post f or a number of keywords in just a f ew weeks, with hardly any money
spent.
Parasit e Pages
T hese have been making a f ew dif f erent headlines as of recently with the likes of Payday Loans by Mr
Cutts (a little taunt at matt cutts anti-spamming campaign) and the viperchill f iasco with YouTube videos
ranking really well.
Ef f ectively, you use spammy link prof iles targeted at pages on high authority domains such as YouTube,
Rebel Mouse and 3rd party blogging platf orms.
If you’re looking to use this kind of tactic f or E-Commerce then it’s f antastic f or both pushing sales and
reputation management.
Check out Dan Z arella’s post on using parasite SEO f or reputation management here.
Chapter 7 – PPC and Media Buy Traf f ic Generation
If you haven’t already seen it, I did an epic guide on Traf f ic Generation around 2 months ago.
T hough that really wasn’t based around E-Commerce traf f ic, so I thought I’d take a look at how we
generate traf f ic to Corner Sof a Company and some ways you can to your own sites.
Adwords PPC Alt ernat ives
Ok, so we’re a f urniture site, so we need to f ind people who are looking at things like home improvement or
f urnishings.
Now Adwords has been hundreds and hundreds of guides that have already been made bef ore and if you
don’t know how to use AdWords then just Google “Adwords guide”, there’s T ONS!
You can even automate your PPC management with Wordstream now, so it really doesn’t take much ef f ort
anymore.
BuySellAds
BuySellAds is a media buying platf orm, it has some gigantic sites and you might even see some f amiliar
f aces, *cough* black hat world *cough* on their listings.
Ok, so we’re going to look f or some sites that will have our target audience in mind.
All you have to do is f ire in your related keywords into the BuySellAds search f acility and it’ll give you all the
sites with your keywords in mind.
Straight away f or our f irst keyword “home improvement” we already f ind 5 sites with some pretty juicy
impressions!
BuySellAds also has the options of “Ad Bundles” and they’ve got over 30 dif f erent bundles to choose f rom!
Included in these ad bundles, is the “Home Design & Improvement” bundle, which f or around $1,250 I can
get nearly a million impressions every month and with a good advert shown across all these sites.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to make our money back!
T hat’s 14 dif f erent site placements, totaling 927,000 (DAMNNN) impressions f or $1,250.
Considering we can make around $320 prof it on each sale, shouldn’t be hard to make our money back if we
can pull in a couple 1,000 visitors!
Text LinkAds now MediaWhiz
TextLinkAds is awesome f or 2 reasons, it not only builds you traf f ic f rom the highly popular pages, but you
get DoFollow backlinks included, meaning you can kill 2 birds (pref erably penguins) with 1 stone
You can get some f antastic related backlinks along with getting some good visitors f rom popular sites.
For this example, I’ll be putting in, again “home improvement” and straight away we get 658 results!
Pretty good, and what’s even cooler about using T LA is we can f ilter all of our searches by Language,
Category, T LD (Top Level Domain, e.g. .com, .co.uk etc), Moz’s DA/PA, the Link Popularity (T LA’s score of
how the quality of inbound links to that specif ic page).
As well as the Alexa rank, the ad price, domain age (Some sites up to 20 years old!), number of Ads sold,
Number of Pages, Number of Backlinks, the location of the backlink (e.g. Homepage or subpage of the site)
and if it’s listed in the Yahoo or Dmoz Directory.
As you can see there’s a ton of dif f erent search f unctions f or us to decide on what kind of a link we’re
af ter!
So, I’m going to search – “home improvement”, have my language as English, and my minimum DA of 45!
It pulls out a whopping 117 results, we could literally build our entire link prof ile just using this site.
Unf ortunately, I’m not really looking to spend 100s of dollars per link, so I’m going to f urther ref ine my
search by adding the maximum price as $50.
T his takes away 7 results and puts me down to 110! Straight away on the f irst page of results, I’ve already
f ound a link that can give me 1 of 3 things -
T his is great becauseIt gives me the opportunity to be on a ranked list, which I can use as an extra bit of reputation
management.
It gives me a link f rom a site that looks completely 3rd party as they rank sites anyway (Unlikely to
get penalized)
And it gives me a link that’s on a super highly related website, which should please the socks of that
Penguin!
Media Buys
Media buying, f or those that don’t know is where you buy a piece of online real estate such as an
advertisement or graphic on.
You can use BuySellAds f or this, so I’ll be going through some cooler things you can do with BuySellAds in
regards to media buying!
So, we’ll be using BSA again! It’s just such a good tool (Where else can one buy a tweet f rom Paris Hilton?!)
moving on to tweets actually, we’ll be looking at buying tweets f irst!
Buying Tweet s
Twitter and Tweeting has become a vital part of most sites online marketing campaigns, with people
tweeting over 500 million tweets… Every day! You need to def initely get in on that action!
So, in this example let’s say we were selling a brand new App f or managing your money – T hat’s 2 dif f erent
kinds of sites we can aim f or, any sites related to apps and any sites related to personal f inance!
Straight away on clicking the “Tweets” part of our navigation bar, we already f ind some cool targets AppCraver with around 46,000 f ollowers and at just $40 f or a Tweet!
Neal Schaf f er with nearly 70,000 Followers f or a mere $80 a Tweet!
I Use T his App with over 22,000 Followers and at just $20 a Tweet!
iPhone Team with over 350,000 Followers and at nearly $270 a Tweet!
As you can see, we have some awesome options to both promote our content and products as well as
help grow our social f ollowing! Not too shabby f inds f or a 5 minute search, aye.
Buying Newslet t er Placement s
If you run your own newsletter, you’ll know how powerf ul it can be to have 100s of people in your target
market to easily re-target!
BSA of f ers an awesome email newsletter buying f acility with a T ON of huge blogs across a number of
dif f erent industries.
So, f or this example let’s say we run a Photoshop template selling site, we want to promote our templates
to a ton of related users and hopef ully grow our own Newsletter.
So, we do a quick search on BSA f or “photoshop” go to the search f ilters on the lef t side of your screen
and select Medium then remove everything but email!
And you’ll get a ton of dif f erent options to buy spots on their newsletters
f rom.
In this case, we actually managed to get a pretty cool 9 results, which
boiled down to our very specif ic niche is actually about 5 but those 5 total
nearly 800,000 newsletter subscribers!
T hat’s a potential boiled down to “real statistics / conversions” of around
50,000 people to both see our brand and click through to our site and buy
some PSD templates!
YouTube Market ing
YouTube, especially f or E-Commerce style sites can be an awesome point
to generate traf f ic.
Just take a look at the Dollar Shave Club campaign if you want a prime
example of someone spending a couple hundred bucks in production to making an absolutely f ortune in
return.
Now, I’m not saying we’re going to make a ton f rom viral videos, but I will be giving you an awesome tip on
how to actually market your videos themselves.
I introduce to you, Tube Assist !
If you’re looking f or some inf o on actually making the videos f or your business, then I’d suggest you check
out Phil Nottinghams guide to video creation f or all sorts of businesses.
Chapter 8 – Maintaining your Site, Traf f ic and SEO!
T his can be really hard once your site starts kicking of f , having orders f lying in, tons of people asking f or
extra inf ormation, your SEO and general online promotion campaign to manage as well as all that juicy
traf f ic you have and want to and convert into sales.
Maint aining your Sit e
When your site starts growing, it can be dif f icult to manage all the dif f erent aspects of your site, so I’ve put
together some awesome tips to help improve various aspects of your site really, really quickly!
Using Trello
Trello is an awesome card based CRM which will make your lif e a LOT easier when it comes to managing
your site, we use it at CSC to help with a number of things, including managing your orders in a lot easier
inf rastructure than WooCommerce by def ault provides.
You start of by making a board and adding your “Cards” to each list of things to do.
T his is our onsite board where we have things to do via the Backend of the site. As you can see I’ve got a
card on Adding a New Blog post, and on that card I’ve commented a title I came up with -
Now all I need to do is move that card into the “Done” section when I’ve added the post, this makes my time
management a lot easier.
If I want to add a deadline to each card or assign cards to specif ic team members, it’s literally as easy as a
click of a button. I can even attach f iles in case I want to add images or videos to a specif ic blog post or as
another example if I want to add an Invoice to a product order card.
With Trello, you can easily manage pretty much every aspect of your time consumption on your site. I highly
suggest using it as a quick way to manage anything on your site and all you need is a Google account to
get started anyway… Oh and it’s Free!
Get t ing More Traf f ic & Sales
So, you’ve built up your site and have a ton of visitors every week pushing through f rom all sorts of places,
but you’re still wanting to get more traf f ic and convert the traf f ic that you’re already getting every month.
Traf f ic Generat ion wit h Micro-Sit es
At God of SEO (my blog) I use these to pull in a ton more visitors to the site and bring in some more
newsletter subscribers completely organically. An example of one of my micro-sites would be
WhatIsLinkBuilding.co.
Which straight away you can see is an EMD, then I’ll add a kick ass landing page design (this one I used is
the Lister theme f rom T hemeForest), with a newsletter signup f orm, video and some epic optimized content
to help f urther push the site up the SERPs.
I’ll throw in some niche related links f rom a blog network, or just organically build links to it f rom my own
sites and let it bring in traf f ic f rom Google, Bing and Yahoo to then push more signups through my blog.
T his specif ic site has only been going f or around 2 weeks now and has already managed to pull in 290
uniques and convert 17 people to signup to my Newsletter!
Now, this landing page is targeted more at gaining Newsletter subscribers but you could easily build them
around a specif ic product or your company itself to pull in more traf f ic and use it as a “f eeder” site to send
that traf f ic back to your main site.
Increasing Conversion Rat es
Luckily f or us, WooCommerce has some excellent built-in f eatures such as the related product and
comparison f eatures that I already mentioned earlier in the guide.
A/B Test ing
T his is simple, just show one thing f rom your site to half your audience, and show another thing to the
other half .
T his can sometimes be as limited as just the header f ont or sometimes as vastly dif f erent as completely
changing the product title, picture or even just the Add to cart button.
better, and what pulls in more people.
Improving your User Experience
I continually love getting new people to check out
your site and try to buy something.
T his can be your grandmother who’s only been
using the internet f or a year and is still on
Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 or your 12
year old nephew that calls you noob every 5
seconds at the dinner table.
People think user experience testing is really
expensive and you have to hire a company to do
a f ocus group or hire a big design/development
agency to changes things, but it’s really not…
Cre d it to Stu Mille r
Whenever you’re on the laptop with a f amily member or a f riend or partner, just sit down with them and ask
them if they could look through your site and buy something, of course, just stop right at the end when you
actually have to put in card or payment inf o.
T his gives you some awesome inf o and can give you a pretty varied sample to take a way and work f rom,
then just stick all the inf o they commented on in your phones notes and when you’re next working on your
site maybe change the Add to Cart graphic to make it a little bigger or have all the Checkout process on one
page
All these small things will help your sites sales sky rocket!
Keeping up wit h your SEO Campaign
If you aren’t an SEO yourself , I’d always suggest hiring an outside SEO f irm on a budget that suits you (and
not what they try and upsell to you) and your site.
T hough, f or some people this can be daunting and some f irms want to enroll you into a 12 month contract
which f or a new business can be crushing.
So, here’s some really easy tips to help manage your SEO over the next f ew months, on a f airly limited
budget!
Link Building
We’re not going to be able to af f ord a massive white hat campaign with a ton of Outreach, so f or clients
that generally can’t af f ord my link building prices I point them to one of 2 Traf f ic Planet gigs that are really
good f or f airly new sites.
If you’re a business looking f or a service that’ll get you links f rom strong authority sites in your niche. T hen
I highly suggest this service by LemonSEO, depending how much you’re looking to spend you can get really
good posts at f airly cheap prices. Use the Custom pack as then you can even provide your own Author Bio
bit to f urther promote your company.
I understand that even at the cheap-ish prices of a f ew hundred bucks, that can still be on the tad
expensive side. So that’s where Morgan comes in with his own Niche blog network service on traf f ic planet,
just select your industry and f or $30 you’ll get 5 posts with an Average DA of 35, all within the week you
ordered them.
Just ordering one of his $30 packages every f ew months means you’re getting 5 really high quality links to
help boost your sites authority up pretty easily.
I use this service f or my own micro-sites as a good alternative to spending a f ew hours creating links with
the same kind of authority.
OnPage SEO
If you have got a site with thousands and thousands of products, then use Trello to do a category of
products every month, you’ll soon see the benef its of having every products onPage optimized when the
traf f ic continues to roll in f or a ton of dif f erent long tail keywords.
If you’re running a pretty small site then use Moz’s OnPage reports to take a look at any onPage errors you
might have, just so that you can continue to tweak your onpage until it’s just perf ect.
Chapter 9 – E-Commerce Tips f rom the Experts
I decided to get some of the top SEO, IM’er and E-Commerce experts to add some valuable insights and
tips into the world of E-Commerce so you guys can learn even more f rom this guide!
Matthew Barby of Wow Internet – Mention Tracking
One method that I use as a core strategy within large ECommerce projects is ‘mention tracking’.
Now, by this I don’t mean just setting up a Google alert around
your brand name, I’m talking about large scale product monitoring
with buyer intent.
One of the tools that I’ve been using a lot recently is BuzzBundle.
T his tool allows you to search across social media, blogs,
f orums, Q&A websites and video sharing sites to f ind mentions
of specif ic phrases.
In the screenshot above, you can see that I’ve identif ied a load of users that are actively searching f or a
solution to an issue they’re having. In this case, they’re looking f or screen capture sof tware.
I actually used this f or a recent tutorial that I put together on Camtasia Studio and generated some good
targeted traf f ic as a result. T his kind of traf f ic can be invaluable f or capturing users with a high level of
purchase intent.
Check out this article f rom Downtown E-Commerce that looks at the best approaches to take when
engaging within f orums with a f ocus of generating sales.
Another tool that I use is Mention.net. T his tool allows you to track mentions across the web of any of
your products or brands.
I use Mention.net to track any mention of my main products online and set up email notif ications so that I
can jump in and either participate in the conversation, or f ind webpages that have discussed my products
without linking to them – this can be a quick link building win.
Mike Campolattano of SerpChirp – Improve your Customers Experience!
Every product you of f er has a history and a story to tell so Use
these as a way to be creative and develop robust & detailed
product descriptions.
Each product in your store should have a number (at least 10) of
large size photos (800 x 600 jpeg should be f ine) on its details
page as well as a zoom photo option if possible.
Remember humans are visual creatures and shopping is
generally an emotional decision so the more photos you have
the more chance you have of the consumer creating mental
ownership of the product.
Make sure you are giving every visitor that views your products
an easy way to review and share that item. T he more personal
choices you give the visitor the more apt they are to perceive
value in you and your product
If you aren’t using product videos on your detail pages then you are missing out on huge opportunities to
be shared and turn prof its.
A nicely done video can have huge value. Also remember to close caption your videos as it’s always a good
thing to not f orget the hearing impaired in our communities.
Ensure that you have trust badges prominently displayed on your site. Establishing credibility by displaying
trust badges can increase conversions by over 70%!
Pratik Dholakiya of E2M Solutions – Some T ips!
You should always f ocus on having unique products description in
all the product pages to avoid duplicate content issues.
Especially when you’re reselling the products that are available
f rom other sources. I’ve come across many E-Commerce websites
having duplicate content issues and being the target of a Google
Panda attack, due to lack of unique content on product pages.
T hese days Lazy Loading seems to be working pretty well instead
of creating pagination if a website is having thousands of
products.
T his would help avoiding duplicate pages, duplicate title & meta
description issues in the long run. I’ve also f ound this to be user
f riendly as users don’t need to go to next page and wait till the time
page loads.
Utilizing a strong blogging strategy most ef f ectively should be an essential part of your marketing activities.
Blogging helps a lot to keep your customers engaged and generate new sources of traf f ic, if you could
share helpf ul tips with your audience – Check out how GrooveHQ did it.
Many E-Commerce website owners doesn’t f ocus on blog much and mainly because they think their
customers won’t be interested in what they share in the blog.
In f act, the customers/users normally always want to read/know more about the product they’re purchasing,
so having a great post on each one or even throwing up some video reviews can really help!
From a social media stand point, I’ve seen many E-Commerce websites using strategies like “Share this
product on your Facebook wall & get a 10% discount” – T his seems to be working pretty well as this opens
up new doors of grabbing more customers, f ollows and it helps with growing your social media campaigns.
Colby Wren from No Hats Marketing – Social Proofing
One way to establish authority as well as credibility is to social proof
your E-commerce brand.
Bef ore you even start an organic f ollowing I suggest making sure you
look the look bef ore you walk the walk.
T hat means spending some time setting up f or Facebook, Twitter, and
Google + adding logos, pictures, content and setup a hootsuite to have
scheduled postings f or your prof iles f or the days to come.
BlackHat tip – Buy your f ollowers, buy your likes, buy your +1’s by around
10,000 Facebook f ans, 20,000 Twitter f ollowers, and 1,000 +1’s. T hese
can be purchased f rom Fiverr or AddMeFast this will give the
psychological association with an established brand.
Promoting and establishing authority provides the psychological assurance of , “T his is not a scam”. T hat
can be very powerf ul f or your conversion rates and growing your real and organic f ollowing quickly.
T here is something attractive about a large number of f ollowers and likes that makes us want to join the
group. Would you rather have your traf f ic second guessing your website while they pull out their credit card
or have them f earlessly spend on multiple occasions?
Many ask me f or an example of this engagement and how much time does it take to actually manage f rom
week to week. One of my f avourite examples is looking through the Dollar Shave Club’s Facebook page.
T hey have built a successf ul E-commerce business based on Brand ambassadors and edgy marketing
campaigns. T hey make sure they respond to every negative criticism prof essionally and thank every
positive comment they can.
Now that they are established they don’t even have to answer questions.
Within the hour a handf ul of brand ambassadors have addressed the question asked and have provided
customer service f or the brand that they love. Pretty powerf ul stuf f .
T his is just a f ew of the comments they have received this morning. T hink about getting an exponentially
larger amount of traf f ic every single month. For example the average video produced by the Dollar Shave
Club receives statistics like this with hundreds of thousands of views f ollowed by thousands of purchases.
To put it in numbers you understand each share reaches
approximately 500-1,000 people. T hat means this post alone
potentially reached 800,000-1,500,000 people. Even on a small
scale this could mean major awareness f or your brand.
Having a website that someone buys something f rom may only happen once and lacks a long-term
relationship.
Social media allows you to nurture a relationship with your brand ambassadors and target audience and
promote more products.
You never want to saturate your pages with promotions and products, but establishing trust and throwing
in products ever 10 or so posts will drastically increase your natural f ollowing.
Brent Johns from No Hats Marketing – Analytics Tracking to Increase Conversions
Everyone goes through the motions of setting up Google Analytics f or
their E-Commerce properties, but not many people go any f urther than
that.
T hey’ll analyse traf f ic based on normal Google Analytics: traf f ic, sources,
demographics, bounce rate, time on page, etc. But taking analytics to the
next level, you’ll be able to make concrete decisions and stop the guess
work.
But how do you take your analytics to the next level and start
understanding exactly how people are using your E-Commerce site and
turn your traf f ic that doesn’t buy a product into prof it down the road.
1. Remarketing
If you start to understand why people leave your site, you’ll also understand how to remarket and retarget
these people. At what point do they leave your site? If they’re leaving with items in the cart, is your cart too
many steps? If you’ve simplif ied your cart checkout, then perhaps it’s the shipping costs.
If they lef t your site with items in the cart, try retargeting them with Free Shipping.
2. Quantitative vs Qualitative measurements
People visit your site f or many dif f erent reasons, but having the amount of people and all the stats
available in Google Analytics don’t give you a very clear picture of the why they visit and why they
purchased, or didn’t.
Ask your audience open ended questions. “Did you f ind what you were looking f or?” If you don’t ask
questions, customers don’t have the opportunity to tell you their experience, and you’ll be surprised how
many will tell you the f laws in your site.
It’s easy to decide how your site looks based on your opinion, but constructive criticism f rom your buyers is
a def initive way to know you’re making the right changes to your sales f unnel. Polls are a really good way to
collect this inf ormation without asking f or too much time input f rom your visitors.
3. Combining reports
Data visualization can help lead to actionable decisions and that’s the point of analytical data. Separately,
the campaign, mobile, and backend data don’t always reveal actionable data, but visualizations of the data
can reveal hidden problems in your E-Commerce site.
Aggregate data is usef ul, but organized data that provide overall insight leads to actionable data that
increase your bottom line.
Chapter 10 – Bonus Tips f or WooCommerce
WooCommerce has some excellent bonus tips that you can use to f urther add f unctionality to your site.
WP-List er f or eBay Management (Free Plugin)
If you’re looking to manage eBay and (like me) hate the eBay backend, then WP-Lister of f ers a built in
solution to quickly add your websites products and manage sales/bids of all your current products.
Check out their video below f or some extra details -
Manage your Cust omer Relat ionships (Paid Plugin)
T here’s a cool premium plugin on CodeCanyon f or WooCommerce called WooCommerce Customer
Relationship Management which allows you to easily manage your relationships with customers.
You can use the likes of Skype to call them, it integrates with Newsletter sof tware like MailChimp, you can
quickly export the contact details f or all clients or individual customers, you can send emails either to
individual, select or all customers.
Basically, you get a ton of awesome f unctionality f or managing all your clients really easily!
Add YouTube Videos t o Product s
You can quickly add a f eatured youtube video to your products using the standard WooCommerce page.
Adding the Yoast Video Plugin I mentioned earlier can help vastly improve conversions of both sales and
people clicking through f rom the SERPs!
In some themes, this will change the Featured Image to your video, not all but some – So be caref ul as you
might want to do a little hacking with this!
Make Amazon Af f iliat e Sit es wit h WooCommerce (Paid Plugin)
As a load of people generally don’t want to sell their own products, amazon af f iliate sites have been all the
rage f or a while.
T here’s an awesome plugin you can use to make quick af f iliate sites called WooCommerce Amazon
Af f iliates which quickly lets you setup amazon af f iliate sites straight in WooCommerce.
Fraud Prevent ion
I got pointed to his by CCarter f rom WickedFire and I must say, it is pretty awesome!
Sif t basically of f ers a real time tracking of users on multiple site, it’ll f lag people that have unusual activity
to make sure your site isn’t getting de-f rauded by some “real black hat” (hehe) and of f ers some awesome
ways to do so.
Check out their How it works page to learn a bit more about what Sif t actually does.
Chapter 11 – Extra Resources & Guides to Follow
I thought I’d add some extra resources f or you guys to learn even more.
I’m sure you’ll be done with reading f or a while (or who knows, maybe you’re even more thirsty f or
knowledge).
Guides Video Tutorials How To Build & Market A Successf ul E-Commerce Website Step By Step by Charles Floate